Are the Suburbs Making People Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck?

Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck aren't actually poor. They make a decent amount, and they have a decent amount of wealth.

And, believe it or not, this makes sense.

Now, you might expect that people without any liquid savings like cash or checking accounts wouldn't have any illiquid savings like housing or retirement accounts, either. Basically, that everyone follows Suze Orman's advice, and builds up an eight month emergency fund before putting any money into investments.

But a new Brookings paper shows that this isn't the world that we live in. The researchers found that about 33 percent of households have very few liquid savings, but, of those, about 66 percent have at least $50,000 in illiquid savings. In other words, someone living "hand-to-mouth," as the authors put it, is twice as likely to be middle class as poor. And, as you can see below, that's been true throughout the past 25 years.

So who are these wealthy cash-poor people? Well, they tend to be older, married, and better-paid. You can see some of this in the chart below. Most poor hand-to-mouth people (the red line) are younger, peaking around 22 years old and then falling rapidly from there. But most wealthy hand-to-mouth people (the blue line) are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It's a U-shaped distribution: there aren't many young people who are wealthy and cash-poor, it goes up as people hit middle age, and then it falls as people get to retirement.

This shouldn't be too much of a mystery. Imagine a couple that's getting ready to have kids, and wants to buy a house near good schools. Well, that's expensive. As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi pointed out in The Two Income Trap, buying a house in a school district you can't really afford is one of the biggest causes of bankruptcies. Couples can only afford the mortgage with both their salaries, so they'll get in trouble if either of them loses their job. 

But even if everything goes right, they'll still be cash-poor for a long time. They'll probably have to use most of their savings on the down payment, and use a big part of their income on the mortgage payments. In other words, the wealthy hand-to-mouth are parents overextending themselves to get their kids into the best schools possible in our de facto private system.

This has big policy implications. For one, school vouchers might be a good idea to cut the link between housing and education. That could keep so many people from becoming cash-poor and wealthy—a precarious thing—in the first place. For another, it tells us that we shouldn't phase out tax cuts quite so much when we're doing stimulus. Economists typically think that richer people are less likely to spend, say, a tax rebate, because they have fewer things they need to spend on. But that's not true for the wealthy hand-to-mouth. They're almost as likely to spend as poor households.

In any case, it's a frightening reminder that there's nothing riskier nowadays than trying to live a middle class lifestyle.

theatlantic

Our Numbered Days: The Evolution of the Area Code

In the mid-20th century, in response to the United States’ rapidly expanding telephone network, executives at the Bell System introduced a new way of dialing the phone. Until then, for the most part, it was human operators—mostly women—who had directed calls to their destinations.

Dialing systems had reflected this reliance on the vocal cord. Phone numbers weren’t numbers; they were alphanumeric addresses, named after phone exchanges that encompassed particular geographic areas. The Elizabeth Taylor movie Butterfield 8 gets its name from that system: The Butterfield exchange served the tony establishments of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, should you have attempted to call their apartment, were apparently reachable with a request for "Murray Hill 5-9975." 

That system evolved, slowly. In 1955, AT&T—after it researched ways to minimize misunderstandings when it came to spoken phone directions—distributed a list of recommended exchange names featuring standardized abbreviations. (Butterfield 8 would become, under that system, BU-8; Murray Hill 5-9975 would have been shortened to MU 5-9975.) But engineers at Bell had been conducting their own research into the scalability of the name-and-number system. They had ambitions to expand the national phone network; their own research had concluded, among other things, that the country could not supply enough working women to meet its growing demand for human operators.

Automation, Bell concluded, would be the future of telephony. And "All-Number Calling"—no names, anymore, just digits—would be the way to get there.

***

I want to tell you about the controversy the Bell System's embrace of numeracy provoked—how resentful some people became when their familiar method of making phone calls was taken from them. I want to tell you about why the change was necessary, and how it still informs our conception of phone calls and text messages. I want to tell you about the future of the phone number.

But first I want to tell you about the Central Coast of California.

You used to be able to access this sparkling little section of the country, over the phone, by dialing the 408 area code; in 1998, the area stretching south of San Jose, and on down the coast to King City, was split off. It all became, suddenly, 831.

I grew up in Carmel, smack in the middle of the new code region; my first cell phone number—the only cell phone number I have ever had—bears that 831 preface. I have held on to those three digits through happily-multiple changes of location (New Jersey, New York, Boston, Washington) and through unhappily-multiple losses of handset. The powers that be—hardware salespeople, cell service representatives—have, at one time or another, tried to force me into a 609 and a 917 and a 617; each time, I have resisted. Because I am not, fundamentally, a 609 or a 917 or a 617. I am not even, my current residence notwithstanding, a 202. I am an 831, wherever I may be in body, and will remain an 831 until they pry those three otherwise totally meaningless digits out of my cold, dead iPhone.

I am not alone in this. As MIT Technology Review’s Brian Bergstein told me:

Of course we didn’t know it at the time, but now it seems that the atomization of area codes was a prelude to the microtargeting that fuels political campaigns and advertising: it refined our perceptions of who people are. When I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, it and all the rest of L.A. was 213. You had to travel a long way to get out of 213, which might have subtly enforced the fallacy that L.A. was actually a coherent city rather than a mere patchwork. Sure, there were always ZIP codes to differentiate fancy neighborhoods from nondescript ones, but a phone number was and is part of an introduction—it’s a calling card in itself, not merely numbers on your actual calling card. You give people your phone number if you like them, not your ZIP code.

