Shared posts

08 Sep 18:08

Bagel pluralism

by Tim Carmody
Dzaleznik

point: bagel hole

Murray's Bagels in New York will now toast customers' bagels on request, doubtlessly reviving a debate about the appropriateness thereof that rivals the oxford comma, shorts on men, and the pronunciation of GIF in its ferocity over the smallest things.

To this I say, let a million flowers bloom, à chacun son goût, de gustibus non est disputandum, whatever blows your hair back. Judge not your fellow citizens' bagel choices, whether in flavor, condiment, or the preparation thereof. But customers, you too should not judge your bagelry too harshly if they are not able to toast your bagel to your specifications. Your indignation is as unwelcome as the prejudice against you.

After all, those machines take up a lot of counter space. And you're holding up the line.

Tags: bagels
31 Aug 15:52

corn chowder salad

by deb
Dzaleznik

She already made this: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2012/07/bacon-corn-hash/

But it still sounds worth doing.

warm corn chowder salad

We’ve rented a house at the beach this week, but we haven’t seen it because why would you leave your house if it had a pool like this in the backyard? Between this, and other things the only delight pathetic city people — the giant (charcoal!) grill, a washer and dryer and an entirely separate floor just for bedrooms, meaning that adults can converse at a notch above a whisper after children go to sleep — we have zero regrets. Plus, 7 week-olds, as everyone lies when they say, are so portable! I mean, they physically are, but our sardine-packed car on Friday with everything from a folding bassinet, crib, tub, reams of burp cloths, swaddling blankets and the most sigh-worthy collection of tiny rompers might tell a different story.

... Read the rest of corn chowder salad on smittenkitchen.com


© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to corn chowder salad | 155 comments to date | see more: Corn, Peppers, Photo, Salad, Summer

24 Aug 13:52

31 Hearty, Healthy(ish) Make-Ahead Lunches

by Rabi Abonour
Dzaleznik

Good resource.


Whether you're at the office, in school, or hitting the open road, eating lunch away from home can be tough. Which is why we love dishes that are easy to make in bulk, hold up well in the fridge, and pack easily into single containers. I'm talking hearty grain and pasta salads, saucy bean dishes, and stewed meats or vegetables: simple, healthy, all-your-food-groups-in-one-bowl fare. From refreshing cold soba noodles to tabbouleh-inspired quinoa to a bacon-studded chickpea salad to quick pressure cooker chicken stew, we've got 31 recipes to shake up your lunch routine. Read More
28 Jul 20:54

Pixar: The Design of Story

by Jason Kottke

Design Pixar

Pixar: The Design of Story is an upcoming exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum here in NYC.

Through concept art from films such as Toy Story, Wall-E, Up, Brave, The Incredibles and Cars, among others, the exhibition will focus on Pixar's process of iteration, collaboration and research, and is organized into three key design principles: story, believability and appeal. The exhibition will be on view in the museum's immersive Process Lab -- an interactive space that was launched with the transformed Cooper Hewitt in December 2014 -- whose rotating exhibitions engage visitors with activities that focus on the design process, emphasizing the role of experimentation in design thinking and making.

More details are available in the press release. Definitely going to check this out and take the kids.

Tags: Cooper Hewitt Design Museum   design   museums   NYC   Pixar
25 Jul 16:57

What happens when New York City streets become too crowded even for New Yorkers

by Emily Badger
New York street, courtesy of Flickr user Bon Adrien, under a Creative Commons license.

New York City in summertime, courtesy of Flickr user Bon Adrien, under a Creative Commons license.

NEW YORK — A New York City street is not like a street anywhere else in America. It is more frenetic, more teeming, more daunting, more commercial, more electric, more lawless, more infested, more sticky, more musical, more neon.

Everywhere, lines are blurred or disobeyed. Pedestrians creep over the curb into the roadway. Restaurants spill out their doors into patio seating. Shoppers who intend to buy nothing at all gawk from the street through the windows instead. And now a UPS truck is honking at a cab dislodging its passenger mid-intersection, and several strangely insistent men want to press in your hand fliers for half-off sandwiches.

"If you look at a typical street — say, 20 years ago — you had cars and you had an occasional truck," says David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. "And that was it."

The cars and trucks are still there. But now there are tour buses bringing tourists who wouldn't have come to New York 20 years ago. There are food trucks, and cab stands, and bikeshare stations. There's Uber, and commuter buses and bike lanes. There's a guy on a pedicab, taking up the space of a car but moving at the speed of a trike with an entire family in tow.

Then there are the construction sites, because condos are rising everywhere, and as they do, they need to borrow just a little strip of the street, too. So they park industrial-scale dumpsters in the road and barricade the sidewalk with cement roadblocks. "Sidewalk closed. Use other side." Except, on the other side, there's another condo coming, too.

Times Square in New York, courtesy of Flickr user Aurelian Guichard, under a Creative Commons license.

Times Square in New York, courtesy of Flickr user Aurelian Guichard, under a Creative Commons license.

And don't forget the delivery trucks — so many delivery trucks. Because Amazon Prime will send in two days what you used to walk to the store for. And the rate's all the same, so why not order another package — I just need kitty litter! — for what you forgot yesterday?

"We have all this action on the streets," King says. "The problem with this is all of these new uses are essentially competing for the curb."

Every square foot of the public way in New York City, especially Manhattan, is reaching the limit of its carrying capacity. If the city wanted to cram more in — mobile health clinics? more fire trucks? another round of pedestrian plazas? — it would need to open some new spatial dimension.

Chinatown in New York, courtesy of Flickr user Heather Paul, under a Creative Commons license.

New York's Chinatown, courtesy of Flickr user Heather Paul, under a Creative Commons license.

This is the backdrop against which Uber, an app service that now has nearly 26,000 drivers and 19,000 cars in New York City, became embroiled with City Hall this month in an existential fight over its contributions to "congestion."

City officials warned that Uber's runaway growth was to blame for slowing travel speeds in Manhattan to 8.5 miles an hour (a claim that's near-impossible to prove given everything else occurring on the same streets). Uber countered that it couldn't plausibly play that role in a city with hundreds of thousands of cars on the road (a claim that's equally unlikely, as the service has no doubt contributed something to congestion). Uber took out attack ads. Mayor Bill de Blasio blasted the company while on a visit to the Vatican. Things only grew uglier from there, before an 11th-hour detente on Wednesday.

The conflict, though — and it's not resolved yet — isn't just about technological disruption, or entrenched taxi interests. It's about space — some of the most valuable space in the country's largest city. Its public streets.

"In New York, transportation has superseded schools and housing as the source of the most intense political conflicts," says Mitchell Moss, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU. "We no longer have the intense fights about school boards, or even about rezoning — but bicycle paths, taxis, even the regulations on bus drivers have turned out to be the most intense topics for political mobilization."

That's because there's so much more competition now for a finite asset that can't be expanded, and because absolutely everyone interacts with that problem. Every New Yorker has fought for a cab, or tripped over a tourist, or been nearly grazed by a car, or spent far, far too long trying to get where they need to go. Political fights over transportation aren't abstract, like affordable housing, or inequality. They're viscerally, instantly relatable. They're about how you'll get to the dentist tomorrow.

Image of New York courtesy of Flickr user Bryan Ledgard, under a Creative Commons License.

Find the food truck, the UPS truck and the restaurant delivery trucks on this one New York block, courtesy of Flickr user Bryan Ledgard, under a Creative Commons License.

Echoes of this same escalating conflict, though perhaps not as acute, appear in Washington, where drivers begrudge the road space cyclists now want to claim. It's in San Francisco, where private charter buses ferrying tech workers to Silicon Valley have clogged the streets public buses drive. It's in Chicago, where residents have sued to block the arrival of bikeshare stations. It exists anywhere anyone is sincerely railing about a "war on cars."

Amid all this competition, it's entirely reasonable for any city to try to regulate clashing claims to public streets.

"The idea that any private company — it doesn't matter if it’s a taxi company or yoga studio – should be able to operate their business on a public asset without any oversight, without any obligation to the city, is absurd," King says. "We certainly wouldn't let a private concert operator start throwing concerts in Central Park every week. But essentially, that’s what we’re letting happen on our streets."

Even if Bill de Blasio wanted unlimited ice cream trucks and horse-drawn carriages and high-speed buses, they simply would not fit.











08 Jul 15:45

Why rental car insurance is usually a ripoff

by Joseph Stromberg

If you've ever rented a car, you've probably been pressured to buy insurance. A salesperson will inevitably urge you to pay a little extra for what seems like lot of protection. He or she might keep offering you alternate plans if you decline — and as you stand there, uncertain of your coverage and fearful of calamity, it might feel like the prudent, adult move to simply say yes.

It isn't.

What the salesperson doesn't tell you is that most drivers won't actually benefit much from their insurance. In some instances, buying it from the rental company will even nullify certain types of existing coverage, leaving you with no more protection than if you'd opted out in the first place.

Insurance is a very profitable add-on, and these agents sell it on commission — but in most cases, you probably don't need to get it.

Don't get either type of insurance if you have your own car

(Shutterstock.com)

To figure out what to get, it's helpful to distinguish between the two main types of insurance rental companies will try to sell you:

  • Loss damage waiver (LDW), which covers any damage you might cause to the vehicle and usually costs $10 to $20 per day.
  • Liability insurance, which covers damage to other people and cars you cause with the vehicle and generally costs $5 to $15 per day.

If you have your own car — and thus your own insurance plan — you probably have both of these forms of protection already. They're built in to most plans, the vast majority of which extend to cover rental cars.

Of course, there are some exceptions. A slim minority of people just have the legally-mandated liability insurance but not the optional collision or comprehensive insurance (which is analogous to the LDW). Or you might have a collision plan with a very high deductible (meaning you have to pay a lot of money towards a repair before the insurance company starts pitching in). If either of these are the case, you might want to consider adding some insurance from the rental agency.

But the bottom line is that if you have your own car, take a good look at your own insurance plan before you get to the rental counter. It'll probably cover you just as well as what they'll try to sell you.

Most credit cards give you some coverage

(Shutterstock,com)

Even if you don't have a car, most credit card companies automatically offer collision insurance for vehicles rented with their cards. This is roughly analogous to the LDW discussed above.

But this is usually "secondary" insurance, which means it's only good if there are otherwise gaps in coverage. In other words, this insurance only kicks in if you don't buy an LDW from the rental car agency.

All this can vary from card to card — so look closely at the fine print of your credit card agreement (or call the company) to see if you're covered. But in general, the following cards offer secondary collision insurance for rental cars:

  • All Visa cards
  • All American Express cards
  • Platinum, Gold, World and World Elite MasterCards
  • Some Discover cards

Again, there are some exceptions, and you have to be careful. Most of these cards only cover rentals made in the US, and they might only cover cars rented for two weeks or less.

If you don't own a car, you probably want liability insurance

Most credit cards, however, don't offer any sort of liability insurance (the kind that covers damage to other people and cars). Rental companies are legally obligated to provide a minimum baseline level of liability coverage for no extra fee, but it's very low — only covering up to $50,000 dollars or so in damages in most states.

In essence, this means that if you cause a serious accident that leads to other drivers' and passengers' medical bills greater than this amount, you'll have to pay the remainder. And that remainder could theoretically be astronomically huge.

So if you don't own a car — and thus don't have your own liability plan — opting to pay for the rental agencies' extra liability coverage is a very good idea. Alternately, you can buy a non-driver liability coverage plan from Geico, Progressive, and a few other companies if you frequently rent or borrow cars.

There are two other types of insurance — and you probably don't need them, either

Rental agencies also offer two other, cheaper types of insurance:

  • Personal Accident Insurance, which covers your medical costs in the event of an accident and usually costs less than $5 per day.
  • Personal Effects Protection, which covers the theft of any of your possessions you might have in the vehicle and usually costs less than $5 per day.

Both of these are usually much cheaper than the first two types of insurance offered, but for most people, they're not necessary.

If you have health insurance — which has been legally required of almost all US citizens since 2014 — you likely have coverage of your own medical costs that's just as substantial as what the rental car company is trying to sell you, if not more so.

If you have homeowner's or renter's insurance, meanwhile, your possessions will typically be covered from theft whether they're at home or on the road with you. If you don't have either of these types of insurance and are traveling with especially expensive items, however, then this insurance might be worthwhile.

Why rental agents push so hard for you to buy insurance

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

There's one basic reason why, even though the majority of renters don't need it: insurance is a high-margin item.

Like prepaid gas, luxury vehicles, GPS navigators, and other sorts of upsells, insurance is responsible for a disproportionate amount of the rental agency's profits. The insurance policies cost rental companies little, and the added daily fees can substantially increase your bill. On the other hand, if you decline insurance (and rent a compact car and pump your own gas before returning), their costs aren't a whole lot lower, but your bill is reduced dramatically.

