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Infographic artist at work:
For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world's largest database of adult films and performers. I've spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.
-- Jon Millward's
studies: Deep inside a study of 10000 porn stars.
When flight attendants first rode aboard Turkish Airlines in the late 1940s they wore cotton blouses under blue suits tailored to accentuate "the contours of the body," as a fashion history of the airline puts it. In the '60s and '70s the trend continued with fashions straight off the Paris runway, designed to show Turkey's European flair on its flagship airline.
Others slammed the new look as too conservative, a transparent effort to please the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The party's decade-long run in power has wrought changes in the traditionally secular culture, like the acceptance of Islamic head scarves in public and on college campuses and restrictions on alcohol in certain places.
"It is a reaction against imposing a certain lifestyle to all institutions in Turkey," said Ayse Saktanber, a sociologist at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. "Turkey is a pragmatic society which doesn't like to fall behind the world. These new costumes came with the alcohol ban on planes."
With Turkey's rise as an economic and political power over the past decade, tourism has soared. Feeding some of the backlash against the new uniforms is the fear that tourists, many of whom form their first impressions of Turkey on a Turkish Airlines flight, will get the wrong impression. And for all the talk of Turkey pivoting from the West and becoming a new leader of the Muslim world, the flight schedules tell a different narrative: in January nearly four times as many passengers flew to Europe as to the Middle East.
Mortgage lenders are not allowed to deny or delay a loan to a woman simply because she is on maternity leave. Yet the Department of Housing and Urban Development says it receives complaints that this is happening.
"Where lenders run up against the fair lending law is where they single out pregnant women for a difference in treatment based upon an assumption that either they're not being paid on leave, they don't have a job to go back to, or that they are unwilling to go back," said John Trasvina, HUD's assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
Under the law, lenders may not use parental leave as a basis for denial if the borrower demonstrates that she intends to return to work, and otherwise has enough income to qualify for the mortgage loan.
In response to the HUD investigations, MomsRising, an advocacy group, asked its members whether they had experienced discrimination in lending, and received some 200 responses through its Web site. "We heard everything from women who were newly married going in with their spouses and having potential lenders asking illegal questions like, 'When are you going to have a baby?' to actual discrimination in the home loan," said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director.
Land in New York is worth more today than at the peak of the market in 2007, Mr. Knakal of Massey Knakal, a New York property sales company said. While the average price per square foot for a building lost 38 percent of its value from that time, the average price per square foot for land fell only about 18 percent, he said. Why the discrepancy? Not much land was for sale in 2009 and 2010, as sellers decided to ride out the market downturn and hold on to less sought-after sites, he said.
That has changed rather drastically in the past year with the surge in the number of development sites being sold. The big sales have not been confined to Manhattan. Last year Mr. Knakal brokered the $54 million sale of a 2.19-acre South Williamsburg, Brooklyn site zoned for residential units. The buyer was the government of China, in what Mr. Knakal said he believed was the first such transaction by a foreign-based buyer outside of Manhattan.
Finally, it's important to understand how the minimum wage interacts with other policies aimed at helping lower-paid workers, in particular the earned-income tax credit, which helps low-income families who help themselves. The tax credit -- which has traditionally had bipartisan support, although that may be ending -- is also good policy. But it has a well-known defect: Some of its benefits end up flowing not to workers but to employers, in the form of lower wages. And guess what? An increase in the minimum wage helps correct this defect. It turns out that the tax credit and the minimum wage aren't competing policies, they're complementary policies that work best in tandem.
A wage increase is supported by an overwhelming majority of voters, including a strong majority of self-identified Republican women (but not men). Yet G.O.P. leaders in Congress are opposed to any rise. Why? They say that they're concerned about the people who might lose their jobs, never mind the evidence that this won't actually happen. But this isn't credible.
For today's Republican leaders clearly feel disdain for low-wage workers. Bear in mind that such workers, even if they work full time, by and large don't pay income taxes (although they pay plenty in payroll and sales taxes), while they may receive benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. And you know what this makes them, in the eyes of the G.O.P.: "takers," members of the contemptible 47 percent who, as Mitt Romney said to nods of approval, won't take responsibility for their own lives.
Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, offered a perfect illustration of this disdain last Labor Day: He chose to commemorate a holiday dedicated to workers by sending out a message that said nothing at all about workers, but praised the efforts of business owners instead.
the concept of "cyberspace." The term was coined by William Gibson in his novel "Neuromancer" and defined as "a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system ..." As a metaphor that borrows imagery from geography, cyberspace is no different in kind from, say, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. But while nobody thinks that governments are invading Kennedy's New Frontier, or commercializing Kennedy's New Frontier, techno-anarchists on the right or left are constantly complaining that "cyberspace" is being "colonized" by government, business or both.
That's what makes it necessary to state what ought to be obvious: There is no such place as cyberspace. It is not a parallel universe, coexisting with our world but in a different dimension. It is just a bad metaphor that has outlived its usefulness. Using the imagery of a fictitious country makes it harder to have rational arguments about government regulation or commercial exploitation of modern information and communications technologies.
Let's start with government and cyberspace. Most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states. The users of the equipment, as well as the infrastructure of servers, wireless towers, and so on, apart from satellites, are physical entities located in sovereign states. Maybe jihadists in the lawless "tribal" regions of Pakistan are effectively beyond the power of sovereign states. But individuals sitting at their PCs in, say, California are subject to the jurisdiction of the state of California and the United States of America. They may claim to be "citizens of cyberspace," but that is a joke -- the equivalent of presenting a customs officer at an international airport with a passport from the Kingdom of Oz.
So it makes no sense to say that California and the U.S. are extending their jurisdiction "into" cyberspace. Cyberspace is not the equivalent of land that has suddenly arisen off the coast and has yet to be claimed effectively by any existing nation-state. The countries of the world already have jurisdiction over all of the activity that goes on within their recognized international borders. How they exercise that authority can and should be debated. A liberal regime will pass legislative safeguards against government misuse of data and communications and will generally take a light hand, when it comes to regulation and taxation, in the interest of personal freedom and ease of commerce. But the fact that bad states may abuse the power to regulate telecommunications does not mean that benign states lack, or should lack, that power.
Indoor erg erging rowing with Concept2.
Banksy observed: "I've learnt from experience that a painting isn't finished when you put down your brush -- that's when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it."
Some are out-and-out sight gags -- giant scissors with cut-here dotted lines stenciled on a wall. Some are doctored works, replacing the Mona Lisa's famous visage with a yellow smiley face or flinging some shopping carts into one of Monet's tranquil water gardens. And some are oddly philosophical meditations: showing a leopard escaping from a bar-code zoo cage, or a woman hanging up a zebra's stripes to dry on a laundry line. What they have in common is a coy playfulness -- a desire to goad viewers into rethinking their surroundings, to acknowledge the absurdities of closely held preconceptions.
Over the years Banksy has tried to maintain his anonymity. He has argued that he needs to hide his real identity because of the illegal nature of graffiti -- that he "has issues with the cops," that authenticating a street piece could be like "a signed confession." But as obscurity has given way to fame and his works have become coveted -- and costly -- collectors' pieces, critics have increasingly pointed out that Banksy has used anonymity as a marketing device, as another tool in his arsenal of publicity high jinks to burnish his own mystique.
The journalist Will Ellsworth-Jones's new book, "Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall," examines the conundrums behind Banksy and the growing Banksy brand, the paradoxes involved in an outsider trying to hold onto his street cred while becoming an art world insider, and artworks that question the capitalist ethos becoming highly coveted commodities themselves.
Mr. Ellsworth-Jones, who was chief reporter and New York correspondent for The Sunday Times in Britain, writes as a reporter, not an art critic. Although his book does not do a terribly fluent job of conveying the magic of Banksy's work (or an understanding of its iconography, its references or its place in a historical context of engagé art), it does pull together a lot of information about Banksy and his work from interviews with colleagues and former associates, from earlier books and from various online and print articles. It also provides an intriguing account of the making of the acclaimed Banksy film "Exit Through the Gift Shop" (which some regard as a documentary and others see as another Banksy stunt) and efforts by Banksy and his team to control and shape the mythology around him.Banksy observed: "I've learnt from experience that a painting isn't finished when you put down your brush -- that's when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it."
There are some peculiar lacunae in this volume, however. While Mr. Ellsworth-Jones quotes from earlier interviews (mainly via e-mail) that Banksy has dispensed over the years to others, he did not bother to submit his own e-mail questions (after failed negotiations with Banksy's publicity agent actually to talk with him) because, he says, "the usual pattern has been for some questions to be answered and other key ones simply ignored."
