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129
INSIDE ETON
ROBERT PARKER
The school that makes Britain’s leaders
World’s most powerful critic
REGEN VILLAGES
CLIMATE CHANGE
Could these be the homes of the future?
Why we can’t agree on what to do
WELCOME TO THE POKÉCONOMY How Pokémon Go is changing businesses small and large
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SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
CONTENTS UPFRONT
12
SURGERY 2.0
The website changing how cosmetic surgery is approached
19
POSTING PROFITS
Why social media posts are worth over half a million dollars
21
DIVORCE AID
LIVING
74
The woman who works as a high-paid divorce concierge
SUITE LIFE
25
76
How you can now pay to have your own wine made and bottled
Looks for men and women this month
29
STREET FOOD
YOUR VINTAGE
DIGITAL ASSISTANT
Your next secretary may be virtual
32
The Kipling Suite at Brown’s Hotel in London STYLE
80
Why great food is to be found at street level… and Michelin agrees
89
INVESTMENT PIECE
FUTURE SHOCK
Are we prepared to face the future?
The timeless appeal of the Cartier Tank watch
90
COLUMN
How innovators accelerate success
09
33,388 copies July - December 2015
PORTFOLIO.
September iSSue 129
contents FeatUres
36
bIoHaCKInG
The man behind the social movement
42
ClIMate CHanGe
Why people are struggling to agree on the best ways to combat it
48
doWn tHe rabbIt Hole
Billions have been invested in virtual reality headsets, but are we ready to move into the virtual world?
56
InsIde eton
Why does this private school give Britain so many of its leaders?
60
tHe Most poWerFUl CrItIC
How wine critic Robert Parker came to shape the industry he writes about
66
reGen vIllaGes
One company’s plan for us to live in modern, sustainable villages
010
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HAPPY SPORT
UPFRONT
Face & Neck > Nose
UPFRONT
PORTFOLIO.
Select Your Concerns
12
PORTFOLIO.
SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
Nasal hump/bump Ski slope nose Nose too big Nose too small Tip too pointy Tip too wide Tip too round Tip too flat Crooked Nose Tip points down Tip points up Tip out too far Nostrils too big Nostrils too wide Contour irregularity Difficulty breathing Deviated septum ‘Bunny lines’ Sunspots/discoloration Spider veins Acne Acne scarring Scar Mole/lesion Other
Select your Procedures
TECHNOLOGY | GLOBAL
Click/Nip/Tuck How an internet startup is changing the world of cosmetic surgery. Words: Janet Morrissey
T
he world of cosmetic surgery – whether it is wrinklezapping Botox shots, breast implants or a full-blown facelift – is hardly an industry that seems to be a natural candidate for disruption by startup entrepreneurs. But the industry is no longer limited to celebrities and wealthy socialites. It has become mainstream in recent years, thanks to TV shows like Botched and Extreme Makeover, as well as infomercial ads promoting the latest age-defying cosmetic products. As a result, more prospective patients are travelling from doctor to doctor to get information through consultations, which can cost up to $500 a visit. So Dr Gary Breslow, a plastic surgeon in Paramus, New Jersey, and his longtime friend, Craig Abramowitz, created Zwivel, an online site that offers an easier and more efficient way to connect doctors with new patients seeking plastic surgery. Zwivel goes further than ‘find a doctor’ search platforms or telemedicine sites like HealthTap, in which doctors give patients medical advice through online chats. Just as Match.com allows strangers to scroll through and evaluate potential dates, Zwivel allows patients and doctors to size up each other and ask questions before committing to surgery. The site allows patients to check out doctors’ credentials, send photos or videos of themselves to preferred
doctors, and get those doctors to answer questions about cosmetic procedures and prices, all free. There are now about 1,400 doctors and more than 28,000 patients registered on Zwivel, up from 800 doctors and 6,100 patients at the end of its first year in 2015, said Scott Kera, chief operating officer at Zwivel. The company makes money by charging doctors a monthly subscription fee of $495. The site is free for patients. It also gets a small cut from the lending companies CareCredit and Prosper Healthcare when patients use either one to finance their cosmetic procedures. Born in New Hyde Park, New York, Breslow, 45, earned degrees from Brown University in 1993 and the New York University School Of Medicine in 1998. He finished his residency in plastic surgery at the Hospital Of The University Of Pennsylvania in 2004 and a fellowship in microvascular reconstructive surgery from NYU before starting his own practice in 2005. But he soon became frustrated with the consultation process. Only about 36 per cent of people who come in for cosmetic consultations end up getting a procedure, Breslow said. He attributes the low conversion rate to patients having insufficient information about pricing and procedures before the consultation. “Patients who are severely overweight sometimes think liposuction is the PORTFOLIO.
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September iSSue 129
upfront / CoSmetiC SurGerY
Dr Gary Breslow, right, a co-founder of Zwivel, and Scott Kera, its chief operating officer
“Demand for cosmetic surgery is about 20 per cent to 30 per cent higher than it was before the recession”
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answer, and I tell them, ‘You don’t need liposuction; you need to lose weight,’” Breslow said. “Or a patient may want $20,000 worth of surgery and thinks the whole thing is going to cost $200,” he said. He created Zwivel with the idea that if patients had a faster and easier way to see doctors’ credentials and get doctors to answer questions about surgical procedures and prices in advance, they would be better informed and more likely to sign up when they went for the in-office consultation. Still, it was a lengthy process to get Zwivel off the ground. In 2012, with $250,000 of their own money, Breslow and Abramowitz hired two teams of programmers and site designers over two years. None could build the site. Two years later, in 2014, Kera, who previously founded and sold another technology startup, came on board and assembled a team that built the site in six months. The company waived the doctors’ subscription fees in 2015 as it built up the site. Since introducing the fee in February, the company has signed on 70 new doctors. Zwivel’s revenue, which has totalled $427,000 since February, Portfolio.
is expected to top $1 million this year, $4 million in 2018 and $15 million in 2020, Breslow said. Breslow and Abramowitz raised $3 million in financing from family and friends in 2015 and another $2 million in 2016. Zwivel has been marketing the site through trade conventions and national TV spots on Bravo, Lifetime and E, as well as ads on iHeartRadio. But many patients are finding it through web searches. When Amber Ingerman decided to have breast enlargement surgery in 2015, she contacted 12 doctors and had five formal office consultations. She accumulated fees of about $500 – and still hadn’t found a surgeon she liked. “I was feeling frustrated,” said Ingerman, 29, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. “I had wanted the surgery for about 10 years, but I didn’t want just anyone touching me.” Then, in early 2016, she discovered Zwivel while surfing the web for information on doctors. Ingerman was impressed with the response and credentials of Dr Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon in Dallas who was on Zwivel. She immediately booked a
formal consultation with him and had the surgery a month later. Demand for cosmetic surgery is “about 20 per cent to 30 per cent higher than before the recession”, Rohrich said. There were 15.9 million cosmetic procedures done in the United States in 2015, up from 12.1 million in 2008, according to the American Society Of Plastic Surgeons. Initially, some doctors questioned the need for a virtual consultation, saying that the face-to-face consultation was their strength and the best way to get a customer to sign on. “Initially I was a doubting Thomas,” conceded Dr Neil Zemmel, a plastic surgeon in the Richmond, Virginia, area, who was one of the first doctors to sign up for Zwivel in 2015. But once he tried the site, he was sold. More than 80 per cent of his patients who come through Zwivel for a formal consultation wind up getting a cosmetic procedure, compared with 40 to 50 per cent for other patients, he said. “It’s been an invaluable tool,” he said. Still, not everyone in the industry is convinced that the virtual consultation is particularly useful or accurate. “It’s hard to give pricing because the photos aren’t necessarily indicative of everything. A surgeon is going to want to feel their skin and assess the skin tone, and it’s hard to do that over photos and video,” said Dr David H Song, president of the American Society Of Plastic Surgeons. Breslow, however, dismisses this concern. “Of course you need to see the patient,” he said. “Zwivel is like Match. com. You still have to go on the date; you just want to know if the date is worth going out on.” Ingerman of Fort Worth was so impressed with her experience with Zwivel that she is already considering another procedure with Rohrich, this time, rhinoplasty. She has even introduced her mother, Angel, to the site. “As people find out they can do these consults online to find out prices and doctors’ experience,” she said, “I think Zwivel will completely take over cosmetic surgery and how you shop for it.”
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September iSSue 129
upfront / Spend
Most wanted
3
Gessato ConCrete CloCk Resembling a circular staircase, and with each hour represented by a miniature triangular step, this testament to brutalist architecture is ideal for your modernist office or Soviet bunker. $240, gessato.com
1
G lab bloCk amp The technical side is this: the amp routes incoming signals – whether from the pair of line-ins or the phono input – through pairs of EL34, ECC88 and 6N6P tubes to produce great sound at only 5.5W per channel. But really, it’s just a beautiful piece of design, verging on art, to sit in your living room with your stereo system. $5,999, glabdefi.com
4
360fly 4k Camera A small go-anywhere mount-anywhere camera that lets you record 360° video. It comes with a phone app so you can live stream interactive 4k footage to family and friends around the world. $299, 360fly.com
5 2
thinkWare X330 dash Cam Onboard video could prove who’s to blame
trisoniC in-fliGht headphones adaptor
in a car accident. With this dashboard-mounted camera you can record 1080P full HD footage. It shoots via a 140° viewing angle and comes with a thermal sensor for advanced reliability in extreme temperatures. Plus, the 2.7-inch LCD viewfinder allows for easy video streaming and device configuration. $179, thinkware.com
The tiny two-pin adaptor lets you use your own headphones with in-flight entertainment systems during flights. $5, amazon.com Portfolio.
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S I M P LY T H E B E S T
SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
UPFRONT / SOCIAL MEDIA
TECHNOLOGY | GLOBAL
The cheque’s in the post Why social media endorsements have hit a record value of $550,000 per post
W
hen Selena Gomez recently put a picture of herself holding a bottle of Coca-Cola on Instagram, she did so because she had been paid by the drinks brand. Although it has not been disclosed exactly how much she was paid to do so, data from social media insight company D’Marie puts the value of her endorsement at a record $550,000. It seems ludicrous, but the maths makes sense. The singer and former Disney teen actor currently has 89.4 million followers on Instagram, which is more than anyone else. In addition, Gomez’s combined social-media audience is growing by an average of 200,000 followers daily across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, according to D’Marie. When you combine the three platforms, she reaches around 200 million followers. So, even if Coca-Cola did pay $550,000 that’s just a dollar per 364 followers. Gomez also generated around 2.5 million engagements (comments or likes) per post, so there’s a clear indication people interact. Frank Spadafora, the CEO of D’Marie Group said the rate-perpost is her ‘ad equivalent’ value per post across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That’s not to say she actually gets paid this – figures are undisclosed – but that value is based on 56 metrics including frequency of posts, number of followers, click-thru and “potential to create sales conversions from her social content”. This, they claim, is her true ad value.
Image credit: Instagram/@selenagomez
200m
Followers singer and actress Selena Gomez has on social media
In comparison, the hugely followed Taylor Swift and Cara Delevigne (who are up among the top five in terms of value) are worth $230,000 per social media post. The hugely-popular are becoming hugely-rich by giving brands a direct link to their followers. But for those who can’t make millions selling endorsements
to their followers, there is another way to get rich – sell followers to people wanting to appear popular. It’s not hard to find people on Instagram or Twitter who appear to have tens of thousands of followers, when in fact those followers are fakes that have been bought. (The lack of comments or likes is the first thing to look for). The New York Times reported that a million Instagram followers was selling for $3,700 and the business of selling fake followers is one that is conservatively estimated to be worth over $300 million. The fake Facebook “likes” industry alone reportedly brought in $200 million in 2014. Most of the businesses creating accounts to generate fake followers are based in Bangladesh or the Philippines, and an insider from one such company told the Motherboard website that their clientele includes celebrities and even politicians and corporations. When the so-called “Instagram Rapture” happened in 2014 at least 18 million suspect accounts were deleted. As a result, among those who saw a change to their numbers was the rapper Akon who lost more than half his followers while Justin Bieber saw his following drop by 3.5 million. But as the ability to weed out the fakes improves, it will leave an even more reliable picture of those who have genuine millions hanging on their every social media action. And that in turn will become an increasingly powerful – and valuable – commodity when it comes to delivering an advert or endorsement to a global audience. PORTFOLIO.
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SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
UPFRONT
The divorce concierge A service for unhitching, without a hitch. Words: Katherine Rosman
B
etsy Cox is sort of a planner for those getting unhitched (a divorce concierge) and José Barceló, a scion of the Ron Barceló rum company in the Dominican Republic, is currently her most active client. Earlier this year, Cox, 52, escaped the cold of New York City to take a daylong meeting with Barceló, 53, who has separated from his wife of 23 years. Cox and he played 18 holes of golf, toured his new properties around Casa de Campo and Punta Cana, and joined him for dinner. Between golf and rum shots, she took notes, a lot of them, typing away on her BlackBerry as she used her iPhone to do quick searches and to respond to texts from other clients.
This is what Cox jotted on the digital to-do list: Barceló wants to travel to a different country every month for the next year. He wants to study philosophy. He wants one daughter to be set up with a cool job in New York and to find the other a summer camp to attend in Switzerland. He also wants to meet a woman and fall in love. Cox, who is laidback in a very can-do sort of way and who calls the business Blackbook Divorce, specialises in making it all happen. “He wants to completely remake himself, which makes him a perfect client,” she said. She is arranging for his travel to four continents, 12 countries and at least one health spa. (“I need to send him to a fat farm,” she said. “I was thinking about The Ashram, but I’m not sure he can handle it.”) She’s looking for
$22.5k
Average cost of getting a divorce. About the same as the average cost of getting married
a month-long philosophy course for him in London. “She’s not my wife, but I don’t have a wife anymore and I need someone to take care of me,” said Barceló, who is paying Cox $350 an hour. Cox is hired by men and women who need help navigating the turbulence of leaving one life behind and building a new one. “My job is to fill the void for what they don’t have,” she said. “I’m a temporary fixer. They really need someone when they suddenly have no one.” As technology works to ease so many of life’s quandaries, divorce remains one of the most 21 logistically complicated and emotionally wrought events. But a small marketplace of fixers are starting businesses to simplify the ancillary processes associated with a breakup. PORTFOLIO.
