Month: January 2013

  • The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

     

    The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

    Denis Rouvre for The New York Times

    Gérard de Villiers, the author of the best-selling S.A.S. espionage series.


    By 
    Published: January 30, 2013
     

    Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.”

    Photograph from Gérard de Villiers

    De Villiers with Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the rebel group Unita, in Angola in 1982.

     

    The book was the latest by Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who has been turning out the S.A.S. espionage series at the rate of four or five books a year for nearly 50 years. The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

    Though he is almost unknown in the United States, de Villiers’s publishers estimate that the S.A.S. series has sold about 100 million copies worldwide, which would make it one of the top-selling series in history, on a par with Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. S.A.S. may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author. The first book, “S.A.S. in Istanbul,” appeared in March 1965; de Villiers is now working on No. 197.

    For all their geopolitical acumen, de Villiers’s books tend to provoke smirks from the French literati. (“Sorry, monsieur, we do not carry that sort of thing here,” I was told by the manager at one upscale Paris bookstore.) It’s not hard to see why. Randomly flip open any S.A.S. and there’s a good chance you’ll find Malko (he is Son Altesse Sérénissime, or His Serene Highness), the aristocratic spy-hero with a penchant for sodomy, in very explicit flagrante. In one recent novel, he meets a Saudi princess (based on a real person who made Beirut her sexual playground) who is both a dominatrix and a nymphomaniac; their first sexual encounter begins with her watching gay porn until Malko distracts her with a medley of acrobatic sex positions. The sex lives of the villains receive almost equal time. Brutal rapes are described in excruciating physiological detail. In another recent novel, the girlfriend of a notorious Syrian general is submitting to his Viagra-fueled brutality when she recalls that this is the man who has terrorized the people of Lebanon for years. “And it was that idea that set off her orgasm,” de Villiers writes.

    “The French elite pretend not to read him, but they all do,” I was told by Hubert Védrine, the former foreign minister of France. Védrine is one of the unapologetic few who admit to having read nearly every one of Malko’s adventures. He said he consulted them before visiting a foreign country, as they let him in on whatever French intelligence believed was happening there.

    About 10 years ago, when Védrine was foreign minister, de Villiers got a call from the Quai d’Orsay, where the ministry is based, inviting him to lunch. “I thought someone was playing a joke on me,” de Villiers said. “Especially because Védrine is a leftist, and I am not at all.” When he went to the ministry at the scheduled time, Védrine was waiting for him in his private dining room overlooking the Seine.

    “I am very happy to join you,” de Villiers recalled telling the minister. “But tell me, why did you want to see me?”

    Védrine smiled and gestured for de Villiers to sit down. “I wanted to talk,” he said, “because I’ve found out you and I have the same sources.”

    De Villiers’s books have made him very rich, and he lives in an impressively grand house on the Avenue Foch, a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe. I went there one day this winter, and after a short wait on the fourth-floor landing, a massive wooden door swung open, and I found myself facing a distinguished-looking man in brown tweeds with a long, bony face and pale brown eyes. De Villiers uses a walker — a result of a torn aorta two years ago — but still moves with surprising speed. He led me down a high-ceilinged hallway to his study, which also serves as a kind of shrine to old-school masculinity and kinky sex. I stood next to a squatting woman made of steel with a real MP-44 automatic rifle coming out of her crotch. “That one is called ‘War,’ ” de Villiers said. In the middle of the floor was a naked female figure bending over to peek at the viewer from between her legs; other naked women, some of them in garters or chains, gazed out from paintings or book covers. On the shelves were smaller figurines in ivory, glass and wood, depicting various couplings and orgies. Classic firearms hung on the wall — a Kalashnikov, a Tommy gun, a Winchester — and books on intelligence and military affairs were stacked high on tables. Among the photos of him with various warlords and soldiers in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, I noticed a framed 2006 letter from Nicolas Sarkozy, praising the latest S.A.S. novel and saying it had taught him a great deal about Venezuela. “He pretends to read me,” de Villiers said, with a dismissive scowl. “He didn’t. Chirac used to read me. Giscard read me, too.”

    After an hour or so, de Villiers led me downstairs to his black Jaguar, and we drove across town to Brasserie Lipp, a gathering spot for aging lions of the French elite. As we pushed through a thick crowd to our table, a handsome old man with a deeply tanned face called out to de Villiers from across the room. It was the great French nouvelle vague actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. He grinned and waved de Villiers over for a conspiratorial chat.

    “That’s Table No. 1,” de Villiers said as we sat down. “Mitterrand always used to sit there.” After a waiter rushed up to help him into his seat, de Villiers ordered a suitably virile lunch of a dozen Breton oysters and a glass of Muscadet. He caught me looking at his walker and immediately began telling me about his torn aorta. He nearly died and had to spend three months in a hospital bed. “If you fall off your horse, you have to get back on or you are dead,” he said. He was able to maintain his usual publishing pace even while in the hospital. There was only one real consequence: he had used the real name of the C.I.A. station chief in Mauritania in his manuscript, and in the confusion after the accident, he forgot to change the final text. “The C.I.A. was angry,” he said. “I had to explain. My friends at the D.G.S.E. [the French foreign-intelligence agency, General Directorate for External Security] apologized on my behalf, too.”

    One of the many myths surrounding de Villiers is that he employs a team of assistants to help with his prodigious turnout. In fact, he does it all himself, sticking to a work routine that hasn’t changed in half a century. For each book, he spends about two weeks traveling in the country in question, then another six weeks or so writing. The books are published on the same schedule every year: January, April, June, October. Six years ago, at age 77, de Villiers increased his turnout from four books a year to five, producing two linked novels every June. “I’m not a sex machine, I’m a writing machine,” he said.

    De Villiers was born in Paris in 1929, the son of a wildly prolific and spendthrift playwright who went by the stage name Jacques Deval. He began writing in the 1950s for the French daily France Soir and other newspapers. Early on, during a reporting assignment in Tunisia, he agreed to do a favor for a French intelligence officer, delivering a message to some members of the right-wing pro-colonial group known as la main rouge. It turned out de Villiers was being used as a pawn in an assassination scheme, and he was lucky to escape with his life. He returned to Paris and confronted the officer, who was completely unrepentant. The incident taught him, he said, that “intelligence people don’t give a damn about civilian lives. They are cold fish.” But rather than being turned off, de Villiers found that blend of risk and cold calculation seductive.

    In 1964, he was working on a detective novel in his spare time when an editor told him that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, had just died. “You should take over,” the editor said. That was all it took. The first S.A.S. came out a few months later. Although sales are down a bit since his peak in the 1980s, he still earns between 800,000 and a million euros a year (roughly $1 million to $1.3 million) and spends summers at his villa in St. Tropez, where he gads about on his boat by day and drives to parties in the evenings in his 1980s Austin Mini.

    He has long been despised by many on the French left for his right-wing political views. “We are all strangled by political correctness,” he told me, and he used the word “fags” several times in our conversations. But his reputation as a racist and anti-Semite is largely myth; one of his closest friends is Claude Lanzmann, the Jewish leftist and director of “Shoah,” the landmark Holocaust documentary. And in recent years, de Villiers has gained a broader following among French intellectuals and journalists, even as his sales have slowed down. “He has become a kind of institution,” said Renaud Girard, the chief foreign correspondent of Le Figaro. “You can even see articles praising him in Libération,” the left-leaning daily.

    De Villiers created Malko, his hero, in 1964 by merging three real-life acquaintances: a high-ranking French intelligence official named Yvan de Lignières; an Austrian arms dealer; and a German baron named Dieter von Malsen-Ponickau. As is so often the case, though, his fiction proved prophetic. Five years after he began writing the series, de Villiers met Alexandre de Marenches, a man of immense charisma who led the French foreign-intelligence service for more than a decade and was a legend of cold-war spy craft. De Marenches was very rich and came from one of France’s oldest families; he fought heroically in World War II, and he later built his own castle on the Riviera. He also helped create a shadowy international network of intelligence operatives known as the Safari Club, which waged clandestine battles against Soviet operatives in Africa and the Middle East. “He was doing intelligence for fun,” de Villiers told me. “Sometimes he didn’t even pick up the phone when Giscard called him.” In short, de Marenches was very close to being the aristocratic master spy de Villiers had imagined, and as their friendship deepened in the 1970s, de Villiers’s relationship with French intelligence also deepened and lasts to this day.

    De Villiers has always had a penchant for the gruesome and the decadent. One of his models was Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist whose best-known book is “Kaputt,” an eerie firsthand account from behind the German front lines during World War II. Another was Georges Arnaud, the French author of several popular adventure books during the 1950s. “He was a strange guy,” de Villiers said. “He once confessed to me that he started life by murdering his father, his aunt and the maid.” (Arnaud was tried and acquitted for those murders, possibly by a rigged jury.) I couldn’t help wondering whether Georges Simenon, the famously prolific and perverted Belgian crime writer, was also an influence. Simenon is said to have taken as little as 10 days to finish his novels, and he published about 200. He also claimed to have slept with 10,000 women, mostly prostitutes. De Villiers laughed at the comparison. “I knew Simenon a little,” he said, then proceeded to tell a raunchy story he heard from Simenon’s long-suffering wife, involving roadside sex in the snow in Gstaad.

    This seemed like a good moment to ask about de Villiers’s own preoccupations. “I’ve had a lot of sex in my life,” he said. “That’s why I have so much trouble with wives. In America they would say I am a ‘womanizer.’ ” He has married four times and has two children, and now has a girlfriend nearly 30 years his junior, an attractive blond woman whom I met briefly at his home. When I suggested that the sex in S.A.S. was unusually hard-core, he replied with a chuckle: “Maybe for an American. Not in France.”

    One thing de Villiers does not have is serious literary ambitions. Although he is a great admirer of le Carré, he has never tried to turn espionage into the setting for a complex human drama. He writes the way he speaks, in terse, informative bursts, with a morbid sense of humor. When I asked whether it bothered him that no one took his books seriously, he did not seem at all defensive. “I don’t consider myself a literary man,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. I write fairy tales for adults. And I try to put some substance into it.”

    I had no idea what kind of “substance” until a friend urged me to look at “La Liste Hariri,” one of de Villiers’s many books set in and around Lebanon. The book, published in early 2010, concerns the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. I spent years looking into and writing about Hariri’s death, and I was curious to know what de Villiers made of it. I found the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus to be impressively accurate, as were the names of restaurants, the atmosphere of the neighborhoods and the descriptions of some of the security chiefs that I knew from my tenure as The Times’ Beirut bureau chief. But the real surprise came later. “La Liste Hariri” provides detailed information about the elaborate plot, ordered by Syria and carried out by Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one of the great mysteries of the Middle East, and I found specific information that no journalists, to my knowledge, knew at the time of the book’s publication, including a complete list of the members of the assassination team and a description of the systematic elimination of potential witnesses by Hezbollah and its Syrian allies. I was even more impressed when I spoke to a former member of the U.N.-backed international tribunal, based in the Netherlands, that investigated Hariri’s death. “When ‘La Liste Hariri’ came out, everyone on the commission was amazed,” the former staff member said. “They were all literally wondering who on the team could have sold de Villiers this information — because it was very clear that someone had showed him the commission’s reports or the original Lebanese intelligence reports.”

    When I put the question to de Villiers, a smile of discreet triumph flashed on his face. It turns out that he has been friends for years with one of Lebanon’s top intelligence officers, an austere-looking man who probably knows more about Lebanon’s unsolved murders than anyone else. It was he who handed de Villiers the list of Hariri’s killers. “He worked hard to get it, and he wanted people to know,” de Villiers said. “But he couldn’t trust journalists.” I was one of those he didn’t trust. I have interviewed the same intelligence chief multiple times on the subject of the Hariri killing, but he never told me about the list. De Villiers had also spoken with high-ranking Hezbollah officials, in meetings that he said were brokered by French intelligence. One assumes these men had not read his fiction.

