Wednesday 30 May 2012
An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?
Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?
Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.
"More and more, life is resembling the chat room," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. "We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle."
We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered "often" or "always," technology may be taking a toll on you.
In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet "addiction."
Technology use was clearly interfering with the students' daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it "Internet dependence."
Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, "Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self," to be released next year.
Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.
"If you can't forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?" Dr. Aboujaoude said. "When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?"
There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. "The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology," Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.
Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.
The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person's need to use the Internet "as a way of escape."
The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Marylandasked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.
"Texting and I.M.'ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?
Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.
"More and more, life is resembling the chat room," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. "We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle."
We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered "often" or "always," technology may be taking a toll on you.
In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet "addiction."
Technology use was clearly interfering with the students' daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it "Internet dependence."
Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, "Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self," to be released next year.
Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.
"If you can't forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?" Dr. Aboujaoude said. "When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?"
There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. "The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology," Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.
Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.
The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person's need to use the Internet "as a way of escape."
The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Marylandasked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.
"Texting and I.M.'ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
Daddy, What Were Compact Discs?
By SAM GROBART
ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.
I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs.
Some were dirty little skirmishes, like the Eight-Track Incursion of the late 1960s. But, oh, there are epic tales to be told as well: How my children's hearts will leap and dive (assuming they are not the kind to be bored to distraction by what Dad is droning on about) as they hear about VHS and Betamax, each bringing the other ever closer to oblivion, and how only one of them left the battlefield — only to fall victim to a far nimbler opponent, DVD, which was waiting in the wings.
And my children will hear of this and be amazed (see assumption above), for they know nothing of this kind of conflict. They will grow up in a world where physical storage of information is as outdated as rotary-dial telephones and mimeograph machines are now.
Indeed, they already live in that world, even if vestiges of the old remain (turntables, for example). We older people can enjoy this new world as well, what with streaming music and video services, cloud-based storage options and social networks that easily absorb our photos and ephemera. We may be hardened by battles past, but our future is digital, wireless, ubiquitous and, we hope, pacific. Here's what it looks like.
ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.
I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs.
Some were dirty little skirmishes, like the Eight-Track Incursion of the late 1960s. But, oh, there are epic tales to be told as well: How my children's hearts will leap and dive (assuming they are not the kind to be bored to distraction by what Dad is droning on about) as they hear about VHS and Betamax, each bringing the other ever closer to oblivion, and how only one of them left the battlefield — only to fall victim to a far nimbler opponent, DVD, which was waiting in the wings.
And my children will hear of this and be amazed (see assumption above), for they know nothing of this kind of conflict. They will grow up in a world where physical storage of information is as outdated as rotary-dial telephones and mimeograph machines are now.
Indeed, they already live in that world, even if vestiges of the old remain (turntables, for example). We older people can enjoy this new world as well, what with streaming music and video services, cloud-based storage options and social networks that easily absorb our photos and ephemera. We may be hardened by battles past, but our future is digital, wireless, ubiquitous and, we hope, pacific. Here's what it looks like.
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Patnaik is in London to...
"....promote investment in Odisha and discuss issues related to poverty alleviation in his state" ....
meanwhile there is revolt against him.
Revolt in BJD against Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik?
meanwhile there is revolt against him.
Revolt in BJD against Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik?
Monday 21 May 2012
Print Media Ads
Reuters was wondering where the money for government ads comes from? Can it be used in a better manner? Are these ads really needed? It went on to add
And it's a collective effort of various ministries. From the Delhi government to the ministries of power, steel, environment, information & broadcasting, women & child development, commerce & industry — all have space reserved in national dailies to pay tribute in their own way.
Over the weekend, Mamata Banerjee, a key ally of the Congress-led government, had a centre spread in The Times of India as her government completed a year in office. The ad, titled 'One year towards a ray of hope' explained the recent initiatives of her state government in West Bengal.
