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Writing the Right College-Entrance Essay

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Writing the Right College-Entrance Essay

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Writing the Right College-Entrance Essay

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A former college-applications adviser reveals the secrets of writing a good essay.

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Does Caligula deserve his bad reputation?

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Does Caligula deserve his bad reputation?

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The Roman emperor Caligula's name has become a byword for depraved tyranny, used as a popular benchmark for everyone from Idi Amin to Jean-Bedel Bokassa. But was Caligula really mad and bad, or the victim of a smear campaign, asks historian Mary Beard.

Our modern idea of tyranny was born 2,000 years ago. It is with the reign of the Caligula - the third Roman emperor, assassinated in 41 AD, before he had reached the age of 30 - that all the components of mad autocracy come together for the first time.

In fact, the ancient Greek word "tyrannos" (from which our term comes) was originally a fairly neutral word for a sole ruler, good or bad.

Of course, there had been some very nasty monarchs and despots before Caligula. But, so far as we know, none of his predecessors had ever ticked all the boxes of a fully fledged tyrant, in the modern sense.

There was his (Imelda Marcos-style) passion for shoes, his megalomania, sadism and sexual perversion (including incest, it was said, with all three of his sisters), to a decidedly odd relationship with his pets. One of his bright ideas was supposed to have been to make his favourite horse a consul - the chief magistrate of Rome.

Find out more

Caligula with Mary Beard is broadcast at 21:00 BST on 29 July 2013 on BBC Two
Or watch on BBC iPlayer Mary Beard: The man behind the infamy
Roman writers went on and on about his appalling behaviour, and he became so much the touchstone of tyranny for them that one unpopular emperor, half a century later, was nicknamed "the bald Caligula".

But how many of their lurid stories are true is very hard to know. Did he really force men to watch the execution of their sons, then invite them to a jolly dinner, where they were expected to laugh and joke? Did he actually go into the Temple of the gods Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum and wait for people to turn up and worship him?

It is probably too sceptical to mistrust everything that we are told. Against all expectations, one Cambridge archaeologist thinks he may have found traces of the vast bridge that Caligula was supposed to have built between his own palace and the Temple of Jupiter - so it was easier for him to go and have a chat with the god, when he wanted.

So the idea that Caligula was a nice young man who has simply had a very bad press doesn't sound very plausible.

All the same, the evidence for Caligula's monstrosity isn't quite as clear-cut as it looks at first sight. There are a few eyewitness accounts of parts of his reign, and none of them mention any of the worst stories.

There is no mention in these, for example, of any incest with his sisters. And one extraordinary description by Philo, a high-ranking Jewish ambassador, of an audience with Caligula makes him sound a rather menacing jokester, but nothing worse.

He banters with the Jews about their refusal to eat pork (while confessing that he himself doesn't like eating lamb), but the imperial mind is not really on the Jewish delegation at all - he's actually busy planning a lavish makeover for one of his palatial residences, and is in the process of choosing new paintings and some expensive window glass.

But even the more extravagant later accounts - for example the gossipy biography of Caligula by Suetonius, written about 80 years after his death - are not quite as extravagant as they seem.

Caligula in popular culture

French Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote well-regarded 1938 play Caligula, recently revived in London starring Michael Sheen

John Hurt (pictured) made screen-stealing performance as emperor in 1976 TV series I Claudius, based on Robert Graves's 1934 novel

1979 film Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell, was infamous for high levels of sex and violence, but disowned by director and scriptwriter and described by one critic as a "dreary shambles"

Discover more about Caligula Lascivious lifestyles in ancient Rome? Rome's pivotal Emperors
If you read them carefully, time and again, you discover that they aren't reporting what Caligula actually did, but what people said he did, or said he planned to do.

It was only hearsay that the emperor's granny had once found him in bed with his favourite sister. And no Roman writer, so far as we know, ever said that he made his horse a consul. All they said was that people said that he planned to make his horse a consul.

The most likely explanation is that the whole horse/consul story goes back to one of those bantering jokes. My own best guess would be that the exasperated emperor one day taunted the aristocracy by saying something along the lines of: "You guys are all so hopeless that I might as well make my horse a consul!"