    What do the spies themselves say about de Villiers? I conducted my own furtive tour of the French intelligence community and found that de Villiers’s name was a very effectivepasse-partout, even among people who found the subject mildly embarrassing. Only one of those I spoke with, a former head of the D.G.S.E., said he never provided information to de Villiers. We met in a dim corridor outside his office, where we chatted for a while about other matters before the subject of de Villiers came up. “Ah, yes, Gérard de Villiers, I don’t know him,” he said, chuckling dismissively, as if to suggest that he had not even read the books. Then after a pause, he confessed: “But one must admit that some of his information is very good. And in fact, one sees that it has gotten better and better in the past few novels.”

    Another former spook admitted freely that he had been friends with de Villiers for years. We met at a cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a cold, foggy afternoon, and as he sipped his coffee, he happily reeled off the favors he’d done — not just talking over cases but introducing de Villiers to colleagues and experts on explosives and nuclear weapons and computer hacking. “When de Villiers describes intelligence people in his book, everybody in the business knows exactly who he’s talking about,” he said. “The truth is, he’s become such a figure that lots of people in the business are desperate to meet him. There are even ministers from other countries who meet with him when they pass through Paris.”

    A third former government official spoke of de Villiers as a kind of colleague. “We meet and share information,” he told me over coffee at a Paris hotel. “I’ve introduced him to some sensitive sources. He has a gift — a very strong intellectual comprehension of these security and terrorism issues.”

    It is not just the French who say these things. De Villiers has had close friends in Russian intelligence over the years. Alla Shevelkina, a journalist who has worked as a fixer for de Villiers on a number of his Russian trips, said: “He gets interviews that no one else gets — not journalists, no one. The people that don’t talk, talk to him.” In the United States, I spoke to a former C.I.A. operative who has known de Villiers for decades. “I recommend to our analysts to read his books, because there’s a lot of real information in there,” he told me. “He’s tuned into all the security services, and he knows all the players.”

    Why do all these people divulge so much to a pulp novelist? I put the question to de Villiers the last time we met, in the cavernous living room of his Paris apartment on a cold winter evening. He was leaving on a reporting trip to Tunisia the next day, and on the coffee table in front of me, next to a cluster of expensive scotches and liqueurs, was a black military-made ammunition belt. “They always have a motive,” he said, absently stroking one of his two longhaired cats like a Bond villain at leisure. “They want the information to go out. And they know a lot of people read my books, all the intelligence agencies.”

    Renaud Girard, de Villiers’s old friend and traveling companion, arrived at the apartment for a drink and offered a simpler explanation. “Everybody likes to talk to someone who appreciates their work,” he said. “And it’s fun. If the source is a military attaché, he can show off the book to his friends, with his character drawn in it.” He also suggested that if the source happens to have a beautiful wife, she will appear in a sex scene with Malko, and some of them enjoy this, too. “If you have read the books,” he said, “it’s fun to enter the books.”

    I asked de Villiers about his next novel, and his eyes lighted up. “It goes back to an old story,” he said. “Lockerbie.” The book is based on the premise that it was Iran — not Libya — that carried out the notorious 1988 airliner bombing. The Iranians went to great lengths to persuade Muammar el-Qaddafi to take the fall for the attack, which was carried out in revenge for the downing of an Iranian passenger plane by American missiles six months earlier, de Villiers said. This has long been an unverified conspiracy theory, but when I returned to the United States, I learned that de Villiers was onto something. I spoke to a former C.I.A. operative who told me that “the best intelligence” on the Lockerbie bombingpoints to an Iranian role. It is a subject of intense controversy at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., he said, in part because the evidence against Iran is classified and cannot be used in court, but many at the agency believe Iran directed the bombing.

    De Villiers excused himself to continue packing for Tunisia, after cheerfully delivering his cynical take on the Arab Spring. (“What this really means is the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood across the region.”) His views on other subjects are similarly curt and disillusioned. “Russia? Russia is Putin. People fooled themselves with Medvedev that there would be change. I never believed it.” And Syria? “If Bashar falls, Syria falls. There is nothing else to hold that country together.”

    Girard and I poured ourselves more Scotch, and he began reeling off stories of his and de Villiers’s adventures together. Many of them involved one of de Villiers’s former wives, who always seemed to show up in Gaza or Pakistan in wildly inappropriate dress. “One time in the mid-’90s, we went to a Hamas stronghold together, and Gérard had his wife with him, wearing a very provocative shirt with no bra,” Girard said. “There were young men there who literally started stoning us, and we had to flee.”

    It was getting late, and Girard seemed to be running out of stories. “He is 83 years old, and he is not slowing down,” he said before we parted. “He still goes to Mali and Libya, even after his heart troubles.” He paused for a moment, looking into his Scotch. “I remember one time during the rebellion in Albania, in 1997, we were sitting on a rooftop together, and we started talking about death. He told me: ‘I will never stop. I will keep going with my foot on the accelerator until I die.’ ”

     

    Robert F. Worth is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the bunker mentality of American diplomacy.

    Editor: Joel Lovell

     

    Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • The End of Courtship. Technology Killed Courtship. Good Riddance.

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    There’s an emoji for that.

     

    By 

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    Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2013, at 3:18 PM ET

    (PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)

    In the New York Times this weekend, reporter Alex Williams mourns “The End of Courtship.” Texting is to blame for dating’s demise. “Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone,” young people today “rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other ‘non-dates’ that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend,” Williams reports. The rise of the “hook-up” has left an entire generation “unhappy, sexually unfulfilled, and confused about intimacy,” one author claims. New technologies have made us “Ph.D.’s in Internet stalking,” but amateurs in love.

    Williams’ report treads familiar ground: Back in an arbitrary time period that predates our own, interactions between men and women were simple, the argument goes; advances in technology have led us astray of this most fundamental human relationship.

    It’s true that dating used to be simpler, but not because our grandparents were spared from mining the flirtation potential of Words With Friends. No, dating was simpler then because men and women were both forced to conform to distinct gender roles and follow a preset romantic script with the mutual expectation of marrying and procreating as soon as possible.

    Williams claims this old system relied on “charm,” but it sounds more like “sexism” to me. Williams quotes our own Hanna Rosin on how shifting gender roles have thrown a wrench in that old routine: “It’s hard to read a woman exactly right these days,” [Rosin] says. “You don’t know whether, say, choosing the wine without asking her opinion will meet her yearnings for old-fashioned romance or strike her as boorish and macho.” Yes, women are individuals nowadays. It is impossible to know what a woman wants without first understanding her as a person, and her preferences are liable to extend far beyond the wine list—she could be pursuing a man for marriage, dating, friendship, sex, networking, or a new buddy for trading emojis with.

    Of course, dating wasn’t a cakewalk back when courtship reigned. Consider The Rules, the dating handbook produced by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider that claimed to instruct women on how to navigate new technologies (Should I leave him a voicemail?) in another time of great social change (the ’90s). The Rules relied on the idea that men and women are naturally different—“Men love a challenge, while women love security. Men love to buy and sell companies as well as extreme sports like mountain biking and bungee jumping, while women love to talk about dates and watch romantic comedies”—but that shifting gender roles (those high-powered modern businesswomen, with their call waiting!) had disrupted traditional courtship strategies.

    So The Rules instructed the women of the ’90s to carefully modify their behavior in order to force men into their rightful role as relationship aggressor, regardless of a particular man’s individual personality (plenty of “Pick-Up Artist” books cropped up to guide any type of man through his own journey). The book’s strategy of “playing hard to get” required women to be outwardly passive, emotionally distant, and perfectly polished, while secretly rearranging their lives and personalities to always play by the rules. The key is to always “make him think you’re busy and running around,” even if you’re not. Perform the dance correctly, the book promised, and a woman could find a husband. (Who that husband ended up being was always a secondary concern).

    This month, Fein and Schneider released an update to their book for a new generation—the one Williams describes as rendered hopelessly unromantic by modern tech. In Not Your Mother’s Rules: The New Secrets of Dating, Fein and Schneider (both now, yes, mothers who quote their children extensively throughout) tweak their strategies to reflect these new technologies like “texting, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, iPhones, Skype, and Twitter!” But the gender roles and one-size-fits all relationship expectations established back in the rotary phone era have not changed. In one section, “Rules Girls” are all advised to wear their hair long, stick-straight, and preferably blonde to secure the best chance of conforming to what “most men” like.

    The technological aspect manages to make Not Your Mother’s Rules even more sinister than the original. Previously, women were only forced to alter their personalities when directly interacting with a dating prospect. Today, with the rise of social media and the expansion of mixed-gender networks, women are instructed to follow the Rules in every medium and social situation in the hopes of landing a husband. Remember how women inherently love romantic comedies? Not on Twitter, where they’re counseled to never “tweet about love songs or chick flicks,” but instead to project an interest in “politics, sports, and the world in general” (even though we know women can’t actually be interested in those things!). Under the Rules, even the fun aspects of online culture are reserved just for husband-hunting. Fein and Schneider tell women to employ acronyms like “LOL” in order to communicate to men that they are just too busy to write out three whole words.

    Even when dating rules for men and women were set in stone, dating was a difficult and charmless process—particularly for women who preferred their hair short and curly, men who preferred women with short, curly, hair, and both men and women who weren’t looking for a relationship with the “opposite” sex. Technology has only accelerated courtship’s “confusion” because it offers so many opportunities for men and women alike to project their individuality and to explore relationships with each other that end short of marriage. Sometimes your Words With Friends partner is just that.

     

     

    © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

  • When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense

    JAN 27 2013, 10:31 AM ET 676

     

    When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense? The answer is that we never really decided.

    615_Apple_iPhone_Flag_Apple_Reuters.jpg

    Reuters

     

    This is now the law of the land:

    ADVISORY 

    BY DECREE OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS 

    IT SHALL HENCEFORCE BE ORDERED THAT AMERICANS SHALL NOT UNLOCK THEIR OWN SMARTPHONES. 

    PENALTY: In some situations, first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both.*

    That’s right, starting this weekend it is illegal to unlock new phones to make them available on other carriers.

    I have deep sympathy for any individual who happens to get jail time for this offense. I am sure that other offenders would not take kindly to smartphone un-lockers.

    But seriously: It’s embarrassing and unacceptable that we are at the mercy of prosecutorial and judicial discretion** to avoid the implementation of draconian laws that could implicate average Americans in a crime subject to up to a $500,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

    If people see this and respond, well no one is really going to get those types of penalties, my response is: Why is that acceptable? While people’s worst fears may be a bit unfounded, why do we accept a system where we allow such discretionary authority? If you or your child were arrested for this, would it comfort you to know that the prosecutor and judge could technically throw the book at you? Would you relax assuming that they probably wouldn’t make an example out of you or your kid? When as a society did we learn to accept the federal government having such Orwellian power? And is this the same country that used jury nullification against laws that it found to be unjust as an additional check upon excessive government power? [The only silver lining is that realistically it's more likely that violators would be subject to civil liability under Section 1203 of the DMCA, instead of the fine and jail penalties, but this is still unacceptable (but anyone who accepts payments to help others unlock their phones would clearly be subject to the fine of up to $500,000 and up to five years in jail).]

    WHO REALLY OWNS YOUR PHONE?

    When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense? 

    The answer is that we never really decided. Instead, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 to outlaw technologies that bypass copyright protections. This sounds like a great idea, but in practice it has terrible, and widely acknowledged, negative consequences that affect consumers and new innovation. The DMCA leaves it up to the Librarian of Congress (LOC) to issue exemptions from the law, exceptions that were recognized to be necessary given the broad language of the statute that swept a number of ordinary acts and technologies as potential DMCA circumvention violations.

    Every three years groups like the American Foundation for the Blind have to lobby Congress to protect an exception for the blind allowing for books to be read aloud. Can you imagine a more ridiculous regulation than one that requires a lobby group for the blind to come to Capitol Hill every three years to explain that the blind still can’t read books on their own and therefore need this exception?

    Until recently it was illegal to jailbreak your own iPhone, and after Saturday it will be illegal to unlock a new smartphone, thereby allowing it to switch carriers. This is a result of the exception to the DMCA lapsing. It was not a mistake, but rather an intentional choice by the Librarian of Congress, that this was no longer fair use and acceptable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation among other groups has detailed the many failings of the DMCA Triennial Rulemaking process, which in this case led to this exception lapsing.