September iSSue 129
upfront / divorce concierge
“If you leave men alone, they die. Have you ever seen a man at the supermarket? They have a shopping cart filled with peanuts” Liza Feiler started a company called Divorce Concierge Group in the Washington area after her own marriage ended in 2012. “I was lost after my divorce, unsure where to begin,” said Feiler, 44. She is hired, post-divorce, for a starting flat fee of $350, most often by ex-wives. She helps clients with tasks like putting their homes on the market and hiring accountants. “You come to me and say, ‘I need new health insurance,’ and I will come back to you with two plans to choose and a start date,” she said. Digital entrepreneurs are also marrying in. Divorceify, a web platform created by three lawyers, pairs members to services that fit their individualised needs: therapists, mediators, parenting coordinators and financial consultants. “Divorce is not a onesize-fits-all process, and you need a holistic approach,” said Sonia Queralt, 34 and a divorced divorce lawyer, who is one of the founders. Cox’s service is also personalised and touches on different facets of her clients’ lives. Her clientele
DIVORCING DOZEN The top 12 countries with the highest divorce rates per capita
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1. Belarus 68% 2. Russian Federation 65% 3. Sweden 64% 4. Latvia 63% 5. Ukraine 63% 6. Czech Republic 61% 7. Belgium 56% 8. Finland 56% 9. Lithuania 55% 10. United Kingdom 53% 11. Moldova 52% 12. United States 49%
Portfolio.
is well-to-do, often international, with multiple homes: the sort of people who frequent Gstaad. The services Cox provides tend to fall into stereotypical patterns. For men, she helps them get set up to manage their own homes and to prepare for parenting challenges. For women, Cox works to get them on a budget, to make sure they have insurance and wealth managers and to give them toughlove lectures about the importance of getting a job. She helps them sell country homes for extra cash. For men and women, she offers herself as a sounding board and friend. She arranges visits to spas and nutritionists for weight loss and to psychiatrists to treat depression. The need for Cox’s services is perhaps best explained by the man who helped introduce her to this potential market, her own ex-husband, Kevin Cox, 53. They were divorced in 2000 after seven years of marriage and have amicably raised their son, Kevin Jr, 18. “When you look at a couple, there are two people with distinct responsibilities,” said Kevin Cox, an investment banker. “Suddenly one side is thrust into taking care of what the other side has always taken care of. I have seen men whose careers fly off the rails amid a divorce.” It was thanks to her own marital breakup that Betsy Cox met the man who has become her closest professional partner, prominent divorce lawyer Bernard Clair. They regularly refer business to each other. “She’s tied into a dirty little secret and that is that even moneyed spouses, the so-called masters of the universe, need a lot of help before, during and after the divorce process,” said Clair, 65.
“A guy has had everything done by the homemaking spouse and is suddenly living alone, and he doesn’t know what the hell to do.” Exhibit A, a client shared by Cox and Clair: a father of two young children who is a wealthy financier and who travels frequently for work. His wife had wanted the divorce, and the combination of her leaving him and his finding himself living alone for the first time in more than a dozen years left the client, Clair said, “emotionally bereft”. While Clair hammered out the legal settlement, Cox got him settled. Clair said she connected him with an agency for nannies and he hired help. She also introduced him to other divorced parents with children of similar ages to his. “He was overwhelmed with the responsibilities of filling all the free time with the children,” Clair said. Cox created a FreshDirect account for the man and put together a list of foods for regular delivery. She taught him how to use Grubhub. She found him a psychiatrist and a girlfriend. “I work a lot with people on issues that can help ease the transition for kids,” Cox said. “I encourage men to get an apartment that’s in walking distance to the mom’s and to make the new home feel very familiar for the kids.” Betsy Cox’s friends and clients say she is suited to this specialised high-end niche, in part because she had worked at a wealth management and investment firm, and as an event planner who travelled abroad extensively, giving her connections all over the world. She is also nurturing. When Cox takes on a client, she offers a full-service operation. “What she is doing with divorce is very smart,” said Ana Luiza Rego, 57. “If you leave men alone, they die. Have you ever seen a man at the supermarket? They have a cart filled with peanuts – $350 an hour is worth it.”
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September iSSue 129
uPfront / wine
wine | france
Fancy making your own vintage? The experiential luxury company that lets you do just that. Words: Alessandra Stanley, Photos: Guia Besana
T
he French region of Bordeaux is the sacred home of Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Margaux, so it would seem unlikely that wines named Duke Of Juice or Bone Ami would come from there. But some winemakers insist on it. And they are entitled, because they pay $12,500 to $25,000 a barrel or $44 to $87 a bottle to create personalised Bordeaux wine and labels. Château Lynch-Bages, a celebrated producer known for rich
yet refined reds, also operates Viniv, a niche company that helps clients create their own custom blends. These clients select the vineyards and tinker with the taste, but leave the grape harvesting, crushing, ageing, barrel-racking and shipping to the experts at the chateau. “I had dreamed about someday buying a vineyard, but it’s a very capital-intensive and thankless business,” said Sébastien Boucraut, 46, a French commodities executive based in Dubai who flies in with two longtime friends to sample their
Above: Nicolas Labenne, right, a technical director for Château Lynch-Bages, helps a client blend wine
Viniv creation. “I thought this was brilliant. You can make your own wine with all the advantages and none of the inconveniences.” They named their wine Racine Carrée de Neuf, or ‘square root of nine’ in French. The three share a tech background, hence the label. It sounds a bit like Build-a-Bear for oenophiles, but Viniv has cachet and a growing clientele across Europe, Australia and the United States. DIY cabernet sauvignon isn’t the only enticement. Stephen Bolger, 52, the CEO and founder of Viniv, describes his business as an “experiential luxury company”. And “experiential luxury” is the new Birkin bag. Nowadays, marketing experts say, the affluent are not content merely to own expensive things, like Cartier watches or Ferraris. Increasingly they prefer to collect one-of-akind moments, and perhaps post them on Instagram. “Wealthy tourists don’t want to sit with other tourists; They want Portfolio.
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to connect with real people and get a story, something they can describe as a really cool, unbelievable experience,” said Jack Ezon, president of Ovation Vacations, a luxury travel agency that arranges for clients to dance in a rehearsal of the Bolshoi Ballet, throw pots with Peruvian artisans or have lunch with Salvatore Ferragamo and design their own shoes in his studio. (Ezon also does bar mitzvahs – in Sardinia.) Travel agents like Ezon are selling veritable virtual reality: A fantasy adventure with real people and no goggles. Conspicuous consumption hasn’t gone away. Sales of yachts, sports cars and jewellery are higher than they were before the 2008 crisis, according to Wealth-X, a research firm that focuses on UHNWI: ultra high-net-worth individuals. But the recession did calm things down a bit at the top end. “There was a values shift after 2008 away from ostentatious materialism,” said Marie-Cécile Cervellon, a professor of marketing at the French business school Edhec. High-end consumers are instead spending on personal fulfillment and family bonding, albeit in rarefied places. Jeff Fromm, a partner at the Barkley ad agency and co-author of Marketing To Millennials, calls it a version of a “millennial mindset” that is spreading across generations. “One in four millennials would prefer to pay money for an experience rather than for a product,” he said. In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group warned, “No luxury firm can ignore the accelerating shift from ‘having’ to ‘being.’” Pete Johnson discovered Viniv in 2010 when a friend in a cigar club told him he was making his own wine in Bordeaux. “I said: ‘What do you mean? That’s what I want to do.’” Johnson, 45, a cigar maker and entrepreneur in Los Angeles, has made five vintages since then, including Bone Ami, in homage Portfolio.
uPfront / wine
$44
Starting price per bottle to create your own Bordeaux wine
From left: James Board, Richard Perris and Will Ledger, Viniv clients, visiting a cabernet sauvignon vineyard in SaintEstèphe with the Viniv cellar master, Thierry Cowez, in the background
to his Rottweiler, and Tatouage (French for tattoo), in homage to his ornately inked forearms. (Duke Of Juice is also his.) He figures he has spent more than $150,000 making wines at Viniv, not including airfare and hotels. “I am making the best possible wine for my palate,” he said. “This isn’t your two-buck Chuck.” There are other Bordeaux chateaus that try to give visitors a sense of ownership. Typically they allow visitors to adopt a plot of vines or personalise their bottles. Viniv caters to clients who are willing to commit the time, travel and expense – and break a Bordeaux taboo. Bolger offers customers three grape varietals from 13 different vineyards, allowing them to mix a cabernet sauvignon from Pauillac with a merlot from Pomerol. For the wine establishment of Bordeaux, blending grapes from different appellations is the vintner’s equivalent of fantasy football, or eugenics. “I recently had an older farmer who refused to sell me his vines,” Bolger said. But he also said rejections were rare because Viniv wines are not commercially sold; they are savoured by their creators.
“This isn’t a gimmick,” Bolger said. “It’s a real and entirely different way of producing fine wine.” And make a splash. “I think it’s fun at dinner parties to pour my own wine for friends instead of something banal,” Boucraut said. Many clients say they go there not just to make wine, but to enter a sophisticated world closed to ordinary tourists. In the spring, the vineyards around Pauillac are lined with wild poppies. Wisteria twists over the walls of stately chateaus and medieval churches. The bistros serve oysters from Arcachon Bay. And Bolger organises tastings and private meals at neighbouring chateaus, including even Chateau Petrus, which for ordinary tourists is harder to visit than Norad. Château Lynch-Bages also provides private tours, tailored to VIP customers. “It’s very intimate, not a typical tour where they give you a thimble of wine and a canned speech,” said Hank Werronen, 73, a retired health care executive and entrepreneur in Arlington, Virginia. He discovered Viniv after winning a trip to Bordeaux at an American Heart Association benefit auction. “I’m not just making a wine, I’m making a memory,” he said.
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SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
UPFRONT / DIGITAL ASSISTANT
TECHNOLOGY | GLOBAL
Dawn of the digital assistant Why your next secretary might be made of 0s and 1s. Words: Henry Alford
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ou don’t hear many people bellyaching about the servant problem these days. In 1904, when Saki wrote, “The cook was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went,” this witticism would have fallen on kind ears. The bourgeoisie of that era talked about the unreliability of hired help with the same willed petulance that we reserve today for conversations about how it takes three remotes to turn on our TV. Indeed, in today’s world, it seems as if you’d be less likely to hear about a domestic walking out than you would someone falling in love with his virtual assistant. I recently used a virtual assistant named Amy for 10 days. We did not fall in love,
but I should point out that Amy is underage because she is still in beta. (“I’d say she’s about a teenager now,” Amy’s representative told me. “Which means occasionally moody and incorrigible.”) My relationship with Amy was less Lord Grantham/the housemaid Jane than the sorcerer’s apprentice/his bucket. Virtual assistants like Siri, Google Now and Cortana have helped many people navigate their lives, but the next wave of helpers is likely to have more agency. Hailing from a New York City startup called x.ai, Amy (who users can alternatively name Andrew) will set up meetings for you. Once someone has agreed to meet with you at a certain place,
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Number of times x.ai says Amy was asked on a date in 2015
you cc Amy, and independently of you she’ll go back and forth with the other person to determine a mutually convenient time, and then help you to put that time on your calendar. Winningly, Amy is (for now) free. Once her users sign up on the x.ai website, they need tangle with neither hardware nor app. The best part of having a virtual assistant is telling your friends you have a virtual assistant; I felt as if I’d discovered a third buttock. It was the conversational equivalent of carrying a baby through an office. “Does she sound like Scarlett Johansson in (the movie) Her?” one person asked me; another jested that bots are the new mimes. PORTFOLIO.
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Allowing someone to do your vetting requires trust. I applaud x.ai for including, at the bottom of each of Amy’s e-mails, the information that Amy Ingram is a form of artificial intelligence; if my correspondents had found out this fact on their own, they might have felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. I wanted to test Amy with some of the vagaries that sometimes befall get-togethers. My own friends and colleagues are, of course, far, far too drenched in integrity and follow-through ever to exhibit even the tiniest glimmer of unreliability or waffling, so I created an e-mail account for someone I called Tania. I imagined Tania to be an impulsive, scatterbrained Portfolio.
uPfront / Digital assistant
entertainer for children. When Amy extended to Tania an invitation for coffee at Starbucks, I had Tania write back to Amy: “I can do 3:00 on Monday, unless I only get three hours of sleep that night and look smeary and indistinct and have trouble following the thread of conversations. In which case Thursday or Friday are much better.” Amy blithely set the appointment for Monday at 3:00, not telling me about Tania’s preemptive waffle. Oops. Next, on the morning of the coffee date, I had Tania write Amy, “I’m working a kids birthday party directly after I meet Henry. Do you think it will be OK if I bring a suitcase full of baby animals to Starbucks?”
Above: Dennis Mortensen, CEO and founder of x.ai
Amy forwarded me the e-mail, saying she didn’t think she could answer it, and then told Tania she had done so, encouraging Tania to get in touch with me directly if Tania didn’t hear from me. Well done. Finally, 16 minutes before Tania’s and my supposed appointment, I had Tania write Amy to say that she was running 15 minutes late: “A bottle of moisturizer has exploded and I am beset with goo.” Amy nimbly forwarded the message to me minutes later. Nice. In the end, working with Amy has made me think about assistantship. Besides the nuts-andbolts of completing tasks efficiently, what are we looking for in our helpers? Reassurance? A second opinion? All our best qualities narcissistically reflected back at us? All of these skills elude my simple Amy. But Amy has one thing going for her that you are unlikely to see from any of her living, breathing counterparts: On Monday morning, Amy sends me a summary of my meetings for the week. But when I say “Monday morning”, I don’t mean at 8.23am, as she’s groggily lumbering onto the L train. I mean at 3.47am. It was hugely consoling to learn that my helper was thoroughly invested in my schedule at an hour when my bladder is making a lot of troubling decisions for me. Indeed, reading the time code ‘3.47am’ made me feel as if I was looking at one of those holographic depictions of tissue being regenerated on the Bionic Man’s body. In her present state, Amy may not be able to do much beyond reduce the number of e-mails that lie between you and the awkward meeting at the Doppio Hut where you and your regional buyer ask each other if you’re taking any holidays days this summer. But we have the technology. We can rebuild her. Henry Alford is the author of Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide To Manners.
