Portfolio. May 2016

125

riSE and dinE in La

China’S pigEon TradE

The city that perfected breakfast

The feathered market takes flight

a BroadEr EduCaTion

Shari rEdSTonE’S war

Exclusive schools become inclusive

The new battle for Viacom and CBS

i

Si Tr Ea LL yp oSS iBL E

y?

issue

pp a Eh L p Eo p Eir h T for g E oVErnmEnTS To mak

The global effort to make wellbeing the mark of society’s success

d e v o r p im e v a h r e v e O n ly one t hing c ould . t r e s e d n ia b a r A e h t r e v o t he v iew of t he sunset Thankful ly, she ob liged.

Only 45 minutes from Dubai International Airport

www.raktda.com Moon Bar, Banyan Tree Al Wadi

may issue 125

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 GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan jaya@motivate.ae sENIOR sALEs MANAGER 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.

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

Published for Emirates by

10

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Portfolio.

LIFE AFTER FOOTbALL 46

This month, the football season will end and with it some players will call it a day.

But while the highly-rewarded few will be able to retire in style, a surprisingly large number of footballers will now face divorce, bankruptcy and in some cases, prison.

So why are so many footballers struggling after leaving the game?

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MAY ISSUE 125

CONTENTS UPFRONT

16

INFORMATION

Global happiness visualised

19

TECH SPEAK

The problem with giving computers their own voice

24 FERRARI RIVA

When two masters of land and sea collaborated

26

THE END OF TV

Why television has changed forever

30

NEW WORLD MAP

A smart new way of mapping the world one square at a time

32

GIRLS’ LOUNGE

The rise of woman only spaces at events

LIVING

74

UNDER THE STARS

A single room with a view from a mountain top

76

WATCHES

Tourbillon, the mark of a watch complication

84

TOP TABLE

Innovative Scandinavian cooking from Frantzen

87

INVESTMENT PIECE

The design classic of the Eames chair and ottoman

90

COLUMN

The commandments of being an adult

13

33,388 copies July - December 2015

PORTFOLIO.

MAY ISSUE 125

CONTENTS FEATURES

34 BREAKFAST IN LA

In a city known for early starts, there are few better places for breakfast

42 ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

What we can learn about good service from a man famous for being bad at it

52 PIGEONS OF CHINA

The trade in racing pigeons has created a strange and lucrative business

58 MAKING COUNTRIES HAPPY

The drive to make happiness and wellbeing the true measure of a society’s success

66 NEW SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Why some of Britain’s exclusive schools are making moves to be more inclusive

70 THE BATTLE FOR VIACOM

Shari Redstone’s looming fight for control of her father’s vast media empire

14

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Samford Media; Tel + 618 9447 2734, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au CHINA IMM International; Tel +852 2639 3635, j.bouron@ imm-international.com GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH; Tel +49 8151 550 8959, w.jaeger@imv-media.com GREECE Global Media; +30 210 69 85 981, c.fronimos@global-media.gr HONG KONG/MALAYSIA/INDONESIA Sonney Media Networks; Tel +852 2151 2351, hemant@sonneymedia. com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, ravi@mediastar.co.in SWITZERLAND/FRANCE/ITALY/SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, n.devos@ imm-international.com JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, all@tandem-inc.com NETHERLANDS giO media; Tel +31 6 6 2223 8420, giovanni@giO-media.nl THAILAND Media Representation International; +66 8 6777 3417, Stephen@mediarepint.com TURKEY TTR Media Ltd; Tel +90 212 275 8433, tanbilge@medialtd. com.tr UK Spafax; Tel +44 207 906 1983, merle.stein@spafax.com USA WorldMedia Inc; Tel +1 212 244 5610, conoverbrown@worldmediaonline.com

PORTFOLIO.

Globally happy

Key

The World Happiness Index 2016

NORT

SOUT

7.000

7.000 Country population Country sizes population (in millions) sizes (in millions)

82nd, Popula 300

upfront

portfolio.

200

16

6.000

10 6.000

50 10

100

100

72n Po 128th, Bulgaria (4.217) 128th, Bulgaria (4.217) Population: 7.09m Population: 7.09m

5.000

5.000

117th, India (4.404) 104th, Iran (4.813) 117th, India (4.404) 104th, Iran (4.813) Population: 1,326.80m Population: 80.04m Population: 1,326.80m Population: 80.04m

132nd, Sudan 132nd, (4.139) Sudan (4.139) Population: 41.17m Population: 41.17m 120th, Armenia (4.360) 120th, Armenia (4.360) Population: 3.02m Population: 3.02m 135th, Haiti (4.028) 135th, Haiti (4.028) Population: 10.84m Population: 10.84m

81s Po (3.622) 149th, Liberia 149th, (3.622)Liberia 146th, Yemen 146th, (3.724)Yemen (3.724) Population: 7.49m Population: 27.47m Population: 7.49m Population: 27.47m

4.000

4.000

154th, Togo (3.303) 154th, Togo (3.303) Population: 7.49m Population: 7.49m

85th, Popula

119th, Egypt (4.362) 119th, Egypt (4.362) Population: 93.38m Population: 93.38m

3.000

3.000

139th, Cambodia (3.907) 139th, Cambodia (3.907) Population: 15.82m Population: 15.82m

102nd, Nigeria102nd, (4.875)Nigeria (4.875) Population: 186.98m Population: 186.98m

148th, Tanzania127th, (3.666)Senegal127th, Senegal (4.219) 148th, Tanzania (3.666) (4.219) Population: 55.15m Population: 15.58m Population: 55.15m Population: 15.58m

108th, Albania108th, (4,655)Albania (4,655) Population: 2.90m Population: 2.90m

155th, Syria (3.069) 155th, Syria (3.069) Population: 18.56m Population: 18.56m

130th, Zimbabwe (4.193) 130th, Zimbabwe (4.193) Population: 15.96m Population: 15.96m

111th, Iraq (4.575) 111th, Iraq (4.575) Population: 37.54m Population: 37.54m

69th, Popula

66th, Popula

Burundi (2.905) 156th, Burundi156th, (2.905) Population: 11.55m Population: 11.55m

UNHAPPY UNHAPPY

Portfolio.

50

300

200

SIZE

may /infographics

issue 125

Key

EUROPE

EUROPE

9th, Australia (7.313) 9th, Australia (7.313) Population: 24.31m Population: 24.31m

Germany (6.994) 15th, Germany15th, (6.994) Population: 80.68m Population: 80.68m

TH AMERICA NORTH AMERICA

8.000

1st, Denmark (7.526) 1st, Denmark (7.526) Population: 5.69m Population: 5.69m

MIDDLE EASTMIDDLE EAST ASIA

TH AMERICA SOUTH AMERICA

8.000

AFRICA

AFRICA

ASIA

AUSTRALASIAAUSTRALASIA

12th, US (7.104) 12th, US (7.104) Population: 324.11m Population: 324.11m

7.000

7.000

27th, UAE (6.573) 27th, UAE (6.573) Population: 9.26m Population: 9.26m , China (5.245) 82nd, China (5.245) 63rd, Peru (5.743) 63rd, Peru (5.743) 33rd, Saudi Arabia 33rd,(6.379) Saudi Arabia (6.379) ation: 1,382.32m Population: 1,382.32m Population: 31.77m Population: Population: 31.77m 32.15m Population: 32.15m 3rd, Iceland (7.501) 3rd, Iceland (7.501) Population: 0.33m Population: 0.33m

70th, Romania70th, (5.528) Romania (5.528) 55th, Russia (5.856) 55th, Russia (5.856) Population: 19.37m Population: 19.37m Population: 143.43m Population: 143.43m

16th, Brazil (6.952) 16th, Brazil (6.952) 6.000 Population: 209.56m Population: 209.56m

6.000

nd, Jamaica72nd, (5.510) Jamaica (5.510) opulation: 2.80m Population: 2.80m 43rd, Venezuela21st, (6.084) 21st, Singapore (6.739) Belgium (6.929) 43rd, Venezuela (6.084) Singapore (6.739) 17th, Belgium 17th, (6.929) Population: 31.51m Population: 11.37m Population: 5.69m Population: 11.37m Population: 31.51m Population: 5.69m Slovenia (5.768) 49th, Italy (5.977) Thailand (6.474) 18th, Ireland (6.907) 62nd, Slovenia62nd, (5.768) 49th, Italy (5.977) 32nd, Thailand32nd, (6.474) 18th, Ireland (6.907) Population: 2.06m Population: 59.80m Population: 59.80m Population: 6.81m Population: 4.71m Population: 4.71m Population: 2.06m Population: 6.81m

5.000

5.000

4.000

4.000

3.000

3.000

85th, Serbia (5.177) Serbia (5.177) Population: 8.81m ation: 8.81m

69th, Paraguay (5.538) Paraguay (5.538) Population: 6.72m ation: 6.72m

66th, Libya (5.615) Libya (5.615) Population: 6.33m ation: 6.33m

OF POPULATION (BY COUNTRY) SIZE OF POPULATION (BY COUNTRY)

The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This is called the Cantril ladder: it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The Danes are the happiest in 2016, but other places are now starting initiatives to make their population’s happiness the measure of how well the society is doing. See page 60 for more

HAPPY

HAPPY

Infographic: Lee McGorie

st, Philippines 81st, (5.279) Philippines (5.279) opulation: 102.25m Population: 102.25m

Portfolio.

17

may upfront / computer voices

issue 125

technology

Creating a computer voice Just how human should a computer sound? Words: John Markoff

H

ow human? This was a question that a team of six IBM linguists, engineers and marketers faced in 2009, when they began designing a function that turned text into speech for Watson, the company’s Jeopardy!playing artificial intelligence program.

Eighteen months later, a carefully crafted voice – sounding not quite human but also not quite like HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey – expressed Watson’s synthetic character in a highly publicised match in which

the program defeated two of the best human Jeopardy! players.

The challenge of creating a computer “personality” is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction.

Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones. Voices have been added to a wide range of everyday objects like cars and toys, as well as household information “appliances” like the home-

Michael Picheny, a senior manager at the Watson Multimodal Lab for IBM Research

companion robots Pepper and Jibo, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo speaker device.

A new design science is emerging in the pursuit of building what are called “conversational agents”, software programs that understand natural language and speech and can respond to human voice commands.

However, the creation of such systems, led by researchers in a field known as human-computer interaction design, is still as much an art as it is a science.

It is not yet possible to create a computerised voice that is indistinguishable from a human one for anything longer than short phrases that might be used for weather forecasts or communicating driving directions.

Most software designers acknowledge that they are still faced with crossing the “uncanny valley”, in which voices that are almost human-sounding are actually disturbing or jarring.

The phrase was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He observed that as graphical animations became more humanlike, there was a point at which they would become creepy and weird before improving to become indistinguishable from videos of humans.

The same is true for speech.

“Jarring is the way I would put it,” said Brian Langner, senior speech scientist at ToyTalk, a 19 technology firm in San Francisco that creates digital speech for things like the Barbie doll. “When the machine gets some of those things correct, people tend to expect that it will get everything correct.”

Portfolio.

may issue 125

Andy Aaron, an IBM Research team member

20

Portfolio.

upfront / computer voices

Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody”, the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language.

Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machinelearning algorithms and huge

Members of the team spent more than a year creating a giant database of correct pronunciations to cut the errors to as close to zero as possible databases of human emotions embedded in speech – are just becoming available to speech scientists.

Synthesised speech is created in a variety of ways. The highestquality techniques for naturalsounding speech begin with a human voice that is used to generate a database of parts and even subparts of speech spoken in many different ways. A human voice actor may spend from 10 hours to hundreds of hours, if not more, recording for each database.

The roots of modern speech synthesis technology lie in the early work of the Scottish computer scientist Alan Black, who is now a professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Black acknowledges that even though major progress has been made, speech synthesis systems do not yet achieve humanlike perfection. “The problem is we don’t have good controls over how we say to these synthesizers, ‘Say this with feeling,’” he said.

For those like the developers at ToyTalk who design entertainment characters, errors may not be fatal, since the goal is to entertain or even to make their audience laugh. However, for programs that are intended to collaborate with humans in commercial situations or to become companions, the challenges are more subtle.

These designers often say they do not want to try to fool the humans that the machines are communicating with, but they still want to create a humanlike relationship between the user and the machine.

Jeopardy! was a particularly challenging speech synthesis

problem for IBM’s researchers because although the answers were short, there were a vast number of possible mispronunciation pitfalls.

