Search Results for: tech

How a Calf Head Roasted in a Pit Became a Popular Mexican Delicacy

“The historical method of preparation of calf head developed from the practice of baking an entire calf in the ground overnight, a practice designed to feed a significant number of people with a single large protein source, baked in the only structure available everywhere for free: the earth itself. This was a crude but effective technique: a hole was dug in the ground and lined with porous or volcanic stones or bricks to absorb heat, then a large bonfire was set alight inside it and allowed to burn down to coal, at which point the calf would be wrapped in leaves and tossed in and the cover sealed so no oxygen could enter the pit. The fuel, the material used to line the pit, and the material used to cover the pit all vary from culture to culture, but the basic principles are found in native cookeries the world over, from the Polynesian brick-lined pits used to cook entire pigs to the tandoors used across the Indian subcontinent.

“Where did the below-ground method originate? It’s difficult for either archaeologists or anthropologists to pinpoint, but in the New World, the method tends to correspond to a map of Spanish colonialism, so it isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that Native Americans, who had previously been roasting their kills over an open fire, learned to bake whole animals in the earth from the conquistadores. On the other hand, the method also shows up in places like Maine, where they cook beans and clams in the earth, and I don’t think Cabeza de Vaca quite made it up to Bangor, so the origins remain firmly in the scope of speculation.

“At any rate, the traditional method of preparation, which included the entire animal, eventually gave way to a predilection for the soft tissues of the head. The word ‘barbacoa’ is actually a corruption of the phrase ‘de la barba a la cola,’ which translates into ‘from the beard to the tail.’ In South Texas bricks or stones line the pit, mesquite is the heat source, and the whole thing is covered with sheet metal. When I was a kid, the barbacoa that emerged was composed of three parts: cachete (cheek), lengua (tongue), and mixta (a mixture of brains, lips, eyeballs, and probably, if you’re not careful, ears).”

– In Texas Monthly, National Book Award finalist Domingo Martinez recalls eating barbacoa with his family in South Texas, and examines how the meat was traditionally cooked and served. Read more food stories in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Neil Conway

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Silicon Chasm

Longreads Pick

Charlotte Allen (who graduated from Stanford) examines the massive income inequality and “new feudalism” in Silicon Valley—as a sign of what’s happening across the United States:

Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000fewer jobs than existed in 2001.

Source: Weekly Standard
Published: Nov 27, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,470 words)

Animals Were Harmed

Longreads Pick

An investigation reveals that the “No Animals Were Harmed” credit at the end of movies has come to mean almost nothing, and the American Humane Association has faced complaints about its lack of oversight:

“Last week we almost f—king killed King in the water tank," American Humane Association monitor Gina Johnson confided in an email to a colleague on April 7, 2011, about the star tiger in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. While many scenes featuring “Richard Parker,” the Bengal tiger who shares a lifeboat with a boy lost at sea, were created using CGI technology, King, very much a real animal, was employed when the digital version wouldn’t suffice. “This one take with him just went really bad and he got lost trying to swim to the side,” Johnson wrote. “Damn near drowned.”

King’s trainer eventually snagged him with a catch rope and dragged him to one side of the tank, where he scrambled out to safety.

“I think this goes without saying but DON’T MENTION IT TO ANYONE, ESPECIALLY THE OFFICE!” Johnson continued in the email, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “I have downplayed the f— out of it.”

Author: Gary Baum
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,075 words)

What Happens When Your Business Partner Becomes Your Rival

“The Dodge brothers already made two fortunes from their relationship with Ford, by 1913 they were not thrilled about continuing to make parts for the Model T. Ironically, by the time the T started selling in really huge numbers in the nineteen teens it was obsolete and being technologically surpassed by by more modern cars. The Dodges were good engineers, probably the best machinists in Detroit next to Henry Leland. The term ‘mechanical genius’ could have been coined for Horace Dodge and his brother John was almost as adept with his own management skills. By 1914 the Dodge brothers, who already owned and operated what was probably most advanced automotive plant in the world in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, wanted to build modern machines.