So when the Valley became 818 when I was a kid, suddenly the Valley’s separateness became more tangible to me. We weren’t all in it together any more. If you gave someone your phone number you instantly revealed yourself as an other to someone from 213, which covered the side of the city that was cooler than the Valley and its cheesy suburban sprawl. My grandparents lived in 213 and consequently they suddenly seemed more urban to me. Even that image is outdated, though, now that L.A. has even more area codes. My grandparents’ old place has shifted from 213 to 310. The associated vibe is more specific: it’s “West side” rather than “more urban, more interesting half of town.”

Area codes, of course, weren't always simply symbolic. When a "long-distance" call had a monetary value assigned to it, moving meant changing your phone number, almost by default: You couldn’t very well ask your new friends and acquaintances to pay long-distance fees each time they gave you a call. The rise of monthly cell service, with its flattening of the national phone grid, transformed the area code from an economic signal into a purely cultural one—and one that has the ever-more-rare virtue of connecting its owner to a physical place. You could liken an area code, now, to a sports team affiliation. Or to an alma mater. Or to an insistence that soda is properly known as "pop."

“It feels to me a little bit like a screen name,” says Philip Lapsley, the author of Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell. Long ago divested of its original role, the three-digit code now functions as a kind of shared social media handle, a collective identity. It’s no longer something to be remembered—we have our phones for that—but is instead something to be talked about. I meet someone at a party. We exchange numbers. “Oh, 510!” I might say. “I was in Oakland a few weeks ago!”

“And 831!” the new acquaintance might reply. “I love the Aquarium!”

More here VIA The Atlantic

The Town That's Building Life Around Sleep

Bad Kissingen is a spa town. According to the town’s website, Bavarian King Ludwig II bestowed the “Bad” part of its name on it in 1883, but not because he didn’t enjoy his stay—“bad” means “bath” or “spa” in German. Just south of the Rhön Mountains in Germany, it’s quaintly charming in the way of small European towns (it has a population of about 20,000), particularly those reliant on tourists.

Apparently there’s a bit of a competition among European spa towns—“medical tourism” brings people who want special, specific treatments, or the cheapest possible version of a treatment. So Dr. Thomas Kantermann, of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells me. A friend of his, Michael Wieden, is the official business developer of Bad Kissingen.

“He joined with me to think—if we want to pimp this town, if we want to make it more sexy and attractive, how can we do it?” Kantermann says.

Wieden sought Kantermann out for his particular expertise—Kantermann is a chronobiologist, meaning he studies the differences in people’s circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. A person’s preferred sleep pattern is his or her “chronotype.” This is what we’re talking about when we say someone is a morning person or a night owl. Research has shown that living outside your chronotype, which most of us do—waking ourselves up early with an alarm clock for school or work, or staying out too late at the bars—can lead to all kinds of problems other than just being tired: poor memory, depression, obesity, even a greater risk for some kinds of cancer.

Sleep is mysterious, and we don’t totally understand why we need it—just that we do, and bad things happen if we don’t get enough of it. On average, we spend around 30 percent of our lives asleep, but as a review of the literature on circadian rhythms from 2005 notes, “The introduction of artificial lighting and the restructuring of working hours has progressively detached our species from the 24-hour cycle of light and dark. … At best we tolerate the fact that we need to sleep, and at worst we think of sleep as an illness that needs a cure.”

Not so in Bad Kissingen.

Though the initiative’s sexiness is perhaps debatable, in an effort to stand out from the pack and improve the lives of its citizens and visitors, Bad Kissingen has committed itself to finding ways to implement chronobiology into the fabric of the town’s society.

“The history of Bad Kissingen has [always] been linked to curation and health,” Wieden says. “We have 17 hospitals, sanatoriums and rehabs. We have about 250,000 guests per year. Hence, tourism and health treatment are closely linked in Bad Kissingen. Therefore, to me, Bad Kissingen is the best place in the world to start a ‘whole city project’ like this.”

Russell Foster, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, studies chronobiology but is not involved in the Bad Kissingen project. “Changing behavior in any area is really difficult,” he says, and notes a classic study in which researchers observed a population of monkeys slowly learning to wash their food in the ocean to get the sand off. “The ones that were slowest to adopt [the washing behavior] were at the top of the social hierarchy.” Similarly, if those in charge of scheduling our lives—school boards, bosses, etc.—aren’t amenable to change, it’s next to impossible to truly sleep like yourself.

But there Bad Kissingen has the advantage of buy-in from the top. Kantermann is the project’s scientific manager, and in July 2013, he, Wieden, Bad Kissingen’s mayor and town council, and other researchers from the University of Groningen and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich signed a letter of intent. In that letter, they pledged to promote chronobiology research in the town, to “gather results that are directly applicable to living, education, work, well-being, health, mobility, rehabilitation, and sleep.” It goes on to claim that “the city of Bad Kissingen will be the first in the world realizing scientific field studies in a wider context.” Those involved often refer to Bad Kissingen as “ChronoCity.”

Though it was first conceived more than a year ago, the project is still in its infancy—it takes time and careful planning to do anything on this scale. Plus, Kantermann says, they need more money.

The goal is to get all of the town’s citizens’ chronotypes in an online database. Right now, individuals have to go to this website and input their own data; the hope is that one day schools and hospitals will take down this information as regularly as someone’s height or weight, making it much easier to determine and work with the town’s needs.

* * *

The roots of the field of chronobiology are actually leaves. The concept was born in France in 1729, when astronomer Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan noticed that the leaves of his heliotrope plant closed and opened at the same time every day. So he enclosed the plant in a dark space, and found that the leaves continued their punctual dance, sun or no sun.

