Workers with less education are more likely to take jobs with more workplace stress, such as those involving shift work, experiencing frequent layoffs, or demanding long hours. Occupations requiring more years of education also experience some of the same stressors, but those stressors are unlikely to have the same impact.
Representation
“I feel a lot of hate,” she said. “I haven’t said anything bad to anyone.”
says the 18 year-old attending a political rally in support of the candidate she wants to speak on her behalf. The candidate is Donald Trump.
Dry direction
“We’re all standing there and Malick hands out these pieces of paper to all of us,” Lennon said. “And the one he gave me said, ‘There’s no such thing as a fireproof wall.’ And I ask, ‘Is this something I’m supposed to say in the scene?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Lennon learned, after talking to the director, that there was no script, just a phrase that might inspire him when cameras started rolling.
“And then Malick goes, ‘Would you like some more? Because I have a whole stack of these.’ And I was like, ‘I think I’m good,’” Lennon said.
Hollywood
From West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein, excerpted by Andrew O’Hagan:
I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel without a Cause – 18 or 19 years old. We’d started shooting in black and white, and two weeks into it Jack clearly saw that something was going on with James Dean. He said, ‘Change this picture to colour. The kid’s going to be a star.’ He’d found his new Rin Tin Tin.
Then one day, the next year, Jimmy Dean and I were coming out of the commissary on the Warner Brothers set, and Jack Warner came up to introduce the banker Serge Semenenko to Jimmy: Semenenko put out his hand to shake hands, and Jimmy reached into his pocket, threw a bunch of coins at their feet, and walked off. They looked completely stunned. I followed Jimmy like a puppy dog and said: ‘What the hell was that all about?’ So he told me that Jack had convinced [his brother] Harry that they should sell the studio, and they sold it to Semenenko; then, the day after, Jack bought back in. All he had really done was to buy his brother out. So that was Jimmy Dean’s reply to what Jack had done.
Where coincidences come from
Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.
“Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never notice anything,” Spiegelhalter says. “I never talk to anybody on trains. If I’m with a stranger, I don’t try to find a connection with them, because I’m English.”
Beitman, on the other hand, says, “My life is littered with coincidences.” He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8-or-9-years-old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen it; they hadn’t. Then, “I was crying a lot and took the wrong way home, and there was the dog … I got into [studying coincidences] just because, hey, look Bernie, what’s going on here?”
“In translation it doubled in size”
Bruce Webber on the late Rosario Ferré
Ms. Ferré began writing in English in the 1990s in the hope of reaching a wider audience. Interviewed by The New York Times in 1998, she said that writing and thinking in another, less familiar language changed her style, making it less flamboyant and less complex.
“When I get into Spanish, I go crazy with words,” she said. “In English, I don’t have the same linguistic repertory. I have no choice but to wear blinders and go straight.”
The result, she said, sometimes ended up surprising her, rendering changes in her characters. “The House on the Lagoon” — a multigenerational story about a wealthy and problematically haughty family that begins in 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship, and ends in the 1980s — is told with rival narrators, a husband and wife, with often conflicting points of view. She wrote it first in Spanish, as “La Casa de la Laguna,” but as she recalled in a 2011 reminiscence (recently published in English as “Memoir”), she decided to translate it into English and send it to an American publisher; it ended up at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
In translation it doubled in size and changed so much that after it was published, she had to retranslate it back into Spanish. In English, Ms. Ferré said in the Times interview, she found that the patriarchal husband, Quintin Mendizabal, was “less unpleasant, nicer and more human,” whereas in Spanish, he was “a scoundrel who is not worthy of forgiveness.”
La cultura circula
Shakespeare remixed Boccaccio. Dostoevsky loved Dickens. Marquez said, “Graham Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics.” Mohandas Gandhi, a brave and direct writer of Gujarati prose, came to many of his ideas reading Tolstoy, who came to his ideas from Schopenhauer, who said that the work that influenced him the most was the Upanishads.
Chronic Underemployment
Six years into the economic recovery, people continue to crisscross the state in search of gigs, putting in three hours of drive time for maybe nine hours of work at $10 an hour…
Solving chronic underemployment could be the next campaign for organized labor. Indeed, several weeks ago, Silicon Valley Rising, a community-labor coalition, submitted paperwork for a ballot measure in San Jose called the “Opportunity to Work Initiative,” which would require large employers to offer additional hours to current part-timers before hiring additional part-time or temp workers…
It takes me seven minutes to make my way to the end of the line; by that time it has stopped completely. We all wait for another 20 minutes, without moving. More workers join, and the line becomes tighter and hotter. Many people have been on their feet since 4 a.m., and we are packed so closely that sitting down is impossible. One woman starts sobbing.
Fair and Square
As quoted by Josh Marshall, a study of 51 recent elections finds that:
In general elections, states with strict photo ID laws show a Latino turnout 10.3 points lower than in states without them. The law also affected turnout in primary elections, where Latino turnout decreased by 6.3 points and Black turnout by 1.6 points.
In short, these laws work as intended.
Certainty is a contact sport
The LIGO team includes a small group of people whose job is to create blind injections—bogus evidence of a gravitational wave—as a way of keeping the scientists on their toes. Although everyone knew who the four people in that group were, “we didn’t know what, when, or whether,” Gabriela González, the collaboration’s spokeswoman, said. During Initial LIGO’s final run, in 2010, the detectors picked up what appeared to be a strong signal. The scientists analyzed it intensively for six months, concluding that it was a gravitational wave from somewhere in the constellation of Canis Major. Just before they submitted their results for publication, however, they learned that the signal was a fake.