“The error rate, in just correctly pronouncing a word, was our biggest problem,” said Andy Aaron, a researcher in the Cognitive Environments Laboratory at IBM Research.

Several members of the team spent more than a year creating a giant database of correct pronunciations to cut the errors to as close to zero as possible. Phrases like brut Champagne, carpe diem and sotto voce presented potential minefields of errors, making it impossible to follow pronunciation guidelines blindly.

The researchers interviewed 25 voice actors, looking for a particular human sound from which to build the Watson voice.

Narrowing it down to the voice they liked best, they then played with it in various ways, at one point even frequency-shifting it so that it sounded like a child.

“This type of persona was strongly rejected by just about everyone,” said Michael Picheny, a senior manager at the Watson Multimodal Lab for IBM Research.

“We didn’t want the voice to sound hyper-enthusiastic.”

The researchers looked for a machine voice that was slow, steady and most importantly “pleasant.”

And in the end, they, acting more as artists than engineers, fine-tuned the program. The voice they arrived at is clearly a computer, but it sounds optimistic, even a bit peppy.

“A good computer-machine interface is a piece of art and should be treated as such,” Picheny said.

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MAY ISSUE 125

UPFRONT / MOST WANTED

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Automated prescription and vitamin dispenser that knows your schedule, so you can retrieve your vitamins and medicine at the right time of day with the push of one button. $399, herohealth.com

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Compatible with any HDMI/MHL device this tiny (2” x 2” x 1.9”) projector is built specifically for smart devices so you can project photos and video from your phone or tablet to 120-inch at a full 50 Lumens. $299, rif6.com

MAY issue 125

upfront / boAts

boAts | MonAco

Riva Ferrari 32 Collaborative speedboat up for auction

R

iva are the Ferrari of the boat world, although they would probably claim that Ferrari are the Riva of the car world, but in 1990 they got together to make something that celebrates both brands – the Riva Ferrari 32. There were 30 hulls made, so it’s not ultra rare, but they are sought after and this particular Riva Ferrari has seen very light use, with just 70 hours on its twin 390hp V-8 BPM Vulcano 400 engines.

Although not as beautiful or classy as the peerless Riva Aquarama, this is nevertheless a fine piece of work, utilising the famous Ferrari red on the carbon-fibre hull and paired with a black carbonfibre foil. And there’s something special about seeing that yellow logo with black prancing horse as you accelerate and hear the roar of the engine.

The 32ft craft will get you up to 60mph, which may not sound wildly fast for a Ferrari, but it’s more than enough when you’re bouncing across the 24 Mediterranean water taking in the Côte d’Azur.

If you fancy being the owner, it’s being auctioned on May 14 as part of the annual Sotheby’s Monaco sale, so you’ll already be in the perfect place to show it off should you top the bidding.

For more see sothebys.com Portfolio.

30

Riva Ferrari 32s were built in the early 1990s

$180k Price that it’s expected to reach at auction

UPFRONT

26

PORTFOLIO.

MAY /TELEVISION

ISSUE 125

MEDIA | GLOBAL

Why television has changed forever

Words: Amanda Lotz

T

he end of television. It’s a headline that’s been liberally thrown around for the past 15 years.

Indeed, the past couple of years saw audiences becoming more and more amenable to adopting new ways to watch shows, with live audiences for broadcast and cable programs declining sharply.

Even entities like ESPN – which many thought immune to these changes in audience behaviour – acknowledged subscriber losses in 2015. In response, Wall Street engaged in a mass sell-off of media stocks. Most rebounded by year’s end, but the volatility is indicative of the uncertainty in a sector that finds its core business model being disrupted.

But viewers are actually watching more TV than ever before. They’re simply shifting to on-demand options from cable operators and broadband services.

Over the last five years, an influx of new broadband-delivered offerings has driven changes in audience behaviour that challenge the businesses of traditional broadcast and cable television channels.

Likewise, cable providers find themselves scrambling to adapt to new competition from leaner channel packages that offer flexible pricing options.

Contrary to what the headlines often suggest, the internet – or rather, broadband distribution – hasn’t come to kill television. Instead, it’s radically improving it.

In the 1990s, many assumed the ascendance of what was dubbed “new media” (anything digital or delivered via the internet) would bring about the demise of “old media” including television.

But media don’t die. Rather, their distribution technologies are frequently replaced. So while new media assassins still haven’t killed – or even maimed – television, a revolutionary transition did begin for the medium in 2015.

The most disruptive form of “new media” for television is broadband distribution (what most casually think of as internet streaming). Companies that deliver video over broadband – Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube – use a new (and in many ways, better) technology for delivering traditional television shows.

Since 2010, broadband-delivered video services and “legacy television” (a more generous name for broadcast and cable TV than “old media”) actually enjoyed an unexpected symbiosis. Rather than battle to the death, the two quietly became neighbouring options for viewers, and to some extent, partners.

Broadband television distributors (Netflix, in particular) provided a muchneeded new revenue stream to traditional networks by paying them high fees to use their shows. In exchange, Netflix was able to disseminate the high-quality television content needed to woo viewers.

As a result, Netflix slowly changed expectations of how television should be experienced: that it needn’t be watched at a specific time, with a week between episodes, and interrupted every 10 minutes with commercials.

But this past year, the tenuous détente fell apart when some of the biggest players in the legacy television industry decided to launch their own broadband-distributed services.

The biggest developments were HBO’s launch of HBO Now and CBS’s debut of CBS All Access. Like Netflix, both services require a subscription payment (though All Access has ads too) that allows customers to access a deep library of content they can watch according to their own schedules.

Several other services also launched, including Nickelodeon’s Noggin, which has hundreds of episodes geared toward pre-schoolers. And NBC and Disney jumped in with the comedy portal SeeSo and DisneyLife, respectively.

Traditional broadcast technologies allowed for the transmission of only a single stream of programming at a time.

This gave rise to almost all of the TV conventions that viewers have come to know: a schedule, channels, fixed program lengths and intermittent advertising.

If you think about it, these aren’t conventions specific to the television medium. Rather, they’re responses to broadcasting’s technological limitations.

Sometimes the arrival of new

PORTFOLIO.

27

may issue 125

distribution technologies introduces only moderate change, like when the music industry shifted from records to cassettes.

Other times, new distribution technologies require a radical reconfiguration of business models and completely change the user experience of a medium.

And just as streaming makes for a very different viewing experience, it is also changing the nature of the shows that are made. Streaming services produce content targeted to narrower niches and sensibilities.

They’ve also allowed for much greater experimentation and diversity in the ways stories are told and structured.

These recent developments illustrate how profoundly norms of making and watching television will continue to shift in coming years.

When announcing the new version of Apple TV in September, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the “future of TV is apps”. That’s one way to characterise the new services. They also could be thought of as the “channels” of the post-network era of broadband distribution. At their core, they’re portals to content; most require a monthly fee, but many are also ad-free and can be easily viewed on a number of devices, from smartphones to traditional television sets.

As portals have introduced new ways to view content, traditional cable bundles also appear to be at a crossroads. The cable bundle is the package of over 100 channels required in even the “basic” digital package. Since most viewers watch fewer than 20 channels, many feel that they’re overpaying for content.

Dubbed “skinny bundles”, Sling TV, Sony Vue and Verizon’s Fios Custom TV all began offering packages of channels that can be experienced as a typical channel with scheduled programming, in addition to some on-demand content.

Like the portals, these skinny bundles are delivered via broadband and add to 28 the competition by providing a cheaper alternative (though also far fewer channel options) for consumers who want to reduce their cable bill.

Despite the added competition, cable providers still find themselves in an Portfolio.

upfront / television

Viewers are actually watching more TV than ever before.

They’re simply shifting to on-demand options from cable operators and broadband services enviable position. The portals and the skinny bundles both require high-speed Internet service, which most receive from those very same cable companies. And in 2015, Internet subscribers surpassed cable subscribers at Comcast, America’s largest cable company.

In response to the growing reliance on high-speed Internet, several broadband providers are moving forward with plans to shift to usage-based billing, similar to datause pricing from mobile phone companies.

History suggests that fewer than half of the portals or broadband distributed bundles announced this year will exist once business models catch up with technology and the experimenting of the past year gives way to consolidation.

It’s not clear who will eventually dominate the post-network era of broadband distribution, but based on the scope of new broadband delivered entries, it’s obvious that legacy companies have been preparing to pivot to broadband distribution. The embrace of broadband technology makes clear that television’s future innovation won’t be confined to a linear schedule.

Whether the portals are the chicken or the egg, a vision for the future of television is flickering into focus.

Amanda Lotz is the Professor of Communication Studies and Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan

may issue 125

upfront / what3words

Your new address I Mapping the entire world with just three words

n short, what3words is universal addressing system. It divides the planet in 57 trillion three-metre by three-metre squares, and assigns each with their own unique threeword combination. A geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these three-word addresses and vice-versa. Simple, but the implications are potentially huge.

While the idea of paper map is becoming increasingly redundant and archaic, there are still many places on Earth that are not even mapped – at least not accurately. But with a unique threeword code you can pinpoint anywhere on Earth without the need for long GPS coordinates or post codes that are hard to remember and can 30 easily be mistyped.

Siting here in an office chair at Superstars.

Dabbled.Convening that might not mean much, but 75 per cent of the world has inadequate addressing systems, leaving as many as four billion people effectively invisible.

Portfolio.

57

trillion squares covering earth each with a three word code

75%

of the world has inadequate addressing systems

They’re unable to report crime quickly, unable to get deliveries or receive aid, or many other things we take for granted because they simply have no way to communicate accurately where they live.

It means in remote locations water facilities can’t be found, monitored and fixed and schools, refugee camps and informal settlements remain unaddressed.

But even in more advanced countries, people get lost, packages aren’t delivered and businesses aren’t found. Now, you just remember three words and that can lead you to an exact spot.

The app is also totally packaged into a 10meg file so it works on a device without the need for a data connection or Internet.

For years, geographical mapping systems were designed for technical use. Now there’s one designed for people.

For more see what3words.com

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upfront

Networking Girls’ Lounge Why businesswomen pour on the pink. Words: Brooks Barnes

S

erious, successful businesswomen banding together as “girlie girls” to help end gender inequality in the workplace? The notion makes some professional women recoil. But Shelley Zalis, the former chief executive of a Hollywood research firm, who is leading an effort to advance corporate women, says pour on the pink.

“I’ve always been told to hold back my feminine characteristics, that there’s no room for that in the boardroom,” Zalis said recently over coffee at Cecconi’s in West Hollywood, California. “I totally disagree. A woman who tries to be a man is a waste of a woman.”

Zalis, 53, is the loquacious, ironwilled founder of the Girls’ Lounge, which started four years ago as a hastily arranged gathering spot for women at the International Consumer Electronics Show. This year, Zalis will take the Girls’ Lounge to 10 major business events. She was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

32 In the most basic sense, the Girls’ Lounge is a free space – a hotel penthouse, for instance – where businesswomen can relax and mingle between meetings and seminars. There is fruit to snack on. Hair, nail and makeup Portfolio.

experts offer mini-makeovers. Zalis, assisted by four full-time staff members, sometimes brings in a “confidence coach” to give pep talks. Pink flowers, throw pillows and plush sofas add to the slumber-party feel.

Girls’ Lounge attendees – roughly 5,000 by now, Zalis estimates – are also encouraged to network and explore business deals, both with one another and with any men who find themselves in their midst. Gail Tifford, for instance, was unable to find a spot at a 2014 convention to discuss business with Stephen Quinn, who was then Wal-Mart’s chief marketing officer, so she asked him to meet her in the Girls’ Lounge. “There were women in robes with their hair in towels,” Tifford, vice president for media and digital engagement at Unilever North America, recalled. “Stephen and I went out to the terrace and had a productive meeting.”

Quinn, who recently retired from WalMart, wrote in an e-mail that it taught him something important about how women must feel when they are surrounded by men. “It was kind of uncomfortable for me,” he said. “I clearly didn’t fit in and distinctly had a feeling of a lot of eyes on me. Voice in my head: ‘What is he doing here?’ Probably wasn’t true, but my mind went there.”

He added: “Also, it was loud – really loud. Everyone talking, big laughter, hair dryers, music. It was interesting to see how women behave when they’re with each other with no men around.”

Tifford, he said, was “very gracious as always”.

