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I found my first job out of college through a temp agency, which sent me to a brand-name bank where I stood in a windowless closet in a polyester-blend suit and heinous square-toed shoes filing carbons of personal portfolio data for individual-wealth-management clients. I was grateful to be hired, but during those humid, lifeless hours, I did think fondly of the days when I shoveled horse manure for $5 an hour.
The experiences of temp workers chronicled by Michael Grabell for ProPublica and Time are far, far worse: getting up at 4 in the morning to sit in an agency office and hope for your name to be called; having no other option but to take van rides with as many as 20 other people to get to your job; taking home less than minimum wage and falling quickly into a hand-to-mouth scramble, always worrying whether your name will be called tomorrow.
Grabell writes that there are more temporary workers now than ever before, some 2.7 million people, according to Labor Department statistics. A temp job is perhaps better than no job at all (and can sometimes lead to a permanent one), but at least 840,000 of those workers are making less than $25,000 a year, ProPublica found. The temp industry is expanding at a rate 10 times that of the private sector — it's easy to speculate that this growth comes at the expense of full-time jobs.
"The temp system insulates the host companies from workers' compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to insure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants," Grabell writes. "In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage."
Recruiting a temporary work force has become so important to American companies that there are so-called temp towns, where anywhere from 5 to 8 percent of the workers are in temporary jobs. "In many temp towns," Grabell writes, "agencies have flocked to neighborhoods full of undocumented immigrants, finding labor that is kept cheap in part by these workers' legal vulnerability." Minorities make up a large portion of the temporary workers; Grabell notes that African-Americans make up 20 percent of the temp industry, compared to 11 percent of the overall work force.
Low wages and a lack of any kind of benefits like health insurance or day care bolster Grabell's argument that the temp industry is creating a kind of vacuum for growing economic inequality. When one temp worker tells Grabell that she dreams of owning "a really small, little house," he asks if she thinks she can, and she laughs.
"'Earning $8.25 an hour?' she says. "I don't think I'll ever be able to do that.'"
This week's Riff examines how time exists onscreen — including in the recent film "Before Midnight." That movie is the third in a trilogy, each produced nine years apart and each following two characters, Jesse and Celine, as their lives overlap and intertwine — often through long, digressive, yet oddly profound conversations. (Here's more on the films and their co-star and co-writer Julie Delpy.)
As a complement to the essay, we present this short screenplay by Dan Kois and Alia Smith, titled "After 'Before Midnight'":
INT. MOVIE THEATER – NIGHT
The credits roll. A couple sits watching, his hand on her knee. He surreptitiously wipes away a tear with his other hand.
HER: No flashbacks this time.
HIM: I guess they assumed we would watch the previous two movies in anticipation…
They walk down the aisle and he lingers in the doorway watching the credits.
HIM: Those little girls were played by real twins!
HER: When they make the next one they'll be 16.
HIM: Ours will be 17 and 15.
HER: We'll be forty-sev —
HIM: Shhhhh.
They walk through the hallway, him holding her arm. She smiles.
HIM: You need to go to the bathroom?
HER: Yeah.
HIM: I'll be upstairs, staring at my phone.
He steps on the escalator.
CUT TO:
INT. MOVIE THEATER LOBBY – NIGHT
HER: Hey. Everything cool?
HIM: Everything's cool.
They walk outside.
EXT. WASHINGTON, D.C., SIDEWALK – NIGHT
HIM: It's still beautiful out! I feel like walking and talking about stuff for like an hour and a half.
HER: There's a lot of pressure though from watching that movie.
HIM: I know, like, can we walk and talk as well as they did. Should we have a big fight, and you tell me you don't love me?
HER: I cannot believe it took us so long to see this.
HIM: This is literally my job.
HER: Um, we lead busy lives. We have adorable children who need us.
HIM: They're not French-speaking twins though.
HER: Yeah, that's a bummer. But that is sort of what this movie is about! How life gets in the way and time passes and all of a sudden your ideas about things are obsolete.
HIM: Yeah.
HER: Ahh, I love her! I mean there are things about her that are sort of annoying, but I am so glad that there is that character!
HIM: Yes! Like just someone who feels like she has to argue about feminism a lot!
HER: Even though he mostly agrees with her. So there are a lot of ways that this couple is not unlike married couples we know, or are.
HIM: Or are.
HER: We battle a lot about who does what or who's giving up what for who.
HIM: I wouldn't say a lot.
HER: "Not infrequently."
HIM: We're basically on the same side!
HER: Basically, but I mean I still am the one who keeps the house clean.
HIM: It's clean enough already!
HER: But there are no other characters who talk about this stuff in movies, ever.
HIM: So … we walked past the car, so, like, do you want to walk and talk?
HER: Oh, I totally missed it.
They turn around.
HIM: You were distracted by the camera, like, gliding in front of us.
HER: Right, on a golf cart or whatever.
HIM: Yeah, I'd like to know how he shoots that. Like, it doesn't jiggle, but there are no rails for a Steadicam. I put the keys in your purse. In the side-
She rummages for the keys in her purse.
HER: Like –
HIM: No, inside the –
HER: You're fired. Here they are.
She unlocks the car and he holds the door for her.
HER: Thanks!
He gets in and turns the car on.
INT. CAR – NIGHT
Continuous shot from POV of hood of car as they drive through Washington across the Roosevelt Bridge, toward their suburban neighborhood.
HER: Do we know how the three of them wrote this? Do they just sit at a desk? Do they improvise scenes?
HIM: I don't know. It feels really crafted.
HER: Does she write her and he writes him, you think?
HIM: Yeah, probably. Mostly. I mean they probably talk in character a little. And the director sort of shaping it into a real story.
HER: I mean I agreed with him most of the time, but I still love her.
HIM: Like agreed with – that she's sort of crazy.
HER: She's not crazy. Another thing though is that, I mean, she's still a size six I'm sure, but I love that she just looks like a normal person.
HIM: She's probably an eight.
HER: Oh, thank you. Whatever, you know what I mean, she's gorgeous, of course.
Long pause.
HIM: You look great too!
HER: Ha, thanks.
HIM: But, like, weirdly, I thought he looked better than he did in the second movie.
HER: Yeah.
HIM: I mean he was not more – he had the same –
HER: He wasn't worse.
HIM: Right. He didn't have more lines, and his hair was better. He gained some weight.
HER: It softened his face a little.
HIM: O.K., one thing that he and I do not have in common –
HER: O.K., but for the record I have not said that you have things in common.
HIM: Well one thing I don't agree with him on is I am not cool with you having an affair with, at a conference, or with your ex-boyfriend or whatever.
HER: That's fine. I am not gonna hook up with Lech Walesa.
There's quiet. A new song starts on the stereo.
HIM: I had a really good idea for nine years from now. Will you remind me?
HER: Put it on our Google calendar.
HIM: OK, but also remind me.
HER: OK.
HIM: When the next one of these movies is coming out I want to make a series of like 80-minute documentaries that are just the conversations couples have immediately after seeing the movie.
HER: Haha, sure.
HIM: Like just mount a camera here.
HER: Was it you who was telling me that she said she never thought they'd do a third one but now she thinks they'll do more?
HIM: That sounds like something I would say.
HER: Like will they do one when they're both 72 or whatever? If they're still alive?
HIM: They better, oh my god. I want to be watching one with you when we're both sixty—
HER: Shut up. Even if one of them dies I hope the other one—
HIM: But remind me of this idea! This movie gets people talking. They want to talk about things that matter.
HER: But there's so much pressure!
HIM: Yes sure but I feel like I'm so conscious of myself talking to you now anyway after this movie, it's already sort of like a performance. Not like to a camera but I'm performing a version of myself to you.
HER: Right.
HIM: So like if there was ever a time that a camera shooting me would change my behavior the least, this would be it.
HER: And sort of the movie's about not just them but all the other people.
HIM: Right, like the other couples at the dinner.
HER: Or all those people in the café in the first one, all speaking their different languages.
HIM: Or the people arguing in the train at the very beginning of the first one! The old married couple!
HER: Oh yeah!
Pause.
HIM: The movie's about us, kind of.
HER: Us?
HIM: Everyone who sees it. The royal Us.
HER: But still that's a lot of pressure to say we're going to talk for 80 minutes and it will be about life and art and oral sex for Eastern bloc leaders like they do, and it'll be interesting.
HIM: We've had long interesting conversations before.
HER: When we were younger, sure. Who has time to do it now?
HIM: Well, Jesse and Celine don't either. It takes, like, extraordinary circumstances for them to have this one.
HER: What's our extraordinary circumstance?