In this way, humans are not unlike plants, as German biologist Jürgen Aschoff discovered in the 1950’s. He built an underground bunker, where human subjects would stay, cut off from light, sound, and the Earth’s vibrations, so they would have no way to tell what time of day it was. (He went in the bunker himself, first, before experimenting on others.) Most people still kept pretty close to a 24-hour day, though some went for 48 hours, and slept for 16. This confirmed Aschoff’s earlier research (which he also did on himself) that found that that humans lose body heat in regular, 24-hour patterns. Along with U.S. biologist Colin Pittendrigh, Aschoff is considered a co-founder of the field of chronobiology. Fitting, then, that a German town should be the first to try to take chronobiology mainstream.

“It’s a quite young field actually, especially the human part,” Kantermann says. “It’s only 50 to 60 years old. Now we have more sophisticated sleep labs where we do it, though, [instead of] a bunker.”

Kantermann explains that the way we measure someone’s chronotype now uses a metric called “mid-sleep.” This is the halfway point between when you fall asleep, and when you wake up. So if you go to bed at midnight, and get your recommended eight hours, waking up at 8 a.m., your mid-sleep would be 4 a.m.

Teenagers, it is widely known, have some of the latest chronotypes around. Their mid-sleep is often as late as 6 or 7 a.m., according to Kantermann. “We have school starting at that time in Germany, at half past seven, or 8 o’clock, which means these students are sitting [in class] in the middle of their biological night,” he says.

Considering teens’ reliably late chronotypes, the one concrete step that Bad Kissingen has taken so far was to do a couple of studies this past summer at the local high school, looking at how light exposure affects students’ chronotypes, and in turn, how their chronotypes affect their academic performance. The data is still being analyzed, so Kantermann can’t discuss the results yet, but he is hopeful that the experiments will yield a way to help shift students’ chronotype using light.

It would seem that the easiest solution would be to just start school later, and studies have shown this to have real results. For example, in 1997, the Minneapolis Public School District changed its start time from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m., and a four-year longitudinal study found that students were notably less tardy, less depressed, and less sleepy during class with the later start time. And they really were getting more sleep. The data showed the students still went to bed at around the same time as they had before—they weren’t using the later start time as an excuse to stay up late.

But changing the school schedule presents a whole host of logistical issues—after school activities may run later, or parents may have trouble dropping kids off, especially if you don’t also shift the start time for elementary and middle-schoolers, who have naturally earlier chronotypes. In Bad Kissingen specifically, Kantermann notes that many students bus in from neighboring villages, and sometimes have commutes that are an hour or two long. So they’d still have to wake up pretty early.

If changing school start time isn’t possible, Kantermann suggests moving things around within the existing school structure—pushing tests to the afternoon when students are more alert, or having outside physical activity in the morning to expose them to more natural light.

These logistical issues apply to work as well. “Your employer should ideally capture the time of day when you’re going to be most productive,” Foster says. Adult chronotypes, though, can’t be as easily lumped together as late-sleeping teens. In fact, a 2004 study (on which Till Roenneberg, of LMU Munich, who is also involved in the Bad Kissingen project, was lead author) suggested that in fact, the disappearance of this extra-late chronotype is a sign that adolescence is over.

“Children are early chronotypes and become progressively later (delaying) during development, reaching a maximum in their ‘lateness’ at around the age of 20,” the study reads. “After 20, they become earlier again (advancing) with increasing age.”

However, if you’re naturally a night owl, shedding the angsty, late-sleeping skin of your youth won’t make you into a morning person. According to this study, you’ll still be a night owl—just less extremely.

“An individual is likely to retain his/her chronotype—in relationship to others of the same age and sex—throughout life,” the researchers write. Other studies corroborate this assertion that one’s chronotype is at least partly genetic.

Another Roenneberg study, this one from 2003, asserts that despite our morning-oriented society, early risers are actually in the minority. This is largely to do with our dissociation from natural light. Light, the study explains, is the major zeitgeber for our internal clocks. Zeitgeber is a German word, coined by Aschoff, that means “time giver” or “synchronizer.” Chronobiologists use it to refer to cues in the environment that synchronize our internal clocks with the Earth’s 24-hour cycle.

“Later distribution of chronotypes is, at least partly, due to the absence of a strong zeitgeber in modern society,” the study reads. Our bodies don’t react as strongly to artificial light as to natural light (although, in the total absence of natural light, we’ll eventually respond to mankind’s bulbs), so a society built on electrical light results in more late chronotypes than one reliant on sunshine. And yet our fluorescent office culture is still geared toward early chronotypes.

On the other side of the coin are shift workers, who, depending on their schedule, may have a sleep pattern that’s completely opposite of the cycle of natural light. Though late chronotypes may have an easier time with this work schedule, night shift workers have been shown to be at greater risk for certain kinds of cancer, because disrupted sleep can impair the immune system. In Bad Kissingen, Kantermann says, shift workers are mostly health care professionals—doctors, nurses, etc.—people you generally want to be well-rested.

If this sounds like a lot of problems with not a lot of solutions, well, it is. Even with the abundance of research available, there are practical problems to consider.

“The project seems quite challenging, attempting to accommodate individuals yet maintain a societal framework,” Mary Carskadon, director of chronobiology and sleep research at Bradley Hospital, and psychiatry professor at Brown University, told me in an email. “I can think of a number of barriers that might arise, including occupational misfits, or challenges to family life, or unavailability of resources that might be required.”