    Conservatives should be leading the discussion on fixing this problem. Conservatives are understandably skeptical of agencies and unelected bureaucrats wielding a large amount of power to regulate, and are proponents of solutions like the REINS Act (which has over 121 co-sponsors). However, if Congress truly wants to rein in the power of unelected bureaucrats, then they must first write laws in a narrow manner and avoid the need for intervention by the Librarian of Congress to avoid draconian consequences, such as making iPhone jail-breakers and smartphone un-lockers criminals, or taking away readable books for the blind.

    If conservatives are concerned of unelected bureaucrats deciding upon regulations which could have financial consequences for businesses, then they should be more worried about unelected bureaucrats deciding upon what is or isn’t a felony punishable by large fines and jail time for our citizens. And really, why should unelected bureaucrats decide what technological choices you can make with your smartphone? These laws serve to protect the interests of a few companies and create and maintain barriers to entry.

    But there is another matter of critical importance: Laws that can place people in jail should be passed by Congress, not by the decree of the Librarian of Congress. We have no way to hold the Librarian of Congress accountable for wildly unfair laws. There are still plenty of crazy laws passed by elected officials, but at least we can then vote them out of office.

    There are numerous other problems with the DMCA. As I explained in an essay for Cato Unbound:

    “The DMCA bars developing, selling, providing, or even linking to technologies that play legal DVDs purchased in a different region, or to convert a DVD you own to a playable file on your computer. Because no licensed DVD playing software is currently available for the Linux operating system, if a Linux user wishes to play a DVD that they have legally bought, they cannot legally play it on their own computer.

    In order to regulate this anti-circumvention market, the DCMA authorizes injunctions that seem to fly in the face of First Amendment jurisprudence on prior restraint. The DMCA also makes companies liable for copyright infringement if it doesn’t remove content upon notification that someone believes the content infringes their copyright – this creates a very strong business interest in immediately taking down anything that anyone claims is infringing to not be liable. Christina Mulligan’s essay for Copyright Unbalanced details how in mid-July 2012 a Mitt Romney campaign ad hosted on Youtube was forcibly removed from the site, and in 2008 Youtube blocked several John McCain ads for more than 10 days. As Mulligan details, the ads were legitimate under “fair use.” Allowing individual people to veto political speech that they do not like stifles free expression and political dialogue and even if a rare occurrence under the DMCA should not be taken likely. There are also other examples of abuse, Mulligan details that one group had all Justin Bieber songs removed from Youtube as a prank.”

    And if you thought this was bad, provisions of the DMCA relating to anti-circumvention are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Treaty — and the United States is the party asking for it as part of the negotiations. Placing it in the treaty will enact our dysfunctional system on an international level in countries that don’t want it, and it will “re-codify” the DMCA in an international treaty making it significantly more difficult to revise as necessary. Copyright laws are domestic laws and they need to be flexible enough to adjust accordingly to not inhibit new innovation.

    I for one am pro-choice with regard to my smartphone. Our representatives ought to be, as well.

    __________________________

    * Specifically this refers to Section 1204 of Public Law 105-304, which provides that “any person who violates section 1201 or 1201 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain. . .[shall be subject to the listed penalties].” However, given copyright laws broad interpretation by the courts, it could be argued that merely unlocking your own smartphone takes a device of one value and converts it into a device of double that value (the resale market for unlocked phones is significantly higher) and therefore unlocking is inherently providing a commercial advantage or a private financial gain – even if the gain hasn’t been realized. In other words, unlocking doubles or triples the resale value of your own device and replaces the need to procure the unlocked device from the carrier at steep costs, which may be by definition a private financial gain. Alternatively, one can argue that a customer buying a cheaper version of a product, the locked version vs. the unlocked version, and then unlocking it themselves in violation of the DMCA, is denying the provider of revenue which also qualifies. There are several cases that have established similar precedents where stealing coaxial cable for personal use has been held to be for “purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.” (See Cablevision Sys. New York City Corp. v. Lokshin, 980 F. Supp. 107, 109 (E.D.N.Y. 1997)); (Cablevision Sys. Dev. Co. v. Cherrywood Pizza, 133 Misc. 2d 879, 881, 508 N.Y.S.2d 382, 383 (Sup. Ct. 1986)).

    ** The Ninth Circuit recently explained in United States v. Nosal, 676 F.3d 854 (9th Cir. 2012) that under a “broad interpretation of the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) you could be prosecuted for personal use of work computers].” The court explained that under this approach “While it’s unlikely that you’ll be prosecuted for watching Reason.TV on your work computer, you could be [emphasis in original]. Employers wanting to rid themselves of troublesome employees. . . could threaten to report them to the FBI unless the quit. Ubiquitous, seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” The Court rejected this interpretation which would have made regular activity by average citizens as a potential felony and ruled that running afoul of a corporate computer use restriction does not violate the CFAA. It’s possible that here a court would use judicial discretion to narrowly interpret the DMCA and reject the broad definitions that are typically advanced by the government.

     

    Copyright. 2013. The Antlantic Monthly.com All Rights Reserved

     

  • Allowing Children to Fail Becomes Integral to Preparation for Life.

    A new study explores what happens to students who aren’t allowed to suffer through setbacks.

    fail2-top.jpgMatthew Benoit/Shutterstock

    Thirteen years ago, when I was a relatively new teacher, stumbling around my classroom on wobbly legs, I had to call a students’ mother to inform her that I would be initiating disciplinary proceedings against her daughter for plagiarism, and that furthermore, her daughter would receive a zero for the plagiarized paper.

    “You can’t do that. She didn’t do anything wrong,” the mother informed me, enraged.

    “But she did. I was able to find entire paragraphs lifted off of web sites,” I stammered.

    “No, I mean she didn’t do it. I did. I wrote her paper.”

    I don’t remember what I said in response, but I’m fairly confident I had to take a moment to digest what I had just heard. And what would I do, anyway? Suspend the mother? Keep her in for lunch detention and make her write “I will not write my daughter’s papers using articles plagiarized from the Internet” one hundred times on the board? In all fairness, the mother submitted a defense: her daughter had been stressed out, and she did not want her to get sick or overwhelmed.

    In the end, my student received a zero and I made sure she re-wrote the paper. Herself. Sure, I didn’t have the authority to discipline the student’s mother, but I have done so many times in my dreams.

    While I am not sure what the mother gained from the experience, the daughter gained an understanding of consequences, and I gained a war story. I don’t even bother with the old reliables anymore: the mother who “helps” a bit too much with the child’s math homework, the father who builds the student’s science project. Please. Don’t waste my time.

    The stories teachers exchange these days reveal a whole new level of overprotectiveness: parents who raise their children in a state of helplessness and powerlessness, children destined to an anxious adulthood, lacking the emotional resources they will need to cope with inevitable setback and failure.

    I believed my accumulated compendium of teacher war stories were pretty good — until I read a study out of Queensland University of Technology, by Judith Locke, et. al., a self-described “examination by parenting professionals of the concept of overparenting.”

    Overparenting is characterized in the study as parents’ “misguided attempt to improve their child’s current and future personal and academic success.” In an attempt to understand such behaviors, the authors surveyed psychologists, guidance counselors, and teachers. The authors asked these professionals if they had witnessed examples of overparenting, and left space for descriptions of said examples. While the relatively small sample size and questionable method of subjective self-reporting cast a shadow on the study’s statistical significance, the examples cited in the report provide enough ammunition for a year of dinner parties.

    Some of the examples are the usual fare: a child isn’t allowed to go to camp or learn to drive, a parent cuts up a 10 year-old’s food or brings separate plates to parties for a 16 year-old because he’s a picky eater. Yawn. These barely rank a “Tsk, tsk” among my colleagues. And while I pity those kids, I’m not that worried. They will go out on their own someday and recover from their overprotective childhoods.

    What worry me most are the examples of overparenting that have the potential to ruin a child’s confidence and undermine an education in independence. According to the the authors, parents guilty of this kind of overparenting “take their child’s perception as truth, regardless of the facts,” and are “quick to believe their child over the adult and deny the possibility that their child was at fault or would even do something of that nature.”

    This is what we teachers see most often: what the authors term “high responsiveness and low demandingness” parents.” These parents are highly responsive to the perceived needs and issues of their children, and don’t give their children the chance to solve their own problems. These parents “rush to school at the whim of a phone call from their child to deliver items such as forgotten lunches, forgotten assignments, forgotten uniforms” and “demand better grades on the final semester reports or threaten withdrawal from school.” One study participant described the problem this way:

    I have worked with quite a number of parents who are so overprotective of their children that the children do not learn to take responsibility (and the natural consequences) of their actions. The children may develop a sense of entitlement and the parents then find it difficult to work with the school in a trusting, cooperative and solution focused manner, which would benefit both child and school.

    These are the parents who worry me the most — parents who won’t let their child learn. You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.

    I’m not suggesting that parents place blind trust in their children’s teachers; I would never do such a thing myself. But children make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.

    I’m done fantasizing about ways to make that mom from 13 years ago see the light. That ship has sailed, and I did the best I could for her daughter. Every year, I reassure some parent, “This setback will be the best thing that ever happened to your child,” and I’ve long since accepted that most parents won’t believe me. That’s fine. I’m patient. The lessons I teach in middle school don’t typically pay off for years, and I don’t expect thank-you cards.

    I have learned to enjoy and find satisfaction in these day-to-day lessons, and in the time I get to spend with children in need of an education. But I fantasize about the day I will be trusted to teach my students how to roll with the punches, find their way through the gauntlet of adolescence, and stand firm in the face of the challenges — challenges that have the power to transform today’s children into resourceful, competent, and confident adults.

     
    Copyright. 2013. Antlantic Monthly.com All Rights Reserved

  • Will you still add me, will you still tag me, when I’m 64?When Will You Stop Using Facebook

    Will you still add me, will you still tag me, when I’m 64?

    facebook like full.png

    Birgerking/Flickr

    Adults are typically grateful that social media didn’t exist when they were teenagers — that their Facebook photos and status messages date to their college years at the earliest, not their first years of high school or middle school. Would you retroactively give your 13-year-old self the power to permanently put anything he or she wanted on the Web? I’d sooner incapacitate him with arcade-prize finger traps, the unexpectedly hazardous technology of my youth.

    What I’d never pondered, until a friend questioned me about it last weekend, is when I’ll stop using Facebook. Assuming it endures as a company, will there be an age at which most people abandon it? Right now, I’m a light user who mostly exploits the platform to share links to my articles. 

    Some people in my “stream” do the same. We’ll all follow the crowd.

    As I reflect on the way most of my friends from high school and college have used Facebook in the past and how they use it today, I’d say that their activity is more often than not tied to life changes. A new “relationship status.” A new job. A move to a new city. A wedding proposal, followed by photographs from the bachelorette party, the wedding, and the honeymoon. A pregnancy, followed by photos of the baby, her first steps, her second birthday, her last day of school, and her spot on the bronze medal podium after placing third in a state college swim meet.

    People want to share these developments. And their friends and acquaintances don’t want to miss out on happy news, or gossip, or vicarious presence at an event, or even mini-scandal or unexpected tragedy. So they keep coming back to Facebook, many times a day, to disseminate news and to receive it, and to decide whether their own life is proceeding at an acceptable pace. But what happens when the pace of “newsworthy” change slows down? When the career is established, the marriage is either stable or long over, the kids are grown, and seeing friends means dinner and a streamed movie rather than late nights drinking with camera phones out? Does Facebook start to feel depressing, like drawing on your dorm room white board during Thanksgiving break, or as if it has lost its purpose, like People magazine after Princess Diana?

    In Joan Didion’s essay on coming of age in New York City, she wrote:

    I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

    Years later, she was still attending the same parties, “all parties, bad parties,” and only looking back was she able to appreciate her mistake: “You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand… that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” 

    Imagine 7 years spent living in a college dorm, or 15 years spent attending the parties you went to in your twenties. Now imagine yourself perusing a Facebook stream daily for a full 25 years.  

    Doesn’t that just feel like too long? 