HIM: Seeing these movies, I guess. We have one great conversation every nine years.
Long pause.
HER: I still think we would compare badly to them.
HIM: But that doesn't matter! A lot of the things they say aren't that interesting. It's, like, what's behind it that matters. Their love.
HER: Yeah!
HIM: What was with that couple who left like 45 minutes into the movie?
HER: Yeah, what were they expecting?
HIM: "I thought this one would be different!"
HER: "I thought in this one they'd finally fight Nazis!"
HIM: That'll get a big laugh in the movie version.
HER: For sure.
HIM: You didn't even say that, I just thought of it later and incorporated it in the script.
HER: It's hard to remember everything I say when you're sitting at your desk typing it later.
HIM: And to shape it into something that isn't just haphazard improv. Like the way people talk in life is haphazard improv.
They park the car in the driveway. She looks for her wallet.
HER: She got here at 7, so…
HIM: Oh I don't have any cash.
HER: None?
HIM: Oh I have ten. Oh wait plus twenty!
HER: We're rich!
She counts out money.
HIM: People will love this part of the movie.
HER: The director would probably cut ahead.
HIM: To something more interesting. The big, romantic climax.
HER: Like after we pay the sitter and we both go to our computers to work.
HIM: Yeah, that'll be amazing.
CUT TO:
INT. HOME OFFICE — NIGHT
They both sit at desks, typing on computers.
END
Adults wear sunscreen to reduce the threat of sun damage, skin cancer, uneven tan lines and wrinkles. Children wear it because they have to. Inspired by seeing his niece resist his brother's attempts to apply sunscreen, the photographer Nolan Conway visited parks in New York City in late April and early May, looking for parents and children who were engaged in similar battles. Genevieve Chamorro, who was at Brooklyn Bridge Park with her sons, Oliver and Sebastian, says her sons have learned to endure the process. "You have to make sure you're getting the whole face," she says. "You don't want to be aggressive, but you end up being a little aggressive. You have to do it fast and a little bit harder than you would normally do it. Now my kids are used to it."
Age children should start wearing sunscreen: 6 months
How long a bottle of sunscreen stays effective: 3 years
Minimum S.P.F. recommended by the F.D.A.: 15 minimum
S.P.F. recommended by the American Academy of Dermatology: 30
I found my first job out of college through a temp agency, which sent me to a brand-name bank where I stood in a windowless closet in a polyester-blend suit and heinous square-toed shoes filing carbons of personal portfolio data for individual-wealth-management clients. I was grateful to be hired, but during those humid, lifeless hours, I did think fondly of the days when I shoveled horse manure for $5 an hour.
The experiences of temp workers chronicled by Michael Grabell for ProPublica and Time are far, far worse: getting up at 4 in the morning to sit in an agency office and hope for your name to be called; having no other option but to take van rides with as many as 20 other people to get to your job; taking home less than minimum wage and falling quickly into a hand-to-mouth scramble, always worrying whether your name will be called tomorrow.
Grabell writes that there are more temporary workers now than ever before, some 2.7 million people, according to Labor Department statistics. A temp job is perhaps better than no job at all (and can sometimes lead to a permanent one), but at least 840,000 of those workers are making less than $25,000 a year, ProPublica found. The temp industry is expanding at a rate 10 times that of the private sector — it's easy to speculate that this growth comes at the expense of full-time jobs.
"The temp system insulates the host companies from workers' compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to insure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants," Grabell writes. "In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage."
Recruiting a temporary work force has become so important to American companies that there are so-called temp towns, where anywhere from 5 to 8 percent of the workers are in temporary jobs. "In many temp towns," Grabell writes, "agencies have flocked to neighborhoods full of undocumented immigrants, finding labor that is kept cheap in part by these workers' legal vulnerability." Minorities make up a large portion of the temporary workers; Grabell notes that African-Americans make up 20 percent of the temp industry, compared to 11 percent of the overall work force.
Low wages and a lack of any kind of benefits like health insurance or day care bolster Grabell's argument that the temp industry is creating a kind of vacuum for growing economic inequality. When one temp worker tells Grabell that she dreams of owning "a really small, little house," he asks if she thinks she can, and she laughs.
"'Earning $8.25 an hour?' she says. "I don't think I'll ever be able to do that.'"
This week's Riff examines how time exists onscreen — including in the recent film "Before Midnight." That movie is the third in a trilogy, each produced nine years apart and each following two characters, Jesse and Celine, as their lives overlap and intertwine — often through long, digressive, yet oddly profound conversations. (Here's more on the films and their co-star and co-writer Julie Delpy.)
As a complement to the essay, we present this short screenplay by Dan Kois and Alia Smith, titled "After 'Before Midnight'":
INT. MOVIE THEATER – NIGHT
The credits roll. A couple sits watching, his hand on her knee. He surreptitiously wipes away a tear with his other hand.
HER: No flashbacks this time.
HIM: I guess they assumed we would watch the previous two movies in anticipation…
They walk down the aisle and he lingers in the doorway watching the credits.
HIM: Those little girls were played by real twins!
HER: When they make the next one they'll be 16.
HIM: Ours will be 17 and 15.
HER: We'll be forty-sev —
HIM: Shhhhh.
They walk through the hallway, him holding her arm. She smiles.
HIM: You need to go to the bathroom?
HER: Yeah.
HIM: I'll be upstairs, staring at my phone.
He steps on the escalator.
CUT TO:
INT. MOVIE THEATER LOBBY – NIGHT
HER: Hey. Everything cool?
HIM: Everything's cool.
They walk outside.
EXT. WASHINGTON, D.C., SIDEWALK – NIGHT
HIM: It's still beautiful out! I feel like walking and talking about stuff for like an hour and a half.
HER: There's a lot of pressure though from watching that movie.
HIM: I know, like, can we walk and talk as well as they did. Should we have a big fight, and you tell me you don't love me?
HER: I cannot believe it took us so long to see this.
HIM: This is literally my job.
HER: Um, we lead busy lives. We have adorable children who need us.
HIM: They're not French-speaking twins though.
HER: Yeah, that's a bummer. But that is sort of what this movie is about! How life gets in the way and time passes and all of a sudden your ideas about things are obsolete.
HIM: Yeah.
HER: Ahh, I love her! I mean there are things about her that are sort of annoying, but I am so glad that there is that character!
HIM: Yes! Like just someone who feels like she has to argue about feminism a lot!
HER: Even though he mostly agrees with her. So there are a lot of ways that this couple is not unlike married couples we know, or are.
HIM: Or are.
HER: We battle a lot about who does what or who's giving up what for who.
HIM: I wouldn't say a lot.
HER: "Not infrequently."
HIM: We're basically on the same side!
HER: Basically, but I mean I still am the one who keeps the house clean.
HIM: It's clean enough already!
HER: But there are no other characters who talk about this stuff in movies, ever.
HIM: So … we walked past the car, so, like, do you want to walk and talk?
HER: Oh, I totally missed it.
They turn around.
HIM: You were distracted by the camera, like, gliding in front of us.
HER: Right, on a golf cart or whatever.
HIM: Yeah, I'd like to know how he shoots that. Like, it doesn't jiggle, but there are no rails for a Steadicam. I put the keys in your purse. In the side-
She rummages for the keys in her purse.
HER: Like –
HIM: No, inside the –
HER: You're fired. Here they are.
She unlocks the car and he holds the door for her.
HER: Thanks!
He gets in and turns the car on.
INT. CAR – NIGHT
Continuous shot from POV of hood of car as they drive through Washington across the Roosevelt Bridge, toward their suburban neighborhood.
HER: Do we know how the three of them wrote this? Do they just sit at a desk? Do they improvise scenes?
HIM: I don't know. It feels really crafted.
HER: Does she write her and he writes him, you think?
HIM: Yeah, probably. Mostly. I mean they probably talk in character a little. And the director sort of shaping it into a real story.
HER: I mean I agreed with him most of the time, but I still love her.
HIM: Like agreed with – that she's sort of crazy.
HER: She's not crazy. Another thing though is that, I mean, she's still a size six I'm sure, but I love that she just looks like a normal person.
HIM: She's probably an eight.
HER: Oh, thank you. Whatever, you know what I mean, she's gorgeous, of course.
Long pause.
HIM: You look great too!
HER: Ha, thanks.
HIM: But, like, weirdly, I thought he looked better than he did in the second movie.
HER: Yeah.
HIM: I mean he was not more – he had the same –
HER: He wasn't worse.
HIM: Right. He didn't have more lines, and his hair was better. He gained some weight.
HER: It softened his face a little.
