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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Can a Reporter Go a Whole Day Without Learning Who Won the Super Bowl?

A hundred and fourteen million Americans watched the Super Bowl on the first Sunday of this month. That same day, just over a hundred people embarked on a different kind of game, an annual, loosely organized showdown called Last Man. Last Man is the battle to be the “Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl;” its players call themselves “runners” and report their “deaths” on Twitter. The whole thing is strictly run on the honor system. Below is an excerpt from a recent New Yorker story by Reeves Wiedeman about Last Man:

Monday is the most difficult day, and within twenty-four hours, half of the runners had been eliminated. Just getting to work was a problem. (Did you glance at the Captivate screen in your office elevator? You died.) “I think the slushercane helped,” John Carney, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a Last Man competitor, said, of the wintry mix in New York the day after the Super Bowl. “I had to keep my eyes down, watching my step. No danger of accidentally seeing a newspaper.” Survival, he said, requires “intense eye discipline.” Getting to his desk near the Journal sports department required passing innumerable copies of the day’s paper, which had the result printed across the top of the front page. He recruited nearby coworkers to alert him to possible danger—the newsroom has enough televisions to make a Best Buy manager envious—and when an editor from another desk walked by wearing a Patriots jersey, a friend warned Carney not to look up. At one point, Carney had nineteen unread text messages and eighty-six unclicked e-mails. (A Journal colleague writes, “Are you making clear there’s no way Carney could have been doing his job effectively while avoiding all news services?”) On Tuesday, he was looking at the Pragmatic Capitalist, a Web site that typically offers “Practical Views on Money & Finance” but that day had an article titled “Game Theory Cannot Rationalize Seattle’s Super Bowl Loss.” (“It all makes me wonder if Carroll wasn’t suffering from a severe case of recency bias.”) Death by game theory.

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Where Does the Term “Spin Doctor” Come From?

A Google Ngram graph illustrating the usage of the term "spin doctor" over the last three decades.

The term “spin doctor” is ubiquitous in contemporary politics—but what exactly does it mean? And when did it enter the common vernacular?

The Oxford English Dictionary added the term in their 1993 draft addition, and defines it as such: “a political press agent or publicist employed to promote a favourable interpretation of events to journalists.” But that’s just when it entered the dictionary—surely people were using it before then. For it’s full etymology, we must turn to the late William Safire’s “On Language” column for the New York Times Magazine, specifically his August 31, 1986 column entitled “Calling Dr. Spin.” An excerpt is below:

Spin doctor is a locution we must keep our eyes on for 1988. It is based on the slang meaning of the verb to spin, which in the 1950’s meant ”to deceive,” perhaps influenced by ”to spin a yarn.” More recently, as a noun, spin has come to mean ”twist,” or ”interpretation”; when a pitcher puts a spin on a baseball, he causes it to curve, and when we put our own spin on a story, we angle it to suit our predilections or interests.

The phrase spin doctor was coined on the analogy of play doctor, one who fixes up a limping second act, and gains from the larcenous connotation of the verb doctor, to fix a product the way a crooked bookkeeper ”cooks” books.

Its earliest citation in the Nexis computer files is from an editorial in The New York Times on Oct. 21, 1984, about the Reagan-Mondale televised debates. ”Tonight at about 9:30,” wrote the editorialist, ”seconds after the Reagan-Mondale debate ends, a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room. . . . A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates. . . .”

…Four days later, Elisabeth Bumiller of The Washington Post picked up the phrase, defining spin doctors – no longer capitalized – as ”the advisers who talk to reporters and try to put their own spin, or analysis, on the story.” The term was thus sealed into the new political vocabulary, and will be trotted out by pundits in the coming campaign to prove that their opinions cannot be influenced.

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How U.S. Spies Dug Up Hitler’s Sex Secrets

Earlier this week Mother Jones published a fascinating sampling from the CIA’s psychological profiles of various international figures. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era CIA predecessor) tasked a Harvard psychologist with drafting a profile of Hitler’s personality. Below is an excerpt, as compiled by Dave Gilson of Mother Jones:

There is little disagreement among professional, or even among amateur, psychologists that Hitler’s personality is an example of the counteractive type, a type that is marked by intense and stubborn efforts (i) to overcome early disabilities, weaknesses and humiliations (wounds to self-esteem), and sometimes also by efforts (ii) to revenge injuries and insults to pride…

Sexually he is a full-fledged masochist…Hitler’s long-concealed secret heterosexual fantasy has been exposed by the systemic analysis and correlation of the three thousand odd metaphors he uses in Mein Kampfand yet—Hitler himself is Impotent. [original emphasis] He is unmarried and his old acquaintances say that he is incapable of consumating the sexual act in a normal fashion.

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The City Opens Up At Night: How LA’s Underground Bike Scene Took Off

The underground bike scene in L.A., most people agree, took off thanks to a single group: Midnight Ridazz, whose origins can be traced to a chilly evening in February 2004, when six cyclists and two skateboarders were hanging out in Echo Park and spontaneously decided to tour the fountains of downtown Los Angeles.

Their 18-mile adventure became known as the first Midnight Ridazz ride, a name devised by its eight participants. One was Don Ward, now a well-known face of L.A.’s cycling community. At 6 foot 8 inches, he’s better known by his nickname “Roadblock,” given because he would step into intersections and use his huge frame to block cars until all the cyclists, sometimes many dozens, had passed through.

“We called ourselves ‘the Mommas and Papas,’” says Ward, now 41.

For the original eight, the fountain tour was something of an epiphany. As the Mommas and Papas explored downtown, they realized something: At night, the city opened up to them. They suddenly had free rein on the roads, the freedom to discover L.A. on their own terms. They could pass through the richest and poorest neighborhoods in a single evening.

Chris Walker writing in LA Weekly about LA’s flourishing underground cycling world. Most of the action takes place on city streets after dark, in a “vast community [where] competition and prestige run deep.”

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E.M. Forster on the Novel and Why Aristotle Was Wrong About Character

“Character,” says Aristotle, gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.” We have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of disagreeing with him. “All human happiness and misery,” says Aristotle, “take the form of action.” We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or sigh. A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.

There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few novels and no modern ones—the Odyssey but not Ulysses—he was by temperament apathetic to secrecy, and indeed regarded the human mind as a sort of tub from which everything can finally be extracted; and when he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown, and this is the great difference between the drama and the novel.

The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man does not talk to himself quite truly—not even to himself; the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. Forster’s magnificent treatise on the novel was published in 1927 and is compiled from a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University.

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What de Blasio and Uruguay’s José Mujica Have In Common

I showed the group a Guardian article calling [Uruguay’s President] Mujica “the world’s most radical president.” They burst into contemptuous groans.

Last January, Bill de Blasio took over as mayor of New York City. The election was a landslide; the hopes invested in him near messianic. “When New York City Democrats head to the polls … they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the narrative of their city … Mayor de Blasio might have a real chance to begin stitching the city’s tattered social contract back together,” the Nation effused in its August 2013 endorsement. It didn’t take long for the backlash to start: protests in the streets over Eric Garner, the police union snubbing and work slowdown. Around de Blasio, The New York Times concluded last month, hangs an “atmosphere of sullen insubordination.”

It’s a pattern: We keep creating saviors whom we expect to single- handedly restore lost values. Then we lash out at them when they inevitably fall short.

“I want a hero,” Lord Byron begins “Don Juan,” written in 1819. “An uncommon want / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one …” So the cycle by which we erect and dismantle saviors isn’t new. But it has been amplified, partly as a result of the increasingly complex nature of global society and power itself.

Eve Fairbanks writing in the New Republic about Uruguay’s José Mujica. Mujica’s straightforward and humble “truth to power” approach has brought him worldwide acclaim, but many Uruguayan progressives are disappointed by what he has actually accomplished.

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What Would a More Efficient Clinical Trial System Look Like?

Photo: Pixabay

What might a more-efficient trial system look like? One collaboration in Chicago offers a possible way forward.

Working together, several of the city’s academic medical centers have established a joint network for conducting clinical trials. Participating institutions now routinely interview all of their hospitalized patients, regardless of diagnosis, to keep detailed records on their health status. With permission, those records are made available to researchers.

Over 15 years, the process has enrolled 100,000 patients, many of whom are then recruited for clinical trials, said David O. Meltzer, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Much of the data is collected by undergraduates, and the team has grown large enough that newcomers can be trained without the need to constantly rebuild for each new trial, Dr. Meltzer said. “It’s wildly cost-effective,” he said, “and it’s incredibly good for the students.”