And from some such quip, that particular story of the emperor's madness was born.

The truth is that, as the centuries have gone by, Caligula has become, in the popular imagination, nastier and nastier. It is probably more us than the ancient Romans who have invested in this particular version of despotic tyranny.

In the BBC's 1976 series of I Claudius, Caligula (played by John Hurt) memorably appeared with a horrible bloody face - after eating a foetus, so we were led to believe, torn from his sister's belly.

This scene was entirely an invention of the 1970s scriptwriter. But it wrote Hurt into the history of Caligula.

The vision even spread to comics. Chief Judge Cal in Judge Dredd was based on Hurt's version of the emperor - and appropriately enough Cal really did make his pet goldfish Deputy Chief Judge.

But if the modern world has partly invented Caligula, so it also has lessons to learn from him and from the regime change that brought him down.

View Caligula's Palace and Bridge by J.M.W. Turner on the BBC Your Paintings site

Caligula was assassinated in a bloody coup after just four years on the throne. And his assassination partly explains his awful reputation. The propaganda machine of his successors was keen to blacken his name partly to justify his removal - hence all those terrible stories.

More topical though is the question of what, or who, came next. Caligula was assassinated in the name of freedom. And for a few hours the ancient Romans do seem to have flirted with overthrowing one-man rule entirely, and reinstating democracy.

But then the palace guard found Caligula's uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and hailed him emperor instead. Thanks to Robert Graves, Claudius has had a good press, as a rather sympathetic, slightly bumbling, bookish ruler.

But the ancient writers tell a different story - of an autocrat who was just as bad as the man he had replaced. The Romans thought they were getting freedom, but got more of the same.

Considering what happened then, it's hard not to think of the excitements and disappointments of the Arab Spring.
Caligula with Mary Beard is broadcast at 21:00 BST on 29 July 2013 on BBC Two You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook

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Did Caligula deserve his bad reputation?

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The Roman emperor Caligula's name has become a byword for depraved tyranny, used as a popular benchmark for everyone from Idi Amin to Jean-Bedel Bokassa. But was Caligula really mad and bad, or the victim of a smear campaign, asks historian Mary Beard. Our modern idea of tyranny was born 2,000 years ago.

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Is the McDonald's McDouble the 'cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history?

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Is the McDonald's McDouble the 'cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history?

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In terms of 'the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history,' the golden arches of McDonald's probably isn't the first thing to pop into your mind.

But they should - according to a New York Post columnist and an economics blogger, anyway.

Post columnist Kyle Smith made a pretty compelling case for the McDonald's Mcdouble's giving diners the most bang for their nutritional buck.

At 390 calories, 23 grams of protein, 7-percent of the daily value of fiber, 20-percent of daily calcium and 19 grams of fat - with a typical price tag of about a buck - the McDouble, its advocates argue, is the most price-efficient food 'that has ever existed in human history.

'For the average poor person, it isn't a great option to take a trip to the farmers market to puzzle over esoteric lefty-foodie codes. (Is sustainable better than organic? What if I have to choose between fair trade and cruelty-free?) Produce may seem cheap to environmentally aware blond moms who spend $300 on their highlights every month, but if your object is to fill your belly, it is hugely expensive per calorie,' Smith writes.

'Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies and the like cost more than 10 times as much, found a 2007 University of Washington survey for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. A 2,000-calorie day of meals would, if you stuck strictly to the good-for-you stuff, cost $36.32, said the study's lead author, Adam Drewnowski.'

Smith's argument initially was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Leavitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

Adding fuel to the argument is the fact that studies show that 'people who eat out tend to eat less at home that day in partial compensation; the net gain, according to a 2008 study out of Berkeley and Northwestern, is only about 24 calories a day.'

Another factor in the argument is the rising cost of organic foods, which Smith says are now becoming a 'luxury item.'

Smith realizes the theory isn't going to be a popular one amongst the Liberal 'coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types.'

But facts are facts - and 'where else but McDonald's can poor people obtain so many calories per dollar?'

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Is the McDonald's McDouble the 'cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history?'