HIM: O.K., one thing that he and I do not have in common –
HER: O.K., but for the record I have not said that you have things in common.
HIM: Well one thing I don't agree with him on is I am not cool with you having an affair with, at a conference, or with your ex-boyfriend or whatever.
HER: That's fine. I am not gonna hook up with Lech Walesa.
There's quiet. A new song starts on the stereo.
HIM: I had a really good idea for nine years from now. Will you remind me?
HER: Put it on our Google calendar.
HIM: OK, but also remind me.
HER: OK.
HIM: When the next one of these movies is coming out I want to make a series of like 80-minute documentaries that are just the conversations couples have immediately after seeing the movie.
HER: Haha, sure.
HIM: Like just mount a camera here.
HER: Was it you who was telling me that she said she never thought they'd do a third one but now she thinks they'll do more?
HIM: That sounds like something I would say.
HER: Like will they do one when they're both 72 or whatever? If they're still alive?
HIM: They better, oh my god. I want to be watching one with you when we're both sixty—
HER: Shut up. Even if one of them dies I hope the other one—
HIM: But remind me of this idea! This movie gets people talking. They want to talk about things that matter.
HER: But there's so much pressure!
HIM: Yes sure but I feel like I'm so conscious of myself talking to you now anyway after this movie, it's already sort of like a performance. Not like to a camera but I'm performing a version of myself to you.
HER: Right.
HIM: So like if there was ever a time that a camera shooting me would change my behavior the least, this would be it.
HER: And sort of the movie's about not just them but all the other people.
HIM: Right, like the other couples at the dinner.
HER: Or all those people in the café in the first one, all speaking their different languages.
HIM: Or the people arguing in the train at the very beginning of the first one! The old married couple!
HER: Oh yeah!
Pause.
HIM: The movie's about us, kind of.
HER: Us?
HIM: Everyone who sees it. The royal Us.
HER: But still that's a lot of pressure to say we're going to talk for 80 minutes and it will be about life and art and oral sex for Eastern bloc leaders like they do, and it'll be interesting.
HIM: We've had long interesting conversations before.
HER: When we were younger, sure. Who has time to do it now?
HIM: Well, Jesse and Celine don't either. It takes, like, extraordinary circumstances for them to have this one.
HER: What's our extraordinary circumstance?
HIM: Seeing these movies, I guess. We have one great conversation every nine years.
Long pause.
HER: I still think we would compare badly to them.
HIM: But that doesn't matter! A lot of the things they say aren't that interesting. It's, like, what's behind it that matters. Their love.
HER: Yeah!
HIM: What was with that couple who left like 45 minutes into the movie?
HER: Yeah, what were they expecting?
HIM: "I thought this one would be different!"
HER: "I thought in this one they'd finally fight Nazis!"
HIM: That'll get a big laugh in the movie version.
HER: For sure.
HIM: You didn't even say that, I just thought of it later and incorporated it in the script.
HER: It's hard to remember everything I say when you're sitting at your desk typing it later.
HIM: And to shape it into something that isn't just haphazard improv. Like the way people talk in life is haphazard improv.
They park the car in the driveway. She looks for her wallet.
HER: She got here at 7, so…
HIM: Oh I don't have any cash.
HER: None?
HIM: Oh I have ten. Oh wait plus twenty!
HER: We're rich!
She counts out money.
HIM: People will love this part of the movie.
HER: The director would probably cut ahead.
HIM: To something more interesting. The big, romantic climax.
HER: Like after we pay the sitter and we both go to our computers to work.
HIM: Yeah, that'll be amazing.
CUT TO:
INT. HOME OFFICE — NIGHT
They both sit at desks, typing on computers.
END
Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
"Like many bike accessories, the kickstand was reinvented various times," says David V. Herlihy, author of "Bicycle: The History." Herlihy likes to point to what is surely the world's first blueprint for a kickstand, drawn by a Frenchman named Alfred Berruyer in 1869.It was designed for an early bicycle, a model whose frame rode high off the ground; Berruyer, lacking a convenient spot to bolt his kickstand, attached it beneath the handlebars. Which meant that the kickstand had to be enormous. In his sketch (see sidebar), it looks as if it might have been two feet long. A contemporary of Berruyer's praised the invention as perfect for bons vivants who might like to stop and rest on the seats of their bicycles to light a cigar or enjoy the scenery.
In 1926, Eldon Henderson patented another kind of kickstand. Short, discreet and suited to the modern bike, it could flip up and tuck under the frame. This type of kickstand caught on in the decades that followed, as kids cruised around the suburbs on two-wheeled behemoths that might weigh 50 pounds and needed to be propped up.
In the 1970s, with the introduction of the wispy 10-speed racer, the tide turned. Detractors called the kickstand a useless appendage that added extra pounds to the elegant frames. "Riding a bike with a kickstand is like going to a prom in dungarees," wrote Eugene Sloane, author of a series of popular bike-repair manuals. Many of today's cyclists grew up in the era of anti-kickstand sentiment and so do not use one, Herlihy says. Besides, most urban neighborhoods now provide racks designed to cradle bikes and hold them upright. The city itself has become an enormous kickstand.
WHEELING AND DEALING
Dan Young is the designer of the Kickstand Desk, a table on stilts that allows you to pedal in place while working.
How did you come up with this idea?My friends and I were talking about treadmill desks — the desks you combine with an exercise machine so that you can walk while you work. And I thought, Wouldn't it be cool if I could ride a bike at my desk?
You just radically redesigned the kickstand desk. Was there a problem with the first version? When we launched the desks in 2011, I thought the customer would want an opulent desk, and we made it out of premium steel. On the larger desks, you could slide the tabletop out of the way so that you could change gears while keeping your monitor and everything else in position. But those were priced at about $1,700. We were really taken aback by the response that we got — thousands of hits per day to our Web site. The feedback was pretty consistent. It was like, This is a really cool idea, but it's too expensive, I can't afford it. So we've just redesigned the whole desk, and we've dropped the price to $349.
The desk does not include a bike? Right. The desk is for people who already own a bike. And you have to buy your own training stand to hold up the bike and create resistance when you pedal.
Doesn't your backside hurt after sitting on a bike seat for hours? It can. We recommend that people have different saddles if they're going to be working on it throughout the course of the day.
When my boyfriend moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco last fall, he left behind a two-person tent, several skateboards, a racing bike, a city bike and a motorcycle. He is outdoorsy and I am not, and his first New York winter was wretched. In California, he planned vacations around 150-mile rides, and weekends began with a jaunt to Ocean Beach with a loop back through Golden Gate Park. It's all he talked about in February. And again in March. There were also lots of reminders how, after a year of dating long-distance, he moved East because I laughed in his face at the prospect of moving West. As grand gestures went, I was in the red.
Late last month, when the Citi Bike sharing program arrived in New York, all he wanted to do was ride on blue bikes with me in the sun, and I couldn't muster a convincing objection. It didn't matter that I didn't know how to ride one. He volunteered to teach me (just as valiant beaus before him have tried), but the way I see it, no adult should have to supplicate herself to such a trust exercise. It's humiliating. I am a 33-year-old woman, and he is not my dad.
It was during a jog around Brooklyn Bridge Park that I noticed an adults-only bike-riding class. (I like to run by the water because cardio is important and because I like to plan escape routes in the event of an apocalypse.) I signed up online, and a week later, at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, I found myself waiting with 20 other grown-ups for a two-hour session taught by an instructor and three volunteers.
The class was noticeably Central Casting. Together we could have composed a convincing airport tableau, a community-college course or a depiction of an outer borough for a Spider-Man movie. The ages varied, there were two sets of couples and all but three students were people of color. There was even a Mets fan.
We were subjected to name tags, and I decided to try to buy into the positive vibe. We were also given helmets. Mine was pearlescent white with pink flowers, and apparently if the helmet fits, you have to wear it, despite how determined you are to switch it out for the plain gray one. We lined up in order of height to be matched with a bike.
We were taught the "balance first" method, which means you scooch along with your feet until you gain enough momentum to swing them up. I was relieved and horrified that we didn't have training wheels. At first, our bikes didn't have pedals, but a half-hour in, I saw a woman sail by with some. It was then that I became convinced that we'd be graded on a curve, so I raced to get my own set of pedals. My competitive spirit did not necessarily jibe with my skill level.
Learning to ride a bike in a public park means anyone can see you. This was plenty insulting, but I took special offense at the sleep-deprived puffy couples with squawking newborns openly delighting in our discomfort. These wan goons I derided sotto voce for bringing their squealing offspring to brunch or for clogging up the sidewalk were momentarily cooler than I, and that was unbearable.
