On the 28th of October I’m giving a talk in Seoul, the home of uninhibited camera fiends*. I’m looking for a face stand-in, someone who can join the event who enjoys having their photo taken, and wouldn’t mind being tagged online as me. The audience will be in on it.
You can be aged 20 to 70, male or female, any ethnicity, frankly I don’t care how you look, as long as you’re comfortable with the process.
From Future Perfect.
You can now give Amazon Prime as a gift. I can think of few greater ways for you to help the global economy, and I already plan to give out many of these to people I know who haven't gotten on the bandwagon yet. Every time they order a package from Amazon, they'll think of you with a smile, it's truly a gift that keeps on giving.
If you're not sure if it's for you, learn more here and sign up for a 30-day trial.
A long time ago, I wrote about Grinnell College's Division III basketball team which plays runs an innovative offense which coach Dave Arseneault calls The System:
94S + 47 3's + 33%OR + 25SD + 32 TO's = W
The ‘Formula for Success’ has withstood the test of time. Since 1996, whenever the Pioneers have attempted 94 shots, with half of those shots from behind the arc, offensive rebounded 33% of their missed shot attempts, taken 25 more shots than their opponent and forced the opposition into committing 32 turnovers, they have won at nearly a 95% clip. Grinnell accomplishes all five of these goals in slightly over one-third of their contests.
While the ‘formula’ has been consistent through the years, the strategies employed to achieve these goals have been altered. During the early years, a new group of five players usually stayed on the court for 2 ½ minutes at a time. The length of playing shifts has been reduced considerably during the last few years and it is now a regular practice to replace all five players on the first whistle after 35 seconds have elapsed off the game clock. Also, in those early years, it was customary practice to rotate three groups of five players. Currently, Coach Arseneault uses two playing groups- each incorporating a total of eight players.
Regardless of the length of shifts or number of groups used, there is still only one way to accomplish all five of the aforementioned goals: Your team must be committed to getting a shot off and getting the ball back every 12 seconds.
Grinnell is still at it, leading all of Division III basketball in scoring per game. Tonight, Grinnell player Jack Taylor scored 109 points in a 173-123 victory over Crossroads. Last year he scored 138 points in a game.
Food may well have replaced high art, as Deresieswicz argues, but it has also replaced popular culture. People talk about food now the way they used to talk about bands. Music has become too fractured and diverse to provide the necessary combination of accessibility and specificity for self-definition. If you liked Kiss or The Eagles in the 1970s, the fact established part of who you were: your class affiliations, where you came from, what drugs you liked to take, whether you were urban or rural. Today, if you like Grizzly Bear or Kanye West, it virtually means nothing. You could be a banker or a member of Occupy Wall Street. You could be eighty or eighteen. You could live in East Texas or the Upper East Side. I mean, Marco Rubio's favorite group is NWA.
Today, your attitude toward pork belly is a clearer statement of who you are and where you come from than any television show you watch or band you follow. Tell me what you know about pasta, and I'll tell you how much your parents made, how much education you managed, how much is in your savings account. Unlike other cultural phenomena, which are more or less generationally undefined now, food explicitly identifies youthfulness. The younger you are, the more you know about food, generally speaking.
I've had this tab open since last Thanksgiving (I'm not joking, I know I have a problem), but now that it's been a year it still applies: On Thanksgiving, the Foodies Should Shut Up. Anecdotally, it does seem as if books, music, and movies have receded as cultural touchstones in favor of food and television.
The rise of TV and food in the pop culture pantheon are related. Television turned chefs (and by association their restaurants) into celebrities. Both television and food have also benefitted from the internet. Television episodes recaps and reviews, food and restaurant blogs, everywhere is a boom in information about a small number of shows and restaurants that we only once read about in books like the local newspaper or books like the Zagat guides.
The number of items in each category matters. Whereas the number of restaurants in a city has stayed largely fixed, and whereas the number of TV shows I watch has increased but perhaps only by 2X, the number of bands and musicians I can follow now has increased by 5 to 10X. Almost everyone I know can easily name 10 bands they love that I've never heard of, but it's rare for someone to mention a restaurant in SF or a TV show I don't already know. Having a small number of items of shared devotion creates a sense of communal power. Music still matters, but more people I know share a greater overlap with my TV and restaurant favorites than with my music universe.
Not everyone is happy with the foodism bubble. Writes William Deresiewicz:
But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.
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But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion. An apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it. A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one. Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things. Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols. Proust on the madeleine is art; the madeleine itself is not art.
A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul.
Yes, food centers life in France and Italy, too, but not to the disadvantage of art, which still occupies the supreme place in both cultures. Here in America, we are in danger of confusing our palates with our souls.
There's no doubt foodism has become a totem of class, and I would be happy to never see another photo of someone's dinner plate or lunch again on a social network–and that includes pictures of my own food, which I've been guilty of inflicting on others in the past (unless you're a chef or serious food journalist, then it's expected).
But the one aspect of foodism I do enjoy is the deep fetishism of the craft of cooking, as epitomized in documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Kings of Pastry or cookbooks like The French Laundry Cookbook or Modernist Cuisine. Reading about the conception of a dish and then the process of perfecting it until it becomes a recipe for maximizing the chances reproducing the best version of that dish is no more ridiculous, to me, than an article discussing the redesign of a website, a book about how the Mac was made, or a piece in American Cinematographer about how a movie like Gravity was shot. The more complex and audacious the better. Craftsmanship is sexy.
While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another 40 years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.
That worry seems preposterous at first. We've all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 6 billion and peaks out about 2050. The tally at the expected peak continues to be downgraded by experts; currently UN demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. The peak may off by a billion or so, but in broad sweep the chart is correct.
But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it is pretty scary news. The untold story of the hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year—and no agreement on how close to zero it can go. In fact there is much more agreement about the peak, than about how few people there will be on the planet in a 100 years.
From Kevin Kelly over at Edge. Lots of interesting data points throughout, and it raises an interesting question: what is the right economic model for a world of fewer people, more of them older?
A country like Japan, already deep in the throes of grappling this dual whammy of lower birth rates and an aging population, has popular art centered around this issue. Roujin Z, an anime movie from Katsuhiro Ôtomo, the creator of the great Akira, built a sci-fi thriller off of this socioeconomic issue. While I have not seen the movie, it sounds from plot summaries as if it was prescient in prescribing an increase in robot labor as one method of bridging the productivity gap that results from this population contraction and demographic aging.
Sometimes I think I should have kids just so that decades from now I'll have someone to teach me how to use the mind control or gestural interfaces on my set top box that allow me to watch reruns of Breaking Bad on my ancient plasma TV.
UPDATE: The plot of Roujin Z may be coming true: "The [Japanese] health ministry is launching a program to promote the use of nursing care robots to meet expected increases in demand in the face of Japan’s rapidly aging population."