    I wonder how many of you will agree. It’s impossible to say right now. The popularity of Facebook among older people today doesn’t really tell us much. Like everyone already grown up when social media came along, they experienced the addicting novelty of remaking long-lost, far-flung connections while in between tasks at work or waiting for the onions to caramelize. People who grew up with social media all along will experience it differently in middle age. 

    A colleague with whom I spoke about this topic guessed that the middle-aged will stick around as users for nostalgic reasons, their accounts, full of archived photographs, serving the same function as old high school yearbooks. Perhaps so. But how often do you look at your high school yearbook? In that scenario, Facebook pays to store ever more data that is seldom accessed. 

    Older folks might also stick around to lurk on the pages of their grown children, especially when grandchildren arrive. But Facebook will always be vulnerable to other companies fulfilling discrete social media niches, like photo-sharing with members of the immediate family. They’re an “all-purpose sharing” site, with all of the attendant advantages and drawbacks. 

    Are my future children going to see the presence of my wife and I on Facebook as a drawback to doing their young-adult social media sharing on the platform? I suspect so. Of course, much of what I’ve written is premised on Facebook itself remaining static, which isn’t going to happen. But the thought experiment helps us think through the challenges the company is facing. There are surely people within its hierarchy asking themselves these very same questions: 

    Is there a tension between keeping older users and attracting younger users?

    Which demographic do we care about most?

    How do we retain users for the long haul?

    Will we try to charge people one day for storing all their decades old photos? 

    How hard will we make it for our users to export their histories?

    It’ll be interesting to see how they answer those questions, and how the people of my generation respond. 

     
     
     2013 Copyright. The Atlantic Magazine. All Rights Reserved

  • Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauli

    http://www.esquire.com/features/stories-of-unemployment-0312

    Work

    Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauling yourself out of bed and going to work. But some of those jobs that went away in the recession — some whole professions — are never coming back. That’s what the men in this story are facing. They are men. That we all know. They might even be us.

    By Ryan D’Agostino

    Published in the March 2012 issue

    SCOTT

    A plastic room-service tray sits on the floor in the hotel hallway, piled high with a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal hardened into a gray fist, misshapen chunks of slimy cantaloupe, strips of bacon hanging over plate edges like socks, pale pancakes with bites missing, and crumpled napkins soggy with imitation syrup.

    Scott Annechino doesn’t notice the tray of rotting breakfast, or pretends not to. He is doing everything he can think of to get a job, and so in the middle of a sunny Thursday a few months ago, Annechino arrives at the Embassy Suites on a commercial road nearthe San Francisco airport. It’s one of those hotels in which the rooms circle a soaring atrium. In the center lobby, travelers with wheeled suitcases drink coffee among koi ponds and palm trees. A glass elevator carries him to the third floor, where the front-desk girl, who knows it’s her job to be cheerful, told him the job fair is supposed to be.

    A pasty kid, maybe thirty, in a too-big shirt and a cheap tie, greets him and tells him the companies are set up in rooms along the hall and that he should definitely visit all of them. Annechino, forty-four years old, wearing his best suit and shined black shoes, walks to the first exhibitor: Devcon, a home-security company. The door is closed, no one inside. Annechino looks around for an explanation. “Oh, I just got an e-mail from my contact there saying they wouldn’t be able to make it today,” the pasty kid says, fingering his BlackBerry.

    A couple of other potential employers who were supposed to be here didn’t make it, either — Konica Minolta, Santa Clara University. “Yeah …” the kid says. Annechino moves to the next room. State Farm. They’re looking for people who can put up fifty grand to start their own insurance agency. The Art Institute is next, mostly looking for people who might want to go to art school. New York Life. The U. S. Army, where men wearing fatigues and combat boots offer brochures.

    That’s it.

    Annechino was a social worker for more than twenty years. Child protective services, mostly. Went into schools, went into homes — sometimes with a couple of cops, when they had to remove a child in a bad part of the city. But it got too political — too much infighting, too many lazy people. Wherever he worked, Scott tried to get the place to run more efficiently and more fairly. For example, a state study, he says, recommended a caseload of around twenty per caseworker, and his once hit seventy. Two years ago, he left under messy circumstances. There was a hearing to determine whether he was eligible for unemployment benefits. No one from CPS showed up, but Scott was there — stood in court wearing a suit and made his case, yes, sir, and the judge agreed. He got his unemployment. Ninety-nine weeks, they give you.

    That was about ninety-four weeks ago. Ninety-four weeks of looking for work. That’s a lot of mornings to wake up with nowhere to be, no one waiting for you to walk through the door. Those mornings pile up until it feels like you can’t breathe. There is dignity in hauling your ass out of bed every morning and going to work — there is purpose in it. Like it or not, what we do is part of who we are, and when you have nothing to do, you can start to wonder who you are. This can be a good thing — they say some people find themselves when they lose their jobs. But not when you have people depending on you, and not when your particular job loss — a wrenching experience for you, but invisible to most of the world — comes at a time when the jobs you want, or the jobs you need, or even the jobs you’ll take, simply don’t exist. You can’t be who you once were. And the person you want to be? That becomes less clear with each sunrise.

    As for Scott Annechino landing another job in social work, forget it — these days they won’t even look at you unless you have a master’s degree, which wasn’t true twenty years ago. But he’s good with people, can talk to anyone. He’s looking at sales or business development, something like that, where he can talk. So he’s online every day — Monster, CareerBuilder, all the sites, uploading his résumé onto the Internet, which is like pinning it to the sky. And he’s here at the Embassy Suites, walking toward the elevator past the cold oatmeal, saying aloud to no one, “This is a joke.”

     Tim Soter
    Name: Greg
    Age: 32
    Occupation: Former warehouse supervisor
    Greg and Janell didn’t buy each other gifts at Christmas, but they didn’t mind that so much. The girls are five and four, and watching them open up the few presents they could afford was gift enough.

    GREG

    The day they let him go started like any other. It was last fall, about a month before his thirty-second birthday. Janell was still on maternity leave from the bank, where she works full-time as a teller, and she was feeding Greg Jr. in bed. Their room shares a thin plaster wall with the bedroom where his two girls, who are five and four, sleep. They’re allowed to watch cartoons on the small flatscreen in their room when they wake up, but the minute they heard Greg and Janell rustling around, they sprinted in like they always do, jumping on Daddy, asking questions.

    The Hantons live on the second floor of a row house on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Hollis, Queens, a few doors down from the house Greg grew up in. He’s known the landlady his whole life — she’s the mom of one of his buddies from growing up. She carved the upstairs into two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen and offered it to Greg for $1,225 a month, utilities included. It’s a nice block — Tudor-style houses, each with a little patio out front and a gate by the sidewalk. His landlady grows tomatoes and strawberries in plastic trays.

    A little after one in the afternoon, Hanton drove his 2006 Honda Accord the twenty minutes to the Raymour & Flanigan warehouse on Metropolitan Avenue, where he worked as a supervisor. He liked to get there a little early for his 2:00-to-10:30 shift so he could see how the morning shift went and get things ready for his crew of five laborers.

    It was looking like a busy day. Three trailers were due in, which would have to be unloaded and their contents stocked in the proper sections of the warehouse within two hours apiece. The guys had a lunch hour, a half-hour break, and two ten-minute breathers. Hanton knew they would have to work quickly. He divided up the jobs — unload, unwrap, move to the right section — and the crew went to work.

    The sun was shining, not that you could see much sky except through the truck bays. Hanton usually spent much of his shift in the windowless back office, making sure each piece of furniture ended up in precisely the right place so that everything was in order for the next shift. There was always the damaged furniture to assign, too — anything wood to Repair 1, sofas to Rep 2, loose parts to Rep 3. Stuff that was just nicked up and could be sold in stores went to V/C, for “back to vendor” or “clearance.” On a busy day, Hanton and his crew handled fifteen hundred pieces of furniture in a single shift.

    Hanton had been working about two hours when he saw the operations manager, a good enough guy, come back from lunch. He said hello to Greg, waved. A couple of minutes later, Greg was walking from the warehouse to the office when the operations manager appeared again and asked to talk to him. Sure, Greg said. The man walked past his own office and into the office of the RDO, or regional director of operations. This was unusual. Could he have done something wrong? He had never been in any kind of trouble here.

    Hanton sat down. The RDO said that, matter of fact, they knew Hanton had been shorthanded the night before — he had only three men instead of five — but certain areas of the warehouse had been left in unacceptable condition, and they were terminating him immediately.

     

    Tim Soter

    LARRY

    Larry Stocks was a king.

    LeAnn Rimes once stood in his office at eight o’clock in the morning and sang for him while he drank his coffee. Aerosmith played the company party one year, Dolly Parton another. This was the 1990s, when he worked for the Handleman Company, the biggest distributor of CDs, videos, books, and computer software this country had ever known. Handleman was a monster. Billion and a half dollars a year. At one point it controlled most of the media sold at places like Bradlees, Caldor, Walmart, and Kmart — it decided which albums would be sold, how they would be stocked, and how long they would stay on the racks. Then Handleman started buying up content rights — they actually owned the music they were selling to the stores. That’s power. That gets LeAnn Rimes singing in your office at eight in the morning.

    Larry’s wife liked the flashy part of his job — the skybox tickets, the celebrities — but that actually didn’t excite him much. Sure, he liked having a company car (including gas), an expense account, and a nice office. But mostly Larry Stocks liked selling. That’s what he does; it’s who he is. Larry Stocks can sell anything — a ketchup Popsicle to an Eskimo, or whatever they say. Selling starts with empathy, and Larry can show empathy like nobody’s business. He’s got the brick-wall build of a high school football coach and a shiny bald head with a fringe of light hair. Dresses smart — slacks, blazers, sometimes a tie clip. His face is round and warm, and his voice is gentle and raspy and makes people feel at ease. His eyes squint friendly. And so when he’s talking to you, all perfect logic and reason, and he says at the end, “Does that make sense to you?” you find yourself nodding. Yeah, Larry, it sure does make sense.

    How many thousands of times has he had that same conversation, giving that same friendly squint?

    Back in 1979, when he was barely twenty-five years old, Stocks started off with a small rack-jobber out of Hagerstown, Maryland, a sleepy town in the crook of the intersection of I-81 and I-70. A rack-jobber is hired by stores that want to sell certain kinds of merchandise — in the case of the Interstate Group, it was magazines at first. Interstate would buy all the magazines up front, then set up and stock the racks in stores every week, and take back whatever hadn’t sold. Stocks made sure they took care of everything — follow-up is the most important part of customer service, see. It takes time to walk into every store and ask how everything is going, but that’s what Larry did.

    Interstate got into music, eventually, and Stocks headed up that part of the business — 45′s and LP’s and eight-tracks at first, then cassettes. When VHS came along, they added those, too — this was at a time when you could sell blank VHS tapes for eighteen or twenty dollars apiece. Nothing on ‘em! When Stocks started at Interstate, it was pulling in $300,000 to $400,000 a year in music sales. By the time Handleman bought Interstate in 1990, Larry Stocks had built it into a $78 million business.

    MICHAEL


    Name: Michael
    Age: 30
    Occupation: Business-school graduate
    No one in his family ever had trouble finding work until Michael, the youngest, graduated last May with an M.B.A. from Boston College, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

    Henry Lesnik came to the United States from Poland during the Great Depression. He worked in a foundry and eventually made bombs for the Navy during World War II. He worked hard. He raised his son, Thomas, in Queens and taught him to work hard, too. Thomas liked to play ball in the neighborhood, but organized sports were off-limits — he was to study and play the accordion for a little money on the weekends. That was it.

    Thomas worked hard like his father. His father’s work had afforded him the opportunity to succeed, and he wasn’t going to squander that. It was the same on his mother’s side: Her father had come over from Poland, too, learned English, and started an ice company, hauling huge blocks around Manhattan by horse-drawn carriage.

    Thomas went to St. John’s University in Queens. In three years he earned enough credits to get into medical school but not to actually graduate from the university. So he left, never graduated, and the next fall matriculated at Albany Medical College. He eventually settled in Connecticut and opened his own ear-nose-and-throat practice in 1973. He woke up early and went to bed late so that he could give his five children even better opportunities than he had. A nice home near the water, private school, their mother at home to take care of them while he ran his practice. None of them ever had trouble finding work until the youngest, Michael, graduated last May from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College with an M.B.A., in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

    GREG

    It felt strange to be driving at rush hour. Usually Hanton commuted during off-hours, but here he was, bumping along the Grand Central Parkway with all the other cars carrying people home from work, like logs on a river.