I crashed into a fence. I crashed into a garbage can filled with extra pedals. I crashed into a woman whose jeans had a design that caught my eye. Evidently, staring at an obstruction guarantees you'll steer into it. I wish one of the teachers had pointed this out, because it seems important. Pro tip: Engaging your core does nothing. Bonus tip: Spin class is wrong.
I narrowly missed a man only by dangling my leg into the frame and falling. This encouraged an instructor to remind me that I had brakes. Again, I found it unconscionable that I was not informed of this earlier. I pulled over for a lesson on gears. I needed the break anyway because my, um, pelvic girdle felt bruised.
In 45 minutes, I could ride a bike. In 75 minutes, I could go in a straight line near indefinitely and make right-hand turns. I know I'll eventually master the left because I did not get into this to be the Derek Zoolander of bike riding. One thing I did learn straightaway, however, is that people with baby seats on their bikes are maniacs who should be locked up. As a new cyclist, I get a vote, and the added cargo's way too dicey, especially on turns, particularly if there are cars or pebbles.
That said, biking with a kid is O.K. if you are forced to flee via your previously devised escape route because of a tsunami or zombies. But man, that kid better be wearing a helmet. Preferably a plain gray one.
Mary H. K. Choi is a writer in New York.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
Sometimes you come across a book with a typo or a mistake or a translation error that is so delicious, it endears you to the text instead of distracting you. It happened to me with "On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe," by Andrzej Stasiuk (translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel). The book turned up in the mailroom on the sixth floor this month, two years after it was published; apparently someone had been hoarding it.
"On the Road to Babadag" describes a series of trips through Eastern Europe, beginning in the 1980s. It's very impressionistic, beautifully so, but it's hard to tell where one trip ends and another begins. At some point, Stasiuk goes to a restaurant in the isolated Romanian Black Sea village of Sulina. See if you spot the mistake:
You entered from the street, into a room with four small tables. Upstairs was a small hotel. Behind the counter stood a willowy young woman with short hair, her face delicate and sad. She did the cooking herself, wiped the glasses, served the food, a moving shadow. Men came in stinking of fish and diesel fuel. … The young woman cleaned the ashtrays and bottles and went back to the counter to insert a tape cassette, a medley of stuff in English: Elton John, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Carpenters, the Seventies, the Eighties. A bony black horse outside the window was hitched to a cart on rubber tires behind a blackened wood house.
See the mistake? The horse was actually brown. No, that's a joke. "Gilbert and Sullivan" is surely supposed to be "Gilbert O'Sullivan," the Irish singer (born Raymond Edward O'Sullivan), who had hits in the early 1970s like "Get Down." Someone or something — author, translator, copy editor, spell-checking software — was more familiar with "The Pirates of Penzance" than "Alone Again, Naturally."
Otherwise, "On the Road to Babadag" is a marvel, a nonfiction update of the lost lands described in Gregor von Rezzori's novels of the interwar years, including "An Ermine in Czernopol," which appeared in its first English translation last year.
But I can't get the image out of my head of that young woman with the delicate and sad face, listening to 19th-century British light opera as she wipes off the four tables in the restaurant.
Dan Winters for The New York Times
"I've never seen a zombie movie where someone drank from a puddle and died of explosive diarrhea."
Max Brooks, age 15, with his very famous (and very protective) parents in East Berlin in 1987.
On a Saturday evening in late April, Max Brooks stood on a stage, in front of a lectern, plaintively trying to convince an audience of about 250 in the auditorium at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Ill., that the coming zombie apocalypse won't be anything like what they've seen in zombie movies or on zombie TV or in Jane Austen-zombie mash-up novels. He seemed frustrated.
He's talking about real zombies here, not the movie kind. Does the audience get that? Believe him, most people in a zombie apocalypse would die not from zombie wounds or anything as sexy as that. They'd die, he explained, from the lack of a clean-water supply. And as anyone with even passing familiarity with his books "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z" knows, the biggest risk in a zombie invasion is fluid loss from all that running.
"It's not exciting, I get that," he told the audience in the affable but slightly patronizing manner of an I.T. guy. Brooks then dived into an extended riff in which he played the different characters in an impromptu scene. He isn't big — he's 5 foot 7, trim but stocky — but his manic energy filled the stage as he pinballed around. First he's the rugged, zombie-movie guy who says: "Quick! The zombies are coming! We gotta get outta here!" Then he's the other guy, the one who's dehydrated, the one who put an ax in his survival pack but no water, and he's hunched over, holding his temples, saying: "You go on without me, Brad Pitt. I got a terrible headache. I gotta go lie down."
Here's a small sampling of other topics Brooks covers in his lecture: Chernobyl. Flatulence. "Snow Klingons." Fjords. Rambo. Saber-toothed tigers. "Ball cancer." Crystal meth. Socialists. Rodney King. Rednecks. Glitter.
What's clear from all this is that Brooks has a deep understanding of history and geopolitics — he isn't just a standard-issue sci-fi author hopping on the zombie train. Rather, he's the engineer of that train, at least in its modern renaissance. "W.W.Z." was featured on a reading list put together by a former president of the U.S. Naval War College, and Brooks has lectured at various army bases on zombie preparedness. He's a zombie laureate, our nation's lone zombie public intellectual, touring everywhere from Long Island to Ireland to Sugar Grove to prepare humans for the coming zombie plague.
What's not clear is just how much of this zombie stuff he believes himself. One thing is for sure, though: Max Brooks is very afraid of something.
When we met in West Hollywood for lunch two days after the Sugar Grove lecture, he tried to explain. He's not making a joke. It's not even that he's being hammy or gimmicky. It's just that it feels obvious to him: Of course there's no such thing as zombies. And yet —
"Since 2001, people have been scared," he explained. "There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening — 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down."
He can be a little intense, but hear him out.
"It's Hurricane Katrina. It's neighbors knifing each other for food, women being raped, the cops not showing up, children dying of starvation, an old lady dying in a wheelchair." Brooks reasons that many folks can't cope with real-life dangers; they (like him) would prefer to metabolize their anxiety through science-fiction. "If all that happens because of a zombie plague, then you can say, 'Oh, well, that would never happen, because there's no zombies.' "
He leaned forward, eyes locked on mine, hands karate-chopping the table to emphasize his points. At 41, he looks like his mother, the actress Anne Bancroft, but he has the stature and frenetic affect of his father, the writer and director Mel Brooks. When Random House wanted to sell his book as comedy, he worried that his fellow nerds would see him, as he puts it, as "Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft's brat, who's probably some coke-snorting, sports-car-driving, trust-fund [expletive] who basically took time out from his partying and his supermodels to piss on something that we love" by writing zombie books.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 26, 2013
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the location where Max Brooks was shown with his parents. They were in East Berlin, not West Berlin.
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In his write-up on Slate of today's landmark Supreme Court decisions, Justin Peters urged revelers to remember Mary Bonauto. "Tonight, as proponents of same-sex marriage celebrate the decision, they should be sure to raise a glass to an attorney and activist named Mary Bonauto, who has been called the mastermind of the legal strategy that eventually led to DOMA's collapse," Peters writes. As Roberta Kaplan, who successfully argued on behalf of Edith Windsor in one of today's Supreme Court cases, put it to The New York Times earlier this year: "No gay person in this country would be married without Mary Bonauto."
Mary Bonauto, a lawyer whose victory in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in November 2003 made Massachusetts the first state to legally recognize same-sex marriage, was profiled in The Times Magazine by David J. Garrow in 2004. Garrow wrote that the effects of Bonauto's work would "mark the beginning of a new social era." Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, described to Garrow the impact the Massachusetts decision would have by saying, "You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube."
But at the time, even the pioneering Bonauto was cautious when it came to the question of whether same-sex marriage would be recognized on a federal level:
"What's happened in Massachusetts has been a beacon of fairness, hope and equality across the country," Bonauto says, but "I think that what it boils down to is avoiding the federal piece" for as long as possible. "I have tried to plead with lawyers not to get overly ambitious about going into court and challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act," she says. "I think a lot of times these cases would arise as tax cases by wealthy individuals" who pay disproportionate sums because of the unavailability of marriage. "I can't think of a less sympathetic prospect," Bonauto says. "I would like the opportunity for states to wrestle with this before we have to go into federal court."
It appears Bonauto's trepidation lessened since then. In 2009, she challenged Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management (the court found DOMA unconstitutional). While that case was not under deliberation in the Supreme Court this week (an eventuality about which Bonauto admitted to being slightly, but fleetingly, disappointed), her work ambitions have been motivated a broad desire for equality rather than a need for personal recognition. In the Times Magazine article, Bonauto rejected being labeled an "architect" of same-sex marriage cases, instead asserting, "I'm happy to be a bricklayer."