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In terms of 'the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history,' the golden arches of McDonald's probably isn't the first thing to pop into your mind. But they should - according to a New York Post columnist and an economics blogger, anyway.

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40 years on from the party where hip hop was born

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40 years on from the party where hip hop was born

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It is 40 years since a ‘back to school jam' in New York’s west Bronx kickstarted a movement and spawned a whole culture. BBC Culture’s Rebecca Laurence looks back on a party that changed the world.

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On a hot August night in 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy put on a 'back to school jam' in the recreation room of their apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx. Entrance cost 25c for 'ladies' and 50c for 'fellas'.

The party wasn't special for its size - the rec room could only hold a few hundred people. Its venue and location weren't particularly auspicious. Yet it marked a turning point - a spark which would ignite an international movement that is still with us today. As Kool Herc said in a recent statement: "This first hip-hop party would change the world."

The legend is a simple one - but the factors leading to the creation of a hip hop culture were a fusion of social, musical and political influences as diverse and complex as the sound itself.

In his award-winning book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the journalist and academic Jeff Chang locates the foundations of hip hop in the social policies of 'urban renewal' pioneered by Robert Moses and the 'benign neglect' of Nixon's administration. The building of New York's Cross Bronx Expressway razed through many of the city's ethnic neighbourhoods, destroying homes and jobs and displacing poor black and Hispanic communities in veritable wastelands like east Brooklyn and the South Bronx, while the government turned a blind eye to those affected.

"Hip hop did not start as a political movement," Chang tells BBC Culture. "There was no manifesto. The kids who started it were simply trying to find ways to pass the time, they were trying to have fun. But they grew up under the politics of abandonment and because of this, their pastimes contained the seeds for a kind of mass cultural renewal."
Break with the past
Hip hop signaled a profound shift at the beginning of the 1970s, following the FBI's suppression of late '60s radical black groups and the waning of gang wars. Rather than taking political action, a new generation expressed itself through DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling (breakdancing), and graffiti, the 'four elements' of hip hop. Artist Fab 5 Freddy, who coined this term, argued that the looping interactivity of the 'four elements' proved hip hop went beyond a purely musical or artistic movement - it was an entire culture.

Marcyliena Morgan is Professor of African American Studies and director of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University. She asserts the importance of celebrating the positive narratives generated by the hip hop generation.

"Hip hoppers literally mapped onto the consciousness of the world a place and an identity for themselves as the originators of an exciting new art form" she tells BBC Culture. "They created value out of races and places that had seemed to offer only devastation."

Kool Herc, along with Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, is one of the 'three kings', the 'holy trinity' of hip hop's early days. But Herc's story, insists Chang, is where it all started: "Without DJ Kool Herc, we wouldn't be talking about [hip hop] now, 40 years later, all around the world" he says.

Clive Campbell was born in Jamaica, moved to New York in 1967, and picked up the nickname 'Hercules', (shortened to 'Herc') for his impressive stature. His father, Keith had a diverse record collection, and as the technician for a local band - and importantly for Herc's burgeoning DJ career - access to sound equipment. Herc began DJing at house parties where he developed some important technical innovations. He found a way to make his set-up the loudest around, using two turntables and a mixer to switch between records (with the labels soaked off, Jamaican-style, to protect his secrets). Inspired by a youth spent watching rival sound systems in Kingston, Herc brought Jamaican culture with him to the Bronx - the booming bass and dub sound, and the custom of 'toasting' or talking over records, which his friend Coke La Roc used to powerful effect at the Sedgwick Avenue party.

Even more importantly, Herc observed that the b-boys and b-girls were going wild for the instrumental breaks in the records, and he began searching for the tracks - and the breaks - to please the dancers. His most famous musical discoveries - Bongo Rock and Apache by The Incredible Bongo Band, were purely instrumental: the bongo and conga beats kept the crowd dancing for longer. It was a simple observation- but the creation of the 'breakbeat' would be one of the key innovations in contemporary dance music.

Such was the popularity of his block parties, that by the end of 1973, Herc could no longer DJ in spaces as small as the Sedgwick Avenue rec room. He moved into bigger clubs and the Bronx's Cedar Park, and for a few years - with his crew the Herculoids - was the ultimate draw in the area's music scene. But by 1977, his star had waned and other rival New York DJs, notably the South Bronx's Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were waiting in the wings.