Foster also expressed concern that enthusiasm for sleep-improving projects tends to peter out over time, that people just don’t take the importance of sleep seriously, and efforts aren’t sustainable. But he praised the questionnaire Kantermann et. al are using to measure chronotypes, saying they already have the data of “tens of thousands of people all across Europe,” enough data to be able to analyze it and make generalizations about populations.

The signers of the letter of intent pledged to meet five times a year to talk about how things are progressing—Kantermann says their next meeting will probably be in March, and he’s just glad people keep coming back; that, so far, interest hasn’t petered out on a project that, by its nature, is a bit of a long game.

The next step, Kantermann says, is to experiment with the lighting in local clinics, hotels, and possibly even the town hall. The ChronoCity project is partnering with lighting companies to help make that possible. “We have to just manipulate a bit here and there,” he says. “If we change too much, you will see an effect, but then it’s hard to determine what happened, so we have to be careful that we don’t change too much.”

Though they’re currently taking small bites out of this whale of a project, Kantermann is dreaming big.

“My great aim for this town is to make Bad Kissingen the first town in Germany that abolishes Daylight Savings Time,” he says. “So the people can decide for themselves to change their clocks or not… To make this really a place where your internal time is acknowledged.”

In a hypothetical future world where Bad Kissingen succeeds in letting all of its citizens and visitors live out their chronotypes, the societal benefits would be huge. The town as a whole would be more creative, happier, and more alert. Social interaction would improve, as would the population’s ability to problem-solve. Chronically tired people often struggle with obesity, immune suppression, and mental illness, so the town’s overall health—both mental and physical—would improve.

“Maybe this village will ultimately change its behavior,” Foster says. “This hasn’t been tried before, so they’ll learn the best way of keeping the town on board. Thomas [Kantermann] is very good at interacting with people, so if anybody can do this, I suspect he will be able to.”

Perhaps Bad Kissingen will be the sleep equivalent of the first monkey to wash its food—a harbinger of societal change to come.

Via The Atlantic

That's What She Said: The Rise and Fall of the 2000s' Best Bad Joke

Groan-worthy innuendos in the style of Michael Scott came and went—that's what she said—but they taught important lessons about puns and parodies along the way.

It came out of nowhere, slipping into the conversation between dinner and dessert. “That's what she said!” your friend blurted out, before sitting back, satisfied.

At first you didn't get the joke, which he'd recently poached from NBC's sitcom The Office. (This was around 2006, or, if your friend was slow on the uptake, around 2010.) So he explained by example for the rest of the meal. When the waitress asked if you wanted sauce on that, he whispered seductively: “That's what she said,” as if her question was scandalous. Then he giggled like a 12-year-old.

That's what she said, hereafter referred to as TWSS, was the best bad joke of the late 2000s. It forced almost any sentence into unintentional sexual meanings, even when you were just “trying to get in” to the highway's fast lane, or “didn't think it would take so long” in the supermarket line. TWSS was like a bully who stole your lunch money to buy cigarettes. It seized your innocent words and contorted them into indecency.

TWSS actually deserves our thanks. It was a formulaic gag, but it showed us that the most mundane moments still have the potential to shock and surprise. And this is pretty much what sitcoms are for.

TWSS wasn't original, but rather intelligently unoriginal. When NBC adapted The Office from the BBC, it also took up the scepter of sexual wordplay, which happens to date back thousands of years. You can find sexual puns in the poetry of imperial Rome. They're sprinkled liberally in such canonical English texts as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Joyce. They could literally be called the oldest trick in the book, according to a British researcher of humor named Paul McDonald, who claims the first Anglo-Saxon joke comes from the 11th century Codex Exoniensis:

What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke a hole that it has often poked before?

Answer: A key.

This sort of wordplay is classic double entendre, which might not actually make you laugh, but nonetheless prompts a momentary double-take. The first line leads a reader toward an overtly sexual conclusion, but the innocuous answer subverts these expectations. Suddenly the words “poke,” “hole,” and “hangs at a man's thigh” seem to refer to two things at once, one sexual and one innocent.

More HERE Via The Atlantic

What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

On a future road trip, your robot car decides to take a new route, driving you past a Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop. A pop-up window opens on your car’s display and asks if you’d like to stop at the store. “Don’t mind if I do,” you think to yourself. You press “yes” on the touchscreen, and the autonomous car pulls up to the shop.

Wait, how did the car know that you might want an original glazed doughnut? Because it has data on your driving habits, and you’re a serial offender when it comes to impulsive snacking. Your car is also linked to your online accounts at home, and you had recently “liked” Krispy Kreme’s Facebook page and visited its website. 

Is this future scenario convenient—or creepy? It’s one thing if a car’s driver-drowsiness detection system (which exists today) sees that you’re nodding off and suggests coffee. But to make your automated car divert from its usual course because some advertiser paid it to do so, well, that sounds like a mini-carjacking.

Whatever you think of it, this future may be coming up on the road ahead. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month in Las Vegas, automakers announced deals to deliver online services or in-car apps to web-enabled cars of tomorrow. And where there are free or cheap online services, there’s online advertising—that train is never late. 

We don’t know what that advertising might look like: It could literally steer your future car, or it could be more familiar, such as streaming ads across your windshield in auto-driving mode (maybe too distracting in manual-driving mode). But because ad revenue is still the dominant e-business model, it’s a safe bet that advertising will be coming to a future car near you. After all, Google’s acquisition of Nest—maker of “smart” thermostats and other appliances—last week appears to be its first step toward owning the Internet of Things. If the technology giant is leaping the firewall of your personal computer to the rest of your home, why not also your car? Apple co-founder Steve Jobs reportedly had hoped to bring an “iCar” to market, essentially a huge iPhone with wheels. 

