Category: society (Page 2 of 3)

On Michael Sam and gay rights

February 10, 2014 /

I am occasionally asked, with a degree of bemusement, why I am so strong-minded and outspoken on the subject of gay rights. It’s a topic I’ve supported at length in this space, from cheering on gay marriage to actively tracking open gay players in pro sports.

I thought I’d take a moment this morning, in the wake of Michael Sam’s groundbreaking announcement, to clarify that support. On some level, it’s personal, as I have numerous gay friends, many of whom are now married, which is heartening.

But on another, more important level, gay rights are about equality. I have never understood humanity’s need for a majority or ruling demographic to suppress the liberties, opportunities or comfort of another. Be it race, gender, religion or nationality, the fear and jealousy that drives this suppression has always upset me. I am strongly in favor of abortion rights, for example, and for multi-racial and interfaith marriages, in addition to institutionalizing support for gay rights.

Even while my own profile is rather straightforward—I’m an ordinary guy who married a woman of the same religion and similar cultural upbringing—I was allowed to choose my path to happiness, and I believe everyone should be afforded the same opportunity. And as a member of a minority religion, albeit a successful and well-assimilated one, I have an appreciation for what it means to be persecuted as well as accepted.

The world is a long way away from universal tolerance. But America comes pretty close, much of the time, and every small step toward openness and understanding is to be cheered. I am rooting for Michael Sam this year, not because he’s gay, but because he’s strong, and honest, and deserves to be a professional football player this spring. I hope he succeeds.

Obsolete vs. useless

January 8, 2014 /

Quartz and Wired is making a big deal today out of a new survey that shows 58% of American households still have a VCR.

“It shows,” writes Christopher Mims*, “that a majority of Americans are holding onto a device designed to play a media format that isn’t even available anymore.”

But there’s a reason for this “lingering on past their expiration date,” as Mims nicely puts it: old VHS tapes.

While millions of Americans have moved on from tape formats, decades of media were created and stored on them before discs, drives and cloud storage appeared. And while it’s easy to replace that videotape of “Dirty Dancing” with Blu-Ray or a stream, doing so with home movies and one-offs taped from live TV is much harder. Many families have paid for a service to migrate their essentials; mine has dubbed its childhood videos from Super-8 to VHS to DVD over the past 15 years. But many others have not. And until they do, they’re not ditching their VCRs.

I still have roughly 800 cassettes in my possession (well, technically, they’re in my parents’ basement, to my mother’s ongoing chagrin, but still), including a number of bootlegs, one-offs, hard-to-find albums, and irreplaceable moments, from a Taj Mahal concert at summer camp in 1989 to my college radio shows. It’d be great to digitize them for posterity. But seeing how hard it is even to move all my CDs to MP3, the digitizing of my tapes won’t come for awhile. And while I wait for myself, I’m glad to have a working cassette deck, still gorgeous in its anachronistic 1988 glory.

So color me unsurprised at the persistence of the VCR. It remains peripherally useful for many, even in the rarest of moments. And so it remains, unbothered in many homes’ wall units, biding its time, and probably blinking ––:–– as usual.

* Of course, Mims is the author behind the recently infamous “2013 was a lost year for tech,” which suggests he’s in the dot-com-needling-provocateur game right now, much like Farhad Manjoo a couple of a years ago.

Creating vs. creating

January 6, 2014 /

Sploid, on Thomas Julien’s Instagram short film: “Seeing all these pictures in a pseudo stop animation you realize how similar all of our photos end up being. Nothing is original. We’re all just frames in someone’s next movie.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about our collective propensity to take photos, and wondering: why? Why do we need to chronicle a moment that is being captured by another? What is the intrinsic value of a photo that someone else can (probably more capably) take on one’s own behalf? It’s one thing to grab a picture of a loved one, or a sunset on an unpopulated beach, when you’re the only person that can take that picture. But when hundreds of fellow onlookers are snapping the same photograph, unless your DSLR skills trump the crowd, is there value to your taking a shot, too?

Jillian Edelstein, on the remoteness of photography: “It’s image taking rather than image making.”

What’s more, with the interconnectedness of social media, not only are those many other photos being taken, but in a matter of moments you and I can download and share them as well, rendering the multiplicity moot. Sometimes these efforts have value; last month, when a large fire raged up the block from me, I posted photos from my vantage point, then shared others’ images from different (and largely better) angles. But certainly my experience of the moment was interrupted by my fiddling with my iPhone, which, it should be noted, occurred while I helped my two young children stand on my next door neighbor’s radiator cover for a better view.

This can’t be where our future lands. Whether ubiquitous, wearable computing simplifies the media taking-and-sharing process, or whether we slowly learn to find the right moments to engage and disengage with our devices, or whether some other paradigms arise, I strongly hope that we evolve past the current heads-down phones-up phase. Because, if not, sooner or later we’re all going to miss something.

What I learned today, January 14

January 14, 2013 /

The air quality in Beijing reached 755 on a 0-to-500 scale over the weekend. Chinese officials called the pollution “crazy bad.” In comparison, New York City’s air quality index on Saturday was 19. (via kottke.org)

What I learned today (yesterday, really), December 24-25

December 25, 2012 /

Americans are 6 percent more likely to get in an automobile accident on April 15: “tax day, likely due to driver distraction caused by stress.”
Other interesting car crash facts: men are responsible for 57% of all crashes, but if it’s due to mashing the wrong pedal, there’s a two-thirds chance a woman was behind the wheel; automobile fatalities are now just 15% as frequent as they were sixty years ago; thanks to reduced fatality rates, fewer people died in an accident last year than they did in 1949, when the population of the United States was less than 150 million.

What I learned today, November 18

November 20, 2012 /

The odds of a U.S. resident getting killed by terrorism from Islamic extremists are roughly the same as dying in a bathtub.