Zalis, who is married to a surgeon and has three grown children, is a qualitative media researcher by trade.

In 2000, after an early career spent at Nielsen, she founded a research company called Online Testing Exchange to assess consumer interest in planned movie trailers and related 30-second television spots. Before long, every major studio was a client and her findings were influencing

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“A lot of us have never really had girlfriends in business, because we’ve been alone. It’s called the boys’ club. Why can’t I have a Girls’ Lounge?”

the allocation of billions of dollars in movie marketing money.

“All of these men take the credit, but I was the one who saw the internet’s potential for this kind of testing,” Zalis said. “The movie business is online because of me.”

She sold OTX to a French company in 2010 for roughly $80 million. Since then, by her estimate, she has spent $1 million of her own money on the Girls’ Lounge and related efforts, and raised another $3 million from sponsors.

As the Girls’ Lounge has grown, landing partners that include Visa, Google and The New York Times, so have Zalis’ ambitions. Early on, she said, she was

simply interested in “the power of the pack”: making women feel like less of a minority at heavily male business events.

(Men outnumber women at Davos by more than five-to-one.) But then she noticed that Girls’ Lounge attendees were having meaningful conversations about sexism at work and how to combat it.

The Girls’ Lounge definitely has its detractors. While reluctant to publicly criticise another woman, especially one working toward an admirable goal, a half-dozen women I approached – senior media executives, a retired judge, lawyers – said that they thought Zalis was hurting professional women by using the “G word”. “A girl is a juvenile,

someone who isn’t ready, and I’ve fought my entire career to avoid being perceived as that,” one Warner Bros executive said.

Among the other comments: “It sounds like a bathroom”; “Anything that makes us separate from men is harmful”; “I embrace my femininity – I wear dresses to work, I shop on business trips – but if I told my male colleagues that I was headed for the Girls’ Lounge, it would only cement in their minds that I’m not as good as them.”

Even several of Zalis’ supporters conceded that the Girls’ Lounge took some getting used to. “It’s an unlikely name for what is really going on there,” said Joanna Barsh, a director emeritus at McKinsey & Co. Barsh added: “Shelley is not making a difference because she’s timid. She’s brazen. This woman is a force of nature, an extraordinary, energised bundle.”

Zalis, who sometimes describes herself as “chief troublemaker”, knows that she offends some people by using the world “girls” to describe grown women, 33 especially businesswomen. And she doesn’t care.

“A lot of us have never really had girlfriends in business, because we’ve been alone,” she said. “It’s called the boys’ club.

Why can’t I have a Girls’ Lounge?”

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The croissant sandwich with beans and beef salami; tongue-tingling “chilaquiles� made with hash browns, and French toast that conjures the flavor and texture of churros, at Trois Familia

Los Angeles: City Of Breakfast

Jeff Gordinier

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Oriana Koren

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LA BREAKFAST

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ne thing becomes clear when you go out for breakfast here, whether you join the hordes waiting in line at Sqirl, République and Eggslut, or linger among the regulars sipping cold brew and finessing their Instagram still lifes on the patio at Gjusta, in the booths at Jon & Vinny’s, and up and down the white picnic tables of Trois Familia: people sure have time on their hands.

Breakfast for much of the country involves random bland calories shoved down one’s gullet in a mad dash to work, but breakfast in Los Angeles – particularly for those engaged in creative, flexible schedule pursuits like acting, screenwriting or shamanic healing – qualifies as both a day at the office and a day at the beach. Fact is, a Los Angeles breakfast lasts all day long.

That has been the case for decades – it’s no accident that downtown’s ancient warhorse of the pancake griddle, the Original Pantry Cafe, stays open 24 hours. But in recent years, the chefs of the city, realising they’ve inherited a captive audience, have seized the opportunity and spiced up their menus.

Right now, the first meal of the day in Los Angeles is arguably one of the most interesting and satisfying meals, of any sort, in the United States. If the nation has a capital of breakfast R&D, this could be it.

“At the moment, LA is the best restaurant city in America,” said Phil Rosenthal, the New York transplant who created Everybody Loves Raymond and now stars in his own globe-spinning food show, I’ll Have What Phil’s Having. In his mind, better quality breakfasts are an outgrowth of that, and of the city’s daylight-relishing culture.

“I went to République the other day, and there was a line down the block at 9am on a Saturday,” Rosenthal said. “It’s all delicious and it features the produce that we have.” And chefs aren’t reluctant to experiment, he added. “It’s almost like an artists’ colony is making you breakfast.”

Restaurants here are “getting away from just a plate of fried eggs and bacon”, said Travis Lett,

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Top: ocean trout, Korean latke and kitchen burrito at Leona. Above left: breakfast sandwich at République. Above right: whitefish tartine at Sqirl portfolio.

LA BREAKFAST

the chef and baker behind Gjelina and Gjusta, both in the Venice area. “It has to be something more than that – without it turning into a precious, highbrow thing.”

For anyone who frets that the American breakfast is defined (and confined) by monotonous yolk-and-starch limitations, a trip to Southern California provides a bite of boredom elimination and consciousness expansion.

Here is Sqirl, where Jessica Koslow delivers sorrel pesto rice and a Home On The Range tartine that makes bedfellows of sturgeon, romesco sauce and apples. Here is Trois Familia, a brunch-hours-only box in a Silver Lake strip mall where Ludo Lefebvre joins forces with Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook for wake-and-bake mash-ups like a tostada crowned with deep purple beets, tongue-tingling “chilaquiles” made with hash browns, and French toast that conjures the flavour and texture of churros.

Want a time capsule of Los Angeles gastronomy circa 2016? At Trois Familia on a recent morning, a server offered a special that involved “a side of French onion soup to dunk a quesadilla in”.

And why stop there? There’s the breakfast burrito with smoked potatoes and chorizo at Cofax. The Korean latke at Leona. The braised short rib with eggs at Post & Beam. The warm quinoa bowl “with 38 roots and flowers”, as the menu puts it, for brunch at Willie Jane.

“Chefs all over town are having fun with brunch – the borders have truly come down,” said Brad Johnson, the restaurateur behind Willie Jane and Post & Beam. portfolio.

Above: smoked fish case at Gjusta Above right: The lines are long at Sqirl, where Jessica Koslow, centre left, is the chef Right: Trois Familia, a brunch-hours-only restaurant in Silver Lake

“Chefs all over town are now having fun with brunch.

The borders have truly come down”

Then there are the eggs fried in olive oil and paired with grilled kale, crispy potatoes and ‘nduja at Jon & Vinny’s (run by Dotolo and Shook).

The fresh bread and smoked fish at Gjusta, a place that feels like an East-West fusion of Russ & Daughters and the Good Vibrations-era Beach Boys. The kimchee fried rice, adobo fried rice and mushroom toast at République. The yolk-gooey sandwiches at Eggslut in the Grand Central Market, and a few steps away, the breakfast raviolo with ricotta and the polenta porridge with Santa Monica honey at Knead & Co. At Moon Juice, Amanda Chantal Bacon’s avantgarde juice bar of the moment, a rainbow-hued panoply of elixirs, milks and powders is said to aid with “anything you’re looking to achieve energetically or physically”, as Sean Brennan, an employee in the Silver Lake branch, recently explained.

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he place also serves bullet-size shots of ocean minerals that another employee described as “unicorn’s tears”. There are putative boosts for the brain, the skin, the spirit and the libido.

“If you want to do a date shake and mix in the S** Dust, I can do that for you,” Brennan offered.

It’s all a far cry from a bacon-egg-and-cheese scarfed down on the subway. If a frantic workday in New York City often starts late and careens toward the catharsis of a late and boozy dinner, Los Angeles clicks along to a different clock, in which pitch meetings and yoga sessions and calorie intake cluster in the sunrise portion of the day.

“LA – we’re an early city, in general,” said Dotolo, of the duo behind numerous spots like Animal and Jon & Vinny’s. “People are up and about. We see a lot of this in our restaurants.”

“Early” can be a relative term. Many restaurants here have been willing to break away from traditional schedule restraints by serving their wake-up calls well into the afternoon.

And now they are testing culinary restraints.

“Breakfast has always been big in LA,” Shook said, “just not always done by chefs.”

What the chefs are bringing to breakfast and brunch here is what they aspire to bring to any meal: fresh ingredients from the farmers’ markets and careful technique, for starters.

“We cure the meat ourselves,” said Walter Manzke, who runs the kitchen at République with his wife, Margarita. “We bake the bread that morning. The butter’s from France.”

Chefs also come with an aptitude for turning traditional recipes upside down with a jolt of imagination. Jon & Vinny’s serves a break-

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Many restaurants here have been willing to break away from traditional schedule restraints by serving their wake-up calls well into the afternoon portfolio.

LA BREAKFAST

Above: the kimchi fried rice at République Left: Nyesha J Arrington, the chef at Leona Below left: the smoked fish and egg plate at Gjusta in the Venice area Below right: Jon & Vinny’s breakfast pizza

fast pizza. So does Leona, which stands about 90 meters from the beach in Venice.

“It excites me to shake up breakfast a little bit,” said Nyesha J Arrington, the chef at Leona, where her morning dishes appear on the weekend brunch menu. Consider her “adult Frosted Flakes”, a bowl of brown-rice pudding laced with dark rum and top-layered with cereal that has been toasted in brown butter. “I think of things that I want to eat and kind of work backwards from there.”

At Sqirl, Koslow has pioneered day starters that come across as simultaneously comforting and disorienting, on purpose.

“I see something like shakshuka, and I’m like, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do shakshuka,’” she said. “I have to figure out a way to make it Sqirl-y.”

The presence of all this captivating food – and a striking regional tolerance for table-hogging — has fostered the growth of a new kind of commissary for creative people.

“Not only is the coffee waking you up, but the buzz of the place is, too,” said Manzke of République. “It’s a meeting place. Everybody’s got their laptops.”

And if they run out of material to muse on, there’s always breakfast itself.

“There’s usually an over-easy egg on top of 41 pretty much every dish,” noted Zach Brooks, the man behind the Midtown Lunch blog and the host of the Food Is The New Rock podcast. “A runny egg probably increases your Instagram likes by 87 per cent.” portfolio.

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Are you being (well) served?

Some lessons in what constitutes good restaurant service from the worst waiter in human history Jon Horsley Roui Francisco

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aseball fans strolling around San Francisco’s AT&T Park on a gameday will pass a Chinese food stand called Edsel Ford Fong churning out skewers and noodle boxes. There is nothing remarkable about it, except for the matter of the man it is named after. The stand is named after a waiter who died back in 1984 but who was so spectacular at his job, his name lives on in the city’s memory. Fong was special.

Fong would berate customers in Chinatown restaurant Sam Wo’s, from the moment he greeted them with a firm, “Sit down. Shut up,” he would be in the customer’s face.

If you perused the menu an instant too long, he’d scream “What is this? A library? Hurry up.” He’d get orders wrong – but would never admit it. He would then deliver whatever food you were going to eat, like it or not by sliding it on the table, not caring how much slopped on to his clients trousers. If you didn’t like it, you were slung out. And once you’d finished eating, there was no relaxing chit-chat, you would literally be swept out of the restaurant – he had a broom specifically used for this purpose.

Sam Wo’s was, of course, packed every night.

People loved Fong. Known as the ‘world’s worst waiter’ in guidebooks, he was a tourist draw all to himself. After he died, the city painted a 20-foot mural of him. People still talk about him. All this proves that good service is, if nothing else, complex.

It is complicated but nonetheless absolutely crucial to a restaurant’s success. According to chef Marco Pierre White, a soulmate of Fong’s who claims to have thrown out 54 customers in one night, it is more vital than we realise.

“Service is more important than food in many ways,” says Pierre White. “Think about it, if you ask yourself: ‘What is my favourite restaurant?’ It’s about being in an environment where you feel com-

fortable, where you’re not going to be annoyed. Then if the food is of a good standard at a decent price point, that’s going to be most people’s favourite. It’s about being comfortable and looked after.”

Service is important. But what makes it good beyond delivering food? One man who has tried-andtested ideas is Otto Albert Tempasse, who owns Otto’s restaurant in London, the only place that you can enjoy the French dish Canard a la Presse in the city because he has purchased an antique duck press made in 1920. It is in every sense a classic establishment.

He is a devotee of service, having travelled from his native Austria to begin his career as a maître d’ and manager in the 1960s at Mirabelle’s in London. At the time Mirabelle’s was the hottest spot in global dining outside Paris. He gives three factors that go together to make up good service. And though he does not seem the type to dignify reading social science papers that research what he sees as an art, the majority back up his 50 years of experience.