    He didn’t make a scene when they said that word — terminated. He didn’t protest. He just thanked them for the opportunity, took his lunch from the fridge, and walked out into the sunshine to his car.

    He understood what was happening. The man who had hired Greg had been let go, too, and the new guy started cleaning house almost immediately. Wanted his own guys in there, it seemed like. And it wasn’t as if Greg loved the job, either. He and Janell had actually gone to a job fair a few weeks before — her grandmother came over to watch the kids. Cablevision had openings for residential cable installers, and Greg left his résumé. He was also waiting to take the test for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to become a bus driver.

    But Raymour was paying him $40,000 a year, with benefits. It was a solid management position on his résumé and the most money he had ever made. He knew his family would never go hungry — between his and Janell’s mothers and grandmothers, and all their friends and neighbors, no one would let that happen. But the girls were growing fast and eating all day, and Greg Jr. needed constant replenishments of diapers and formula. There was the rent, the car payments, car insurance, cell phones, and cable, not to mention clothes, gas, and the Christmas shopping that would have to be done in the next month.

    And it wasn’t right, the way they did it. Hanton used to work sick, came in early, always helped in the warehouse to speed things up, even when he was told he could stay in the office. The only day he could remember missing in his eight months on the job was when Greg Jr. had a fever and Greg had to drive him to the ER. If his crew was still unloading at quitting time and wouldn’t have time to clean up — you can imagine the mountains of cardboard and plastic wrap after a truck is unloaded — Hanton did it himself, without even thinking. Lately he was even wearing a boot on one foot because he had strained his Achilles tendon. He was pretty sure he’d done it lifting a dresser out of a truck one day, but he wasn’t about to make a big deal out of it.

    The RDO knew all this. Greg just looked at him, asked him to reconsider. Nothing we can do, he said.

    Greg drove along, his mind pinballing between anger and resignation. What does a man do when one day his job isn’t there anymore? When he doesn’t have to be there the next day at two o’clock? When he doesn’t really have to be anywhere?

    He called Janell.

    “Baby, I got fired,” he said.

    “Stop playing.” She was lying down with Greg Jr. as he napped.

    “I’m serious. I’m coming home.”

    A moment passed before Janell said into the phone, “What are we gonna do?”

    LARRY

    Like a lot of North Carolina boys in the 1930s, Stocks’s father went from the tobacco farm to the army. By the time he had children, years later, he was an aide to Lieutenant General Ridgely Gaither, a three-star general in charge of the U. S. Caribbean Command and a veteran of Korea and World War II. They were stationed on a base in the Panama Canal Zone, which is where Larry lived until he was six. There was a big stone wall around the base, which kept the larger animals out, but Larry remembers watching the sloths, strange-looking, hairy animals that could hang upside down from the trees in the jungle just outside the perimeter of the base. Larry’s father wasn’t overly strict, but he was an army sergeant and liked order and obedience. He was one for getting your hair cut, that sort of thing.

    They moved back up to Maryland as his father approached retirement, and Larry was sent to Fork Union Military Academy, in Fluvanna County, Virginia, a rural pocket between Richmond and Charlottesville that sent twelve hundred men to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The school was a football factory, and Larry played well enough to land on the University of Maryland’s team after graduation in 1972. But he suffered a ventral hernia on the field — basically, his stomach muscle was ripped open, and his intestines spilled out. Larry left school, got married, and went looking for work.

    It was 1976. He was barely twenty-two years old, and he had a wife and child to support and a future to start.

    MICHAEL

    Dr. Lesnik had done well for himself. Through hard work and some luck with the real estate market, he owned two waterfront homes, side by side, in Old Lyme, a quiet town on Long Island Sound. Michael could stay in one of the houses while he waited for a job to come through — which he figured would take a few weeks, maybe a month.

    Mike got up early each morning and, wearing the T-shirt and gym shorts and fleece socks he had slept in, read the news. Then he sat in front of his computer and scoured the online job boards. He wanted something entrepreneurial, even if it was for a big company — something where he could use his brain to invent some new product or service that no one had ever thought of before but that everyone needs. He wanted every day at work to be thrilling.

    Weeks passed. Months. The spring of 2011 became the summer, and then the fall. In the afternoons, he ran. Sometimes on the beach, but mostly through streets lined with summer rentals. He mowed lawns — a twenty-nine-year-old M.B.A. mowing lawns. If the surf was good, he’d drive the twenty minutes across the state line to Rhode Island, where the waves were bigger. He felt guilty when he did this, of course. Told himself he should be at the computer, submitting online applications to companies that would never, ever respond. Told himself he should be thinking of new people to network with — old classmates, friends of his parents, professors, anyone. But how many people have you even met when you’re twenty-nine?

    It shouldn’t be this hard, he would think to himself. You work hard, you get into a good school, you do pretty well, you print out all those cover letters and all those résumés — he wondered if maybe he should try bartending, just to tide him over. But then the minute he went out and got a bartending gig, he told himself, his phone would ring with an offer. So it hardly seemed worth it, when the phone was gonna ring any day. Because it had to ring any day. It just had to.

    GREG

    His mother always figured it out, didn’t she? She ran a Pizza Hut for as long as he could remember. General manager. Supported Greg and his little brother Willie and then David after him. It took her almost an hour to get there each way. But she made it work. It’s like a reminder for Greg, seeing that house just off Francis Lewis every day, the same one his mother woke up in every morning to get him and his brothers ready for school, and came home to every night, exhausted, her feet aching, the stale, sweet smell of tomato sauce and cheese on her clothes. Never a minute to herself.

    People still know Greg on this block, on these streets. He walks his girls to that same elementary school every morning, P.S. 134, and now people know them, too: the Hanton sisters. He likes that.

    The first step after he lost his job last year was to call the unemployment office and get those payments flowing. But they didn’t call him back and didn’t call him back. Hanton wondered if Raymour was telling the government he wasn’t eligible. Greg knew he could fight that claim easily if it came to that.

    Next: a financial plan. He mapped it out, and even if the unemployment checks didn’t start soon, he could survive for two months — until December. After that, he could get a job at the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise over in Long Island, where his uncle worked. That wouldn’t be ideal — he was making forty grand at Raymour, and this would pay twelve dollars an hour. Plus he would be slinging chicken wings. But at least it would get them through Christmas.

    SCOTT

    Christmas was going to be big last year. Annechino didn’t have much money — his unemployment was just about up — but he really liked this girl. It had been only about six months, but he was already telling his friends she might be the one. So she was a little younger — so she was twenty-five. Whatever. He felt twenty-five. How many forty-four-year-olds love karaoke as much as he did? And this girl, she was a doll. An actress. She did Cat on a Hot Tin Roofa while back, and was going to be the lead in a production of Cabaret. His friends said she was the female version of him.

    Christmas would have a theme: old and new. He bought her a cool old hatbox — she loved hats — and a vintage hat for inside. Then he found a brand-new hatbox and put a new hat inside. He found a jewelry box from around 1900 and some antique earrings to put in it, plus a new jewelry box with new earrings.

    And then, because he couldn’t resist, a makeup compact that read, IF YOU CALL ME HIGH-MAINTENANCE, I CONSIDER THAT A COMPLIMENT. She’d laugh at that.

    It took him forever to wrap it all up for her.

    MICHAEL

    Everybody has a reason they can’t hire him.

    There’s the huge financial-services firm in Hartford that just called him back for the third time. First time, they marched out about nine different people over two days to talk to him. In the end, they told him they had every confidence he could do the job, but they were concerned it wouldn’t be challenging enough for him. He was overqualified.

    He drove back to his father’s house on the water. He read the news, he submitted online applications, he ran in the August heat.

    They called back. Another position was open. He drove up to Hartford. Same thing. Nine people. Overqualified. But, they said, they liked him, so they were passing him along to another department that did some kind of high-level strategic thinking. Perfect. A week later, he met with the strategy department, and the guy looked Michael in the eye and said, “They’ve taken all our positions away. My secretary left a month ago, and I’m not even allowed to hire a new one.” And this was a senior vice-president.

    Then there’s this little consulting firm that Mike’s in love with. It’s a mom-and-pop, but they haveFortune 500 clients. They said they want to hire him, they really do, but they’d have to go out and drum up some more business to balance the cost. Shouldn’t take more than a week or two, they said. That was three months ago. The owner told Mike a story: One of their longtime clients recently dropped them — a multinational corporation whose name we all know. The firm offered to keep the corporation on for free for a while, to keep the relationship going. You don’t understand, the client said: We’re not authorized to spend money on the airfare to come meet with you. We’re not authorized to pay for the postage. We can’t do it.

    And that, Mike Lesnik was told, is why we can’t hire you.

     

    LARRY

    Larry scrambled around for work after college. He built swimming pools for a few months, mucking around in backyard holes spraying gunite. He worked for a metal finishing company. While he was doing his training for that, he visited a place called Fleetwood Enterprises, in Williamsport, Maryland. Fleetwood manufactured recreational vehicles, travel trailers, mobile homes, and other ways for people to enjoy the uniquely American pastime of bringing your living room along as you travel the country.

    Larry joined as an assistant sales manager. It was great, until the late-1970s gas crisis hit. When you’ve got people pushing their cars in line at the gas station all night to wait for their turn to buy a few gallons, it’s not a good time to be in the RV business.

    But hell if Stocks didn’t get a taste of what it takes to sell. When he saw an ad in the paper for something called a rack-jobber, selling magazines to retail stores, he called up and got the job. The Interstate Group. That was the company he took from $300,000 in sales a year to $78 million. It was also the company that got swallowed up — Larry included — by the Handleman Company in 1990.

    If it were Stocks’s decision, he wouldn’t have sold. Two brothers owned Interstate, but basically Stocks was his own boss. And so while Handleman became a plush gig for nine years, Larry was drifting further from the places where he felt the strongest and the surest: sitting at a wood table in an airless conference room, or standing on the beaten linoleum floor of a department store with the fluorescent glare shining off his glasses, or holding the phone to his ear listening to every lilt and rhythm in the voice on the other end, trying to read the person’s thoughts. Selling. Things. To people.

    And so, as the twentieth century approached its end, he left.

    Went back to the rack-jobbers.

    Small-time. Sandusky, Ohio. Chaska, Minnesota. Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Four companies in thirteen years where he could call the shots. The last one was in Ivyland, Pennsylvania. By the time he took the job in 2004, online downloads of music and movies and video games had long been taking business from the stores where Larry used to haggle under the fluorescent lights. By last summer, most of those stores didn’t exist anymore. And what that meant was, well, Larry’s job didn’t exist anymore.

    On his last day, they had a lunch catered at the office, and his boss, a man he had known for years, praised his dedication, his intelligence. A few of them went out to a bar after. And that was it.

    MICHAEL

    His older brothers used to call him Mikey Tikey. He was always a little guy, didn’t really fill out until college. But Jesus, he could hit a baseball. And throw and run. All three of the Lesnik boys were good athletes, but because Mike was small, his talent surprised other teams. Mike Lesnik was a scrapper. He couldn’t control his size, but he could control how hard he tried, and no one was going to try harder than him.

    One day last October he was wearing a trim-fitting pinstripe suit, standing in a line of people in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Farmington, Connecticut. Five months had passed since graduation. The few employment possibilities he had, if you could call them that — the small consulting firm, the big company that kept calling him back — were barely keeping the fuzz of discouragement off his brain. He and his girlfriend talked about moving in together and vaguely about spending their lives together, and it made him anxious, because he couldn’t even afford a sandwich, let alone rent.

    No one talked in the line. When Lesnik got to the front, he stood for a moment before entering the banquet hall and collected himself. Behind the tall oak door was a job fair. The ad had said to dress well, bring a lot of résumés, and be ready to talk. He could ace an on-the-spot interview, and he knew it. He walked in.