As an anonymous Los Angeles rental car agent wrote in a "confession" for the auto website Edmunds.com:

Selling products above and beyond the car was essential for survival in the business. If someone walks out with a killer deal, takes the cheapest car, takes no "protection," which is their term for insurance, takes none of the other products we offer — it reflects poorly on me and ruins my likelihood of promotion.

18 Jun 17:26

This photo captures America’s relationship with guns

by Christopher Ingraham
Dzaleznik

Jonathan Neufeld! I used to take classes with him!

Accentuating the irrationality of the Charleston news, the paper puts an ad for a gun shop on the front page today. pic.twitter.com/GyAW4EcKF1

— Jonathan A. Neufeld (@jneuf) June 18, 2015

Jonathan Neufeld, a philosophy professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C., shared this photo on Twitter today. It shows this morning's edition of the Charleston Post & Courier with its front page story on the shocking murder of nine black congregants at a church last night.

The front page also carries an ad for "Ladies' Night" at the ATP Gun Shop & Range in Summerville, S.C. "$30 gets you everything!" the ad promises, including eye and ear protection, a pistol or revolver, and 50 rounds of ammo for use on the shooting range. You get a souvenir T-shirt, and the range's Web site notes that the instructors are women.

"Have you ever wanted to learn to shoot for fun, sport, or self-defense, but felt intimidated by guns or the guys? Then you need to sign up for one of our Ladies' Night Shoots," the Web site says.

In a statement to media reporter Jim Romenesko, the Charleston Post & Courier said "the front-page sticky note that was attached to some home delivery newspapers on the same day as this tragedy is a deeply regrettable coincidence. We apologize to those who were offended." Romenesko notes this isn't the first time that this type of thing has happened.

The paper's front page is a jarring reminder of the dual role of firearms in American public life. On the one hand, they are implements of murder, contributing to one of the highest firearm homicide rates among the world's wealthy nations. On the other, they're a source of entertainment, sport and self-defense for millions of Americans.

But rarely do you see those two roles juxtaposed as starkly as they are here.

This story has been updated to include a statement from the Charleston Post & Courier.









05 Jun 20:05

Sea is for Cookie

by Jason Kottke

Sea is for Cookie

Magisterial. The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai, modified by Reddit users Put_It_All_On_Red and photosonny. (via @craigmod)

Tags: art   Katsushika Hokusai   remix   Sesame Street
04 Jun 14:16

I used to make fun of SoulCycle. Now I'm an addict.

by Alex Abad-Santos
Dzaleznik

Pathos.

My name is Alex, and I'm addicted to SoulCycle. My last class was Wednesday at 10:30 am, and my next class will be a 90-minute post- Thanksgiving ride on Friday at 10:45 a.m.

I didn't used to be this way. In fact, I remember being completely befuddled two years ago at the sight of a group of people dressed like shiny ninjas — clad in black shirts and tanks tops adorned with bedazzled skulls and wheels — waiting to enter a SoulCycle studio at 7 am on West 19th Street in New York City.

The brand — which promises a full-body workout via "indoor cycling reinvented" — has been labeled a cult, an obsession, even therapy. The riders who participate are called warriors, rock stars, renegades, and legends. SoulCycle has been made fun of relentlessly. To many sane, logical people paying $30 for a class where you ride a stationary bike for 45 minutes is a sign of mental illness — or perhaps a signal that you may be susceptible to fanatical behavior. Surely, the only people paying that much to sweat and listen to music have to be people with addictive personalities.

But SoulCycle must be doing something right. The company is filing an IPO, just as it's in the middle of a national expansion. And while many fitness studios and boutique gyms are forging deals with services like ClassPass (a sort of fitness class broker) to fill their empty slots, SoulCycle's classes are as popular as ever.

I don't have all the answers as to why some people are obsessed with SoulCycle. While there are some riders who will pay $54 for a tank top that says "front row" (an assertion of SoulCycle dominance), I'm not there yet. But perhaps I can shed some light on why the company is as successful as it is.

SoulCycle is one of the hardest workouts I've ever done, and that makes it incredibly gratifying

(Yue Wu/the Washington Post via Getty Images)

When people make fun of SoulCycle (I've made fun of it in the past), their derision is never about the actual workout. It's usually about what people wear to said workouts or the company's hippie-ish sayings. That might be because the workout is actually pretty taxing. The key to SoulCycle is that it isn't so difficult that it makes you feel like a failure five minutes in, but it's tough enough to leave you gasping for air.

At SoulCycle, you rent a pair of cycling shoes with clips on the balls of the feet, and then you enter a candlelit room and snap into a bike. The shoes reduce you to an inelegant waddle, but once you're strapped in, they make it nearly impossible to fall off and allow you to focus on getting your legs moving.

For the next 40 minutes or so, you perform various movements while pedaling against resistance. You turn a knob, and it becomes tougher to pedal. You're also in charge of how hard you're working.

The moves vary from crunches (while riding, you drop your elbows and support yourself through your abs) to tap-backs (you thrust your hips backward while riding out of the saddle), and many of them hit weird muscles you didn't know existed. You're also told to position yourself in a certain way (hips back, arms tucked close to your body, shoulders locked down, etc.) that ensures you're getting a good workout.

There are "hills" — intervals where you crank up the resistance and pedal against it — where it feels like you're moving your legs through thick mud. There are fast sprints that will make you gulp oxygen and feel like your lungs are leaking. There's even an arms section where you curl and press your biceps and triceps until they fail, all while pedaling. You never stop pedaling; if you stop pedaling, a cannon sounds and you're airlifted out of the arena. By the end of every class, I've left a small puddle of glistening sweat beneath my bike and my shirt is soaked through.

For some reason, I find all of this thrilling.

SoulCycle is exponentially more exciting than just using a treadmill, stationary bike, or elliptical machine, or attending any other fitness class I've been to. It leaves me sweatier and more accomplished than any cardio I would normally do on my own. And the combination of the darkened room (no one looking at me), thumping music (dancing is fun), and exhausting exercise makes me want to come back the next day and try harder.

"Maybe tomorrow I can put on more resistance," I've thought to myself. This is, of course, a lot easier said than done.

While it isn't the absolute toughest workout I've ever tried, SoulCycle has become my favorite.

The instructors are inspiring and won't make you feel bad about yourself

I will never allow someone to photograph me in a SoulCycle class. (Yue Wu/the Washington Post via Getty Images)

One of the worst fitness experiences I've ever had is taking a "free" training session from a personal instructor at my gym. He was texting and barely paying attention to my squats. I felt like I was eating up his time, and I was much more worried than he was about my form and whether I was correctly performing the exercises.

It was awkward, and one-on-one training is something I have never tried again.

SoulCycle's instructors go through a rigorous training program to avoid such unpleasant situations. It's a 10-week process during which they learn the company's credo of inspiration, how to choose music, and, most importantly, how to teach people in a way that's unique to the company.

"One thing I love about SoulCycle is that the instructors don't yell at you. I hate that feeling when you drag yourself to go work out, only to have an instructor tell you you're not trying hard enough," says Marisa Kabas, a writer at the Daily Dot and a SoulCycle enthusiast. "At Soul they let you do your thing, which oddly makes me want to work harder."

Being treated like an actual human being isn't something you often find in the fitness world. That's why when you talk to SoulCycle devotees, they will usually tell you who their favorite instructor is; mine is Garrett in Washington, DC.

What makes him such a great teacher is that he obviously enjoys his work. It shows in the way he treats his riders — pushing them to the limit one second, inspiring them the next, gently correcting them when needed — and in the way he treats his job. He pays a lot of attention to how people are doing, and he doesn't set specific requirements (i.e., two turns on the resistance knob to the left, one turn to the right). Instead, he puts it on you to make sure you're challenging and being honest with yourself. In Garrett's classes, you're inflicting the pain and resistance on yourself, and you're pushing yourself to get stronger. (I think my maniacal type-A alter ego attitude thrives on this.)

Garrett isn't the only great instructor at SoulCycle.

Recently, I've been taking classes in New York City, and had the pleasure of taking Karyn. I'm convinced she is part-lioness, part-machine, and has found a way to take human form. Her classes are dazzling adrenaline rushes — a mix of challenging choreography and breath-busting pushes — and she finds a way to get you to dig into your being and somehow find more.

My other favorite New York City instructor is Charlee, a marvel on the bike. She floats, making something as physically demanding as SoulCycle look effortlessly hip. Charlee also has a powerful, one-of-a-kind presence that demands your full attention. You can't rip your eyes away from her. Her classes are challenging, intense, and daring experiences.

Each instructor brings something different to class. SoulCycle invests time and energy into making sure its instructors are on point, and instructors invest a lot of time into the training program. It likely won't be long before you find an instructor whom you mesh with — whether it's due to their teaching style, the way they push their students, their inspirational attitude, or their feelings on Rihanna's music.

That said, Garrett is rad.

SoulCycle is competitive and just the right amount of cutthroat

(Michael Buckner/Getty Images for Glamour)

What makes SoulCycle work is the collective competition that naturally occurs. Everyone in that candlelit room has paid at least $30 for a workout. No one is looking to take it easy. This attitude helps every single person in the room, because everyone arrives ready to work hard.

A hierarchy exists at SoulCycle that's not unlike that of a high school cafeteria. And while that notion might make some folks wary, it's not as Mean Girls as it sounds. Though all participants reserve a bike (signups open every Monday at noon) and choose where they sit, the rows tend to sort themselves. The newbies are usually in the back and off to the left and right. The overachievers tend to gravitate closer to the center and the front.

The front row of bikes, the subject of a New York Times trend story or two, is allegedly where the best riders sit. Other riders follow their lead to stay on the beat. And when their less-experienced cohorts start wheezing or looking bent and broken (some people even barf), the front-row riders are usually still at ease, as if they're daydreaming or receiving some kind of deep-tissue massage.

Yes, this setup can be intimidating, but it also can be inspiring, in the same way that The Hunger Games is inspiring. There's a strange spark that arises when you see other people coasting while you're struggling, and it pushes you to work harder.

Conversely, watching other people heave while you're coasting along is quite satisfying (in the same kind of Hunger Games way). When I see people breaking and gasping for air, in my head, all I hear them saying is: "You're tougher than me. You're stronger than me. You win. Keep going."

That's fun for me.

And while I'm fully aware that my bloodlust is slightly disturbing, it also keeps me going back for more.

The benefits are both physical and mental

This is Max Greenfield. He is teaching a class. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images for Glamour)

I've been doing SoulCycle since October, shortly after the company opened its DC location. I usually go between three and five times per week, and in the past eight or so months I've dropped three inches off my waist and lost between 15 to 20 pounds.

Anyone who tells you that vanity and the desire to look fit are not part of the reason they do SoulCycle is lying. And from a purely vain standpoint, I'm really happy with my results.

But I've also noticed other positive effects. My endurance has increased, my resting heart rate is down, I sleep better, and when I go to the "regular" gym, I'm stronger when it comes to exercises like squats and leg presses.

Plus it's a great stress reliever — just like lots of exercise — and a healthy way to give your mind a break. There's something therapeutic about working out in a dark room where no one can see your face, dropping your guard, and using that bike to get away from whatever has ruined your day. It's dopey. It's spiritual. But each class is 45 minutes where I don't look at my phone, I don't text, I don't worry about what's next on my to-do list.

Writing off SoulCycle as a cult is needlessly cynical

Why do some people call SoulCycle a cult? Here's the short answer:

Here are some mantras 4 u. (SoulCycle)

Yes, this graphic from SoulCycle includes the line "High on sweat and the hum of the wheel." I cannot imagine myself uttering that combination of words, in that order, to another human being unless I was trying to get a laugh.

There are also a lot of "we's" in the text, referring to SoulCycle's community of riders. Of course, lots of folks would bristle at thought of riding a bike in the dark alongside a bunch of sweaty strangers and calling it teamwork.

So it's not too difficult to understand why many folks have been quick to pan the entire SoulCycle enterprise. But I would be lying if I said I've never found meaning in some of those words.

I understand the eye-rolling that comes with the idea of instructors spouting inspirational quotes while your lungs are on fire, but in combination with the endorphins of the workout, those words and mantras can be more powerful than you expect.

And even though SoulCycle's atmosphere can be competitive, it also forges respect, friendships, and bonds. You start learning people's stories, why they're in there, what they're going home to, and what they do when they're not sweating their faces off. You learn about how some riders come to class because they want to lose weight and change their lives, or because it's the only time they have to themselves, or because they want to look good for a vacation they've saved up for.

Ultimately, there are myriad reasons why people do SoulCycle. But there's also one basic one: this class, this "cult," makes them feel great and beautiful. The shiny ninja sipping her green juice is an easy target for trend pieces — but what's the use in hating on someone because she's found something that makes her feel good about herself?