Common office supplies, while they can seem indispensable, don't remain the same forever. It would be no easy task to find a typewriter sitting on someone's desk today. I doubt there is one in The New York Times building. Telex machines are gone, as are the hot-glue rollers that the designers used for paste-up. The telephone, once in constant use, now sits largely forgotten on most desks (just about everyone prefers e-mail). But some nondigital office items remain. Post-it notes, which were invented in the late '70s and were once described as the "solution without a problem," are now in constant use. Rare is the computer screen that doesn't have a couple stuck along its edges. Other items, like scissors, have been around for centuries. The rubber band was patented in 1845. The modern staple and staple remover came along in the 1930s. In this second installment of the "Office Romance" series on the 6th Floor Blog, I look for beauty in these objects.
The grease pencil, once used constantly to mark up photography contact sheets — one of my favorite things to do — now lies idle. The optimist in me keeps one in my cup, in case a photographer hands in a stack of sheets for me to edit. Designers used X-acto knives daily when they did layouts by cutting and pasting. The X-actos are now used merely to trim the paper on which the layouts are printed for presentation after having been designed on a computer.
These pictures were all photographed on my desk or the table alongside it. The office supplies may be ordinary, but the light coming in the windows on the east side of the building, first thing in the morning, is not.
To see more photographs of office life, follow Kathy on Instagram.
Pansy was probably in her 50s when she died, which is pretty good for a chimpanzee. She passed in a way most of us would envy — peacefully, with her adult daughter, Rosie, and her best friend, Blossom, by her side. Thirty years earlier, Pansy and Blossom arrived together at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park near Stirling, Scotland. They raised their children together. Now, as Pansy struggled to breathe, Blossom held her hand and stroked it.
When the scientists at the park realized Pansy's death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom, Rosie and Blossom's son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy's mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy's body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy's death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.
This account was published in 2010 in the journal Current Biology, but it's not the only time scientists have watched chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates deal with death in ways that look strikingly like our own informal rituals of mourning: watching over the dying, cleaning and protecting bodies and displaying outward signs of anxiety. Chimps have been seen to make loud distress calls when a comrade dies. They investigate bodies as if looking for signs of life. There are many cases of mothers refusing to abandon dead infants, carrying and grooming them for days or even weeks. Still, it's rare to capture primate deaths, especially those of chimpanzees and bonobos, in detail. It happens just often enough that many scientists are starting to think there's something interesting, maybe protohuman, going on.
But this sort of speculation is laden with epistemological issues: are the scientists guilty of anthropomorphizing their subjects? Are these just isolated events? Are they more likely in captivity? Stories like Pansy's are mere anecdotes in a world that demands testable hypotheses, and they color the fringes of a continuing scientific debate: Can we find the basis for aspects of our culture in the behavior of other primates?
Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a proposal to put captive chimpanzees on the federal endangered species list. (Wild chimps have officially been endangered since 1990.) The goal is to clear up a bureaucratic catch that treats some chimps different from others, but it has big implications for what we can do with the animals — both as medical-research subjects and comic relief on screen. It's also part of a shift in how we perceive chimps: Are they just animals, or are they something closer to us? Understanding how chimpanzees cope with death is part of that increasing sense of closeness.
Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is convinced that an ape death he witnessed gave him a glimpse into something significant, especially because the animals acted so thoroughly against their own interests. "As a person, I can tell you what it feels like to watch," says Hare, who describes the experience as emotionally intense. "As a scientist, though, you're supposed to rely on ideas that can be tested and falsified. And how could you possibly do an ethical experiment here?" Hare studies how chimpanzees and bonobos solve problems, and in 2007 he happened to see one of our closest evolutionary relatives die. He was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and traveled anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo's corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff.
Cut paper by Bovey Lee/Tom Schierlitz for The New York Times
Brendan Kennedy and Michael Blue, private-equity financiers, settled into a downtown Seattle conference room in March to meet with a start-up. Both wore charcoal blazers and polished loafers. Kennedy, 41, is the former chief operating officer of SVB Analytics, an offshoot of Silicon Valley Bank. Blue, 35, learned his trade at the investment-banking firm de Visscher & Co. in Greenwich, Conn. Two years ago they quit comfortable posts to form Privateer Holdings, a firm that operates on the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts model: they buy companies using other people's money and try to increase their value. What sets them apart is the industry in which they invest. Privateer Holdings is the first private-equity firm to openly risk capital in the world of weed. Or as the Privateer partners prefer to call it, "the cannabis space."
Megan and Ben Schwarting, a casually dressed couple in their early 30s, made a presentation. Their company, Kush Creams, produces "cannabis topicals," which are lotions andcreams infused with marijuana's active ingredients. Kennedy and Blue had invited them in to learn more about the pot-cream market.
"We know nothing about topicals," Blue said as he reached for a little jar of something called Purple Haze. "Walk us through this like we're third graders," Kennedy added.
Megan offered a nervous smile. Their products, she said, contain cannabinoids like THC and CBD. They're medically active but won't get you high.
"What do people use it for?" Kennedy asked.
"Pain relief, initially," Megan said. But customers have found them useful for "everything from fibromyalgia to psoriasis."
She told the financiers about their product line, which included eye creams, toothache drops and a first-aid spray called Owie Wowie.
"How do you extract it?" Kennedy said, referring to the cannabinoid oil that's mixed into the lotion.
"That's kind of our company secret," Ben said. "We work mostly with one strain. Others don't produce quite the same effect."
"What led you to start the company?" Kennedy asked.
The couple acknowledged that they started years ago as pot growers. "Then we had daughters and wanted to move into something with less risk," Megan said.
The Privateer partners are always hunting for a good investment, but it was apparent that they wouldn't be taking a stake in topicals any time soon. Though state law allows the manufacture and sale of cannabis topicals, Kennedy and Blue worried about whether you could make the stuff without violating federal drug laws. This put topicals off-limits as an investment, at least for now. If there's one rule that Privateer lives by, it's "don't touch the leaf."
Kennedy and Blue's venture into the cannabis space began three years ago. At the time, Kennedy was directing the operations of SVB Analytics, which specializes in entrepreneurial fields like high tech, genomics, medical devices and green energy. He spent part of his time in San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif., for work and part in Seattle, where his wife has a high-profile career with the Pacific Northwest Ballet.
One day a call came in to the SVB office from an entrepreneur who sold inventory software to medical-marijuana dispensaries. He wanted to know how to attract venture capital. Christian Groh, who was head of sales at SVB Analytics, took the call and told Kennedy about it. They were intrigued and amused. Pot software? They knew their own firm wouldn't touch it. "Nobody wants to be known as the first banker or venture capitalist to make an investment in the cannabis industry," Kennedy later told me. "The risk to the firm's reputation is too great."
Later that week, as he drove on I-280 through Silicon Valley's green hills, Kennedy happened to tune in a radio show on marijuana legalization. He hadn't touched pot since he was 19, he says, but the notion proposed by one guest seemed to make sense: Marijuana should be regulated like whiskey or wine. Kennedy thought about the software developer. Maybe there was a way to get into the business without being directly involved with pot. The growing and selling of marijuana, as it becomes increasingly legal, will require many ancillary products. "When everyone is looking for gold," the saying goes, "it's a good time to be in the pick-and-shovel business."
Bruce Barcott is a former Guggenheim Fellow who is currently writing a book about the battle over salmon and Indian treaties in the Pacific Northwest.
Editor: Ilena Silverman
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This weekend's Look section features rare photographs of the early "Saturday Night Live" cast hanging out in New York City in the mid-'70s. The pictures are from a larger series taken in Times Square by a photographer named Kenneth Siegel, who died at the age of 44 in 1994.
Siegel came from a photography family — his uncle was Cornell Capa, photographer and founder of the International Center of Photography — and made his living as a photographer shooting mostly for nonprofit organizations. But his images of Times Square, one of which is shown above, were done for pleasure. He spent a lot of time hanging around the area, which at the time was known as a hangout for drug dealers and prostitutes. In a description that was found with the pictures, Siegel wrote: "Most of the portraits are of people I know, usually by street name. They all knew me or knew of me and often asked me to take their portrait. I could not have made these images without their cooperation. They express their need for recognition, and I graciously oblige them."
