Portfolio_July_2016

issue

127

icelanD’s Pools

Dyson’s next iDea

the reason for a nation’s wellbeing

can James Dyson do it again?

bistronomie

facebook’s new team

a food trend saving Parisian dining

making social media more humane

rise of the machines a photographic journey through our history of computers

july issue 127

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn GROUP EDITOR mark evans marke@motivate.ae EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy matthew.pomroy@motivate.ae sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFFaGHellO sarar@motivate.ae sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO rom@motivate.ae sUb-EDITOR salil kumar salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne anthony@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF craig.wagstaff@motivate.ae PUbLIsHER Jaya balakrisHnan jaya@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs MANAGER PORTFOLIO & INTERNATIONAL micHael underdOwn michael@motivate.ae

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

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Portfolio.

RIsE OF THE MACHINEs P66

A photographic celebration of the early computers that changed the world. Newly shot, then digitally enhanced, these images show the machines – some shown for the first time in colour – that paved the way for modernisation and the digital age.

JULY ISSUE 127

CONTENTS UPFRONT

10

GROUP THINK

The power of crowdsourcing your ideas

15

MOBILE WALLETS

Why paying by phone is on the rise

20

CHOPSTICKS

The case for eating the ancient way

22

FREE SPEECH

The new app that lets you understand foreign languages

24

HIDDEN ART

LIVING

74

BATHROOM WITH A VIEW

An award-winning suite

76

SUMMER STYLES

Holiday looks for men and women

84

The spectacular collection of art you’ll never see

BISTRONOMIE

28

87

THE NEW ROCK STARS

How businesses bought in and bands sold out

A trend that is changing the way Paris dines out PERUVIAN FOOD

The best restaurant in Dubai right now

90

COLUMN

The Nordic theory of creativity

07

33,388 copies July - December 2015

PORTFOLIO.

JULY ISSUE 127

CONTENTS FEATURES

34

THE POOLS OF ICELAND

Why Iceland’s pools are the centre of the community, and perhaps happiness

42

THE GREAT BEE HEIST

Bees are now a billion-dollar industry, and with big business comes big crime

52

JAMES DYSON’S NEXT IDEA

Can the man who revolutionised vacuum cleaners change the way you dry you hair?

60

THERE, THERE. FACEBOOK CARES

The new team at Facebook charged with helping people deal with breakups in a social-media age

08

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PORTFOLIO.

CALIBER RM 033

upfront

portfolio.

upfront

10

Portfolio.

july /crowdsourcing

issue 127

Lee Mayer, chief executive of an interior design site called Havenly, turned to crowdsourcing to test pricing, products and website design

Crowdsourcing your next idea And why it’s the end for focus groups. Words: Constance Gustke

S

ome of the best business ideas are inspired by others, or so the wisdom of the crowd goes. That is leading more entrepreneurs to tap into other people’s brains – rather than just their pocketbooks – to test new products, set pricing and bring ideas to market faster.

Lee Mayer discovered the benefits of crowdsourcing after she had moved to a new home and struggled for three months to find an interior decorator who would work within her budget. Then, she met a decorator who was not booking enough business. And with that, an online interior design site called Havenly – offering services that were affordable – was born.

But before Mayer took any steps to set up the company, she turned to the crowd for advice, sending out thousands of survey forms to answer one crucial question: would people pay for this decorating service? Before quitting her job as a business strategist and spending thousands on a new venture, Mayer wanted some sign that the venture would succeed.

“You want to make sure other people believe what you believe,” said Mayer, who has an MBA from Harvard University and has worked as a consultant. “That takes some risk out of it.”

Mayer, now chief executive of Havenly, has been turning to the masses for answers ever since, including testing her pricing, products and website design. (The interior decorator who did not have enough clients

is now her design director.) Development is costly, reasoned Mayer, who even learned coding to start the site, so it is important to make choices that are as right as possible.

“Crowdsourcing is fast, cheap and scruffy,” she said, “especially when you need to move quickly.”

While well-established crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo dip into people’s pockets, crowdsourcing taps into their brains. Experts say that turning to the masses can even yield sharper answers than other methods.

“Crowdsourcing has replaced focus groups,” said Chris Hicken, president of UserTesting, a company based in Mountain View, California, that specialises in sifting through the ideas of crowds on behalf of online businesses. “It’s faster and a lot cheaper. Innovation is going so fast that we need faster answers.”

UserTesting, for instance, helped Speek, a conference calling service, adjust its web design to make it more understandable. As a result, registrations jumped 60 per cent, according to Speek.

Mayer herself turned to UserTesting, which offers access to more than one million users, for ideas on Havenly’s site design. Based on the feedback, one of the things she added was a budget calculator.

Such entrepreneurs may be onto something. Research shows that the best ideas come from outside a company, said Portfolio.

11

july issue 127

upfront / crowdsourcing

Marketing experts say companies can test new products and develop customer loyalty by turning to online surveys and other tools.

Answers via crowdsourcing can be faster and more relevant, too

Elizabeth Gerber, an associate professor of design at Northwestern University.

“Employees don’t question as much,” she said. “Every decision feels more momentous in an innovate-or-die world.”

Harnessing the brainpower of consultants and focus groups can be costly and time-consuming. But crowdsourcing gives companies a bigger toolbox.

Companies can both test new products and develop customer loyalty, Gerber said.

Speed is a crucial ingredient for success these days, researchers have found. Getting early input from consumers helps companies switch gears faster and more cheaply on products destined to fail, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey last year.

“It’s harder to stay ahead these days,” said Rob Hoehn, chief executive of IdeaScale. “Small businesses with no R&D departments have the crowd.”

His company offers software that helps companies run crowdsourcing campaigns. The firm, which started in the co-founder’s garage, is seven years old and has 25 employees.

IdeaScale, whose client roster includes big companies like Xerox and Ikea, has even run crowdsourcing campaigns for the White House, yielding money-saving ideas like a high-tech tool lending library at Nasa.

Mayer, a self-proclaimed data geek, has turned to crowdsourcing repeatedly over the last two years. One of Havenly’s web features is a style survey, using crowdsourced data that walks customers through a fun, quick questionnaire that helps define their tastes. Havenly also crowdsourced the prices for its services. A $79 price seemed to be ideal for a “minidesign” of one room, based on surveying of users and nonusers alike.

When harnessing the crowd, 12 questions cannot be broad, though.

Focusing choices between different options is crucial. Hone questions from a set of hunches, advised Mayer, and ask as many people as possible. Hicken suggested querying about 500 people.

Portfolio.

“If 75 per cent say ‘yes’ to a product, you can be sure that they want it” “That’s the right sample size,” he said.

“If 75 per cent say ‘yes’ to a product, you can be sure that they want it.”

Other companies have used data analysis to draw conclusions from a fire hose of information. Orit Hashay, founder of Brayola, a bra seller, said she analysed feedback from millions of women.

That user data helped her create an algorithm to allow customers to choose better-fitting bras that are also stylish. An online form helps match users to bras bought by similar women with similar preferences, minimising the need for returns, Hashay said.

“So buying bras online can become more like buying shoes,” said Hashay, whose company logged $6 million in revenue last year and plans to triple that this year. And now customers talk about

their bras on Instagram and Pinterest, she said, helping her market expand via social media. On the company’s Facebook page, which has more than 360,000 likes, women voice their views on colours or brands.

Crowdsourcing does have its risks, however. For example, trade secrets may be inadvertently revealed, said Gerber of Northwestern. To guard against that, entrepreneurs can survey small bites of information rather than reveal their entire strategies.

Another benefit for companies is that crowds typically are not offered payment for their input, saving companies on market research costs.

But the people in the crowd “do get bragging rights”, she said. “So there are reputation benefits.”

HORTENSIA COLLECTION • VOIE LACTÉE RING

L’ART DE LA JOAILLERIE DEPUIS 1780

JULY UPFRONT / FINANCE

ISSUE 127

In the race to pay, mobile wallets win They are faster and more convenient to use than the chip. Words: Brian X Chen

E

very weekend, when Pierre Houle works the brunch shift at Olea, a neighbourhood restaurant, many customers want to split the tab on multiple credit cards, a process that takes much longer than it used to.

For waiters like Houle, diners going Dutch is nothing new. But now he has to take each of the credit cards, insert

them into a chip reader and wait about 10 seconds for every transaction to process.

In the past, he could swipe a card, wait a few seconds, print out the receipt and get going.

“It isn’t much, but in the restaurant world it can be enormous,” he said. “I have to wait there, and I can’t go check on something else. You need to move all the time when you do a job like that.”

$8.71bn Amount spent in the US last year via mobile phone payment apps

Many merchants and retail workers are watching their lives play in slow motion when they process credit cards. To combat fraudulent transactions, the retail industry is shifting from the traditional magnetic stripe toward tiny computer chips embedded inside cards.

The chip technology, known as EMV (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa) has been around for decades in PORTFOLIO.

15

july upfront / finance

issue 127

Europe. But starting last October in the United States, banks pushed the liability of purchases made with counterfeit credit cards on to merchants. That means if a criminal swipes a counterfeit credit card to buy something, the merchant now has to pay for it.

The sweeping change has compelled many retailers to upgrade their equipment to read chips, which have stronger security than the easy-to-forge magnetic stripe. By the end of this year, about 80 per cent of all credit cards in the United States should include chips, according to a new report by fraud prevention company Iovation and research firm Aite Group.

The chip initially may annoy consumers. For most chip transactions, you have to dip the credit card into a slot and wait for the transaction to be approved before you can remove it and scribble your signature.

Mobile payments could be a quicker alternative. Some of the biggest tech companies – Apple, Google and Samsung Electronics – released mobile wallet technologies in the past two years, although they are still a niche product. In the United States, only 0.2 per cent of all in-store sales were made with phones last year, according to a survey by eMarketer, a research firm.

“Contrary to what Tim Cook said when Apple rolled out Apple Pay, consumers have been swiping their cards for a long time and it’s not that hard,” said Julie Conroy, a research director for the Aite Group.

I tested chip cards and each of the mobile payments services in 16 three different stores: Walgreens, BevMo and Nancy Boy, a small beauty supply store in San Francisco. I inserted a chip card or tapped a phone and timed how long it took each transaction to Portfolio.

Banks have pushed liability of purchase on to merchants, so if a criminal swipes a counterfeit credit card, the merchant now has to pay for it

Apple’s mobile payment service lets iPhone 6 and Apple Watch owners make payments using Near Field Communication with their devices

be approved and start printing a receipt. The results varied slightly, but the mobile wallets were generally much faster than the chip.

What is happening with the chip to make it so slow? When you dip in the card, the chip generates a one-time code, which is sent to the bank over a network.

The bank confirms the code and sends verification back to the terminal. With mobile wallets, the same thing is basically happening in the background. They generate one-time tokens that are sent out and approved by the banks.

Visa is addressing the perception of sluggish transactions with Quick Chip.

It is basically a coming software upgrade that will allow the terminals to instruct the customer to dip the card and remove it right away.

Mobile wallets feel faster, more convenient and less awkward to use than the chip, so you should use them whenever possible.

The caveat, of course, is that not every merchant that takes credit cards also accepts mobile payments. At least not yet.

JULY ISSUE 127

UPFRONT / SPEND

MOST WANTED

3

H2O NINJA MASK A one-piece diving mask that gives a much wider view and extracts the damp air, so it will never fog up. Also available with a GoPro camera mount so you can record your dive. $145, h2oninjamask.com

1

YAMA SILVERTON HOT OR COLD COFFEE DRIPPER This coffee dripper made from hand-blown borosilicate glass and copper not only looks great, it actually serves a function. Coffee can be siphoned through either a stainless steel or ceramic filter while an adjustable valve lets you to control the drip rate and easily switch between hot and cold brews. Ideal for next-level coffee snobs. $100, espressoparts.com

4

SENSORWAKE ALARM An olfactory alarm clock that (via plug in cartridges) wakes you up with a nice smell. Options include cut grass, chocolate, croissants, coffee, peppermint or, somewhat cryptically, the sea. $99, sensorwake.com

5

18

2

PICTAR IPHONE GRIP While camera phones are getting better with every new release, you’re still holding a phone. This grip gives you the feel of using a DSLR camera and adds a series of physical buttons, as well as letting you attach a tripod or LED light source. Then via ultrasonic soundwaves it connects with the PICTAR app on your phone to scroll through lens and other shooting options. $90, kickstarter.com PORTFOLIO.

ANKER POWERHOUSE A portable power supply capable of powering lamps, phones, laptops, TVs etc. Comes with triple output modes: a 12V car socket, an AC outlet and four fast-charging USB ports. $599, amazon.com

JULY UPFRONT / CHOPSTICKS

ISSUE 127

Why do we still use chopsticks?

