Coruscation

Startups cluster from Broadway to rand Central in midtown, down to SoHo.

An analysis of public records shows that more than 400 technology start-ups in New York City have raised money from investors in the last two years. The vast majority of these companies have landed in Midtown South, within blocks of venture capital investors and veteran start-ups. The area's affordable rent and popular restaurants and bars are a big draw. Many of the companies are working to use technology to reshape the city's established industries, like retail, finance, health care and entertainment.

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There is also a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem. A study, by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford, shows that Americans are increasingly living in areas that are either poor or affluent. The isolation of the prosperous, he said, threatens their support for public schools, parks, mass transit and other investments that benefit broader society.

OPINION
The Poor, the Near Poor and You
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Published: November 23, 2011
One in three Americans lives in poverty or close to it. If the country does not change direction, more Americans will be struggling.

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According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny -- based on military force -- inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.

In other countries, China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States, which remains the world's pre-eminent hegemonic power. Military strength underpins hegemony and helps to explain why the United States has so many allies. President Obama has made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but his actions also demonstrate that Washington is capable of leading three foreign wars simultaneously. By contrast, China's army has not been involved in any war since 1984, with Vietnam, and very few of its high-ranking officers, let alone its soldiers, have any battlefield experience.

OPINION
How China Can Defeat America
By YAN XUETONG
Published: November 20, 2011
For China to replace America as the preeminent global power, it will have to win hearts and minds at home and abroad.

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Mr. Girouard said that Google Apps would introduce even more features with Google+ over the next few months. "We're headed to a place where all productivity is inherently social," he said. "Questions like 'What do we do next?' and 'Who needs to make a decision today?' are handled inefficiently now. It's why there are so many meetings in companies." Social networks in business, he said, could be faster, less formal and more efficient.

Social networking "is the next phase of what we're going to do in business," said Mr. Girouard.

-- David Girouard, who runs Google Apps for Business.

TECHNOLOGY
Mixed Results as Google Enters Microsoft's Turf
By QUENTIN HARDY
Published: November 20, 2011
Google has lured some small businesses away from Microsoft Office by offering similar features at lower cost. But big companies have been harder to land.

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Some owners use them as mobile offices, outfitted with fine leather chairs and Persian rugs; vans may also double as a child's playroom on wheels, complete with a built-in vacuum to clean what the children dirty.

And while some owners say they are drawn to the vehicles' vanilla exteriors, their outsize profiles cannot help but draw attention: at more than 22 feet long and nearly 9 feet tall, they look like cargo vans on steroids, their high roof lines dwarfing nearly all that surrounds them on the streets of New York. And that's before the satellite dishes are raised.

They are a striking and sometimes unwelcome counterpoint to other trends seen on city streets, where tiny Smart cars dart around hybrid taxis and traffic lanes once reserved for gas-guzzlers are now for bicycles or pedestrians.

"Using your vehicle as a luxury lounge is just usurping public space for your own private use," said Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that encourages New Yorkers to travel around the city more responsibly. "Streets are shared space and belong to the community."

Nonetheless, during morning spin classes at Soul Cycle, the Upper East Side studio, the parking spaces cannot accommodate the Sprinter vans, Range Rovers and Lexus GX470s that are sometimes double-parked. A modified black Mercedes van owned by Philip A. Falcone, the chief of Harbinger Capital Partners, has become a fixture on the Upper East Side, idling by the Michael Kors shop on Madison Avenue.

Jill Kargman, a writer and mother of three who lives on the Upper East Side, said that play dates adhered to a certain pecking order: those that start in one of these ultra-luxury vans are preferable because they can "just bop into a souped-up bulletproof living room on wheels," she said.

The most popular model is made by Mercedes: a stripped-down, basic version of the van, the Sprinter, starts at $41,315; Mr. Kantor's version, which Mercedes-Benz Manhattan arranged to have customized, is fitted with satellite television, a Wi-Fi network and flat-screen monitors, and sells for $189,000. Even that is not quite enough for some New Yorkers, who employ designers to install even pricier custom details that easily drive up the total cost to $500,000.