The class is actually really fun — and that's largely because of the music

Some people smile at SoulCycle. (Brad Barket/Getty Images)

One element that separates SoulCycle from other "spin" classes is that you pedal to the beat of the music. At other places, like SoulCycle competitor Flywheel, there isn't as much of a relationship between the music and your actions. You're often just told to pedal fast or slow.

At SoulCycle, if everyone is doing it right, the class will look like a synchronized street gang from West Side Story, only sparklier; a sign on the studio wall even encourages riders to move out of the front row if they're going to have trouble staying in step with the music.

Sessions are divided into sprints, hills, jogs (a medium-paced interval), and "jumps" (where you hold yourself up out of the saddle for two, four, or even eight beats at a time) — intervals that require different paces, changing beats, and varying levels of effort (sprints require bursts of energy, whereas hills require more endurance). The music acts as a skeleton plan for riders, keeping them together.

That's why music is so integral to SoulCycle, and why instructors spend hours compiling the right mix. The songs tend to be trappy or EDM remixes of pop where the strong beat screams into your ear. This is perfect for me because I have the musical taste of a 15-year-old girl and my dancing ability hovers around "enthusiastic bar mitzvah."

"There's such a high standard of musicality in the instructors," Natalie Kottke, a longtime rider, told me. "But it's completely accommodating to the musically inept."

Music can also actually help riders get more out of a workout. Studies have found that listening to music while exercising enhances endurance and mood and distracts from pain. "When listening to music, people run farther, bike longer and swim faster than usual—often without realizing it," Scientific American reported in 2013, revealing that one researcher compared music to a performance-enhancing drug.

The $30 price tag is steep, but it means I never miss a class

(Michael Buckner/Getty Images for Glamour)

SoulCycle is expensive. If you attend three to five classes per week, that's $90 to $150 — and $150 is comparable to the cost of a one-month membership to a "fancy" gym. You only have until 5 pm to cancel tomorrow's class. Once that deadline passes, you're charged whether you show up or not.

Make no mistake, SoulCycle's prices are steep. But I'd argue that spending $150 per week and regularly attending class is a better use of your money than spending $150 a month if you're terrible at getting yourself to the gym.

That $30 (more if you live in New York City) keeps me honest. When I was paying $110 per month for the gym, I didn't feel an overwhelming need to go. I could always skip one day, then two days, then maybe drag myself there some other time — there just wasn't a sense of urgency. Skipping SoulCycle really drives home the fact that you're wasting money. That isn't the best reason to attend, but it's pretty good motivation, especially on top of the workout you're getting.

SoulCycle meshes nicely with my type-A personality, but it's still welcoming to everyone

This is Kelly Ripa. She will probably kick your ass at SoulCycle. (John Lamparski/WireImage)

I grew up playing tennis, which can be one of the loneliest competitive sports. I think that's why I tend to glom on to the aggressive "front-row" nature of SoulCycle. I like it when classes feel like a contest or a challenge and remind me of being on the court.

For others, SoulCycle is more about having fun and dancing along to the music, or about taking time to reflect. Meanwhile, some people view it as a chance to hang out with their friends (I have dragged multiple Vox staffers to classes), or simply as a way to look better in a bathing suit. I'm sure there are folks who love being part of a club. And there are plenty of profound stories about riders who came to SoulCycle while they were fighting cancer or battling depression.

Not everyone at SoulCycle is addicted to the competition. But I think all of the regulars are addicted to something SoulCycle gives them.


SB Nation presents: Another workout that inspires fervent dedication- CrossFit

01 Jun 17:26

A Little Work in Advance Makes a Cocktail to Drink All Summer

by Max Falkowitz

"It's just a Paloma variation with a cordial instead of a grapefruit soda," Zac Overman, the bar manager of Seattle's Sitka & Spruce tells me. I consider his cordial a lesson in patience. Do a little work now, wait a bit, then reap far greater rewards than any instant-gratification solution would have provided. Read More
27 May 16:24

High-rent blight in the West Village

by Jason Kottke

Shuttered storefronts. Abandoned retail locations. Small businesses that fall like the House of Cards & Curiosities on Eighth Avenue. These are the signs of urban blight we usually associate with economic downturns or poor, forgotten neighborhoods. But these shuttered storefronts are in one of America's wealthiest neighborhoods; NYC's West Village. As The New Yorker's Tim Wu explains, some urban blight emerges when economic times are too good and rents get too high. And we're not just talking about mom and pop here. Even Starbucks is closing some Manhattan locations due to rent hikes.

Syndicated from NextDraft. Subscribe today or grab the iOS app.

Tags: cities   economics   NYC   Starbucks   Tim Wu
19 May 01:06

Tweet of the Day

by Taegan Goddard

Welcome to @Twitter, @POTUS! One question: Does that username stay with the office? #askingforafriend

— Bill Clinton (@billclinton) May 18, 2015

14 May 02:12

mushrooms and greens with toast

by deb

mushrooms and greens with toast

Regarding the ever-present stacks of cookbooks around the apartment, my mother joked to me on Sunday that I should open a library. She’s probably right. I don’t think that a week goes by that I don’t* receive at least one new cookbook and I hardly know where to dive in. And don’t get me wrong, I too swoon over the currently in-demand aesthetic of vertically oriented, dimly lit photos of reclaimed weathered barnwood tables boasting sauce splatters and variations on kale on matte pages bound in jacketless books. It’s just that they’re all starting to jumble together.

... Read the rest of mushrooms and greens with toast on smittenkitchen.com


© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to mushrooms and greens with toast | 121 comments to date | see more: Casserole, Greens, Kale, Mushrooms, Photo, Vegetarian, Weeknight Favorite

12 May 18:40

The arguments that convinced a libertarian to support aggressive action on climate

by David Roberts

To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they've begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives.

Jerry Taylor. (Niskanen Center)

Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent of this perspective. About five or six years ago, he says, he was convinced by a series of discussions, mainly with other right-leaning thinkers, that he was wrong on climate policy. His position "fundamentally switched."

In March, he released a new policy brief, "The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax," which argues for a steadily rising "revenue-neutral" fee on fossil fuel producers. Aside from a small portion set aside to cushion low-income households, all the revenue would be devoted to reducing other taxes.

Taylor has in mind a deal that would impose a carbon tax in exchange for the removal of other climate regulations, notably EPA carbon rules and state renewable energy mandates. He's been defending the proposal on Niskanen's blog, mainly against attacks from skeptical conservatives.

On a hot DC day last week, I caught up with Taylor at Niskanen's office — housed, improbably, in a buzzing shared workspace filled with attractive millennials and their startups. The muggy weather had him in a natty seersucker suit, full of energy and eager to dig into wonky details.

Though it may not be obvious, our conversation has been edited for length. Part one covers the arguments that convinced Taylor aggressive climate policy is necessary, why the Tea Party still disagrees, and how he thinks the right base can be brought around to his way of thinking. Part two, tomorrow, will get into climate policy and how it squares with libertarian principles.

David Roberts: Tell me a little about your personal evolution on the issue of climate change.

Jerry Taylor: Well, I’ve been wrestling with climate issues ever since I was employed at Cato, back to 1991 — I initially started out editing [noted climate skeptic] Pat Michaels’s books. For most of my time at Cato, I took what is today the conservative orthodox line on climate, which is that it’s unclear how big a problem it is, there’s a lot of uncertainty, and there’s probably more of a chance that it’s going to be a relative non-problem than it will be a problem. Given that, the premiums associated with addressing it in the manner environmentalists wish to address it were so high, it was not worth the policy.

You can add to that what I call the Bjorn Lomborg position, which is that if you put down a list of all the things plaguing mankind and putting people in body bags, you’re going to find climate change pretty far down the list — there are a lot more worthy things to address if you’re going to spend the kind of resources required to address climate change.

So that was my line. But I began to change, maybe five or six years ago, for several reasons.

One, the scientific evidence became stronger and stronger over time. A lot of conservatives think of climate change as similar to the population issue. You have to remember, in the '60s and '70s people were frantic about population growth. And it just peeled away as an issue, simply because it was wrong — or the projections were. And so I would say the same thing: [climate change] is just one in the endless parade of environmental apocalypse stories.

But in this particular case, the concern has been with us for over 30 years, and the case isn’t getting weaker. It seems to get stronger. And while one can do some gymnastics to continue to defend the "there’s nothing to see here, folks" argument, it became harder and harder. It’s not irrelevant that the smart skeptics still remain a tiny, tiny minority [in the scientific community], even to this day.

(Dragons flight/Wikipedia)

There’s one of three reasons for that. You can argue, one, that most scientists happen to be left-of-center activists. I don’t agree with that. Second, you can argue that there are public choice dynamics that explain why environmental scientists, atmospheric physicists, and others embrace alarmism. There’s probably some truth to that, but nowhere near as much as a lot of people on the right believe. Or third, [skeptics] just don’t have a strong case. And I increasingly began to worry that it was the latter.

But what really changed things for me ... it began with an essay by Jon Adler, a friend of mine who now teaches at Case Western Reserve University. He wrote an essay on free-market environmentalism and why, if you take it seriously, it’s pretty hard to be as cavalier as libertarians are when it comes to climate change.

Libertarians tend to compare the cost side of climate change [mitigation] to the benefits. They say, when [person or company] A harms [person or company] B, if the gains to A are greater than the harms to B, then fare thee well. No! If you believe in property rights and individual liberty, it simply does not matter if aggression from A gains more than is lost by the victim.

I just never thought of it that way. And I thought he was exactly right. So that was the first thing that changed for me.

Then Bob Litterman comes along. He is pretty well-known in the environmental community; he's on the World Wildlife Fund board of directors; he’s on the Resources for the Future board of directors. He’s also — prior to and separate from these activities — a partner at Goldman Sachs. He started their quant operation and is one of the top risk analysts in the world.

So [Litterman] came in to talk to me and my then-colleague, Peter Van Dorn, and laid out what I thought a very powerful argument. In brief it went like this: the issues associated with climate change are not that different from the risk issues we deal with in the financial markets every day. We know there’s a risk — we don’t know how big the risk is, we’re not entirely sure about all of the parameters, but we know it’s there. And we know it’s a low-probability, high-impact risk. So what do we do about that in our financial markets? Well, if it’s a nondiversifiable risk, we know that people pay plenty of money to avoid it.

[Litterman's] point was that if this sort of risk were to arise in any other context in the private markets, people would pay real money to hedge against it. He did it every day for his clients. Even if Pat Michaels and Dick Lindzen and the rest [of the climate-skeptic scientists] are absolutely correct about the modest impacts of climate change as the most likely outcome, it’s not the most likely outcome that counts here. Nobody would manage risk based on the most likely outcome in a world of great uncertainty. If that were the case, we’d have all our money in equities. No one would spend money on anything else. But we don’t act that way.

I thought that was a very powerful argument. At this time, it was nagging at me what [economist] Marty Weitzman had come up with. This was another big intellectual development, his long-tail [risk] argument, how these long-tail risks are accounted for in cost-benefit calculations. And as each rebuttal was issued to Weitzman, they were just shredded.

Look at all these long tails. (IPCC AR4)

And then Litterman comes along and marries that analysis to the financial markets. That was very powerful stuff. So my position fundamentally switched at that point.

And about that same time was Mass v. EPA [the case in which the Supreme Court authorized EPA to regulate carbon emissions] — the baseline was no longer non-intervention. It was no longer a conversation about whether we should do something, but a conversation about how we should do something. And with the endangerment finding at EPA, and the Clean Power Plan going forward, the regulatory drumbeat is banging. It's pretty hard to argue that a carbon tax is a less attractive answer than, say, EPA regulation.

DR: Lots of people thought the threat of EPA regulations was going to be the killer argument to help get cap-and-trade through in 2009. But it didn’t. Nobody bought it.

JT: There are probably a couple reasons. My conversations with friends on the right suggested that they didn’t think EPA had the ability to execute a plan like this. And if it did, it wouldn’t want to take ownership of the costs associated with it. The Obama administration needed a political green light from Congress to take policy in this direction. Even though in theory [Obama] could [on his own], in practice he really couldn’t. And that even if they were wrong, they’d fight it — that’s what lawsuits are for, that’s what presidential elections are for.

So that threat never moved anybody’s needle even a centile on the right. It probably should’ve, but it didn’t.

DR: The intellectual evolution you’ve described makes a lot of sense to me. Yet you remain among the very few on the right to have gone through that evolution. From the outside, at least, the right still looks like a giant lump of "no" on climate. Is there more going on beneath the surface?