The reasons Asia has it right. Words: Jon Horsley

T

hey’re fiddly, take time to learn and even when mastered, they slow the diner down. And yet around 1.2 billion people continue to use chopsticks to eat.

Chopsticks were common as table dining implements by around 300AD and remain so despite their inefficiency compared to a spoon, knife and fork. Also, 200 million trees a year are felled for disposable sticks, which is to put it mildly, not great for the environment. So why 20 are people staying with the sticks?

Ironically, there seems to be a three-pronged argument in favour of them. They promote elegance both in and out of the kitchen, they’re better for sharing PORTFOLIO.

and, finally, they’re healthy. In terms of elegance, they do have undeniable advantages.

“There’s a famous story about when Nixon went to China for the first time back in 1972,” says chef and Chinese food ambassador Ken Hom. “He has a meal with a Chinese dignitary and asks why they use chopsticks. The dignitary turns to him and says: ‘President Nixon. We do not like to do our butchering at the table.’ And so Nixon is silenced.

“The story may be true but the fact is that there is a certain charm to not cutting at the table. It’s a lot more pleasant. Also there’s the elegance of the kitchen. It allows the chef an extra layer of design

200 million Number of trees felled annually to make wooden disposable chopsticks.

Use plastic.

to work with. He has to present you with food that is prepared one step further. So he has another way he can express himself. Let the chef do the work, I say.”

The culture of sharing and feasting is important to Asian cuisine and chopsticks are excellent for dipping in and out of food even if, since the Sars outbreak of 2003, practices have changed and there are often communal chopsticks for hygiene reasons.

“Picking at a plate in the middle of the table is the best way to eat,” says Andrew Wong, chef at London’s fashionable A Wong. “It has cultural implications that are a part of Chinese and Asian cuisine. A knife and fork as a symbol is individual and insular, as if to say, ‘This is my plate, this is my knife and fork, so don’t touch it.’ Chopsticks are for dishing out and picking up. Actually, what is interesting is that more and more chefs are using chopsticks for food preparation these days, even if they’re not Asian. I’m not really sure why that is.”

Perhaps most importantly, they breed good eating practices. Their fiddly nature means it’s impossible to shovel food down. This could help explain why Japan (who use more pointed, broader chopsticks) has managed to avoid rising obesity rates found in Western cultures.

“It’s a very healthy way to eat,” explains Kimiko Barber, author of The Chopsticks Diet. “It forces you to slow down and take smaller mouthfuls. It therefore takes you longer to eat and so your stomach has time to tell your brain that you’re full. If you think about the period when they were developed in Asia, food was scarce. You had to savour every mouthful, so it makes sense that you would slow down your intake using chopsticks.”

Creatively-inspiring, inclusive and good for the waistline? Maybe the question really should be why the rest of us are sticking with knives and forks?

JULY ISSUE 127

UPFRONT / TECH

A future without language barriers The real-time language translation earpiece is here

Y

22

ou’ve probably seen footage of United Nations conferences in which world leaders are having speeches translated in real time by a professional translator, who relay a translation via an earpiece. Now it seems we’re close to having the same service via an earpiece and app, and not just in global meetings of heads of state, but wherever we want.

Using speech recognition software, machine translation and the advances of wearable technology, the smart earpiece created by Waverly Technology lets wearers speak different languages but still understand each other. So when one person speaks, the other hears it in their own language.

In theory, it means that while you still can’t download the ability to speak any language, you will be able to understand any that your hear, and if the other person has the same app, you can have a conversation without the need to know how to speak each others’ language. No more struggling with that Business Mandarin For Beginners book.

The earpiece uses a companion app to toggle between languages and, crucially, it can function offline, so you’ll never be struggling to get an Internet connection to understand what someone is saying. It also comes with a speaker function and conference mode so you can have a meeting with more than one person while letting the app translate for everyone.

PORTFOLIO.

English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese will be the first available when the app is launched later this year, with German, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, Hindi and Urdu to follow in late 2017. Adding a new dialect to the app is as simple as downloading a song or podcast.

The initial model only translates with people who also have the Pilot earpiece, but future generations of the product will be developed to translate everything around you – much like the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy – so all the conversations happening within earshot will be heard in your own language.

We are now on the verge of a world that’s largely free from language barriers.

HOW IT WORKS

Speech Recognition Pilot App

The Pilot is a smart earpiece that uses specially designed dual, noise-cancelling microphones to filter out ambient noise from the speech of someone talking

The speech is then passed through the smartphone app and layers of speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis

Speech Synthesis

At the end of the funnel, the translated language is sent to the other person. This occurs simultaneously without interruption as each person speaks to each other

upfront

art | geneva

The greatest museum no one can see One of the world’s greatest art collections hides behind a fence, boxed up and hidden in the dark Words: Graham Bowley and Doreen Carvajal

T

he drab free port zone near the Geneva city centre, a compound of blocky grey and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made.

Treasures from the glory days of ancient Rome. Museum-quality paintings by old masters. An estimated 1,000 works by Picasso.

As the price of art has skyrocketed – the value of some works has increased tenfold and more over the last decade – perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary collecting habits more than the proliferation of warehouses like this one, where masterpieces are increasingly being tucked away by owners more interested in seeing them appreciate than hanging on walls.

With their controlled climates, 24 confidential record keeping and enormous potential for tax savings, free ports have become the parking lot of choice for highnet-worth buyers looking to round out investment portfolios with art.

Portfolio.

“For some collectors, art is being treated as a capital asset in their portfolio,” said Evan Beard, who advises clients on art and finance at US Trust. “They are becoming more financially savvy, and free ports have become a pillar of all of this.”

The trend is prompting concerns about the use of these storage spaces for illegal activities.

It is also causing worries within the art world about the effect such wholesale storage has on art itself.

“Treating art as a commodity and just hiding it in storage is something that to me is not really moral,” said Eli Broad, a major contemporary art collector who last year opened his own Los Angeles museum.

Free ports originated in the 19th century for the temporary storage of goods like grain, tea and industrial goods. In the past few decades, however, a handful of them – including Geneva’s – have increasingly come to operate as storage lockers for the superrich.

Located in tax-friendly countries and cities, free ports offer savings and security that collectors and dealers find almost irresistible.

Someone who buys a $50 million painting at auction in New York, for example, is staring at a hefty $4.4 million sales tax bill. Ship it to a free

july /art

issue 127

port, and the bill disappears, at least until you decide to bring it back to New York. If you ever do.

Many masterpieces have long lived outside of public view, buried in the basements of museums or tucked away in the private villas of the rich. But the free ports are drawing more criticism and concern, namely: are they bad for art? Does the boxing up of millions of valuable works pervert the very essence of what art is supposed to do?

Yes, say many in the art world.

“Works of art are created to be viewed,” said the director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, who described free ports as the greatest museums no one can see.

Some see even higher stakes for contemporary works, as they can be whisked off, their paint hardly dry, before ever entering the public’s consciousness. Storage puts the art “intellectually almost in a coma”, said Joanne Heyler, the director of the Broad Museum.

Not everyone agrees, pointing out that there is plenty of art in the world for people to see and that much art was created as private property. “Paintings are not a public good,” said David Nash, a New York gallery owner.

Even so, some collectors whose businesses have come to depend on free port storage are a bit sheepish. “It is a shame,” Helly Nahmad, a London dealer whose family is said to store 4,500 works in the Geneva Free Port, told The 25 Art Newspaper in 2011. “It is like a composer making a piece of music, and no one listens to it.”

So just what works are locked away? Because most art is Portfolio.

july issue 127

upfront / art

Buying a $50 million painting at auction in New York means a $4.4 million sales tax bill.

Ship it to a free port and the bill disappears

tucked into storage spaces quietly, it is difficult to know what is where at any given moment.

But assorted legal disputes, investigations and periodic exhibitions featuring stored works have provided glimpses of specific pieces lost from view.

There are the rare Etruscan sarcophagi discovered in Geneva

by Italian police two years ago, found among 45 crates of looted antiquities, some still wrapped in Italian newspapers from the 1970s. And the $2 billion collection of the Russian billionaire Dmitry M Rybolovlev, which includes a Rothko, a van Gogh, a Renoir, Klimt’s Water Serpents II, El Greco’s Saint Sebastian, Picasso’s Les Noces de Pierrette and Leonardo da Vinci’s Christ As Salvator Mundi.

Despite enhanced Swiss efforts to track inventory and ownership, the free ports there remain an opaque preserve (though more transparent these days than counterparts in places like Singapore), filled with objects whose ownership can be confounding convoluted.

26 Case in point: $28 million worth of works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Joan Miró and others now stored in the Geneva Freeport. Equalia, a company registered by Mossack Fonseca Portfolio.

1.2m

Number of artworks estimated to be at the Geneva port

(the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers controversy about how the wealthy conceal their riches), stored the works on behalf of a diamond broker, Erez Daleyot, in 2009. Once in storage, the art was used as collateral for debts Daleyot owed to a Belgian bank, according to court papers. Now a man named Leon Templesman, president of a New York diamond manufacturing company, Lazare Kaplan International, is trying to seize the art as part of a dispute with Daleyot and the bank.

Templesman said the free port’s embrace of confidentiality made such seizures more complicated.

The bank, KBC, said it had kept the art in the free port “out of precaution” and that it could not comment further on a matter involving one of its clients.

David Hiler, president of the Geneva Free Port, said that as a result of the audit, the Swiss were working to address concerns about lack of transparency. Come September, he said, all storage contracts will require that clients allow additional inspections of

any archaeological artifacts they want stored there.

Collectors and dealers choose to store art in the free ports for more pedestrian reasons than tax avoidance. Some simply have no more room in their homes, said Georgina Hepburne Scott, who advises collectors. And in a free port, their property is protected in climate-controlled environments, often under video surveillance and behind fire-resistant walls.

“When it is brought to light, the work is preserved; it’s not been hanging above a smoky fireplace,” she said.

Some warehouses also have viewing rooms where collectors can review their art and show it to potential buyers. This year, after voters in Geneva rejected a plan to expand the major art museum, a Swiss lawyer, Christophe Germann, wrote a newspaper column advocating wholesale sharing, arguing that free ports be forced to open their doors to let people see public displays of the private collections, a worthy trade-off for the tax benefits collectors receive.

Butterflies 18ct gold and diamond

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upfront

Behold, this is now what rock stars look like Like most things that were once cool because they positioned themselves against the mainstream, the idea of “rock star” has been thoroughly co-opted. Words: Carina Chocano

O

nce, a long time ago, a rock star was a free28 spirited, conventionflouting artist/rebel/ hero who fronted a world-famous band, sold millions of records and headlined stadium concerts where people were trampled in frenzies Portfolio.

of cultlike fervour. Someone who smashed guitars and trashed hotel rooms. Despite what his Behind The Music episode would invariably reveal, a “rock star” (or the Platonic ideal of a rock star) wasn’t just a powder keg of charisma and childhood issues,

but a revolutionary driven by a need to assert the primacy of the self in an increasingly alienating commercial world.

Now, 60 years since the phrase came into existence, “rock star” has made a complete about-face.

In its new incarnation, it is more

july /rock stars

likely to refer to a programmer, salesperson, social-media strategist, recruiter, management consultant or celebrity pastry chef than to a person in a band. The term has become shorthand for a virtuosity so exalted it borders on genius – only for some repetitive, detail-oriented task. It flatters the person being spoken about by shrouding him in mystique while also conferring a Svengali-like power on the person speaking.

Posting a listing for a job for which only “rock stars” need apply casts an HR manager as a kind of corporate Malcolm McLaren; that nobody is looking for a front-end

developer who bites the heads off doves in conference rooms goes without saying. Pretty much anyone can be a “rock star” these days – except actual rock stars, who are encouraged to think of themselves as brands.

This bizarre transposition goes back to the turn of the millennium, when the idea of a “creative class” was popularised in books like The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing The World and The Rise Of The Creative Class, which argued that innovation would drive growth in the 21st century. The creative class, according to these thinkers, valued

issue 127

the cool things in life. More than money and status, they cared about authenticity, activism, ecology and the interconnectedness of all things. They were egalitarian, more into personal growth. Whereas the popular business literature of the ’80s urged managers to imagine themselves as fierce, merciless warriors (Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise The Art Of War was required reading for executives and business students), by the end of the century, consultants had declared a “war for talent”. Business writers in the new millennium reconceptualised men in suits (or hoodies) as social revolutionaries.