Could advertisers really influence the route taken by a self-driving car? It seems plausible, and legal, in at least some circumstances. Say there are multiple routes to your destination. Some may be shorter in terms of distance but longer in terms of travel time, or some routes are equidistant. In those cases, there’s no obviously “right” route to take, but advertiser money could be a “plus factor” that’s just enough to tip driving algorithms in their direction. 

This practice doesn’t seem to be a big inconvenience for the car’s passengers, as long as the detour doesn’t add much extra time or distance to their trip. Some taxi drivers and hotel concierges are known to accept kickbacks from restaurants, casinos, strip clubs, and other establishments to steer business toward them. So this already happens today. But even if not illegal, it raises ethical questions and the need for transparency in a world run by algorithms most of us don’t understand.

More HERE Via The Atlantic

It's Not Too Late to Make San Francisco Affordable Again. Here's How

San Francisco, is in the midst of an affordability crisis. People here are angry and afraid. The skyrocketing cost of housing comes up in seemingly every conversation and dominates local news and local politics.

The recent piece on San Francisco's housing crisis I wrote for The Atlantic Cities seemed to hit a nerve. But it was mostly devoted to describing how the city got to be a place with the highest housing costs in the country. Now, I want to turn to what we can actually do about it.

We face a complex problem. It has roots in income inequality, a national issue, as well as regional anti-growth attitudes that extend well beyond the city boundaries. But at the city level, there are a surprising number of things we can definitely do.

Protect existing rent-controlled housing units

San Francisco has roughly 172,000 units of rent-controlled housing. Rent control is the city's core tenant protection, allowing many people to stay here. The first thing the city needs to do is to make sure we don't lose those units.

As housing prices go up, there is ever more incentive for owners of rental units to find a way to get out of the landlord business and sell. One of the most often abused mechanisms is California’s Ellis Act, a state law that says that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to "go out of business."

Tenant groups in San Francisco have developed a set of proposals to make it more difficult for landlords to use the Ellis Act as a tool to evict people. One of the proposed reforms that seems to make sense is to discourage the practice of buying rent-controlled units for the purpose of converting to Tenancy-in-common units (TICs) or condos by requiring landlords to have been in the landlord business for some set period of time before using the Ellis Act to “leave the business.”

There is a social compact in San Francisco that needs to be upheld: rent-controlled units should stay under rent control, while ownership opportunities should come from new construction.

Reinvest in San Francisco’s public housing stock

The San Francisco Housing Authority has 6,300 units of public housing and roughly 9,000 Section 8 vouchers (which help subsidize rents for low-income tenants). The city is in the process of compiling a broad public housing reform plan to better manage this housing stock and provide resources to upgrade many of its public housing buildings.

At the same time, the city is also working on an ambitious program to rehabilitate its most troubled public housing units as part of a program called HOPE SF. Through Hope SF, the city government is seeking to build in a comprehensive set of social services to give residents the resources to get out of poverty. San Francisco has started this process by identifying the highest-need public housing developments (such as those at Sunnydale and Potrero Terrace), pairing them with project sponsor teams, but much of the funding for both the redevelopment and the resident services still needs to be identified.

HOPE SF and the broader set of public housing renovations offer an opportunity to physically knit public housing back into the fabric of the city. But most importantly, it means we can keep all those affordable units habitable.

More here Via The Atlantic

The Decline of the American Book Lover

And why the downturn might be over.

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn't cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrubland full of cat GIFs and reality TV spinoffs, then this news will probably reinforce your worst suspicions. But buried beneath it, I think there's an optimistic story to tell about American book culture. It's about the kids. 
Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn't enjoy today's abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they'd read more than 50!).  Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark. 
But here's why I wouldn't proclaim the death of the book quite yet (aside from the fact that the vast majority of the country does still read them).First, as shown on the Pew chart below, the number of books an American reads tends to be closely associated with his or her level of education. Even those with just a little bit of college read far more, on average, than men and women who only finished high school. That may be because people who grow up reading are far more likely to enroll in higher education. But it seems at least somewhat likely that reading books in class conditions people to read books later in life. And the good news (for publishers, at least) is that today's twenty-somethings, as a rule, go to college. A recent Department of Education study found that 85 percent of the high-school class of 2004 had at least some postsecondary education. 

It's true that those highly educated young adults aren't reading that many books today. The average 18-to-29 year old finishes nine per year, compared to 13 among older American. But according to the National Endowment for the Arts, teens and twenty-somethings have almost always read less than older adults.

Most importantly, the percentage of young folks reading for pleasure stopped declining. Last year, the NEA found that 52 percent of 18-24 year-olds had read a book outside of work or school, the same as in the pre-Facebook days of 2002. If book culture were in terminal decline, this is the demographic where you'd expect it to be fading fastest. Perhaps the worst of the fall is over. 

Via The Atlantic

Can Physicists Find Time Travelers on Facebook?

Twitter and Facebook have been asked to save journalism and overthrow autocrats. Now, two physicists have proposed an application even more ambitious: Can social media find time travelers?

Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, two researchers at Michigan Technological University, thought they might. In a study released online last week, the two scoured Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a few other websites to find “prescient information”—that is, tweets and statuses about current events posted before the events became current. The only way someone could write such a post, they reasoned, is if they were visiting… from the future.