JT: I think so. The libertarian world is inscrutable enough to a non-libertarian. But even within the libertarian world, it’s divided into factions. When outsiders look at the right-of-center world, what they tend to look at is people in Washington. The people who make a living arguing about, say, environmental policy, sure, they’re a giant voice of "no." And the organizations they work for tend to be that way, as well.

But if you put together a roster of the smartest right-of-center or libertarian thought leaders, whether they’re economists or lawyers or philosophers or what have you — I mean libertarians or thoughtful right-of-center libertarian-ish people like Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard — you’ll find a very different picture. You see far more support for doing something in a market-oriented direction to address climate change than you see denial. In fact, you see very little denial.

So it’s a very different picture outside of Washington. If you look at the Pew research, you find that the libertarian world outside of Washington is heterodox. They believe in action. They are already on the other side of where the DC establishment is. And then a lot of the people I know in libertarian and right-of-center organizations who are not engaged in the climate debate but are in some other policy area, there’s a not-insubstantial amount of lingering and, in my opinion, growing skepticism about the direction of the libertarian world on this issue. So it’s a little more complicated than it might look from the outside.

DR: But then you look at the Republican base ... one recent poll of early primary states found that [in Iowa and South Carolina] belief in climate change was the least acceptable position among Republican voters. It seems to have become an identity issue. Does anyone know how to unwind that?

JT: John McCain knew how to unwind that. Climate change is low salience, not just for voters in general, but even for activists. Yeah, if you ask people in the Tea Party movement, "What do you think about climate change?" they’ll get very militant about the topic. (I notice they’re like that about a lot of topics.) But back in 2008, they sure hated Barack Obama a lot more than they hated a cap-and-trade project. It didn’t get in the way of their votes for John McCain.

There are a couple of things the polling tells us. The first is, outside of the self-identified Tea Party voter, even Republicans are more inclined to vote for a candidate who is in favor of some proactive measures on climate than one who is against it. That even goes for self-identified conservative Republicans. It’s only the Tea Party where you see the huge opposition.

(Yale Project on Climate Change Communication)

The second thing to note is there’s a real difference between Republican primary voters in red states versus blue states. There was a very interesting article in the New York Times a few month ago that looked at a path to the Republican nomination. All the commentary says you have to kowtow to the Tea Party, the activists and the anti-tax groups. [The article] said, nonsense. How many Republican nominees have done that? Lots of people trying to get the nomination do that, but all the [successful] nominees tend to be establishment Republicans.

How could that be? It turns out the road to the GOP nominations still runs primarily through blue states. And Republican voters in New Hampshire do not look like Republican voters in South Carolina, even in the primaries. So for that reason, I think you can make more of the surveys you’re talking about than maybe you ought to.

That’s not to say [the Tea Party] is unimportant. The main thing that keeps a lot of elected Republicans from entertaining the ideas I’m for is the fear that were they to do so, they would soon be working at republicEn with Bob Inglis [who lost his South Carolina House seat to a Tea Party challenger in 2010, in part due to his support for a carbon tax], because they won’t have a job. They don’t want to be Bob Inglis. And until they see some real reason they won’t, they’re going to hold their fire.

DR: It does seem that there’s some effort from the Republican establishment to mute the science denial, but they don’t really know how. They've unleashed a beast they can't control.

JT: That’s exactly right. I mean, the thing I try to play up when I’m engaging with the right on this topic is that if you look at surveys, you find a majority of the people in the opposition camp will tell you they don’t buy [climate change]. They take the James Inhofe line: "It’s a hoax" or "It’s a fraud" or "It’s all natural, there’s no way man can affect the climate, this is hubris."

Whereas the scientists they point to to justify that position don’t agree with that. For the most part, the credible climate scientists — Dick Lindzen, [Pat] Michaels, Judith Curry, Bob Balling — all dismiss that argument. They believe anthropogenic emissions are indeed changing climate at the margins.

So you’re right, a beast was unleashed. A lot of it comes from talk radio, a lot of it comes from Fox, and that’s where a lot of the conservative base gets their information.

The discussion about how public policy changes — there’s no real orthodox view on that. There are lots of different theories. None of them are proven.

But when it comes to public opinion, there are academic orthodoxies. They survive the test. And those orthodoxies suggest that public opinion follows elite opinion, pure and simple. If elite opinion changes, public opinion changes — it can change fast and it can change dramatically.

Beliefs about climate change — whether it’s happening, whether we should do anything — have been pretty stable. What moves around is right-wing opinion. And it tends to follow the leader. So when Newt Gingrich and John McCain were talking about the need to do something about climate change, what do you know? Republican support for doing something about climate change, including conservative support, shot up. When they were out of the game and the messages were more uniform on the other side, Republican support dropped.

DR: This suggests that the smart thing for people like you to do is to go after elite opinion.

JT: Yes. If the objective is to change public opinion, then changing elite opinion is a necessary prerequisite. In fact, I would say necessary and sufficient. I don’t think you need to win a war on talk radio to have your impact on right-of-center opinion.

[Tune in tomorrow, when Taylor and I discuss libertarian principles, climate policy, and Obama's Clean Power Plan.]

11 May 23:05

How to get an ethical manicure: a guide to spotting worker exploitation

by Dara Lind

After reading yesterday's heartbreaking New York Times exposé about the exploitation of nail salon workers, some of my colleagues and readers alike had the same question: is there some way I can get a manicure and know for sure that I'm not exploiting an immigrant worker?

If you don't live in New York, your local nail salons might not pay workers as miserably as the ones the Times investigated. But worker exploitation and even labor trafficking certainly happen — in nail salons and in other service industries — and the best thing that you can do is to be aware of what it looks like.

The good news is there are possible solutions out there — both ways to identify businesses that are engaging in fair labor practices, and ways for individual customers to check up on workers. And while some of these suggestions are specific to the nail-care industry, it might be a good guide for customers who might be concerned about worker exploitation in other services like landscaping or maintenance.

Here's how you can get a manicure without turning into a human rights abuser.

1) Understand the difference between trafficking and exploitation

A group of teenage girls after their rescue from traffickers. Johan Ordonez/AFP

According to Rebecca Pfeffer, a professor at the University of Houston who studies labor exploitation and trafficking in America, the best thing a customer can do is be aware of worker exploitation and know where to look for it. But to do this, it's extremely important to understand the difference between a worker who's being exploited through low or illegal pay, and one who's being trafficked — who's being forced or coerced into staying at her job.

The two often go together. Some behaviors can indicate that something bad is going on, Pfeffer says: "whether the worker displays any fear of their employer; whether they're free to talk to anyone they want at work. Another thing you might look at is whether people seem to be in charge of their own finances. So if you're giving tips, and someone is collecting those tips, or if all of the money is collected communally, you have no guarantee that someone is actually going to be paid a fair wage from that."

But not all underpaid workers are being trafficked, and if you're confident that a salon is sketchy, you'll want to know which agency to call to investigate them. Pfeffer says the thing to look out for in potential trafficking cases is whether the worker has control over her own movement: "During the day, are they allowed to take a break and leave? At the end of the workday, is everybody in a place, leaving together in a group, and being taken somewhere? And does that happen on their own accord, or is it facilitated by a third party?"

2) Call the damn hotline

If you have some confidence that a business is exploiting its workers, call your state's department of labor.

If you think a business is trafficking its workers, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

Put those fancy nails to use! (Craig Barritt/Getty Images Entertainment)

If you're uncomfortable enough at a salon or other business that you don't want to go back, ask yourself why. Seriously consider the possibility that anything you saw that could be evidence of exploitation or trafficking is something an investigator would want to know about. You shouldn't file a report based on zero evidence, and you certainly shouldn't exaggerate what you saw. But if what you've seen and the questions you've asked make you wary enough that you want to stop going somewhere, you shouldn't assume that someone else will notify the authorities about it.

3) Ask owners for more transparency about where their money is going

In a blog post yesterday, Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir recommended that customers go to more expensive salons. Pfeffer agrees, to a point: "With [manicures] and with a lot of other things, we have to know that if you're paying very little for something that involves human work, that person is not making very much money." In her experience, higher-end businesses are generally less likely to exploit their workers.

But the only way to know for sure is if a business says explicitly that it charges customers more so that it can pay workers a good wage. "In some other businesses," Pfeffer points out, "they are very transparent about their wages, and about the steps that they take to avoid exploitation in their supply chain. I think a call for more of that would certainly make a difference."

If you're going to a higher-end nail salon, it couldn't hurt to ask. An owner might not always tell you the truth — but if the salon is legit, they've just learned they can use that to appeal to customers.

4) Trust your instincts, but ask questions

In my conversations with colleagues, I quickly discovered that people can often sense something's not right about the salon they're visiting. "We've all had that experience," says Pfeffer. "I know I have. I've gone into one nail salon, and the atmosphere feels so different from another. 'Okay, I feel like something is weird.'"

"So what do you do?" she continues. "And the answer is that you can ask questions. And I always do now. 'How much do you get paid?' 'Do you get to keep your tips?' 'How long have you been here?' Sometimes I'll just say, like, 'Where do you live?' Just getting a sense of whether they have the freedom to come and go as they want."

(Nick Smith/BuzzFoto)

In other industries, it's not very easy to interview workers — you can't interview the farmworker who picked your grapes. But Pfeffer points out, "In a nail salon, where you're sitting face to face with someone for 30 minutes, you have a lot of opportunities to ask a few questions" in a gentle way that doesn't necessarily set off any alarms.

5) Be aware of language barriers

One of the reasons immigrant workers can be exploited to begin with is that they don't speak English fluently, or at all. And even if nothing is wrong, a manicurist might be reticent to carry on a conversation in a language she barely speaks. Conversely, an exploited manicurist might not want to talk about her exploitation in a language her exploiter speaks better than she does.

A couple of my colleagues had had good experiences when they spoke their manicurists' native language — they would hear about the manicurists' homes and families, and come away convinced that the salon treated its workers well. In another case, though, a colleague's manicurist described her life using the Chinese word for "bitter" or "hardship." "And I never went back," the colleague says.

Most of the workers in the New York Times story are Korean or Latina, but most manicurists in the rest of the United States are Vietnamese; you can also find salons with Chinese or Latina technicians. If you have a friend who speaks the salon worker's language, consider taking him or her along. (Treat him or her to a manicure or a foot scrub. It's the least you can do.) If not — and if you can do it unobtrusively — consider getting a translation app like iTranslate that has voice recognition.

6) Don't just feel guilty. Try to resolve the dilemma.

Many of my colleagues have already tied themselves up in ethical knots over whether to stop getting cheap manicures. On the one hand, they say, they don't want to participate in exploitation. But on the other hand, if they don't go to a cheap salon, an exploited worker might make even less.

The point of seeking out businesses that treat their workers well is that you want them to get more customers and hire more people. If there are more job opportunities at good salons, that's good news for poorly paid workers at other salons.

But this is where the difference between trafficking and exploitation really becomes important. As long as a worker is genuinely free to leave a bad job, no matter how terrible, then you should not feel guilty about going to a business where workers are better paid. If you're worried that a worker isn't free to leave, you're not just dealing with a pay problem — you're dealing with a human trafficking problem. And you should call that in.

7) Find a way to label good businesses

There actually is a model for a local group to identify and certify nail salons that are doing the right thing. The bad news is that it's not exactly focused on workers' pay — it's focused on health concerns. But it's a demonstration of one way a customer can know with confidence she's getting her nails done at an ethical salon.

A Healthy Nail Salons advocate in a Boston suburb talks to a salon owner. (Essdras M Suarez/Boston Globe/Getty)

The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative started in the Bay Area and now operates in several of California's biggest counties. Julia Liou, a co-founder, works at a community health clinic for Asian Americans; she told Vox that she noticed a lot of nail salon workers were coming in with health concerns "from breathing difficulties to dermatitis — and even up to a lot of stories of workers who had had breast cancer, reproductive impacts such as miscarriages, wondering if their children had developmental delays." Workers didn't know there was any connection between their health complaints and the salon products they were being exposed to every day. But Liou says many common products in nail salons have been linked to reproductive and neurological health dangers — a topic the Times actually covered in another part of its investigation.

These products aren't regulated at the federal or state level, but Liou and her colleagues didn't think the political climate was right for them to succeed with a big regulation campaign. Instead, they started working with county governments to set up a Healthy Nail Salons standard, which the county could inspect and certify. (Some similar campaigns in other industries operate without government involvement — a new campaign called the Equitable Food Initiative, for example, certifies farmers directly if they meet certain standards for treating their workers.)

The Healthy Nail Salons standard is, Liou stresses, primarily about the health and safety of workers and customers — not about whether workers are being paid legal wages. But she does say that in order to get certified, a salon has to engage in training that includes telling owners and workers alike about wage and hour regulations. And the collaborative meets often with both owners and workers.