Daniel Barile, a Mercedes-Benz spokesman, said that because many buyers were going to after-market shops to decorate their van interiors, Mercedes started releasing its own version in early 2010, and sold 8,000 the first year. Mercedes has sold 13,000 this year.

And although the modified Mercedes van is popular in several large cities, Howard Becker, president of Becker Automotive Design in Oxnard, Calif., said New York, with its executives in hedge funds and finance, had become his best market.

Hyde Ryan, a designer who worked with a wealthy New York family on decorating the interior of their Mercedes Sprinter van, said that the family wanted gold-plated fittings for every button that would be pushed. The owner installed a vacuum cleaner so the chauffeur could remove every crumb and grain of sand each time the children stepped out of the van.

Carmelo Umpierre, a 44-year-old chauffeur, idled the $425,000 van he drives for an executive based in Connecticut. It is nearly impossible to find a parking space for such a large vehicle, so Mr. Umpierre often waits for his boss in illegal spots, and moves when the police come by.

The car's owner declined to be interviewed, saying he did not want to draw attention to himself. But he allowed Mr. Umpierre to display the van's interior: the seats were upholstered with heavily scented leather and a stocked bar had individual lighting for each wine glass and Champagne flute. Mr. Umpierre said he vacuumed the interior every night and covered the custom-designed gray wool rugs with towels when it rained. He said he tried to navigate the van through side streets so gawkers could not peek in when he dropped off his boss.

"He likes to be private," Mr. Umpierre said of his employer. "He doesn't like to be dropped off in the front."

On Friday, Martin Brass, a 43-year-old former Wall Street executive turned investor, was shopping for a Mercedes Sprinter at a Manhattan dealership. Mr. Brass, whose work-related travel often finds him in New York or Hawaii, said he planned to buy a basic model and then have some after-market improvements made to the interior.

N.Y. / REGION
For the Rich, Cargo Vans on Steroids
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: November 20, 2011
Some of the richest New Yorkers are driving around in costly vans decorated with leather seats, Persian rugs and flat-screen TVs.

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What Else Is Going On?

At the Bowery Hotel's lounge, Marissa Evans and Esther Kang were concerned about FOMO, the fear of missing out.

Ms. Evans, 27, runs a social networking site called Go Try It On, which gives users feedback on what they are wearing. On her phone, she navigates among three e-mail accounts, two Twitter feeds, Foursquare, Instagram and several group text-message accounts. All of these can cultivate FOMO.

"Especially when I leave the city," she said. "In the past, maybe I'd have had one text message inviting me out. But now I know from Facebook and Twitter and GroupMe that 10 of my friends were all together, and I can see pictures of what they did."

At the moment, however, she was more concerned about a friend who had been left out -- and who, thanks to their mobile phones, knew it. When Ms. Evans arrived at the bar, she "checked in" on the social networking site Foursquare; Ms. Kang, 29, checked in on Facebook. Within moments, Ms. Kang received a Facebook message from a third friend, Joydeep Dey, who had not been invited.

"Miss you two!!" his message read.

Ms. Kang was not warmed by his concern.

"I know he's being passive-aggressive," she said. So she responded in kind.

"Are you working?" she texted.

Mr. Dey, 30, contacted the next morning, said he had felt left out -- not because he had not been invited, but because he had been stuck at work. "Marissa, Esther and I are usually this trio," he said. "When I saw them both check in, I had to let them know I knew."

Among young adults surveyed by the advertising agency JWT New York, 65 percent said they felt left out when they saw that some of their friends were doing something without them. That feeling leaves many social media users perpetually antsy that, somewhere accessible by their phones, someone is having more fun than they are, said Ann Mack, the agency's director of trend-spotting.

"It's a very efficient way to make plans for later, but when you are out, people are still texting other people, trying to drum up more friends, not living in the moment," Ms. Mack said. "It's like, I'm here but what else is going on? Is there something better, cooler, that I'm not in the know about?"

Seated next to Ms. Evans, Jordan Cooper, 29, kept one eye on his cellphone but did not answer any of the incoming text messages, e-mail messages or phone calls. Mr. Cooper, who is starting a data-collection and search site called Hyperpublic, said he did not feel FOMO, in part because he did not feel left out of an event just because he was not there physically.