They specifically looked for posts about two topics, both chosen for their universality and future notability. The first was Comet ISON, an unusually bright comet discovered in September 2012. (Histories of bright comets have been “generally well kept by societies and journals around the world,” they write.) The second was Pope Francis, made leader of the largest sect of the world’s most popular religion in March 2013.

So, in the fall of this year, Nemiroff and Wilson searched Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for references to Comet ISON and Pope Francis. They searched both the keywords—“Pope Francis”—and, on Twitter, the hashtagged version—“#popefrancis.”

Immediately, the two would-be time hunters ran into issues.

The first: Google+ doesn’t always order search results by time, confusing the research, they found. “It was therefore too difficult, in practice, to find older and potentially prescient informational mentions,” they lament. They abandoned the network.

Facebook search proved perhaps more frustrating. The service allows statuses to be backdated: A user could have made a post in the summer of 2013 about Pope Francis, then dated it to April 2008. As such, a user would look exactly like a time traveler. Furthermore—and perhaps even worse—Facebook frequently failed to return results for statuses posted too far in the past.

Attention, Facebook and Google+: Your social network’s crappy search is preventing humanity from finding time travelers from the future.

Even working through these issues, Nemiroff and Wilson failed to find a single particularly prescient post on Facebook or Google+. 

On Twitter, though, they did find one tweet, posted before March 2013, referencing “Pope Francis.” Once they consulted the blog post it advertised, though, they the tweet “deemed overtly speculative and not prescient.” 

Apparently, if time travelers are on a social network, they aren’t using it to spoil the news.

More here VIA The Atlantic

Frozen's Prince is anything but Charming

The Disney hit is a good, subversive kids' film—until a needlessly jarring surprise at the end.

After I saw Frozen last week, I texted my best friend. Per her request, I sent her a list of the elements that her kids (ages seven, five, and three) might find scary: Rampaging snow monster, heroine freezing into solid ice, seemingly noble prince who turns out to be evil.

My friend quickly texted back to say that the prince sounded scariest of all. And she was right.

In Frozen, our heroine Princess Anna embarks on a quest to bring back her sister, Elsa, who has run away after inadvertently revealing her magical, winter-creating powers. Elsa accidentally strikes Anna with a shard of ice that pierces her heart; Anna believes that a kiss from the charming Prince Hans, whom she thinks is her true love, will save her from death. But just when he should be saving the princess, the male lead reveals himself to be a greedy, throne-usurping would-be killer: Hans leans in, supposedly about to give her that kiss ... then sneers, “Oh, Anna, if only there were someone who loved you.”

Ouch. That moment would have wrecked me if I’d seen it as a child, and the makers of Frozen couldn’t have picked a more surefire way to unsettle its young audience members.

It’s not like Disney has never given us heartbreaking moments before. (Bambi’s mother, anyone?) And it’s not that there’s no purpose behind the film’s cruel twist, either: The naïve and lonely Anna has fallen in love with and become engaged to Hans in the course of just one day. As her other love interest, Kristoff, tells her, this is not exactly indicative of good judgment.

However, there is something uniquely horrifying about finding out that a person—even a fictional person—who’s won you over is, in fact, rotten to the core. And it’s that much more traumatizing when you’re six or seven years old. Children will, in their lifetimes, necessarily learn that not everyone who looks or seems trustworthy is trustworthy—but Frozen’s big twist is a needlessly upsetting way to teach that lesson.

Before the shattering reveal takes place, the audience has already enjoyed more than an hour of Hans’s niceness. He’s kind to people and animals; he saves Anna’s sister, Elsa, from being killed; he even offers free winter cloaks and soup to the poor.

More here VIA The Atlantic

The Art of the Christmas Truce

Ninety-nine years ago today, something strange happened on the Western Front: It fell silent. World War I had only just erupted that summer, but the fighting had already proven fierce, claiming nearly a million lives. On December 24, 1914, however, an estimated 100,000 soldiers, mainly British and German troops, laid down their guns, left the trenches, and mingled in the frigid cold of No Man's Land to mark Christmas—an uplifting if surreal moment in an otherwise soul-crushing war.

"All I'd heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices," Alfred Anderson, a British veteran and the last survivor of the Christmas Truce, recalled in 2004. "But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted 'Merry Christmas', even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

Elsewhere on the Western Front, the celebrations were more exuberant and long-lasting, involving everything from impromptu soccer games to spirited renditions of "Silent Night" to free haircuts by a British machine gunner. On December 30, The New York Times republished a bubbly letter from a British soldier that captured the mood well:

We exchanged souvenirs: I got a German ribbon and photo of the Crown Prince of Bavaria. The Germans opposite us were awfully decent fellows—Saxons, intelligent, respectable-looking men. I had quite a decent talk with three or four and have two names and addresses in my notebook.

It was the strangest scene you could imagine—going out unarmed to meet our enemies, also unarmed. After our talk I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated. Of course, these men were Saxons—not Prussians.

Full Story HERE VIA The Atlantic

NORAD Tracks Santa's Path on Christmas Eve Because of a Typo

It was 1955, and Christmas was approaching, and Sears had a new idea for a yuletide gimmick. In local newspapers, the department store placed ads ... on behalf of Santa himself.

"HEY, KIDDIES!" the ad read, in a greeting that would seem creepy only in retrospect. "Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night."