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upfront / future Shock
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September iSSue 129
technology | global
Future shock Do we have an inability to deal with ever-faster change? Words: Farhad Manjoo, Illustration: Ralph Mancao
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ore than 40 years ago, Alvin Toffler, a writer who had fashioned himself into one of the first futurists, warned that the accelerating pace of technological change would soon make us all sick. He called the sickness “future shock”, which he described in his totemic book of the same name, published in 1970. In Toffler’s coinage, future shock wasn’t simply a metaphor for our difficulties in dealing with new things. It was a real psychological malady, the “dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future”. And “unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it”, he warned, “millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments”. Toffler died recently at 87. It is fitting that his death occurred in a period of weeks characterised by one example of madness after another – a geopolitical paroxysm marked by bombings, Brexit, rumours of Mike Tyson taking the stage at a national political convention and a computer-piloted Tesla crashing into an old-fashioned tractor-trailer. It would be facile to attribute any one of these events to future shock. Yet in rereading Toffler’s book, as I did recently, it seems clear that his diagnosis has largely panned out, with crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.
All around, technology is altering the world: social media is subsuming journalism, politics and even terrorist organisations. Inequality, driven in part by techno-abetted globalisation, has created economic panic across much of the western world. National governments are in a slow-moving war for dominance with a handful of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen – all of which happen to be tech companies. But even though these and bigger changes are just getting started – here come artificial intelligence, gene editing, drones, better virtual reality and a battery-powered transportation system – futurism has fallen out of favour. Even as the pace of technology keeps increasing, we haven’t developed many good ways, as a society, to think about long-term change. Look at the news: Politics has become frustratingly small-minded and short-sighted. We aren’t any better at recognising threats and opportunities that we see emerging beyond the horizon of the next election. While roads, bridges, broadband networks and other vital pieces of infrastructure are breaking down, governments, especially ours, have become derelict at rebuilding things – “a near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future”, as the writer Elizabeth Drew put it recently. In many large ways, it’s almost as if we have collectively stopped planning for the future. Instead, we all just Portfolio.
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sort of bounce along in the present, caught in the headlights of a tomorrow pushed by a few large corporations and shaped by the inescapable logic of hyper-efficiency – a future heading straight for us. It’s not just future shock; we now have future blindness. “I don’t know of many people anymore whose day-to-day pursuit is the academic study of the future,” said Amy Webb, a futurist who founded the Future Today Institute, a forecasting company. It didn’t have to come to this. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as the US government began to spend huge sums in the Cold War, futurists became the high priests of the coming age. Forecasting became institutionalised; research institutes like RAND, SRI and MITRE worked on long-range projections about technology, global politics and weaponry, and world leaders and businesses took their forecasts as seriously as news of the present day. In 1972, the federal government even blessed the emerging field of futurism with a new research agency, the congressional Office Of Technology Assessment, which reviewed proposed legislation for its long-term effects. Futurists were optimistic about lawmakers’ new interest in the long term. “Congressmen and their staffs are searching for ways to make government more anticipatory,” Edward Cornish, president of the World Future Society, told a reporter in 1978. “They’re beginning to realise that legislation will remain on the books for 25 or 50 years before it’s reviewed, and they want to be sure that what they do now won’t have an adverse impact years from today.” But since the 1980s, futurism has fallen from grace. For one thing, it was taken over by marketers. “‘Futurist’ always sounded like this weird, made-up, science-fiction term,” Webb said, even though in its early years, people were doing deep, nuanced research about how various tech and social movements would shape the world. Futurism’s reputation for hucksterism became self-fulfilling as people who called themselves futurists began to make and sell predictions about products, and to go out on the conference circuit to push them. Long-term thinking became Portfolio.
upfront / future Shock
“The future doesn’t stop coming just because you stop planning for it” associated with the sort of new-agey “thinkfluencers” who hung out at TED and Davos, and who went by names like Shingy and Faith Popcorn. Futurism became a joke, not a science. The end of the Cold War and a rise in partisan political interests also changed how lawmakers saw the utility of looking at the future. In the Reagan years, many on the right began to see the government as the cause of most of the nation’s ills. The idea that the government could do something as difficult as predict the future came to be considered a ridiculous waste of money. Newt Gingrich has long been enamoured of science fiction – he wants to build a moon base. But when Gingrich became speaker of the House in 1995, he quickly shut down the Office Of Technology Assessment. The government no longer had any place for futurists, and every decision about the future was viewed through the unforgiving lens of partisan politics. Of course, the future doesn’t stop
coming just because you stop planning for it. Technological change has only sped up since the 1990s. Notwithstanding questions about its impact on the economy, there seems no debate that advances in hardware, software and biomedicine have led to seismic changes in how most of the world lives and works – and will continue to do so. Yet without soliciting advice from a class of professionals charged with thinking systematically about the future, we risk rushing into tomorrow headlong, without a plan. “It is ridiculous that the United States is one of the only nations of our size and scope in the world that no longer has an office that is dedicated to rigorous, nonpartisan research about the future,” Webb said. “The fact that we don’t do that is insane.” Or, as Toffler put it in Future Shock, “Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.”
The Supplemented Self Is ‘biohacking’ just a fad? Or can data-driven diets help us become a better, happier species?
features
portfolio.
Jenna Wortham
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ave Asprey does not like infomercials. He didn’t want our conversation to feel like one, he said, raising both hands in a gesture of innocence, like a magician showing there was nothing up his sleeve. But once he planted the suggestion, it wouldn’t go away. There was the register of his voice, oscillating between breathy and enthusiastic, and the complete absence of qualifiers to soften his bold claims. And then there were the wares clustered on the table in front of him. He had laid out cups of his signature product, Bulletproof Coffee, which is made with grass-fed butter and Brain Octane, a trademarked oil extracted from coconuts. Next to the cups lay Bulletproof-branded protein bars in chocolate and vanilla. “I am not plugging my stuff,” he said with a semi-embarrassed laugh. “I’m just talking about how things work.” And this is how things work for Asprey, according to his claims: By experimenting on his own body, he found a diet to end all diets, one that encourages the consumption of rich foods like avocado, steak and butter and requires little exercise to maintain a healthy weight. In the course of developing this diet – the Bulletproof Diet – Asprey says he lost 100 pounds, boosted his IQ more than a dozen points and lowered his biological age in the process. Asprey, 43, is the founder of Bulletproof Executive, a company that sells supplements and gadgets. He is also an avatar of the quantifiedself movement, a loose-knit group of people who obsessively collect data about their lives in order to learn more about their behavior, and potentially change it. Once the rarefied pastime of alpha geeks who meticulously logged data about their bodies in spreadsheets and built graphs to glean trends about their inner workings from the numbers, selftracking has become practically mainstream in recent years. The market for wearable fitness devices is projected to generate $1.8 billion this year. There are commercial headbands to monitor brain waves and wristbands to track movement. Many smartwatches log their wearers’ heart rates, and a number of smartphones count their owners’ footsteps. In theory, the insights gained from self-tracking set the stage for biohacking, the tweaking of exercise routines and eating habits to yield a better you. But Asprey is betting that most people won’t want to figure all that out, preferring instead to rely on the fruits of his years of self-funded and -directed research. Venture capitalists agree: in July, Asprey raised $9 million from Trinity Ventures, the same investment firm that 37 placed early bets on Starbucks and Jamba Juice. Shortly thereafter, he opened his first Bulletproof Coffee shop on a fashionable strip in Santa Monica, California. He is working to build Bulletproof into a global corporation – and firmly believes the world portfolio.
BIO-HACKING Asprey says nutrition should be as effortless as everything else in our technologyenhanced existence.
will be better off for it. To Asprey, futurists’ grandiose ambitions will be meaningless if humans can’t find a way to improve their longevity. “The way you do that is you monitor and manage the human body and then do small-level system upgrades,” he told me. “Before you do a hardware upgrade, shouldn’t you make better use of the hardware you have right now?”
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sprey, who is 6 feet 4 inches tall and on the verge of being muscular, sat alert in a blue polo shirt. His blue-blocker shades rested on the table next to him. (He believes the glasses protect his circadian rhythm from the glow emitted by his phone’s screen.) All morning, he came off as hyperfocused and articulate, able to speak in complete paragraphs about his esoteric health interests. Eventually, he revealed that before our meeting, he dosed himself with a cocktail of substances to enhance his cognitive function. He’d wanted to be as alert as possible for the day, which included our interview and setting up for his annual Bulletproof biohacking conference. In addition to his regular daily supplements, he ingested a milligram of nicotine to improve his focus. The jitteriness was apparently worth it. Asprey says he finally lost faith in western medicine at 23, when a doctor told him that vitamin C could kill him. It turns out this isn’t true, but for Asprey it was the last straw. As a boy, he suffered from inexplicable rashes and alarming, recurring nosebleeds. He says he also felt a mental sluggishness that never seemed to recede. This frightened him, especially as he entered college. By the time he was 22, he weighed 300 pounds. He bought disability insurance when he was about 25 because he was worried that there would come a day when he wouldn’t have enough energy to work. His poor health didn’t hold back his career. Asprey rose through a series of high-profile positions at several successful technology companies in the portfolio.
“Asprey says he lost 100 pounds, boosted his IQ more than a dozen points and also lowered his biological age in the process”
’90s and ’00s. Still, he felt restless and unhappy. In 1995, determined to get his weight under control, he spent 18 months on a strict diet and exercised six days a week. He got stronger, but lost little fat. And the food restrictions made him even more miserable. In the ’90s, he studied a form of information management called a decision support system at California State University, Stanislaus. Such systems use artificial intelligence to analyse data and present it so users can more easily make difficult business decisions. Asprey decided to apply similar tactics to his health. He began closely tracking his food intake alongside his energy levels, mood, sleep and physical activity to create a data set so he could see what patterns emerged – which inputs correlated with positive outcomes and which didn’t. After his failed low-calorie diet, he tried others: the Zone, Atkins, raw veganism, high-protein and intermittent fasting. At the same time, he went to extreme lengths to collect additional data on his body’s performance. He had adrenal testing done to better understand how his hormones worked; extensive blood work let him monitor his glucose and albumin levels. He got DNA tests to look for genes that might cause immune-deficiency and sent out samples of his faeces to learn about the microbes in his digestive tract. He bought an electroencephalogram, or EEG machine, to monitor his brain waves. Once, in 2006, hoping to treat gut problems, he placed an order online for a shipment of parasites called porcine whipworm. The eggs arrived from Thailand a few days later in a saline solution. He drank the whole thing hoping they would trigger an anti-inflammatory reaction in his gut. They didn’t. In all, Asprey says, he has spent more than $300,000 over 20 years on this self-funded research. He talks about himself almost as a lab rat, or as a monkey that was shot into space and returned intact, bearing data to share. But, with his background in computer science, he also fancies himself a hacker – someone who endlessly manipulates a complex system, troubleshooting and looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. He eventually developed his dietary guidelines, which emphasise that half the day’s calories should come from healthy fats like coconut oil and avocados. Asprey believes these provide more energy and satiation than carbohydrates. The rest is a mix of organic proteins and vegetables. It is both strict and decadent. Sugar (including fruit), grains, legumes and pasteurised dairy are to be avoided, as are many trendy health food items like raw kale and nut milks, which Asprey says contain toxins. The diet is ketogenic; it forces the body to burn fat, instead of carbs and glucose, for energy. The centrepiece of the Bulletproof Diet – and the business – is Bulletproof Coffee: a blend
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BIO-HACKING
of freshly brewed coffee, the Brain Octane oil and grass-fed butter, consumed at the beginning of each day to boost energy and curb hunger. It comes with a remarkable patter. In 2004, as part of his campaign of self-improvement, Asprey went to Tibet to study meditation. On a trek in the Himalayas, he began to feel the effects of altitude sickness. At a local guesthouse, he was served a cup of tea mixed with yak butter, which he found to be revitalising and energising. After returning home, he tried to make his own version, and eventually landed on the recipe he sells today – almost.
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ulletproof employees are fond of asking whether you’ve had “real” Bulletproof Coffee – meaning not made with storebought butter and coconut oil in your kitchen, but with their branded products. Asprey insists that most American coffee is riddled with a fungus that causes a post-consumption crash. He is especially hung up on mold toxins, or mycotoxins, which he believes were responsible for the health conditions that afflicted him while growing up. The mould in American coffee, he says, leads to illnesses, inflammation and weight gain. Asprey sells his own specially treated mould-free coffee for as much as $18.95 a pound online and at the shop. The next morning, I arrived at the Pasadena Convention Center for the first day of the Bulletproof Biohacking conference. Inside, the crowd was almost comically Southern Californian. The bodies were firm, the jawlines sharp. The women were no strangers to cosmetic enhancement, and five-toe Vibram shoes and neoprene yoga pants were the popular pan-gender wardrobe choices. This was the vanguard of the quantified-consumer class – healthconscious Angelenos, the same types who were early adopters of the Master Cleanse and green juices. The event was billed as a cutting-edge biohacking event, but it was tame compared with what goes on at the fringes of this community. Seven months earlier and about two hours away, in Tehachapi, a much more extreme clique of biohackers gathered to share the recent discoveries at a gathering called GrindFest. These are the real transhumanists, the kind of people who implant magnets under their skin and embed microchips in their bodies to replace key cards. Asprey’s ethos is not so dissimilar – he wants to push humanity past its biological limits – but his sell is more palatable: We need only think of our bodies as hardware in order to improve upon them. Little of the technology on display at the Bulletproof convention was new. No one was being implanted or fused with anything. They preferred to upgrade the old-fashioned way, with a miracle drug or pill or elixir that would transform them from the portfolio.