For what’s right

May 9, 2012 /

In my limited forays into politics, I have in this space previously noted my support for Barack Obama (moreso in 2008 than 2012, but still) and my heartfelt support of gay rights and gay marriage and my frustration in this country’s resistance to its obviousness. So today is a particularly gratifying moment, as I can note that Barack Obama, too, supports gay marriage.
That this comes a day after North Carolina residents banned gay marriage in all its forms makes this news all the more enjoyable. Fifty years ago many Americans were against civil rights for African-Americans, too. As Dave Pell noted in his NextDraft newsletter today, “History’s march towards equal rights often feels inevitable, but it can really take a long time.” Yesterday we slowed down, and today we sped up again.
Next Saturday I am attending a wedding party for my gay friends Chris and Stuart, who are getting married at City Hall, because as New Yorkers they thankfully can do so. I couldn’t be happier for them, or more supportive of their right to be married. And I am glad that the President of the United States of America feels the same way.

Having one’s Facebook cake and eating it, too

April 16, 2012 /

Sean Bonner: Facebook makes me feel like a shitty friend.

Facebook made it easy. So now I have to wonder am I only staying in touch with those people because it requires absolutely zero effort on my part? What kind of a person does that make me? What does that say about how much I value their friendship?

Earlier this month I found out about a friend’s wife giving birth via Facebook, and only Facebook. It’s not the first time this has happened (indeed, not even the first time with this friend). And, to use Bonner’s turn of phrase, it made me feel kind of shitty.
Social media sites are wondrous things. I am in touch with more people in infinitely more ways than I ever expected. The problem lies with scale and distance, as the same interactions that feel immediate to the author can feel very different to the reader–both more and less intimate than originally intended, depending on the recipient. What Bronner and I are observing is less technological than sociological: replacing important real-life touchpoints with digital ones can be inherently, and inadvertently, disappointing.
Social interactions have myriad levels of nuance. Facebook is different from Twitter, for example. Email distribution lists remain popular alongside social networks (for my demographic, at least). And each type of action carries its own etiquette. Checking into the hospital on Foursquare and tweeting the delivery of a child can be fascinating and energizing and fun. Extreme example: Matt Haughey live-tweeted his vasectomy! But the same broadcast capabilities that bring levity to such things also defy conventional levels of friendship. When inner-circle, 20-years-of-history friends post the same birth notice to you as to 680 of their digital connections, that inner circle takes on a much flimsier feel. (Let the record show that in each case of “hey, I saw on Facebook that you’re a dad now,” I replied with a phone call.)
I rediscovered Bonner’s post because yesterday he quit Facebook altogether. I don’t think I’m in quite that drastic a frame of mind. My own Facebook usage is quite minimal: after all, if you’re concerned about privacy on Facebook, limiting what you tell Facebook goes a long way toward mitigating its pervasiveness. My profile there is no more robust than what you find about me on Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. with the exception of a handful of photos and some basic banter with my friends. My privacy settings are finely tuned. I can live with Facebook knowing and using that much about me.
And indeed, I almost need Facebook, because its wall has become many people’s primary mode of communication. I only log onto Facebook once a week or so, and when I’m gone for too long, I miss out on news of life-altering events. The privacy concerns are valid, sure, but many people have decided, however unwittingly, that they’re willing to live with the trade-offs of privacy and reach. And while I’d probably be fine not residing within the Facebook social graph, I don’t terribly want to dictate terms to my friends regarding how they keep in touch with me. So for now, they’ll post, I’ll call, and we’ll all go to bed happy.
Social media is an amazing tool. Even more so on one’s own terms.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

October 6, 2011 /

Farewell to an incredible man. See also my thoughts from six weeks ago. (And 30 years of proof.)

Ten years

September 10, 2011 /

A confession: I’ve spent the past week two weeks willfully avoiding most September 11 commemorations. I certainly know why, although I have had a hard time putting it into words. Am I not ready to recollect? Do I find it too sad, too ugly? Does it feel too obvious to me?
Perhaps all of the above, or something else, subconscious and intangible, that drives me away from the past. Different things evoke different responses. I blithely skipped past The Economist’s coverage of the anniversary, but I can’t even bring myself to crack open the New York magazine special, and I have been noticeably averting my gaze whenever I spy the billowing smoke on its cover. A decade on, I am not at all inured to the visuals of the event–if anything, I have a more visceral reaction now, in remembrance, than when it actually happened and we all couldn’t stop looking.
My wife pointed out, rightly, that we as a society need to remember, to reflect, to refresh our memories, to celebrate the heroes and respect the innocent and the fallen. I had friends who experienced a far more dramatic 9/11 than I did, and friends who lost their lives.
Perhaps that’s where I am: I haven’t reflected because I haven’t forgotten. I can tell, in vivid detail, the story of that day and the entire week around it: where I was, what I did, how I felt, what I smelled. It was my reality and remains my experience. To that end, America’s insistent media saturation leading up to Sunday’s commemorations are invaluable: no one is being allowed to forget, just as I, and many others, already cannot.
Tomorrow is a somber and important day for all of us, however explicit our reflections may be. My thoughts are with those whose memories are far more painful than mine.
—
On and after September 11, the Internet was both a lifeline and an outlet for me. My blog posts from 9/11 through the 23rd are available in a single-read archive, and I invite my readers to explore them. For historical accuracy, the girlfriend cited in the posts is now my wife; we have long since moved out of Union Square to the Upper West Side, where we will be spending a quiet 9/11/11 at home.
In 2001 I also published my friend Adam Oestreich’s first-hand account of the attacks, which remains a compelling read. At this time of year it is always the most popular page on this website. (Adam, it can be noted, now works in midtown.)