"In many ways, I think, the owners we've seen have actually welcomed" getting information about labor law, Liou says. "[With] a lot of nail salons, it's easy to open, it's often a family business, they don't know all of the different regulations involved in setting up a business." Liou says it was initially awkward to discuss labor issues with both workers and owners in the same room, but the collaborative has figured out a way to do it that both educates owners and gives workers "a safe space to talk about the issues." And in one case, when workers were being exploited, the collaborative was able to refer them to a law clinic — which successfully sued the salon for $750,000 and forced the owner to change labor practices.

Liou and her colleagues are trying to make it as easy as possible for groups in other areas to set up Healthy Nail Salons certification programs. (There's already a campaign in Boston, for example.) But Liou acknowledges that a lot of the interest in the campaign has come from customers who are trying to protect their own health, or the health of their families.

Could customers really care enough to make a Healthy Nail Salons–style model work for labor rights? Pfeffer isn't sure. She talks about a local TV segment she shows in one of her classes, where a station uncovered "pretty gross labor trafficking" at a Chinese restaurant. The anchor interviewed one of the restaurant's customers, "and they were like, 'So what are you going to do? Are you going to change the way you visit restaurants, or what you learn about the places you go?' And the customer said, 'No, I'm not going to stop coming here, the food is really good!'"

"We can't just expect people to be conscious consumers just because they have goodwill, I think," Pfeffer continues. "There are a lot of competing demands for people's decision making."

Still, she says, doing something like the Healthy Nail Salons campaign for labor "is an excellent model, and I think it's good to try. The worst thing we can do is what we've been doing all this time, which is nothing."

11 May 23:04

The US tortured a child soldier at Gitmo for years. On Thursday, he won his freedom.

by Max Fisher
Dzaleznik

Holy shit. I didn't know about this.

  • Omar Khadr, often known as the "al-Qaeda child soldier," has been freed in Canada after 13 years in detention, most of that at Guantanamo.
  • A Canadian citizen, Khadr was made to fight for al-Qaeda when he was 15. US forces captured him, then sent him to Gitmo, where he was repeatedly tortured.
  • Omar Khadr's case represented the American treatment of "war on terror" detainees at its worst; his hard-won release is perhaps a symbol of the gradual end of that era.

What happened to Omar Khadr

In 2002, when Omar Khadr was 15 years old, his father enlisted him as a child soldier for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Khadr is Canadian, but his father spent much of the 1990s entangled in jihadist causes, moving the family between Canada, Pakistan, and later Afghanistan. A few months after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Omar's father sent him to translate for Libyan jihadists who were training Afghan fighters in bomb-making.

On July 27, 2002, US special forces raided the jihadist camp where Omar Khadr was staying. It at first appeared that everyone in the camp was killed in the firefight, but when one of the Americans inspected the motionless body of a boy with three bullet wounds, they found he was alive. In fluent English, the boy begged to be killed.

Khadr was sent to the US military hospital and then the US interrogation center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was tortured. He was then sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was to be his home for over a decade.

Omar Khadr's torture at Guantanamo

There is a story you most commonly hear in reference to Omar Khadr's torture at Guantanamo: the mop incident. Journalist Jeff Tietz, in his harrowing 2006 investigation for Rolling Stone, described it in disturbing detail.

A few months into Khadr's detention — he was, keep in mind, still only a child — guards chained him to the floor of an interrogation room. They pulled his arms and legs behind in a "bow" position, until his limbs strained painfully at their sockets. This was known in the officially sanctioned American torture guides as a "stress position," and victims often pass out from the pain. Over several hours, the guards contorted Omar into different stress positions, each time shoving him into a painful position on the ground. Eventually, inevitably, he urinated himself.

The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

Much of Omar's torture was psychological as well as physical. One interrogator used Omar's youth against him, threatening to send him to a special facility where "they like small boys." Such threats often went with physical torture, as Tietz recounts:

While he was at Guantanamo, Omar was beaten in the head, nearly suffocated, threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely and, as at Bagram, lunged at by attack dogs while wearing a bag over his head. "Your life is in my hands," an intelligence officer told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003. During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. He spat in Omar's face, tore out some of his hair and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria -- places where they tortured people without constraints: very slowly, analytically removing body parts.

The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa -- Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Omar's treatment was not unique at Guantanamo, especially in the early years. But it is all the more horrific for his age.

What Omar Khadr represents about America's war on terror

It is possible to imagine a way in which interrogators and guards could convince themselves, however wrongly, that their torture of other Guantanamo prisoners was permissible or even warranted; that these were "bad guys" undeserving of fundamental human rights and that their torture would protect American national security.

Omar Khadr in 2005, when he was 18 years old. (Rick Eglinton/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

But it is mind-boggling to try to understand how an entire system of American jailers, interrogators, and military overseers could believe that repeatedly torturing a child was both acceptable and worthwhile. That they reached this conclusion, and continued to hold it for years, speaks to the horrors of Guantanamo and the moral black hole into which the Bush administration led the United States.

In a 2003 meeting with Canadian intelligence officials, Khadr broke down in sobs. "Promise me you'll protect me from the Americans," he begged. When they refused, he called out for his mother.

That same year, Army Chaplain James Yee was assigned to Guantanamo, where he was surprised to find Khadr, an English-speaking boy, among the prison's population. Yee later told the journalist Michelle Shephard that he would sometimes see Khadr reading a book of Disney cartoons. An interrogator had presented the book to Khadr during an interrogation, intending it as an insult. In fact, Khadr had been delighted.

Yee recalled finding Khadr curled up asleep on his cot, the book with the Mickey Mouse cover clutched to his chest. It is difficult to picture: a boy on a metal cot finding momentary respite between violent interrogations, grasping this lone symbol of a childhood he never had.

In 2010, after Khadr had spent nearly a decade in Guantanamo and was now in his early 20s, a psychologist who was visiting the prison asked him what he most missed about life before his captivity. He replied, "Being loved."

Omar Khadr's path to freedom

Throughout his detention, international rights groups and the United Nations called repeatedly for Khadr's release. He was a child soldier, they said, and under international law should be considered a victim of his recruiters who was acting under coercion, not of his own volition.

The US rejected this, and accused Khadr of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier during the July 2002 firefight. (The merits of that allegation remain a source of considerable controversy.) He was the first person since World War II prosecuted by a military tribunal for war crimes committed while he was a juvenile.

In 2010, he pleaded guilty, later explaining that he did so only because he saw no other path to freedom. The US had a strong incentive to pursue a plea deal: a number of its Guantanamo cases had gone poorly, and had the government pursued and lost its case against Khadr, it may have set a precedent on issues relating to evidence that would have imperiled a number of other US military commission cases.

The plea deal allowed Khadr to be transferred to a Canadian prison in 2012. He was transferred between a series of prisons in Canada through 2014 as he began appealing both his case and his earlier guilty plea. On April 24, 2015, a Canadian judge granted Khadr bail — at the Canadian government's objection. On May 7, the judge overruled the government's objections and ordered him freed.

Omar Khadr's life after captivity

As of Thursday, Khadr had been released on bail, and will live with his lawyer and his lawyer's wife in Edmonton. That comes with substantial restrictions: he must wear a monitoring bracelet and submit to extensive monitoring, is not allowed to possess a laptop or cellphone, and is under curfew every night.

Khadr spoke to reporters in Edmonton on Thursday. He expressed gratitude and humility. "I would like to thank the Canadian public for trusting me and giving me a chance," he said. "I will prove to them that I am more than what they thought of me."

In the video, one of the reporters asks Khadr about his father, who had sent young Omar into service as a child soldier and was killed in 2003 by Pakistani security forces. "There's a lot of questions I would like to ask my father," he says. "A lot of decisions that he made, reasons he took us back there, just a whole bunch of questions about his reasoning, his life decisions."

Another reporter asks Khadr, "What do you want to do most?" He smiles. "That's a hard question. Everything, and nothing in particular. Everything." He suggests he might like to work in health care.

08 May 13:51

NYC's nail salon sweatshops

by Jason Kottke

From Sarah Nir at the NY Times, an investigation into the world of NYC nail salons, where workers need to pay a fee to get a job, are underpaid, subjected to abuse, and are crammed into one-bedroom apartments with several other workers.

Qing Lin, 47, a manicurist who has worked on the Upper East Side for the last 10 years, still gets emotional when recounting the time a splash of nail polish remover marred a customer's patent Prada sandals. When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman's hand came out of the manicurist's pay. Ms. Lin was asked not to return.

"I am worth less than a shoe," she said.

Prepare to be infuriated over and over as you read this.

The typical cost of a manicure in the city helps explain the abysmal pay. A survey of more than 105 Manhattan salons by The Times found an average price of about $10.50. The countrywide average is almost double that, according to a 2014 survey by Nails Magazine, an industry publication.

With fees so low, someone must inevitably pay the price.

"You can be assured, if you go to a place with rock-bottom prices, that chances are the workers wages' are being stolen," said Nicole Hallett, a lecturer at Yale Law School who has worked on wage theft cases in salons. "The costs are borne by the low-wage workers who are doing your nails."

In a Q&A about the investigation, Nir shares how she became interested in nail salons:

About four years ago, I was at a 24-hour spa in Koreatown. It's one of the Vogue top-secret best-bet salons -- a really unusual place. It was my birthday, and I treated myself to a pedicure at 10 AM. And I said to the woman, "It's so crazy that this is a 24-hour salon. Who works the night shift?" And she says, "I work the night shift." And I said, "Well, it's daytime. Who works the day shift? What do you mean?"

And she said, "I work six days a week, 24 hours a day, I live in a barracks above the salon, and on the seventh day, I go home to sleep in my bedroom in Flushing, and then I come right back to work."

And I was like, This woman's in prison. People had to shake her to keep her awake. And then she would do a treatment. I just thought it was crazy.

I don't see how you can go to a NYC nail salon after reading this article. Even Nir's tips about being a socially conscious nail salon customer aren't much help.

Update: Part 2 of Nir's series on nail salons is out. It's about the health hazards faced by nail salon workers, including lung disease, miscarriages, and cancer. One woman even lost her fingerprints.

Similar stories of illness and tragedy abound at nail salons across the country, of children born slow or "special," of miscarriages and cancers, of coughs that will not go away and painful skin afflictions. The stories have become so common that older manicurists warn women of child-bearing age away from the business, with its potent brew of polishes, solvents, hardeners and glues that nail workers handle daily.

A growing body of medical research shows a link between the chemicals that make nail and beauty products useful -- the ingredients that make them chip-resistant and pliable, quick to dry and brightly colored, for example -- and serious health problems.

Whatever the threat the typical customer enjoying her weekly French tips might face, it is a different order of magnitude, advocates say, for manicurists who handle the chemicals and breathe their fumes for hours on end, day after day.

The prevalence of respiratory and skin ailments among nail salon workers is widely acknowledged. More uncertain, however, is their risk for direr medical issues. Some of the chemicals in nail products are known to cause cancer; others have been linked to abnormal fetal development, miscarriages and other harm to reproductive health.

Update: Governor Cuomo has set up a task force to conduct investigations into the city's nail salons.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered emergency measures on Sunday to combat the wage theft and health hazards faced by the thousands of people who work in New York State's nail salon industry.

Effective immediately, he said in a statement, a new, multiagency task force will conduct salon-by-salon investigations, institute new rules that salons must follow to protect manicurists from the potentially dangerous chemicals found in nail products, and begin a six-language education campaign to inform them of their rights.

Nail salons that do not comply with orders to pay workers back wages, or are unlicensed, will be shut down. The new rules come in response to a New York Times investigation of nail salons -- first published online last week -- that detailed the widespread exploitation of manicurists, many of whom have illnesses that some scientists and health advocates say are caused by the chemicals with which they work.

This is good news...as long as it results in real positive changes and doesn't just get a bunch of salon workers deported.

Tags: business   NYC   Sarah Nir
07 May 14:27

Brooklyn's Great Unsung Chinatown: A Food Tour of Avenue U

by Corbo Eng

There are more Chinatowns than meet the eye in New York. In Brooklyn, Sunset Park gets all the attention, but locals know of another Chinatown farther south, a stretch of Avenue U from Coney Island Avenue to Ocean Avenue, that's been home to a growing Chinese community for the past 15 years. There you'll find higher quality cooking than what most of Manhattan's Chinatown restaurants are serving these days. Read More
01 May 17:58

crispy broccoli with lemon and garlic

by deb
Dzaleznik

Roasting broccoli is nothing new, and this sounds good... but next time we're stuck for a dinner idea lets check the variations at the bottom.

crispy broccoli with lemon and garlic

I may have suddenly, and at least a month earlier than I’d hoped, reached the slightly less awesome phase of pregnancy, which I suspect is nature’s way of ensuring that despite all of the great things about gestating — thick, shiny hair! elastic-waist pants! people actually encouraging you to be lazy! — you will have little desire to stay this way forever.