According to a 2013 study in The Human Resource Management Review, “talent,” in its new usage, could refer to qualities, like natural ability and technical mastery, or it could refer to talented people, as in a subset of elite, superskilled workers, or it could mean all people, no matter how untalented. On the HBO show Silicon Valley [pictured] a recent episode saw a pretty event manager introduce the benightedly dorky programmers Dinesh and Gilfoyle as “rock stars” to her unimpressed boyfriend. In the series, Nelson Bighetti, known as Big Head, is a prime example of this last category. Big Head is an inept app developer whose swift rise through the ranks of his company, Hooli, makes no sense to his colleagues – which of course it shouldn’t, because it’s all just part of a cynical legal strategy.

But Hooli, a very loose spoof of Google, is a faith-driven “culture” led by a “visionary”, Gavin Belson.

To doubt his talent for spotting “talent” would border on apostasy.

Belson is a “rock star”, and Big 29 Head becomes a rock star by association. Silicon Valley nails this particular lexical puffery: the way that language can create power in the most ridiculous, illogical ways.

Rock star ad absurdum.

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july upfront / rock stars

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Rock stars themselves bear some responsibility for the creation of brand “rock stardom”. In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein traces the inversion of artists and corporate wage earners to the 1980s, when seemingly every ’70s rock star who survived youthful hard living into hale middle age entered into a synergistic alliance with other, bigger brands.

Comeback concert sponsorships, commercial licensing agreements, lucrative advertising contracts and co-branded merchandising opportunities offered the ageing rock star, drifting into irrelevance, advantages only a die-hard romantic and well-funded idealist would turn down: a final victory lap; an extra couple of hundred million; and a shot to trade enshrinement in a specific era for an eternal, ahistorical, everfungible brand “relevance”.

Who could blame him? A person can sanely assume a countercultural stance only when there is a culture to counter – and by the ’80s, there wasn’t one anymore. Advertising permeated popular culture so 30 thoroughly that it essentially replaced it. This oddity is illustrated by the successful co-opting of the Beatles’ song Revolution as the soundtrack to a 1987 Nike commercial. The Beatles sued the Portfolio.

Keith Richards as the face of Louis Vuitton luggage

sneaker company, the company that created the ad and EMI-Capitol Records for $15 million, claiming that they did not “endorse or peddle sneakers or pantyhose”. This sounds comically innocent now. Now we’re at the point where it seems perfectly normal to see the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards as the face of Louis Vuitton luggage; last year, Bono announced, while performing at the launch of the Apple Watch, that U2’s album Songs Of Innocence would be automatically released for free to the accounts of as many as 500 million iTunes users – a great many of whom were evidently not U2 fans.

Complaints about the rock star’s attempt to glom onto the launch and about the sullying of the pure Apple brand experience ensued.

When a brand becomes associated with a rock star in the public imagination the star is subsumed into the permeable and capacious brand, like a vanishing

Pretty much anyone can be a “rock star” these days – except actual rock stars, who are encouraged to think of themselves as brands

twin. And the spirit of rock music is devoured too. The brand itself becomes the star. Which is where we find ourselves now, in the postrock-star era, reading books like The New Rockstar Philosophy that are aimed at helping artists think, and possibly talk, like businesses.

(One blurb praises its “actionable insights”.) Musicians today know that you have to be a pro to succeed: compliant, controlled, image-focused and customerservice-oriented. Tossing TVs off balconies is not cost-effective and just sends the wrong message.

Years ago, in the early ’90s, I took a copywriting class at a large Chicago ad agency, and the teacher told us a story about how, a few years earlier, he tried to persuade the indie band Timbuk3 to allow his client (I think it was Procter & Gamble) to use its song “Hairstyles and Attitudes” in a commercial, but the musicians refused. I was struck by his contempt for their decision, and how fresh his anger seemed. He kept sputtering the reason they gave for turning down his agency’s offer – “They didn’t want to sell out!” – as if it constituted not just an unthinkable betrayal but also a reprehensible moral lapse. He seemed to expect us to mirror his indignation, but we just sat there, feeling uncomfortable.

Today, not only would the band that wrote the song about hairstyles accept the shampoo company’s offer without hesitating, it would also gratefully participate in any and all cross-promotional efforts, cheerfully splicing its DNA with that of its benevolent sponsors on social media and on TV. It would go on late-night shows and gamely participate in any attendant self-mockery.

The copywriter would use it as an example of leveraging brand synergies through 360-degree cross-platform campaigns, and the kids in his class would think he was a rock star.

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july upfront / moss

issue 127

Japan’s moss obsession What’s behind the craze? Words: Mako Nozu

I

n 2011, Hisako Fujii published a book titled Mosses, My Dear Friends. It went on to sell more than 40,000 copies, and helped trigger a wave of moss viewing parties among young women, who call themselves “moss girls”.

Since then, moss-themed drinks and rings that sprout moss instead of gems have joined moss balls (marimo) as popular wares. Devotees can go on special tours, during which guides lead small groups of fanatics deep into Japan’s lush, mossy forests, where they inspect the plants with magnifying glasses.

So what’s behind Japan’s moss craze? It’s deeply rooted in Japanese values and aesthetics.

Of the roughly 12,000 species of moss worldwide, Japan possesses 2,500 varieties. Japan’s humid climate creates the perfect conditions for the plant to thrive, and gazing at moss during Japan’s hot, humid summers can actually have a relaxing effect – one reason many will hang moss balls under the eaves of their houses.

Perhaps due to its prevalence on the island nation, moss is deeply rooted in Japanese culture.

Most Japanese gardens, also known as Zen gardens, have moss.

A Japanese garden is thought to be incomplete without the plant.

And the Japanese national anthem even contains the word “moss”.

(In English: “May your world go on for thousands of years / Until pebbles merge into one giant rock 32 and covered with moss.”)

In western cultures, people will often view nature as something to be conquered. But instead of trying to dominate nature, the Japanese attempt to coexist with Portfolio.

it, approaching the natural world with the attitude of a polite guest.

Accordingly, there’s an inherent urge to preserve it; while there’s a robust moss-removal market in many cultures, many Japanese wouldn’t fathom destroying something so innocuous.

Japanese culture also values age and history. Because moss doesn’t grow dramatically overnight – and instead takes years to cover the surface of a stone – the Japanese see something inherently virtuous about the plant.

Similar to bonsai trees, moss can be grown in the home and found almost anywhere in Japan, from street curbs to backyards, so it’s easy to scrape some off, place it in a glass and create a clean, simple home decoration. Like cacti (popular in the United States), it’s easy to care for, requiring little water to survive.

Perhaps crucially, the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi also plays

Mosses, My Dear Friends – a Japanese bestseller

a key role. It’s an aesthetic that places a premium on qualities like impermanence, humility, asymmetry and imperfection.

It’s the opposite of many western aesthetic values, which include permanence, grandeur, symmetry and perfection. Think of the Lincoln Memorial or the Georgian architecture style, which originated in England.

Many Japanese, however, prefer simple stone-collared tea bowls to meticulously crafted china. In some cases, the bowls will assume an imperfect shape and feature colours that might clash with typical western sensibilities.

To the Japanese, there’s a natural aspect to Wabi-sabi that’s considered beautiful. And moss is perhaps Wabi-sabi’s standard bearer: it grows seemingly at random, in asymmetrical patterns.

The humblest of plants, it’s often trampled upon, overshadowed by its larger, looming neighbours.

KNIGHTSBRIDGE, LONDON

har veynichols.com

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features

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Iceland’s water cure Can the secret to the country’s happiness be found in its communal pools?

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Dan Kois

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iceland

O

n a frigid February day in Reykjavik, I stood barechested and dripping wet just inside the dressing room at the Vesturbaejar pool, facing a long, cold walk to the outdoor hot tubs. My host was stoic, strong, a Viking.

I was whining.

“I just don’t want to go out there,” I said. “How do you make yourself do it?”

“You must, to swim in the pool,” Valdimar Hafstein said with a shrug. He is a folklorist at the University Of Iceland who studies the country’s pools. “Kids hate it, too. I have to haul my kids kicking and screaming.” I took a deep breath and tried to think of warm things. Wearing only a Speedo bathing suit – I had packed three, in honour of the island’s reputation as one of the company’s most avid markets – I stepped on to the deck. It was a few degrees below freezing.

Imagine the feeling you get when you hold an ice cube tight, that combination of sting and ache, except imagine it all over your body. Battling my long-ingrained instincts never to run at a swimming pool, I fell into a kind of brisk walk-trot, aiming for the large set of interconnected hot tubs in the centre of the complex. I’m sure I looked ridiculous. The good news: I’d never been less concerned about my appearance while wearing almost nothing in public.

Small snowflakes glittered in the sky, which at 4pm was already darkening towards dusk. I reached the largest hot tub and sank to my chin. For one glorious moment, I felt my mind go blank: there was just my body, my big, stupid body in its stupid bathing suit, enveloped in warmth, the cold wind on my ears only heightening my delight. Behind me, Valdimar ambled across the deck, saying hello to a neighbour in another hot pot.

Every Icelandic town, no matter how small, has its own pool. There are ramshackle cement rectangles squatting under rain clouds in the sheepstrewn boonies. There are fancy aquatic complexes with multilevel hot tubs and awesomely dangerous waterslides of the sort that litigious American culture would never allow. All told, there are more than 120 public pools – usually geothermally heated, mostly outdoors, open all year long – in Iceland, a country with a population just slightly 36 larger than that of Lexington, Kentucky.

“If you don’t have a swimming pool, it seems you may as well not even be a town,” the mayor of Reykjavik, Dagur Eggertsson, told me. I interviewed him, of course, as we relaxed together in a downtown hot tub. portfolio.

These public pools, or sundlaugs, serve as the communal heart of Iceland, sacred places whose affordability and ubiquity are viewed as a kind of civil right. Families and teenagers and older people lounge and chat in sundlaugs every day, summer or winter. Despite Iceland’s cruel climate, its remoteness and its winters of 19 hours of darkness per day, the people there are among the most contented in the world. The more local swimming pools I visited, the more convinced I became that Icelanders’ remarkable satisfaction is tied inextricably to the experience of escaping the fierce, freezing air and sinking into warm water among their countrymen.

The pools are more than a humble municipal investment, more than just a civic perquisite that emerged from an accident of Iceland’s volcanic geology. They seem to be, in fact, a key to Icelandic wellbeing.

This past winter, I visited Iceland and swam in 14 pools all over the country. I found them full of Icelanders eager to discuss what role these underwater village greens played in their lives.

I met recent immigrants to the Westfjords town Bolungarvik as they mingled with their new neigh-

iceland

The swimming pools are what make it possible to live here.

You have storms, you have darkness, but the swimming pool is a place for you to find yourself again

bours, their toddler carrying fresh handfuls of snow into the hot tub and delightedly watching them melt. I saw Icelandic parents splash with their kids to calm them before bedtime; I talked to adults who remembered that ritual from childhood and could summon the memory of slipping their still-warm bodies between cool sheets.

I heard stories of divorcing couples splitting their local pools along with their possessions and retired couples bonding by swimming together every day. I watched four steaming septuagenarians swim laps in a northern Iceland pool while the sunrise lit up the mountains behind them and an attendant brought out foam cups of coffee balanced on a kickboard. “I think the swimming pools are what make it possible to live here,” the young artist Ragnheidur Harpa Leifsdottir said. “You have storms, you have darkness, but the swimming pool is a place for you to find yourself again.”

For centuries, Iceland was a nation of seamen who regularly drowned within sight of shore. One local newspaper reported in 1887 that more than 100 Icelanders had drowned that winter alone.

In 1931, a boat carrying four farmers capsized while they tried to row a panicking cow across

Kollafjordur fjord. Three of the men died; one, who had studied swimming, survived.

Incidents like this fostered an enthusiasm for swimming education.

At the time, the only place to learn was a muddy ditch downstream from the hot spring where the women of Reykjavik did laundry. Inspired by that hot spring, and using a heavily mortgaged drill that had been brought to Iceland to search fruitlessly for gold, the city soon tapped the underground hot water generated by Iceland’s volcanic underbelly. Iceland’s first geothermal heat flowed into 70 homes and three civic buildings: a school, a hospital and a swimming pool. The national energy authority offered no-risk loans to villages across the country to encourage geothermal drilling, and within a generation, the ancient turf house had nearly disappeared from Iceland, replaced by modern apartment buildings and homes, all of them so toasty warm that even on winter nights most Icelanders leave a window open. With hot water flowing through the country and a populace eager to take a dip – swimming education was made mandatory in all Icelandic schools in 1943 – pools soon popped up in every town.