The ads then listed local numbers for area children to call to get some one-on-one Kringle time. Which must have seemed, if you were a kid back then, pretty amazing. A direct line to St. Nick! Kids could, finally, bypass the middlemen that stood between them and their gifts—the Post Office, their parents—and go directly to the source. And, even more directly, to that source's enormous bag of loot. You can almost hear the Ralphie Parker voice-over.

Suddenly, phone calls intended for Santa were being received on a top-secret NORAD line.
More here via The hho

If that Duck guy wasn't bad enough, here is another reason

Phil Robertson, the star of Duck Dynasty and a self-described “Bible thumper,” has been forced to fly the coop after making disparaging remarks about gays.

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” Robertson said in an interview with GQ. He went on to add that he thinks being gay is illogical because, well, “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus.”

Cue the outrage by gay advocacy groups. Cue the announcement of an indefinite suspension by A&E, the network that produces Duck Dynasty. Cue conservative charges of anti-Christian intolerance. So predictable.

But Robertson’s comments aren’t all that shocking. A broad swath of Americans—about 45 percent, according to Pew Research—agree with Robertson that homosexual behavior is “sin,” though they might not have expressed their beliefs in such a brash way. This is especially true of religious Americans, including a large number of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims.

The presumably informed readers of GQ must be aware that such beliefs exist, and it’s hard to believe they are “shocked” when an outspoken conservative Christian like Phil Robertson espouses them. His comments may be ignorant, offensive, or ineloquent. But they are not all that shocking.

What is shocking are Robertson’s comments about race in the same interview. Buried under the firestorm of media and public outrage over Robertson’s comments on sexuality is his stunning insinuation that blacks were quite happy in the Jim Crow South:

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field .... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word! ... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

Now here is something that’s truly surprising. His recollection is oddly reminiscent of the Song of the South vision of the past, long since abandoned by even fringe historians. I’m reminded of a talk titled “The danger of a single story” that Chimamanda Adichie gave at TEDx in Oxford, England. There is never only a single story about a place or a people that tells the whole truth, she argues. The truth emerges upon hearing many stories, and one story taken alone is at least a partial falsehood.

Read Complete Article HERE Via The Atlantic

Psychology of Lululemon: How Fashion Affects Fitness

Does expensive athletic wear actually incline us to work out? "Enclothed cognition" proposes that the clothes you wear directly affect how we think and what we do.

The Simpsons might seem an odd place to find scientific inspiration. Considering Homer’s affinity for couches and anything donut-related, finding insight into Americans’ psychological relationship with exercise and fitness also seems unlikely. But Northwestern researchers Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky did just that.

In “Team Homer,” an episode from the series’s seventh season, Springfield Elementary’s newly-instituted drab grey uniform (instituted after Bart’s “Down With Homework” tee causes an uproar) pushes the students into a zombie-like funk until a freak rainstorm washes off the dye, revealing the true color of the t-shirts: tie-dye. The students riot, and fun returns—all because of their clothes.

Read more here

Via Theatlantic

One Theory of Marriage and Kids: 'Very Cute in the Abstract'

Whenever I'm walking around D.C. with friends on sunny Saturday afternoons, we inevitably see lots of babies: adorable, fat, charmingly bald babies. It's not uncommon to hear sighs of "oh my gosh, he's so precious!" and "I want one!" from my companions; I, too, have been accused of being a baby stalker from time to time. 

But at The Atlantic's One Day University event on Saturday, Amherst psychology professor Catherine A. Sanderson made a convincing case that cute kids (and cute husbands and wives) might seem different when they're yours to keep. She gave a witty lecture on what social science can tell us about happiness, and these were my three biggest take-aways:

First, I will no longer have to worry about being awesome if I get married, because my husband will probably be happier for having taken vows regardless of how great I am. In studies of marital satisfaction over time, Sanderson said, "there is in fact a positive correlation for some people. Guess who those people are? Men. For men, yeah, being married makes you happier, and the good news is, it doesn't matter at all who you're married to. It could be like a mail-order bride from Russia—does not matter at all."

Overall, marriage is a big win for men: "Men who are married are happier than men who are not. They also make more money, they also live longer, they have fewer psychological problems, etc. etc.," Sanderson said. 

But unfortunately for me, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be happier than my single friends: For women, happiness fluctuates significantly based on the quality of their marriages. 

"Marriage for women increases happiness—if the marriage is good," Sanderson said. "A high-quality marriage for women boosts their happiness above women who are single. But a marriage that is unhappy for women decreases satisfaction below women who are single. For women, the quality of the marriage has a major impact."

And sadly, even adorable children can't rescue me from my potential future unhappiness.

"What else do we think makes us happy but really doesn’t? Children," said Sanderson, the mother of three kids who must have been raised with excellent dinner-table banter.

"Children are very cute in the abstract," she said. "In the abstract, they’re much easier—like, they’re much quieter. The idea of children is very appealing. But the reality is, if you ask people who have children, especially young children, life consists of chores they don’t really like doing."

And they're damned expensive. "Has anyone here looked at their children and said, 'If I didn’t have you, I’d have a vacation home?'" she asked the room.

Sanderson's solution to finding satisfaction as a wife and mother?

"My husband and I have been married 20 years, and the secret to our marriage is as followed: We have three kids, and we have a dog. We decided several years ago that if one person left the other one, the person who left would have to take all three kids, and the person who didn’t leave would get the dog," she said.

"And that has kept our marriage so strong."

Via The Atlantic

Can Print Magazines Save Themselves?