“Not only were they tired of dealing with Henry’s eccentricities, and tired of building an old fashioned car, they knew that they were increasingly vulnerable having such a big customer, a customer that had already started making many components himself, on his path to making FoMoCo perhaps the most vertically integrated manufacturing company ever. One reason why people don’t know about the Dodges’ role in Ford history is because Ford was later famous for making every part of their cars, including the raw steel and glass. In the early days, though, Ford, like most automakers then, was an assembler, buying components and subassemblies. The Dodges supplied other automakers like Cadillac and Oldsmobile, but Ford represented the lion’s share of their business. So the Dodges had plenty of reasons in 1913 to jump before they were pushed and in July of that year they gave Henry Ford a year’s notice that they’d no longer be supplying him. Soon, the automotive world was abuzz with the news that Dodge Brothers would be making a Dodge car.”

Ronnie Schreiber on the Dodge brothers and the 100-year anniversary of their car company (2013).

Read the story

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Photo: Dodge.com

How to Build a Car and Car Company, in Three Notebooks

Longreads Pick

A look inside the early notebooks of the Dodge brothers, who broke away from Henry Ford to build their own startup 100 years ago:

While they already made two fortunes from their relationship with Ford, by 1913 they were not thrilled about continuing to make parts for the Model T. If you think automotive technology changes rapidly today, imagine how quickly things advanced a century ago. In five years the Model T went from state of the art to technologically lagging its competitors but Henry thought it was the perfect car. Ironically, by the time the T started selling in really huge numbers in the nineteen teens it was obsolete and being technologically surpassed by by more modern cars. The Dodges were good engineers, probably the best machinists in Detroit next to Henry Leland. The term “mechanical genius” could have been coined for Horace Dodge and his brother John was almost as adept with his own management skills. By 1914 the Dodge brothers, who already owned and operated what was probably most advanced automotive plant in the world in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, wanted to build modern machines.

Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,810 words)

The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate: Our Member Pick

Nancy Scola | Next City, Forefront magazine | November 2013 | 26 minutes (6,561 words)

Uber

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

 

Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next City’s Forefront magazine, about the rise of Uber. You can read a free excerpt below.

For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.

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Travis Kalanick, the 36-year-old CEO of the ride-on-demand company Uber, calls it the “palm to forehead” moment: That instant when you understand for yourself why a simple car hailing app has both captured people’s imaginations and churned up a queasy feeling in the stomachs of taxi industry power players. Here’s mine.

It was a rainy spring Friday in San Francisco, before five o’clock in the morning. Needing to catch a flight home to New York City, I’d asked my host the night before about the best way to get to SFO from Japantown. “Just go downstairs and Uber,” she’d said. Groggily I made my way to the cold and lonely lobby. Once there, I pressed a few buttons on the Uber app on my iPhone. Almost instantaneously, one of the tiny black car avatars on the live digital map on my phone screen swung around and started heading my way. I could hear it, even. A splashing sound.

Mesmerized, it took me a few beats to realize that it wasn’t the app making noise. It was my car itself, tracking through real puddles as I tracked it on screen. Before I knew it, Waqar, my driver, slid into view. I knew his name because Uber had texted it to me while I’d waited. Later, the company would email me the data on my trip. It had taken 19 minutes and 43 seconds. We had traveled precisely 14.35 miles. It had cost me $54.04, charged to the credit card whose details I’d inputted when I download the app months earlier in curiosity. But it was when said goodbye to Waqar and hopped out of the car at the terminal that I realized how deeply I had, in the past, hated taking a cab or black car to go anywhere. All that hailing or giving my address, giving directions, fumbling for money, calculating and recalculating the tip. Technology had taken care of all of it.

For less than 20 minutes, I’d had almost nothing to worry about. What else was I simply putting up with in life? What other broken systems could be fixed?

I’m hardly the first one to put my hand to my head and contemplate the universe upon taking Uber for the first time. The San Francisco-based company launched 4.5 years ago, introducing a select group to the patent-pending technology that allowed me to press the Uber button and experience the magic of a driver that seems to pop out of the ether. It is already up and running in 18 countries and counting around the globe. This summer, Google Ventures poured some $258 million into Uber, the most it had ever invested in a company.