He talks about himself almost as a lab rat, or as a monkey that was shot into space and returned intact, bearing data to share
inside out, and there was no shortage of products that promised to do so. The Bulletproof Coffee was abundant, as were the Bulletproof-branded collagen bars, grass-fed meat jerky and small paper cups of steaming, earthy bone broth. There were samples of Fat Water, a new Bulletproof sports drink infused with a certain fatty acid that Asprey believes the body processes into energy more efficiently than it does glucose. There were Bulletproof-branded supplements, like glutathione, an antioxidant that Asprey says helps detoxify the body. I narrowly missed the cricket brownies smeared with colostrum icing – the crowd descended on them as soon as they were set out. I watched a woman drip a tincture made from deer antlers on the eager tongue of a slim and handsome attendee. I rolled my eyes at a hypnotist putting a woman into a trance, and then, hours later, the same hypnotist talked me into taking an injection of vitamins labeled simply a “shine shot”. There are more than a few nutritionists who are dubious of Asprey’s claims. There’s little research outside his own that backs them up. Asprey’s diet advises against calorie counting. It is also high in fat. Marion Nestle, an author and professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, is among those sceptical of what Asprey is selling. “I don’t know any diet, exercise or healthful-living shortcuts,” she wrote in an emailed exchange. “We all want to live forever, and if changing one thing in our diets can do that, we can all hope. The success of the dietary-supplement industry is best explained by wish-fulfillment fantasies.” Asprey’s diet is, for all its technological fervour, a refutation of the last generation’s hollow wisdom. In its avoidance of complex carbohydrates and its pseudoscientific rhetoric, it’s not so dissimilar from the Paleo diet – along with supplements that would befuddle a cave man, or even a New Yorker. Fad diets persist because they are seductive, and offer the promise of unlocking a better you by following a few simple rules. And Asprey’s pitch couldn’t be more epistemologically fashionable: A/B testing, hacking and data analysis have already provided us with many novel insights and conveniences. Asprey believes that nutrition should be as effortless as everything else in our technologyenhanced existence – why shouldn’t it be? His background is in information management, and that is what he is skilled at: distilling oceanic volumes of information for easy consumption and decisionmaking. The allure of the Bulletproof lifestyle is that you can outsource that work. “That fundamental laziness, where I want everything to be easier, is part of what drives me,” he told me that first day. “I don’t want to do more work than is necessary to do great things. I don’t see why anyone should do more work than is necessary to do great things.”
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Climate Change
Another Inconvenient Truth It’s hard to agree how to fight climate change John Schwartz
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James Yang
y just about any measure, the movement to battle climate change has grown so large that the truths of Al Gore’s decade-old movie now seem more mainstream than inconvenient. In Paris in December, 195 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gases. In the United States, 70 per cent of Americans say that climate change is real. Pope Francis has joined the call for action. Hundreds of thousands of people have come together for climate marches in Paris and New York, and demonstrators recently held fossil-fuel protests on six continents. “That’s what I call momentum,” Daniel R Tishman, the chair man of the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in its recent annual report. “This isn’t just the wind at our backs; these are the winds of change.”
But the movement that started with a straightforward mission – to get more people to appreciate the dangers of climate change as a precursor to action – is feeling growing pains. What may seem like a unified front has pronounced schisms, with conflicting opinions on many issues, including nuclear power and natural gas, that are complicating what it means to be an environmentalist in this day and age. The factional boundaries are not hard and fast, with groups shifting their positions as the science and waves of activism evolve. The environmental movement has always been a congregation of many voices, and some disagreement should be expected on such complex and intractable problems as saving the planet. Still, the tensions remain strong. Over the page we look at some of the biggest points of contention.
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Climate Change
Natural Gas
Nuclear Power There are sharp disagreements over whether nuclear plants should be part of the energy mix to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Disasters like that at the Fukushima plant in Japan have undercut confidence in the technology, but it remains attractive to the Obama administration and many in the environmental movement, including James E Hansen, a retired Nasa climate scientist. Supporters argue that nuclear plants can produce enormous amounts of power without the carbon dioxide that burning coal and natural gas produce. They also point out that the energy sources replacing existing plants tend to come from natural gas, causing greenhouse emissions. That was the case in New England when the Vermont Yankee plant was shut down, and in California after the closing of the plant at San Onofre. Opponents of nuclear energy argue that the move to renewable energy sources would not require a new generation of nuclear plants. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian who has written about the tactics of those who spread doubt about climate change, said proponents of nuclear power had not proved that the risks of operating the plants, and the waste they produce, could be managed.
If we’re going to win the climate fight, it will come with a change in the zeitgeist and not any particular pieces of legislation
Burning natural gas produces less carbon dioxide and smog-producing pollutants than burning coal, so environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and even American President Barack Obama once praised it as a “bridge” to renewable fuels: that natural gas plants could replace coal plants until alternate sources like solar and wind power could take over. More recently, however, the environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is used to extract fossil fuels, and growing worries about the greenhouse gas methane, which often leaks when natural gas is produced and transported, have led many scientists and activists to call natural gas a “bridge to nowhere”. (The Sierra Club now has a ‘Beyond Natural Gas’ campaign.) Climate campaigners like Bill McKibben have argued that the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas, especially in the short term, might make it worse than coal. He has described those who favor natural gas as a way to reduce greenhouse emissions as believers in “painless environmentalism, the equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair.” The fight has made its way into the Democratic campaign for the presidency: Bernie Sanders of Vermont called for a national ban on fracking, while Hillary Clinton has suggested that the technology should be carefully regulated and that, if natural gas is a bridge to alternate energy sources, “we want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible”. Those putting together the Democratic Party platform narrowly rejected the call for a ban.
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Climate Change
Fossil-fuel Companies Two distinct camps have emerged on the best strategy for dealing with companies like ExxonMobil. One camp wants to attack their very existence, and to hurt their businesses and reputations as a way of accelerating the transition to renewable technologies such as wind and solar. Universities and institutional shareholders such as pensions and church endowments are being pressed to sell their stock in fossil-fuel companies, to fight projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and to disrupt construction of fossil-fuel facilities. This approach animates the “keep it in the ground” campaign led by groups like McKibben’s 350.org, which argues that many of today’s fuel reserves are “unburnable” if climate change is to be slowed, and so must be considered “stranded assets” – a notion that oil giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron reject. On the other side is the camp that wants to engage with the companies, particularly through shareholder proxies, to push for more action on climate change. Groups like the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, as well as New York state and city officials, recently presented at ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting proposals that would require the company to assess the business risks of meeting the Paris climate goals and to “acknowledge the moral imperative” to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2⁰ Celsius since the start of the industrial era; they also helped to pass a resolution giving shareholders greater say in corporate governance.
Insiders Vs Outsiders More fundamentally, a split is growing between the large, traditional environmental groups that try to work with companies and the scrappy campaigners who stand proudly outside. Naomi Klein, an author on environmental and economic issues, has sharply criticised what she called “a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the big green groups”, like the Environmental Defence Fund, which has worked with fossil-fuel companies to research methane leaks and to pursue market-based solutions to the climate crisis, such as putting a price on carbon. Klein argues that capitalism inherently worsens climate change. Working within the system as the institutional players do, she has said, is “more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost”. McKibben said the kind of noisy activism that characterises the work of organisations like 350. org helps correct what he sees as the institutional inertia of the established groups. He said the lack of mass-movement activism was a key reason behind the failure of legislation such as the 2010 effort to develop a system to limit and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. “If we’re going to win the climate fight, it will come with a change in the zeitgeist,” he said. “And that – not particular pieces of legislation – is the ultimate point of building movements.” Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defence Fund, disagreed. Working with industry, he said, had helped deepen the understanding of such issues as methane leakage, which could produce remedies. “More and more businesses want to be part of 47 the solution,” Krupp said. Collaborative efforts helped lead to June’s bipartisan passage of an overhaul of toxic substances legislation, he said, adding, “And we’re getting close to being able to do it with climate change.” portfolio.
Down the virtual reality rabbit hole
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Billions have been invested in new virtual reality headsets Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. So are we ready to move into the virtual world?
Farhad Manjoo
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his is going to sound like the technerd version of one of those firstperson People magazine essays about surviving adversity: you don’t appreciate how much you need to see your hands until you can’t. Your hands – they’re always there. Even in the most immersive of media experiences – an IMAX movie or the hypnotic reverie of a darkened opera house – your sense of where your hands are is an ever-present comfort. Because you can see your hands, you can reach for the popcorn without knocking it over. Because your eyes aren’t locked on the screen, you can check your phone to make sure your babysitter hasn’t texted with an emergency. But then you don virtual reality goggles, and your hands disappear. So does the rest of the world around you. You are bereft, and it is very unsettling. This sounds obvious: the whole point of virtual reality is to create a fantasy divorced from the physi- 49 cal world. You’re escaping the dreary mortal coil for a completely simulated experience: there you are, climbing the side of a mountain, exploring a faraway museum, flying through space or getting in bed with someone way out of your league. PORTFOLIO.
virtual reality
Astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman during a VR session used in preparation for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. The technology is now available for homes
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ut in many ways, the simulation is too immersive. After spending a few weeks with two of the most powerful VR devices now on the market, the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, I suspect that VR will be used by the masses one day, but not anytime soon. I’m not sure we’re ready to fit virtual reality into our lives. Getting completely submerged in a simulation is good for things like games, but for most media, total immersion feels like a strangely old-fashioned experience. Because it leaves your body helplessly stuck in the physical world while your mind wanders, VR doesn’t fit with the way most people work at a computer, watch TV or encounter many other digital experiences. Virtual reality is the opposite of a smartphone, a device that offers you quick hits of the digital world as you go about in the real world. Instead, VR is at this point an experience best left for the privacy of one’s cave – a lonely, sometimes anti-social affair that does not allow for multitasking, for distraction or for the modern world’s easy interplay of the real and the digital. “I’m a real proponent of being careful how we use it because immersion is not free,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a research centre for virtual reality experiences. “Immersion comes at a cost. It takes portfolio.
The Oculus Development Kit 2
you out of your environment, it’s perceptually taxing at times, and it’s not something that we can use the way we use other media, for hours and hours and hours a day.” Part of the problem is that the technology still isn’t good enough. People at Oculus, the VR startup that Facebook purchased for $2 billion in 2014, compare their Rift headset to the Apple II personal computer – one of the earliest incarnations of a device that would change the world. Eventually. The Apple II went on sale in 1977, but a couple of decades would pass before person-
virtual reality
al computers became ubiquitous. The earliest PCs were also very expensive (the Apple II sold for what would be about $5,000 today) and VR is no different. The Rift sells for $599, and the Vive goes for $799; both require a powerful desktop computer that will set you back at least $1,000. Both companies are working to solve some of the issues I had with VR. A representative for Oculus told me that one of its goals was to add more parts of your body to the simulation, so that you don’t feel as if your mind and your limbs are in two different worlds. Later this year, Oculus will release a pair of touch sensi-
“Immersion comes at a cost. It takes you out of your environment, perceptually taxing at times”
tive controllers. When you carry these into a virtual world, as I did during a recent demonstration at Facebook’s headquarters, you can see a representation of your hands in virtual space, and the controllers let you manipulate digital objects in a way that feels remarkably real. In Oculus’ demo room, I threw three-point shots in basketball, repeatedly punched a guy (and took some punches) in an unruly hockey game and passed some digital toys back and forth with an Oculus employee who was also wearing a headset. Compared with the lonelier, hands-free version of Oculus now shipping, the hands-on demonstration offered less of a split between what my body was doing in the real world and what my eyes were seeing in the virtual one. HTC’s Vive is ahead of Oculus on this score. It comes with hand-sensing controllers that allow for digital manipulation, and its headset has a handy camera that provides an in-goggles map of the room around you, letting you find your chair and your keyboard without having to fumble clumsily for them. But even as the technology improves, VR is still something you have to get used to. It’s unusual, in these days of multitasking, to plunge yourself completely into a media experience. You might want to tweet and snap while you watch a presidential debate or the NBA finals. And you’re probably multitasking even when you’re watching something longer and more serious, like a movie. But VR doesn’t allow you to easily direct your gaze toward anything beyond the media at hand. Once you’re in it, you’re in it; even handling a snack can be challenging. In a paradoxical way, the intensity of VR tends to limit its integration into your daily life. “In general, we never put somebody in a helmet for more than about 20 minutes, and we give them frequent breaks,” said Bailenson of Stanford. “Being perceptually disconnected from the world for much longer may not be something a lot of people want to do.” There are some great games on these systems, and there are sure to be many more during the next couple of years. There are also several useful experiences, like designing your Ikea kitchen in VR. But if you’re not a gamer and you’re not looking for a new kitchen, VR is, at this point, just too immersive for most media. A few minutes after donning my goggles, I came to regard my virtual 51 surroundings as a kind of prison. Yes, VR is a prison of fantastical sights and sounds and one that is at moments irresistibly exciting, but it’s a prison nevertheless. And before long, it will leave you yearning for escape. portfolio.
POKÉMON GO
COVER STORY
Welcome to the Pokéconomy: how businesses are riding the Pokémon craze
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POKÉMON GO
Why paying small amounts to lure virtual characters leads to real-world increases in footfall and takings
Dan Tynan
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POKÉMON GO
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he mobile game sensation Pokémon Go has altered the lives of the more than 30 million people who’ve downloaded it since it launched, but it has also affected the thousands of businesses that find themselves situated near one of the game’s many hotspots – both for good and ill. In tech-crazed San Francisco – where a Pokémon Go crawl attracted over 10,000 players – local business owners couldn’t help noticing throngs of people in front of their establishments, huddled around their phones tossing Pokéballs around. “I did my research,” said Rich, an imposing figure with a bullet-shaped head who minds the door at The Gold Club, a gentleman’s bar in the city’s south of market district. “They got seven million more people signed up this week than last. The kids come by, they’re like 20 or 25, they just col-
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Companies will be able to pay to be featured in the virtual game because it will drive foot traffic
Below: maps guiding players to certain areas and the virtual creatures they are trying to capture
lect their points and move on. But I can see them bringing their dads along to come in for a drink.” Diana Roman, an employee of Cafe Germain Creperies, just down the road from The Gold Club, thinks it would be a great idea to put a Pokémon character in front of her business to draw more customers. “Can you do that? Really? That would be awesome. I just started playing,” she said. “I’m on Level 4,” her colleague Priscilla Rico boasted. The game works through a smartphone’s camera overlaying some 250 Pokémon characters into real-world settings. Players capture these creatures by throwing Pokéballs at them, which they collect at various interesting places such as historic landmarks or graffiti walls. Players slowly “level up” during the game until they reach the status of Pokémon trainer, where they can take a passel of captured creatures to a Pokégym (do keep up) and teach them how to fight. And they can also purchase objects to use inside the game, which is how Nintendo and its partners are making a reported $1.6 million per day from the free download. Pokémon Go is not the first augmented reality (AR) game to use real-world locations as its playing field. Its predecessor, Ingress, was created by the same company, former Google subsidiary Niantic. Pokémon Go and Ingress share the same user-generated location database, only in Ingress the hotspots are called “portals”, and there are no cute fuzzy Pokémon creatures to capture. A handful of companies have purchased “sponsored locations” in Ingress, paying Niantic a few pennies for every player drawn to the site. In an interview with the Financial Times, CEO John Hanke said Niantic plans to pursue the same strategy with Pokémon Go, which is significantly more popular. He said companies will be able to pay to be featured in the virtual game because it will drive foot traffic. Lewis Ward, IDC’s research director for gaming, doesn’t expect Niantic to roll out sponsored locations for Pokémon Go any time soon. For the short term, he says, Niantic will concentrate on upgrading its infrastructure to handle the unexpected demand on its servers – which has caused some outages – as well as adding more locations, more things to buy in the app and new content. “This is by far the most successful AR game ever,” says Ward. “It’s spawning changes in behaviour and opening up new possibilities for revenue that have never been tangible before. I’m sure companies not on Niantic’s map will want to opt in, while some who don’t want people snooping around their place of business may want to opt out.”