Appearing on Charlie Rose in October to promote a celebratory coffee table book, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age, Graydon Carter, who has been the magazine’s editor for a successful run of 21 years, paid eloquent tribute to print magazines: “There are so many great magazines out there,” he said. “They’re inexpensive, you can buy them anywhere, you can give them to a friend . . . you can recycle them, they don’t need batteries, they don’t need instructions and they’re just wonderful. I love them more than newspapers, and I love them more than books, in a way.”

For those of us—and I am one—who still read multiple magazines that arrive weekly and monthly via the U.S. Postal Service, Carter’s description of the traditional virtues of the print version was a welcome plaudit. But, alas, as everyone with the remotest interest in media developments can attest, the great era of magazines notable for their largesse to staffs, and replete with copious, handsome advertising and strong single-copy newsstand sales, is almost certainly in the past. My personal list of favorites—including (but not limited to) The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and New York—provides an extraordinary array of articles that still reflect the narrative, tenacious, critical writing and editing skills of journalists as gifted as any in the glory days, when magazines were consistent providers of profits to proprietors and (in a few cases of public companies) shareholders.

But Carter, who has a particular flair for maintaining Vanity Fair’s glamorous aura, really did make a point to Rose that is more than just an editor’s accolade to a format and reading experience that may be destined to disappear. The economics are certainly in upheaval, which has happened to magazines before—Look, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and many other publishing stalwarts all succumbed to the challenges of changing habits and technology. But books in print—a format also in the midst of digital transformation, along with an unsettled pricing and marketing model—look likely to endure. Even Nick Bilton, in his New York Times Bits column earlier this month, wrote that, “when I touched that physical book again for the first time in years, it was like the moment you hear a nostalgic song and are instantly lost in it. The feeling of a print book, with its rough paper and thick spine, is an absorbing and pleasurable experience—sometimes more so than reading on a device.” And, radio, which is almost a century old now, is still a mainstay of information, sports, and music. So maybe the print magazine is not altogether doomed.

More here via The Atlantic

How to Design a Happier City

Charles Montgomery begins his new book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, on a bicycle ride in Bogota, Colombia, with former mayor Enrique Peñalosa. While in office, Peñalosa implemented a number of policies quite progressive for that time and place. He scrapped plans for highways through the city. He built hundreds of miles of bike lanes. He made room for parks and pedestrian plazas.

More here via The Atlantic

Google, Apple, and Microsoft Agree: NSA Spying Undermines Freedom

A total of eight prominent tech companies are urging President Obama and Congress to rein in the surveillance state.

In an open letter to President Obama and Congress, eight of the most prominent U.S. tech companies have demanded that strict new limits be put on government surveillance, citing revelations made earlier this summer, when stories based Edward Snowden's leaked documents began running in The Guardian. "The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual," they argue, "rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change."

They've staked out an extraordinary position. 

Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL all have an interest in restoring public trust in their products and averting new regulatory challenges in countries disinclined to let a spying hegemon control the Internet. My colleague James Fallows has written eloquently about the damage the NSA's behavior could do to U.S. economic might as other countries react to it. The companies could've made a compelling case for reform on those grounds alone. 

More here via The Atlantic

How Will Historians Study Video Games?

Universities and museums recognize the cultural value of video games, but the question of whether to preserve the actual devices—and how—is more divisive.

Since their birth as a science-fair curiosity at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the late 1950s, video games have moved inexorably towards higher and more central cultural ground, much like film did in the first half of the 20th century.

Games were confined at first to the lowbrow carnival of the arcade, but they soon spread to the middlebrow sphere of the living room, overran this private space, and burst out and upwards into the public spheres of art and academia. With prestigious universities like NYU and USC now offering graduate-level programs in game design, and major museums like MoMA, MAD, and SF MoMA beginning to acquire games and curate game exhibitions, preserving the early history of the medium appears more important than ever. But what exactly does it mean to preserve a digital game?

The answer is surprisingly simple: It means, first and foremost, preserving a record of how it was played and what it meant to its player community. Ensuring continued access to a playable version of the game through maintenance of the original hardware or emulation is less important—if it matters at all.

More here Via The Atlantic

When Design Is Used for Violence

A new MoMA digital exhibit explores the darker consequences of creativity.

Design is never neutral. It alters behavior and has life-and-death implications. For Paola Antonelli, senior curator at the MoMA’s department of architecture and design, this fact has been a fixation. She has initiated an impressive share of breakthrough exhibits and events focusing on the way visuals affect the world. Her latest is Design and Violence, an online forum devoted to exploring the darker side of the creative mind, using essays and discussion boards. Given MoMA’s mandate to acquire and exhibit objects of beauty with cultural significance, it’s a somewhat radical move.

Read more here via The Atlantic

Now that a Wonder Woman has been Cast, Why WW Shouldn't Be a Sidekick

Originally conceived as Superman's superior, feminist replacement, the character has become a second-stringer over the years—including, unfortunately, in her forthcoming big-screen debut.

Various Wonder Woman movie projects have been stuck in development hell for more or less forever, but it looks like we'll finally be getting to see an on-screen Amazon princess in the near future. Zack Snyder is including the character in his Batman vs. Superman film; Gal Gadot has been cast. Wonder Woman fans rejoice!

Then again, maybe not so much. Wonder Woman as add-on bit player to the manly conflict on the marquee is a sadly familiar scenario to anyone who has subjected themselves to DC comics superhero product over the years. Batman and Superman are both very popular properties. Wonder Woman is the highest-profile female counterpart, but one who has had much less success in the last few decades (at least since the 1970s Lynda Carter television show).

More here Via The Atlantic