Firstly, you need to be reliable. “You don’t want to annoy people,” says Tepasse. “If you’re taking a date or some business people, you don’t want to feel embarrassed. You have to be able to trust the staff.”

Obviously Edsel Ford Fong falls down hard here being as he made his name embarrassing the customers. It takes a good deal of style and panache to impress a date if you’re being yelled at to wipe down your own table before you sit down. It’s also tough to carry out a business deal if the person you’re negotiating with is called “fat” for ordering the wrong thing.

However, this presupposes the fact that your dining partner is not prepared for Fong. If they were, 43 the opposite becomes true. It would be far more disappointing if he didn’t dish out insults. They came with his reputation built up. If he was a good conventional waiter, that would be disastrous. If nothing else, he would be consistent. Reliably so.

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good service Edsel Ford Fong with his customers in 1982

Secondly, you need to be adaptable. You need to be able to read a table. This is the most skilled part of being a waiter. There are secret signs you need to interpret as soon as a table walks in. Are they dressed for the theatre? Will they need to eat quickly? On large tables, is there an obvious leader? Massive chains like T.G.I. Friday’s and Pizza Hut have spent fortunes training staff in body language, eye contact and listening in order to provide more personalised service.

Simple rules like “always give a dessert menu to a parent to stop children crying” have to be learned.

“You need to follow on from what you get from them,” explains Tepasse. “I go out for good food and so I don’t have to do the cooking and the washing up. Other people want to go out to share things. You need to have them on your side. They should be able to do that from the first step in the door.”

Here again, Edsel Ford Fong doesn’t appear to be scoring particularly highly. From the first step in the door of Sam Wo’s (after climbing through a musty kitchen and up the stairs) you’d be shouted at, made to stand in the queue or both. Any queries about the menu would be directed with a wordless gesture to signs on the wall, which were in Chinese.

And yet, he noticed every customer. He went out of his way to be unpleasant to each and everyone in different ways. He remembered them and he was consistent. An article on economics website Pricenomics recalls: “Another customer, Lou Sideris, once tried to order the ‘fried shrimp’, an item nearly double the price of anything else on the menu. ‘No! It’s a rip-off!’ yelled Edsel. Sideris and his friends would return many times over the years, each time attempting to order the shrimp, and each time being furiously denied by Edsel.”

As a side note, even dismissing his own chef ’s food probably worked in his favour. Stanford psychology professor Robert Cialdini wrote in his book Influence about “super waiter” Vincent. Whenever there were large parties, he’d start with a woman and no matter what they ordered, he’d look concerned: “I’m afraid that’s not great tonight, madam. Why not try this dish?” and point out two cheaper options, following up with: “This is excellent.”

This achieved many goals: It made him seem friendly. It made him sound like an expert on the restaurant’s food and because the suggested options 44 were cheaper, he could be trusted by the table to save them money. Thus when it came to recommending wine or dessert later, he could easily sell them a more expensive option and also rely on a bigger tip.

The third pillar of great service is experience. The waiter needs to provide something to make the meal portfolio.

“Service is more important than food in many ways”

memorable, something that proves they’re not eating at home. In the past, this was done with the ceremony of presentation. Tepasse recalls early days in Maxim’s in Paris after the Second World War when everything was done by waiters. “There was real theatre. Everything was done at the table,” he says. “They’d take the cooked ingredients out on platters then serve them. You had a griddle woman and 20 or 30 waiters, the stars of the show.” It was only when Pierre Troisgros in Roanne restaurant began plating dishes in the kitchen in the 1960s that focus shifted to the chefs.

“Since nouvelle cuisine, this side of service has been neglected,” continues Tepasse. “Everything is plated away in the kitchen. That’s why at my restaurant, I do the duck at the table, or I make a tartare de boeuf or slice smoked salmon at the table. It is not fashionable at the moment, but it will come back.”

Of course, the experience dished out by our friend Fong was unforgettable. It was sought after, people went to be sworn at and abused. Or watch others be mercilessly picked on. Armistead Maupin immortalised him as a character in Tales Of The City.

Who cares about the food, when you have a man creating interactive theatre out of thin air 30 years before ‘immersive theatre’ became popular?

It’s no surprise when Sam Wo reopened last year after a three-year hiatus, they decided to put on a show called A Night With Edsel, featuring a friend of his, Chuck Howe Gee, dishing up the insults. He told the local press: “After you get used to it and he doesn’t assault you, you feel something is missing.”

Edsel Ford Fong was reliable, adaptable and provided an experience. As customers, we should hope that all waiters are as great as the absolute worst.

Life after footbaLL 46

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Why do professional footballers get into financial difficulties when they retire?

Alan Gernon

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ince you started reading this sentence Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney has earned around £5.

His £300,000-a-week contract should set him up for life, especially considering he’s already England’s richest footballer with an estimated net worth of £45 million. So, what could the Manchester United and England striker splurge his weekly wages on?

Despite currently residing in a £12 million luxury Cheshire home, he could theoretically splash out on a house above the average UK property price every single week. With average prices hovering around the £250,000 mark, he’d still have cash left over to kit it out.

Incredibly, Rooney’s weekly wage would pay for 400 entry-level season tickets at Old Trafford, which are around £700 each. While that might not seem great value based on some of the team’s recent performances, it seems absurd that United would have to sell 20,000 season tickets a year – or just under a quarter of all seats at Old Trafford – just to pay Rooney’s salary.

With such an outrageous weekly stipend the general public can find it difficult to comprehend how

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professional footballers can get into financial difficulties upon retirement. But Rooney is an outlier – one of the highest-paid sports stars in the world with wages from Manchester United also topped up with lucrative endorsements with the likes of Nike, Samsung and EA Sports.

The situation in League Two, English football’s fourth tier, is a lot more pragmatic. The most recent figures suggest this division’s average weekly wage is £747, with a mandatory salary cap in operation that restricts clubs’ spending on players’ wages to 100 per cent of turnover. This means Rooney’s wages could pay just over 400 League Two players every week. Basically, England’s record goalscorer could almost cover the wages of every League Two player who makes their club’s next match day squad.

With eight years being the average duration of careers in English football, it’s not hard to fathom how footballers that spend their time in the lower divisions can get into financial difficulties upon retirement. While the bumper contracts of elite players such as Rooney and big-money TV deals will generate the headlines, the general public doesn’t get to read about a journeyman midfielder’s pay-as-you-play contract at Luton Town.

after football

XPRO – a charity established to help, support and advise former professional footballers – estimate that there are more than 60,000 living former players across the UK and Ireland. To put that into perspective, it’s enough men to fill Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium or Celtic Park in Glasgow. While highprofile modern-day footballers garner little sympathy from fans, the majority of these ex-pros spent their careers in English football’s lower tiers, earning modest amounts and were offered little or no support upon retirement.

What about the elite players though? As an enthralling English Premier League draws to a close, so too will the careers of many professional footballers. What will they do next? Ask many people and they’ll presume that retired footballers live off their vast millions while managing a club or sitting comfortably on the Match Of The Day panel pretending to laugh at Gary Lineker’s jokes.

It transpires, however, that it’s not all champagne lifestyles and glamour. The American author Roger Kahn wrote in The Boys Of Summer, his acclaimed 1972 book on baseball, that “unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of 30 and 40 he perishes as an athlete”. This quote may as A surprisingly large number if those abanwell have been written about the experience of a doned by the game turn to a life of crime. This newly-retired footballer. Arsenal manager Arsène is more prevalent in young footballers that have Wenger echoed Kahn’s sentiments when he stated failed to make the grade, left on the scrapheap that retired players experience difficulties because by their clubs in their late teens and early twenthey “lose passion, fame and income at a very ties. With many clubs signing boys as young as young age. To replace that is nearly impossible”. seven years of age, attrition rates in academies Research from XPRO on the effects of retire- are extraordinarily high, with just two per cent of ment on professional footballers in the English scholars signed at 16 still playing the game profesgame is startling. It suggests that two out of every sionally when they turn 21 years of age. five Premier League players – who earn an averMany of these young men leave the game with age of £40,000 per week – face the threat of bank- little or no qualifications or life skills and enter a ruptcy within five years of ending their careers. competitive labour market where job prospects Let that figure sink in. When you’re watching are incredibly low. It comes as little surprise that a match, around nine of the 22 players some turn to crime to subsion the pitch could be bankrupt within 60 Two out of dise their income. Figures as of months of retiring.

October 2015 intimate that 141 every five Both physical and mental health issues former players are in the British Premier can be acute. XPRO estimate that 80 per prison system. Almost 90 per cent of retired players will suffer from League cent of these offenders are under osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease players face the age of 25, with a similar perthat will typically affect 10 per cent of centage incarcerated for drugthe threat males over 60 in the general population. related offences. Many more Recent research by world players’ of bankruptcy are believed to be in the young union FIFPro revealed that 35 per cent within five offenders system. of former players faced problems with Despite his vast wealth, it’s years of depression and anxiety, particularly if unlikely that Rooney will add a they had suffered serious injuries dur- ending their World Cup winner’s medal to his ing their playing careers. This compares careers impressive haul of club honours to a rate of between 13 per cent to 17 per before he retires. But he could cent in the general population. buy one. Or two. Manchester

Alan Ball’s World Cup winner’s medal, which was auctioned in 2005

Seven highprofile playerS who went bankrupt Paul Merson went broke in 2007, having gambled away an estimated £7 million.

Former Leeds United and Liverpool defender Dominic Matteo was declared bankrupt after racking up more than £1 million in gambling losses.

Former England player Lee Hendrie earned £24,000 a week, but was declared bankrupt in 2012 owing £200,000 in unpaid tax.

Ex-England goalkeeper David James earned an estimated £20 million during his career but was declared bankrupt in 2014.

Newcastle winger Keith Gillespie lost over £7 million, mostly through gambling.

Goalkeeper Brad Friedel was declared bankrupt in January 2011 with a reported £5 million debt from a failed soccer academy in America.

Celestine Babayaro’s career was cut short by a bout of malaria and he was unable to meet repayments, leaving him bankrupt in 2011.

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Paul Merson, who would become bankrupted by gambling, and Paul Gascoigne, who would suffer from mental illness and alcoholism, and eventually sectioned under the Mental Health Act

Second careerS

When players don’t earn enough to retire on, they find a new career.

Results are varied, here are seven of them Lee Bowyer

The former Leeds and England player now runs a carp fishing lake in France.

Barry Horne

Ex-Everton and Wales international became a chemistry teacher.

Arjan de Zeeuw Once a defender at Portsmouth, he’s is now a private investigator.

Thomas Gravesen

The former Everton favourite became a professional poker player in Las Vegas and is now reportedly worth over $100 million.

Ken Monkou

The Southampton player returned to Holland to be a pancake chef.

Kevin Kyle

The former Sunderland and Scotland striker now works as a ‘storeman’ on a ship that houses oil workers.

Robbie Fowler 50

Invested in property as a player, buying around 80 houses, and is now worth £28 million.

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But despite the lavish salaries doled out to United legend Nobby Stiles sold his 1966 gold medal for £188,200 in 2010 – to the Old Trafford modern-day Premier League stars, some still conclub. The fact Stiles had to resort to selling his pre- trive to get themselves into financial bother.

It seems absurd that young men with so much cious garland, and wept as he did so, while Rooney could snap it up with about four days’ wages dis- earning power could possibly fall on such hard plays a lot of what’s wrong with modern football. times, and these are just the figures for the Premier League. After speaking to several Rooney would still have change to buy retired players and financial experts Gordon Banks’ 1966 medal – which was Figures it’s evident that there are a number auctioned for £125,000 in 2001. of factors at play that lead to retired Stiles and Banks are just two exam- from the footballers’ financial woes. Most of ples of stars of yesteryear that have Professional the bankruptcies involving retired had to resort to selling off their prized Footballers’ footballers have been down to a memorabilia to provide for their famiAssociation combination of bad investments lies. Of the 11 players who played in and failing to adjust to changes in England’s World Cup-winning side in suggest that income, with many involving buy1966, just three still own their med- a shocking 75 to-let properties, which were badly als. George Cohen, once described by per cent will affected by the crash in 2008.