    Immediately, a tall, weird-looking old guy with a ponytail and a backpack bumped into him on his way out. There were folding tables set up around the perimeter, and a few people stood in line at each, waiting their turn to be told they could apply for jobs online. Over in the Aflac line was a kid wearing khakis and a golf shirt, untucked. There was a table in the middle of the room where four or five people just sat, drinking water, thumbing the brochure. What the hell were they doing? Hanging out at a job fair?

    Lesnik gripped his leather folder tight — the one that held the multiple copies of his résumé. He exhaled. This felt cruel. Like if you blindfolded a little kid and told him you were taking him to a carnival but instead you drove to an auto-parts store. It was crushing.

    So what did Mikey Tikey do? He stayed for an hour and a half, waited patiently at every goddamn booth and listened to the rehearsed lines — Here’s how to apply on our Web site, here’s a brochure.And he told them no, he was looking for something higher up. Did they know of anything higher up? Something where he could use his M.B.A., where he could use his brain?

    They looked at him a little funny, and smiled politely.

    GREG

    Greg and Janell didn’t buy gifts for each other at Christmas — not even a video game for Greg — but they didn’t mind that so much. Watching the girls open the few presents they could afford was gift enough.

    He thought he would be working by now. He felt in his heart that he would. He had gone to a few job interviews, but they told him he was overqualified. Hanton is a worker, and he had worked hard to achieve what he had — supervisor, making forty grand, good car, nice little place in the neighborhood, got to take Janell out once in a while. Now he had to think about changing his résumé to make himself look less successful so he wouldn’t have to keep hearing how overqualified he was. This felt strange. He wondered how many men out there were dumbing down their lives to try to get a job.

    Not long after Christmas, he sits on his bed, watching Greg Jr. sleep, listening to his soft breaths, watching his tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall. A few more weeks and the boy will be six months old. Janell is at work, the girls are playing somewhere, and the apartment is quiet. Greg has lived here so long he doesn’t notice the sound of the cars rolling along Francis Lewis outside.

    A woman walks by the house. He can just make her out through the window without straining too much — he doesn’t want to wake Greg Jr. The woman walks slowly and carries a handbag at her side. It looks heavy. She might be limping a little. Her form drifts past the bars in Greg’s front gate as if in a dream. She is about his mother’s height, he thinks. She’s walking north up the block, toward his old house. Probably coming home at the end of a shift, like his mother always did, those same footsteps a hundred thousand times on tired, cracked feet.

    Greg pulls in a deep breath. He thinks about the furniture warehouse, and the job fairs he’s been to, and his résumé, and about the future, and about his mother. He thinks about the bus-driver job, which would be great. A friend of his told him about a test you can take to work as an armed security guard — armored cars, that kind of thing. That’s a job that doesn’t disappear. He’s going to pursue that. And he looks down at his sleeping boy, and for the first time in a long time without anybody looking, he smiles.

    SCOTT

    He started collecting coins maybe ten years ago. He has a big colonial collection, defined generally as before 1793. It’s one of the better colonial collections around, he’s been told. He has another collection of coins from the Belgian Congo that may be one of the best in the world.

    He’s selling the colonials. It wasn’t the plan, doesn’t make him happy, but there’s no other way. He’s putting it up for auction, where it could sell for $40,000, maybe more. That’s a lot of money, but he has debt, and he has his rent and gas for the car. One thing he might not have much longer is the girlfriend. You know what she got him for Christmas, after all that old-and-new crap he bought her? A plastic tip jar for the nights he hosts karaoke at the bar. Probably cost ten bucks.

    Ah, well. What are you gonna do, right? Maybe the age difference was too much. But he still feels like a kid — he just joined a band, singing classic-rock covers. He was very specific in the ad, even naming bands he likes — the Grass Roots, Paul Simon, Seal, Pearl Jam, Bush. These seem like good guys, and they play well enough that they could get some gigs. He lives in his little rented room out by the beach — inconvenient, but nice and cheap.

    But what the people at karaoke night and the guys in the band and maybe even the girlfriend don’t know about, don’t see, is the work. The hours spent on CareerBuilder and Indeed.com and all the rest of the sites, clicking through the job postings, tweaking his résumé, uploading his cover letter, trying to stand out. The hours spent driving to job fair after job fair, twenty in two years — putting the suit on, tying the tie, bobbing among the smiling representatives of companies he doesn’t want to work for, driving all the way back out to his small, kitchenless room.

    The cold, crusty oatmeal on a tray on the hotel floor. That’s what nobody sees.

    A while back, he was driving along thinking about what might come next. All he knew was he wanted to work. It’s nice to sleep late if he wants to, sure. But not forever. He thought about the jobs he had back in high school. There was Al, the kind old drunk who had a subcontractor business cleaning out abandoned buildings. He hired Scott to do the work for him, and soon Scott was loading dumpsters with all kinds of dusty furniture and crap pulled from dark corners. Al gave the kid a raise on his second day, to maybe five bucks an hour, for working so hard.

    Then there was the farm. This was in the early eighties in upstate New York, way up near Rochester. Fertile country. Scott loaded bales of hay into wagons out in the fields and then piled them high in the barn. He picked vegetables for hours, bent over — cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, hot peppers.

    When he came home at night, he’d blow his nose and it would come out black from all the dust and dirt. But then he’d get his shower, and put some fresh clothes on, and Scott would feel refreshed by the work he had done. He felt restored. That’s what a day’s work will do for you. And that’s the feeling he wants again.

    MICHAEL

    December. Close to the turn of the calendar, when his B-school graduation would become “last year.” His phone rings.

    Just a few days earlier, he had called a start-up company near Springfield, Massachusetts. His father knew about the place — they’re in the business of trying to improve medical billing. For doctors in private practice, billing is one of the most expensive parts of doing business. This company is trying to make it easier and less costly. They had an opening they wanted to talk to him about, and Mike liked the people he met. It’s a start-up, and he loves the idea of helping create something out of nothing. He had taken the big step of moving in with his girlfriend a month ago, before he had ever heard of this company. The rent was low because it was his sister’s place, but it wasn’t free, and in truth, he wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to pay his share if he didn’t find work soon.

    His father had told him all along not to settle for something he didn’t like — that’s the luxury Michael inherited from his father’s work as a doctor, and his grandfather’s work as a metalworker, and his great-grandfather’s work as an iceman. Michael had inherited the luxury of finding a job he enjoyed. This company, if it panned out, didn’t feel like settling. On the phone was the woman who ran it, wanting to know if he could start work on Monday.

    LARRY

    Four a.m. — that’s what time Larry woke up most mornings after he lost his job last year. He was probably the first person in the United States to see the online job postings every day. He’d sit in the little area of the downstairs he was using as a workspace, in the early-morning darkness, and start pecking away, firing résumés off, futzing around with his cover letter so it seemed “personalized.” He tried to make it obvious that he didn’t care about job titles or even salary all that much. A young company could get his decades of experience for cheap. An established firm could plug him into a position and not worry about a thing. But it’s hard to say all that in the little box they give you to write about yourself, or even in a cover letter. How do you tell them that you’re the first person there in the morning and the last person to leave at night? How do you tell them that you’re a worker?

    When the sun came up, he drove through office complexes and industrial parks, writing down the names and addresses of companies that sounded interesting. Then he would go home and write a letter to each one, inquiring about any openings they might have.

    Larry’s boy was grown and had moved out long ago, did okay for himself. There was just Larry and his wife, Nancy, but now he was having to dig into his savings just to pay the mortgage. His unemployment check barely covered the $1,300 a month in health insurance for the two of them. He had a twenty-eight-foot Sea Ray docked down in Maryland, but he couldn’t use it, not with gas prices the way they were. In fact, pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to make payments on the boat anymore. They’d take it away. Well, that would be too bad, but there are people a lot worse off. Then again, that creates the problem of bad credit, and most employers run a credit check, and suddenly you’ve got bad credit because you couldn’t make your boat payments… because you didn’t have a job.

    A few years ago, a man Larry had known for a long time couldn’t find a job, and one day he went out into his garage and shot himself in the head.

    It never got that bad for Larry, but still, it was discouraging like you can’t imagine. But Christ, he thought, I have to keep trying.

    Sometimes, in the afternoon, when there were no more résumés to send off, Larry and his wife would pack a lunch and go to the park. Or to the river. He would throw a line in the water, she would read her book. That was nice.

    Then one day, the phone rang. It was Raymour & Flanigan, the furniture company, asking him to come in for an interview the next afternoon at the store over in Montgomeryville. Larry said okay.

    Any good salesman will tell you that the most important part of selling is listening. A guy told Larry many years ago, when you’re talking, the only thing you hear is what you already know. Larry was a good listener.

    Raymour & Flanigan called back a couple of days later. And just like that, Larry Stocks was selling again.

    No statistics changed — when Stocks went to work on his first day, unemployment was still around 8.5 percent, just as it was the day before. But a man who had been spit out by an economy that told him he didn’t matter anymore, that his services were no longer required, had stared that economy down. He had swung back. He had outlasted it. He had done what men like him, and Greg Hanton, and Mike Lesnik, and Scott Annechino have always done: When there is no place to go every day, no job to haul your ass out of bed and show up for, you haul your ass out of bed anyway. You figure it out.

    On Larry’s first day, an older lady came into the store. They talked awhile — she was picking out a bed and a mattress for one of her sons. He was struggling, she said. Out of work. Larry nodded, squinted his eyes at her with warm understanding.

    He made the sale — his first sale, after a million sales before that.

    As he was finishing up the paperwork, the woman looked up at him. His suit fit him well, from his corporate days, and his shoes were shined. His tie was silk, and tied in a perfect half Windsor. “What did you do before, Larry?”

    He looked down, smiled. Told her he ran a company that distributed music and movies. She said, “What happened?”

    He said, Well, the company closed down, because people don’t buy that stuff in stores anymore. They download it.

    She nodded and stared off at nothing. She was probably just about old enough to remember the Great Depression.

    “It’s terrible out there, isn’t it?”

    Yes, it was. But I have a job, Larry thought. I’m selling. I’m working.

     

    http://www.esquire.com/features/stories-of-unemployment-0312

     

    Copyright. 2013.http://www.esquire.com/ All Rights Reserved

  • Las Vegas CityCenter Condos Sell in Bulk for $119 Million

    Las Vegas CityCenter Condos Sell in Bulk for $119 Million

    By John Gittelsohn - Dec 21, 2012 3:42 PM PT

    The owners of CityCenter, an $8.5 billion Las Vegas Strip development that opened amid the city’s real estate crash, said they sold 427 condominiums in a bulk transaction for $119 million.

    The residences are at the 669-unit Veer Towers, built as part of CityCenter, a joint venture ofMGM Resorts International (MGM) and Dubai World’s Infinity World Development Corp., they said today in a statement. The condos’ buyer is Ladder Capital Finance Holdings LLLP, said Tony Dennis, executive vice president of CityCenter Residential. The CityCenter hotel, casino and condo complex opened in 2009.

    “We built in the best of times and opened in the worst of times,” Dennis said in a telephone interview. “We’re seeing significant improvements in the market.”

    Investors have been buying homes to hold as rentals in Las Vegas and other cities hit by foreclosures, seeking to take advantage of low prices and demand for housing from people who can’t buy because of damaged credit.

    The median Las Vegas home price was $143,000 last month, up 24 percent from a year earlier, DataQuick reported today. They remain 54 percent below the November 2006 peak. Home sales in Las Vegas fell 7.7 percent from a year earlier as fewer properties priced less than $200,000 traded hands, the San Diego-based research firm said.

    Ladder Capital, a New York-based commercial real estate finance company, plans to hold the condominiums for as long as four years, selling them as the Las Vegas market recovers, Dennis said.

    ‘Feel Confident’

    “We feel confident about the investment potential of these condos,” Brian Harris, Ladder Capital’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an e-mailed statement. “Vegas is one of the condo markets that has not yet come back, but we think it will.”

    The company probably plans to rent the condos out until prices recover, said Brian Gordon, principal with Applied Analysis, a Las Vegas-based real estate consulting company.

    “The buyer clearly sees the opportunity to generate sufficient return during the hold period and ultimate resale,” Gordon, who wasn’t involved in the transaction, said in a telephone interview.