Mr. Ellsworth-Jones says that the young Banksy joined the burgeoning graffiti scene in Bristol in the 1980s, centered on a youth club that provided "a second family for teenagers in their rebellious years" and was "buzzing with ideas, alliances, rivalries." Banksy experimented with names and styles in his formative years, Mr. Ellsworth-Jones says, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, which "soon evolved into Banksy, which had less of the gangster 'robbing banks' ring to it but was much more memorable -- and easier to write."
Why did Banksy switch from freehand drawing to his distinctive stencils? Mr. Ellsworth-Jones says the artist has given different answers over the years, ranging from not being fast enough (after a near escape from the police, he said he realized he had to cut his painting time in half "or give up altogether") to preferring the efficiency and crispness of a stencil. "I also like the political edge," Banksy is quoted saying. "All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars. Even a picture of a rabbit playing a piano looks hard as a stencil."
Among the big influences on Banksy in his formative years were Robert Del Naja, known as 3D, who used a stencil in 1986 for the face of the Mona Lisa, and Blek le Rat, who had been stenciling life-size rats on Paris walls since 1981 and whose impact on the young Banksy remains extremely evident.
Assessing students has always been a fraught process, especially 4-year-olds, a mercurial and unpredictable lot by nature, who are vying for increasingly precious seats in kindergarten gifted programs.
In New York, it has now become an endless contest in which administrators seeking authentic measures of intelligence are barely able to keep ahead of companies whose aim is to bring out the genius in every young child.
Hunter, a public school for gifted children that is part of the City University of New York, requires applicants to take the Stanford-Binet V intelligence test, and until last year, families could pick from 1 of 16 psychologists to administer the test. Uncovering who was the "best tester," one who might give children more time to answer, or pose questions different ways, was a popular parlor game among parents.
The city's leading private schools are even considering doing away with the test they have used for decades, popularly known as the E.R.B., after the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the exam, which is written by Pearson.
"It's something the schools know has been corrupted," said Dr. Samuel J. Meisels, an early-childhood education expert who gave a presentation in the fall to private school officials, encouraging them to abandon the test. Excessive test preparation, he said, "invalidates inferences that can be drawn" about children's "learning potential and intellect and achievement."
Last year, the Education Department said it would change one of the tests used for admission to public school gifted kindergarten and first-grade classes in order to focus more on cognitive ability and less on school readiness, which favors children who have more access to preschool and tutoring.
For the 2012-13 school year, nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools. That was more than double the number five years ago. "We were concerned enough about our definition of giftedness being affected by test prep -- as we were prior school experience, primary spoken language, socioeconomic background and culture -- that we changed the assessment," Adina Lopatin, a deputy chief academic officer in the Education Department, said.
¶ And yet test prep companies leapt to action, printing new books tailored to the new test and organizing classes.
¶ Natalie Viderman, 4, spent an hour and a half each week for six months at Bright Kids NYC, a tutoring company, working on skills like spatial visualization and serial reasoning, which are part of the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, or NNAT 2, the new gifted and talented test. She and her mother, Victoria Preys, also worked every night on general learning, test prep and workbooks, some provided by Bright Kids.
¶ "It is my philosophy that if you can get more help, why not?" Ms. Preys said. She prepared her son the same way and he benefited, she said, scoring in the 98th percentile, qualifying him for a seat. She interpreted the Education Department's decision to change the test and "raise the standards," she said, as a message that it expected parents to do more. "We are increasing the standards, so you have to work with your kids more, to prep more," she said.
¶ "Every time these tests change, there's a lot of demand," Bige Doruk, founder of Bright Kids, said. She said she did not accept the argument that admissions tests had been invalidated by test prep. "It is not a validity issue, it's a competitive issue," she said. "Parents will always do what they can for their children." And not all children who take preparation courses do well, she said. The test requires that 4-year-olds sit with a stranger for nearly an hour -- skills that extend beyond the scope of I.Q. or school readiness.
Dr. Meisels, who is president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school and research organization in Chicago focusing on early childhood development, told the private schools admissions officers in November that the test was effective at identifying cognitive delays, diagnosing learning disabilities and measuring I.Q., the reasons the test was developed. But he argued that it was not a good admissions tool -- which is what the schools are using it for. "It is an off-label use," he said. He told the schools that they could collect enough information from families to make an informed decision without the test -- most schools require an interview with parents, a play date with the child, a report from the preschool and the records bureau.