But that explosive growth hasn’t come without friction. Americans have been hiring driven cars for more than a century. Laws have accumulated governing that exchange. But those laws never contemplated an Uber. And so the battle is on, all across the country, to determine whether Uber will remake the transportation market or whether the transportation market will remake Uber first. There’s no better place to understand that fight than where regulations are both business and sport: Washington, D.C.

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Creationists’ Last Stand at the State Board of Education

Longreads Pick

A history of the Texas textbook wars, and questions of whether those seeking to influence changes to textbooks can hold onto their power:

But highly placed stakeholders — ranging from those in publishing to sitting board members — believe the culture warriors are losing the ability to run roughshod over state education. After years of alienating the Legislature, the state board has seen its influence weakened. A changing textbook marketplace has eroded Texas’ clout, and technology is sweeping into the classroom, bringing with it the next generation of learning materials. The statewide reach of the culture warriors is ending.

The biggest test will take place when the state board considers a new high-school biology text next week. Another will follow in the ensuing months, as it takes up a new social studies text. How the state board and publishers respond to Bohlin’s critiques, to his evolutionary “gaps,” will determine whether the innuendo of God lingers in classroom discussions about evolution. It will determine whether the political ideology of an elected board shapes, by omission and addition, the history of America Texas students will learn for years hence.

Source: Dallas Observer
Published: Nov 14, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,072 words)

How Detectives Interrogate Suspects and Get Confessions

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“The goal is to turn questioners into the equivalent of human lie detectors who can read behavioral tics to determine guilt. It begins with the isolation of the suspect. Kassin explained that a Reid-trained officer will typically go through nine steps, offering the suspect both positive and negative incentives. The goal of the interrogation, according to Reid & Associates, is to increase the suspect’s anxiety associated with denial and decrease the anxiety associated with confessing.

“‘Basically make it easier psychologically to confess than to deny involvement,’ he said. ‘And you do that with the carrot and the stick — both the maximizing techniques that scare the suspects into submission and minimizing techniques that seem to offer a palatable way out.’”

– There is no universal method of interrogating someone, but a private company called John E. Reid & Associates has trained clients in both the private and public sectors on how to do so. Chester Soria revisits the infamous Central Park Five case, and examines false confessions and NYPD interrogation tactics at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. See more stories about interrogations.

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Photo by: Krystian Olszanski

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The Future of Personal Data, Democracy, and Opting Out of Fitness Trackers

“People who say that tracking their fitness or location is merely an affirmative choice from which they can opt out have little knowledge of how institutions think. Once there are enough early adopters who self-track—and most of them are likely to gain something from it—those who refuse will no longer be seen as just quirky individuals exercising their autonomy. No, they will be considered deviants with something to hide. Their insurance will be more expensive. If we never lose sight of this fact, our decision to self-track won’t be as easy to reduce to pure economic self-­interest; at some point, moral considerations might kick in. Do I really want to share my data and get a coupon I do not need if it means that someone else who is already working three jobs may ultimately have to pay more? Such moral concerns are rendered moot if we delegate decision-making to ‘electronic butlers.’”

Evgeny Morozov, in MIT Technology Review, on the future of big data, privacy and what it means for democracy. Read more from Tech Review.

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Photo: gauravonomics, Flickr

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'A Kind of Emotional Terrorism': Or, How the 'Game Change' Reporters Get Sources to Talk

“Once a critical mass of conversations is reached, a kind of network effect kicks in, with every additional source begetting the participation of other sources suddenly concerned about their version getting left out. Meanwhile, Halperin and Heilemann are scrupulous about not letting anyone know who else is squealing. ‘They keep it like a VP selection,’ says Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, who says he spoke to them. To this day, for instance, the authors have never acknowledged interviewing Reid. (‘I will say—as long as you make it clear, please, that I’m not referring to any interview we might or might not have done—that we would never threaten anybody we interviewed,’ Halperin insists.)

Not everyone who shares his or her story does so with what you might call full consent. ‘They tell you that everybody’s talking, and if you don’t talk, you’re the one person who’s not talking,’ says a 2008 operative who describes Halperin and Heileman’s technique as ‘a kind of emotional terrorism.’ But most of the authors’ very well-placed sources seem perfectly happy, if not eager, to spill the beans.”

Marc Tracy, in The New Republic, on how Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have perfected their insider reporting for another book, Double Down. Read more from Heilmann.

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