George Best as “the best full back I have Last November, The Sunday ever played against”, was first to sell be divorced Times claimed that up to 100 his due to financial hardship in 1998. within three retired players faced financial ruin Even the late Bobby Moore and hatyears of – with total losses of up to £100 trick hero Sir Geoff Hurst sold theirs, million – as a result of investwhile fellow West Ham alumni Martin retiring ing in film schemes and propPeters offloaded his after being made erty ventures. It was reported redundant from an insurance compathat the likes of Rio Ferdinand, ny in 2001. Should England pull off an Robbie Savage, Martin Keown unlikely World Cup triumph in Russia in 2018 – they are 10th favourites prior to the qualifi- and Danny Murphy were amongst those affected. cation process – it’s highly doubtful that the likes of Some experts I spoke to suggested that as many as Joe Hart, Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane would 300 former players may have become embroiled ever have to resort to selling off their winning med- in these schemes. One retired Premier League star that had been affected by the fallout from als to provide financial security for their families.

after football

these film schemes told me he’d gone through “15 years of torture. It was a scheme that came back to haunt me”.

Unfortunately, many of the players affected by these schemes have hung up their boots and no longer have the earning power to deal with the retrospective taxation involved. Quite often, bankruptcy is the only option available.

Costly divorces can also take their toll.

Indeed, XPRO’s figures on divorce rates among retired footballers are just as staggering. They estimate that one-third of footballers will be divorced within just 12 months of retirement.

Figures from the Professional Footballers’ Association suggest that a shocking 75 per cent will be divorced within three years of leaving the game. Marriages in the United Kingdom last, on average, 32 years, according to the Office For National Statistics.

Of course divorce, whether it comes before or after retirement, can have huge financial ramifications for a footballer with a finite earning capacity. So, what can a footballer expect to lose in a divorce settlement? Well, it often depends on when his relationship began with his wife.

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he most recent figures for the average age at which UK males get married is 30.8 years, according to the Office For National Statistics. Of course, footballers tend to get married much earlier. Clubs welcome a settled home life, with Sir Alex Ferguson renowned for encouraging his players to settle down at an early age.

Brian Clough was another who liked his charges to marry young in an attempt to keep them away from other temptations.

As many players marry their childhood sweethearts, or at a relatively young age, this can have even more devastating effects on their finances. The landmark case when it comes to football divorces came in 2004 when the ex-wife of former England and Arsenal midfielder Ray Parlour was awarded one-third of his future income. The pair’s marriage had been dissolved two years earlier.

Parlour married his childhood sweetheart Karen in 1998 but their marriage hit the rocks just three years later. Karen Parlour’s divorce application cited her husband’s “loutish behaviour”, substance abuse and gambling, and his detached relationship with her and their children as the major factors in the breakdown of their marriage. The Court Of Appeal awarded her £440,000-a-year maintenance, increased from an initial £250,000 per annum, to be reviewed after four years.

Parlour had offered her a sum of £120,000 per year. Mrs Parlour had also been awarded two mortgage-free properties worth £1 million and a £250,000 lump sum in the original settlement.

The player’s lawyers, and critics of the ruling, argued that it was the footballer who played the game and dealt with all that comes with it, whereas his spouse did nothing to earn the money. However, the court felt that Karen had played a major role in her husband’s career, not least her efforts in curbing her husband’s addictions, and that the money earned by the latter could be seen as “matrimonial property”.

This came after White v White in 2000, which changed everything in regards to payouts to divorcees. It ruled that in future “there should be no bias in favour of the money-earner and against the home-maker and the child-carer”. The ruling opened the floodgates on future divorce cases that would have a detrimental impact on the finances of footballers.

One former Premier League star who got divorced shortly after retiring told me it left him financially devastated. After 20 years as a professional footballer, quickly followed by a costly divorce, he is left – as he puts it – “without a pot to p**s in”.

And since you started reading this article Wayne Rooney has earned around £700. But, of course, he’s not your typical footballer.

Retired: What Happens To Footballers When the Game’s Up by Alan Gernon is out this month

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The

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Dan Levin

Amy Lombard

The Silk Road market where pigeons go for up to $400,000

Xinjiang

of

china pigeons

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“Uighurs see the costly and laborious hobby as a rite of passage”

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n many parts of the world, pigeons are an urban pest or, at best, a tasty meal. But here in this storied, ancient outpost near China’s border with Kyrgyzstan, they are much more: a hobby, an investment and, for some, an addiction.

On Sundays, an outdoor market in the centre of the city fills with ethnic Uighur men and boys engaged in a frenzied, mercantile display of traditional male bonding. The objects of their attention – many outrageously adorned in multihued and frilly plumage – appeared largely unfazed by the prodding appraisals of crown, beak, wing and tail.

“You get kind of addicted,” said Azizjam Mamat, 27, a cellphone company manager who started coming to the market when he was eight years old and now owns 300 birds. “One pigeon gives the love of 10 women.”

The passion for pigeons sustained the Uighurs, a largely Muslim Turkic-speaking minority, long before China took control of their traditional homeland more than 60 years ago and named it Xinjiang, or “new frontier” in Mandarin.

Despite a harrowing cycle of government repression and bloodshed, the pastime has continued to thrive. It is also popular, to some extent, among the ethnic Han Chinese migrants who have flowed into Xinjiang by the millions, lured by generous state subsidies and economic opportunities that stem from Beijing’s efforts to resurrect Kashgar as a hub on a new Silk Road trading route to Pakistan and beyond.

But the scene at the Kashgar pigeon market, with its predominantly Uighur patronage, highlights the entrenched divisions between the city’s Uighur majority and the Han newcomers, most of whom live in separate, recently developed neighbourhoods across town.

Not a word of Mandarin was heard amid the din of negotiations, interrupted by cooing from cages and the occasional flapping of wings. On the roof of one stall, a man clutching a butterfly net in one hand crept on all fours toward a perched escapee. Overheard, a flock of pigeons wheeled across the hazy sky in balletic synchronicity.

In Xinjiang, a region larger than France, Germany and Spain combined, pigeon predilections vary greatly. Northerners favour the racing varieties, while showy breeds are popular here in the south. The market, one of the biggest in 54 China, offers the full range, including grey racing homers that closely resemble the denizens of Manhattan sidewalks; white Jacobins with impossibly chic feathery ruffs; brown peacock-like fantails; and black reverse-wing pouters, their feet concealed by flowing plumage.

“He owns 600, including four he said were worth over $15,000 a pair.”

china pigeons

“Northern people don’t care about colour, just how many flips a pigeon can do,” Amrula Abdula, 30, a blanket salesman, said dismissively. “In the south, we require both.”

Surrounded by green cages containing dozens of fancy pigeons, Miradijan Matalip, 35, a postal worker, had no problem parting with members of his menagerie – for the right price.

“This is a hobby that can make money,” he said, holding a black-headed specimen worth $60 firmly behind the wings as he inspected the inside of its beak. Matalip has kept pigeons since he was six years old and owns more than 600, including four he said were worth over $15,000 a pair. “I keep those at home,” he said.

The popularity of certain breeds can be fleeting.

Pidayi Odikim, 66, a retired teacher, has seen count- 55 less pigeon fads come and go in his five decades of keeping the birds. Still, many Uighurs see the costly and laborious hobby as a rite of passage, one vital for teaching responsibility. “It keeps boys off the streets and brings them to the roof,” he said. portfolio.

Devotees claim Uighurs have been keeping pigeons for more than a thousand years, though some say the special bond between man and bird has biblical origins, with Noah and his faithful dove. “The pigeon has been a valuable pet ever since,” said Muradil Sidik, 22, a construction worker and collector who spends up to $50 each week buying birds.

Market forces have played an increasingly important role among China’s pigeon enthusiasts, who are said to number at least 300,000, according to state news reports. In 2013, a Han Chinese businessman paid a record $400,000 for a Belgian racing pigeon, a savvy investment considering that prestigious races offer prizes worth millions of dollars.

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uch extravagantly priced specimens were absent from the Kashgar market, but that does not mean Uighurs are reluctant to pay handsomely. Yusanjan Abdur Rahim, 15, claims he once sold a pair of pedigree chicks 56 for $22,000. “Pigeons are like cars if they’re rare enough,” he said.

If the scene felt far removed from the rest of China, closer inspection revealed a flurry of modern influences. Counterfeit bags of “Purina” pigeon food, mysteriously labelled “Biot portfolio.

“He claims that he once sold a pair of pedigree chicks for $22,000”

china pigeons

Eounader” in the Latin alphabet, were for sale alongside fake versions of the numbered leg rings used globally to identify a bird’s age and the organizations with which it is registered.

Azizjam Azizdawut, 43, an employee of the state-run electric company, said he has kept pigeons for decades, including in his university dorm room. A member of a local pigeon association, he remembers when the hobby became a sport in the 1990s. Back then, racing distances in Xinjiang stretched up to 97 kilometres.

These days, thanks to decades of strategic breeding and rigorous training, the contests span more than 483 kilometres over vast deserts and jagged mountains.

In 2013, several of Azizdawut’s pigeons won racing prizes, a point of pride tinged with resignation. “Winning is an honour, but it was too much work,” he said with a sigh.

cover story

If you’re happy and you know it

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Dubai now has a Minister Of State For Happiness as part of a global effort, praised by the United Nations, to make happiness and wellbeing the true measure of a society’s success.

But how do you measure happiness?

Gareth Rees Roui Francisco 59

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Because I’m happy Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof Because I’m happy Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth Because I’m happy Clap along if you know what happiness is to you Because I’m happy Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

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re you singing along yet? Clapping, even? It wouldn’t be surprising. This is the chorus to American pop star Pharrell Williams’ hit Happy – the most successful song of 2014.

While the people of the world – or at least the 13.9 million who bought Happy in one form or another – were merrily clapping along with the former N.E.R.D frontman, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, launched Dubai’s Happiness Index in October 2014, encouraging the installation of 23 smart devices in public buildings across the emirate and inviting residents to rate their satisfaction with government services.

In December 2014, Sheikh Mohammed launched the Dubai Plan 2021, and tweeted: “The first objective for the Dubai Plan 2021 is achieving people’s happiness. We have full confidence in those responsible to fulfil this goal.” For Sheikh Mohammed, happiness was more than just the subject of a catchy ditty – it was an attainable political objective.

Skip forward to 2016 and both Pharrell Williams and the music buying public have moved on, but Sheikh Mohammed is more determined than ever to make the happiness of the people of the UAE the prime motivation for the government. In February, he moved beyond his original focus on Dubai and appointed the UAE’s first Minister Of State For Happiness, Ohood Al Roumi, to “align and drive government policy to create social good and satisfaction”.

In March, Sheikh Mohammed approved the National Programme For Happiness And Positivity. “All government policies, programmes and services must help and instil happiness and positivity in society,” he said.

60 Dubai already has The Knowledge and Human Development Authority who are responsible for the growth and quality of private education, supporting schools, parents and students to create a high-quality education focused on happiness and wellbeing. Under Director General Dr. Abdulla Al Karam the KHDA portfolio.

also runs the Healthy and Happy School Award, designed to recognise schools that are focusing on students’ wellbeing and to raise awareness about the importance of happiness and wellbeing. The drive for happiness starts young, but there’s also a global view.

Saeed Al Nazari works in Projects Management in the Executive Office of Sheikh Mohammed and is UAE President of the Global Happiness Organisation, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to promote happiness and reduce suffering around the world. He approves of Al Roumi’s appointment, saying that she is a good choice because she has always aligned her work with happiness, and is very enthusiastic about the government’s new inspiration.

But he is also eager to point out that realising the importance of happiness is not something new to the Arab world. “It was something people were focusing on a lot in the region, and then we suddenly moved away from thinking about it,” he says, citing Persian philosopher and theologian Al-Ghazali’s The Alchemy Of Happiness, published in the early 12th century, and the works of 14th century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun as examples of Arab thinkers who examined the concept of happiness. Al Nazari also mentions the Baghdad-based intellectual centre known as the House Of Wisdom and the salons of the “Islamic Golden Age” – usually dated from the eighth century to the 13th century – where scholars and rulers would meet to discuss ideas. Sheikh Mohammed made the same argument in an open letter, published in February. “Since the dawn of history, happiness is all that humanity has sought,” he wrote.

Of course, happiness was not solely considered by the Arab cognoscente. As Sheikh Mohammed also pointed out in his open letter, the concept has occupied men and women of ideas since before the time of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. But in modern history, it was another ruler, Jigme Singye

Wangchuck, King Of Bhutan from 1972 until 2006, who elevated happiness from the realm of ideas to a concrete, measurable aim for government, developing the notion of Gross National Happiness (GNH).

Dasho Karma Ura is president of the Centre For Bhutan Studies And GNH Research, the research institute responsible for creating Bhutan’s GNH Index, the measurement framework for Bhutan’s GNH. “Happiness as an individual striving of all human beings is as old as history,” he says, echoing the thoughts Sheikh Mohammed articulated in his open letter. “Government elsewhere left it at that. The innovative leap the fourth king took was to take that universal individual striving into a system of governance. By doing so, the chances of a fundamental individual aspiration aligning with [government] policies and programmes increased. For any government to recognise the importance of happiness to its citizens and do nothing is contradictory. Doing nothing is equivalent to leaving it to chance.”

Ura is keen to stress that GNH has not replaced Gross Domestic Product (GDP), used by most countries as a measure of economic performance. “GDP is still calculated but it finds its proper place by recognising the inherent limitations of GDP’s measuring system, within itself, as well as in relation to the inner experience of human beings in terms of happiness and its variations,” he says.

Bhutan carries out a happiness survey every four years, interviewing 8,000 individuals aged 18 or older out of a population of approximately 780,000. “This allows us to assess subjective and objective factors associated with happiness,” says Ura. The survey considers 130 factors associated with happiness, which are grouped into the “nine domains of GNH”: psychological wellbeing; time use; community vitality; cultural resilience; ecological diversity; good governance; living standard; health; and education.

“Within the last 40 years, the touchstones of development have evolved significantly towards happiness and well-being”

happiness index

“In order to classify the population by degree of happiness the main criteria is the number of factors or conditions that a person enjoys,” says Ura. “If a person has sufficiency in 0-49 per cent, he or she is considered unhappy. If a person has 50 to 76 per cent, he or she is considered extensively happy. A person having 77 to 100 per cent is viewed as deeply happy.”

The Centre For Bhutan Studies And GNH Research, an autonomous entity, works closely with the government’s GNH Commission, the body responsible for producing a five-year plan for Bhutan and for coordinating and funding all government projects, proposing goals based on information drawn from the latest GNH survey.

For Ura, the global media still takes GDP too seriously and politics reflects that. “GDP will not be replaced too easily, partly because it is anchored institutionally, with huge funding, from the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund to national statistics offices. There is institutional bias for it to persist,” he says. “However, there is also an effort to improve many of its blind spots, [and to work] towards a better accounting system.”

Ura praises Sheikh Mohammed’s appointment of a Minister Of State For Happiness and commitment to placing happiness at the heart of the UAE government’s agenda as “a huge light in the Arab world”. He is also pleased with the increased interest in policies that focus on happiness and well-being, rather than solely economic growth, in Europe, Latin America and Japan. “Within the last 40 years, the touchstones of development have evolved significantly towards happiness and well-being,” he says.

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happiness index

“What the Emirates does is going to be emulated by others, so this is a positive and creative step by the government”

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he strongest sign yet that the world had started taking happiness and well-being seriously came in 2011, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 65/309, recognising “the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal” embodying the spirit of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set out in the UN Millennium Declaration in 2000, which focused on tackling extreme poverty worldwide, and inviting member states “to pursue the elaboration of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development with a view to guiding their public policies”. The resolution also recognised the limits of GDP, stating that it “was not designed to and does not adequately reflect the… well-being of people in a country”.

The resolution resulted in the first World Happiness Report being published in 2012, with further reports published in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

The World Happiness Report is produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and edited by Professor John F Helliwell of the University Of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute For Advance Research; Professor Richard Layard, director of the Well-Being Programme at the London School Of Economics’ Centre For Economic Performance; and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and SDSN. Using data collected by the Gallup World Poll, the report looks at variables including GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, and generosity, and ranks levels of happiness in 156 countries. The UAE was ranked 28th out of 156 countries in the World Happiness Report 2016.

In September 2015 the UN passed Resolution A/ RES/70/1 that contained 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the successors to the MDGs, and Sachs

believes that the World Happiness Report is the best way for the 193 UN member states to assess the impact that pursuing these goals, which include ending poverty, reducing inequality, combating climate change and promoting sustainable economic growth, is having on the happiness and well-being of their citizens. “Here we have a globally agreed development agenda,” he says. “We really should find out, is this making people happier over time? Are the ones who are following the development principles [those] that are gaining faster happiness, and so forth? So we’re really urging the governments [of the UN member states] to take up this methodology and to build it right into public policies and into the international process around sustainable development.”

What does he think about Sheikh Mohammed’s recent innovations? “I think it’s really impressive and really path-breaking and very important,” he says.

“And because the Emirates is a leader on many fronts, and it’s a crossroads economy where more and more people are coming for conferences, for meetings, for regional headquarters, what the Emirates does is going to be emulated by many other countries. So I regard this as a positive and creative step.

“We want governments to take this up and say the happiness of their citizens is a paramount concern,” he continues, expressing his admiration for both Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission and the UAE’s appointment of a Minister Of State For Happiness and labelling them “great innovations” that other states should be inspired by.

Derek Bok, former president of Har vard University and the author of The Politics Of Happiness: What Government Can Learn From The New Research On Well-Being, (2010) agrees that measuring hap- 63 piness is a welcome alternative to the status quo. “I think it’s a considerable improvement on what I consider an over emphasis in public policy on GDP or rates of growth that assume the only things that matter a lot are material goods,” he says. “[We know], portfolio.

happiness index

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ill Davies, senior lecturer in politics at Goldsmiths University Of London and author of The Happiness Industry: How The Government And Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (2015), says that it’s important to ask why is happiness being measured, conveying his concern about emotions being treated as “economic resources”. “I think the problem also with measuring happiness is that you can then say: so what is the financial return on an investment in happiness? Or: how does happiness correlate to productivity? Or: what sort of cost does stress create for employers or the state? And then you start to look for some rather short-sighted, quite mechanical forms of intervention to solve these problems,” he says.

The economic motivation is “not necessarily bad”.

“If there were virtuous win-wins between people feeling fulfilled and making lots of money, then it’s difficult to see what’s wrong with that,” he says. “In the business world it depends where you are in the job market. If you’re an employee of Google then they want to care for you in every possible way: physically, mentally, emotionally.” Davies admits that life as an employee of the tech giant could be “quite cushy”.

“But then you get these employers, like call centres, where the work is not well-paid, it’s stressful, it’s boring, it’s repetitive and it tends to have quite high staff turnover,” he continues. “High staff turnover is inefficient for an employer, but also this level of stress can produce bad levels of customer satisfaction for the people on the other end of the phone, because they don’t like being spoken to by a person who is stressed. So in these sorts of environments the pursuit of happiness is more a behavioural management programme, which is not really caring about how the person actually is, the employee actually is, it is more caring about how they’re behaving, how they’re coming across. Are they doing their job properly?”

Davies is particularly concerned about the use of technology to track how a person is feeling, giving the example of Beyond Verbal, a company that claims to be able to analyse a person’s emotional state simply by listening to their vocal intonations. “All of this stuff is presented as being good for people, because it is all concerned with their well-being, but a dark edge is emerging already,” he says.

“If there were virtuous win-wins between people feeling fulfilled and making lots of money, then it’s difficult to see what’s wrong with that”

from our lives and a lot of scientific evidence, that worldly goods and high salaries are one source of satisfaction but there are many others. So if one is really trying to increase the welfare of the people one needs a somewhat more capacious definition [of success] than simply whether the economy is growing rapidly.”

Not everyone is convinced that measuring happiness is wholly positive, though.

Davies’s arguments bring to mind Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave NewWorld, a warning about the dangers of social engineering, and Bok, who says he read Huxley’s “cautionary tale” as a child, because the British author was a close family friend, agrees that there is a line between helping people, giving them the opportunity to flourish, and manipulation, but that we shouldn’t throw out the idea of measuring happiness simply because it could be used inappropriately.

“I think we ought to take that line very seriously, but I’m sure that not all forms of trying to make our lives more satisfying are manipulation, and for that reason the first step is to find out more about [what makes people happy], and instead of publishing what happened on the stock market or what happened to GDP it would be nice to know what effect a lot of other things had on the overall feeling that people have about the quality of their lives,” he says.

Philosopher and best-selling author Alain de Botton would also like to see GDP lose its powerful monopoly as a the sole measurement of success, declaring that while GDP is not irrelevant to the good society it is a very imperfect guide. “The ultimate goal of work and money – trade, buying and selling, manufacture, enterprise, corporate activity, financial investment: the whole array of economic activity which is currently designated Capitalism – should be human flourishing,” he says. “That is, an economy geared to flourishing and meeting our highest private and public needs. Good economics is the study of the quality of commercial activity, not just the quantity. It aims to track how well (or badly) our economy is serving its ultimate purpose. To what extent is it aligned to its 65 true goal? In what ways are we making progress?”

With this in mind, de Botton believes that Sheikh Mohammed’s decision to appoint a Minster Of State For Happiness is a “great idea”. How about you? Are you singing along yet? Clapping, even? portfolio.

Britain’s exclusive schools try to be less so 66

Stephen Castle Andrew Testa portfolio.

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Michael Olorunlogbon, a scholarship student at Rugby

atrick Derham remembers the moment in October 1973 when, age 14, from a troubled home and planning to join the navy, he saw the course of his life changed, rather miraculously, for the better.

Out of the blue, he was offered a free place at an expensive private school.

He took it, went on to Cambridge University and then served as headmaster of two of Britain’s most famous educational institutions. He was never told how he had been selected for the scholarship, but he has since tried to repay that faith in his potential by bringing more students from disadvantaged backgrounds – including young black teenagers – to some of Britain’s most elite places of learning.

Few institutions better symbolise social stratification and privilege in Britain than its top independent schools, whose origins date back centuries in some cases. Their former students dominate many spheres of British life, and half the members of the cabinet were privately educated, including prime minister David Cameron, who attended the nation’s most exclusive academy, Eton College.

Critics blame this system for some of Britain’s social, economic and racial inequalities; argue that such schools impede mobility; and want them to do more for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to justify the tax breaks they receive. Some schools, prodded by Derham and others, are doing just that: taking steps to further diversify their student bodies.

“More and more of us are concerned by this polarisation in society,” Derham said in an office at Westminster School, where he is the headmaster.

“There is no point producing people who have only met people like themselves.”

In 2003, in his previous post as headmaster of Rugby School, Derham helped set up a programme called the Arnold Foundation, which provided free boarding places for teenagers recruited from disad- 67 vantaged communities. He forged links with a London club for Afro-Caribbean youngsters, called the Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which was started by a former prison officer, Ray Lewis, who was alarmed at the number of young black men ending up in jail. portfolio.

Route to poweR aNd iNflueNce

The likes of Eton, St Pauls, Charterhouse, Rugby and so on are not just elite institutions within themselves, they also traditionally represent the pathway to the best universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews, etc. And that in turn is a route to the top jobs. As an illustration, here is the British government’s current cabinet and where they were educated. Of the 22 ministers, more than half were Oxbridge educated. oxfoRd uNiveRsity David Cameron George Osborne Theresa May Philip Hammond Michael Gove Jeremy Hunt Nicky Morgan Theresa Villiers Elizabeth Truss cambRidge uNiveRsity Chris Grayling Greg Clark Oliver Letwin st aNdRews uNiveRsity Michael Fallon uNiveRsity of ediNbuRgh David Mundell Amber Rudd uNiveRsity college loNdoN John Whittingdale bRistol uNiveRsity Stephen Crabb uNiveRsity of southamptoN Justine Greening uNiveRsity of exeteR Sajid Javid

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bRoxtowe college of fuRtheR educatioN Baroness Stowell uNiveRsity of wales Alun Cairns staffoRdshiRe college of agRicultuRe Patrick McLoughlin portfolio.

Lewis had been inspired by a TV report about an academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, set up to improve prospects for young black men and influenced by America’s Prep For Prep, a programme aimed at creating opportunities for black, Latino and Asian-American students.

Yet initially Lewis doubted that exclusive, expensive and traditional schools like Rugby were a place for any “self-respecting black guy”.

It seemed “absolutely preposterous”, he said.

“Boarding school? All you ever heard about that was the beatings.”

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ot only was he eventually convinced, but last year a student from Eastside, Michael Olorunlogbon, 16, became the 100th pupil to attend Rugby thanks to an Arnold Foundation scholarship.

Arriving at a school founded almost 450 years ago, with its quadrangles, cloisters and ivy-clad buildings, was “slightly intimidating”, Olorunlogbon conceded. But he now likes life here and thinks he is likely to make higher grades, secure a better university place and forge a brighter future.

“The teachers have more time for you – there is a small student-teacher ratio at the school,” he said in a large room next to the headmaster’s office. “At home, there are more distractions. I work harder here than I would at home, definitely.”

This is not always an easy adjustment, however. David Ejim-McCubbin, 23, said that when he

went from a deprived district of London to Rugby School, he struggled to reconcile two “astronomically different” worlds.

“I left one realm, as it were, to peek into one that was – I don’t know how many – stratospheres above the one I was born into,” said Ejim-McCubbin, who has since received a degree in law and a master’s degree in legal and political theory. He now coordinates Eastside’s scholarship programme.

The transition was so difficult, he said, that in his first months at Rugby School only the lack of a train ticket home stopped him from quitting. Other students were welcoming, but he recalls being treated like a curiosity, and once being surrounded by a group and asked whether he had ever witnessed a stabbing. He had not.

The experiment at Rugby has spawned another programme, SpringBoard, which places students from disadvantaged backgrounds in other boarding schools, including Eton.

All this has further stirred debate over the social effect of Britain’s private schools. Seen by supporters as beacons of excellence that drive up standards, they are blamed by critics for allowing well-heeled parents to opt out of state education, removing the incentive for it to improve.

Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union Of Teachers, most of whose members work in state schools, argued that when exam results are adjusted for social factors, “students in state schools succeed as well as their peers in independent schools”.

education Students at Rugby School, one of the elite British institutions that critics say help perpetuate England’s class divide

Most expensive uk boarding schools 1. Hurtwood House 2. Cheltenham Ladies’ College 3. Malvern St James 4. Malvern College 4. Tonbridge 6. Harrow 7. Eton College 8. Wycombe Abbey 9. Winchester 10. Charterhouse All of the prices listed are full boarding for a full year.

$56,255 $53,003 $52,790 $51,600 $51,566 $51,370 $50,769 $50,740 $50,612 $50,500

“All children and young people should have access to a good local school, irrespective of parental social class and disposable income,” she added.

Peter Green, the current headmaster of Rugby School, said the school was now building on its history of charity, and adapting to modern times a long tradition of offering free places. For example, one of its best known historical figures, William Webb Ellis, who is credited with handling, rather than kicking, a ball here in 1823 and thus starting rugby football, was educated on a scholarship.

Nowadays, fees for a boarding pupil are around $46,000. When all free places and scholarships are included, Green said, 12 per cent of students at Rugby pay nothing. He acknowledges that some Arnold Foundation students have had problems but said that, of more than 100, only two had left early.

Although candidates take an academic test to ensure they can cope, the idea is to take not just the very brightest, but also those who will benefit from boarding at the school, often because of their fam69 ily situation.

“We may not be able to help everybody, but at least we can help some people,” Green said, adding that fee-paying students benefit from mixing with those from less privileged backgrounds. Rugby, he said, must not be “an extremely wealthy cocoon”. portfolio.

Shari redStone prepareS for battle 70

The fight for her family fortune and fate of Viacom and CBS Emily Steel portfolio.

Ryan Stone

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hari Redstone pulls her iPhone out of her purse to show off “just one” picture of her grandchildren. She laughs, then apologises, when she sees that the back of the phone is covered with stickers – the result of a craft session with the two youngsters.

Petite, with coifed blond hair and a cautious smile, Redstone is the picture of a doting grandmother. Beneath that cheery exterior, though, is a tenacious woman at the centre of a battle over her family’s fortune as well as the fate of two of the world’s largest media companies, Viacom and CBS. “My life is really good,” Redstone, 61, said during a rare interview recently. “It is a dream life,” she said, “except for the part that is not a dream life.”

Redstone is the intensely private daughter of Sumner Redstone, the pugnacious mogul who ruthlessly assembled a $40 billion entertainment empire.

A Massachusetts native who speaks in a pronounced Boston accent, Redstone shies from public attention with the same alacrity that her father attracted it. Her father and mother divorced after 52 years of marriage. He then remarried and dated women decades younger. He was sued by Shari Redstone’s uncle, brother and cousin. He has feuded publicly with his children and cycled through a series of chief executives at his companies. He famously declared that he would never die.

Now, Sumner Redstone is 92, in poor health and confined to his Beverly Hills mansion. After he dies, or is deemed incompetent, Shari Redstone is expected to face off against Viacom’s current leadership to determine what becomes of his media empire – and by extension her children’s inheritance and family’s legacy.

The relationship between father and daughter is complicated. She was the one he phoned after surviving a hotel fire when he was 55. He persuaded her to join the family business and once told a reporter that life wasn’t complete until people had “met Shari”.

Over the years, however, he has denigrated her in conversations with other executives and chastised her for meddling in his business. He publicly criticised her attempts to position herself to eventually succeed him as chairman of Viacom and CBS. Their feuding often made headlines, such as the time he wrote a 72 letter to Forbes saying his children had done little or nothing to help build the family empire. Sometimes father and daughter communicated exclusively through fax or lawyers, if at all.

Today she’s not in his will. The bulk of the estate goes to charity. portfolio.

Sumner redStone key dateS from the man who built an empire 1954 Joins cinema chain Northeast Theater Corporation (the family business), which is later renamed National Amusements.

1967 Becomes CEO of National Amusements.

1987 Takes over Viacom Pictures in a leveraged buyout (estimated to be $3 billion) and becomes chairman.

1994 Buys Paramount Communication (parent company of Paramount Pictures).

1996 Becomes Viacom’s CEO. 1999 Acquisition of Infinity Broadcasting and CBS Corporation (parent company of CBS), for a reported $46 billion. The biggest ever media deal.

Redstone says that she has patched up her “very public” disagreements with her father. Lately, she has been a frequent presence in his home.

That portrayal of their relationship is being challenged now in a salacious lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by a former companion and romantic partner of Sumner Redstone. The lawsuit says that he is not mentally competent and that Shari Redstone manipulated him to take control of his life, his companies and his money.

“The rosy picture painted by Shari of her supposed reconciliation with her father is a smoke screen,” Manuela Herzer, the former companion, said in a recent declaration to the court. “Her sudden conversion to the loving, omnipresent daughter coincides with this epic battle” for control of his empire.

Redstone declined to discuss the lawsuit or her father’s health. Her spokeswoman called the claims in the lawsuit “unfounded”, as have lawyers for Sumner Redstone, who declined to comment beyond their court filings.

That legal brawl, scheduled to go to trial this month, is just one part of a broader struggle for money and power across Sumner Redstone’s empire. The battleground is a uniquely convoluted corporate structure.

Sumner Redstone controls Viacom and CBS through National Amusements, a private theatre chain started by his father that holds about 80 per cent of the voting stock in the two companies. After he dies, his stake in National Amusements will go to a trust created to benefit his five grandchildren.

The trust wields great power. It could, for instance, endorse the current leadership, install a new board and executive team or even sell the companies. Shari Redstone is one of the seven voting members of that trust.

She declined to discuss board activity, and her plans are not clear, beyond that she does not personally want to lead either of the two companies. Also not clear is how many members of the trust will side with her. Several people close to her, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are private, say she has the support of at least two.

Redstone is known to say that she has 80 per cent of her father’s brains, 90 per cent of his passion and 100 per cent of his obsessive nature. That is likely to be a forceful combination as she prepares for what is certain to be an epic saga.

Redstone went to law school and worked as a criminal defence lawyer at a small Boston firm. She married in 1980, started a family and, when her

redstone

“I am seeing the world as it is going to be.

I am exposed to the future, not just of media, but of the world”

children were older, decided to pursue a degree in social work after volunteering at a trauma centre for abused children.

That’s when her father brought her into the family business. He was spending more time in New York with Viacom and wanted more family oversight over National Amusements in Boston. He persuaded Redstone to run it. “My grandfather started this business,” she said. “It was our family legacy.”

Redstone, who was going through a divorce at the time, agreed to work at National Amusements two days a week for a year. Six months later she was working full time.

At National Amusements, Redstone focused on two areas where she thought she could carve out her own reputation: expanding internationally into Russia and South America; and upgrading the movie-going experience beyond popcorn tubs and sticky theatre floors.

In some theatres she began adding reserved premium seating, full dining menus and cocktails she helped design. “I don’t like to follow in the footsteps,” Redstone said. “I like to learn from the footsteps that came before me, forge a new path.”

As time went on, the harmony between father and daughter got out of sync. There was a series of public squabbles after Sumner Redstone brought her in as vice chairwoman of Viacom in 2005. She pushed

2006 CBS Corporation and Viacom split into separate companies.

2006 Sued by son Brent who accuses him of favouring daughter Shari over business dealings.

2016 Steps down as chairman of CBS. 2016 Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman replaces Redstone as executive chairman.

2016 Trial ordered for May to judge Redstone’s mental capacity.

for more authority and stronger corporate governance measures, such as tying compensation to performance. At least once, he threatened to oust her.

After helping National Amusements negotiate its debts, Redstone decided it was time to set off on her own. Today, she remains its president, yet her new focus is the venture capital firm Advancit Capital, which she started in 2011 with her son-inlaw, Jason Ostheimer.

“I am seeing the world as it is going to be,” Redstone said of Advancit’s ambitions. “I am exposed to the future, not just of media, but of the world.”

Over the years, Redstone has struggled to balance her desire to make her own mark on the Redstone legacy yet live a quiet life and shield herself, her children and her grandchildren from the spotlight.

“It is really hard when your life is scrutinised by people who don’t know you and who don’t really know what the situation is,” Redstone said. “So I avoid the good and the bad and just try to live in a world where I can insulate myself from whatever is out there.”

Recently, Redstone and her family took a holiday to celebrate her mother’s 91st birthday. After a din- 73 ner one evening in a room overlooking the ocean, Redstone received a note from the staff telling her that they appeared to be the perfect happy family.

“Oh, God,” she later recalled, with a laugh. “You guys don’t know the half of it.” portfolio.

A night with the stars…

living

portfolio.

The Starlight Room Dolomites

Cortina d'ampezzo

Price $342

rooms 1

cortinadolomiti.eu

 VCe

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t an altitude of 6,742 feet in the Dolomite Mountains, this single room, glasstopped cabin is a fine way to enjoy some romantic isolation under the stars.

The room, located near the Rifugio Col Gallina in Cortina D’Ampezzo is a couple of hours’ drive north of Venice. Once there, the room can be reached by snowmobile, or for the more adventurous and energetic, you can hike up wearing snowshoes or ride up on a fat-tyre bike.

Inside your room, the bed is adjustable for optimised viewing and there’s a docking station so you can play your own music to accompany the star show. Dinner is included in your stay, as is breakfast to be served just as the sun is rising and the Dolomites are gently glowing pink. It may not have the luxury of a five-star hotel, but the view and privacy more than make it memorable.

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living / watches

Why a $15,950 tourbillon watch is considered a steal

Words: Alex Williams

W

ith a price tag of $15,950, the new Carrera Heuer02T wristwatch from TAG Heuer – a brand often associated with “starter” Swiss luxury watches under $3,000 – may strike budget-minded consumers as “mind boggling”, as one watch site, Monochrome, put it; perhaps even “incredible”, in the words of another, Hodinkee.

An entry-level timepiece for the price of a factory-fresh Japanese subcompact? I’ll take the Honda.

To the watch cultists who inhabit sites like these, however, the new TAG is not an egregious example of price gouging but rather a steal, a timepiece so jawdroppingly underpriced that there must be, according to the site aBlogtoWatch, some sort of sorcery involved.

What the wizards at TAG 76 have done is conjure a tourbillon – an intricate, gyroscope-like mechanism long considered a holy grail for watch enthusiasts – at the luxury-watch equivalent of a Kmart bargain price.

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may issue 125

Up to now, a “cheap” tourbillon timepiece was the Montblanc 4810 ExoTourbillon Slim, for $34,500. At the GDP-of-a-small-country end of the spectrum, the Greubel-Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon (which, yes, contains four of them) retails for $815,000.

TAG, in other words, has seemingly enabled buyers to take that Honda budget and snag a Bentley.

But is it worth it? You don’t have to explain to anyone why a Bentley costs so much. But a tourbillon? How could a feather’s weight of metal increase the value of an already expensive watch by a factor of 10?