    The condos sold for about $300 a square foot, more than other recent sales in the city and less than a third of their listing price before the towers opened, Gordon said.

    The transaction joins other bulk purchases in the city. Blackstone Group LP’s Hilton Worldwide, based in McLean, Virginia, bought 300 condos at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, New York-based Trump Organization said in September.

     

    ©2013 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    Mandarin Oriental

    In addition to condos, CityCenter — located on 67 acres (27 hectares) between the Bellagio and Monte Carlo casinos — includes Aria, a 61-floor, 4,004-room gambling resort; a Mandarin Oriental hotel and residences; Vdara Hotel & Spa; and 500,000 square feet (46,000 square meters) of retail space.

    Veer Towers are now 98 percent sold, with 11 penthouses remaining. The deal will allow CityCenter’s owners to focus on the sale of the 160 remaining condos at the Mandarin Oriental, Dennis said.

    To contact the reporter on this story: John Gittelsohn in Los Angeles at johngitt@bloomberg.net

    To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net

  • Facebook: Why some “likes” are worth more than others

    By Tom Chatfield.
     
     

    Facebook: The new power of like

    (Copyright: Getty Images)

    After the social media giant announced its much-anticipated search function, Tom Chatfield wonders whether all its users are created equal, or has it become easy to game the system for personal profit?

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    IN BBC NEWS:

    Facebook, Apple - and the psychology of markets

    Facebook, Apple and the markets

    Look at what’s happened on the stock market to two of the best known names in technology over the last three months. The wild gyrations in their value will do nothing to convince sceptics that there is anything rational about stock markets.

    When Facebook announced its much-anticipated Graph Search earlier this week, there were two questions underpinning most commentators’ responses: will this make a lot of money, and can it beat Google at its own game?

    So far as the first question is concerned, the stock market response – an initial dip of around three per cent – suggested caution verging on disappointment. On the second front, however, there has been greater optimism, not least because Facebook seems to have invented a whole new game of its own: the world’s first truly social search function.

    As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained at the launch event, while search engines like Google are all about links, Graph Search is about answers: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers… Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, not give you links that might provide the answer”.

    These answers, moreover, will be entirely drawn from your individual “social graph” of friends. Type in a complex query – “people I know in New York who like video games”, or “friends who enjoy both modernist novels and hot chocolate” – and a sortable list pops up based on people who have “liked” these topics. You can search where your friends have been, what they’ve done, what they’re interested in, and how they rated all of these experiences.

    The system remains in beta, but advertisers, recruiters and brands are already salivating at the opportunities. So too, no doubt, are users hoping to meet attractive friends of friends, now all they have to do is type in search terms like “people who like Star Wars and are single” – photos being another major part of Graph Search. It’s big news for businesses and individuals alike, not to mention lovelorn geeks.

    Beyond this, though, Facebook’s decision to turn its data into an unprecedented playing field for social discovery also says something significant about the future of the internet, and its ever-closer integration with daily life.

    Once upon a time, most people used online services from behind at least a thin veil of anonymity. Search and discovery were impersonal: driven by the measurement of global trends and the aggregated analysis of millions of users’ actions.

    Arguably the biggest oversight in the history of companies like Google was their underestimation of people’s desire to personalise this experience. Using search engines to discover accurate results was all very well – but a still greater hunger existed for information defined not by its ranking, but by who it came from. Even the arbitrary mutterings of someone we know or admire (even if it is a Z-list celebrity) are more interesting to most of us, most of the time, than mere knowledge.

    As Elise Ackerman put it in her analysis of Graph Search for Forbes, “some ‘likes’ are worth more than others”. Not all users are created equal, and the more that anonymity is replaced by the encroaching real world of fame, friends, status and followers, the more this inequality becomes an embedded part of the daily business of digital living.

    Playing for perks

    None of which should be much of a surprise to those accustomed tocelebrities like Snoop Dogg or Kim Kardashian hawking products to their millions of Twitter followers. What began with these fortunate few, however, is a pattern that increasingly applies to us all.

    Inequality isn’t just about social status, of course. As more and more of the world comes online across a greater variety of devices, we inexorably face a more unequal global internet: different speeds, different restrictions, different services and rights. By putting network effects at the heart of not only social interactions, but also information discovery and dissemination, Facebook is feeding this unevenness – and helping us all, along the way, to work our particular assets for all they’re worth.

     

    It’s easy to see how this system can be gamed. Visited a restaurant and enjoyed the experience? Write a favourable review for money off next time. Haven’t visited a restaurant, but have lots of friends and followers? Earn cash in hand for claiming that you visited and loved every minute.

    Social networks are not, in this sense, a levelling force so much as a vast magnifying glass applied to human nature, accentuating that which is already there – contacts, celebrity, exclusivity, excitement and attractiveness included.

    None of which is to suggest Facebook’s Graph Search is destined for triumph, or that it’s only about fame and freebies. What it is, however, is a sign of a digital culture increasingly rooted in real lives and locations; or at least in certain clickable, measurable aspects of them. Playing the system brings its perks – and opting out means missing out in real as much as virtual terms.

    In the end, Facebook just wants to make us happy: to help us get more of what we want, when we want it, from whom we want. It doesn’t matter whether the details involve fine dining, exclusive fragrances, ski trips, or special offers at Burger King – it still means recruiting each one of us as part-time publicists, broadcasters, reviewers and self-promoters.

    The catch, as Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski argued back in November 2011, is what incentives this particular vision places on our relationships. “We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage,” he noted. “We call that person a sociopath.”

    Ceglowski’s words are a warning rather than a prophecy, but they’re also something we need to take seriously. In the age of an increasingly unequal internet, where relationships and endorsements alike are saleable commodities, the rewards for tapping into our inner sociopaths have rarely been more tempting. Win or lose, however, some games are never worth playing.

    Do you agree with Tom? If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

     

    BBC © 2013 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

  • How Pursuit of Billionaire Hit One Dead End

    HEDGE FUNDS | LEGAL/REGULATORY JANUARY 14, 2013, 10:01 PM25 Comments

    How Pursuit of Billionaire Hit One Dead End

    BY PETER LATTMAN AND BEN PROTESS

     

    When Jonathan Hollander left his high-flying job at SAC Capital Advisors in late 2008, he departed one of Wall Street’s premier hedge funds.

    Weeks later, when two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents confronted him outside the Equinox gym in Greenwich Village, Mr. Hollander realized that investigators viewed his former employer as something else — a corrupt organization rife with insider trading.

    Steven A. Cohen, the founder and chairman of SAC Capital Advisors, a $14 billion hedge fund.Steve Marcus/ReutersSteven A. Cohen, the founder and chairman of SAC Capital Advisors, a $14 billion hedge fund.

    The agents took Mr. Hollander into a nearby cafe and questioned him about his trading in the stock of a supermarket chain. They showed him a sheet of paper with headshots of several of his former colleagues. At the center was a photograph of Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire owner of SAC, according to two lawyers briefed on the meeting who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The agents compared Mr. Cohen to a Mafia boss who sat atop a criminal enterprise, the lawyers said.

     

    In the end, no criminal case was filed against Mr. Hollander. And neither Mr. Cohen nor SAC has been accused of any wrongdoing. Mr. Cohen has told employees and clients that he and SAC have at all times acted appropriately.

    An examination of Mr. Hollander’s case, based on a review of court documents and interviews with people involved in the investigation, provides a lens into the government’s aggressive crackdown on insider trading and fierce pursuit of Mr. Cohen over the last decade. Investigators saw Mr. Hollander as a suspect, and he also piqued their interest as someone who could open a window into SAC and Mr. Cohen.

    Yet the investigation of Mr. Hollander, 37, also highlights the challenges of using lower-level employees to build a case against their boss.

    Hedge Fund Inquiry

     

    1 of 4

    • Graphic

    • Video

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    • Documents

     

    A Look at Insider Trading

    Some of the cases involving former employees of SAC Capital Advisors, the fund run by Steven A.Cohen.

     

     

    The authorities have moved on from Mr. Hollander, who is working as an entrepreneur. Today, they are focused on another former junior SAC employee, Mathew Martoma, who is fighting a recent indictment and refuses to cooperate with the government. Mr. Martoma’s case has increased the pressure on SAC and Mr. Cohen, who was involved in the trades at the center of the charges against Mr. Martoma.

    While Mr. Hollander provided prosecutors with no such direct link to Mr. Cohen, some authorities thought he possessed a rich vein of information about his former employer. Others dismissed him as a junior analyst who offered uncorroborated tips at best, lawyers close to the case recalled.

    With authorities at odds over his importance and the strength of the evidence against him, Mr. Hollander’s criminal case fizzled.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission settled a lawsuit with Mr. Hollander related to improper trading in his personal account for less than $200,000, a manageable penalty for someone who earned a few million dollars on SAC’s trading floor. And in an embarrassment for prosecutors, they charged the investment banker who they thought provided confidential information to Mr. Hollander, and then dropped the case against the investment banker entirely.

    “A low-level guy sometimes doesn’t get the government where it needs to be because there is only so much information they can give,” said Allen D. Applbaum, co-leader of global risk and investigations at FTI Consulting and a former federal prosecutor. “Frequently, you can hit a dead end or a roadblock and then have to move on.”

    Through his lawyer, Aitan D. Goelman, Mr. Hollander declined to comment for this article.

    A native of Annapolis, Md., Mr. Hollander pursued a career on Wall Street after graduating from Tufts University and Stanford Business School. Early in his career, in the late 1990s, Mr. Hollander worked at Credit Suisse, where he became fast friends with two other ambitious young analysts — Ramesh Chakrapani and Nicos Stephanou.

    The three went their separate ways but stayed in touch. Mr. Hollander eventually landed at SAC, where he spent nearly four years in its CR Intrinsic unit, a division of the fund. In November 2008, SAC, which is based in Stamford, Conn., let Mr. Hollander go during broad cuts because of the financial crisis.

    Around that time, investigators learned that Mr. Stephanou, who had moved to UBS, was sharing confidential information with friends about merger deals, according to court records. That December, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Stephanou, who began cooperating.

    He told investigators about a dinner that he claimed to attend with Mr. Hollander and Mr. Chakrapani where the three freely discussed a planned buyout of the grocery business Albertsons. Mr. Stephanou and Mr. Chakrapani, who was then working as a banker at the Blackstone Group, both advised on the transaction.

    F.B.I. agents approached Mr. Hollander and Mr. Chakrapani in January 2009. It was a coordinated operation. As the agents waited for Mr. Hollander to finish his workout, law enforcement officials met Mr. Chakrapani at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he walked off a plane from London.

    They arrested Mr. Chakrapani and prosecutors filed a complaint charging him with tipping an unnamed hedge fund trader about the Albertsons deal. The S.E.C. filed a parallel lawsuit. Mr. Hollander was the unnamed hedge fund trader, according to lawyers close to the case. Prosecutors said that the trader — Mr. Hollander — made $3.5 million in profits for his employer by illegally trading in Albertsons stock.

    Mr. Hollander, seen as a potential cooperator who could help them penetrate SAC, was not charged. After his initial meeting with agents at the Greenwich Village cafe, where Mr. Hollander appeared calm and poised, he spent two days in April being interviewed by government officials at the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.

    Prodded for information about the hedge fund giant, Mr. Hollander offered up several examples of questionable activity at SAC that he had either witnessed or had heard about, lawyers briefed on the matter said. He told the authorities about a lucrative, uncannily timed trade in the drug maker Elan, which is now at the center of Mr. Martoma’s prosecution. While investigators were already examining the transaction, Mr. Hollander reinforced their suspicions. Mr. Hollander also shared information on a more than $150 million trade at SAC involving shares of the biotechnology firm MedImmune, the lawyers said. Authorities suspected that an SAC employee placed the trade using inside information about a British company’s 2007 acquisition of MedImmune.

    Some of the insights Mr. Hollander offered aided the government’s inquiry into SAC. The broader investigation has led to three onetime SAC traders pleading guilty to trading stocks based on secret corporate information while at the fund; at least seven former employees have been tied to insider trading.