Pokémon Go
Unintended consequences: how Pokémon Go is also helping to gamify exercise Companies like Fitbit, which makes pedometers, and other firms creating distance apps for mobile phones have helped drive the trend for counting steps walked each day. The daily target is 10,000 and although somewhat arbitrary, that number accounts for roughly five miles. As a way of losing weight, it’s an effective tool, given the average number of daily steps is around half that. The motivation to keep up the number of steps, however, is simply the desire to hit the daily target. Pokémon Go has provided the unintended consequence of encouraging people to get out and walk. One user said he was walking six miles a day, largely because he was regularly out and about searching for Pokémon creatures to capture. The game also requires you to travel to physical points to complete other tasks, and once there (and take completed) it encourages you to keep travelling. The playability of the game and justone-more-go factor is not in front of a TV screen like most games, but something that you have to physically interact with. The steps, miles and calories burned very soon add up by just playing the free game.
He also expects to see a rush of AR apps attempting to duplicate Pokémon Go’s surprising success. In the meantime, enterprising Pokémon-savvy businesses are finding their own workarounds. L’inizio Pizza Bar in Queens, New York, increased its walk-in business by 75 per cent – and made national headlines in the process – by taking advantage of its location next to a Pokéstop. Pokéstops are places in Pokémon Go that allow you to collect items such as eggs and more Pokéballs to capture more Pokémon. Restaurant manager Sean Benedetti purchased so-called “lure modules” (costing 80 cents to $1 a piece) inside the game and set them outside the restaurant. Each module lasts for 30 minutes, attracting creatures to them – as well as players who wish to capture them. So for just $10, Benedetti was able to have a dozen of the virtual Pokémon characters lured to the store. It drew in players looking to virtually capture them and as a result the shop’s realworld business went up 75 per cent. But not every small business owner is ready to embrace his or her inner Pokémon trainer. Maria Kambatta is a concierge at Beach Chalet, a restaurant and brewery in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The restaurant has become a popular
Above: crowds of people drawn to Sydney Harbour in search of Pokémon
As a result, the shop’s real-world business increased by 75 per cent
Pokéstop, with at least 250 people a day stopping by solely for the game over the last week. “We’re not complaining,” she said. “The only problem is they’re taking all of the parking from real customers… and now our customers are saying they have to go quite a distance to find parking. It’s unusual. It’s absolutely because of Pokémon.” The huge crowds weren’t helping business, Kambatta added, because the Pokémon fans aren’t dining in. “They come in looking at their phones. They just go in and out.” Giulio Tempesta is the proprietor of Umbria, an Italian restaurant in central San Francisco. He almost spits when the topic of Pokémon Go is brought up. “About a dozen people came by asking about it today,” he says. “I got 250 people in here for lunch, you think I have time to be interrupted by a bunch of kids asking me stupid questions? I think it’s time we got back to the concept of communicating with each other face to face, the way our parents did.” Umbria’s bartender Ally Ramos – maybe a gen- 55 eration or two younger than Tempesta – thinks Pokémon Go is a great way to get kids to leave the house, meet up and talk to each other. She’s planning to create a special drink named after one of the Pokémon characters. portfolio.
Inside Eton
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he new boy at Eton College, England’s most famous school, finds himself thrust into an overwhelming world that has its own codes, uniform and language. Might he be late for a Div (lesson), and find himself in Tardy Book (an especially exacting punishment whereby the miscreant had to get up at the crack of dawn for a week and sign a register in a far-flung part of the school)? Might he get lost looking for The Burning Bush, Dutchman’s or Judy’s Passage (the landmark lamppost, playing fields, the alleyway shortcut between two blocks of classrooms)? Might he fall foul of a member of Pop (a
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prefect) or a Beak (teacher) and be put in the Bill to see the Head Man (sent to the headmaster)? However, the young man’s most immediate concern, or so it was for me when I started there in the late 1980s, is how to get dressed. If the young Etonian was in any doubt that he was being marked out for something beyond the ordinary, the uniform will convince him without delay: pinstripe trousers, a waistcoat, a long tailcoat of the sort one sees only on undertakers or bridegrooms, and a white shirt with a detachable starched collar that is fixed with press-studs back and front, the latter of which holds
Images: Getty
How has this one school produced so many men who have shaped Britain’s role in the world and what do you get for the £37,000 annual fee? Alan Tyers
Eton
a small oblong tie. It was, to me, an alien costume for an alien world. Many of my contemporaries, whose older brothers or fathers (and grandfathers and great-grandfathers) had been there seemed, on the face of it at least, to fit the uniform as if it had been cut for them. Perhaps it had. The self-assurance of the Etonian is legendary. Take Boris Johnson, the Old Etonian MP and former London mayor who may or may not have wanted to Leave Europe but spearheaded a bluff charge by way of a tilt at becoming prime minister. Or David Cameron, the Old Etonian prime minister who unleashed the EU referendum in the hopes of bringing the Eurosceptic Right of his own Conservative party to heel. Both gifted speakers, highly self-confident, fluid, unburdened by ideology, a provocative newspaper columnist and an ex-public relations man, respectively. It’s easy to understand the fashionability of the notion that Brexit was won and lost on the playing fields of Eton, or that the United Kingdom has been helmed by men drawn from a narrow sliver of a society whose toughest problems are unlikely to hit them personally in the wallet. Boris wanted to be the 20th prime minister to have been schooled at Eton, but has had to settle for being the foreign secretary: Britain’s front-man abroad. Cameron was the school’s 19th PM. Of the 330 MPs on the government benches, 17 went to Eton. The school is also well represented in the House Of Lords. The UK’s Supreme Court, its highest, is made up of 12 judges: two of them went to Eton. The upper echelons of the City, notably in hedge funds and private equity, feature many Old Etonians. The Archbishop Of Canterbury, leader of the Church Of England, went to Eton. Old Etonian Geordie Greig is the editor of the UK’s Mail On Sunday, his school contemporary Nicholas Coleridge is president of Condé Nast. Eddie Redmayne, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 2014, Hugh Laurie, Damian Lewis and Tom Hiddleston all trod the boards at the school’s on-campus theatre. When the time came for Prince William and Prince Harry to attend secondary education, there was only one horse in the race. How has this one school produced so many men who shape the country? What makes it different to other fee-paying schools? And what are pupils – or rather their parents – getting for the £37,000 annual fees it charges? Matthew Maxwell Scott, an Old Etonian who contested Carshalton and Wallington at the 2015 general election for the Conservatives, says: “Competition is such an important part of life at the school, and that is what drives people on. They understand the pursuit of excellence from an early age. And the school encourages excellence in all fields, not just academic: sport, music, drama, whatever you are interested in.
“It allows boys the independence to develop in whatever areas they are interested in, as long as they conform to the rules. And that’s OK because children tend to like rules. “Because it is all-boys and all-boarding, there is no emphasis on the pursuit of the opposite sex, so these boys are trying to fill their time somehow. The combination of plenty of time, brilliant facilities and constant competition is a fantastic recipe for success.”
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he facilities are certainly world class. Acres of playing fields, gymnasiums, swimming pools, a golf course, concert halls, recording studios, art galleries and workshops, science, design and technology labs, a West End-quality theatre and drama studios, libraries, and beautiful old chapels and historic buildings help to attract many excellent teachers keen to work in an environment where school discipline is strict, resources are near-boundless and the boys are generally bright thanks to a testing entrance exam. 160 full-time masters mean that Eton has a teacherpupil of 8:1, unheard of in the state sector. But there are other private schools with excellent facilities. How does Eton ensure its students get the most from them – and does this help them in later life? Old Etonian Oliver Isaacs, a barrister at the 3PB Chambers of Nigel Lickley QC, says: “Certainly I know quite a few old Etonians who are barristers. The things we were encouraged to do at school like public speaking, being engaged in the world outside, and the key attribute of confidence all prepare you well. “At school I founded a law society and got lawyers to come down to the school and talk to students. You have societies like that, and a debating society, and you pick up skills like how to introduce a speaker, say, and those sort of abilities do give you a head start. And also, there are some other bits of the Bar that are a little bit like being at school. You have to wear a silly uniform in court, for instance, and many of the Law’s buildings and traditions are very old. At the Inns Of Court, Middle Temple has a huge double hammerbeam roof that is a little bit like going back into College Hall at school. There is a slight sense of institutionalism about it all. “But most importantly, the school encourages you to be passionate about whatever it is and support you. And the boys themselves, to my mind, didn’t really like the students who were a bit lazy and didn’t do anything.” For those who “did things” at school and continue to move and shake the country today, is the Eton name always an advantage, though? The recent EU referendum was said to be a manifestation of a country divided, and few four-letter words paint such a succinct and vivd image of a privileged elite than Eton.
“It allows boys the independence to develop in whatever areas they are interested in”
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Eton
“I could see a situation where you, say, had more property developers sending their sons to Eton and then those boys would grow up around a different family approach and would emerge from Eton with different attitudes in business and finance.” Beyond the facilities, attitudes, learned skills and competitive hothousing, another Old Etonian, user experience consultant Will Scott, has a more direct answer as to why OEs do so well: “Social capital,” he says. “The advantages it gives you in terms of the people it puts you in the same classroom with. Networking. And the social capital that people would have had anyway, from their families, well, that doesn’t hurt, either. “It did nurture skills and talents and you cannot say that it didn’t give you opportunities but you had to be a certain way, be a certain sort of kid to get the most out of it.” Above: interior of The Quadrangle, Eton College, as depicted in a 19th century engraving Below right: the entrance to the playing fields
With the fees going up well above inflation yearon-year, the costs, sending boy there is a big ask, even for a barrister or a GP
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Marcus Armytage, the Old Etonian jockey who won the Grand National in 1990 aboard Mr Frisk, says: “No other school seems relevant. If someone went to Harrow School no-one says, ‘Oh, a Harrovian’, unless he is doing battle with an old Etonian. If you went to Oundle School then no one says anything. But they always say ‘Old Etonian’. “If you go there you get a label and it sort of sticks with you. And it has negative connotations: people think ‘he is an ex-Etonian, he’s got lots of money, he has had a very good start in life and made the most of it, so let’s slag him off’.” It might be that “Eton” has become shorthand for the entrenched advantages of family wealth and an imbalance of opportunity. But with the fees going up well above inflation year-on-year, even allowing for the fact that some parents get means-tested assistance with the costs, sending a boy there looks a big ask even for a barrister or GP. Might the Eton of 20 years time be stocked, not with the sons of the British upper-middle and professional classes, but with the children of City millionaires and the international super-wealthy? Are Old Etonians going to be able to keep up if they want to send their own sons there? An Old Etonian City headhunter keen not to be named says: “I have noticed that guys from some other schools, particularly Harrow, tend to be very commercially aware, they really understand profit and loss, what a deal is, how to read a balance sheet. Some Old Etonians are less good at that, not so strong on the technical side of finance and analysis. Where they tend to be good is if they are interested in something, and they can take control and shape it, perhaps in private equity. “In negotiation they are incredibly polite, no matter how cut-throat they are trying to be. It is always with a straight bat. Sometimes that can be frustrating, especially to people with a background in, for instance, American law firms.
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here was an element of luck involved, as well, in that the school’s 1,300 pupils are divided into 25 houses, each of which has a high degree of autonomy. The single most important person in a boy’s school experience is his housemaster: this key figure might be a brilliant educator, a mentor, an inspiration, a wizard at divining each boy’s unique gifts and helping him onto his path. Or… he might not.
Eton
By all accounts the school is different now, but physical fear was a part of the day-to-day in my first couple of years there, and certainly the shy child without a family history at the place could feel lost. It was a sink-or-swim sort of environment, and many of those who swum were propelled into adulthood with great confidence, a rock solid sense of their own self-worth, a conviction that the world was theirs for the taking and the skills and the network to take it. Even at £37,000 per annum one could argue that this represents money well spent. But is the total self-confidence of the stereotypical Old Etonian an unqualified boon? Would, for instance, the banking crisis or the divisions between “haves” and “have nots” laid so bare in UK politics recently have been so brutal if those running the show were just a little bit less certain about themselves and their decisions? Richard Pleming, a former master at Eton who is now headmaster at Charterhouse, says: “Who
knows if things will be the same in the future as they have been, with schools like Eton providing lots of people to occupy important places in the political world, investment banking and so on? “Because it seems to me that increasingly you need diversity: you need different sorts of voices and different ways of thinking about things, to manage and direct businesses and countries in a world that is becoming more and more complex. That bedrock confidence that comes from being ‘the right sort of person’, and having gone to the right school and the right university, isn’t necessarily what’s going to make the difference in the future.” From William Gladstone to James Bond and his creator Ian Fleming, George Orwell to the Duke of Wellington, Old Etonians have shaped Britain’s role in the world and its view of itself. The challenges are bigger and more complicated than ever: what an opportunity Eton has to produce the people to meet them.
“Increasingly you need diversity: you need different sorts of voices and different ways of thinking about things”
OLD ETONIAN, BRITISH PRIME MINISTERS Robert Walpole John Stuart, Earl Of Bute George Grenville William Pitt The Elder Frederick North William Grenville George Canning Arthur Wellesley Charles Grey William Lamb Edward Smith-Stanley William Ewart Gladstone Robert Gascoyne-Cecil Archibald Primrose Arthur Balfour Anthony Eden Harold Macmillan Alec Douglas-Home David Cameron
1721–1742 1762–1763 1763–1765 1766–1768 1770–1782 1806–1807 1827 1828–1830, 1834 1830–1834 834, 1835–1841 1852, 1858–1859, 1866–1868 1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, 1892–1894 1885–1886, 1886–1892, 1895–1902 1894–1895 1902–1905 1955–1957 1957–1963 1963–1964 2010–2016
Left: engraving of a bust of politician Charles James Fox in the Upper School at Eton. Old Etonian Fox never made it to prime minister but 19 other former pupils did go on to lead Great Britain portfolio.