“Because of the weather, we don’t have proper plazas in the Italian or French style,” the writer Magnus Sveinn Helgason explained to me. “Beer was banned in Iceland until 1989, so we don’t have the pub tradition of England or Ireland.” The pool is Iceland’s social space: where families meet neighbours, where newcomers first receive welcome, where rivals can’t avoid one another. It can be hard for reserved Icelanders, who “don’t typically talk to their neighbours in the store or in the street”, to forge connections, Dagur told me. (Icelanders generally use patronymic and matronymic last names and refer to everyone, even the mayor, by first name.) “In the hot tub, you must interact,” Dagur continued. “There’s nothing else to do.”

Not only must you interact; you must do so in a state of quite literal exposure. Most Icelanders have a story about taking visitors, often American, to the pools and then seeing them balk in horror 37 at the strict requirement to strip naked, shower and scrub their bodies with soap from head to toe.

Men’s and women’s locker rooms feature posters highlighting all the regions you must lather assiduously: head, armpits, feet. Icelanders are portfolio.

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iceland

In the tradition of politician interviews everywhere, an aide lurked nearby, in a manner I would call unobtrusive but for the fact that he was also naked

very serious about these rules, which are necessary because the pools are only lightly chlorinated; tourists and shy teenagers are often scolded by pool wardens for insufficient showering.

The practice was even the subject of a popular sketch on the comedy show Fostbraedur, in which a zealous warden scrubs down a reluctant pool visitor himself.

That one of the naked bystanders in that viral video, Jon Gnarr, was later elected mayor of Reykjavik demonstrates that Icelanders are quite un-self-conscious about nudity in the service of pool cleanliness. This was made most clear to me, perhaps, in a dressing room in the town Isafjordur, where a chatty liquor-store manager named Snorri Grimsson told me a long story about the time a beautiful Australian girl asked him to go to the pool but then revealed that she doesn’t shower before swimming. He mugged a look of comic horror, then brought home the kicker: “It was a very difficult decision. Thankfully, the pool was closed!” I could tell this bit killed with his fellow Icelanders, but my own appreciation of it was somewhat impeded by

Snorri’s delivery of it in the nude, his left foot on the sink, stretching like a ballet dancer at the barre.

As a journalist, I will never forget the uniquely Icelandic experience of shaking hands with handsome Dagur and then, just minutes later, interviewing him as we each bared all. (In the tradition of politician interviews everywhere, an aide lurked nearby, in a manner I would call unobtrusive but for the fact that he was also naked.)

But near-nudity, by encouraging a slight remove from others, also allows the visitor to focus, in a profound and unfamiliar way, on his own body, on its responses and needs. Despite its being a social hub, the pool also cultivates inwardness. Results of a questionnaire distributed by Valdimar’s research team suggested that women in particular go to the pool to seek solitude.

According to women I talked to, most everyone 39 respects the posture of aquatic reverie – head tilted back against the pool wall, eyes closed, mouth smiling a tiny smile of satisfaction – that you adopt when you come to the pool and just really wanting to be left alone. portfolio.

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40

“When people are in the swimming pool, it doesn’t matter if you are a doctor or a taxi driver.

Everyone is dressed the same”

portfolio.

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igurlaug Dagsdottir, a graduate student researching the pools, speculated that the sundlaugs’ social utility in Icelandic communities derives in part from the intimacy of the physical experience: in the pool, she said, you can “take off the five layers of clothing that usually separate you from everyone else”. As such, the pools are a great leveler: council members in Reykjavik make a point to circulate among the city’s sundlaugs, where they often take goodnatured grief from their constituents. The filmmaker Jon Karl Helgason, who is shooting a documentary about Iceland’s pools, said, “When people are in the swimming pool, it doesn’t matter if you are a doctor or a taxi driver.” His girlfriend, Fridgerdur Gudmundsdottir, added, “Everyone is dressed the same.”

On the way from Reykjavik to Keflavik airport is the Blue Lagoon, a luxurious hot-water spa that is one of Iceland’s most popular tourist destinations.

There, for 40 euros, you can shower in private stalls and float in mineral-rich water – discharge from the

nearby Svartsengi power plant, which uses turbines twice as tall as a man to generate 75 megawatts of electricity and 150 thermal megawatts of heat for the surrounding towns.

My final day in Iceland, I turned off the highway just after the Blue Lagoon and instead drove into one of those towns, the port Rekjanesbaer.

The lobby of the town’s pool is dotted, fittingly, by a series of portholelike windows. The woman working at the desk charged me nine bucks and asked, “Is this your first time in an Iceland swimming pool?”

“Nope,” I said with some pleasure.

The familiar signs in the showers were supplemented by notices in Polish, targeting the new wave of immigrants who have found work in Rekjanesbaer. I snapped on my Speedo, steeled my courage and exited the warm lodge into the chill. The 36-to-38-degrees-Celsius hot pot was full of enormous men with Bluto-type physiques and also a small girl in a pink ruffled bathing suit. The largest of the Blutos rose from the water, picked up the girl and carried her, giggling, to the family pool. His biceps sported a tattoo of a roaring bear consumed by flames.

This time I didn’t approach anyone, didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t speak at all. I concentrated on what I could feel: the water pressing lightly on my skin, the wind prickling my beard. All around me was the soft white noise of a community. The conversation; the connection; the freedom, within that flurry of sociability, to withdraw and simply be within yourself.

It called to mind something a PhD student named Katrin Gudmundsdottir told me on my first day in Iceland. She was describing a certain ineffable emotional state to me, a native Icelander’s sense of comfort while immersed in her neighbourhood sundlaug. When I thought of what she said, a perfect G chord strummed inside me. “It’s not exactly like you’re happy,” she had mused. “It’s that you know how to be in the swimming pool.”

The sun was low on the horizon, bright but evanescent. The only other thing in the crystal-blue sky was the contrail of a jet, pointed to the west.

I closed my eyes. I was in the pool.

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Sticky fingers: The rise of the bee thieves Brett Murphy Bees have become a billion-dollar business.

But who would try to steal them?

T

he bees crawled up the thief ’s arms while he dragged their hive over a patch of grass and through a slit in the wire fence he had clipped minutes earlier. In the pitch dark, his face, which was not covered with a protective veil, hovered inches from the low hum of some 30,000 bees.

The thief squatted low and heaved the 30kg hive, about the size of a large office printer, up and on to the bed of his white GMC truck. He had been planning his crime for days. He knew bees – how to work them, how to move them, and most importantly, how to turn them into cash.

He ducked back through the fence to drag out a second box, ‘Johnson Apiaries’ branded over the white paint. Then he went back for another. And another.

The Diablo Grande foothills edge the western side of California’s vast Central Valley. During 42 the day you can see rolling pastures and an endless quilt of farmland. But at night, it is so dark that you are lucky to see your hand in front of your face.

The thief thought there was almost no chance that a motorist would pass by, let alone one who would notice him. portfolio.

Jerry Phillips, a night manager for the area’s water provider, spends his nights zooming between pump stations in the foothills. He knows every farmer and cowboy on the hill’s eightmile stretch, including a local beekeeper named Orin Johnson.

Johnson, who had been hit by bee thieves before, liked to alert potential witnesses. “If you see anybody in there in the middle of the night,” he had told Phillips, “it ain’t me.”

Sure enough, Phillips saw someone on his way down the parkway that night. He quickly phoned the nearby golf resort, which has its own roving security detail on the hill.

After the thief loaded the ninth hive, he sat behind the wheel, with the driver’s-side door open. The truck was far from full, and there were almost 100 more boxes behind the fence for him to choose from. That meant a lot of money. The exact value of a hive is not standard – it depends what you do with them – but nine hives can bring in about $5,000 in just one year. And they are worth considerably more in the hands of a capable beekeeper who can maintain them season after season.

Suddenly, a wall of white light hit the thief from behind, and he froze.

A security guard stood next to his patrol car’s spotlight, keeping his distance. The guard, whose name was Dre Castano, inched forward, wary of being ambushed. He thought there was no way just one guy had got all of those big boxes into the truck on his own.

The thief climbed out of the car and turned into the light. He stood there alone, his eyes glazed over and sullen. Maybe a drunk driver, Castano thought.

He asked for the man’s ID. Pedro Villafan, 5ft 2in tall, and 46 years old. He lived 20 minutes south, in Newman, another little town at the base of the foothills. He looked flushed, half-asleep. But he kept calm and answered Castano’s questions. Yes, those were bees. No, they were not his. No, he did not work for Orin Johnson.

Yes, he was stealing them.

Castano, surprised by Villafan’s immediate confession, put him in ziptie handcuffs and walked him to the backseat of his patrol car. Less than 45 minutes later, at about 3.40am, Johnson pulled up to the scene, now lit red and blue. A sheriff ’s deputy had just arrived, as well. He asked Johnson to identify the bees and sign an affidavit committing to press charges.

“The suspect wants to talk to you,” the deputy said to Johnson, motioning to his cruiser. “Do you want to talk to him?”

Johnson walked over and poked his head through the window.

“I made a huge mistake,” Villafan started.

“Of course you did,” Johnson interrupted, trying his best to remain composed.

“I shouldn’t have done this,” the thief said. “All my bees died.”

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hese are strange times for the American beekeeper. In California, the centre of the industry, members of this tight-knit community find themselves enjoying an economic boom while trying to cope with environmental turmoil. And now they’re dealing with a new kind of criminal: the bee rustler. Every year, at the height of pollination season in the spring, dozens of nighttime thieves – nobody knows exactly how many – break into bee yards all over California to steal hives.

Farmers depend on bees, but they do not keep their own – it is too costly, too time-consuming and too painful. So, they lease their pollinators from the commercial beekeeping industry, a fast-growing trade that underpins American agriculture.

About a third of the country’s beekeeping operations, known as “apiaries”, are in California, more than the next four states combined. It is a $1.8 billion trade nationwide, driven by roughly 1,500 apiaries, which own 95 per cent of the country’s bees.

(About 60,000 hobbyists keep the other five per cent.)

It was only recently that beekeeping became big business. For most of the 20th century, American beekeepers were primarily honey manufacturers. In order to manufacture good honey, they sought out open space where their bees could forage. Johnson’s father knocked on farmers’ doors all over Stanislaus County for decades, often with his son in tow, looking for land away from humans and other bees. His proposition: my bees pollinate your crops, your crops feed my bees. They squared the deal with a handshake and a case of honey.

So it went for decades. But little by little, high-value crops such as pistachios, walnuts and mandarin oranges began to take up larger swaths of land all over Central Valley. The beekeepers realised that there was money to be made in pollination – growers needed bees and were willing to pay rental fees, as if investing in airborne fertiliser. Once crops bloom, bees scatter skyward in a mushroom-cloud formation before darting for nectar in the open buds; “grocery shopping”, as one beekeeper described it. As they fly around, each bee grabs pollen from one tree and sheds it at another, boosting the number of leaves, flowers and nuts.

From the 1980s on, commercial keepers supplemented their honey business by renting out their bees at $25 per hive for a single, month-long bloom. A large-scale beekeeping operation would have thousands of hives (in addition to producing honey in the autumn), bringing in money from crop pollination: cherries, watermelons and everything in between. Small outfits such as Johnson Apiaries did not have to worry much about uncertain honey sales any more. There was more than enough opportunity to make up their revenue in the spring.

Commercial beekeeping was honest, sustainable and relatively free of competition, but not exactly a business others raced to join. Then, in the early 2000s, two things shook up the industry.

First, the world discovered almonds. Thanks to global demand, particularly from Asia, the nut has taken over Central Valley, nearly doubling its hectarage to 370,000 since 2005. California produces more than 80 per cent of the world’s almond supply today. The boom brought with it an unprecedented demand for pollination. With bees, an almond tree produces 70 per cent 43 more nuts than without. “Bees,” one almond grower told me, “are as important as water.”

Second, the bees started to die. During the 2006 winter, beekeepers reported losing anything from 30 to 90 per cent of their hives to disease, an unprecedented amount compared with portfolio.

bee thieves

previous decades, in which losses hovered around 10 or 15 per cent. (The average death toll has since levelled to just under 30 per cent each year.) Even Johnson, a second-generation keeper with “honey in the blood”, finds boxes and boxes of dead colonies every winter, and has to scrape out the crusted nectar and tiny corpses.

What became known as “colony collapse disorder” – a lethal combination of disease, drought, land loss and pesticide use – brought the industry to its knees, forcing hundreds of keepers, unable to maintain their hives through the winter, out of business.

But those who weathered the storm have benefited from simple economics: the national supply of bees fell, while demand for pollination has since quadrupled alongside almond growth. This year, almond farmers paid $180 to rent a single hive. And every half-hectare requires two hives.