And what happened to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue? In 2007, Kool Herc was involved in a campaign to stop the block being sold to developers. The recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick was officially recognised by NYC Housing Preservation as "the birthplace of hip-hop". This weekend, 40 years after hip hop's birth, the normally reclusive Herc will be DJing alongside Coke La Roc at events around New York City.
Creation myths
The story of hip hop's genesis is a legend as much shrouded in mythology as that of punk and the Sex Pistols' gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester three years later. That gig has become legendary as the birth of post-punk, indie and the entire Manchester scene. Thousands have since claimed they were there - although the actual number that attended is better estimated at between 40 and 100. What makes these tales so important?

"Every culture needs a creation myth" says Chang. "These stories tell us about the kinds of values we want to transmit. I think the story of Herc and Cindy's party, in ways we perhaps don't realise, speaks to the need for joy amidst turmoil, the power of creativity against destruction, the 'started from the bottom' ethic that youth will always find a way to express itself."

Remembering and preserving the legacy of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, DJ Kool Herc and the night of 11 August 1973 is a way to keep these positive values alive. "The Bronx won the rights to the DJ history through constant repetition of the first time DJ Kool Herc connected his sound system and mixed records" Professor Morgan says, and hip hop's pioneers transformed "the land of the ghetto into the land of myth and the future."

Jeff Chang agrees. For him, looking back to hip hop's early days is also a way of looking forward.

"I'm not a purist or a nostalgist" he says. "But I believe in the values that have sustained hip hop from the beginning: inclusion, recognition, creativity, and transformation. In the end, hip hop is about teenagers, it's about youth. And as long as they are taking those values forward, hip hop won't die."
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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40 years on from the party where hip hop was born

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On a hot August night in 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy put on a 'back to school jam' in the recreation room of their apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx. Entrance cost 25c for 'ladies' and 50c for 'fellas'.

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30+ Techniques

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Closing techniques in selling are used to gain agreement to the sale.

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Happiness: something everyone hopes to achieve in his or her lifetime. Such a simple concept, yet many have trouble realizing how to obtain it. Sometimes we unintentionally create our own obstacles that prevent us from achieving this goal. It is ever so important to realize the ways we are limiting ourselves so we can fully reach happiness.

Happy people and unhappy people see the world through two completely opposing views. Let's look at the ways happy people stay happy, while the unhappy remain miserable.

1. Gossip

The only people who gossip are people whose personal lives are not fulfilling enough. If you are happy and content with your life, why do you even care what is going on in someone else's? There is no reason to engage in this petty behavior -- all it does is make you look pathetic and jealous.

2. Concern Themselves With Other People's Problems

People who are unable to mind their own business are most likely internally miserable. They seek to find faults within others just to make themselves feel better. They tend to lead boring lives and have no excitement in their own, so they act in this manner to create something out of nothing. They seek to fill the gap in their lives by discussing the lives of others and judging them harshly, so that they can feel better about their own miserable existences.

3. Think Negatively

There are the miserable people, who are always complaining about anything and everything, while on the other side, we have the optimistic people who always look at the glass as half full and are constantly looking for more out of life. Thinking positively will directly affect your happiness since you are focusing on the good as opposed to the bad.

4. Act Jealous

There is no reason for a happy person to act jealous towards others. They recognize the good fortune they possess and relish in it. They do not compare themselves to others since they are more than likely content with themselves. Instead of acting jealous towards others, they take pleasure in their success and celebrate their accomplishments with them.

5. Seek Validation From Others

Happy people do not look to others to confirm their self-worth. They recognize their value on their own and don't live up to anyone's expectations. They do things for themselves that they believe will advance them in life. By not concerning themselves with the opinions of others, they can focus on personal growth.

6. Seek Revenge

There is no reason to actively seek revenge against another person. Leave that up to karma and just continue living your life accordingly. Instead of focusing on revenge, happy people try to make peace with the issue. The only way to stop revenge is to give up and to accept it. Replace the evil feelings with opposite thinking. This is the only way; rise above it and let it be.