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ROBERT PARKER
The man with the golden palate How lawyer and wine enthusiast Robert Parker became the world’s most powerful critic Stuart Peskett
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hink about the critics you enjoy reading, be they experts in music, film, sport. You like the way they write, you trust them and you’re confident that what they say is honest and authoritative. But no matter how good they are, no matter how famous, the influence they command is nothing compared to that of wine writer Robert Parker. Parker changed the way wine is made. A bold statement, but an accurate one. A praiseworthy Parker review ensures healthy sales; a bad one could spell financial disaster. Parker’s love of rich, ripe, powerful wines made some of Bordeaux’s biggest names change their style. He’s even seen off death threats, dog attacks and lawsuits in the course of doing his job. So how did this humble lawyer from Maryland become the most influential critic on the planet? Robert M Parker Jr was born in Baltimore in 1947 and studied history at college before turning his attentions to law in the early 1970s, spending a decade as an attorney. But he had already caught the wine bug, following a visit to Alsace in northeast France in the late 1960s. In the summer of 1978 he sent the inaugural issue of his newsletter, The Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate, to a few hundred wine drinkers and six years later it had grown to the extent that Parker was able to quit his legal job and concentrate full-time on wine writing. This dramatic career change was prompted by one incident that changed his life forever. The region of Bordeaux in southwest France is where you’ll find some of the finest wines in the world, but the quality of the vintage, largely dependent on the weather conditions in a particular year, is crucial. Poor weather, even for just a couple of weeks, can turn a potentially great vintage into a mediocre one. Parker was effusive in his praise of 1982 Bordeaux, describing it as a “vintage of legendary proportions” and one that has “produced the most perfect wines
Parker Points became the benchmark for top wines from around the world
in the post-World War II era”. Two years later, he awarded his first-ever perfect scores to a pair from that vintage: Pétrus and Mouton-Rothschild. Simon Staples, sales director for UK merchant Berry Bros & Rudd, says Parker “nailed” 1982, when plenty of other critics had been “lukewarm” about the vintage. Parker’s praise of the 1982s guaranteed him an open door to the best Bordeaux châteux and raised his profile considerably among US wine drinkers. The other factor in his success was his scoring system, known as ‘Parker Points’. He chose a 100-point scale to score wines, unlike other wine critics who usually rated bottles out of five, 10 or 20. Dawn Davies MW (Master Of Wine) is head buyer at UK retailer Speciality Drinks and a former sommelier at Michelin-starred restaurants Zuma and The Ledbury. She says: “Parker was very smart in choosing a 100-point system, because it’s the one that every American is familiar with – 100 points is the standard scoring system in all educational establishments, for example, not 10 or 20.” Parker Points quickly became the benchmark for top wines around the world, and if a wine failed to break the 90-point mark, it would struggle to command the best prices. There are even tales of restaurant-goers checking Parker Points on their phones at the table and only ordering high-scoring wines, irrespective of the sommelier’s recommendation – a perfect example of how novice wine drinkers feel the need to be told what they should be drinking, rather than finding out for themselves through trial and error. With Parker Points effectively making or breaking certain wines, it is perhaps inevitable 61 that winemakers started to change their style and produce wines more in tune with Parker’s own palate. They would leave the grapes on the vine for longer, increasing ripeness and potential alcohol levels. They would extract more tannin from PORTFOLIO.
ROBERT PARKER
“It’s inevitable winemakers started to change their style and produce wines in tune with Parker’s own palate”
Robert Parker in France as part of what were his annual visits to try the en primeur wines. His score would define their worth globally
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the fruit and they would also use more new-oak barrels to bring out a spicy richness in the finished wine. Parker makes no apologies for his love of rich, oaky red wines with a big blast of tannin and alcohol (although he insists this is not the only style he enjoys), and the 1990s and 2000s saw a huge rise in wines made in that way. Elegance, finesse and balance had been cast aside in favour of big, strapping monsters. I remember tasting a wine Parker had awarded 95 points to, an Australian Shiraz that weighed in at more than 15 per cent alcohol, and I could barely finish one glass. For me it was one-dimensional and unpleasant to drink, but Parker’s approval set global sales soaring. This change in style was most apparent in Bordeaux, a region whose red wines are rich and powerful, but still defined by their elegance and refinement. But as Parker’s influence grew, so did
the body and power of the wines he reviewed. The way Bordeaux sells its wines is different to every other region. The en primeur (futures) system works like this: each spring, wine writers and buyers from across the world descend on Bordeaux to taste the new vintage. These young wines, all still in barrel – they are not bottled for another year or two – are incredibly tannic and impenetrable to the amateur, and they can take up to two decades to soften and show their true class. Experienced tasters, however, can tell the good from the bad with just one sip, and their tasting notes and scores are critical to the success of a particular wine. Bad reviews will almost certainly mean a château having to set a lower-thanexpected price, but on the upside, a good score from the right critic will mean being able to command high prices and creating a high demand. Tom Cannavan, editor of UK website winepages.com, says: “I remember the 2001 en primeur campaign, tasting the St-Emilions and Pomerols. They were all hugely overextracted and this was the height of people trying to make ‘Parkerised’ wines. They were not to my taste at all, and I think that Parker almost made people defy their own tastes. I suspect there will be a few wine drinkers still with a cellar full of wines they don’t actually want to drink.” A sentiment echoed by Simon Staples, who has covered every en primeur campaign since 1991. “I remember getting on a plane in 2003 after tasting 500 wines from that vintage, which was one of the hottest on record, thinking, ‘How are we going to sell these?’ None of the winemakers thought 2003 was special, either, and then Parker describes it as one of the greatest vintages of all time!” The 2003s provoked fierce disagreement between Parker and his counterparts across the Atlantic. The 2003 Château Pavie from St-Emilion was dismissed as “ridiculous” by UK critic Jancis Robinson MW, who scored it 12/20. Parker thought otherwise, awarded the wine 96 points and took umbrage at Robinson’s “nasty swipes” at Pavie. Individual wines aside, the episode highlighted the basic difference between UK and American palates, although Parker would tell an audience in California some 10 years later that “the advantage we have as Americans is that we can be fair; we tend to be more open-minded about different styles of wine”. Parker fever reached its peak in 2004 with the release of Jonathan Nossiter’s Palme d’Ornominated film Mondovino, which looked at the impact of wine critics around the world. Parker was less than impressed at his portrayal, which
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RobeRt PaRkeR
The Wine Advocate/ Robert Parker 100-point wine-scoring scale:
painted him as the antithesis of terroir and diversity, leading to a heated exchange between him and Nossiter. More favourably, a year later President Jacques Chirac awarded Parker the rare distinction of ‘Officer’ in France’s Legion d’Honneur for his wine writing, while in 2006, a book by American writer Elin McCoy bestowed Parker with the title The Emperor Of Wine.
HE SAYS
- “There are styles of wines I don’t like. Orange wine, natural wines and low-alcohol wines. Truth is on my side, and history will prove I am right” - “I always said your best palate is your own, not mine. I’m a guidepost” - “You can’t simplify my taste and say, ‘Parker likes big wines,’ because it’s just not true” - “I’ve always followed the rule that anything worth doing is worth doing excessively” - “I don’t think anyone will ever dominate wine criticism in the same way again. I came along at the right time at the right place”
THEY SAY
- “Am I really not allowed to have my own opinion? Only so long as it agrees with Monsieur Parker’s, it would seem” – Jancis Robinson MW - “The man with the paragon palate…for countless wine lovers, Robert Parker’s tastes are infallible” – Time magazine - “Imperial hegemony lives in Washington and the dictator of taste in Baltimore” – Hugh Johnson - “The critic who matters most” – The New York Times - “Robert Parker is the most followed and influential critic for French wines in the entire world” – Jacques Chirac
96-100:
An extraordinary wine of profound and complex character displaying all the attributes expected of a classic wine of its variety. Wines of this caliber are worth a special effort to find, purchase and consume.
B
ut over the past decade, Parker’s influence has decreased, due to several reasons: he has reduced the number of regions he covers for The Wine Advocate; the internet age has seen the rise of new wine writers and bloggers, all desperate for their voices to be heard; and Bordeaux’s en primeur system is not the big draw it once was. And in February last year, Parker dropped the big bombshell – he would no longer be covering en primeur, after more than 35 years of intensive nosing, tasting and scoring, passing the baton to UK wine writer Neal Martin. Parker still reviews Bordeaux wines once they have been bottled, but Martin is tasked with making the annual pilgrimage to taste the wines for the first time. Martin is a well-respected writer, albeit one with a much smaller profile than his predecessor, as well as a markedly different palate, so it will be interesting to see how the Bordeaux wine scene reacts to his tasting notes and scores over the coming years. Parker himself announced last year that no one will ever “dominate wine criticism in the same way again”, and that he “came along at the right time at the right place”, and he’s probably right. His profile grew in an era when finding out which wines to drink was incredibly difficult; now you can read a dozen reviews of the same wine in a matter of moments online. Parker will turn 70 next year. And apart from a reduced Bordeaux workload, the only region he continues to write about is California. Those who have met him share the view that he made winemakers raise their game. Yes, that may have been at the cost of a little regional identity, but you have to remember that the general standard of wine around the world just 30 or 40 years ago was not great. What will be his legacy? Overwhelmingly positive, based on the people we spoke to. “Parker will be remembered as a phenomenon,” says Cannavan. “People have even made films about him. He’ll also be remembered as someone who improved bad wines, someone who opened up wine to new markets and someone who helped make fine wine commercially viable again.” Staples agrees, praising the way Parker helped “revolutionise” wine appreciation. “His tasting notes are spot on; they’re imaginative, romantic and evocative. He was the one who started it all and he has made the wine industry an exciting business to be in.”
90-95:
An outstanding wine of exceptional complexity and character. In short, these are terrific wines.
80-89:
A barely above average to very good wine displaying various degrees of finesse and flavour as well as character with no noticeable flaws.
70-79:
An average wine with little distinction except that it is soundly made. In essence, a straightforward, innocuous wine.
60-69: Above: Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Pauillac, France 1986, one of the wines that scored a perfect 100 points. The 1945, 1959 and 1982 vintages also scored full marks Below: Parker’s bi-monthly publication, The Wine Advocate
A below average wine containing noticeable deficiencies, such as excessive acidity and/or tannin, an absence of flavour, or possibly dirty aromas or flavours.
50-59:
A wine deemed to be unacceptable.
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People in glass houses
Could regenerative villages be the future of mankind?
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PORTFOLIO.
REGEN VILLAGES
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PORTFOLIO.
Housing units
Glass envelope
Food production
Housing units are organised in a circle of 25 dwellings.
The housing units are encased in a glass envelope, to extend the growing and living seasons in the food production facilities and the housing units.
Food production facilities are placed in the centre of the housing units. See also the top image on the right hand page.
Infrastructure
Biodiversity and seasonal gardens
Social spaces
Eight squares are connected to ensure an efficient infrastructure. The squares works as electric car charging station and a drop off zone.
By minimising the footprint of the food production and housing units, space is freed up to create biodiversity/permaculture and seasonal gardens. It results in a village that doesn’t deplete nature but restores it.
Social spaces are created between the buildings, to ensure a complete integration between food production and the housing units.
REGEN VILLAGES
W
e live in uncertain, fragile times. Imagine a world where the lights go out – for whatever reason. How long would cities last without electricity before chaos set in? And that’s just one facet of our civilisation that could go wrong. What happens if the water supplies dry up, agriculture collapses or a new disease mutates? “Cities are very brittle,” says James Ehrlich, a Senior Fellow, Opus Novum at Nasa Ames and founder of ReGen Villages. “Just recently in São Paolo, you had a drought which meant you had 25 million people with no water, and in Mumbai, they’re pumping in water every day for 35 million people. You can see how easy it would be to collapse. “I grew up in Manhattan. It’s a wonderful, vibrant place with great food and great entertainment. But when you pull the electrons out and the zeros and ones don’t work any more, it gets dark very quickly. It’d take people just days to panic. Once you’ve eaten your food in the freezer and your pantry, and the water’s not there any more where do you go?” By the year 2050, there will be 10 billion people living on Earth, requiring food, energy and water. At the moment, we simply don’t have the land or commodities to feed them. So Ehrlich founded ReGen Villages to offer the world the chance of a new way of living. Regenerative villages are neighbourhoods made to be capable of living off the power grid, with renewable energy, water management and waste resource systems. Alongside them will run organic food production capable of fulfilling the community’s diverse nutritional needs.
“I saw the Nasa Handy report that predicts a civilisation collapse – as in humanity will collapse, rather than it can”
“This project started three years ago,” explains Ehrlich. “But I’d been involved in case studies about organic family farming for year before that so it’s probably got about 14 years of work I’ve put into it.” “I saw the IPCC climate report and the Rockerfeller report about exodus of people from rural areas to megacities. And I also saw the Nasa Handy report which predicts a civilisation collapse – as in humanity will collapse, rather than can. Putting these three studies together I thought that rural areas might be the 69 best way to work things out.” So in three years there is to be a model village in Almere, Netherlands with 25 homes. These houses will have integrated photovoltaic solar panels to generate power and heat water and hopefully feed back into the grid, making them money. PORTFOLIO.
Regen Villages
The land around them will be encased in glass to aid heating and there has also been ventilation built in for summer time. This glass will extend the harvest of food, which will be grown in vertical agroponics alongside the houses. “We hope to have a lot of food,” says Ehrlich. “We anticipate literally tonnes of organic food every year – vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, fish, eggs, chicken, small animal dairy and protein – that can continually grow and yield in the vertical garden systems all year long as supplement to the seasonal gardens and farming adjacent.” Meanwhile sewers and waste will be used in a close loop as compost or converted into biogas for more energy. It all sounds futuristic but it is all extremely feasible. There is no big scientific leap required. “A lot of these technologies have been in place and around for quite some time,” says Ehrlich. “We’re one of the first but we won’t be the last to bring all the relevant technologies together. We thought: ‘Let’s bring them all together and let them work on a neighbourhood scale.’”