"I don't think of what's here and what's not here as separate," he said. "Like I'll be out with my mom and if I look at my phone, she says I'm being anti-social. I say, 'I'm being social, just not social with you.' "

N.Y. / REGION
Out on the Town, Always Online
By JOHN LELAND
Published: November 19, 2011
Many young, wired New Yorkers are living simultaneously in the physical world and in their smartphones, without missing out on either.

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Beats have redefined the lowly headphone, as well as how much people are willing to pay for a pair of them. A typical pair of Beats sell for about $300 -- nearly 10 times the price of ear buds that come with iPods. And, despite these lean economic times, they are selling surprisingly fast.

Whether Beats are worth the money is open to debate. Reviews are mixed, but many people love them. The headphones are sleekly Apple-esque, which is no surprise, since they were created by a former designer at Apple. Beats also offer a celebrity vibe and a lot of boom-a-chick-a-boom bass.

So much bass, in fact, that some audio experts say that Beats distort the sound of the music.

"In terms of sound performance, they are among the worst you can buy," says Tyll Hertsens, editor in chief of InnerFidelity.com, a site for audiophiles. "They are absolutely, extraordinarily bad."

Time was, manufacturers marketed high-priced audio equipment by emphasizing technical merits like frequency response, optimum impedance, ambient noise attenuation and so on. The audience was mostly a small cadre of audiophiles tuned to the finer points of sound quality.

But, three years ago, Beats by Dr. Dre set out to change all that by appealing to more primal desires: good looks, celebrity and bone-rattling bass. Annual sales are approaching $500 million, and Beats have transformed headphones into a fashion accessory.

BUSINESS DAY
Headphones With Swagger (and Lots of Bass)
By ANDREW J. MARTIN
Published: November 19, 2011
The rap impresario Dr. Dre is the celebrity behind Beats, a successful line of expensive headphones that have become a fashion accessory.

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Lorenzo Martone, public relations executive and ex-boyfriend of Marc Jacobs: "I remember kissing some random people that I don't know who they are. That was memorable because it was so much fun. But not memorable enough to remember who it was with."

Andy Cohen, television host and Bravo executive: "I'm a Hamptons guy. I haven't spent a ton of time there. But the time that I have spent there, which is very little, I barely remember, which is I think the point of the Pavilion in the first place."

FASHION & STYLE
Reminiscences of a 'Gay Utopia'
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: November 18, 2011
Clubgoers reminisce about the Pavilion, a dance hub and gay landmark in Fire Island Pines that was destroyed by fire this week.

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Joannides, who is 58, made sex education his life's work following the success of his sex manual for older teenagers and adults called, "The Guide to Getting It On." Lauded for its voluminous accuracy and wit, the 900-plus-page paperback took him 15 years to research and write. Joannides argues that pornography can be used as a teaching tool, not a bogeyman, as is apparent in a short Web video he made called "5 Things to Learn About Lovemaking From Porn." "In porn," he affably lectures, "sex happens instantly: camera, action, crotch. . . . In real life, the willingness to ask and learn from your partner is often what separates the good lovers from those who are totally forgettable." (Another of Joannides's assertions is that the best way to reach heterosexual boys -- who he believes are the most neglected in the current environment -- is to play to their desire for "mastery", because by middle school, they've thoroughly absorbed that to be a man is to be a stud.)

-- NYT

In other words, as much as Joannides criticizes his opponents on the right, he also tweaks the orthodoxies of his friends on the left, hoping to spur them to contemplate how they themselves dismiss pleasure. His main premise is that young people will tune out educators if their real concerns are left in the shadows. And practically speaking, pleasure is so braided through sex that if you can't mention it, you miss chances to teach about safe sex in a way that young people can really use.

For instance, in addition to pulling condoms over bananas -- which has become a de rigueur contraception lesson among "liberal" educators -- young people need to hear specifics about making the method work for them. "We don't tell them: 'Look, there are different shapes of condoms. Get sampler packs, experiment.' That would be entering pleasure into the conversation, and we don't want that."