For starters, a tourbillon promises at least a theoretical improvement in performance. To put things in “watch-geek-ese”, the tourbillon, which was pioneered by Abraham-Louis Breguet at the end of the 18th century, mounts the watch’s escapement, balance spring and balance wheel inside a tiny rotating cage, to fight the effects of gravity, and in theory even out minor deviations in timekeeping.

It is widely debated whether tourbillons actually deliver better time; generally, they are considered a symbol of watchmaking virtuosity. But at least a tourbillon bestows undeniable marketing value, according to Hyla Bauer, the editor of Watch Journal.

“It is the ultimate complication for achieving accuracy in mechanical timekeeping,” Bauer said, “and many collectors who are obsessed with accuracy are willing, and indeed expect, to pay a handsome premium for this slight improvement in accuracy. In this case, seconds do count.”

Even marginal gains would hardly seem to represent value in an era when you can summon atomic-clock accuracy with an iPhone app.

But as with any precious commodity, scarcity adds to the allure. Tourbillons

are extremely difficult to engineer and manufacture, said Jack Forster, managing editor of watch site Hodinkee, meaning they have always been rare. “Before the late 1990s,” he said, “there were probably only a few hundred made since their inventor patented the idea in 1801.”

The talismanic appeal of the tourbillon is evident at the offices of Hodinkee, where 3D-printed models of tourbillons are displayed with reverence, as if they are original Giacomettis.

No wonder. To the horologically minded, who fetishize engineering for engineering’s sake, the tourbillon is a form of kinetic art.

As Bauer said: “They are constantly in motion and are an endless source of visual stimulation.

They are mesmerising to watch, bordering on hypnotising.”

Even so, the idea of spending a year’s apartment rent for a mechanism of negligible practical value and almost zero cachet to the general public (unlike, say, a Bentley, or even a Giacometti) would seem to defy logic.

And it does, said Adam Craniotes, founder of RedBar Group, an international network of watch lovers.

That is the point.

“If we accept that a mechanical watch is obsolete technology, which it is,” Craniotes said, “then an intricate escapement designed to address a problem that existed on an even more obsolete example of the genre, the pocket watch, is quite possibly the best way that we, as collectors, can telegraph to ourselves and others the permanence of watchmaking as 77 a craft, particularly in the face of cheap, mass-produced and ultimately disposable tech.”

The tourbillon, he said, “is a testament to our ability to celebrate, and indeed cherish, obsolescence as art”.

“The tourbillon is a testament to our ability to celebrate obsolescence as art”

Portfolio.

living / style

What to pack ...for warm weather in Nice, and beyond

W Average temp

17°c

Venice Madrid Paris Sydney

also Wear in...

16 °C 15 °C 15 °C 19 °C

may

nice

Average hours of sun:12

Where to stay Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat One of the truly great old European hotels. Overlooking the sea and set in 17 acres of immaculate grounds, the good and great have been staying here for more than a century. Novelist Somerset Maugham wrote here, Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill

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roamed the gardens, while Picasso learned to swim in the pool. It was also the filming location for much of the 1988 comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

The Grand-Hôtel can lay a reasonable claim to be one of the very best in one of the most beautiful settings. fourseasons.com/capferrat

may issue 125

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beach look 5 4

accessories

1. Sunspel Riviera polo shirt $140 2. Officine Generale cotton chino shorts $230 3. Dolce & Gabbana cotton twill trousers $595 4. Common Projects trainers $410 5. Miansai leather-trimmed holdall $680

Dries VanNoten sunglasses $345

Nuxe moisturising gel $27

Acqua di Parma fragrance $87

Aesop skin parsley cleansing masque $39

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

Average temp

31°c Sea temp

28 °C 34 °C 25 °C 33 °C Maldives Muscat Cairo Delhi

also wear in...

dubai may

28°c

additional info

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Portfolio.

level shoe district While The Dubai Mall is full of flagship designer stores, a Bloomingdale’s, a Harvey Nichols and more, it’s worth noting that if you’re looking for shoes then the Level Shoe District is well worth visiting for it’s design

and layout, as well as huge range of high-end footwear across 96,000 square feet of space.

It’s also the place in Dubai to pick up limitededition trainers and other exclusives that you won’t be able to find anywhere else in the country.

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accessories 1

2

Soleil Toujours SPF45 Soleil Du Midi Mineral Sunscreen For Face $55

3

Alexander McQueen card holder $170

city look 4

5

Kate Spade carousel bag $477

81 1. Elie Saab lace mini dress $4,125 2. Chan Luu embellished polka-dot chiffon scarf $65 3. Sensi Studio straw sunhat $230 4. Marni colour-block glossed-leather slingback sandals $920 5. Cedar Street mini hayden bag $272

Ray-Ban Clubmaster silver and gold-tone sunglasses $215

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living / style

High-end hoodies

N

o matter what you think about Mark Zuckerberg, it’s refreshing to see that all that money hasn’t gone to his clothing.

It would be easy for him to dress in wildly expensive designer gear, but he chooses to stay true to his own style. Some have called it Normcore, others used the term “deviation chic” and claimed that dressing down is the new power dressing. And it is a pretty bold move to meet the president of Japan or go to Wall Street for your company’s IPO wearing your old black hoodie.

82 When asked why he nearly always wears that plain grey T-shirt (he has lots of the same, as the picture of his wardrobe [right] that he posted shows) and his black hoodie, he said he didn’t want to waste time having to choose what to wear each Portfolio.

morning. “Decision fatigue. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain,” he told The New York Times.

Albert Einstein did something similar and Barack Obama takes the same approach to his suits.

But if Zuckerberg didn’t pay attention to the high-fashion world, many of those brands have sartorially come to him and now make hooded tops of their own – albeit rather fancy ones. They are ideal for loafing at the weekend, flying long-haul or running billion-dollar tech companies.

After all, as Zuckerberg himself has demonstrated, if you can’t wear whatever you want, then are you really the boss?

Words: Matt Pomroy

The clothing staple gets an upgrade

MAY ISSUE 125

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4

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1. Lora Piana $1,825 2. Ralph Lauren $300 3. Officine Generale $320 4. Club Monaco $400 5. Massimo Alba $995 6. Berlutti $1,650 7. Thom Browne $590 8. Neil Barrett $605

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5

All are available from mrporter.com

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may issue 125

living / food

Top table Influential, modern Scandinavian cooking

B

jorn Frantzén founded his eponymous restaurant in 2008, and within a couple of years it had already earned a two-star Michelin rating. As one of the foremost restaurants in the Nordic cuisine movement it has become hugely influential via its reputation for seasonal Scandinavian produce, much of which is grown in the restaurant’s own garden.

Also known for the occasional absurdity – the tasting menu once included a cheese plate delivered with an iPod playing a narration by the actor Stellan Skarsgård – it’s rarely less than an entertaining and inventive meal, but crucially the food is excellent and you don’t get the emperor’s new clothes feel of some of the other trendsetting places.

If you can’t get to Stockholm, then it’s worth noting that Frantzén is now taking his menu to the Middle East with a short-term residency at Enigma in Dubai until June 30.

franTzen, stockholm

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sCaLLop in its own sheLL served with dried roe, fir tree, finger Lime & dashi

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Chef’s reCommendation | Björn Franzén's pick oF three restaurants to try 1. masa (New York) I´m a big fan of Japan and its cuisine, this is the American western way of doing it. The perfect mix.

2. L'astrance (Paris) I think Pascal Barbot is a great chef and he always has a new way of presenting things.

3. ishikawa (Tokyo) This is the only restaurant I make sure I always visit when I’m in Asia.

Portfolio.

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Expect the exceptional.

may living / investment

investment piece

issue 125

Eames 670 lounge chair The most stylish and iconic chair ever made

1

3

The chair is composed of three curved plywood shells: the headrest, the backrest and the seat

5

Seven layers of plywood covered by finishing veneers of Brazilian rosewood

Low seat permanently fixed at a recline to take the weight off your lower spine and distribute it properly

2

Matching ottoman footrest

4

Height adjustable legs to compensate for uneven flooring

Designed by Charles and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller furniture company, this piece of furniture first went on sale in 1956 and has been sold continuously since then. It’s one of the very few piece of furniture that can truly claim to be iconic, and unlike many others, 87 this one is actually comfortable as well as aesthetically pleasing. Inspired by the English club chair, Charles said he wanted to create a modern version of that but with “the warm receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt”. It’s long been a fixture in the homes of the wealthy and stylish – it featured in Frasier Crane’s apartment throughout the run of the hit sitcom. Picking up a vintage piece from the 1970s or before, however, is actually not recommended. Due to the design, they tend to weaken after four decades of use, but Herman Miller still make them (now in various finishes and colours) and a new one will set you back around $5,000.

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MAY LIVING / BOOK

ISSUE 125

The Tale Of Tomorrow A celebration of retro-futuristic buildings from the 1960s and ’70s

T

his coffeetable book celebrates an era when architects started to think about what the future might look like and decided to design and build it right then.

Although the future turned out to be more prosaic, their designs have now come to represent the era in which they were created, one of radical ideas and visionary structures.

Among the case studies are places like the Sheats Goldstein Residence in Los Angeles [top right] which has been used in 88 films, including The Big Lebowski where it was Jackie Treehorn’s residence. And the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport in New York City [bottom right], which was considered a masterpiece when it opened in the early 1960s.

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The Tale Of Tomorrow: Utopian Architecture In The Modernist Realm, published by Gestalten, is out now for $60

MAY LIVING / COLUMN

ISSUE 125

The secrets of adulthood

By Gretchen Rubin

TWELVE COMMANDMENTS 1. Be Gretchen.

2. Let it go.

3. Act the way I want to feel.

4. Do it now.

5. Be polite and be fair.

6. Enjoy the process.

7. Spend out.

8. Identify the problem.

9. Lighten up.

10. Do what ought to be done.

11. No calculation.

12. There is only love.

These Twelve Commandments, I predicted, would help me as I was struggling to keep my resolutions. I also came up with a goofier list: my Secrets Of Adulthood. These were the lessons I’d learned with some difficulty as I’d grown up.

I’m not sure why it took me years to embrace the notion that over-the-counter medication actually would cure a headache, but it had.

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The Happiness Project (Revised Edition) by Gretchen Rubin is out now

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SECRETS OF ADULTHOOD • People don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think.

• It’s OK to ask for help.

• Most decisions don’t require extensive research.

• Do good, feel good.

• It’s important to be nice to everyone.

• Bring a sweater.

• By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.

• Soap and water remove most stains.

• Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.

• If you can’t find something, clean up.

• You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you like to do.

• Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.

• What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.

• You don’t have to be good at everything.

• If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.

• Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.

• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

• What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you – and vice versa.

• People actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts off their registry.

• You can’t profoundly change your children’s natures by nagging them or signing them up for classes.

• No deposit, no return.

I had fun coming up with my Twelve Commandments and my Secrets Of Adulthood, but the heart of my happiness project remained my list of resolutions, which embodied the changes I wanted to make in my life. When I stepped back to reflect on the resolutions, however, I was struck by their small scale. Take January. “Go to sleep earlier” and “Tackle a nagging task” didn’t sound dramatic or colourful or particularly ambitious. Other people’s radical happiness projects, such as Henry David Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond or Elizabeth Gilbert’s move to Italy, India, and Indonesia, exhilarated me.

The fresh start, the total commitment, the leap into the unknown – I found their quests illuminating, plus I got a vicarious thrill from their abandonment of everyday worries. But my project wasn’t like that.

I was an unadventurous soul, and I didn’t want to undertake that kind of extraordinary change. Which was lucky, because I wouldn’t have been able to do it even if I’d wanted to.

I had a family and responsibilities that made it practically impossible for me to leave for one weekend, let alone for a year. And more important, I didn’t want to reject my life. I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.

I knew I wouldn’t discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now – as in the haunting play The Blue Bird, where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird Of Happiness, only to find the bird waiting for them when they finally return home.

Author Photo: David Cross

When I planned to start my project, I completed my chart with dozens of resolutions to try in the coming year. For the first month, I’d attempt only January’s resolutions; in February, I’d add the next set of resolutions to the January set. By December, I’d be scoring myself on the whole year’s worth of resolutions. As I worked to identify my resolutions, some overarching principles started to emerge. Distilling these principles turned out to be far more taxing than I expected, but, I arrived at my Twelve Commandments:

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