7. Hold Onto Resentment

By holding onto resentment, all you are doing is continuing and intensifying your own sadness. Learn to let things go, especially those which are unchangeable and that are in the past. This feeling will eat at you from the inside and cause stress. There is a unique sense of freedom once you let your anger go.

8. Argue For The Sake Of Being Right

It'd be easy to voice my thoughts rationally, but quite as easy to do it condescendingly as well. Many people will have a belief and will hold onto it even when contrary facts are presented to them. If it is a topic that you know they won't listen to with open ears, don't open your mouth just so you can appear wiser in the eyes of those around you. You're only boosting your ego. Do not force your opinions on others or think you know best, as everyone is coming from somewhere. State your point calmly and listen to others. At the very least, you can always agree to disagree.

9. Have Expectations

One of the biggest challenges we face in life is learning to accept people for who they truly are. Once you realize that your expectations cannot change people, the better off you will be. The problem will arise when the expectations do not materialize. Unrealistic expectations will, can, and most often do lead to disappointment. Do not expect things out of situations; just go into them with an open mind. This will allow you to fully immerse yourself without the pressure of living up to preconceived notions.

10. Avoid Personal Problems

When a problem arises, it is the unhappy people who tend to ignore it. This is an awful way to handle situations as the longer you let a problem linger, the greater it will become. You need to tackle issues head on and as soon as possible in hopes of rectifying the circumstances. The stress and anxiety of ignoring such things can and will make you miserable and consumed with worry.

11. Look For Happiness Externally

Your happiness is contingent upon your outlook and not the actual situation. You have the power to view things in certain ways, so it is crucial to try and remain positive. Look within yourself to create your own happiness. Do not look at others to fulfill you, you are more than capable on your own. No relationship or material possession can bring you true happiness until you are happy on your own, first and foremost. This is a fatal error far too many people make in their lives.

12. Over Think Things

Over thinking is what creates problems from nothing and is probably the leading cause for arguments between two people. Many people falsely believe that by over thinking certain things, they can garner a better result. There are actually little to no benefits to overanalyzing any given situation. All this will do is cause a person stress and anxiety. The more time a person analyzes a decision, the more time this person makes themselves susceptible to negative thinking. Rational decisions can become clouded when a person lingers on them for too long. The motivation and drive behind the initial idea can and will start to obscure.

13. Live In The Past

The past is the past for a reason -- it has already happened. There is no reason to linger there since it cannot be changed. Happy people tend to make peace with their past and focus on the future. They actively seek out different opportunities in order to make the most out of their lives.

14. Follow The Crowd

Confidence is a crucial aspect of any happy person, just like this is a critical characteristic for a leader. Happy people tend to be secure in their values and beliefs and, as a result, have a propensity to be leaders as opposed to followers.

15. Take Things Personally

When you hear a comment that you think is directed at you, take a moment and think. Do not over analyze the situation at hand, just let the other person speak freely. Listen completely to what this person is saying - selective hearing is the cause of these misinterpretations. People tend to get caught up in petty drama, which typically occurs when one person takes something the wrong way. When it comes down to it, you're in control of how you interpret things. Think of how much more you could achieve with a new perspective, one seen only through your eyes.
Photo Courtesy: Tumblr

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Happiness: something everyone hopes to achieve in his or her lifetime. Such a simple concept, yet many have trouble realizing how to obtain it. Sometimes we unintentionally create our own obstacles that prevent us from achieving this goal. It is ever...

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Scientists Seek to Rein In Diagnoses of Cancer

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Scientists Seek to Rein In Diagnoses of Cancer

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A group of experts advising the nation’s premier cancer research institution has recommended sweeping changes in the approach to cancer detection and treatment, including changes in the very definition of cancer and eliminating the word entirely from some common diagnoses.

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A group of experts advising the nation's premier cancer research institution has recommended changing the definition of cancer and eliminating the word from some common diagnoses as part of sweeping changes in the nation's approach to cancer detection and treatment.