    Representatives for the F.B.I., the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the S.E.C. declined to comment.

    After a flurry of activity, the cases against Mr. Chakrapani and Mr. Hollander sputtered.

    In a rare reversal, just three months after bringing criminal charges against Mr. Chakrapani, prosecutors dropped them without explanation. As investigators struggled to corroborate Mr. Stephanou’s story, the S.E.C. also withdrew its lawsuit. The government said in court papers that dismissing the case against Mr. Chakrapani had nothing to do with its “assessment of Stephanou’s veracity.” Mr. Stephanou, who was detained for 19 months in jail, while cooperating, has since returned to his native Cyprus.

    After Mr. Chakrapani’s arrest, Blackstone suspended him. Without a job, he moved in with his parents in California. Mr. Chakrapani recently rejoined Blackstone, according to a spokesman for the firm.

    “The dismissal of the unwarranted charges brought against Mr. Chakrapani cannot undo the damage to his professional reputation,” said Michael Sommer, the lawyer who represented Mr. Chakrapani. “And it remains one of the glaring flaws in our system that the law provides little if any legal recourse for those subjected to these types of damages.”

    Mr. Hollander also remained in limbo as authorities weighed his importance and the quality of the evidence against him. Some wanted to use him as a witness in a broader SAC case, according to officials briefed on the investigation, but prosecutors questioned the accuracy and utility of his tips.

    Ultimately, he was never criminally charged and did not enter into a formal cooperation agreement with the government. The S.E.C. did not bring its lawsuit until 2011. And when it did, unlike the triumphal news releases that normally accompany its insider trading victories, the agency put on its Web site a brief statement about the settlement. The complaint did not mention SAC.

    The S.E.C.’s case involved claims that Mr. Hollander, along with a family member and business school classmate, illegally traded Albertsons stock in their personal accounts, earning combined profits of about $96,000. Mr. Hollander agreed to pay the government $192,000, and accepted a three-year ban from the securities industry.

    At the time of the settlement, Mr. Goelman, the lawyer for Mr. Hollander, said his client resolved the matter rather than engage in costly litigation.

    His brush with the government seemingly over, Mr. Hollander has tried to move on. Unable to trade stocks, he started his own consulting firm, the Chesapeake Advisory Group, and also co-founded EvoSpend, a financial services technology company.

    And last year, in an attempt to improve his Internet profile and de-emphasize articles about his insider trading case in Google search results, Mr. Hollander set up a series of Web pages highlighting his philanthropic pursuits and other accomplishments.

     

    Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

    A version of this article appeared in print on 01/15/2013, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: How Pursuit of Billionaire Hit One Dead End.

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  • Poppin’ Tags: Vintage, Thrift, and the Value of Slow Fashion

    12/19/2012 4:30:33 PM
    by Katie Haegele

    The Vintage Shop Window by slightly everything, Creative Commons 
    Photo by slightly everything, licensed under Creative Commons. 

     

    This afternoon, to reward myself for a morning of hard writing work and because I couldn’t stand using my brain for one minute more, I went looking online for a new winter coat. Online shopping is fun where real-life shopping is stressful: I don’t have to get all sweaty and frustrated in a fitting room, and I don’t feel driven to buy something to justify the time I’ve spent negotiating crowded stores. I can just look.

    But on this occasion, actually, I wanted to buy. I had seen an ad on some fashion blog for these gorgeous cloaks made by designer Lindsey Thornburg. That’s what I want!, I thought. Not a dorky old coat like I’ve worn every year, all fastened into it like a Stay-Puft straight-jacket. I want to swoosh around in soft fabrics that sort of wrap around and hang off me, all cool and chic. Visions of Denise Huxtable danced in my head. But talk about getting sweaty: The cloaks cost between $600 and $1200, and as beautiful as they are I couldn’t justify spending that much money on one piece of clothing.

    Maybe other people make nice cloaks / capes / cape-coats, I thought. I toggled the terms and did some Google searching and to my surprise etsy shops kept popping up. I like etsy, which is an online craft marketplace where makers of all kinds of things can sell them. I’ve had my own etsy shop for quite a few years now; I use it to sell my zines and other paper crafts. But to my total dismay I soon understood that many of the stores that were offering the—trendy, cute, and inexpensive—coats I liked were being sold by overseas clothing manufacturers posing as craftspeople. The vast majority of these were located in China. The same thing has happened on ebay, if you’ve noticed, though this doesn’t have quite the same meaning since that site has no requirement that the things sold there be “handmade.”

    Today, and for the last twenty years or so now, most of the clothes we Americans buy have not been made in the U.S., but in poorer countries where the legal hourly wage is much lower. I know that you know this. But did you know that Americans now buy an average of 64 pieces of new clothing a year? That one reason we’re able to get clothing as cheaply as we now can is that huge “fast fashion” retailers like H&M and Target can order clothes in previously unheard-of quantities, a production rate that is devastating for the environment? Or that more than 40 percent of the clothing now produced worldwide is made of plastic in the form of polyester and other synthetic fabrics?

    Boombox Bling, photo by Aih, Creative Commons

    I didn’t, not really, until I read Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, by Elizabeth Cline. Cline, a journalist and first-time author, talks about sweatshop labor in the tradition of books like The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. But she goes beyond this and looks at something else: Our hunger for excessively cheap clothes and trends that cycle in and out every week or two, and the massive machine that keeps it all moving.

    This is a serious problem. Unfortunately—very unfortunately—it’s a problem that’s hard to feel. Cheap clothes are everywhere, looking bright and cheerful, and few of us Americans have actually seen, firsthand, the environmental desolation caused by all the unsustainable factory production in other parts of the world. (Cline writes that after visiting China’s Guangdong Province, where polyester plants and electronics factories are clustered, her throat ached, her eyes burned, and she got a sinus infection that lingered for months.) It’s not the 90s anymore, and people who talk about conspicuous consumption and petroleum products don’t get invited back to parties. Furthermore, our economy sucks right now—ironically, in large part because we’ve outsourced almost all of our factory work to other countries—and a lot of us are out of work or working jobs where we can’t get enough hours, enough pay, or any health insurance. If things aren’t really cheap we might not be able to buy them at all. We’ve come to expect cute clothing—and electronics, and other entertainment and luxury goods—to be about as inexpensive as we want it to be, and where there’s a demand, there will always, always be a supply, even when the toll is human lives.

    I found Cline’s book fascinating and distressing. It would have moved me to make some serious life changes if I’d read it ten years ago, when I was a frequent lunchtime H&M shopper. But I don’t go into malls or other stores that sell new clothing very often anymore. This isn’t because I’m not vain about how I look (!!! trust me), or because I’m so morally superior that I always make the unselfish choice. It’s because at this point I buy almost all the things I need and want secondhand, and I do so because it’s frugal, interesting, and fun. I know this isn’t terribly unusual of me, and also that it is not revolutionary. Except that it is, in a small way—a way I can feel.

    I have a million thrift shop victory stories. Let me tell you one. A few weeks ago I discovered a junk store in an outer suburb of Philadelphia, a sweet and down-to-earth town with a thriving main street filled with small local businesses and a commuter train that goes right through its center. And this store, it’s incredible. It’s dank in there—they said something about the front half of the store being heated with electricity and the back with oil, and they were still waiting for the month’s oil delivery, yeesh—and its darkness and clutter would probably repel a more casual shopper. This is how I knew it would be good. This place has more records than some small record stores I’ve been to and, pinned to big bolts of fabric hanging on the walls over the crates of records, some woman’s enormous collection of band buttons from the ‘70s-’90s. (The place sells on consignment, and the owner told me about the person who brought those in.) I found a Fad Gadget button and a Human League one, and ones with Bobby Brown with a hi-top fade! I also found a stack of papers in the magazine section that were some kind of survey about nuclear energy taken by college students in the 1940s. Point is, all the clothing, including shoes, cost $1.50 apiece. I bought a beautiful light blue sweater that’s embellished with beads and ribbon and has gathered sleeves and shoulder pads, a pair of black ankle boots, and a terrible teal pants suit (which I wanted for the pants only) that I don’t think I’ll be able to keep because, oh gosh, it really looks bad. I plan to wear the sweater on New Year’s Eve, though I may have to have it laundered first. It was such a fun way to spend a blank Saturday afternoon.

    Cline writes that one of the ways we have tended to give ourselves permission to buy trendy clothing that we don’t need is the idea that there is always a “poor African” who will be grateful for our donation when we’re through with it. She says this is pretty much a fantasy at this point, and this dangerous thinking—besides being arrogant and insidiously racist—is instead helping to fill landfills with fabrics that won’t break down for like a hundred years, and leak poisons into our soil and water supply as they do. But if you buy the stuff used in the first place, it’s got to be an improvement, right? When I’m tired of a piece of clothing or it no longer fits me, I give it away to a thrift store again, sometimes the same one I bought it from.

    Having bought mostly secondhand things for several years now has changed my attitude toward objects and ownership in an interesting way. I do have things I’d hate to lose, but for the most part it feels like I have an apartment full of knick-knacks and books and shoes on loan, like I’m lucky to get to look at and wear all these neat things and it’s extra special and sort of poignant too because I know they’re not really mine. This is a more light-hearted and also more emotionally engaged attitude than the shackled sense of fretful responsibility I have felt toward things I paid a lot of money for. Like, go ahead and steal it, it was practically free. Knowing that something once belonged to someone else—coupled with the fact that I paid only a dollar or maybe ten for it—makes my ownership of that thing feel less real, temporary, like the universe is my big sister and I’m borrowing stuff from her closet. I’ll give it back soon, I promise.

    It happens that Cline’s book came out the same month as my first book, White Elephants, a small memoir which is, in a nutshell, about going to yard sales with my mom. It ends up also being about my relationship with her and my deceased father, and whatnot, but it really is honestly also a book about stuff. About the piggy banks, teacups, clip-on earrings, picture frames, typewriters, paperbacks and, yes, heaps of clothing I’ve bought for next to nothing in church basements and on people’s front lawns, and about the pleasure I get from imagining these objects’ history or even meeting the people who own them and want to tell me about them. 

    In her book, Cline addresses the problem of true “vintage” clothing (anything older than 20 years) being picked over by resellers and given a high price tag at hip boutiques, and she talks in a doomy way about how everything at the Salvation Army these days is just some tired-looking thing from Target or Old Navy. (Indeed, because to the rapid production of “fast fashion” clothes, even thrift stores can’t keep up with all the donations they receive. They end up having to throw many of these new clothes away.) But this was the one part of the book I couldn’t fully relate to. I go to a thrift store or yard sale once a week on average, and I’m always able to find legit old clothing that is weird and wonderful and much better made than most things you find new these days. That said, I’ll wear the crappy sparkly fast-fashion top, too, if I can get it secondhand. Is this immoral or hypocritical of me in some way? Or is buying the thing new what keeps the big bad machine in gear? I’m not sure I know the answer to that. These are confusing problems, and I love glitter.

    Cline writes that the lesson she’d like people to take away from her book is not that they can never again buy something new, or that they should go off the grid and start making all their own clothes (though she found, by taking sewing lessons, that knowing how to make and alter things is deeply satisfying and far from impossible). She wasn’t interested in making us feel ashamed or guilty. She placed the blame where it belongs: On the big, greedy companies who have created a marketplace where, depending on where you live, it can be basically impossible to buy new clothing that wasn’t produced by people working in dangerous conditions or in a way, and at a rate, that is ruinous to our environment. What she wants, she says, is for people to be mindful when they buy new things. To not let clothing be an impulse purchase, just because it’s cheap. For us to treat our belongings with respect because they were made by a human being, and only a spoiled brat throws her nice things all over the floor.

    That’s one of the things I like most about secondhand shopping—that thoughtfulness. I like having to dig for my treasure, to not know what I’ll find, and to fill my home with things that vibrate with other people’s energy. It’s neat to think that mine will be the life someone else imagines when I pass my stuff along to them.

    Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ hit music video, “Thrift Shop feat. Wanz” 

     

    Read more: http://www.utne.com/mind-body/poppin-tags-vintage-thrift-and-slow-fashion.aspx#ixzz2H0JFzzQd

     

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