This time through, the blind-injection group swore that they had nothing to do with the signal. Marco Drago thought that their denials might also be part of the test, but Reitze, himself a member of the quartet, had a different concern. “My worry was—and you can file this under the fact that we are just paranoid cautious about making a false claim—could somebody have done this maliciously?” he said. “Could somebody have somehow faked a signal in our detector that we didn’t know about?” Reitze, Weiss, González, and a handful of others considered who, if anyone, was familiar enough with both the apparatus and the algorithms to have spoofed the system and covered his or her tracks. There were only four candidates, and none of them had a plausible motive. “We grilled those guys,” Weiss said. “And no, they didn’t do it.” Ultimately, he said, “We accepted that the most economical explanation was that it really is a black-hole pair.”
South Pasadena, USA
I drove through South Pasadena, California this afternoon. It’s a beautiful neighborhood with tree lined streets and large, stately houses. If you’re looking to buy one, the median price is about a million dollars – more than five times the national rate.
At a quiet intersection, I waited for the car in front of me to make a left turn when I noticed the black Mercedes Benz SUV that was waiting behind me suddently pull around to my side. Just then the car ahead of me completed its left and I started to roll forward. The black SUV that had been behind me was in a right turn only lane but it kept going, effectively cutting me off. Must have been in a hurry.
At the indoor parking lot for the Whole Foods in Pasadena, I was pulling out in reverse when I noticed a woman in a light-colored SUV drive up behind me. I stopped and looked back to make eye contact with her, to see if she was going to wait. She avoided my eye contact but threw her hands up in frustration. I put the car in drive and got out of her way. She kept looking straight ahead and drove off hastily. She was waiting at the next red light when I pulled up behind her. Must have been in a hurry.
An hour or so later, I was making a turn on an especially leafy and quiet street when I noticed an elderly woman walking with great difficulty on the side of the road. She was in her mid 70s, at least. There was grass or hay stuck to the back of her legs and she was carrying a brightly colored parka like the kind Patagonia makes, rolled up in one hand. She looked like she was in trouble so I pulled over to get a better look.
Lost highway
The sleepy beach town of Bolinas has something lively to talk about this week, as reports emerge that a coyote (or coyotes) has been attacking cars along Highway 1 in a manner so bizarre it has residents scratching their heads. The attacks are weird enough that one seemingly outlandish explanation, that the coyotes are eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and vision questing their way into interactions with drivers, is being considered.
A report in the Pacific Sun details the late-night encounters had by numerous motorists.
“A coyote has taken to staring down automobile drivers as they drive through this twisting, turning section of highway,” notes the paper, “before attacking the car and then skulking off back into the wilderness. The coyote runs up to the cars, usually at night, forcing drivers to stop as the beast stares and sniffs around the vehicle.”
robots and secrets
From an overview of consensus by John Cassidy:
Why, then, are the markets so disturbed? One possible explanation has to do with trading algorithms, which encourage trend-following and herding. Once stocks or bonds or oil prices make a sharp move, everyone piles on in the same direction, and the market’s over-all shifts are exaggerated. Even those hedge funds and other institutional investors that aren’t actively shorting tend to adopt a “risk off” strategy, which precludes them from buying very much in response to drops in the market.
Another possible explanation is that the markets, through the magic of aggregated private information, have discovered something that the economists have missed. Perhaps China’s economy is in much worse shape than the authorities are letting on, or big Western banks are much more exposed to the collapse in commodity prices than they are admitting.
Things that make the stock market both fascinating and frightening.
looking at the dark side
Recognizing a problem is an invitation to do something about it. That is the main lesson I learned from the formative experience of my life, in 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary. I might not have survived if my father hadn’t secured false identification papers for his family (and many others). He taught me that it’s much better to face harsh reality than to close your eyes to it. Once you are aware of the dangers, your chances of survival are much better if you take some risks than if you meekly follow the crowd. That is why I trained myself to look at the dark side. It has served me well in the financial markets and it is guiding me now in my political philanthropy. As long as I can find a winning strategy, however tenuous, I don’t give up. In danger lies opportunity. It’s always darkest before dawn.
A movie about the “war on drugs”
At the end of the excellent movie Sicario, Benicio del Toro puts a gun to Emily Blunt’s face and tells her that she should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists because the place where they are – the U.S.-Mexico border – has become a land of wolves and she, unlike he, is not a wolf.
del Toro, who previously played a man who became a wolf in the 2010 movie The Wolfman, thus implies that he has murdered and will continue to murder because he recognizes that the land where they live is no longer governed by human law but rather by a primordial order. In such a time and place, humans must either flee or heed the call of the wild: master or be mastered, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
It’s an interesting argument in and of itself but moreso because the movie has already presented other, very different arguments as to who the titular hero, the assassin, is and why he must exist. This abundance of arguments betrays a lack of confidence in an otherwise perfectly confident movie about confident men. Why?
The ebb and flow of public spaces
A slow yielding of public to private spaces led to a tremendous opportunity for Starbucks in the early 1990s: not to sell coffee but to rent public space.
To rent a Starbucks public space you purchase a disposable token (a white Starbucks coffee cup) and place it near your person. The cup contains a complimentary drink. The tokens are uniform in outward appearance but can be filled with various liquids which are sold at different prices to allow the consumer to signal who they are. The liquids may be consumed.
It’s understandable that Starbucks would attempt to program a discussion of race throughout its chain of “public squares.” The effort failed but I bet they’ll try again, perhaps by allowing regional or individual stores to set the agenda and partnering with established brands.
I was reminded of Starbucks’ trade in public spaces by this short history of anti-theft devices in medieval libraries.
By way of analogy, the author asks : “Do you leave your e-reader or iPad on the table in Starbucks when you are called to pick up your cup of Joe?”
postscript
Mick Stevens, The New Yorker – December 1, 2015:
