The Longreads Blog

The New York Times Investigates the Exploitation of Nail Salon Workers

Photo via Flickr

Salon workers describe a culture of subservience that extends far beyond the pampering of customers. Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish. At her Harlem salon, Ms. Cacho said she and her colleagues had to buy new clothes in whatever color the manager decided was fashionable that week. Cameras are regularly hidden in salons, piping live feeds directly to owners’ smartphones and tablets.

Qing Lin, 47, a manicurist who has worked on the Upper East Side for the last 10 years, still gets emotional when recounting the time a splash of nail polish remover marred a customer’s patent Prada sandals. When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay. Ms. Lin was asked not to return.

“I am worth less than a shoe,” she said.

Sarah Maslin Nir, in The New York Times, on the low wages and abuse suffered by manicurists.

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Technology, Privacy, and Searchable Text

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.

What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.

In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.

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Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

Dan Froomkin writing for The Intercept about how the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text.

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The Man Who Became Big Bird

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

 

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

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The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it. Read more…

The Boy Who Loved Transit

Photo via mtaphotos (Edited)

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words)

 

This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Livingston Journalism Award. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Business Writing, and The CAFO Reader. Our thanks to Tietz for allowing us to reprint it here. For those interested in an update on Darius McCollum’s story, see this 2013 The Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req’d).

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Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:

To: All Concerned Departments

From: Thomas Calandrella Chief Track Officer

Re: Darius McCollum Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.

To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.

Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny—”attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is thirty-seven and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victim-less offenses related to transit systems. Read more…

The Fight Club of Motivational Books

The professional cannot take rejection personally because to do so reinforces Resistance. Editors are not the enemy; critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy. The battle is inside our own heads. We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe. The foe is strong enough already.

A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still.

—From writer Steven Pressfield’s manifesto on overcoming creative blocks, negative thoughts, and fear: The War of Art.

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The Price We Pay for Mass Incarceration

Put another way, the supposition on which our mass incarceration is premised—namely, that it materially reduces crime—is, at best, a hunch. Yet the price we pay for acting on this hunch is enormous. This is true in the literal sense: it costs more than $80 billion a year to run our jails and prisons. It is also true in the social sense: by locking up so many young men, most of them men of color, we contribute to the erosion of family and community life in ways that harm generations of children, while creating a future cadre of unemployable ex-cons many of whom have learned in prison how better to commit future crimes. And it is even true in the symbolic sense: by locking up, sooner or later, one out of every three African-American males, we send a message that our society has no better cure for racial disparities than brute force.

Federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, writing in the New York Review of Books about mass incarceration.

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Romantic Love: The Dominant Subject Matter of Western Popular Music

[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as the dominant subject matter of Western popular music.

This tendency became overwhelming in 20th-century America. Both in the freestanding commercial pop songs of Tin Pan Alley and in musical-comedy lyrics, love is the near-universal theme. One can almost count on the fingers of both hands the number of standard ballads written between 1920 and 1960 that are not about romantic love, whether failed or successful. Even among such chronically disillusioned lyricists as Lorenz Hart, it is the singer’s desirable but unattainable ideal: This funny world/Makes fun of the things that you strive for/This funny world/Can laugh at the dreams you’re alive for. What is more, most of these perennially popular songs presuppose marriage as the natural consequence of love, sometimes implicitly but just as often explicitly, as in Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”: He’ll build a little home,/Just meant for two,/From which I’ll never roam,/Who would, would you?

Terry Teachout writing in Commentary about love songs, and music historian Ted Gioia’s new book Love Songs: The Hidden History.

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The Secret to Honesty in Writing

“It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret.”

Author Louise Erdrich, in the Paris Review.

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Why People Get Tattoos

OK, changing the subject a little: Tattooing has been around for thousands of years, we’re even finding early humans with tattoos. Do you think there is something inherent to human nature that makes us want to tattoo ourselves?
Sure. The cadaver that was found frozen and preserved in the Alps, which I think is about 5,000 years old—he’s in a museum in Italy, you can drop by and say hello—the latest research shows that his body has quite a few tattoos on his skin. They tend to be abstract designs. Based on their locations, it’s been hypothesized that they were there to distract from uncomfortable physical things like arthritis. Or possibly, that they have some kind of magical significance. If you think about it, from a certain point of view, as all of our behavior tends to be very magical in some ways. Imagine that there’s some special power in your symbols, in your tagline, in your brand, that somehow elevates your mood, makes you feel stronger, more capable, better about yourself.

Do you think that’s something inherent to humanity?
Sure. As people, we are regularly on the edge of an existential panic. Becker said that if you were to see the world realistically; just how vulnerable and totally insignificant you are, in terms of the cosmos, you’d go crazy. So you constantly need stories that build up your self esteem and make you feel significant, which is, of course, what culture provides.

Jules Suzdaltsev interviewing Dr. Kirby Farrell about why people get bad tattoos for Vice.

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How Art Critic Jerry Saltz Fell in Love with Museums

I’ve spent much of my life in and in love with museums. When I was 10 years old, there was no mention of art in my home. But then my mother began driving me from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she looked at art on her own for hours, leaving me to do the same. At the time, I liked being alone but hated museums. I felt they were old and dead, places where people just stood and stared. But one day, waiting, bored, brooding, I found myself absorbed by two beautifully colored adjacent old paintings. On the left, a pair of men standing outside a jail cell talk to a haloed man, inside the cell, while an incredible leopard guards nearby. After a long time, I looked at the right-hand panel, where the setting was the same but the time was different. In place of the leopard, there is a man returning a huge bloody sword to its sheath; the haloed man inside the cell stoops down, both hands on the sill to support his body, extending his neck, which has been severed, through the bars. His head is on the ground, on a platter, as blood spurts all over. I looked back and forth; left, then right. Then something gigantic hit me. These images were telling a story. The paintings were from the 15th century, just when Renaissance painters were beginning to understand perspective. And yet they were not dead, they were alive, at least when I looked at them. Two paintings from the 1450s, still working their magic on me. Amazed, I looked around the gallery and saw gates open. I thought each work was the same — a voice, yearning or in pain or proud, but speaking to me, in visual tongues, down through history. Maybe everything in this suddenly amazing building was telling a story, I thought, a story I could discern just by looking (and without going to school). I wanted to spend forever in this cacophony, this living catacomb. A few months later, my mother committed suicide. I didn’t return to a museum until I was in my 20s.

Jerry Saltz writing for New York Magazine about the newly redesigned Whitney Museum.

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