After his death, Kenneth's widow, Ilyce Siegel, donated the photographs to the New-York Historical Society. Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator and head of the Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections there, says that the images not only record a bygone era but show Siegel's ability to connect with his subjects. "When I first saw the images, I immediately thought he had captured a world that was no more," she said. "And in a very brash way. He got these people to open up to him. You see that connection in the images. He could get inside these people."
Siegel's photos of Times Square life follow the S.N.L. shots in our slide show.
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This weekend's Look section features rare photographs of the early "Saturday Night Live" cast hanging out in New York City in the mid-'70s. The pictures are from a larger series taken in Times Square by a photographer named Kenneth Siegel, who died at the age of 44 in 1994.
Siegel came from a photography family — his uncle was Cornell Capa, photographer and founder of the International Center of Photography — and made his living as a photographer shooting mostly for nonprofit organizations. But his images of Times Square, one of which is shown above, were done for pleasure. He spent a lot of time hanging around the area, which at the time was known as a hangout for drug dealers and prostitutes. In a description that was found with the pictures, Siegel wrote: "Most of the portraits are of people I know, usually by street name. They all knew me or knew of me and often asked me to take their portrait. I could not have made these images without their cooperation. They express their need for recognition, and I graciously oblige them."
After his death, Kenneth's widow, Ilyce Siegel, donated the photographs to the New-York Historical Society. Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator and head of the Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections there, says that the images not only record a bygone era but show Siegel's ability to connect with his subjects. "When I first saw the images, I immediately thought he had captured a world that was no more," she said. "And in a very brash way. He got these people to open up to him. You see that connection in the images. He could get inside these people."
Siegel's photos of Times Square life follow the S.N.L. shots in our slide show.
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This weekend's Look section features rare photographs of the early "Saturday Night Live" cast hanging out in New York City in the mid-'70s. The pictures are from a larger series taken in Times Square by a photographer named Kenneth Siegel, who died at the age of 44 in 1994.
Siegel came from a photography family — his uncle was Cornell Capa, photographer and founder of the International Center of Photography — and made his living as a photographer shooting mostly for nonprofit organizations. But his images of Times Square, one of which is shown above, were done for pleasure. He spent a lot of time hanging around the area, which at the time was known as a hangout for drug dealers and prostitutes. In a description that was found with the pictures, Siegel wrote: "Most of the portraits are of people I know, usually by street name. They all knew me or knew of me and often asked me to take their portrait. I could not have made these images without their cooperation. They express their need for recognition, and I graciously oblige them."
After his death, Kenneth's widow, Ilyce Siegel, donated the photographs to the New-York Historical Society. Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator and head of the Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections there, says that the images not only record a bygone era but show Siegel's ability to connect with his subjects. "When I first saw the images, I immediately thought he had captured a world that was no more," she said. "And in a very brash way. He got these people to open up to him. You see that connection in the images. He could get inside these people."
Siegel's photos of Times Square life follow the S.N.L. shots in our slide show.
The artist Matthew Booth's new video (below), "Milk Drop Coronet," is a 3-D view of Harold Edgerton's famous 1936 photograph of the same name; it captures the moment when a drop of milk splashes into the shape of a crown.
Trying to see the milk-drop crown has inspired technological advances. At the turn of the 20th century, a scientist named A.M. Worthington built a device that enabled him to control a drop's fall and time it to an electric spark. Edgerton, a scientist and photographer who worked at M.I.T. for 63 years, built upon Worthington's work when he developed stroboscopic technologies to view things like a bullet piercing an apple, a balloon in midpop and an atom bomb exploding — images the human eye had previously not perceived with such clarity. "Milk Drop Coronet" appeared in 1937 in the Museum of Modern Art's first photography exhibition, "Photography 1839–1937."
Now Booth, using today's technology, has expanded upon Worthington's and Edgerton's innovations. His six-minute video, whose view circles the event, was created by carefully placing 13 cameras that could shoot simultaneously around and above the splash; the array produced a series of images that were then processed with 3-D modeling software to generate an exact replica of the scene. Booth says that to achieve this effect with no computer assistance whatsoever would have required 8,640 cameras (one for each frame of the six-minute video) — a physical impossibility, considering the splash is about the size of a quarter.
"Milk Drop Coronet" and other works by Matthew Booth are on view through July 7 at White Cube in London.
Illustrations by Steve McNiven. Colors by Andy Cotnam and Simon West.
Earlier this year, senior members of President Barack Obama's campaign team took a trip to Las Vegas. Nevada holds a special place in Obama-wonk lore as the place where his monthslong strategy of defeating Hillary Clinton by slowly and surely amassing delegates emerged. But the operatives were not there in March for any political reason. They were there to make money — specifically to land what they hoped would be the first corporate client for their new advertising business, Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.). Its bland name obscures its relatively grand promise: to deliver to commercial advertisers some of the Obama campaign's secret, technologically advanced formulas for reaching voters.
Left to right: Gaurav Shirole, Chris Frommann, Chauncey McLean, Will St. Clair.
The potential client was Caesars. The casino chain was looking for ways to induce semiregular visitors to show up more routinely at its other casinos around the country and to keep regulars from defecting to new competitors. A.M.G. was making the pitch that keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney. It was all a matter of figuring out how to get their message in front of the right customers at the right time. It was not lost on the Obama strategists that the "change" they were talking about was not the kind "you can believe in" but rather the kind you can put in a slot machine. "I kind of felt like the Devil's advocate," Chauncey McLean, 31, the Democratic Party's director of media tracking during the campaign and now A.M.G.'s chief operating officer, wryly told me.
A.M.G. was founded in late December by a splinter group of longtime Obama advisers: Larry Grisolano, who oversaw how the campaign spent its advertising dollars; Grisolano's direct-mail partners Terry Walsh and Pete Giangreco; Jeff Link, a seasoned Iowa veteran who was an outside adviser in 2012; and Erik Smith, an advertising consultant for the 2012 campaign, whose work running one of the biggest 2004 pro-Kerry outside groups gave him an inside track with party donors from the corporate world.
McLean was their first hire. During the campaign he proved himself to be particularly deft at translating between the old hands of the political world, who talk about "message" and "narrative," and the quants in their 20s, who speak of "code" and "algorithms."
McLean was so moved by Obama's 2004 convention speech — the one that called for an end to a red-state America and a blue-state America — that when Obama decided to run in 2008, he took a leave from law school and joined the campaign. He had just spent the last 18 months of the 2012 presidential race bouncing between a couch in Washington and a small, shared apartment in Chicago where a colleague slept in the dining room. So he was experiencing considerable culture shock in the high life of Vegas.
Arriving at Caesars Palace after a first-class flight (only the second of his life), he was shown to his room. "I open the door and there's just this huge, like, double, wall-to-wall window with a view of the strip and a huge king bed," he said. Over room service, he met with his deputy, Chris Frommann, now 26, and made some last-minute revisions to their proposal. McLean took an iPhone picture of his kung pao chicken and sent it to his wife back in Brooklyn, "to show her that I'd made it," he joked.
The next morning McLean, Frommann, Grisolano, Smith and a couple of others were escorted through a maze of doors that led them to the casino's marble-and-glass executive offices, where their meeting went well enough that they scheduled another, to discuss a deal. Later that night they celebrated with a red-meat-and-red-wine dinner at Old Homestead, Caesars' upscale steakhouse.
Recalling that Vegas trip while sitting at a MacBook Pro-dotted coffee shop in Brooklyn in March, McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign. In a nonpresidential year, no political effort would have the money to finance what he described as the "huge R.& D. project" that the Obama campaign effectively became. The resources for that kind of project could now be found only in corporate America. If companies with big budgets wanted members of Obama's team to do for them whatever it was that they did for the president, McLean couldn't see why they shouldn't answer the call.
In early April, Chuck Close photographed James Turrell, a contemporary of his, for the cover of last weekend's issue using a 20-by-24 Polaroid camera. You might wonder how he was able to do so, given that Polaroid declared bankruptcy in 2008 and no more Polaroid film is being made, much less 20-by-24 sheets of it. (The Fuji film and camera that says Polaroid on it today does not actually use Polaroid film.)
It turns out that John Reuter, who has been collaborating with Close for more than three decades (including on our shoot), stockpiled and put into cold storage a lot of Polaroid film back when it became apparent that the company was going to stop manufacturing it. Reuter told me that as soon as the unused film comes out of cold storage "it starts to catch up to its age." (Polaroid's internal testing indicates that used color film should last about 90 years in light. Kept in darkness, it should last twice as long.) No one knows when the black-and-white film will expire, but Reuter, who is the executive director of the 20X24 Studio, and his colleagues are amazed that it is in such good shape at this point, five years after he bought it. As of now, he still has approximately 450 sheets of black-and-white film and approximately 18,000 sheets of color film. For the shoot with Turrell, Close used six black-and-white and three color sheets of Polaroid.
