The new $100 bill is coming October 2013. Per USA today, this is what it will look like:
Not so impressive, considering the delay:
The revamped bill had been expected to go into circulation in February 2011. But in December 2010, officials announced an indefinite delay. They said they needed more time to fix production issues that left unwanted creases in many of the notes.
What are your thoughts on the design? Here are a few comparisons.
The Wall Street Journal, using Crumbs as an example, explains the decline in the gourmet cupcake business:
As a business, making cupcakes has a relatively low barrier to entry and the field has become saturated with competitors, including individual bakeries, chains and grocery stores. Gigi’s Cupcakes USA, based in Nashville, Tenn., has opened 85 stores in 23 states since 2008 through its franchising system.
Crumbs rivals include people like Cynthia Hankerson, owner of the three-year-old Cupcake Salon in Jersey City, N.J. Sales at her bakery cafe are slipping and she said she suspects the cupcake fad may be waning. Last year, a typical Saturday brought in an average of $600 to $700 in sales for her signature cupcakes, which come in flavors like pistachio, amaretto vanilla and strawberry banana. But now “we’re lucky if we get $300,” she says. “People get tired of things,” the 42-year-old adds.
When I lived in Pasadena, my favorite cupcake place was Sprinkles. My friend Fiona introduced me to the chain. She says Sprinkles is still thriving: they even have special cupcake ATM in Beverly Hills!
James Surowiecki’s analysis of Reddit’s crowdsourcing ability in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings is one of the best things I’ve read on the subject:
You can certainly fault the Redditors for not recognizing the limits of their own knowledge and for jumping to conclusions (even if a good deal of that jumping was done by the national press). But this isn’t a failing that’s specific to Reddit—on the contrary, official investigations fall prey to it all the time. Richard Jewell, of course, was seized on almost immediately by authorities as a prime suspect in the 1996 Olympics bombing, and continued to be treated as such for months before being cleared. The government investigated and harassed Steven Hatfill for years in connection with the 2001 anthrax mailings, before finally backing down. And the F.B.I., on the basis of faulty fingerprint analysis, accused Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer, of assisting with the train bombings in Madrid in 2004; arrested him; and refused to acknowledge its mistake for weeks after Spanish authorities had definitively cleared him. These misidentifications were far more damaging and longer-lasting than anything Reddit did last week, yet one would hardly take them as per se evidence that the F.B.I. should stop investigating crimes.
I think this is an essential point:
The problem from Reddit’s perspective, of course, is that this method of sleuthing would be far less exciting for users, and would probably generate less traffic, than its current free-for-all approach. The point of the “find-the-bombers” subthread, after all, wasn’t just to find the bombers—it was also to connect and talk with others, and to feel like you were part of a virtual community.
Perhaps the secondary goal of Reddit was not to find the bombers, but to allow people to connect with one another after the traumatic event. In a way, participating in Reddit was a way of reconciling the event (and for some, a way to heal).
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Related: Alexis Madrigal’s piece on how misinformation spread on Reddit.
David Farley goes on a journey to Ethiopia to discover the world’s best coffee. He reports in a fascinating piece for Afar Magazine:
Coffee is to Ethiopia what hops are to Bohemia or grapes to Bordeaux. That is, coffee is almost everything, from the cornerstone of the community’s economic fortunes to the lifeblood of its social relations. Java drinking is so deeply rooted here that Azeb was dumbstruck that I could have lived 40 years on the planet never having seen what coffee looks like before it’s plucked, peeled, dried, roasted, and ground.
Which is exactly why I was in Ethiopia. I wanted to travel around this East African country’s primary coffee-growing regions and immerse myself in its coffee culture. I can sit around at coffeehouses in New York and San Francisco drinking all the Ethiopian coffee my brain can take before spinning out of control. But I was curious about the time and toil it takes to produce these beans, everything that goes into slaking the States’ obsessive thirst for small-batch artisan roasts.
After all, great coffee is harvested all over the world—in Guatemala, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, and Rwanda, for example—but no coffee-producing country on earth can match the variety that grows in Ethiopia. By some estimates, nearly 99 percent of the world’s arabica coffee can be traced to Ethiopia. Moreover, according to aficionados, it’s here that some of the best coffee in the world is being produced.
A useful corollary post is this one: where to buy Ethiopian coffee in the United States.
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(via @travelreads)
An interesting experience by Brooke Allen on negotiating the highest salary (in his mind) by asking for nothing at all (literally, $0):
The next time I had to negotiate a contract, it began in typical fashion with a prospective employer sending me a lopsided agreement and asking me to counter-propose. I said I was incompetent to do that and suggested they write a new contract as if they were me, putting in everything that would be in my best interests, and then taking out everything they would never agree to. Since that would be the best I could get, I would accept it subject to agreement on compensation.
We started with base pay. I wrote down the least I would work for and asked them to write down the most they would offer a perfect person, irrespective of whether I was that person or not. If when we exchanged papers, their number wasn’t higher than mine then we could stop there and save time. Their number was twice the best base pay I had ever received in past jobs, and my request was for $0. I explained that my goal is to live a debt-free life, and therefore I wanted to give value before receiving compensation.