The recommendations, from a working group of the National Cancer Institute, were published on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They say, for instance, that some premalignant conditions, like one that affects the breast called ductal carcinoma in situ, which many doctors agree is not cancer, should be renamed to exclude the word carcinoma so that patients are less frightened and less likely to seek what may be unneeded and potentially harmful treatments that can include the surgical removal of the breast.

The group, which includes some of the top scientists in cancer research, also suggested that many lesions detected during breast, prostate, thyroid, lung and other cancer screenings should not be called cancer at all but should instead be reclassified as IDLE conditions, which stands for "indolent lesions of epithelial origin."

While it is clear that some or all of the changes may not happen for years, if it all, and that some cancer experts will profoundly disagree with the group's views, the report from such a prominent group of scientists who have the backing of the National Cancer Institute brings the discussion to a higher level and will most likely change the national conversation about cancer, its definition, its treatment and future research.

"We need a 21st-century definition of cancer instead of a 19th-century definition of cancer, which is what we've been using," said Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who was not directly involved in the report.

The impetus behind the call for change is a growing concern among doctors, scientists and patient advocates that hundreds of thousands of men and women are undergoing needless and sometimes disfiguring and harmful treatments for premalignant and cancerous lesions that are so slow growing they are unlikely to ever cause harm.

The advent of highly sensitive screening technology in recent years has increased the likelihood of finding these so-called incidentalomas - the name given to incidental findings detected during medical scans that most likely would never cause a problem. However, once doctors and patients are aware a lesion exists, they typically feel compelled to biopsy, treat and remove it, often at great physical and psychological pain and risk to the patient. The issue is often referred to as overdiagnosis, and the resulting unnecessary procedures to which patients are subjected are called overtreatment.

Cancer researchers warned about the risk of overdiagnosis and overtreatment as a result of new recommendations from a government panel that heavy smokers be given an annual CT scan. While the policy change, announced on Monday but not yet made final, has the potential to save 20,000 lives a year, some doctors warned about the cumulative radiation risk of repeat scans as well as worries that broader use of the scans will lead to more risky and invasive medical procedures.

Officials at the National Cancer Institute say overdiagnosis is a major public health concern and a priority of the agency. "We're still having trouble convincing people that the things that get found as a consequence of mammography and P.S.A. testing and other screening devices are not always malignancies in the classical sense that will kill you," said Dr. Harold E. Varmus, the Nobel Prize-winning director of the National Cancer Institute. "Just as the general public is catching up to this idea, there are scientists who are catching up, too."

One way to address the issue is to change the language used to describe lesions found through screening, said Dr. Laura J. Esserman, the lead author of the report in The Journal of the American Medical Association and the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco. In the report, Dr. Esserman and her colleagues said they would like to see a multidisciplinary panel convened to address the issue, led by pathologists, with input from surgeons, oncologists and radiologists, among others.

"Ductal carcinoma in situ is not cancer, so why are we calling it cancer?" said Dr. Esserman, who is a professor of surgery and radiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Such proposals will not be universally embraced. Dr. Larry Norton, the medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said the larger problem is that doctors cannot tell patients with certainty which cancers will not progress and which cancers will kill them, and changing terminology does not solve that problem.

"Which cases of D.C.I.S. will turn into an aggressive cancer and which ones won't?" he said, referring to ductal carcinoma in situ. "I wish we knew that. We don't have very accurate ways of looking at tissue and looking at tumors under the microscope and knowing with great certainty that it is a slow-growing cancer."

Dr. Norton, who was not part of the report, agreed that doctors do need to focus on better communication with patients about precancerous and cancerous conditions. He said he often tells patients that even though ductal carcinoma in situ may look like cancer, it will not necessarily act like cancer - just as someone who is "dressed like a criminal" is not actually a criminal until that person breaks the law.

"The terminology is just a descriptive term, and there's no question that has to be explained," Dr. Norton said. "But you can't go back and change hundreds of years of literature by suddenly changing terminology."

But proponents of downgrading cancerous conditions with a simple name change say there is precedent for doing so. The report's authors note that in 1998, the World Health Organization changed the name of an early-stage urinary tract tumor, removing the word "carcinoma" and calling it "papillary urothelial neoplasia of low malignant potential." When a common Pap smear finding called "cervical intraepithelial neoplasia" was reclassified as a low-grade lesion rather than a malignancy, women were more willing to submit to observation rather than demanding treatment, Dr. Esserman said.