The surge in bee rental prices in the valley over the last decade has brought with it an unsettling rise in thefts. In 2015, poachers stole more than 1,700 hives – and those are just the thefts that were reported. Last year was the first time anyone had actually counted, but beekeepers and law enforcement both say that the crime is becoming increasingly common. For small beekeepers such as Johnson, a few dozen hives going missing just before spring can bring ruin. Worst of all, everyone knows that the heists are inside jobs.

During the 2006 winter, beekeepers reported losing anything from 30 to 90 per cent of their hives

New keepers enter the industry hoping to cash in on the pollination boom – and it is they who often end up becoming the chief suspects in bee robberies. They sign contracts in the autumn, lose their hives to disease in the winter, then steal to make back the difference in the spring. “People are trying to meet their obligations at our expense,” one recent victim told his local paper, after thieves made off with $100,000 worth of hives. “There’s no doubt in my mind it was another beekeeper.”

The seasoned, generational beekeepers trust one another. They drink beer and eat donuts together. They loan each other hives and equipment. They even share trade secrets, such as recipes for artificial pollen supplements. They were here long before the almond boom, and their sons – beekeeping is a predominantly male industry – will carry on their apiaries long after. But the Central Valley’s beekeeping fraternity believes that a growing number of opportunists are now entering the business.

“They get desperate,” said Dion Ashurst, president of the state beekeepers association. “And they go out and do stupid stuff.”

A fourth-generation beekeeper and repeat victim, Ashurst called them “fly-by-night” criminals who may understand the ins and outs of beekeeping, but are not of the community.

Now thousands of hives are vanishing, taken with precision and coordination at the very time their owners need them most. Every winter, more and more legitimate keepers, struggling to keep their bees alive, have woken to find their yards emptied and their livelihoods in sudden and serious jeopardy.

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hat Villafan was even caught is remarkable. Thieves in the Central Valley rarely end up in handcuffs, let alone face prosecution. Witnesses do not drive by often. At 42,000 square miles, the area is vast and isolated, yet still connected by freeway arteries – helpful to thieves looking to make a fast getaway. With the right equipment, know-how, and a buyer lined up, stealing hives is easy. A truck full of bees boosted at midnight in Stanislaus can be unloaded in a Kern County orchard, 200 miles away, by the morning.

The state beekeepers association offers a reward for anyone who helps catch a thief. The security guard who accosted Villafan in January 2015 got $1,000, although the sum can be as high as $10,000. The association likes to address the issue in its monthly board meetings. Minutes from one session last year read: “An attempted hive theft in San Luis Obispo, but the thief dropped the hive and got stung a lot, leaving the hive where he dropped it.

Law enforcement is after this thief!”

Detective Rowdy Jay Freeman – a backyard beekeeper himself – drives out to meetings, conferences, bars and bee yards to meet the keepers. Hunting down bee thieves is a frustrating job, 45 given the dearth of evidence. Where dozens or even hundreds of humming boxes sit one day, there are “nothing but tyre tracks in mud” the next, said Freeman. “There are no witnesses out there in the country.” In three years investigating rural crime, Freeman had not caught a single bee thief. portfolio.

bee thieves

But that changed this year when he got a tip two counties south. Jacob Spath, a young beekeeper short on his contracts after a tough winter, had backed a flatbed truck into a bee yard and made off with 60 hives. Two days later, Spath was negotiating prices with a broker, when a friend of the victim spotted the boxes, recognised the name, and called the police. Freeman arrested him that week.

Now the district attorney is looking to make an example of Spath by charging him with grand animal theft, a felony that carries a much higher possible sentence than ordinary grand theft. Spath pleaded guilty in April and could serve three years in prison – possibly more, depending on the judge’s valuation of the bees. The specific penal code only mentions large animals, including horses, goats, cows, mules, sheep, hogs and boars. This will be the first time in the history of California that someone is charged with grand animal theft for stealing bees.

Most thieves share Spath’s modus operandi: steal a truckload of hives, drive them a few counties away, chisel the label off (or gut the frames completely and burn the box), then rent them out to almond farmers or brokers. Bee brokers typically help connect large, out-of-state keepers with farmers in the Valley. They tend to buy wholesale, and ask few questions about the bees’ origins.

Half the industry is built on handshakes with the farmers, one beekeeper told me, “millions of dollars every day without a single paper signed”.

Beekeepers try to look out for themselves and each other. A select few hire private security guards or install expensive GPS chips in every hive. Others hide cameras in their yards or make nightly rounds in their trucks. Most simply brand every single piece of equipment with their name, number and a unique registration code in the hope that a friend may recognise their name if boxes go missing.

But none of that does much good after they have been taken and gutted. And the law only goes so far. Beekeepers are often forced to do their own sleuthing. Last year, Joe Romance, of Kern County, went to move 128 hives out of one of his bee yards, only to find them missing. There was talk around town about a beekeeper holding meetings in a coffee shop, selling half-price hives to almond growers. Romance, posing as a farmer, went to the man’s house and found something like an automobile chop shop inside a warehouse. Three men were cracking open hundreds of boxes, removing the frames inside and assembling new hives.

Another beekeeper, Brent Woodworth, rented a small Cessna aircraft and flew it three hours in

In 2015, poachers stole more than 1,700 hives – and those are just the thefts that were reported

search of his $30,000-worth of stolen hives, his eyes trained on the tiny square specks below, looking for his specific bright yellow lids. “It takes a thief ’s constitution,” Woodworth told me last winter while we ate lunch in his truck and gazed out on his bee yard, which was home to about 3,700 roaring hives. “Some ballsy people, I’ll tell you.” He grabbed a bee off the radio and gave it a flick. “Stealing from somebody is just about as bad as it gets. I think it’s just the worst thing you can do to a man.”

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rin Johnson is 68, with an impressive belly and a mess of white hair. In 1969, he came home from Vietnam with two Purple Hearts, a bum eye and a blown eardrum. He went to night school on the GI Bill, “participated in the free love, Woodstock era”, married that pretty girl Patti from his apartment building, and went back to work at the telephone company Pacific Bell for almost two decades as before taking over his father’s hives.

He thrived for years after returning to the bee life, maintaining the old accounts and finding plenty of his own. With some 500 hives and no employees, his operation is relatively small, but profitable. He stuck it out through a national tracheal mite epidemic in the 1980s; through a flood of Chinese honey that crippled domestic sales in the 1990s; and, so far, through the bee plague of the 2000s. “It’s a tough road to hoe,” he told me once, “no doubt about it.”

More than a year after he caught the thief stealing his bees in Diablo Grande at 4am, Johnson and I left the wood furnace in his warehouse and headed into the foothills for a routine “spot 47 check”. When we got there, sunlight smacked the clearing where his hives stood in the grass, each airborne bee a dark freckle on the sky. We put on veils and walked through the boxes.

Johnson gave each hive a gentle lift with his bare hands. His hands are baseball mitts, swollen and dirt-stained, skin portfolio.

bee thieves

Where dozens or hundreds of humming boxes sit one day, there are nothing but tyre tracks in mud the next

cracked at the knuckles and nails. (On a busy day, he can get stung 50 or 60 times.) With each lift, he measured the weight of the honey inside: too light and the colony is weak and underpopulated, too heavy and the hive is overcrowded and the bees may end up abandoning it entirely. Johnson marked the light hives with a dry cowpat so he would know which to feed with sugar syrup later. Every now and then, he paused for a moment and leaned his good ear towards a hive, squinting through the veil.

A strong hive hums deep like an engine. The weak ones are faint, almost a hiss. Others, completely silent.

Every beekeeper in the country stares down at boxes and boxes of dead hives each year. Since 2006, the industry has scrambled to repopulate bees quickly enough to match the devastating yearly mortality rates – temporary solutions for a long-term problem.

Johnson guesses that he usually loses about 30per cent of his hives – right around the industry average. Keepers spread out the survivors, splitting hives by artificially introducing new queen bees, as well as medicine and protein supplements. It’s pretty much like “feeding them McDonald’s,” Johnson said.

Beekeepers tend to shrug at media reports about the mysteries of colony collapse. They know the causes of “declining bee health”, as industry insiders refer to it, and what has created today’s hostile environ48 ment for their colonies. “It’s more difficult to keep bees alive and healthy today than it’s ever been,” said Gene Brandi, president of the American Honeybee Federation. One major problem is overgrazing. The pollination boom has invited droves out-of-state beekeepers that compete for the dwindling forage land. portfolio.

Bees need good nutrition to stay healthy and to fend off disease, which is often introduced by humans. Farmers constantly experiment with new pesticide sprays that can choke baby bees before they hatch. “The hive is more of an organism, the individual bee more like a cell,” said Katie Lee, a researcher at the Bee Informed Partnership.

And every new airborne chemical can threaten those cells.

But the majority of scientists and keepers agree that the most pernicious threat to bees is the varroa destructor mite. It arrived in Florida in 1987 and spread fast. (Honeybees, an invasive species themselves, arrived in the late 17th century.) In a TED Talk from 2014, beekeeper John Miller called varroa a “dirty needle” that transmits deadly diseases like a mosquito. In the video, he flips a slide to show baby bees covered in ticks. “It’s really hard to kill a bug on a bug,” Miller says, pausing for effect. “But if we don’t, we’re going to lose our bees.”

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n January 7, 2015, four days after they met in Diablo Grande, Johnson and Villafan were together again in Stanislaus County court. Annette Rees, a rising star in the district attorney’s office who handles the county’s most violent cases, happened to be in the courtroom as the magistrate read out the charges. A 487, the penal code for grand theft. Beehives. Rees raised an eyebrow.

She approached Johnson in the hallway after the hearing. He told her that this was fourth time his livelihood had been stolen out from under him. They caught the first guy in 2003. He had gutted Johnson’s colonies, moved the bees to his own boxes, and then tossed Johnson’s shattered hives into a riverbed – and he got off with only a misdemeanour. Rees did not want that to happen this time, so she asked to represent the beekeeper. “Plus,” she told me, “it was a nice departure from the rapes and murders.”

The preliminary examination was held on 27 March. Villafan’s public defender tried to have the charges reduced to a misdemeanour. He argued that his client’s remorse about the crime and his record of good behaviour should warrant some leniency. “I believe he was crying and stressed out about it,” the lawyer told the judge, citing Villafan’s flushed face under the security guard’s spotlight. “And him not sleeping a few days, you know, shows me he was extremely nervous and was unsure that he wanted to do something like this.”

Rees was not buying it. “This is an agricultural valley,” she told the judge. “Almonds are a huge part of our agricultural history and industry, and bees are critical for pollination of the almond trees. These were pollinating bees.”

“The beekeepers are already fighting the colony collapse disease,” she continued. “And to have someone simply go in the middle of the night, cut a fence, and make off with someone’s bee colonies is a serious offence. We take it very seriously.”

The judge maintained the felony charge of grand theft (stealing anything worth more than $950). On May 12, Villafan signed a plea deal with the court: 120 days in prison, with restitution to Johnson, and community service afterwards.

After weeks of trying to reach him, Villafan called me on the phone one night, and agreed to meet in person. A few

bee thieves

New keepers enter the industry hoping to cash in on the pollination boom – and it is they who often become the chief suspects in bee robberies

days later, I met with him at a Starbucks in the city of Turlock, California.

Villafan was waiting at the end of a long table, his hands around a cup. He smiled to greet me, but frowned when I took out my notebook. He asked why I cared about his story, his side of things. “It’s all in the police report,” he said.

I was interested in what had happened in the minutes and days leading up to that night in Diablo Grande, I told him – about anything I could not read in the public record. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he finally said, “and that’s it.”

“I was doing an investigation about why the colonies are dying.” He said his public defender never let him make the case in court, but scientific research was the motive. “I was short of bees because I was trying to buy bees, but nobody wanted to sell at that time. And the ones that I did have ran out.”

He told me he had lost his factory job and decided to start a career in pollination. But first he wanted to determine if colonies were, as the news said, dying out at an alarming rate. “I finished my research,” Villafan continued. “All the stuff that they say about bees dying and the stuff like that, that’s not true. They’re not dying because of whatever. If no one knows why they’re dying, then they’re lying. That’s like the mafia. You know beekeepers, maybe they want to keep the prices high.”

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n a warm afternoon in late July 2015, a few months after Villafan had been sentenced, 50 Johnson made the rounds through a couple of bee yards in Diablo Grande, where he had come across one too many dead hives.

He called up a friend and fellow beekeeper, Bob Renested, who breeds queen bees and sells them for about $20 each. Queen breeders are more common further north, but Johnson needed portfolio.

roughly a dozen that day. With enough care, a beekeeper can take a single queen and build a full, 30,000-member hive over the course of a season.