"You're not a failure if you decide to leave Brooklyn," Ms. Ghiorse said. "People move to New York with a plan, a dream, and sometimes it doesn't work out that you can live that lifestyle. It takes a lot of money."
As a server at Marlow & Sons, the nose-to-tail temple in Williamsburg, Ms. Ghiorse said she loved being surrounded by "that unbelievably saturated population" of creative influencers, like James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem.
While she savors the space and mental calm of the suburbs, she finds herself looking hopefully for signs of creative ferment. "We've found it in pockets," Ms. Ghiorse said. "Once in a while, you'll think, 'This place gets it,' because they have a Fernet Branca cocktail on their menu."
The signs are there, if you know where to look.
On a visit to Hastings on a recent gray Tuesday, a stroll down the snow-flecked sidewalks of Warburton Avenue, a main drag, revealed more than a few glimpses of "Portlandia" popping up in an otherwise "Mayberry R.F.D." tableau.
The gluten-free bakery, By the Way, sits across the street from Juniper, the farm-to-table restaurant that wouldn't look out of place on Smith Street, the restaurant row that cuts through Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Nearby is Maisonette, a home-décor shop that sells felted-wool gazelle heads, for those who prefer their antlers cruelty-free. The owners are Maria Churchill and Kevin McCarthy, recent refugees from the East Village.
The fact that there is a main street to stroll is a big draw for former Brooklynites who find sprawling, car-culture suburbs alienating. These pedestrian-friendly towns, filled with low-rise 19th century brick buildings and non-chain shops, offer a version of village-style living that Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village urbanist, would have approved of.
"Walking to pick up milk, to nip over to the farmers' market, is priceless," said Helen Steed, a creative director in fashion in her early 40s whose family moved from Brooklyn to Irvington four years ago. "It's more familiar, less suburban."
Indeed, the sturdy, retro, all-American character of the river towns fits well with the whole Filson/Woolrich heritage-brand aesthetic. People who set their cultural compass to the Brooklyn Flea appreciate the authenticity.
"Hastings-on-Hudson is a village, in a Wittgensteinian sort of way," Mr. Wallach said. He added, "We are constantly hearing about the slow-food movement, the slow-learning movement and the slow-everything-else. So why not just go avant-garde into a slow-village movement?"
Indeed, in the era of artisanal chic, a move up the Hudson feels like Back to the Land Lite. Brooklyn locavores settle in comfortably at The Village Dog in Tarrytown, which serves a salmon boudin hot dog, with sustainable fish sourced from Pierless Fish in Brooklyn; or at Harper's, a bar and restaurant in Dobbs Ferry, where Clark Moore, the bartender, barrel-ages cocktails on the premises.
No wonder Marco Arment, the former lead developer for Tumblr who recently moved to Hastings from Park Slope, said he no longer needs to run off to the country every three-day weekend.
The slower pace and cheaper space also make it easier to pursue the D.I.Y. hobbies and maker-culture businesses that Brooklyn has become famous for.
This is not to say the river towns are Brooklyn North. The mood is still sleepy and commuter-oriented, and real estate, while cheaper than Cobble Hill, is expensive by national standards (don't even get the locals started on property taxes). Furthermore, the relative lack of racial diversity is striking to newcomers.
Marie Labropolous recently moved from a one-bedroom rental in Brooklyn to a four-bedroom 1970s split-level in Hartsdale, about 10 minutes from her shop in Dobbs Ferry. She and her husband, Simeon Papacostas, now have space for a music studio in their basement, where they enjoy regular "pajama jams," she said.
"We keep to ourselves a lot more, keep to our hobbies a lot more, which for creative types is great," said Ms. Kalliste, 33. "Having a little bit of isolation, you become even more creative."
There are some things, however, that she refuses to let go. "I still have my Brooklyn phone number," Ms. Labropolous said. "I'm not giving it up."
Of the many things he learned from his grandfather, snobbery was not one of them. "He said to me at one point, 'I wrote for my friends, and my friends aren't intellectuals,' " Mr. Ben Smith, 36, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, said. "I kind of worshiped him growing up." He and his wife, Liena Zagare, cite a distaste for elitism as the prime reason they fled Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood for the less trendy Ditmas Park. "We got tired of being criticized for keeping our kid on a leash," Ms. Zagare, the publisher of Corner News Media, a local news site, said at the Hastings book party.