And this is not restricted to the government. Last week, J.Jayalalithaa, whose party sits in opposition in parliament, celebrated a year in office as chief minister of Tamil Nadu with ads on the front page of many English dailies."
Well, being a media entity why is Reuters playing this naive?
This is not wastage of public money but money well spent ..... from the point of view of political party in power.
Every kid knows that these ads are a way of controlling the media through public funds and also using public money to build political capital.
Sunday 20 May 2012
Following the footsteps of Steve Jobs in California
Steve Jobs was the ultimate tastemaster, but the Apple co-founder lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Follow Jonathan Margolis on Guardian's interactive map as he follows Jobs's trail
Quick-fix Approach
I could not agree more with Jerry Rao on our government's quick-fix approach.
This is bound to happen if the most powerful member of the cabinet is know as fire-fighter.
Tuesday 15 May 2012
Facebook snaps up mobile photo sharing firm Lightbox, decides Instagram isn't enough
We get the impression that Facebook is on a big mobile photo sharing kick: just weeks after it bought Instagram for a cool billion, the social network has just hired the staff behind Lightbox. The two-man team of Nilesh Patel and Thai Tran is bringing its mostly Android- and HTML5-focused knowledge over to Facebook, where it's hoping to reach many, many more people. You'll have to wait awhile to see what the Lightbox team brings to Facebook's ever more mobile platform, but you'll also want to hurry if you want to keep anything hosted on Lightbox: the service shuts down on June 15th. As a consolation for the shutdown, the startup's code is being posted to GitHub so that the fruits of its efforts live on in open-sourced form.
The original article appeared in engadget here
The original article appeared in engadget here
Monday 14 May 2012
New wedding web app connects guests before the big day
By Natasha Baker
TORONTO | Mon May 14, 2012 2:34pm IST
(Reuters) - Planning a wedding? A new web app lets the bride and groom-to-be create a social website that connects guests with each other before the big day.
Called Weduary, the web app provides a simple way of creating a modern-looking wedding website, and allows the couple to invite guests using Facebook.
The site tells guests which of their Facebook friends will also be attending and points out people at the event who may have common interests and mutual friends.
If a guest is attending alone, the Flirt section of the site shows other singles who will be there.
"We're giving people a cheat sheet on who to meet at these big wedding events," said Brit Morin, CEO of Brit & Co., the digital lifestyle brand behind Weduary.
In addition to connecting guests, the site provides details about the date and time of the wedding, hotel information, and a link to the couple's registry.
Each guest also gets their own profile.
"It says which hotel they're staying at, when they are arriving to the event, their favorite story of the bride and groom and what their cell phone is," she explained.
Information on the site can be useful to help guests to co-ordinate travel plans, pitch in on registry gifts, or split accommodations.
Morin said that she came up with the idea while planning her own wedding last year.
"Not only were a lot of the templates, themes and web designs a little bit dated, but we also didn't find anything that was social in nature," she said, adding that couples are increasing opting for non-traditional wedding registries.
"We've seen a lot of websites catering towards inventive registries like donation registries, or registries to fund the purchase of the first house, or their honeymoon," she explained.
Morin believes the wedding industry is ripe for innovation. Her company is also working on an iPhone app that will harness real-time communication between other guests at weddings.
Other popular wedding websites include TheKnot.com, and WeddingWire, which provide free wedding website building tools, but without the social component.
An app called SocialTables connects with Facebook to let guests see other guests attending the event and allows hosts to create seating arrangements, but it is not exclusively targeted to weddings.
About 70 percent of brides create a personal wedding website, according to a survey conducted last year by websites TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com.
TORONTO | Mon May 14, 2012 2:34pm IST
(Reuters) - Planning a wedding? A new web app lets the bride and groom-to-be create a social website that connects guests with each other before the big day.
Called Weduary, the web app provides a simple way of creating a modern-looking wedding website, and allows the couple to invite guests using Facebook.
The site tells guests which of their Facebook friends will also be attending and points out people at the event who may have common interests and mutual friends.
If a guest is attending alone, the Flirt section of the site shows other singles who will be there.
"We're giving people a cheat sheet on who to meet at these big wedding events," said Brit Morin, CEO of Brit & Co., the digital lifestyle brand behind Weduary.
In addition to connecting guests, the site provides details about the date and time of the wedding, hotel information, and a link to the couple's registry.
Each guest also gets their own profile.
"It says which hotel they're staying at, when they are arriving to the event, their favorite story of the bride and groom and what their cell phone is," she explained.
Information on the site can be useful to help guests to co-ordinate travel plans, pitch in on registry gifts, or split accommodations.
Morin said that she came up with the idea while planning her own wedding last year.
"Not only were a lot of the templates, themes and web designs a little bit dated, but we also didn't find anything that was social in nature," she said, adding that couples are increasing opting for non-traditional wedding registries.
"We've seen a lot of websites catering towards inventive registries like donation registries, or registries to fund the purchase of the first house, or their honeymoon," she explained.
Morin believes the wedding industry is ripe for innovation. Her company is also working on an iPhone app that will harness real-time communication between other guests at weddings.
Other popular wedding websites include TheKnot.com, and WeddingWire, which provide free wedding website building tools, but without the social component.
An app called SocialTables connects with Facebook to let guests see other guests attending the event and allows hosts to create seating arrangements, but it is not exclusively targeted to weddings.
About 70 percent of brides create a personal wedding website, according to a survey conducted last year by websites TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com.
Books: Hitting Re-start: Bill Clegg's Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery
by Molly Creeden ( Vogue)
What happens after rock bottom? In Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery(Little, Brown and Company), a follow-up to 2010's riveting Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent Bill Clegg recounts the years following his decision to get sober after a decade plagued by alcohol and drugs. Like his count of days clean, Clegg starts from zero—his bank accounts, from rehab and binges are empty, his job and boyfriend are gone, the circles in which he previously moved are off-limits. In a manner that recalls a fledgling New Yorker's first days in the city, Clegg pieces together a new life, a new apartment, routine, and friends, always in the shadow of his personal transgressions and the lure of the cell-phone numbers and apartments that still hold the promise of a high.
Whereas Portrait was a thrashing, high-octane bender of a narrative, Ninety Days, it may come as no surprise, is a somber, steadier progression, marked by tiny victories and frenetic dips into relapse. Like many tales of recovery, Clegg's account emerges out of basements filled with strangers on squeaky folding chairs, friendships always tenuously tethered to the possibility of falling off the wagon, and unimaginable amounts of coffee. Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart that balances out the navel-gazing intrinsic to the genre. And indeed, Clegg reveals it is people, not a program, that keep him afloat.
What happens after rock bottom? In Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery(Little, Brown and Company), a follow-up to 2010's riveting Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent Bill Clegg recounts the years following his decision to get sober after a decade plagued by alcohol and drugs. Like his count of days clean, Clegg starts from zero—his bank accounts, from rehab and binges are empty, his job and boyfriend are gone, the circles in which he previously moved are off-limits. In a manner that recalls a fledgling New Yorker's first days in the city, Clegg pieces together a new life, a new apartment, routine, and friends, always in the shadow of his personal transgressions and the lure of the cell-phone numbers and apartments that still hold the promise of a high.
Whereas Portrait was a thrashing, high-octane bender of a narrative, Ninety Days, it may come as no surprise, is a somber, steadier progression, marked by tiny victories and frenetic dips into relapse. Like many tales of recovery, Clegg's account emerges out of basements filled with strangers on squeaky folding chairs, friendships always tenuously tethered to the possibility of falling off the wagon, and unimaginable amounts of coffee. Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart that balances out the navel-gazing intrinsic to the genre. And indeed, Clegg reveals it is people, not a program, that keep him afloat.