The keeper slowly introduces frames of unhatched baby bees and adults, who will mate with the queen to produce the colony.

Renested told Johnson to come on by. About 30 minutes later, they sat in the shade beneath Renested’s carport. Johnson had a wooden crate by his feet, about the size of a lunch box, where 12 bees wiggled inside individual shelves. A crate of queens looks like a model building, each bee inside a flat of its own, no larger than a thumb.

Renested told Johnson that he was selling just two more queens today, and then he was done breeding for the season. A man had pre-ordered just two bees.

Then Renested’s phone rang. He told the buyer to come around back and headed off to his warehouse to grab the queens, leaving Johnson by himself.

A short man with square features walked around the corner. Johnson stood up and out of the shade to greet him. He cocked his head to the side and squinted hard at the buyer, who quickly darted his eyes to the dirt. Silence for a moment.

“What’s your name?” Johnson asked, incredulous.

He doesn’t always trust his bad eye, after all.

“Pedro.”

“Pedro what?” Still not convinced.

“Pedro Villafan.”

Johnson’s voice climbed a couple octaves. “You know me, don’t you Pedro?”

Villafan nodded. Johnson waited another awkward beat for him to answer the obvious question.

“Well?” Johnson yelled. “Why aren’t you in jail?”

Villafan had agreed to serve his time that August. (In the end, he was released on parole after 48 days. “It’s literally a slap on the wrist,” Annette Rees said later.

“All that time and effort, it’s kind of disheartening.”)

Renested returned from the warehouse and handed Villafan two shelves, a single long, dark bee in each; no yellow stripes on them. Villafan paid the man while Johnson looked on. There stood the thief who, for Johnson, represented so much trouble and heartache – and not just for himself, but for every beekeeper who has come across an empty patch of grass where his hives once buzzed.

Yet Johnson was not angry. He just saw another outsider trying to break into the industry. “I hope those are for your bees,” he said.

“Yes,” came the reply. “They are.” With that, Villafan turned and walked away.

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portfolio.

Dyson’s next revolution Elizabeth Paton Isak Tiner

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dyson

S

i r Ja m e s D y s o n , t h e British designer and engineer, sporting sneakers, cobalt blue spectacles and a voluminous thatch of silvery hair, stood in his vast glass office in the depths of the English countryside one recent afternoon. He was clutching a device that he says could change the monotony of bathroom routines forever.

“There has been zero innovation in this market for over 60 years,” said Dyson, 68, a billionaire who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006.

“Millions of people use contraptions daily that are hideously inefficient, waste their time and are causing them long-term damage,” he said. “We realised that we could – and should – sort this situation out.”

He triumphantly held up what appeared to be a sleek black and pink plastic doughnut on a stick.

“Four years, 100 odd patents and 600 prototypes later, I think we might have found the answer.”

Known as the Dyson Supersonic and unveiled in Tokyo recently, the device is his response to a question many never thought to ask: is it possible to make a better hair dryer?

This may not seem like a big deal. A few burned scalps and frizz issues aside, people have been doing just fine with the standard hair dryer for decades.

But, as Dai Fujiwara, a Japanese fashion designer who collaborated with Dyson on an Issey Miyake runway presentation, wrote in an e-mail, “Because everyday life is too common, people rarely realise there is a problem.”

Dyson, Britain’s best-known living inventor, is the Steve Jobs of domestic appliances. He has built a fortune from making otherwise standard products seem aesthetically desirable, in the process persuading untold numbers of consumers that they really, really want cordless and bagless vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, bladeless fans and even household robots.

“His inventions are disruptive – beautifully so,” said Terence Conran, the British restaurateur, retailer and furniture designer. “Who would have imagined that a bagless vacuum cleaner could become a highly covetable status symbol? He has made other businesses think differently about how to use design, creativity and innovation.”

Dyson said 103 engineers were involved in the creation of the Supersonic, which included the taming of more than 1,625 kilometres of

“Four years, 100 odd patents and 600 prototypes later, I think we might have found the answer”

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Dyson’s headquarters in Malmesbury, England

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human hair tresses and 7,000 acoustic tests as teams tackled three core issues: noise, weight and speed.

Ground zero for the project was the Dyson research facility, a Willy Wonka-like world deep in the rolling Wiltshire hills, with a Harrier fighter jet and spliced Mini car in the visitors’ parking lot.

Projects are kept under lock and key from virtually all outsiders – as well as many within the walls itself (which, like those owned by Roald Dahl’s flamboyant fictional chocolate factory owner, are often painted a lurid purple).

Ed Shelton, a design manager for the Supersonic, said: “It was the hardest project I’ve ever worked on. Beyond having to crack the science of hair, we’ve had to tackle a highly subjective user psychology.

“Trust me when I say there are many more approaches and angles to blow-drying than vacuuming in the world. British women want volume.

Japanese women want straightness. No one wants hair damage. And then we had to create a fleet of robots specifically to test that over and over again.”

The sound waves operate at frequencies higher than the upper audible limit for humans The company says the key to the Supersonic is its high-speed 13-blade motor. About the size of a quarter, the motor is small enough to fit in the base of the hair dryer handle, rather than in the conventional motor position at the top of the device, a shift that creates its unorthodox streamlined aesthetic.

The smaller motor allows for high velocity flow but not pressure, the company says, which is how temperatures shoot up on traditional hair dryers and users burn themselves if the dryer is too close to the head.

The company says the positioning of the motor in the hand also limits the so-called dumbbell effect of old-guard models, where top-heavy weighting

dyson

A brief history of hot Air Practical demonstrations, presented at the annual White City Fair in England around 1930

The first hair dryer was invented in 1890 by French stylist Alexander F Godefroy. The device was a large metal bonnet attached to the chimney pipe of a gas stove, which a user sat beneath.

In 1911, ArmenianAmerican inventor Gabriel Kazanjian received the first patent for a hand-held hair dryer, and during the 1920s early metal portable models arrived on the market, such as the Sol in Germany in the mid-twenties. Slow, heavy at around two pounds and prone to overheating, there were multiple cases of electrocution.

Seated devices continued to be popular in salons, with cubicle models emerging that offered magazine stands, ashtrays and even speakers so clients could listen to music as their hair was being set. Some women keen for a similar effect at home were known to connect a hose to the exhaust of their vacuum cleaners to try to style their hair.

can cause arms to ache. Weighing just 370 grams the new structure allows for a longer silencer tube and smaller fan, cutting down drastically on noise.

Coupled with the high motor speed, the fusion of new technologies gives rise to Dyson’s claims that the sound waves can operate at an ultrasonic level – in other words, at frequencies higher than the upper audible limit for humans. It also has magnetic heatproof nozzles and intelligent heat sensors to prevent hair burn. “Frankly, I’m rather terrified,” Dyson said. “We had to learn a great deal with the Supersonic, and there have been a lot of firsts on all fronts, including the fact that I had to grow my hair especially for a launch.”

“It hasn’t been this long since my ’60s student days, when I wore flowered shirts and flares,” Dyson said.

As with any other Dyson device, research and development didn’t come cheap: The investment into developing this new hair dryer, including a state-of-the-art hair laboratory, reached 50 million euros (about $72 million).

As a result, the Supersonic will retail at $399 when it arrives in stores in September, a price at stark odds with the low-priced, high-volume business model that has traditionally defined the competitive hair dryer market. Hair dryers currently on Amazon retail for $12.99 to $219.98.

A sawed-inhalf Mini in the lobby of Dyson’s headquarters

Soft bonnet dryers were introduced into hairstyling salons. With short, tight curls all the rage, a small box-shaped dryer attached by a tube to a showercap-like plastic bonnet with holes blasted air continuously and evenly all over the head.

The rigid-hood dryer (a large, hard plastic bonnet) arrived in 1951 and went on to become a mainstay of the salon market over the next 30 years. While Sol hairdryer, Germany, working on the same c 1925 premise as the bonnet, it was able to conduct a higher wattage level, resulting in quicker styles.

Portable hand-held hair dryers continued to attract large interest thanks to the increased privacy and efficiency from using a device within the home. Over time, plastic housings were developed, motors were made lighter and more powerful, and safety circuit interrupters were incorporated to limit accident or injury.

By the 1970s hair dryers had become a mass-market consumer product. While the inner workings of most models have remained largely unchanged since the earliest devices, external features have been added, including diffuser, airflow concentrator and comb nozzle attachments.

Many models have also become more compact. The portable hair dryers of the 21st century could produce over 2,000 watts of heat.

The Dyson Supersonic, unveiled in April, is a first foray into the world of beauty for a company known for fans and vacuum cleaners. The Dyson hair dryer has its motor in the handle rather than the head, and its inventors claim it to be quieter, safer and lighter than market rivals. portfolio.

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The Facebook breakup The social media giant now has a Compassion Team devoted to making interactions more human and more humane Penelope Green Jason Henry

F

Artwork inside Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park

or Kate Sokoloff, a brand strategist in Portland, Oregon, the Facebook mirror of her breakup with her boyfriend of three years was like “an emotional sucker punch”, she said. “Not 15 minutes after we broke up four years ago, and probably while he was still parked outside of my house, he changed his status to ‘single.’”

This meant that all of the couple’s Facebook friends, including her teenage sons, were instantly notified. “There was no hiding or time to cry on my own,” said Sokoloff, now 55.

She did message friends, asking them to remove any photos of herself and her former partner from their own Facebook albums, but she remembers wishing “there was a Facebook vacuum cleaner that could suck every trace of our relationship off the Internet. Photos, in particular. In fact, some just popped up yesterday”.

Since last November, there has been such 61 a tool, part of a kit the network has designed to manage and curate the digital archive that is growing with each relationship. It’s like cleaning your closet, said Kelly Winters, a product manager on Facebook’s designatportfolio.

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Exclusive sales by Douglas Elliman Development Marketing This project is being developed by 8701 Collins Development, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“Developer”), which has a limited right to use the trademarked names and logos of Terra and Bizzi & Partners Development. Any and all statements, disclosures and/or representations shall be deemed made by Developer and not by Terra and Bizzi & Partners Development and you agree to look solely to Developer (and not to Terra and Bizzi & Partners Development and/or each of their affiliates) with respect to any and all matters relating to the sales and marketing and/or development of the project. ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED UPON AS CORRECTLY STATING THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, MAKE REFERENCE TO THIS BROCHURE AND TO THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION 718.503, FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEVELOPER TO A BUYER OR LESSEE. These materials are not intended to be an offer to sell, or solicitation to buy a unit in the condominium. Such an offering shall only be made pursuant to the prospectus (offering circular) for the condominium and no statements should be relied upon unless made in the prospectus or in the applicable purchase agreement. In no event shall any solicitation, offer or sale of a unit in the condominium be made in, or to residents of, any state or country in which such activity would be unlawful. Images and designs depicted herein are artist’s conceptual renderings, which are based upon preliminary development plans, and are subject to change without notice in the manner provided in the offering documents. All such materials are not to scale and are shown solely for illustrative purposes. EQUAL HOUSING OPPORTUNITY.

facebook

ed “Compassion Team”, a changing squad of product managers and designers, engineers, researchers, social scientists and psychologists.

“You don’t want to keep anything around that doesn’t spark joy,” she said, echoing the mantra of Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru.

Three million users have already deployed some aspect of the breakup flow, as it’s called, by choosing to minimise what they see of an ex going forward, and similarly hide their own postings, settings that can easily be reversed if the future brings a change of heart or a dulling of the ache.

Undoing the vacuum tool (to use Sokoloff ’s words for the engineering feat that harnesses what is known as distributed computing to untag hundreds or even thousands of images that no longer spark joy) is more laborious.

It’s not news that the social network, whose roiling environs hold more than 1.5 billion people, is a complex and sometimes confounding space. Navigating its evolving rules and byways requires the nuance and skill of a Jane Austen heroine, as well as the thick skin of a politician.

The Compassion Team is devoted to making Facebook’s interactions a bit more human, and more humane.

Winters and her colleagues have developed tools to help with social resolution, bullying, online aggression (or perceived aggression), eating disorders and issues particular to high school students, working with the Greater Good Science Center at the University Of California-Berkeley, the Yale Center For Emotional Intelligence and other academic partners.

New projects will assist in identifying suicide ideation in a friend’s posts and offer help connecting to resources for suicide prevention. There is a team working on how Facebook profiles can be managed after someone dies; another group has created safety checks, so friends and family can communicate quickly in a disaster.

One Tuesday in February, at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, campus, Winters; Gregory Wells, a clinical psychologist; Dan Muriello, an engineer; and Emily Albert, a product designer, were gathered in a conference room named “Outlook Not Syncing” to explain how the breakup flow came to be.