We did the same thing with profit sharing percentages. However, this time I wanted the highest payout standard for our industry, which happened to match their number. We agreed on that percentage because it maximized my incentive to perform and minimize the risk I would ever want to go elsewhere. (As it turned out, because human resources wouldn’t put me on the books without paying me something, I ended up getting a better deal than the best I would have ever asked for.)
I’m all about the win-win, but I have doubts about the employer playing a game where they write their number down, you write your number down, and then perform a bilateral exchange. This process takes days or even weeks, not minutes as implied by Allen’s post.
While not as enthralling as his other story “Labyrinth” that I’ve profiled before, Roberto Bolaño’s short story “Mexican Manifesto” was nevertheless an interesting read. The setting is of a couple who goes to a number of saunas in Mexico and partakes in experiences of a certain sort:
In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas, and, above all, cheap. There, in Sauna 10, I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which valve to turn to make the steam come out.
The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door. In the first, there was usually a divan—an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos—a folding table, and a coatrack; the second chamber was the actual steam bath, with a hot and cold shower and a bench of azulejo tiles against the wall, beneath which were hidden the tubes that released the steam. Moving from one vestibule to the next was extraordinary, especially if the steam was already so thick that we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan, where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared. Lying there, holding hands, we would listen or try to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the gym while our bodies cooled. Practically freezing, submerged in silence, we would finally hear the purr welling up through the floor and the walls, the catlike whir of hot pipes and boilers that stoked the business from some secret place in the building.
I’m glad The New Yorker made this story un-paywalled.
One week ago, at approximately 2:50 p.m. on Monday April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded yards away from the Boston Marathon finish line.
Today, The New York Times compiles an extraordinary feature titled 4:09:43, the “final split second of normalcy” before the area turned into a war zone. The Times interviewed the runners and spectators who witnessed the explosion:
David Abel, 41, reporter:
Mr. Abel, a Boston Globe reporter who is currently on sabbatical with a fellowship, was at the event to film a documentary on Juli Windsor, the first female dwarf to run the Boston Marathon. When the bomb went off, he was at the finish line waiting for her to arrive.
Debi Caprio, 50, nurse:
I said out loud, ‘This is how my life is going to end.
Joe Curciro, 63, information security officer:
Mr. Curcio has run about 70 marathons. His plan was to run the Boston Marathon every five years to keep it special for him, but after the events of last week, he is determined to go back next year.
Lisa Baragiola, 49, dietitian:
There’s a camaraderie among runners anyway, but I think this whole incident has brought the running community even closer together.
Kim Boglarski, 27, school psychologist:
A woman handed me a Kleenex to hold on my head. We weren’t sure if we should stay or run. I put my head down and started crying.
Worth reading these stories. And listening to the audio.
Only fools play a rigged game forever, writes David Simon in his post titled “Dead Children and Monied Politicians”:
Our elections — and therefore our governance — have been purchased. Instead of publicly funded elections, instead of level playing fields, instead of processes in which the power of actual ideas prevails over the size of the bankroll, we have given our democratic birthright over to capital itself. A gun manufacturer’s opinion can be thousands of times louder than the voice of any grieving Connecticut parent. And the damage that might come to political careers from individual Americans who wish to have gun laws require as much responsibility of gun owners as, say, motor vehicle laws? It pales when compared to the damage that can come to political careers from a lobbying group backed to hilt by those who will profit directly from the fear and violence in our culture.
An acerbic take, but one we need to hear.
A fascinating post by Kevin Ashton at Quartz on how easy it is to create a fake profile and website and become “Internet famous.” His price tag in creating an account and web site under the alias of Santiago Swallow cost $68:
Creating Santiago and the online proof of his existence took two hours on the afternoon of April 14 and cost $68. He was conjured out of keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I generated his name on “Scrivener,” a word processor for writers and authors. I turned the “obscurity level” of its name generator up to high, checked the box for “attempt alliteration,” and asked for 500 male names. My choices included Alonzo Arbuckle, Leon Ling, Phil Portlock and Judson Jackman, but “Santiago Swallow” just leapt out as perfect. I gave Santiago a Gmail account, which was enough to get him a Twitter account.
Then I went to the web site fiverr.com, the online equivalent of a dollar store, and searched for people selling Twitter followers. I bought Santiago 90,000 followers for $50, all of whom would, he was assured, appear on his Twitter profile within 48 hours. Next I gave him a face by mashing up three portraits from Google images using a free trial copy of Adobe’s “Lightroom” image manipulation software. I gave Santiago his “Twitter verified account” check box by putting it onto his cover image right where his name would appear. It will not fool many people, but might give him a little extra credibility with some. By the time I uploaded these images to Twitter, Santiago had developed a large “following,” even though he did not have a profile and had never tweeted anything.
So that’s one way to become Internet famous. (I don’t encourage or endorse this method, of course.)
Gabriel Giffords writes a powerful New York Times op-ed:
I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.
As she says, she has difficulty speaking. But I think her voice is loud and clear.
Books I Read 