... Read the rest of crispy broccoli with lemon and garlic on smittenkitchen.com


© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to crispy broccoli with lemon and garlic | 150 comments to date | see more: Broccoli, Budget, Lemon, Side Dish, Vegetarian

01 May 01:17

Another Bonus Quote of the Day

by Taegan Goddard

“I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish. But I do speak a common language. I speak Jesus.”

— Mike Huckabee, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, speaking to a Hispanic audience.

24 Apr 20:38

You have $8 billion. You want to do as much good as possible. What do you do?

by Dylan Matthews

I sat in a San Francisco conference room a few months ago as 14 staffers at the charity recommendation group GiveWell discussed the ways in which artificial intelligence — extreme, world-transforming, human-level artificial intelligence — could destroy the world. Not just as idle chatter, mind you. They were trying to work out whether it's worthwhile to direct money — lots of it — toward preventing AI from destroying us all, money that otherwise could go to fighting poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Say you tell the AI to make as many paper clips as it can possibly make," Howie Lempel, a program officer at GiveWell, proposed, borrowing a thought experiment from Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.

The super AI isn't necessarily going to be moral. Even with positive goals, it could backfire. It could see the whole world as a resource to be exploited for making paper clips, for example.

"Just because it's very intelligent doesn't mean it has reasonable values," Lempel said. "Maybe it starts turning puppies into paper clips."

"Maybe it would turn the whole universe into paper clips," cofounder and co-executive director Holden Karnofsky added.

Joining the GiveWell staff in the meeting was Cari Tuna, the president of Good Ventures, a foundation she and her husband, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, founded with their roughly $8.3 billion fortune. The couple plans on giving most of that sum away.

"We want to burn down our foundation before we die, and ideally well before we die," says Tuna. So she and Moskovitz joined forces with GiveWell to form the Open Philanthropy Project, whose mission is to figure out how, exactly, they should spend their billions to do as much good as possible.

That may mean giving cash to poor people in Uganda, or distributing anti-malarial bed nets, but it also might mean funding research into how to prevent AI from killing us all. Or it might mean funding the fight to end mass incarceration in the US. Or it might mean funding biological research.

Open Phil (as the staff calls it, eschewing the OPP acronym) doesn't know which of these is the best bet, but it's determined to find out. Its six full-time staffers have taken on the unenviable task of ranking every plausible way to make the world a much better place, and figuring out how much money to commit to the winners. It's the biggest test yet of GiveWell's heavily empirical approach to picking charities. If it works, it could change the face of philanthropy.

Better charity through research

The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can.

Effective altruism holds that giving abroad is probably a better idea than giving in the US. It suggests that giving to disaster relief is worse than giving elsewhere. It argues that supporting music and the arts is a waste. "In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal," philosopher Peter Singer, a proponent of effective altruism, writes in his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. In the meantime, opera houses will have to wait.

Effective altruism also implies it's quite possible that even the best here-and-now causes — giving cash to the global poor, distributing anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa — are less cost-effective than trying to reduce the risk of the world as we know it ending. Hence, the chatter about AI. If it causes human extinction, then billions, trillions, even quadrillions of future humans who otherwise would have lived happy lives won't. That dwarfs the impact of global poverty or disease at the present moment. As Bostrom writes in a 2013 paper, "If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy."

What's radical about GiveWell and Open Phil is their commitment to do substantial empirical research before deciding on causes. Many other foundations pick issues based simply on the personal whims of the funder. If that whim is to fund medical science (as in the case of Howard Hughes), the world gains. But if it's to fund a fancy art museum (as J. Paul Getty did with his fortune), then money that could have saved lives was, in the effective altruist view, frittered away.

"The vast majority of donors aren't interested in doing any research before making a charitable contribution," Paul Brest, former president of the Hewlett Foundation, wrote in an article praising effective altruism. "Many seem satisfied with the warm glow that comes from giving; indeed, too much analysis may even reduce the charitable impulse." By contrast, effective altruists are obsessed with doing research into cause effectiveness. Open Phil has a literal spreadsheet ranking a number of different causes it might invest in.

That has earned effective altruism criticism from more traditional corners of philanthropy. Charity Navigator, which tries to ensure that charities' money goes where they say it's going, has been particularly opposed. Its CEO, Ken Berger, and consultant Robert Penna penned a venomous takedown in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in which they replaced every mention of "effective altruism" with "defective altruism."

"This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby ‘my cause' is just, and yours is — to one degree or another — a waste of precious resources," they write. In the comments of the piece, Penna clarified: "We do not believe that it is the role of anyone to say to another that his or her cause is not 'worthy.'"

To effective altruists, this attitude reeks of moral nihilism. In response to Berger and Penna, Will MacAskill, who founded the effective altruist group 80,000 Hours and co-founded Giving What We Can, proposed a thought experiment. Say you're standing before two burning buildings, one of which has a family of five trapped inside and the other of which is storing a $20,000 painting for a nearby museum. You only have time to save the family or the painting. What do you do? Save the family, right? Now, how is that different from choosing whether to save lives by giving to the Against Malaria Foundation or to make exhibits a little nicer by giving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? It's not, MacAskill claims, and that's lethal to the argument for philanthropic pluralism: "[Berger and Penna] have to reject the idea that the family of five's interest in continuing to live is weightier and more morally important than the museumgoers' interest in viewing an additional painting."

That's the other thing about effective altruists: they're utilitarians. Or, if not utilitarians obsessed with maximizing happiness, they're consequentialists concerned with maximizing the good in whatever form it takes. "We want to give people more power to live the life they want to live. It's a consequentialist moral framework," GiveWell's Karnofsky says. "Justice as an end in itself, liberty as an end in itself — those aren't things we're interested in."

That lends itself to a particular political bent, which is left of center but technocratic, friendly to markets (when they can be shown to work), and, above all, cosmopolitan. Effective altruists, and GiveWell in particular, go to great lengths to emphasize that doing good abroad is just as valuable as doing it in America, and probably cheaper, as well. They're sympathetic to the welfare state but far more jazzed about open borders.

Effective altruists tend to share a hyper-analytical personality type. Before visiting the GiveWell offices, I went to a Super Bowl party at Karnofsky's house. We went around the room saying which team we were rooting for — the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks — and why. Karnofsky said he was rooting for the Pats in light of then-recent allegations that they had purposely deflated their balls to win the AFC championship. Many detractors wanted them to lose as punishment for this offense, and Karnofsky thought it important to disabuse the public of the notion that the world can exact cosmic justice like that: "Trial by combat doesn't work." Tim Telleen-Lawton, a GiveWell analyst and roommate of Karnofsky's, said he was rooting for a tie, as it was the most improbable outcome and thus the most exciting. My explanation — my dad's a Seahawks fan, so I'm a Seahawks fan — felt a little under-reasoned by comparison.

My reasoning failures aside, the effective altruists' tendency to rationally analyze everything is endearing, and I should disclose that I've been won over. I'm a cosmopolitan utilitarian, too. I've given to GiveWell's recommended charities for years (GiveDirectly is my current favorite). I'm friends with many of the staffers outside work. I talked to Karnofsky and Berger about policy issues in the early going of Open Phil, even musing about what we should name the idiosyncratic set of positions we happen to share ("newtilitarianism" was rejected as an offense against the English language). And I was and remain deeply excited by the prospect of a dedicated team sharing my values doing empirical research to rank policy issues in order of importance — which is exactly what Open Phil is up to.

How Open Phil thinks about causes

Open Phil may not care about justice as an end in itself, but it's certainly interested in it as a means. Criminal justice reform is one of its top priorities at the moment, not because of the concerns over due process and constitutional liberties that motivate many groups working on the topic, but due to the Open Phil team's hard-to-dispute observation that prison is really, really awful.

Most Americans live lives far better than those of people in developing countries, but the same can't necessarily be said for prisoners. That makes interventions involving American incarceration look similarly promising to ones benefiting the global poor. In global health, it's common to talk in terms of "disability-adjusted life years" (DALYs), which measure a disease's burden by considering both how many years of life it denies victims and how much worse it makes their lives before they perish. A disease that cuts 10 years off your lifespan and causes 10 years of partial paralysis before that has a higher DALY toll than one that just cuts off 10 years, for instance.

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As part of his investigation into the issue, Alexander Berger, the program officer overseeing Open Phil's policy work, did a quick and dirty analysis of how many DALYs would be saved by reducing incarceration by 10 percent. He posited that the "disability weight" of being in prison (that is, how much it reduces the quality of a life-year) is 0.5. A year in prison is half as good as one on the outside. For context, that's roughly the same disability weight as having terminal cancer. Once you take the abject awfulness of prison into account, reducing incarceration starts to look like a great way to save hundreds of thousands of DALYs.

Criminal justice is also one of the few points of bipartisan agreement in contemporary politics. Over the past decade or so, conservatives at the state level have come around to the view that prisons and the law enforcement complex are just another form of big government, and deserving of major cuts. There are a number of bipartisan proposals to reduce incarceration on the federal level, as well. It's at a point where philanthropic involvement could help push through significant reforms.

Open Phil's spreadsheet of causes ranks policy interventions based on their importance and tractability: how much good they're capable of producing, and whether philanthropy can actually effect policies that produce that good. Even taking the DALY analysis into account, criminal justice is listed as only moderately important. But it's unusually tractable.

How Open Phil knows whether a cause is effective

To that end, Good Ventures is already spending a lot on criminal justice. It has given $3 million to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project, which works with states to develop policies that "reduce incarceration and correctional spending while maintaining or improving public safety and concentrating prison beds on high level offenders," to quote Open Phil's review of the group.

GiveWell prides itself on trying to rigorously determine the magnitude of impact of the charities it recommends, and Open Phil took the same approach here. Pew claims incarceration will fall 11 percent in the states they're working with, compared with rates if they hadn't intervened; that suggests the project has led Americans to spend 858,000 fewer person-years in prison, at a cost of $29 per person-year. That's pretty good; wouldn't you spend $29 to avoid a year in prison? Or, in wonkspeak, $58 for a DALY?

But Open Phil's review expresses skepticism about that magnitude, as "in many states where PSPP did not provide intensive assistance, prison growth reversed or stagnated on its own." It concludes, however, "We believe that PSPP increased the probability of reform and/or the quality of reforms in at least several of the states in which it worked."

This is about as rigorous an evaluation as Open Phil can do. But it's still considerably less rigorous than analyses GiveWell does of charities. Just look at GiveWell's analysis of the Against Malaria Foundation, its current top-rated charity. To evaluate the group, GiveWell has to know how effective the anti-malarial bed nets it distributes are. And it does know that: it cites five randomly controlled trials about the effect of bed nets on childhood mortality in its evaluation of the foundation. That means GiveWell knows how many bed nets it takes to save a life, and how big of a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation is needed to buy and distribute that many bed nets. It has a strong quantitative estimate of the real-world effects of giving to the group.

By contrast, Open Phil has very little sense of how many people are spared prison time due to a donation to the Public Safety Performance Project. There are no randomly controlled trials about the effectiveness of the program's particular approach in enacting criminal justice reforms. While there are well-established best practices for evaluating service delivery programs like the Against Malaria Foundation, none exist for evaluating advocacy efforts.

"Advocacy, even when carefully nonpartisan and based in research, is inherently political, and it’s the nature of politics that events evolve rapidly and in a nonlinear fashion, so an effort that doesn’t seem to be working might suddenly bear fruit, or one that seemed to be on track can suddenly lose momentum," Steven Teles, who has consulted for Open Phil, and Mark Schmitt once wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. "Advocacy evaluation should be seen, therefore, as a form of trained judgment — a craft requiring judgment and tacit knowledge — rather than as a scientific method." This, they argue, makes "evaluating particular projects — as opposed to entire fields or organizations — almost impossible."

Open Phil concedes that it's not able to estimate the effects of the Public Safety Performance Project's work precisely. "We have not invested much time in explicit estimates of PSPP's cost effectiveness," their review concludes. "We highly value the unquantified benefits of learning from PSPP and we do not believe policy-oriented philanthropy is likely to consist of proven, repeatable interventions with easily quantified expected impact."

They're right, of course. You can't know the exact effectiveness of a policy intervention. But because of that, doing the kind of cause comparisons that Open Phil needs to do could prove maddeningly difficult.

The only ones in the room

Key to Open Phil's thinking about policy is the idea of leverage. Effective advocacy work isn't necessarily that expensive, and when it works, its impact can be several orders of magnitude bigger. For instance, $100 million spent lobbying for a health reform bill could produce hundreds of billions of dollars in new health spending. Even if you don't think the lobbying is guaranteed to work, it's an attractive-looking investment.

