A subreddit for early Apple Watch owners to find others to share taps, drawings, and heartbeats with. I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone turns this into an app for people to find others to do this without having to share one's iMessage email publicly. The Apple Watch seems like the ideal device for this type of simple interaction to tackle one of the internet's two most popular use cases, that is: you are not alone.
Websites including the Daily Mirror and Metro in the UK and the New York Daily News in the US duly published the story, alongside an image showing the teacher posing poolside in her bikini. “Teacher suspended after sex session with teen pupil ends up on hardcore porn website,” read the Mirror’s headline. The Daily Mail – the most successful English-language newspaper website in the world – even went so far as to claim that there would be a criminal investigation, and that this wasn’t the first time that the teacher in question had sexual relations with a student.
There was just one problem: It wasn’t true.
...
So how did this fake story make the leap from South America to the English-language press? The answer is tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo of the woman in her bikini: a credit labelled “CEN”.
Central European News (CEN) and its sister outfit EuroPics are small news agencies, largely unknown outside certain sections of the media, whose headquarters are in Canterbury in the UK (although they claim to have 35 staff based in offices across central and eastern Europe). In recent years, CEN has become one of the Western media’s primary sources of tantalising and attention-grabbing stories. They’re often bizarre, salacious, gruesome, or ideally all three: If you’ve read a story about someone in a strange country cutting off their own penis, the chances are it came from CEN.
The full crazy story here. The same conditions that reward viral news like much of what's on Buzzfeed also work on behalf of CEN. So it's some poetic justice that Buzzfeed did the legwork on debunking so many of CEN's stories. It reminds me of those movies like Blackhat in which the government has to release a hacker from prison to chase down other hackers, or a thief to catch a thief.
At the bottom of the piece, Buzzfeed publishes a list of stories they previously sourced from CEN. It's an amusing collection of headlines.
No, not these two, I'm not just a bad speller.
Rather, Courtney Love or Kim Gordon. Agatz Pyzik reviews Gordon's memoir Girl in a Band and Anwen Crawford's Hole's Live Through This (33 1/3), about the making of Hole's Live Through This, and uses the two books as an opportunity to contrast two styles of feminism.
The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her.
In her book on Live Through This, Crawford gives Love’s fans room to say what she meant to them. (“A long-standing bugbear of mine is the way in which teenage girls are never taken seriously as an audience,” Anwen told an interviewer when describing her research and writing process for the book. “They are the easiest demographic to patronize. Hole were huge with girls and young women, so of course they and their audience can be dismissed as silly and trivial.”) While Love may not have been poor, many of the fans described in Crawford’s book on Hole were, and they found something inspiring in those features which others found most problematic about Love. These fans were mostly Australian and New Zealander women or gay men whose lives were changed by the music. Hole dragged them out of depression, out of being closeted or harassed, and helped them do something positive with their lives. They’re now music journalists, writers, or work in radio. They started groups, often riot grrrl/punk in style, though the relationship between Hole and the riot grrrl scene was far from simple. They courted different scenes, different behaviors.
The feeling that recurs among them is that Hole, and Love in particular, gave them “permission” in their lives. “Hole gave me this permission to feel like it’s OK to want to be heard,” says Dominican-American radio DJ Mariel Reyes. Another interviewee, Nicole Solomon, disputes the notion that Courtney was a terrible role model: “No, she’s not. She’s a great role model! She’s telling you not to be ashamed of yourself and to express yourself, including the parts of yourself that society may deem ugly and inappropriate. Especially in her lyrics, she was so visceral, the amount of times the vomit comes up, or bleeding, ripping your guts out. And to have that made cool?” Around the world, and especially in its less-privileged parts, Love’s version of “visceral,” vulgar feminism resonated because it was all about the lack of shame, about giving yourself permission to be the way you want, no matter what society tells you. Even Gordon admits that Hole’s music had something in it, that it was positively messy. Messy, visceral, distasteful but thrilling—things that were the opposite of Sonic Youth.
I grew up listening to Sonic Youth, and a friend at a label invited me backstage to meet the band in happier times for them years back at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. What this article gave me was a greater appreciation for Courtney Love.