"Changing the language we use to diagnose various lesions is essential to give patients confidence that they don't have to aggressively treat every finding in a scan," she said. "The problem for the public is you hear the word cancer, and you think you will die unless you get treated. We should reserve this term, 'cancer,' for those things that are highly likely to cause a problem."

The concern, however, is that since doctors do not yet have a clear way to tell the difference between benign or slow-growing tumors and aggressive diseases with many of these conditions, they treat everything as if it might become aggressive. As a result, doctors are finding and treating scores of seemingly precancerous lesions and early-stage cancers - like ductal carcinoma in situ, a condition called Barrett's esophagus, small thyroid tumors and early prostate cancer.

But even after years of aggressively treating those conditions, there has not been a commensurate reduction in invasive cancer, suggesting that overdiagnosis and overtreatment are occurring on a large scale.

The National Cancer Institute working group also called for a greater focus on research to identify both benign and slow-growing tumors and aggressive diseases, including the creation of patient registries to learn more about lesions that appear unlikely to become cancer.

Some of that research is already under way at the National Cancer Institute. Since becoming director of the institute three years ago, Dr. Varmus has set up a list of "provocative questions" aimed at encouraging scientists to focus on critical areas, including the issue of overdiagnosis and molecular tests to distinguish between slow-growing and aggressive tumors.

Another National Cancer Institute program, the Barrett's Esophagus Translational Research Network, or Betrnet, is focused on changes in the esophageal lining that for years have been viewed as a precursor to esophageal cancer. Although patients with Barrett's are regularly screened and sometimes treated by burning off the esophageal lining, data now increasingly suggest that most of the time, Barrett's is benign and probably does not need to be treated at all. Researchers from various academic centers are now working together and pooling tissue samples to spur research that will determine when Barrett's is most likely to become cancerous.

"Our investigators are not just looking for ways to detect cancer early, they are thinking about this question of when you find a cancer, what are the factors that might determine how aggressively it will behave," Dr. Varmus said. "This is a long way from the thinking 20 years ago, when you found a cancer cell and felt you had a tremendous risk of dying."

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Scientists Seek to Rein In Diagnoses of Cancer

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A group of experts advising the nation's premier cancer research institution has recommended changing the definition of cancer and eliminating the word from some common diagnoses as part of sweeping changes in the nation's approach to cancer detection and treatment.

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Bluffing still matters, but the best players now depend on math theory

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Bluffing still matters, but the best players now depend on math theory

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By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers.

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By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame-each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world-above- and belowground-that the rest of us never knew existed

Editor's Note: On March 10, 2014, journalist Matthew Power lost his life pursuing a story along the Nile River in Uganda. He left behind a body of work as diverse and compelling as the adventures, tragedies, and passions of his subjects. To honor Matt-and to encourage young writers to pursue new stories-the _Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award _ at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University has been established. A** generous anonymous donor has offered to match all gifts contributed to the endowment, up to a total of $50,000 _, between now and October 22-what would have been Matt's 40th birthday. _**

_Donors who give $125+ will be sent their choice of one of five prints (82) donated by urban explorers featured in this story. You can view these select images on the Crowdrise page photo carousel. _

By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame-each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world-above and below ground-that the rest of us never knew existed

As Singapore Airlines flight 322 descended through the early-morning haze toward Heathrow, Bradley L. Garrett, Ph.D.-just Brad to his research subjects-looked out over the gray sprawl of London spreading to a horizon streaked by sunrise. He was returning from a monthlong study project in Cambodia, and seeing his adopted city of London again he thought about all the incomparably strange and wonderful things he had witnessed there over four years-all the dizzying heights and hidden depths.

The 747 touched down and taxied, its passengers cramped and bleary after the thirteen-hour flight. But when the aircraft reached the gate, its doors didn't open. After several minutes, the pilot came on the intercom, and Garrett fired off a tweet: "Just landed at Heathrow and we are told the police are boarding our aircraft. Welcome home. x"

A group of uniformed officers from the British Transport Police entered the plane and came down the aisle. They stopped at his seat, 42K. "Dr. Garrett?" "Yes?" "We need you to come with us." An officer gripped each arm, and they led him down the aisle, past scores of wide-eyed passengers. In first class, former British prime minister Gordon Brown was furious over the delay.