That's why Open Phil's other main area of interest on policy is preventing recessions. This is an unusual point of focus for a foundation. Apart from extraordinary measures like the 2009 stimulus, the task of ensuring that the economy doesn't fall into recession and inflation doesn't spiral out of control is the almost exclusive province of the Federal Reserve. And the Federal Reserve is generally regarded as un-lobbyable. Since donors haven't traditionally thought anything could influence the Fed, spending like that hasn't happened.

That is changing to a degree. A number of think tanks and grant-making groups interested in monetary policy have cropped up since the financial crisis, including the George Soros–funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy (whose staff includes former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke). But the advocacy side is extremely sparse. In particular, there aren't many voices calling for the Fed to worry less about inflation and more about unemployment, which is still a problem seven years after the crisis hit.

Cari Tuna, president of Good Ventures. (Marvin Joseph/the Washington Post via Getty Images)

There's a lot of potential leverage here. Open Phil's analysis notes that the most recent financial crisis cost the US economy around ten trillion dollars in lost output, not to mention the permanent harm it did to the economy's ability to grow by reducing investment and forcing people out of the workforce. Even if you assume that a crash like that will happen only twice in a century, that means preventing huge recessions could have an annual impact in the hundreds of billions. The humanitarian benefits swamp those of reducing mass incarceration.

The great spreadsheet of causes lists the tractability of macroeconomic policy as "highly uncertain," which makes finding grantees a bit of a challenge. So far Good Ventures has given $335,000 to support the Full Employment Project at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and $100,000 to back the Center for Popular Democracy's Fed Up campaign, which aims to organize workers in favor of a looser, more pro-growth monetary policy. Both are, in their way, investments in advocacy.

But Open Phil is even less able to estimate the effectiveness of these investments than it is its investments in criminal justice reform. Pew's Public Safety Performance Project at least produced an estimate for how many people its work kept out of jail, albeit one that's nigh impossible to verify. But the Fed Up campaign and Full Employment Project are new endeavors. They don't have track records to evaluate. That makes the work more exciting. But it also makes it hard to tell if the money is better spent here than elsewhere.

The plague

Policy is only one of four issue areas Open Phil covers. One is global health and development; research there isn't a priority, since GiveWell has already learned a lot about what works. Another is science, where work is still preliminary. That leaves the fourth and final area: global catastrophic risks, or GCRs. Such as world-destroying AI.

The basic idea — originated by Oxford's Bostrom in his paper "Astronomical Waste" — is that human extinction or civilizational collapse would be so bad that even a small risk of it happening is worth expending considerable resources to reduce. There are likely billions, if not trillions or quadrillions, of humans who could live in the future, provided we don't go extinct. Saving their lives is thus, on this view, massively more important than anything affecting people currently alive.

"Even if average future periods were only about equally as good as the current period, the whole of the future would be about a trillion times more important, in itself, than everything that has happened in the last 100 years," Nick Beckstead, a GiveWell research analyst who works on Open Phil, wrote in his 2013 philosophy dissertation.

To that end, if there are dangers that pose a real risk of destroying civilization, and steps can be taken to reduce that risk, Open Phil is interested. And the stakes required are quite high, such that major concerns like antibiotic resistance don't make the cut. "We looked at antibiotic resistance," Karnofsky says. "What would a world without antibiotics look like? It'd look like not that bad. It'd look like the '40s or '50s. Most of the decline in bacterial diseases happened before we developed antibiotics at all, on any large scale. Most of it is a hygiene thing. Look, it'd really suck to lose antibiotics, a lot of people would die, but I don't think it counts as a GCR for me."

That's not to say that plagues aren't a major concern for Open Phil. On the contrary, "biosecurity," or work to make it easier to prevent and control massive outbreaks of the kind that could end civilization, tops Open Phil's list of GCRs. The risk is compounded by the advent of synthetic biology, a field that works on both creating artificial life and repurposing existing organisms for new ends.

But to count as a GCR, a pandemic would have to do more than kill merely millions of people. It'd need to kill enough people to threaten civilization as we know it, perhaps to such a degree that the survivors won't be able to make it. "The way I've put it is a global disruption of civilization," Karnofsky says. "Something that didn't literally wipe out every single person but killed, like, 25 percent of the world's population would be enormously destabilizing. Today we have this civilization that seems to be making some kind of progress. Based on my understanding of history, it's very easy to not make that kind of progress."

He has a point. The current post–Industrial Revolution era of steady economic growth and improving living standards is a gigantic historical aberration. Any shock that threatens to end it could make billions, if not trillions, of people worse off.

Open Phil's position here is actually markedly less extreme than many effective altruists'. "There's a certain set of people who basically care about global catastrophic risks because of the potential for existential risk," Lempel, who manages Open Phil's work on GCRs, says. "There's an argument that goes something like, 'An enormous proportion of all people who will ever live are potential people who will live in the future, and so all the utility that exists is in the future — so the difference between something really bad that winds up not making us go extinct is enormous relative to something that makes us go extinct, so we should only care about things that make us go extinct.'"

That view implies that biosecurity shouldn't top the list. Massive outbreaks have the potential to do great harm, but they can't kill everybody. "There are some people on submarines," Lempel notes. "Those people are going to make it." There are a couple of reasons Open Phil lists it anyway. For one thing, Lempel says, there's not unanimity among the staff that future persons have heavy or perhaps even equal moral weight as people today. "Personally, speaking for Howie, and not speaking for GiveWell, I care about future generations a lot. That's just my value set." Lempel says. "I think that's not a consensus at GiveWell. But when we weigh different values, it's one value set that we are thinking about."

Biosecurity also appeals because many of the philanthropic steps that will likely be involved — improving response to disease outbreaks in poor countries, increasing hospital sanitation, etc. — would be desirable even if you don't care much about future people. And the fact that they're implementable now also means they can be tested, increasing confidence in their ability to avert a future mass catastrophe and motivating continued funding.

"There's a risk when you set something up that's only used in case of a crisis," Lempel says. "Some of the stuff you might think about for AI risk, for example, are things that might be used if there was a really malevolent AI that was developed. You could imagine setting up infrastructure to work on that, five years later nothing's happened, and it loses its support."

But Open Phil still has a ways to go before it starts making grants on the issue. "We do not feel that we have a strong sense of the interventions available to a new philanthropist in this field," its cause evaluation concludes, "but we expect that most work would take the form of research and advocacy." Biosecurity thus poses a very similar challenge as criminal justice reform and monetary policy. Estimating the magnitude of impact for a philanthropic intervention is difficult bordering on untenable.

What could go wrong

Open Phil will be in a research phase for a while, but soon it will need to start spending down Tuna and Moskovitz's billions more rapidly.

"The world is getting better, and that means that giving opportunities now are better than they're going to be 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, hopefully," Tuna says. "The good you do today compounds over time."

That suggests Good Ventures' money needs to be distributed sooner rather than later. That's a quicker time horizon than many foundations use, and allows for a relatively rapid test of what large-scale giving on effective altruist grounds would look like. If it works, it could prove hugely influential for other donors. Already other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are signing on; Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger (who got an estimated $100 million from selling the company to Facebook) and his fiancée, Kaitlyn Trigger, have committed at least $750,000 to Open Phil, and Trigger is set to start working there part-time.

That means that at some point in the not-too-distant future, Open Phil will have to decide if criminal justice investments are a better bet than macroeconomic policy ones, and by how much; if macroeconomic policy investments are a better bet than biosecurity; and whether either is better than funding medical research. It will have to start comparing magnitudes — and that's ridiculously difficult.

Think about what you'd need to know to do a really precise comparison of whether to invest in prison reform or in preventing geomagnetic storms. You'd need to know exactly how many people will be let out of prison due to your grant to the think tank you're considering funding. You'd need to figure exactly how much worse life in prison is than life on the outside — is it half as good? three-quarters? — and what effect, in either direction, you're having on crime.

You'd need to know the weather patterns of the sun for the next few centuries, in order to calculate the odds of a coronal mass ejection hitting us. You'd need to know exactly how much damage those ejections will do to our current grid. You'd need to know who needs to be paid what to make telecommunications and electrical systems robust against an ejection.

It's an impossible task, and Open Phil admits as much. Because of the inherent difficulty in assigning numeric odds to everything from effects of policy investments to global catastrophic risks, it's moved away from relying too heavily on quantification. "We're excited about the project of making giving more analytical, more intellectual, and overall more rational," Karnofsky once wrote. "At the same time, we have mixed feelings about the project of quantifying good accomplished: of converting the impacts of all gifts into ‘cost per life saved' or ‘cost per DALY' type figures that can then be directly compared to each other."

A man receives a cash transfer in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images)

So far, so good. But you still need to be able to compare rough magnitudes. I know we can't quantitatively compare geomagnetic storms to criminal justice reform with any rigor. But I strongly suspect we can't even qualitatively judge one to be more effective, either. The human brain can only process so much data. Six people can only process so much data.

Quantification can obscure more than it helps, but qualitative evaluations are prone to all kinds of cognitive biases, to subconscious emotions, to instinctive individual political leanings. One striking feature of Open Phil's policy list is that it looks like my own personal public policy wish list. Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe what's going on is that people with a similar personality type are latching on to one set of causes and ignoring others that are equally good but less amenable to our temperaments. The less quantitative the process gets, the higher the potential for arbitrary factors to corrupt it.

This is especially true when most of the people in the room look alike. Out of GiveWell's staff of 18, just three (plus Tuna) are women. There is not a single person of color on staff. When your stated purpose is to rank the world's problems by importance and solvability, this really matters. Consciously or not, it influences your views on the importance of, say, women's education in poor countries, or reducing police mistreatment of minorities, or even criminal justice reform, which did make it onto the list, but not on racial justice grounds.

"There's a group of staff members with whom I'm almost daily sharing articles on issues that are totally separate from GiveWell issues, like identity politics," research analyst Eliza Scheffler says. "We'll often talk about gender." But there's no reason, Scheffler says, not to consider identity issues as causes worth addressing. She recalls seeing a talk by a gay activist from rural Kenya, who was forced to undergo numerous rounds of reparative "therapy."

"His life sounds horrible," Scheffler says. "I think we need to be able to try to compare that ... I worry that we're missing out on negative utility, but I also feel pretty confident in the way we are approaching it." She's right. Cost-benefit analysis is not an inherently racist or sexist practice. But you need to be aware of costs to which your position in society might blind you.

"We're not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and we're working on it," Karnofsky says. "Based on accepted offers, our incoming class will represent a step forward on this front — about evenly split on gender with a significant minority of people of color — though we recognize that we still have a long way to go."

The sheer difficulty of the process raises the question of whether Good Ventures should just give to the causes GiveWell has already identified, and whose effectiveness is much easier to measure. For example, GiveDirectly, one of GiveWell's top charities, gives cash directly to poor people in Kenya and Uganda. Cash transfers to the poor are among the most-studied topics in development economics — and if that weren't enough, the charity was subject to a randomized evaluation that found major positive results for families receiving the cash. GiveWell knows what it does, and knows that it works.

"The things that we found so far in Open Phil, some of them I'm really happy that we've been able to provide funding to," GiveWell cofounder Elie Hassenfeld says. "But I don't yet feel like, ‘Oh wow, this is so amazing that GiveDirectly should never get another dollar.' If anything, the fact that we have done the Open Phil work for a year or two and haven't found anything that is so amazing makes me feel better about GiveWell than I did two years ago." Karnofsky has expressed similar thoughts.

Tuna says she doesn't understand her colleagues' pessimism. "I am still optimistic that we can do better than just giving money to poor people," she says. "But in the meantime, we're doing a lot of just giving money to poor people."

Still, whether there's something better than giving money to poor people may not be the hardest question Open Phil faces. The really hard question is how they'd know.

25 Mar 15:01

How to opt out of everything from credit card offers to group texts

by Joseph Stromberg
Dzaleznik

"if you have an iPhone, you can opt out of group texts!!!!!"

Modern life can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there's two-word a solution to many of our most irritating problems: opt out.

1) How to opt out of getting calls from telemarketers

Visit donotcall.gov to put your phone number in the Federal Trade Commission's "do not call" registry.

After 31 days have passed, telemarketers aren't supposed to call you anymore, and you can file a complaint on the same website if they do. Sure, nonprofits don't have to follow this rule, and there are some telemarketing companies that illegally evade it. But it will definitely cut down on the number of calls you get.

2) How to opt out of getting some junk mail

Visit dmachoice.org to stop some companies from sending you junk mail.

Sadly, it won't stop all junk mail — and there's nothing you can do (short of bricking up your mailbox) that would accomplish that. But it will eliminate junk mail that comes from roughly 3,600 companies that use a service operated by the Direct Mail Association.