Mr. Smith is less a political enthusiast than a product of his upbringing. As a child, he was exposed to years of political debate between his father, a conservative Republican who was a partner at Paul Weiss, and his mother, a liberal Democrat who tutors learning-disabled children. "It's a good background for somebody who's not going to have incredibly strong political opinions," he said, refuting the pro-liberal bias he is sometimes accused of.
His grandfather was Robert Smith, a novelist in the 1940s who later turned to writing books about baseball, including "Baseball: A Historical Narrative of the Game, the Men Who Played It, and Its Place in American Life." His grandmother was Janet Smith, a Mark Twain scholar and editor of a 1962 collection called "Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race."
Time is a commodity. And time spent in a meeting should generate a productivity return on investment. But how often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.
Carson Tate, founder of Working Simply
Ibrahim Ibrahimov, who plans to live in the penthouse of Azerbaijan Tower, had his epiphany on a flight from Dubai. The vision behind Khazar Islands, after all, is not a vision so much as a simulacrum of a vision. The fake islands, the thousands of palm trees and the glass and steel towers -- many of which resemble Dubai's sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel -- are all emblems of the modern Persian Gulf petro-dictatorship. And two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- its final custodian during 23 centuries of near-constant occupation -- Azerbaijan could be accused of having similar ambitions. The country, which is about the size of South Carolina, has 9.2 million people and is cut off from any oceans. It builds nothing that the rest of the world wants and has no internationally recognized universities.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the energy sector became a source of enormous wealth. Now Azerbaijan is trying to take advantage of that wealth. As such, Avesta's sales and marketing team recently produced a gleaming 101-page coffee-table book in a gilded box promoting Khazar Islands. It features photographs of men in Italian suits and women with pouty faces; everyone drinks wine and is on a cigarette boat or in a Mercedes convertible. There's also a video that shows computer renderings of Khazar Islands in the not-too-distant future. The video lasts 5 minutes 6 seconds and includes an image of a make-believe skyline at night and another of Ibrahimov on a cellphone in front of a private jet, even though, he conceded, he doesn't own one.
On some level, there is an economic logic behind building the tallest, biggest, brashest building anywhere. The rise of superdevelopments in cities like Doha, Riyadh, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai -- and, of course, Abu Dhabi and Dubai -- sent signals to investors that the state supported growth. Usually, these sorts of developments attract the attention, first, of regional investors who know the local topography, which Khazar Islands has already done. "They're coming from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Arabic countries and especially from Israel," Guluzade told me. Next are the more skeptical international investors that Ibrahimov is hoping to impress. Hence the Azerbaijan Tower. "The investor is faced with this battery of choices," explained Brian Connelly, a strategic-management professor at Auburn University's College of Business. "But there are things they can't see, so they're looking for a signal that tells them this is good for them. If I can see that there's the tallest building in the world, I know the host-country institutions are behind them."
"You just get sad," Mr. Agati said. "I see people getting up in the morning, going out to their careers and going home. I just wish I was doing that. Some people don't like their jobs, or they have problems with their jobs, but at least they're working. I just wish I was in their shoes."
He said he cannot afford to go back to school, as many younger people without jobs have done. Even if he could afford it, economists say it is unclear whether older workers like him benefit much from more education.
"It just doesn't make sense to offer retraining for people 55 and older," said Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "Discrimination by age, long-term unemployment, the fact that they're now at the end of the hiring queue, the lack of time horizon just does not make it sensible to invest in them."
Many displaced older workers are taking this message to heart and leaving the labor force entirely.
The share of older people applying for Social Security early spiked during the recession as people sought whatever income they could find. The penalty they will pay is permanent, as retirees who take benefits at age 62 -- as Ms. Zimmerman did, to help make her mortgage payments -- will receive 30 percent less in each month's check for the rest of their lives than they would if they had waited until full retirement age (66 for those born after 1942).
Those not yet eligible for Social Security are increasingly applying for another, comparable kind of income support that often goes to people who expect never to work again: disability benefits. More than one in eight people in their late 50s is now on some form of federal disability insurance program, according to Mark Duggan, chairman of the department of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Dan Slater writes for
[ __ ] Washington Post
[ __ ] The Beast
[ x ] Slate
[ __ ] The Awl
The Dennis the Dentist theory; previously, Baskauskas the basketballer.