Albert, an ebullient 25-year-old who had been a classically trained ballet dancer before she attended the Rhode Island School Of Design, described struggling with the digital legacy of a former boyfriend from college.

“I was seeing one post after another,” she said, “experiencing this thing that a lot of my

“If I cut my ex off, it’s too much negative energy on my part. I want to extend an opening for the future”

friends have, where it’s almost impossible to separate when you’re constantly tied digitally. In one cathartic move toward empowerment, I thought, what if Facebook tried to tackle this?”

On the company shuttle home to San Francisco one evening, she floated an idea she had been working on to minimise that entanglement. How to digitally unmesh without choosing “the nuclear option” of unfriending or blocking someone?

There was resounding encouragement, she said.

“Heartbreak is a very common ailment here.”

Heartache and Facebook do go hand in hand.

There are studies that have examined the relationship between attachment styles and a tendency toward digital surveillance after a breakup on Facebook. There are studies that show a correlation between that digital surveillance – so-called Facebook stalking – and what’s known as obsessive relational intrusion, or the pursuit of intimacy with someone who doesn’t want to be pursued.

A breakup has stages of aggressiveness, said Morgan Smith, 18, currently a freshman at Northwestern University.

“If you block your ex on every platform, that’s like 10 on the scale,” she said. “If I cut my ex off on Facebook, it’s also too much negative energy on my part. I want to extend a polite opening for the future. I don’t want to see what you do every day with your life” – as on Snapchat, for example – “but if you’re accepted to the study-abroad programme or become class president, I would like to congratulate you. Facebook is more of a 63 long-term document of your life.”

Finding the right tone was a big part of the design process, Albert said, language being crucial in creating a tool kit that would be flexible enough to address a 14-year-old breaking up with her portfolio.

facebook

From left: Kelly Winters, Gregory Wells, Emily Albert and Dan Muriello, who work on Facebook’s Compassion Team

boyfriend of four weeks as well as longtime married couples with children.

It also had to be neutral, not familiar, and not in any way hortatory. “If designers are in charge of surprise and delight,” she said, “what does it mean to design for aspects of life that are painful?”

Facebook language isn’t lyric poetr y, by any means, but it does the trick. If you’re able to stumble onto the breakup flow (not an easy task, at this point; it’s only available on mobile and only in the United States), you should discover, as Winters described, a box of options.

“Take a Break. Here are some changes that might be helpful. We won’t notify Taylor of any changes you make. See less of Taylor. See Taylor on Facebook only if you visit his profile.” And so on. Mostly the language is like that of an instruction manual – “Turn on tag approvals for posts and photos you’re tagged in” – although at the end, it veers into self-care: “Reach out to people you trust for support. Stay Active...”

64 In her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power Of Talk In A Digital Age, Sherry Turkle explores, as she puts it, “how technology makes us forget what we know about life”.

Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology And Self, and a longtime observer of portfolio.

“The reason we’re looking through those old letters is we’re trying to work through our past”

how people interact with their machines, recalled a presentation in the “early days of the Internet Of Things,” she said, “for how we might use this new way of animating our worlds.”

It was a phone app that would present you with a path to, say, Starbucks, that was designed to bypass former lovers who may be in the way, or indeed anyone you had tagged as someone to avoid. In this way, Turkle said, you could enjoy a friction-free walk to pick up your frappuccino.

The notion of “friction-free” still disturbs her. “Maybe you’re not supposed to move on for a year,” she said, while noting the boons of Facebook’s breakup tools. “I was thinking about people compulsively reading old love letters and diaries, poring over old wedding albums and photos, and then writing poetry, short stories, novels.”

Making art, in other words, after marinating in the stew of the past.

“It’s not to say that Facebook shouldn’t make it easy to click that button to avoid certain painful memories,” she said. “But the reason we’re looking through those old love letters is we’re trying to work through our past. I think we just have to acknowledge the humanness of that process and be compassionate with ourselves. Life is supposed to be complicated.”

cover story

The Machines The award-winning production studio INK has collaborated with photographer James Ball (aka Docubyte) on Guide To Computing, a photographic series that explores the neverbefore-seen history of the hardware we use every day

STaTeMenT froM The phoTographer

g

uide To Computing represents the first release of a body of work documenting the beginning of our computing history. Born through affection for historical analogue aesthetic, these images are more than visual depictions of modernday museum pieces.

It is often supposed that computing design – as in their physical aesthetic design – was of minimal consideration until the emergence of the modern Apple iMac. To look at these early computers in their purest form is to realise that this is not the case.

From the colourful randomness of Alan Turing’s Pilot Ace to the bug-eyed stare of the retrofuturistic Control Data 6600, early computer and mainframe designs are as beautiful as they are fascinating.

Bound by the technological limitations of the time, these huge mainframes were meant to be stood at, worked at, walked around and with advancements, eventually sat at. The continual miniaturisation of computers has rendered these objects somehow charmingly naive and, from a modern-day perspective, essentially obsolete.

In seeking to explore and photograph the design of these fascinating machines, it seemed inexcusable to simply visually record the piece through the lens alone.

With skillful retouching and digital post-production techniques, these ageing, clunky and quite battered historical objects could be restored to their commercial best. Here they are documented, as they were originally intended, in a style inspired by the original marketing imagery of retro-chic rooms full of ’60s mainframes.

A number of these objects predate modern colour photography, and as such represent a truth and a fiction together. The digital restoration has culminated in the creation of an image never seen before in this context.

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portfolio.

computers

Endim 2000 The ENDIM 2000 analog computer was a tube-based design developed and manufactured in the former

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German Democratic Republic. Only around 20 of these machines were produced. The surviving machine is now held at the the Technische Sammlungen Dresden.

portfolio.

computers

HDR 75 The HDR 75 is a small analog hybrid computer that was developed in the former GDR at the Technical

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University Of Dresden (now known as The Center For Information Services And High Performance Computing).

portfolio.

computers

IBM 1401 The IBM 1401 is a variable word length decimal computer first produced in 1959. The first member of the highly

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successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing tabulation machines equipment for processing data stored on punched cards. Over 12,000 units were produced. During the 1970s, IBM installed many 1401s in India and Pakistan where they were in use well into the 1980s. Some of today’s Indian and Pakistani software entrepreneurs started on these 1401s and it is believed that the first computer in Pakistan was an IBM 1401 installed at Pakistan International Airlines.

portfolio.

computers

Control Data 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship mainframe supercomputer of the 6000 series of computers manufactured by Control Data

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Corporation. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, with performance of up to three megaFLOPS. It held the title of the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969. Developed and created by legendary computing pioneer Seymour Cray, it was delivered in 1965 to the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. There, it was used to analyse up to three million photographs of the bubble-chamber experiments that CERN were producing every year.

portfolio.

computers

IBM 729 The IBM 729 Magnetic Tape Unit was IBM’s iconic tape mass storage system from the late

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1950s and used right through until mid-1960s. Part of a series of IBM tape units, these machines defined the look of computers in the 1960s. This model used a magnetic tape up to 2,400 feet long (wound on 10.5-inch reels) that could store the equivalent of around 50,000 punched cards – the previous storage system, and equivalent of about three megabytes in today’s terms.

portfolio.

computers

Harwell Dekatron The Harwell Dekatron is an early British relay-based computer created, built and used at the Atomic Energy

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Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire. The machine went into operation in 1951 and was used to help scientists by doing electronically the calculations that previously were done using adding machines.

Weighing in at two-and-a-half tonnes, it is now working and on display at the National Museum Of Computing, where it has been recognised as the world’s oldest working digital computer.

portfolio.

computers

ICL 7500 The ICL 7500 range of terminals and workstations were developed in the 1970s by the now defunct UK

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computing company, ICL. Similar in size to a desk side or tower PC, but mounted horizontally, the ICL 7500 machines were intended to function in an office environment, with steel-framed and wood-veneered cabinets available for the processor and peripheral units. By the 1980s, highly specialised versions of these machines had the ability to run the latest available games of the time, such as PacMan and Space Invaders.

portfolio.

living

portfolio.

july issue 127

Bathroom with a view T

enchanted island

Price $1,688

rooms 2

The Starlight Room Dolomites

he Enchanted Island Resort in Seychelles recently picked up the World Travel award for Seychelles’ Leading Luxury Hotel Villa 2016, but if you’re going to stay there The Owner’s Signature Villa is the room to get. The whole resort only holds a maximum of 24 guests in the island’s 10 villas, but it’s this two-bedroom, Creole-Seychellois style villa with direct access to three beaches that really stands out. And we can’t be the only ones thinking that sitting in this bath, drink in hand, right there overlooking the water is probably the most relaxing place in the whole of the Seychelles.

enchantedseychell es.com

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Portfolio.

living / style

what to pack

W

...for warm weather in Rio, and beyond

Average temp

27°c

28 °C 23 °C 27 °C 29 °C Florida Barcelona Mumbai Bangkok

also wear in...

july

rio

Sea temp: 22°c

additional info Tijuca NaTioNal Park Covering 8,300 acres, the Tijuca National Park is the largest urban rainforest in the world. It’s got waterfalls, over 1,600 plant types and more than 350 species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, as well as lots of terrain to explore,

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Portfolio.

including multiple hiking trails. But perhaps the best thing is its proximity to the main areas of the city: being just a few miles from Ipanema Beach and Carioca Hill (home of Christ The Redeemer), it is technically in the park, so stay on and see a bit more than just the famous statue.

july issue 127

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1. Ralph Lauren printed shirt $125 2.Oliver Spencer cotton shorts $190 3. Maison Kitsune for Mr Porter polo shirt $165 4. J.Crew canvas messenger bag $98 5. Lock & Co Hatters Panama hat $350 6. Lacoste Landsailing shoes $155

accessories

Leica X edition Moncler $2,950

77 Allure Homme Sport cologne $72

Sol de Janeiro starfruit sunscreen $28

Cutler & Gross shades $595

Portfolio.

living / style

W

what to pack ...for warm weather in Moscow, and beyond

Average temp

21°c

20 °C 18 °C 24 °C 25 °C Paris London New York Rome

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moscow

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additional info white rabbit This Alice In Wonderland-themed restaurant on the 16th floor of the Smolensky Passage building is arguably th best restaurant in the entire country. The food is a modern take on traditional Russian dishes, including buckwheat porridge served with fried

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duck hearts and reindeer moss sauce, or the Russian ‘Lakomka’ ice cream dessert in a bird cherry dough and served with morel sauce. As well as the food, it’s also got some brilliant 360-degree views of the historic centre of Moscow. www.whiterabbitmoscow.ru

july issue 127

city look

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79 1. Kate Spade tiger lily applique dress $478 2. Gucci for Net-a-Porter floral-appliquéd wool-blend mini skirt $1,100 3. Étoile Isabel Marant Ken striped linen T-shirt $180 4. Victoria Beckham Aviator-style gold-tone mirrored sunglasses $425 5. Castañer Carina espadrilles $110 6. Jeremy Scott 'Long Distance Call' bag $327

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Foreo silicone toothbrush $199

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july issue 127

Blind Barber lemongrass tea shampoo and body wash $18

Erno Laszlo oil control cleansing bar $45

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Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s fragrance wardrobe, via mrporter.com $195

Thom Browne 24k gold razor $250

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Portfolio.

july living / investment

investment piece

issue 127

Porsche Design shisha pipe 2.0 Ancient Arabic pastime meets modern German design

B

ack in 2011, the team at Porsche Design created a shisha pipe, largely aimed at the Middle East market, but it got a lot of attention globally. For years now, Porsche have made things other than cars – sunglasses, pens, luggage – but this was something unexpected. Now, they have updated that model and released an improved 2.0 version.

At an increased height of 73.5cm, the shisha is tableside rather than tabletop, has clean lines, and is constructed with the precision engineering you’d expect of Porsche.

We should point out, of course, that smoking shisha is far worse for your health than smoking cigarettes (which is pretty bad anyway), and despite the fruit flavours this is in no way good for you. But if you are going to smoke, then this piece of design really is quite elegant. Price around $1,700.

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Stainless-steel riser and ceramic tobacco bowl to ensure smoke is produced evenly and at the correct temperature

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Long, flexible tube made out of TecFlex material, which is also used for the classic Porsche Design TecFlex writing tools

Sealing system that guarantees the shisha is 100 per cent airtight

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Mouthpiece and handle made from anodised aluminium

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Hand-blown glass bowl

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Portfolio.

living / food

Bistronomie The trend that’s saving French food

Portfolio.

Below right: mushroom dish at Frenchies Top right: Inaki Aziparte and his staff at Chateaubriand

they’d made the dish themselves.