“With drones, broadband, and electric cars, there’s no reason why you need to to be in proximity to your place of work”
Though there’s only 25 to be built initially, with another 75 to follow soon after, scaling up the idea should not be an issue. “We don’t see this as small scale,” continues Ehrlich. “We’re thinking of groupings of 100 homes or maybe 200 families. Even inside that you have a pod of 25 homes which are by themselves self– reliant. Those 25 have their own systems for food, water waste and energy. Then you don’t have the same chance of collapse.” The first villages are in Holland with more to follow in Northern Europe but they’re not the only places the company hopes to conquer. “We’re looking at cold weather first in a climate context,” says Ehrlich. “That’s why the glass houses – in a hope to solve long winters. But then we’re looking to develop in the other big area which would provide problems for ReGen Villages – arid regions. We’re looking around Saudi Arabia and places like that at how we can be self sufficient in dry climates.” If this is necessary to survive, it sounds like it might be worthy and require significant sacrifice.
The currenT Problem
...the equivalent of the size of Africa and South America combined
One third or 1.3 billion tons of the world food is wasted every year...
...while one in seven people are starving. This makes hunger and malnourishment the single greatest threat to health worldwide.
Farming is the single most powerful driver of deforestation and loss of biodiversity.
70 per cent of global water consumption is used for farming, causing rivers and lakes to dry up.
On average vegetables travel 2,400km or 1,500 miles from farm to consumer, causing an extra 12% emissions prior to consumption.
With a growing population and an emerging middle class, demand for food is ever increasing, calling for smarter and more resilient solutions to feed the world.
Farming accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, making it the single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world.
Fertilisers have more than doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our environment, contaminating our soil and drinking water.
Meanwhile, 66 per cent of our environmental impact is directly related to home activities, consumption of energy and food ingestion.
33 per cent of our income is spent paying for our household consumption – rent, energy, heating, water and food. We spend half our waking hours paying for this.
42 per cent of Earth’s land surface area is used for farmland...
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Regen Villages
Why AquAponics? Using aquaponic farming systems can decrease land use by 98 per cent…
But ReGen Villages are not a rebranding of Amish culture. Ehrlich is quick to assert that they are designed for people to be able to live the same lives they live now – but in a different context. “We like to call ourselves the Tesla of ecovillages,” he says, referring to the electric car company. “We’re huge fans of Elon Musk and that aspirational way of living better. We’re creatures of modern technology, of course. People who are coming towards us in the millions since we displayed at the (art show) Venice Biennale. We’ve had people from all walks of life who are craving to live a better life, this means they can do this without all the hassle. They don’t have to be a farmer or an engineer. We’re frontloading that. We’ll oversee that for them. We’ll concierge that. “On the other hand, if they want to live like that, if they want to get involved in the farming, then we’ll have an app that will track their volunteer work and we will deduct that from their homeowner association fee. It’s engagement on people’s own terms. “We’ve done the research and there’s a group of people who maybe 10 or 20 per cent want to be actively engaged in the community. The other 80 per cent want to live the way they live now only in a suburban context. Only they want to be next to their food source. Next to their nature. They want to be with their families, kids and grandkids to have security and a sense of stability. They want to have community. “With broadband, drones and autonomous electric cars, there’s no reason why you need to be in proximity to the workplace. Living–urban–in–rural sounds pretty good to people.” While the way of living sounds different and novel, there’s certainly a clear link to humanity’s very past. In fact, the cities we live in now are much more modern inventions that you’d imagine. “Until 1950, 75 per cent of the population of the world lived in self–sustaining communities,” says Ehrlich. “They lived in their own footprint. The food, the water, the waste, everything was precious and everything was used to regenerate the systems. “So really what we plan is no different than our ancestors did in village life. They lived in communities where they relied on each other and they relied on nature. They got through the winter and they got the harvest in.”
…freeing up space for biodiversity and permaculture.
Aquaponics facilitate a more effecient and a 100 per cent organic food production.
Aquaponics have the capacity to increase yield 10-fold compared to terrestrial farming – in the exact same footprint.
At the same time decreasing water consumption by 90 per cent…
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... and eliminating transportation by enabling farm-to-table.
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Myanmar sunrise Hot air ballooning in one of Asia’s unspoiled countries
T
he scattered monuments of the first Myanmar kingdom, from the 9th to 13th centuries, still remain with around 3,000 of the 10,000 temples and building intact. The way to see them is from the air at dawn, gliding near-silently over the landscape as the morning mist starts to fade and the sun hits the buildings and fields.
living
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Emirates flies daily from Dubai to Yangon in Myanmar
september issue 129
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living / hotel
brown’s hoTel, london
Where to stay
33 Albemarle St, Mayfair W1S 4BP, London
Price
From $8,020 per night for the Kipling Suite
roccofortehotels. com
Lhr
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T
he idea of the hotel suite, and what it used to represent, has been somewhat lost over the last decade. Quite often, in lesser hotels, the “suite” is just a regular room with a slightly larger bedroom and a sofa. A sofa you’ll probably never use. This is why it’s great to get back to the idea of a suite being something special, and the Kipling Suite at Brown’s Hotel in London is one of the best examples of how it should be done. After three months of renovation, the original Kipling Suite has been merged with the Albemarle Suite and reimagined to form the largest space now available to guests. Named in celebration of the English author Rudyard Kipling, who wrote The Jungle Book during one of his many stays at the hotel, the suite features personal touches from the hotel and Kipling’s history, including a framed, handwritten letter from Rudyard Kipling, penned and sent during a stay at the hotel [pictured right]. Brown’s has a long history, having been accepting guests since 1837, and Kipling is just one writer among
Kipling is just one writer among the likes of oscar wilde, Arthur conan doyle, robert louis stevenson and JM barrie who have all stayed here
the likes of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, JM Barrie and Bram Stoker who have all stayed here. Rather than feeling like a hotel room, the suite gives you the rather comforting experience of staying in a grand London W1 residence, with antiques throughout, Lewis & Wood wallpaper, books and artworks all making this feel like a house. The 16 square metre en-suite bathroom finished in white veined marble with a freestanding bath and double showers further adds to the experience of this being something more than just a typical hotel bathroom. You’ll wish it was home. Right now throughout London a number of the top hotels are renovating their suites, or plan to do so in the near future. This isn’t coincidence. There’s a new type of guest to be catered for, expecting more from their stay in a suite than just the hotel-room-basics writ slightly larger. Here at Brown’s, the Kipling Suite is not just a grand statement about the history of the place, it’s somewhere that is now setting a whole new standard for what’s expected of suites in five-star hotels.
september issue 129
in the hotel
eat
One of Britain’s best chefs, Mark Hix, has a restaurant in the hotel. If you stay in a suite, beakfast here is included and it’s one of the best in the city. You can also take afternoon tea here. The tea menu is extensive.
spa
As well as a 24-hour gym, there are three private rooms offering an extensive range of treatments. The 80-minute jet leg recovery combines a foot massage with a muscle-relaxing back, neck and shoulder massage.
extra touch
When you stay in one of the Forte Suites, the little extras include a bottle of Ruinart champagne upon arrival, complimentary spa treatments and evening wear pressed on the night you arrive.
places of interest in the area eat
wander
shop
see
75 It’s just a few minutes to Berkeley Square where one of London’s best new restaurants, Sexy Fish, is serving Asian fusion. A few doors down is the outstanding, and Michelinstarred, Indian restaurant Benares.
A short walk is Green Park, with Buckingham Palace at the bottom and St James’s Park to the east, while it links into Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to the west. Lovely for early morning walks.
Opposite the hotel is the Royal Arcade and it runs through to Old Bond Street, home of some of the most high-end shopping in London including Prada, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Cartier and Rolex.
The exhibition of original Quentin Blake artwork for Roald Dahl’s book The BFG at the House Of Illustration in King’s Cross is a little celebration of one of the most quintessentially British artists. Portfolio.
living / style
What to pack ...for mild weather in Milan, and beyond
Average temp
20°c
Paris Amsterdam London New York
also Wear in...
16 °C 14 °C 15 °C 20 °C
september
milan
Chance of rain: 20%
additional info the Navigli quarter To the centre-south of the city, the Navigli Quarter on the banks of a canal has become an area of recent regeneration and one of the best places in Milan to go for restaurants and bars. Restaurants such as El Brellin, Officina 12, Pizzeria
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Tradizionale, Turbigo and many more all offer authentic local food, wine and aperitivo. It’s also a great place for post-dinner wandering with bars like Il Barcone and the wine cellar La Vinera where Italian wine can be bought by the glass or bottle, and even includes a home delivery service.
SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
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ACCESSORIES
1. Pal Zileri suit $1,777 2. Ermenegildo Zenga cashmere and silk scarf $597 3. Burberry wool and cashmere coat $2,795 4. Ermenegildo Zenga Belgracia leather Oxford shoes $822 5. Troubadour day bag $1,449
Brunello Cucinelli wash bag $1,175
Bally wallet $270 Misc. Goods Co. playing cards in hardcase cover $98
Panerai Luminor watch $20,418
Sentryman carbon fibre pen by Dunhill $625
PORTFOLIO.
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living / style
What to pack ...for autumnal weather in Chicago, and beyond
Average temp
18°c
Toronto Paris Sydney Frankfurt
also Wear in...
18 °C 16 °C 16 °C 15 °C
september
chicago
Chance of windy day: 67%
additional info saved by the max Retro dining is not new, but ironicretro-TV-dining with a side order of childhood nostalgia has just become a huge hit. This pop-up restaurant is a recreation of the Bayside diner from the TV series Saved By The Bell, and while the food is of the burgers, fries
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and shakes variety, it’s also one of the city’s hottest tables. There's even been a ‘Brunch with Mr Belding’ and people involved with the show regularly give talks there. As dining experiences go, it’s fun you won’t get elsewhere. Wicker Park, 1941 W North Ave Chicago, IL 60622, (773) 687-9824
SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
ACCESSORIES
1. Gucci polka-dot wool-blend blazer $2,100 2. Diane Von Furstenberg Saphira pleated chiffontrimmed printed skirt $400 3. LalaQueen Arabian Moon purse $247 4. Anya Hindmarch vanity case $525 5. 3.1 Phillip Lim cable-knit wool-blend sweater $495 6. Stuart Weitzman over-the-knee boots $800
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IWC Portafino $10,272
5 4 6
Dolce & Gabbana gold-plated brooch $1,075
Byredo Gypsy Water Eau de Parfum $230 3
79 Hackett card holder $82
PORTFOLIO.
living / Street Food
Street food takes on three-star Michelin The acknowledgement that high quality can be found at street level
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Traveller and chef Allegra McEvedy, who launched global healthy fast-food chain Leon, with branches at Heathrow, Schiphol and more to come, believes that there is simply more excitement to be found in eating street food. “It has more life to it,” she says. “It’s more fun and more real. Kerbside dining is a more vital, life-affirming way to eat. Ever since I went on holiday at 11 years old, I started keeping food diaries of notes and pictures and markets. You talk to people to find the best stalls, you investigate. You track down the best version of what you want. And as I’ve grown up I’ve continued, even though I’ve got more to spend. “Recently we went to Singapore and I’d heard about this place, which was
The 32-seater Tim Ho Wan, the world’s cheapest Michelin star restaurant. Michelin awarded a one-star rating to this dim sum restaurant, which serves some of the cheapest Michelin meals in the world. The wait to be seated, however, is three hours
just a single stall in a market. It was one person doing a grilled fish with a sambal baked into it and I stood on the side, eating it, and it remains the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. You can’t get that from high end. I honestly believe that the exact same fish would not have tasted as good on a white table cloth.” The location of the meal is, of course, crucial. For yourself and people you’re dining with. Food anthropologist Robin Fox writes in his essay Food And Eating: “Every meal is a message, and where
Words Jon Horsley
F
or the first time, Michelin has included a host of street food vendors in its guide to Hong Kong. These frill-free establishments include a burger joint, a hole-in-the-wall Thai operation and Fat Boy, which sells “stick of octopus, pig’s intestines, gizzards and duck’s stomach marinated in soy sauce”. Meanwhile, as these small, gritty establishments flourish, there has been a string of mid-range restaurant closures in the city, including the Life Café, Zurriola and the 27-year-old Admiralty Grill. This appears to be a global trend – restaurants are finding it tougher to compete against street food and lower-end cuisine. So why are the big boys fading?
september issue 129
we eat is as important as what we eat in getting the message across.” Nowadays high-end dining may give off a message that the people dining have a large amount of status but it doesn’t necessarily display dynamism or knowledge. If you know where to get the finest octopus in Hong Kong, from a myriad of run-down market stalls, this gives off an air of expertise. Max Halley, who runs the awardwinning backstreet sandwich shop Max’s in London and who grew up based on street-food experiments, agrees. “It’s a lot about specialisation,” he says. “I’d back my sandwiches against any three-star Michelin dish, I honestly would. We only do four different types and we’ve done thousands of them, so we know exactly what works and what doesn’t. The fact that we don’t have tablecloths or cutlery does not mean that our food isn’t equally good. If Michelin give out the first star just for food – as they say they do – well, I’ve been to plenty of Turkish restaurants with just a perfectly seasoned kebab that deserve one. Customers queue at the Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice And Noodle stall in Singapore, one of two street food hawkers in the city to receive a Michelin star this year
If you know where to get the finest octopus in Hong Kong, from a myriad of run-down market stalls, this gives off an air of expertise “I read about Heston Blumenthal and his tricks like playing the sound of the sea through an iPod while you eat a dish and I just think: ‘Doesn’t this just mean you feel your own restaurant is a boring place to be and that diners should be dreaming about being elsewhere?’” Not everyone is won over by the appeal of street food over fine dining. Josh Barrie, web editor of Country And Town House, a magazine for the British upper classes, believes that it has its place. “Sitting down is not to be sniffed at,” he says. “It’s harder to appreciate food, whether it is good or not, if you’re worrying about it getting all over your shirt. If you go out to a meal, you want to have it in comfort and be looked after. I don’t see that there should be any shame in that. There’s a reason that we’ve been going to restaurants for hundreds of years and that’s because it’s a nice thing to do. And the reason
that French restaurants were the best in the world was because they worked out the best way to give people spectacle, service and an event. “You want eating out to mean more than grabbing a burger, no matter how well cooked it is or what steam-to-flour ratio the bun has been experimented on. A good meal is more than just one item cooked well. It’s a complete holistic experience. Fair enough buy an artisan cheese burrito if you’re late for a meeting, but if you take me out to lunch and serve me that, I’m going to be very upset. I certainly wouldn’t do business with you and we probably would not be friends.” The truth may be that this is not a straight battle between fine dining and street food as both can survive in the same world. Food lovers will always want to hunt down street food stalls that offer astonishing food and the thrill of a new find, and also treat themselves to fine dining at restaurants that can tantalise and expose them to sensations that they could never imagine. The real problem here lies in the middle. Midrange, middle-of-the-road restaurants by comparison can offer nothing in the way of experience. The comfort of mediocrity may not be enough in our brave new gastronomic world.