Books: Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
by Jonathan Van Meter
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
Wednesday 9 May 2012
Distress of "Tehelka" Sting Journalist
Journalists in first episode of Satyamev Jayate were not the only ones to suffer the after-effects of their journalistic efforts.
The key journalist in Tehelka is undergoing the same fate:
"I have not done a single sting operation since 2001. I even discourage others from undertaking any sting, citing my own experience. The day after the Tehelka tapes were released, on March 13, 2001, my landlord in Delhi's Greater Kailash locality threw us out of his house. Police and Intelligence Bureau sleuths had turned up the heat and he could not bear it. My wife, who worked for a private firm, had to quit her job because it became impossible for her to continue, with police and the IB constantly arriving at her office to make inquiries. Sleuths from the IB even went to my village in Kerala and interrogated my father."
Still he finds a way to crack a small joke in a detailed account:
"It turned out to be more difficult to catch Jaya Jaitly on camera. Madam, I was told, would not allow any briefcase inside the defence minister's house. But she had no problem with cash, of course. She possibly knew about spy cams and the briefcase device. I was told that an Indian cricketer may have shown her how the briefcase-camera worked.
I therefore arranged for a spy cam on a tie-pin. The trouble was that the battery was tucked inside my underwear and the remote was in my pocket. And when I switched it on, the battery would start vibrating inside my underwear. The few minutes I spent in her presence were among the most uncomfortable moments I have ever had."
The key journalist in Tehelka is undergoing the same fate:
"I have not done a single sting operation since 2001. I even discourage others from undertaking any sting, citing my own experience. The day after the Tehelka tapes were released, on March 13, 2001, my landlord in Delhi's Greater Kailash locality threw us out of his house. Police and Intelligence Bureau sleuths had turned up the heat and he could not bear it. My wife, who worked for a private firm, had to quit her job because it became impossible for her to continue, with police and the IB constantly arriving at her office to make inquiries. Sleuths from the IB even went to my village in Kerala and interrogated my father."
Still he finds a way to crack a small joke in a detailed account:
"It turned out to be more difficult to catch Jaya Jaitly on camera. Madam, I was told, would not allow any briefcase inside the defence minister's house. But she had no problem with cash, of course. She possibly knew about spy cams and the briefcase device. I was told that an Indian cricketer may have shown her how the briefcase-camera worked.
I therefore arranged for a spy cam on a tie-pin. The trouble was that the battery was tucked inside my underwear and the remote was in my pocket. And when I switched it on, the battery would start vibrating inside my underwear. The few minutes I spent in her presence were among the most uncomfortable moments I have ever had."
Saturday 5 May 2012
Shared Values
I am not the only one who is exasperated by our sense of traffic that is the lack of it.
One of the explanations offered is our society's lack of coordination for common good.
This extends to other areas of Indian social life where we invariably put self before common good.
Mint argues that "The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us."
Is there any light at the end of tunnel?
Well... if at all there is any it is very far and very faint ...
"None of this means that things cannot change, as we can see in so many other countries in Asia that have climbed the ladder of prosperity. But weak political leadership, a soft state and opposition to reform of traditional social arrangements are serious obstacles in this necessary transition. Till then, we will continue to be the stag hunters who run off in search of a rabbit."
One of the explanations offered is our society's lack of coordination for common good.
This extends to other areas of Indian social life where we invariably put self before common good.
Mint argues that "The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us."
Is there any light at the end of tunnel?
Well... if at all there is any it is very far and very faint ...
"None of this means that things cannot change, as we can see in so many other countries in Asia that have climbed the ladder of prosperity. But weak political leadership, a soft state and opposition to reform of traditional social arrangements are serious obstacles in this necessary transition. Till then, we will continue to be the stag hunters who run off in search of a rabbit."
Band-Aid Innovation
Usually band-aids are not associated with innovation but there are surprises sometimes.
Finally we have band-aids which need not be peeled-off... they are made of edible starch that dissolve on the skin once the wound heals.