While the conference attendees couldn't have agreed more with Joannides about what should be taught in schools, much of the crowd thought he was deluded to imagine they could ever get away with it. Back in 1988, Michelle Fine, a professor of social psychology at the City University of New York, wrote an article in The Harvard Educational Review called "Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire." In it, she included the comments of a teacher who discouraged community advocates from lobbying for change in the formal curriculum. If outsiders actually discovered the liberties some teachers take, Fine was told, they'd be shut down.

"The campaign for abstinence in the schools and communities may seem trivial, an ideological nuisance," Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland wrote in a 2006 study in The Harvard Educational Review, "but at its core it is . . . a betrayal of our next generation, which is desperately in need of knowledge, conversation and resources to negotiate the delicious and treacherous terrain of sexuality in the 21st century."

It's axiomatic, however, that parents who support richer sex education don't make the same ruckus with school officials as those who oppose it. "We need to be there at the school boards and say: 'Guess where kids are getting their messages about sex from? They're getting it from porn,' " Joannides exhorted. "All we're talking about is just being able to acknowledge that sex is a good thing in the right circumstances, that it's a normal thing."

Laurie Abraham wrote "The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group," which began as an article in the magazine.

Editor: Ilena Silverman

MAGAZINE
Teaching Good Sex
By LAURIE ABRAHAM
Published: November 16, 2011
Introducing pleasure to the peril of sex education.

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What's happening at Journal Communications is one small win for Google and its cloud computing challenge to Microsoft's lucrative Office division, maker of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. But more than 4 1/2 years after Google Apps for business made its debut, the question remains how much of a dent Google is making in Microsoft's business.

Microsoft says Google's efforts are hardly noticeable. But Google executives say that more and bigger companies are signing up for the cloud service.

Possibly more important to Google is the way that Apps helps Google build social networks inside business. If successful, it would be a threat to Microsoft's biggest division and would create another inroad in its struggle with Facebook to dominate users' online lives.

"Businesses are inherently about people and relationships," said David Girouard, who runs Google's Apps business. Predictable things, like figuring out the supplies needed for manufacture, were "not the minimum to play," he said. "You need to have a social system, where a guy can introduce an idea about a new supplier, and he gets input from a lot of people quickly."

TECHNOLOGY
Mixed Results as Google Enters Microsoft's Turf
By QUENTIN HARDY
Published: November 20, 2011
Google has lured some small businesses away from Microsoft Office by offering similar features at lower cost. But big companies have been harder to land.

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It was largely for his children's sake that he was pursuing an education on the other side of the earth -- for their future and, in some inchoate hope-filled way, for his country's future too. What he often said was that he wanted to be a bridge between the Islamic world and the West. None of the summer students in New Haven knew much about his personal circumstances; of his history they knew nothing at all. He had discussed it with the Yale admissions office, and with an administrator in the provost's office who during a dinner with him seemed concerned that he might be a spy. [1]

Occupy Wall Street is animated by a central, galvanizing idea -- that the distribution of wealth is unfair. That struck a very live nerve, grabbing something that was in the air and turning it into simple math: 1 percent should not live at the expense of the other 99 percent. Still, Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go. In addition to the 5 W's -- who, what, when, where and why -- the media are obsessed with a sixth: what's next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward.

But if Occupy Wall Street seems inchoate and short on answers, it has plenty of company. The president has primed the pump over and over with borrowed federal largess and still jobs refuse to flow. The myriad Republican debates have become a kind of random gaffe generator with little in the way of serious public proposals. And by the way, there's another term for a gathering of politically committed people who make a lot of speeches and argue endlessly over process without producing much in the way of solutions: Congress.

[ via: 1, 2 ]

BUSINESS DAY
For a Movement, a Question: What Now?
By DAVID CARR
Published: November 20, 2011
Without a physical anchor, a movement's way forward is unclear. But its impact may have already been made.

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He wrestled with the question of how to portray what happens in the private chambers. "Sex scenes in a brothel are so expected that they could be very boring," he said. "I went much more into theater, fetishism, a kind of play." Masks and mirrors are ubiquitous; one prostitute mimics a marionette, while another dresses as a geisha and speaks pidgin Japanese. "These things can tell you more about power relationships than a faked sex scene," he added.