Even more savings could be realized by reconsidering when trial participants are even needed. A dozen years ago, Benjamin A. Olken, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted to study corruption in Indonesia, to learn which of two strategies—threatening audits of government officials or giving community members a more direct role in monitoring—would do a better job of keeping road builders from “cheating.”

Paul Basken writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education about what he learned over the course of seven years as a participant in a medical clinical trial.

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The Invisible Hand: Who Was Adam Smith?

In a recent essay for Adbusters, Douglas Haddow posited that algorithms are the new “invisible hand” guiding our capitalist system. But before Haddow got to that conclusion, he explored the original idea of the invisible hand, and the man behind the phrase:

If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard behind the ghost in the machine, we need to look no further than Adam Smith, that dour Scot who lived with his mum and accidentally created the modern world.

Smith was neither a modernist nor a cosmopolitan. He was an absent-minded hermit who never married, had few friends, suffered from alternating fits of depression and hypochondria, travelled outside Britain on just one occasion and demanded that all his personal writing be burned upon his death. He was the supreme king of unintended consequences, a humble and misunderstood moral philosopher who became the patron saint of greed.

Most famously, and most tragically, Smith was an ambitious writer who got a bit flowery with his language on occasion, and, as a result, his entire legacy was reduced to two words: invisible and hand. As in, the Invisible Hand — that mysterious market force that secretly and surreptitiously guides all our actions and decisions. Or so we’ve been told.

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Using the British Railway Mania of the 1840s to Explain the Beanie Baby Craze

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23488805@N02/

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and naysayers. (Some scholars think Jesus’ resurrection might have been an acute instance of collective hallucination.)

The existence of groupthink has been confirmed in a rich assortment of studies, and Odlyzko’s theory expands the idea to economic bubbles. Under his analysis, the initial coterie of Beanie Baby collectors comprised an in-group that shared the great secret of Beanie Babies’ worth. As more people discovered the toy, they yearned to learn this secret and partake in the impending financial success of the Beanie Babies market. Soon, millions of Americans were gripped by the conviction that they had discovered an easy path to personal wealth. And thanks to their collective hallucination of Beanie Babies’ worth, none of these collectors ever realized that the only thing driving the Beanie Babies market was their own conviction that the toys were valuable.

These theories may explain the mass delusions that enabled a large chunk of the country to believe that a $5 Beanie Baby could eventually be worth thousands. What they never quite get at, however, is that initial spark of fascination: how the ineffable appeal of Beanie Babies turned them, and not one of a thousand other 1990s trends, into a collective mania. That allure can probably never be quantified.

Mark Joseph Stern writing in Slate about the economics and psychology of the Beanie Babies craze.

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How a $1B E-Commerce Site Found Its Market on a Trip to Babies “R” Us

They had a small inkling of what they wanted to do. At the time, flash-sale startups like Gilt were just beginning to make some noise, and Cavens and Vadon seriously considered aping the model for the home and beauty space (a la One Kings Lane) before scrapping the idea. “What we came to realize in the health and beauty space, there’s a lot of vendor concentration,” Cavens says. “Many of the top 50 brands are owned by three large companies. If you don’t have the supply there, it’s hard to go after.” They ruled out fashion as well because they deemed it too unwieldy. “What we felt like there is you couldn’t control the supplier dynamics if you’re going after high fashion,” he says, especially “if you were trying to get new freshness every day.”

As they tell it, they decided to focus on boutique products for young moms shortly after Vadon and his wife, who at the time was five months pregnant, made their first trip to Babies “R” Us. Overwhelmed by the mountain of crap that young parents never knew they needed, they made one loop through the store and headed for the exit to get lunch.

The experience would prove to not so much be a moment of clarity as a conversation starter. Vadon brought the ovum of his mom-driven business to Cavens, and they soon realized that the total addressable market for new mothers was both underserved and enormous: Some 4.5 million kids are born in the U.S. every year, and the only discount retailers in the space were, like, T.J. Maxx. If they could subvert a legacy diamond seller like Tiffany & Co., they could do something here. In mid-2009 they chose the name “Zulily” with the help of a branding agency because it was easy to say and just as important, it wouldn’t limit what they could sell. (Some of the too-cute runner’s-up included: ItsyBtsy, Tumble Up, Tip Toe, Katroo, Toodle, and Pitter-Patter.)

And so, two new dads began building an online retail store for new mothers.

Chris Gayomali writing about the e-commerce company Zulily for Fast Company.

 

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