Finally we have band-aids which need not be peeled-off... they are made of edible starch that dissolve on the skin once the wound heals.
what a relief... Ask a person who is having an injured finger and getting the dressing peeled off every other day
'Super Moon': Large Full Moon This Weekend
"The full Moon has a reputation for trouble," wrote Tony Phillips, an
astronomer who maintains NASA's Science News site. "It raises high
tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night
with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes.
(abcnews.go.com)
astronomer who maintains NASA's Science News site. "It raises high
tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night
with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes.
(abcnews.go.com)
the designer baby factory
Immediately on the heels of 'Vicky Donor' highlighting the penchant for handsome, beautiful and smart kids through sperm donation there is a story in 'dailymail' on designer babies through surrogacy.
And the economics:
Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style 'global baby' boom.
And the economics:
Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style 'global baby' boom.
Canada Stops Making Cents
Canada minted its final penny today as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the coin was too expensive to produce and no longer needed for business.
Why?
The penny, with two maple leaves on one side and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the other, has lost 95 percent of its purchasing power since it was first produced by the mint.
(Bloomberg)
Newspapers are trying to avert economic disaster
The Who Needs Newspapers report says the keys to success include community-service-driven reporters and ethically managed reporting.
Afraid of Social Networks
Who?
Who lese?
The governments, the ruling classes....
Now its turn of Kuwait which says "Social Networks Must Be Regulated To 'Safeguard The Cohesiveness Of Society"
Is Facebook worth more than the $96bn valuation looking at the idea of freedom it promises to people who do not even know that something called Facebook exists?
Who are we, asks Kalki Koechlin...
...in this article in HT.
" We are an army of sheep" says she and goes on to explain why are we so and what can be done about this.
I want this birthday cake
The last time I had a full fledged birthday party was 65 billion years ago.
There was no vegetarian cake available in the city and I had to cut a slab of Milk Cake.
If I ever muster the courage to cut a cake it will be something like this !!!
Restore Dignity of President's Office
The entire nation will agree with the thought that "both the Government and the Opposition should ponder over how to restore the dignity of the President's office."
Is the government or the opposition listening or doing something to achieve this end?
Why does God create Musicians
"I believe — I still believe — that God sent him to this earth to be a special messenger, to make people happy" said Phoebe Jacobs of Louis Armstrong.
Reuters : Photos of the Week
Reuters' Photos of the Week are a mix of war, politics, sports and entertainment.
The photo on Sudan conflict is the one we would see but would still like not to see.
What It Takes To Innovate: Wrong-Thinking, Tinkering & Intuiting
Polaroid inventor Edwin Land explains in this article on the99percent.com what it takes to innovate:
Point number 3 is worth mentioning here:
3. Embrace failure.
True innovators are practically impervious to the notion of failure. Whereas the everyman might feel shame or embarrassment in making a mistake, the inventor sees an opportunity for learning.
True innovators are practically impervious to the notion of failure. Whereas the everyman might feel shame or embarrassment in making a mistake, the inventor sees an opportunity for learning.
Who is to blame for Siachen deaths - weather or mankind?
The Hindu says
"The weather and the inhospitable terrain have taken more lives on this side of the glacier as well as on the Indian side than the actual conflict, and now it is the most slowing factor of the rescue work."
Thanks to Sachin people know that Rajya Sabha exits
Author was this article was shocked, this week, to discover that an institution he once thought of as being a myth (like Santa Claus, dragons, and tasteful Marwadis), was in fact real.
"The Rajya Sabha is apparently a real, actual thing. I always thought it was the sort of bedtime story politicians told their children to make them behave. "Beta go to sleep, or you'll wake up in the Rajya Sabha, where everyone's pointless and the only thing you're worth is one mark on a Civics exam.""
(Mid-Day)
Friday 4 May 2012
There are no secrets online
That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you. (NYT)
How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
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