Q. What’s your concept of what it will mean to have lived your life well?
A. People always say you should live every day as though it's your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it's going to go on forever. You should treat people like you're going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time. And so I want to live every day as though it's going to go on forever.
From an interview with Peter Thiel on work.
Reminds me a bit of Bezos, who always thought that one advantage that Amazon had over competitors was the patience and endurance for a longer game. Think of the fable of the tortoise and the hare not as being about slow and steady wins the race but that if your competitor wants to run a mile, you should choose to run a marathon, and if they decide to run the marathon, you should make the race an ultra marathon. It helps, of course, if you control enough of the company that the stock market or Board can't shorten the distance on you (one of Twitter's chief challenges now is that they need to put some long-term plans in action, but the stock market may be tightening the leash). When I say distance, of course I largely mean time.
Thief often says not to over-rotate on status but instead on substance. Seems highly intertwined with a longer-term time orientation, perhaps it should be thought of largely as a supporting clause, status typically being short-lived and substance presumably being more durable.
Fascinating read on how the marriage squeeze, already established in countries like Japan and South Korea, has finally hit a third of the world's population, namely that of China and India. It's not just that sex selection at birth has led to a large gender imbalance in the population. Other factors exacerbate the problem.
Countries with normal sex ratios can experience a marriage squeeze if their fertility rates are falling fast. Fertility is important, because men tend to marry women a few years younger than themselves. In India the average age of marriage for men is 26; for women, it is 22. This means that when a country’s fertility is falling, the cohort of women in their early 20s will be slightly smaller (or will be rising more slowly) than the cohort of men they are most likely to marry—those in their late 20s (this is because a few years will have gone by and the falling fertility rate will have reduced the numbers of those born later). This may not sound like a big deal. But in fact between 2000 and 2010 the number of Indian men aged 25-29 rose by 9.2m. The number of Indian women aged 20-24 (their most likely partners) rose by only 7.6m.
Even if India’s sex ratio at birth were to return to normal and stay there, by 2050 the country would still have 30% more single men hoping to marry than single women. This is explained by a rapid decline in India’s fertility rate. But in China, where fertility has been low for years, the more gradual decline in fertility still means there will be 30% more single men than women in 2055, though the distortion declines after that. A decline in fertility usually benefits developing countries by providing a “demographic dividend” (a bulge of working-age adults compared with the numbers of dependent children or grandparents). But it does have the drawback of amplifying the marriage squeeze.
The problem is further accentuated by a so-called “queuing effect”. The length of a queue is determined by how many people join it, how many leave, and how long queuers are prepared to wait. In the same way, marriage numbers are a result of how many people reach marriageable age (the joiners); how many get married (the leavers) and how long people are willing to wait. In India and China, marriage remains the norm, so men keep trying to tie the knot for years.
Hence, a marriage queue in India and China builds up. At stage one, a cohort of women reaches marriageable age (say, 20-24); they marry among the cohort of men aged 25-29. But there are slightly more men than women, so some members of the male cohort remain on the shelf. Later, two new cohorts reach marriageable age. This time, the men left over from the previous round (who are now in their early thirties) are still looking for wives and compete with the cohort of younger men. The women choose husbands from among this larger group. So after the second round even more men are left on the shelf. And so on. A backlog of unmarried men starts to pile up. Just as you need only a small imbalance between the number of people joining a queue and the number leaving it to produce a long, slow-moving line, so in marriage, a small difference in the adult sex ratio can produce huge numbers of bachelors.
One can't help but conclude that India and China must prepare for an end to universal marriage. Is that so bad? Could both countries start to shift their policies to prepare for a post-universal-marriage society? Are there any countries with economic policies that can cope with declining birth rates?
Perhaps, but it's difficult to imagine a world in which the consequences are anything but a net negative.
There may be positive side effects: a shortage of brides in India is causing dowry prices to fall in some areas, for instance. Overall, though, the impact is likely to be negative. A study by Lena Edlund of Columbia University and others found that in 1988-2004, a one-point rise in the sex ratio in China raised rates of violent crime and theft by six to seven points. The abduction of women for sale as brides is becoming more common. The imbalance is fuelling demand for prostitution.