Here are some iPhone photos of Close at work.
Last summer, the magazine featured some mighty impressive bugs from Mozambique — the pictures could've been casting shots for a "Starship Troopers" sequel. This month's National Geographic includes new photos (creepy-crawlies and more!) from the same place, Gorongosa National Park, to go with an article by the biologist E.O. Wilson, who has been involved in surveying its wildlife.
Wilson's assistant there was a local named Tonga Torcida, who shared with him an origin story that explains why Mount Gorongosa, at the park's heart, is considered sacred.
In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult — and so it has been to this day.
Life for Mount Gorongosa certainly improved after the country's civil war ended two decades ago. But deforestation remains a problem, which in turn threatens its biodiversity. All the more reason to get a sense of what's at risk of being lost, especially given that the area is a kind of "ecological island" that has hardly been surveyed by biologists. Wilson describes one method of changing that:
To sample the current biodiversity on Mount Gorongosa, Greg Carr [a philanthropist] and I decided to hold a "bioblitz" there and to engage the community living on its lower slopes. We asked Tonga Torcida to help organize the event and to recruit local children as our helpers. Bioblitzes are counts of species found and identified in a restricted area over a fixed period of time, usually 24 hours. They follow simple rules: Participants search within a set radius around a focal point, assisted by local naturalists who are familiar with one or more groups of organisms and can identify the species discovered. The first bioblitz I helped organize was at Concord, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1998, with Walden Pond as the focus. Naturalists came from all over New England. The effort was so successful and well publicized that similar events have since been conducted all over the United States (including two in New York City's Central Park) and in at least 18 other countries.
(A bioblitz in Central Park sounds fun, right?)
Wilson figures that tens of thousands of species of insects, arachnids and other invertebrates — "the little things that run the world . . . that form the foundation of ecosystems" — have yet to be discovered in Gorongosa National Park. Me, I'm sort of wondering if that's where the cicadas went. Weren't they supposed to have been crawling and whirring all over the place by now?
The artist Matthew Booth's new video (below), "Milk Drop Coronet," is a 3-D view of Harold Edgerton's famous 1936 photograph of the same name; it captures the moment when a drop of milk splashes into the shape of a crown.
Trying to see the milk-drop crown has inspired technological advances. At the turn of the 20th century, a scientist named A.M. Worthington built a device that enabled him to control a drop's fall and time it to an electric spark. Edgerton, a scientist and photographer who worked at M.I.T. for 63 years, built upon Worthington's work when he developed stroboscopic technologies to view things like a bullet piercing an apple, a balloon in midpop and an atom bomb exploding — images the human eye had previously not perceived with such clarity. "Milk Drop Coronet" appeared in 1937 in the Museum of Modern Art's first photography exhibition, "Photography 1839–1937."
Now Booth, using today's technology, has expanded upon Worthington's and Edgerton's innovations. His six-minute video, whose view circles the event, was created by carefully placing 13 cameras that could shoot simultaneously around and above the splash; the array produced a series of images that were then processed with 3-D modeling software to generate an exact replica of the scene. Booth says that to achieve this effect with no computer assistance whatsoever would have required 8,640 cameras (one for each frame of the six-minute video) — a physical impossibility, considering the splash is about the size of a quarter.
"Milk Drop Coronet" and other works by Matthew Booth are on view through July 7 at White Cube in London.
Illustrations by Steve McNiven. Colors by Andy Cotnam and Simon West.
Earlier this year, senior members of President Barack Obama's campaign team took a trip to Las Vegas. Nevada holds a special place in Obama-wonk lore as the place where his monthslong strategy of defeating Hillary Clinton by slowly and surely amassing delegates emerged. But the operatives were not there in March for any political reason. They were there to make money — specifically to land what they hoped would be the first corporate client for their new advertising business, Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.). Its bland name obscures its relatively grand promise: to deliver to commercial advertisers some of the Obama campaign's secret, technologically advanced formulas for reaching voters.
The potential client was Caesars. The casino chain was looking for ways to induce semiregular visitors to show up more routinely at its other casinos around the country and to keep regulars from defecting to new competitors. A.M.G. was making the pitch that keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney. It was all a matter of figuring out how to get their message in front of the right customers at the right time. It was not lost on the Obama strategists that the "change" they were talking about was not the kind "you can believe in" but rather the kind you can put in a slot machine. "I kind of felt like the Devil's advocate," Chauncey McLean, 31, the Democratic Party's director of media tracking during the campaign and now A.M.G.'s chief operating officer, wryly told me.
A.M.G. was founded in late December by a splinter group of longtime Obama advisers: Larry Grisolano, who oversaw how the campaign spent its advertising dollars; Grisolano's direct-mail partners Terry Walsh and Pete Giangreco; Jeff Link, a seasoned Iowa veteran who was an outside adviser in 2012; and Erik Smith, an advertising consultant for the 2012 campaign, whose work running one of the biggest 2004 pro-Kerry outside groups gave him an inside track with party donors from the corporate world.
McLean was their first hire. During the campaign he proved himself to be particularly deft at translating between the old hands of the political world, who talk about "message" and "narrative," and the quants in their 20s, who speak of "code" and "algorithms."
McLean was so moved by Obama's 2004 convention speech — the one that called for an end to a red-state America and a blue-state America — that when Obama decided to run in 2008, he took a leave from law school and joined the campaign. He had just spent the last 18 months of the 2012 presidential race bouncing between a couch in Washington and a small, shared apartment in Chicago where a colleague slept in the dining room. So he was experiencing considerable culture shock in the high life of Vegas.
Arriving at Caesars Palace after a first-class flight (only the second of his life), he was shown to his room. "I open the door and there's just this huge, like, double, wall-to-wall window with a view of the strip and a huge king bed," he said. Over room service, he met with his deputy, Chris Frommann, now 26, and made some last-minute revisions to their proposal. McLean took an iPhone picture of his kung pao chicken and sent it to his wife back in Brooklyn, "to show her that I'd made it," he joked.
The next morning McLean, Frommann, Grisolano, Smith and a couple of others were escorted through a maze of doors that led them to the casino's marble-and-glass executive offices, where their meeting went well enough that they scheduled another, to discuss a deal. Later that night they celebrated with a red-meat-and-red-wine dinner at Old Homestead, Caesars' upscale steakhouse.
Recalling that Vegas trip while sitting at a MacBook Pro-dotted coffee shop in Brooklyn in March, McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign. In a nonpresidential year, no political effort would have the money to finance what he described as the "huge R.& D. project" that the Obama campaign effectively became. The resources for that kind of project could now be found only in corporate America. If companies with big budgets wanted members of Obama's team to do for them whatever it was that they did for the president, McLean couldn't see why they shouldn't answer the call.
The artist Matthew Booth's new video (below), "Milk Drop Coronet," is a 3-D view of Harold Edgerton's famous 1936 photograph of the same name; it captures the moment when a drop of milk splashes into the shape of a crown.
Trying to see the milk-drop crown has inspired technological advances. At the turn of the 20th century, a scientist named A.M. Worthington built a device that enabled him to control a drop's fall and time it to an electric spark. Edgerton, a scientist and photographer who worked at M.I.T. for 63 years, built upon Worthington's work when he developed stroboscopic technologies to view things like a bullet piercing an apple, a balloon in midpop and an atom bomb exploding — images the human eye had previously not perceived with such clarity. "Milk Drop Coronet" appeared in 1937 in the Museum of Modern Art's first photography exhibition, "Photography 1839–1937."
Now Booth, using today's technology, has expanded upon Worthington's and Edgerton's innovations. His six-minute video, whose view circles the event, was created by carefully placing 13 cameras that could shoot simultaneously around and above the splash; the array produced a series of images that were then processed with 3-D modeling software to generate an exact replica of the scene. Booth says that to achieve this effect with no computer assistance whatsoever would have required 8,640 cameras (one for each frame of the six-minute video) — a physical impossibility, considering the splash is about the size of a quarter.
"Milk Drop Coronet" and other works by Matthew Booth are on view through July 7 at White Cube in London.
Jehad Nga for The New York Times
Ibtisam Ali Aboud (with her son Jafar) says that her husband, a Syrian Alawite, was killed by his Sunni friend.