3) How to opt out of credit card offers that come in the mail

Visit optoutprescreen.com to stop getting pre-approved credit card offers in the mail.

Companies send these to you based on your credit score, but they're not allowed to do so if your name and address are on the opt-out list, as mandated by the 2011 Fair Credit Reporting Act. Bizarrely, you can only opt out for a five-year period online; you have to mail in a form if you want to opt out permanently.

4) How to opt out of getting the phone book

Visit yellowpagesoptout.com to tell phone companies to stop delivering a phone book to your house every year.

However, there's a caveat: this might not work at all. Phone book industry groups have sued cities that tried to establish official opt-out systems, and created their own system instead. But lots of people report getting phone books delivered even after they've put their names on the opt-out list, and there are no penalties for companies that do so.

Read more: The infuriating reason you still get a phone book delivered every year.

5) How to opt out of reply-all email conversations

If you use Gmail, you can mute any email thread by clicking the "more" button at the top of the window, then clicking "mute."

Once you do this, new replies to the conversation will still show up as unread, but they'll automatically be archived, so you won't see them in your inbox.

6) How to opt out of advertisers tracking you online

When you browse the internet, a number of companies collect data on your browsing and shopping habits, which is then used by advertising companies to tailor the ads you're shown to (supposedly) fit your interests. It's virtually impossible to stop entirely, but there are a number of things you can do to cut down on it.

The Network Advertising Initiative and Digital Advertising Alliance both have tools that let you opt out of tracking from specific companies (you'll need to opt out separately for each browser you use). You can also opt out of being shown personalized ads by Google and Yahoo in particular.

You can also try using DuckDuckGo — a search engine that doesn't store IP addresses or other user information — and installing a browser extension like Ghostery or Privacyfix, which tell you who's tracking you and in some cases allow you to stop it. You can also tinker with your browser settings to disable cookies (here are instruction links for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), although you may want to later manually turn them back on for sites you visit regularly.

7) How to opt out of annoying copy-paste text on the internet

You know when you try to copy text from a website and it automatically appends the URL and other information at the end of it? That's the fine work of a company called Tynt, and you can stop it from happening ever again right here.

8) How to opt out of group texts

If you have an iPhone, you can opt out of group texts by going to the group thread, clicking "details," scrolling down, and either hitting "leave this conversation" (to truly leave it) or just "do not disturb" (to stay in the thread but stop getting notified every time someone texts).

If you use Android, it's a bit trickier, but you can download an app called GroupXit that will silence certain message threads.

9) How to opt out of the US government spying on you

Wait, sorry, this actually isn't possible.


Correction: This article previously said that iMessages sent to Android phones wouldn't be silenced by the GroupXit app — but all messages sent to Androids are delivered as SMS in the first place.

16 Mar 23:34

Severed goat heads are haunting Brooklyn

by Susannah Breslin

park-slope-goat-heads.jpg

"Severed goat heads keep turning up in nearby Prospect Park," reports Adrien Chen. Was it religious sacrifice? A prank? Something else?

A mysterious flood of goat heads is the only interesting thing that has happened in Park Slope since I moved to the neighborhood three years ago. Yes, the rush to blame a little-understood religion practiced largely by immigrants smacked a bit of lazy xenophobia, but the idea of Park Slope as a hotbed of animal sacrifice, in addition to child-friendly bars, was undeniably intriguing. In a city where everyday occurrences are casually weighed against the events of September 11, 2001, it was shocking to find that so many of my neighbors and I were actually shocked. The goat heads seemed to rear out of some shadow New York City that was even gnarlier than the pre-Guiliani version I'd seen in the movies, and at the edge of Brooklyn's most thoroughly gentrified neighborhood, to boot. When New York asked me to investigate the goat heads, I leapt at the chance. I wanted to see if the world they hinted at lived up to the hype."

His investigation includes a Freedom of Information Law request ("'I'VE SEEN AS MUCH AS SEVEN SQUIRRELS DEAD IN THE PARK,' went one report. 'I'VE SEEN ONE THAT'S DECAPITATED'"), a Vodou priest, and multiple trips to the butcher.

Tags: animals   Brooklyn   religion
16 Mar 14:13

The Case for Al Gore in 2016

by Taegan Goddard

Ezra Klein: “To many Democrats, the fight the party needs is clear: Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. But the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear. Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound: tightening financial regulation, redistributing a little more, tying up some loose ends in the social safety net. Given the near-certainty of a Republican House, there is little reason to believe there would be much difference between a Warren presidency and a Clinton one.”

“The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and who no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore. Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.”

12 Mar 14:05

Manspreading has been a problem on public transit for 60 years

by Joseph Stromberg

Manspreading is nothing new.

Men's habit of taking up too much room on public transportation seats has gotten a lot of attention lately, with the MTA — which runs New York's subway — launching an official campaign against manspreading last month.

But as a new exhibit at the New York Transit Museum shows, manspreading — and all other sorts of public transit etiquette issues — has been around for decades.

(New York Transit Museum)

Thanks to New York Magazine for spotting these fascinating vintage ads, drawn by artist Amelia Opdyke-Jones and featured in the museum's new exhibition "From Sitting to Spreading: Subway Etiquette Then and Now."

In the late 1940s, these ads were printed in the Subway Sun, a long-running etiquette campaign published by a precursor to the MTA and designed to look like a newspaper. As you can see, subway riders of yore also had problems with:

Leaning on poles

(New York Transit Museum)

Leaning into other people

(New York Transit Museum)

Blocking the door

(New York Transit Museum)

Not letting people off the train before getting on

(New York Transit Museum)

Putting their feet up

(New York Transit Museum)

One problem that didn't exist in the 1940s: people blaring music on their phones without headphones.

25 Feb 18:19

Lawmaker Says Cancer Is a Fungus

by Taegan Goddard
Dzaleznik

I'm not a doctor.

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R) wants to ease health care rules because she has friends who left the country to find end-of-life treatments, Jon Ralston reports.

Said Fiore: “If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing with, say, salt water, sodium cardonate, through that line and flushing out the fungus. These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.”

The post Lawmaker Says Cancer Is a Fungus appeared first on Political Wire.

20 Feb 15:57

People in the self-checkout line are terrible. Here's how to make them faster.

by Phil Edwards

This is your life: After a long day of work, you're stuck behind somebody who uses a self-checkout at the grocery store like he's a time traveler from the 1800s.

Self-checkouts are great in theory: They save time, kill awkward small talk, and allow you to purchase incredibly embarrassing items without shame. But nobody ever seems to know how to use them efficiently.

This is a problem worth fixing. So I got in touch with two experts from Duluth, Georgia's NCR, the world's largest self-checkout vendor. The company vends about 70 percent of global self-checkout shipments, so if you're using a self-checkout, it probably came from NCR. The company studies all of it extensively in the field and in its own lab, where researchers watch consumers in a fake grocery to see what works and what doesn't.

My guides were Jennie P. Johnson, a human factors engineer, and Monica Hachem, a retail marketing manager. They offered five basic tips that anyone can use to speed up the self-checkout line:

1) Stop looking for the barcode

This is the most important way to speed up your self-checkout time, by far: Never examine your item for a barcode again. Just run it across the scanner. If it doesn't scan, your hand is covering the barcode or it's facing you, so just flip it and scan again.

"Just pass it over the scanner," Johnson insists. "The chances that it's going to read on the first pass are extremely high."

This works because each register has a "scan zone" that will search the whole product for a code. Think of it less like a laser hitting the code and more like a field that you pass the product through. NCR even tells cashiers to use the "power slide" — they recommend extending your arm like you're shaking hands with the product.

"We've done a lot of testing in our labs and in the field where we quantify how long these behaviors take," Johnson says. "When a consumer picks up an item and actively hunts for the barcode, they usually spend about 2 or 3 seconds per item." That's a roughly 50 percent increase in total time per item.

So trust the technology. Swipe, don't look. It will work.

2) Don't worry about accidentally scanning an item twice.

This low-angle shot conveys the excitement of using a self-checkout machine. (Boston Globe/Getty Images)

We've all seen it: Somebody examines a barcode, gently moves the item toward the scanner, and then pulls it back as if it might explode. People are paranoid about scanning twice, but you don't need to be — most self-checkout software protects against it.

"The protection against double scan is with our weight-based security," Johnson says. "The scanner is actually disabled until you place the item in the bag. There is also technology built into the scanner — a same-item lockout timer — that normal cashiers will have. If it sees the same barcode within 500 milliseconds, it won't read or report it."

3) Buying produce? Remember your favorite codes.

A banana with the classic PLU. This number should be burned into your banana-loving brain. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

If you've ever been a cashier, you know the significance of #4011. That's the price lookup code (PLU) for bananas, and it's the little number you see on produce stickers. If you get the same produce a lot, it might make sense to memorize the PLUs.

"Cashiers, through their training and experience, start to learn some of the more common produce codes," Johnson says. "A lot of savvy self-checkout users have done it as well."

You'd be right to note that it shouldn't be your job to remember PLUs when you go to the grocery. After all, you can always use the produce lookup tool instead. But memorizing your top codes will get you through the line and home faster.

4) Scan your loyalty card at the beginning, not the end

It's natural to scan your loyalty card at the end, when you have your wallet out to pay. But Johnson recommends you scan it at the beginning instead.

Why? Many self-checkouts feature customization for each user. For example, if you need to look up produce on the self-checkout, the list is customized to your purchase history. It will show your most-purchased produce first and save you some time scrolling through the list.

There are other possible perks, as well. For example, the loyalty card can automatically set your language or email you a receipt. It can even make the self-checkout smarter. "If you're an expert user, you'll never see a prompt," Johnson says. "We call that multi-pathing — we've tried to design the system to handle both expert and novice users."

5) A few more tips for true self-checkout pros

There are a few other things you can do to become a self-checkout pro (and make other shoppers less annoying).

One tactic is to "gamify" your experience. Cashiers are frequently measured by how many items they scan per minute, and you can do it too. The average self-checkout size is six items, and the average transaction time is about 85 seconds — see if you can beat it. Soon, you may have help making your checkout experience into a game: some of NCR's scanners have a "power bar" that lights up as you scan more quickly. Hachem says that for cashiers, "it helps reduce training costs and shows up every time you scan."

Finally, there's one other training tip you can take from the pros. Some cashiers will practice "power slide" scanning by wearing a blindfold. Please consult a manager before attempting this on your next visit to the grocery.

Some obstacles are tough to overcome

Shoppers wait in a long line, despite following all the self-checkout tips. (Brent Lewis/Getty Images)

All those tips should work wherever you shop. But some things are up to the grocery stories, hardware stores, and other retailers that actually sell you your stuff.

For example, you might have trouble knowing when to remove your full bags of groceries, but that's probably more the retailer's fault than the self-checkout's. "The system has been designed to be flexible in terms of removing full bags," Johnson says, "but that's all configured and decided by each retailer. They choose how much independence or flexibility they want to give to the shopper."

The same goes for those delays when you buy alcohol, DVDs, medicine, or other age-restricted items. The best practice, according to Johnson, is for the retailer to let you continue scanning while the cashier makes their way over to check your ID. However, that's all retailer-approved.

And sometimes it's the government that determines self-checkout rules. California, for example, doesn't allow alcohol sales at a self-checkout machine.

Obstacles aside, most of these tips will work wherever you shop. And if you use the self-checkout with confidence, you'll be able to get home quicker.

Watch: The better way to board an airplane

18 Feb 20:18

How to Make Lemongrass and Coriander-Marinated Grilled Tofu Vietnamese Sandwiches (Vegan Banh Mi)

by J. Kenji López-Alt

Crispy tofu is marinated in garlic, coriander root, and lemongrass, and stuffed into a Vietnamese-style sandwich with pickled carrots, daikon, cilantro, cucumber, and jalapeños. The trick is a low and slow cooking method and a double coating of the flavorful marinade. Read More
12 Feb 16:28

Democrats Pick Philadelphia for Convention

by Taegan Goddard
Dzaleznik

Bummer. Should be Brooklyn.

“Philadelphia has been selected to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention, DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced this morning,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

“The city beat out Columbus, Ohio, and Brooklyn, for the event, which will take place the week of July 25, 2016.”

New York Times: “The symbolism of the city, where the founding fathers overcame broad ideological and regional differences to forge consensus, helped Philadelphia prevail over New York and Columbus, Ohio.”

The post Democrats Pick Philadelphia for Convention appeared first on Political Wire.

12 Feb 15:45

Interactive Matisse cut-outs

by Jason Kottke
Dzaleznik

Figure you've seen it, but this is good.

If, like me, you couldn't get it together to make it to the Matisse cut-outs show at MoMA, the NY Times has you covered with an interactive look at the show.

Tags: art   Henri Matisse   MoMA