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living / consume
Eat & drink
Global recommendations for this month
DUBAI
WesLodge Dubai sees new restaurant openings on such a regular basis that it’s hard to know which ones are worth trying, but this Canadian grill is fantastic. The first Canadian restaurant in the emirate, WesLodge has applied an upgrade to a national classic with its lobster poutine, while Canadian beef and bison are things unavailable elsewhere, and this is also home of the dish that’s causing a food frenzy in the city – their fried chicken with waffles. It’s a collection of traditionally non-fine dining dishes that have been elevated to a level that puts them on a par with the best places elsewhere. Meanwhile, the 1920s-style cocktails, including (if you ask) a maple-syrup Old Fashioned, are served by bar staff who were brought over from Toronto and really know what they’re doing, while views from the 68th floor are pretty spectacular. Get a window table and hunker down for an evening, this is real winner. 68th Floor, JW Marriott Marquis, Business Bay, Dubai (+971 52 869 7868)
MODenA
Osteria Francescana Recently named the best restaurant on the planet, by the annual Top 50 Restaurants In The World, chef Massimo Bottura’s modern Italian has become a highly sought after place to dine. The nine-course tasting menu is not cheap at €220 but it’s a collection of dishes that you almost certainly won’t get to taste anywhere else. Also recommended for lovers of fine cheese is the ‘Five Ages Of Parmigiano
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Reggiano In Different Textures And Temperatures’. It’s a perfect example of Bottura doing something new with traditional ingredients. That said, the restaurant has been brilliant for years, and already had the full, three Michelin stars before this recent accolade. If you’re in Milan it’s the perfect reason to take a day tip to Modena. But book well in advance – it has a waiting list as big as the bragging rights for those who manage to secure a table at the place now considered the best on the planet. Via Stella, 22, 41121 Modena MO, Italy (+39 059 223912)
september issue 129
hong kong
London
duBAi
Amber
Bronte
Vii Lounge
With street food being recognised by the Michelin Guide it’s a great time for food in Hong Kong, but let’s not forget that it’s also a city that does excellent high-end dining. Chef Richard Ekkebus’ restaurant Amber is still one of the great culinary experiences. From floor-toceiling windows providing views over the city, to some of Asia’s finest dishes, this is a unique and memorable meal. 7/F The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, The Landmark, 15 Queen’s Road, Central (+852 2132 0066)
Overlooking Trafalgar Square, Bronte opened this summer and has already become one of the best new places to eat in the city. Camp-meets-colonial decor from Tom Dixon and a menu with influences of Asian, Antipodean, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and British it’s global dining done well. It’s also a good spot for breakfast meetings over Brit classics like soft-boiled eggs with Marmite and cheddar soldiers. Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London WC2N 5EJ (+44 20 7930 8855)
Under a canopy of green, this rooftop “secret-garden” bar has become one of the best places to go for drinks in Dubai. The cocktails here are excellent and they also do sushi and bar food and the adjacent indoor part is a nightclub. But it’s really the bar that’s the draw here. It’s also open until 3am and a few doors down is a 24-hour branch of Elevation Burger. Those big nights out are often made by little facts like this. 7th Floor, Conrad Hotel, Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai (+971 50 169 6777)
WAshingTon dC
The next Whisky Bar Washington, DC’s iconic Watergate Hotel reopened this summer after sitting unoccupied for eight years. Perhaps the most exciting part of the $125 million renovation is the whisky bar. The MidCentury modern design includes an illuminated wall of 2,500 whisky bottles and bright red Ron Arad chairs. Behind the bar there’s a big range of scotch and American craft whiskies all, almost certainly, oiling the wheels of conversation among the capital’s gossiping politicos. 2650 Virginia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20037, United States (+1 202 827 1600) Portfolio.
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sePTeMBeR issue 129
living / Books
The right notes... A photographic collection documenting American jazz
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n 960, photographer William Claxton and German musicologist Joachim Berendt travelled across the US in search of jazz. The result was a collection of photos of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians. From a funeral procession home from the cemetery turning into a joyous celebration for the dead with dancing in the streets to the music of the brass bands, to New Orleans [below] to The Ramsey Lewis Trio at Chicago's Loop [above left] and drummer Elvin Jones outside Birdland in Manhattan [above middle] to children
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playing on the street [bottom right] it’s a joyous celebration. The book Jazzlife became a collector’s item, but Taschen began reassembling the material – along with many never-before-seen images from those trips. They’re brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword by Claxton tracing his travels and love affair with jazz music in general. Jazz Life by William Claxton and Joachim E Berendt is available now for $58
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living / single malts
Single malts, but don’t call them Scotch
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t’s as Scottish as Robert Burns, tartans and the wail of the pipes. I mean whiskey, of course, single malt in particular. The proverbial wee dram is a romance in heather and smoke, fascinating the world over, yet always traced back to the foggy glens of Scotland. Actually, that last bit is not true, and it hasn’t been for years. Single malts may always be associated with Scotland, but now they are of the world, made in every continent but Antarctica and all over the United States. The Japanese have been making single malts for decades, and the rest of the world is catching up. How can Scotch be made outside Scotland? It can’t. By law, it can only be called Scotch if it is distilled in Scotland according to a set of specific rules. But single malt whiskey can be distilled anywhere. Noting the growing number of malt whiskeys from unexpected origins, the tasting panel recently sampled 20 single malts from anywhere but Scotland. They found bottles from Japan and Taiwan, from India and Canada, from the United States and all over Europe, including Ireland, which insists on using its traditional spelling ‘whiskey’, unlike the rest of the single-malt producing universe, which, in deference to its inspiration, follows the Scottish usage of whisky. The 20 bottles represented a mere sliver of the non-Scottish single malts available. They could have easily filled our quota solely from Japan, if price were no object. But they operated with an upward limit of $100 per bottle. Even those that qualified for the tasting weren’t so cheap. Seven of the 20 bottles cost $80 to $100, and nine more were upward of $50. That’s a lot of money, especially because many excellent single malts from Scotland are available Portfolio.
for less than $50. Is it novelty alone that would inspire paying $55 for a whiskey from India or $85 for a malt from deep in the heart of Texas? Certainly, people thought these whiskeys offered something exceptional and offered an unusual breadth of flavours and styles. Whether they are good values is an individual decision. But the tasting showed that producing whiskey under different circumstances can produce distinctive results in, say, warmer climates than in Scotland or Ireland, where it will actually age at a different rate. First, though, a definition: Single malt is simply whiskey made from only
By law, it can only be called Scotch if it is distilled in Scotland, but single malt whiskey can be distilled anywhere water and malted barley at a single distillery. In Scotland, single malts are distinguished from blended Scotch, the province of familiar names like Johnnie Walker, Dewar’s and Chivas Regal, which are a blend of one or more single malts with whiskeys distilled from other grains. Another category, blended malt Scotch, which used to be called vatted malts, is a blend of two or more single malts. For startup distillers, ageing is the tough part. Whiskey needs to mature. But the longer it rests in barrels, the longer the wait to sell. Making whiskey is also a craft. As with gin, which requires a delicately balanced formula and a careful hand, small so-called artisanal distillers without much experience do not necessarily make better whiskeys than seasoned producers.
In the tasting, the biggest problem found was inconsistency. Some were exceptional, while others seemed as if they were unfortunate experiments by hobbyists. Some are too young and are not ready for drinking, but these distillers will improve over time. Scotland will have competition on their hands, as they already do with Japan, a place where they know what they’re doing. The overall favourite was from Navazos Palazzi in Spain, a joint venture between Equipo Navazos, the excellent sherry négociant, and Nicolas Palazzi, a spirits bottler. This is a singular whiskey, a single barrel selected by the bottlers from a Spanish distillery, complex and savoury with a hint of the sherry cask in which it was aged. It’s a great example of the quality that can be achieved. It, by the way, was one of two whiskeys in the top 10 that were about 53 per cent alcohol, calling for dilution with a little water. The second best was a 10-year-old Irish single malt from Lord Lieutenant Kinahan’s, was smooth, mellow, complex and lovely, while third was a 12-year-old Japanese single malt from Hakushu, was exuberant and multi-layered. These were among only three bottles in our top 10 with age statements, indicating that most of these whiskeys were, indeed, being bottled young, both to meet demand and to increase cash flow. Fourth best was the Tyrconnell Irish single malt, was well balanced and complex. At $30, it was by far our best value. The only American malt in our top 10 was the Balcones, from Waco, Texas, coming in at number five, tasting of toffee, cream and an array of herbs and spices. It was the other cask-strength malt, and likewise calls for a little water. The best nine are listed on the right, but increasingly more are out there. Scotland beware.
Words: Eric Asimov
Amid the growing number of global single malts, we test a few of them
september issue 129
nine TasTing noTes
Tyrconnell – ireland Mellow, with lingering flavours of wax, cream, iodine and licorice. $30
Kavalan Classic – Taiwan Clean and balanced, with mellow flavours of vanilla, spices and smoke. $100
Hakushu 12 Years – Japan Bursting with sweet aromas and flavours of fruit and flowers, herbs, soy and vanilla. $85
Lord Lieutenant Kinahan’s 10 Years – ireland Smooth and appealing, with mellow flavours of fruit, flowers, butterscotch and spices. $62
navazos Palazzi single Palo Cortado Cask – spain Complex and savoury, with wideranging flavours of toffee, clover, butter, iron and salt. $100
Warenghem armorik Breton – France Spicy and floral, with an oily texture and flavours of apple blossoms, cream and smoke. $52
Balcones – Texas, Usa Complex, with dominant flavours of toffee, cream and caramel, supported by herbs and spices. $85
Reisetbauer – austria Polarizing, with aromas of fruit and lingering flavours of lanolin, wax, heather and salt. $90
Bastille 1789 – France Young and powerful, with savoury, spicy, medicinal flavours. $70
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sePtemBer living / investment
issue 129
Tank Louis Cartier watch
investment piece
The timeless watch worn by Cartier himself
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Pink gold case
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Alligator-skin strap with 18K pink gold ardillon buckle
4 3
Silver-grained dial
Blued-steel swordshaped hands
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Just 5.1mm thick, it’s the slimmest watch created by Cartier
Beaded crown set with a sapphire cabochon
7
Mineral glass front
T
he Tank is the greatest of all Cartier’s watches. Introduced in 1918 by Louis Cartier, it was inspired by the Renault FT-17 light tanks that were used in the First World War. Cartier thought that the watch’s side “brancards” resembled the parallel tanks treads, but far from a bulky war machine, this watch has become an icon of refined elegance. Its proto-Art Deco design was one of the first to give thought to how it looked, largely because people used pocket watches (that were mostly hidden away) and partly because Cartier was a jeweller. Despite only six being made in the first year of production, and just around 100 every year up until the 1960s, it became a classic, worn by the likes of Cary Grant, Andy Warhol and John F Kennedy. Its androgynous style meant it was also worn by female style icons including Jackie Kennedy, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Princess Diana. The one pictured here (ref: W1529756) is one of many variants available, but with the Tank, the neater and cleaner models like this one are the ones to seek out. It is, after all, that clean style that make it a timeless watch that will never go out of style. Portfolio.
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SEPTEMBER ISSUE 129
LIVING / COLUMN
The power of negative feedback… and why you should seek it out By Shane Snow
S
ince the early 20th century, psychologists have argued about the effects of feedback interventions, or critiques, on behaviour and performance. Various studies have shown that such interventions improved learning, while others “prove” that feedback has negative effects on performance. For years, academics debated whether positive feedback (“You’re doing great!”) was more helpful than negative feedback (“You did that wrong!”), and argued about whether direct, drillsergeant– like feedback was more helpful than kind, tactful feedback. Results were all over the map. Everything worked sometimes, and everything didn’t work sometimes. Then in 1996, researchers Avraham N Kluger and Angelo DeNisi looked at a hundred years of these studies and found something interesting: cumulatively, most feedback interventions were indeed not actually helpful to bettering performance, and much feedback indeed made things worse; however, some feedback was very helpful to boosting performance, and it had nothing to do with bedside manner. The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task. If you’ve ever been bowling, you may have experienced this effect (or seen someone else experience it). Everyone loves to give bowling advice to the guy who’s losing. “Try throwing it harder,” your friend says after you manage to knock down three pins. “Twist your wrist a little as you let go,” says the girl who just bowled a strike, after you hit one more pin.
The next time you’re up, someone else says, “Aim just to the right of the middle pin,” and the first guy adds, “Bend your knees.” Your teammate reminds you, “You need to get a spare for us to still have a chance to win.” So, you step up to the line and throw the ball – knees bent, wrist twisted, eyes staring to the right of the middle pin, and what else am I supposed to be doing?! – right into the gutter. All that feedback made you worse at bowling. Not because it wasn’t decent advice, but because a highpressure feedback barrage tends to make us self-conscious. We get stuck inside our own heads. Kluger and DeNisi found that, as with bowling anxiety, the closer feedback moves our attention to ourselves, the worse it is for us. The research showed that experts – people who were masters at a trade – vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement. That was because criticism is generally more actionable than compliments. “You did well” is less helpful in improving your bowling game than “You turned your wrist too much.” Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback.Meanwhile, novices psyched themselves out. They needed encouragement and feared failure. The tough part about negative feedback is in separating ourselves from the perceived failure and turning our experiences into objective experiments. But when we do that, feedback becomes much more powerful.
“The research showed that experts (people who were masters at a trade) vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement”
90 Shane Snow is the author of Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power Of Lateral Thinking PORTFOLIO.
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