From this sad scene ‘Bistronomie’ was born. It was a series of new restaurants like Le Chateaubriand (now rated in the Top 50 restaurants in the world), Chez L’Ami Jean and Frenchies, set up by people sick of the staid reputation of Parisian food.

“It’s all about personality,” says Gregory Marchand, who runs the hugely popular Frenchie restaurant, which has recently opened a new branch in London. “Not just the food but the tables, the service, the atmosphere. The whole experience of Bistronomie is different. It’s laid back from the moment you walk in and very personal.

“It’s about the quality of produce, finding the best things in the markets and cooking them with style. It’s not about frills and fanciness. I’d say it

is simple but it isn’t. It’s hard to get right, hard to achieve the balance.

It’s not just home-cooked food, it is a much higher level than that but it is certainly not about formality.”

And crucially, it wasn’t all classically French. Marchand trained in London and New York before returning to France and it’s likely that this foreign influence helped him and the movement succeed.

Other hits like Chateaubriand were run by a Basque chef Inaki Aziparte and the much-loved Bones by a (now departed) Australian James Henry. That’s certainly what halfFrench, half-English chef Alice Quillet who was brought up in London, believes. She set up Le Bal Café near Montmartre with her business partner, another Brit, Anna Trattles, five years ago. “In the last

Words: Jon Horsley

P

aris is back on top as one of the gastronomic capitals of the world – and it is thanks to foreign influence.

Romantic foodies considered Paris a paradise of fine dining, where every bite from morning café to night-time digestif holds a treasure trove of flavour. However, its well-earned reputation as a gastronomic idyll began to slip during the 1990s and during the early 2000s, when a flurry of articles suggested that the standard of food was average and – quel horreur! – cities like London or New York might actually serve up better food.

Even the proudest of Frenchmen, like chef Jean Christophe Novelli, who has held four Michelin stars, suggest that French cooking may have become just un petit-peu stale.

“The classic French bistro foods are very heavy,” says JeanChristophe. “And many French cooks didn’t adopt lighter oils and less fat and salt as quickly as places like Britain. Not everyone wants things to have been cooked in duck fat for hours.”

A bestselling book, written in 2009, called Au Revoir To All That: Food,Wine And The End Of France

by Michael Steinberger, laid out the problems: chefs had stopped innovating; cafés and bistros were all shutting at an alarming rate (in 1960, there were 200,000 cafés in France, now there are about 30,000 – an average of two shutting every day. Bistros became so rare that one in the 16th arrondisement became 84 classified as a historic monument).

And a large percentage of food served up was not made in-house.

So much so that the government brought in a new symbol for use on menus when restaurants could prove

july issue 127

FOuR bistROs tO Visit... few years there’s been Bistronomie and a huge influx of foreign chefs who have started working in Paris,” explains Alice. “The scene has very much changed. Restaurant models are different. They have menus that change daily and there aren’t linen tablecloths everywhere. They’re putting on loud rock music and that sort of thing. They’re more casual, market-driven restaurants and they’re not exclusively French.

“You can also see that a lot of second generation immigrants, like the Vietnamese are taking over their parents’ restaurants and doing interesting pop ups and that sort of thing. So these two factors have really opened up the restaurant scene and made everyone raise their game and look outside the great French traditions.

“For example, at the Bal Café, our customers love British cheeses,” she insists. “Love them. You have to compare it to a French cheese saying: ‘It’s a bit like a Pont l’Eveque’ and then they’ll try it and they really go for it. It’s some of our best selling stuff. British cheeses. So, if you can sell foreign cheese to the French, really anything is possible...”

While Bistronomie may have encouraged younger chefs to start their own small restaurants, there does seem to be fewer hopefuls going to hone their fine-dining

Chateaubriand 129 Avenue Parmentier, 75011 Paris, France Opened in 2006

by Inaki Aziparte a former gardener from the Basque country, this is perhaps the spearhead of the movement. It serves fantastic fresh dishes like squid salad with sea asparagus and you can only book for the first service at 7pm.

From 9.30pm you have to queue.

FrenChie

skills in Michelin starred “Grand Restaurants”. A few years ago, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing and Heston Blumenthal felt obliged to come and train in the great kitchens of the likes of Joel Robuchon or Guy Savoy. Now, according to rising star Daniel Calvert who works at the three Michelin star L’Epicure, named The World’s Best Hotel Restaurant last year, they’re looking elsewhere.

“People are going to Scandinavia to train,” he says. “It is very fashionable at the moment. But Paris still has an incredible depth of knowledge. I worked in Per Se in New York but I wanted to come here because of the traditions, the knowledge and the part that France has played in food.”

But he does believe that even in the larger, higher-end restaurants, the renaissance may be due to arrive, thanks in part to Bistronomie, even if he reckons the chefs in the three-Michelin starred restaurants around him are not aware of the new scene.

“I know that I’m a bit unusual in that at this point in time,” he says. “But I think they’ll all end up coming back here… They will.”

5 Rue du Nil, 75002 Paris, France Gregory Marchand’s tiny restaurant is always rammed but extremely adventurous at the same time as being laid back. There are dishes like short horn beef with cepes mushrooms and crispy green salt marsh salicornes and to finish with you will find, once more, a range of British cheeses.

Le Comptoir de reLais 5 Carrefour de l'Odéon, 75006 Paris, France More traditionally French dishes like snails or lamb shoulder roasted in thyme, Yves Cambeborde’s restaurant is achingly charming and surprisingly laidback. But trying to get a table can take some perseverance.

Le LuLLi 4 Rue de Valois, 75001 Paris, France A classic example of how the movement has opened up French cooking. Clement Le Norcy serves up “French dishes with Asian accents” such as roast cod in yuzu vinaigrette or game in a thai soup.

Portfolio.

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JULY LIVING / FOOD

ISSUE 127

Top table High-end Peruvian food in the heart of Dubai

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eruvian is a huge trend in dining that only appears to be getting more popular. What chef Benjamin Wan and his team have done, however, is create a restaurant that not only delivers high-end Peruvian dishes, but also provide an atmosphere and setting that matches the quality of the food.

While the evening a la carte option is excellent, the $81 Friday brunch is a long and lively affair that lets you try lots of dishes and even have lessons making traditional pisco sour drinks.

It’s rare that you find highend dining and top quality service in a restaurant that’s relaxed and fun, but here they pull it off in some style.

Right now, Coya is one of the best restaurants in Dubai, itself a city that’s fast becoming one of the top places for finedining in the world. If you only try one brunch while in Dubai, this is the refined pick.

COYA, DUBAI

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SEA BASS CAZUELA Sweet Spanish cazuela rice with shallots, garlic and ginger

Salad of pea shoots and red onion with lime dressing

Grilled sea bass marinated in tamarind and aji Amarillo paste Sweetcorn purée

Four Seasons Resort Jumeirah 2, Dubai, UAE

coyarestaurant.com

 DXB

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MIXED ANTICUCHO

CAUSA TRADICIONAL

Marinated prawns with chopped tomatoes and aji panca paste, chicken thighs with aji amarillo puree and aji mirasol puree and ox hearts marinated in aji panda paste, garlic, cumin, oregano, mirin, tamarind. All cooked over the traditional robata grill.

Potato puree with lime juice and Amarillo paste topped with picked crab meat, chives, diced apple, spring onions, yuzu mayonnaise and garnished with apple batons, chives, fried shredded potatoes and a sliver of josper red pepper.

CHEF’S RECOMMENDATION | BENJAMIN WAN’S PICK OF THREE RESTAURANTS TO TRY 1. Amaz (Lima, Peru) Straight from the Amazon jungle. Flavours so intense and the ingredients are like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It was a fantastic meal from start to end including palm hearts, ceviches and scallops with camu camu butter. Their standout dish for me was a Cecina Ice Cream.

2. Per Se (New York) Solid French foundation that is totally flawless coupled with impeccable cooking. French food at its modern best complemented by amazing service. I counted 16 courses when we had the tasting menu, it really was a ‘culinary journey’.

3. Tom Aikens (London) Modern European fine dining with awe inspiring 87 food presentation. Even the starting selection of breads is unbeatable. I’ve been there so many times I’ve lost count and have always walked away totally inspired. The place delivers above expectations each and every time.

PORTFOLIO.

JULY ISSUE 127

Looking at sharks in a whole new light

O

ver a decade in the making, this collection of shark photographs by Michael Muller is the culmination of time and technology. What makes these photos special is the light, thanks to the photographer’s use of a bespoke seven-bulb, 1,200-watt plexiencased strobe lighting rig (developed with Nasa engineering), and no cage.

Muller always dives without a shark cage, believing “they are not after us, we’re not on their menu”. In fact, we are more of a threat to them. Part of the project was to raise awareness about the falling shark numbers. Humans kill around 100 million sharks every year (mostly for use in soup in Asia) and thry are becoming endangered.

One study showed that the shark numbers have fallen by 50 per cent in the past 15 years, with scalloped hammerheads decreasing by 89 per cent, thresher sharks by 80 per cent and white sharks by 79 per cent. Conversely, despite their reputation, globally in 2014 there were only three recorded cases of humans being killed by sharks.

The images are contextualised with essays from Philippe Cousteau, Jr and marine biologist Alison Kock, who discuss exploration and conservation of our oceanic kingdom. Together, these texts and images offer a record of photographic feats, a tribute to the beauty and might of sharks, and a rallying cry for their fragile future.

88 Sharks: Face-to-Face With The Ocean’s Endangered Predator by Michael Muller is out now for $65

PORTFOLIO.

LIVING / BOOK

JULY ISSUE 127

LIVING / COLUMN

The Nordic theory of creativity

By Anu Partanen

T

he Danish TV show The Killing, an innovative crime drama that connects the mystery of a young girl’s murder to local politics, gained a passionate following in the United States as a remake.

The British, meanwhile, have fallen in love with the Danish version. The show was produced by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the Danes’ version of the BBC. In recent years this broadcasting company – DR, as it is called in Danish – has emerged as a powerhouse of highquality TV drama watched all over the world.

What’s weird, though, is that none of DR’s success makes any sense, at least if you look at it from a typical free-market standpoint. That’s because DR, a tax-funded public service, doesn’t have to compete, and isn’t required to turn a profit.

Since DR’s worldwide success would seem to contradict some basic assumptions about what incentivises corporations to produce top-quality work, I wanted to find out what, exactly, has motivated the person who created The Killing. Søren Sveistrup, a tall man with a soldier’s frame and a clean-shaven head, met me in Copenhagen. He’d studied at Denmark’s main film school and tried his hand at movie scripts before being recruited by DR. He’d always been an ardent fan, he told me, of American movies and television shows – Clint Eastwood’s work had been particularly close to his heart.

Sveistrup acknowledged that the budgets he works with in Denmark are a small fraction of those enjoyed by similar British or American TV productions. But he thinks that Denmark, and DR, offer a different kind of advantage for someone looking to create an original TV show. “I think the Danish system is very good.

We get spoiled. Compared to the Americans, of course we do. The whole welfare nation stuff is fantastic,” Sveistrup said, referring to the general quality of life and sense of security that even he, working in a risky industry, can enjoy. “I think

as a writer or just as an entrepreneur I have more possibilities in Denmark than I would have in other countries. I’m very grateful for that.

I think public funding can help artists do something that they would not have done if they were by themselves.”

When Sveistrup was working on The Killing, he received a monthly salary as he researched and wrote the script and, typically for citizens of Nordic countries, he manages to mostly leave work early enough to pick up his children from day care and eat dinner with his family. Sveistrup believes that while different environments can enable different kinds of work, the drive and ambition to create something extraordinary has, in the end, little to do with the specific structure of the monetary and material incentives involved, whether one is working in a Nordic-style welfare nation or in the trenches of the most brutal form of capitalist competition.

The ambition, Sveistrup says, comes from inside.

“My experience is that every good, dramatic story comes from some kind of inner hunger or necessity to create it,” Sveistrup said.

“What makes you have any kind of ambition, it’s grounded in your past, in your childhood, in your youth. You took a bite of the apple, or maybe you didn’t get the apple, or maybe you’re trying to get attention, or recreate something that you lost. That aspect has nothing to do with the welfare state. That’s the universal drive for a creative life.”

The profit motive certainly has its place – and the Nordic countries, despite their welfare systems and their popular reputation, are still largely free-market capitalist economies. Yet the lesson of DR seems to be that we sell the human race short when we believe that people are only motivated by money. In fact, part of the trick to nurturing talent in today’s information age may well be helping up-and-coming creative workers feel secure enough that they can forget about money.

“We sell the human race short when we believe that people are only motivated by money”

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This article has been adapted from Anu Partanen’s book The Nordic Theory Of Everything: In Search Of A Better Life (Harper)

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