The Damascus neighborhood known as Mezze 86 is a dense, dilapidated warren of narrow hillside streets adorned with posters bearing the face of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. The presidential palace is nearby, and the area is crawling with well-armed guards and soldiers. It is next to impossible to enter unless you are accompanied by government officials or well-known locals, almost all of them members of Assad's Alawite sect. I drove there on a quiet Friday morning in May, and we were stopped several times at checkpoints by young soldiers who examined our documents carefully before waving us on. When we arrived at our destination, in a small parking lot hemmed in by cinder-block towers, I emerged from the car to the suspicious glares of several middle-aged men in fatigues. "They are not expecting foreigners here," one of the men who accompanied me said. "The rebels are trying constantly to hit this place, because they know who lives here." He pointed to a damaged roof not far away. "A mortar struck very close the other day. A lady was killed just above us, and another just below."
Latakia, the capital of Syria's Alawite region.
To many Syrians, Mezze 86 is a terrifying place, a stronghold for regime officers and the ruthless paramilitary gunmen known as shabiha, or "ghosts." These are the men accused of carrying out much of the torture and killing that has left more than 90,000 people dead since the Syrian uprising began two years ago. Some of the older men living in the neighborhood are veterans of the notorious defense brigades, which helped carry out the 1982 massacre of Hama, where between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed in less than a month. Yet Mezze 86 now emanates a sense of aggrieved martyrdom. The streets are lined with colorful portraits of dead soldiers; every household proclaims the fallen and the wounded and the vanished.
I went there to meet a woman named Ibtisam Ali Aboud, who had fled her home after her husband — a retired Alawite officer named Muhsin — was killed in February by rebels. Ibtisam is a woman of 50, but she looked 20 years older, her face a pale canvas of anxious lines over her long, black mourning cloak. Her son was with her, a timid-looking 17-year-old named Jafar. We spoke in a dingy, sparsely furnished room, with a picture of a bearded Alawite saint on the wall. "We never used to feel any distinction between people of different sects," Ibtisam told me. "Now they are ready to slaughter us." Her husband's killer was a car mechanic named Ayham, she said, who had eaten at their table and casually borrowed money from her husband only 10 days earlier, promising to pay it back soon. Someone had been slipping notes under their door — "Die, Alawite scum," "Get out, regime thugs" — and sectarian killings and kidnappings were growing more common; even Muhsin had narrowly escaped being taken captive by armed men. But he refused to listen to his wife's warnings when she told him that Ayham was working with Sunni rebel gunmen. "Ayham is my friend," he had told her. "This is Syria, not Iraq." One night he went out to run an errand and never came home. They found his body in the family car the next day, a bullet hole in his head. The family's small auto-repair shop was burned to the ground days later. Jafar said that he was on his way home from there when five men surrounded him. "We will cut you all to pieces if you don't get out," the men said. "You will follow your father to the grave."
The family fled their home on the capital's outskirts to Mezze 86, where they would be surrounded by other Alawites. "We are the ones who are being targeted," Ibtisam told me. "My husband did nothing. He was a retired officer volunteering at a hospital." Now, she said, she could barely afford to rent two cramped rooms with her four children. A dull artillery boom shook the coffee cups on the table where we sat. The men who took me to her, also Alawite, began to reel off their own stories of murdered friends and relatives, and of neighbors abducted by rebels. "You will find stories like this in every house, people killed, people kidnapped, and all because of their sect," one of them said. "They think all Alawites are rich, because we are the same sect as Bashar al-Assad. They think we can talk to the president whenever we like. But look how we are living!"
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The Meh List continued its newsroom tour with a list this past weekend from Sam Dolnick, The Times's deputy sports editor who raised eyebrows as a guest editor by declaring guest editors "meh."
As he did in his coverage of abuses in New Jersey's privatized halfway houses, Dolnick fully threw himself into the project. He didn't just write the list. He lived the list. He spent the week engaged in "a Talmudic debate of the precise makeup of Meh," he says. "Was it something mediocre? Or was it something overhyped? Was it something that some people loved and others hated? I came down here: Meh is that which you would not turn away, but would never seek out, and were it to vanish from the world, you would hardly notice."
Dolnick took the Meh obsession to the Sports desk. Together with his colleagues, he put together a bonus all-sports list:
Three-second violations
Compression sleeves
Alternative jerseys
Unsalted peanuts (or unsalted anything)
Balks
Non-Super Bowl halftime shows
All-Star games
Courtside interviews
Shirts vs. Skins
Stadium sushi
Add your own sports-related meh in the comments section below, or on Twitter via #mehlist.
Illustration by Jasper Rietman
As I toured Israel Kirschner's Bronx paintbrush factory earlier this month, I couldn't stop feeling amazed that it was still in business. Many days, Kirschner feels the same way. The charming, energetic 69-year-old joked about his ancient equipment ("That could be 100 years old," he said of a bristle-cleaning machine); his two least-committed employees, his son and daughter ("They come late, they leave early"); and how his business has been increasingly undercut by Chinese manufacturers. After introducing me to his star brush maker, Fermin Gil, a Mexican immigrant who "can just see" when a brush isn't right, Kirschner handed me a one-inch boar-bristle brush with a wooden handle. A Chinese manufacturer sells it for 30 cents. If he made it himself, he told me, it would cost significantly more.
Deep thoughts this week:
1. The Chinese haven't yet (totally) undercut the paintbrush business.
2. Some U.S. companies have transformed while others have remained the same.
3. And both strategies work.
4. At least for a while.
Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.
Chinese manufacturers long ago wreaked havoc on the U.S. textile, apparel, toy and electronics industries, but the disruption came slowly to the brush business. There are simply so many types of brushes for so many applications that many Chinese manufacturers thought the business wasn't worth the hassle. For decades, China lagged behind in the main categories (toothbrushes, brooms, mops and, of course, paintbrushes) and only dominated the lowest rung of the business — extracting bristles from boars. "It's dirty, smelly, foul work," David Parr, executive director of the American Brush Manufacturers Association, told me. "Nobody wants to go to West Texas to try to catch a boar and figure out how to get the bristles off him."
The collapse of the housing market in 2007 and the subsequent recession turned out to be a boon for China's brush exports. With far less construction and far fewer jobs, not as many people needed paintbrushes (or brooms or toothbrushes). Those who did need them chose cheap imports over more expensive products made in America. Retailers, who stood to make more from the cheaper products, jumped at the opportunity to sell them. Now everyone in the business has to account for the Chinese.
That's a familiar story for U. S. manufacturing. The strange thing here is that there are still more than 200 brush, broom and mop makers in the U.S. These companies have employed two strategies to stave off Chinese competition: 1) change everything all the time, or 2) don't ever change a thing. Kirschner hasn't changed a thing. He makes brushes the very same way, employing many of the same machines, that his father did 50 years ago. He told me that he sticks with the old ways because, unlike with toys and T-shirts, a big chunk of the brush business caters to professionals who aren't merely shopping for price but rather for quality. Michael Wolf, who runs the Greco Brush Company, a supplier to professional house painters, told me that his customers need to know before each job that every single bristle on every single brush will be attached properly. One loose fiber left on a wall can damage a painter's reputation, which in turn can hurt Wolf's too. Wolf said that he can buy brushes for between a quarter and a dollar cheaper in China, but he is never sure exactly what he'll get. Some orders are shoddy; others never arrive. So Greco sticks with the company he knows. "My father did business with his father back in the '50s," Wolf told me. "We're keeping it going, the two of us."
At the other end of the business is Lance Cheney, 53, the fourth-generation president of Braun Brush, who told me that he would close his company rather than make the same kind of brush, the same way, for 50 years. He is constantly creating innovative brushes so that he never has any competition. Cheney makes a beaver-hair brush that's solely for putting a sheen on chocolate. He sells an industrial croissant-buttering brush and a heat-resistant brush that can clean hot deep fryers. His clients, he said, now include General Mills (he made a brush for their cereal-manufacturing line) and the energy industry (a line of expensive brushes for cleaning pipes in nuclear reactors). He even developed Brush Tile, fuzzy panels used in artistic wall hangings. He said his proudest creation is a tiny brush that helped Mars rovers dust debris from drilling sites. When Cheney sees other firms making one of his brushes, he often drops the product rather than enter a price war. Braun Brush, he said, has grown at 15 to 20 percent annually for the past five years.
Kirschner's don't-change-a-thing strategy has not brought anything like this kind of growth. Last year, he says, "was a disaster." As was this spring. But June, so far, has been "unbelievably good." Many of his customers are governmental agencies that prefer "Made in the U.S.A." products or have precise needs that Chinese imports can't yet fill. Some of the paint on New York City subways and Texas prisons, for example, was applied by Kirschner brushes.
Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.