Extending the metaphor of brothel as theater, he likened the madam in "House of Pleasures" to a director committed to putting on a nightly show and consumed by the logistics and economics of doing so. (She is played by the director and actress Noémie Lvovsky, and many of the customers are also played by filmmaker friends, including Xavier Beauvois and Jacques Nolot.)

From the fablelike opening line -- a prostitute murmurs, "I'm so tired, I could sleep for a thousand years" -- to the jolting epilogue in present-day Paris, "House of Pleasures" amounts to a riff on the adage about prostitution being the oldest profession. Mr. Bonello compounds this sense of timelessness with soundtrack choices that could be called anachronistic, starting with his own minimal electronic score. (A trained classical composer, he writes his own music, and, in lieu of rehearsals, gives his actors CD mixes.) After one of the women dies of syphilis, her grieving friends hum the melody to the spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and then slow-dance to the Moody Blues ballad "Nights in White Satin."

While his new film has earned Mr. Bonello his best reviews in France (and a spread in French Vogue), there was some hostility from the English-language press in Cannes, even an accusation of "cruelty porn" from a British paper. His detractors complain about sexual violence: In "Tiresia" (2003), a transgender prostitute is blinded before becoming an oracle (as in the Greek myth), and in "House of Pleasures" one woman is the victim of a horrific face slashing. But Mr. Bonello said he never resorts to gore for shock value. "I show some things because it's necessary to understand the pain," he said. "I'm never doing it casually."

MOVIES
What Do Courtesans Do by Day?
By DENNIS LIM
Published: November 18, 2011
"House of Pleasures," by the French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, is set in a turn-of-the-20th-century French brothel, a place of business and a locus of fantasy.

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"I have seen women in great positions of authority who make assumptions that the women who work for them are their friends," she said. "They share intimate information with them -- their marital relations, their sex lives, whether they think the delivery guy is hot. They go shopping with them, they go into the dressing room with them. These women, in their mind, are exempted because they consider it a friendship. But it is bad boundaries."

Fran A. Sepler, president of Sepler & Associates, a Minneapolis firm that investigates harassment claims on behalf of employers, says she has examined about a dozen cases in recent years involving women harassing women. Often the situations are not explicitly sexual, she said.

JOB MARKET
Less 'He Said, She Said' in Sex Harassment Cases
By HILARY STOUT
Published: November 5, 2011
The numbers and types of accusations of sexual harassment have shifted greatly in the last 20 years.

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Of the 55 million mortgages in America, more than 10 million are reasonably likely to default. That is a staggering number -- and it is, in large part, because so many homes are worth so much less than the mortgage the homeowners are holding. That is, they're underwater.

Her second calculation is that the supply of housing is going to drastically outstrip demand for the foreseeable future; she estimates that the glut of unneeded homes could get as high as 6.2 million over the next six years. The primary reason for this, she says, is that household formation has been very low in recent years, presumably because of the grim economy. (Young adults are living with their parents instead of moving into their own homes, etc.) What's more, nearly 20 percent of current homeowners no longer qualify for a mortgage, as lending standards have tightened.

The implication is almost too awful to contemplate. As Goodman put it in testimony she recently gave before Congress, the supply/demand imbalance means that housing prices "are likely to decline further. This may recreate the housing death spiral -- as lower housing prices mean more borrowers become underwater." Which makes them more likely to default, which lowers prices further, and on and on.

The only way to stop the death spiral is through principal reduction. The reason is simple: "The data show that principal modifications work better" than other kinds of modifications, she says. Interest rate reductions can lower monthly payments, but the home remains just as underwater as it was before the modification. And the extent to which a home is underwater is the single best indicator of whether the homeowner will default. The only way to change the imbalance between the size of the mortgage and the value of the home is to reduce principal.

OPINION
To Fix Housing, See the Data
By JOE NOCERA
Published: November 4, 2011
One expert's data-driven approach to the housing crisis makes it clear that mortgage modifications that reduce principal are the only thing that will work.

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