Garrett was handcuffed and led through passport control, where his ID was seized. Fingerprints, mug shots, and DNA swabs followed. He was eventually led to a holding cell and then an interrogation room. There he was not formally charged but was informed that he was being investigated for burglary, property destruction, and criminal trespass, among numerous other possible charges. He was told he had been the subject of a manhunt by the British Transport Police. His alleged crimes were a blatant affront to the image of a high-tech security state London had constructed for itself. And yet, during his interrogation, an investigator leaned across the table and whispered: "Off the record, Bradley, I love the work that you do."

Despite his scholarly bona fides-his doctoral work in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London had garnered wide acclaim-Garrett scarcely looks the part of an academic, neither tweedy nor fusty. Thirty-two years old, with a trimmed goatee and a mop of straight brown hair hanging over black plastic frames, he grew up in Southern California and ran a skate shop before deciding to pursue a doctorate. His face, which is frequently lit up in mischievous, eyebrow-raised delight, still bears the pocks of over a dozen piercings he dispensed with in the interests of maintaining some veneer of academic respectability.

*How's This for a To-Do List? * Bradley Garrett tells us his team's dream targets.

1. Gwangmyong Ghost Station, North Korea.

"Apparently North Korea has a metro system in Pyongyang and, even better, an abandoned station hidden in its depths."

"Henry Ford built this Michigan-style company town to harvest rubber from the Brazilian jungle in 1928. It's now a ghost town.

"This Moscow metro system was rumored to have been built by Stalin to transport the Soviet elite to the Kremlin, a secret airport, and a town beneath Ramenki. It's guarded by guys with machine guns. We want in."

4. The Statue of Liberty Torch.

"Accessible via a fifty-four-rung ladder in the arm. And if we can't take the ladder, we'll shoot an arrow tied with fishing line up to the torch from the crown and rig ropes like we did at the Angel of the North in England. Game on."

But it was his doctoral research itself that was perhaps most punk rock. His dissertation in human geography, which he had defended the previous year, was entitled "Place Hacking." The title came from his argument that physical space is coded just like the operating system of a computer network, and it could be hacked-explored, infiltrated, re-coded-in precisely the same ways. He conducted a deep ethnographic study of a small crew of self-described "urban explorers" who over several years had infiltrated an astonishing array of off-limits sites above and below London and across Europe: abandoned Tube stations, uncompleted skyscrapers, World War II bomb shelters, derelict submarines, and half-built Olympic stadiums. They had commandeered (and accidentally derailed) an underground train of the now defunct Mail Rail, which once delivered the Royal Mail along a 23-mile circuit beneath London. They had pried open the blast doors of the Burlington bunker, a disused 35-acre subterranean Cold War-era complex that was to house the British government in the event of nuclear Armageddon. The London crew's objective, as much as any of them could agree on one, was to rediscover, re-appropriate, and reimagine the urban landscape in what is perhaps the most highly surveilled and tightly controlled city on earth.

The catch-all term for these space-invading activities is "Urbex," and in recent years it has grown as a global movement, from Melbourne to Minneapolis to Minsk. The Urbex ethos was, in theory, low-impact: no vandalism, no theft, take only photographs; as one practitioner put it, "a victimless crime." Urbex is staunchly anticommercial (Converse was widely mocked in the scene when it released an urban-exploration-themed sneaker), and yet has an undercurrent of self-promotion, with many explorers selling their photographs to the media or publicizing them on blogs and web forums. Despite some initial skepticism about the legitimacy of the topic by his university advisers, Urbex proved to be a rich avenue of inquiry for Garrett-far better than his initial plan to study modern-day Druids. But in the course of his research Garrett had gone native in a big way, acting both as a scientific observer of a fractious subculture and an active participant in their explorations. And he made no excuses for that. "The whole definition of ethnography is that it's participation," he told me. "You go out and you interact with people, and you live with them, and you understand their lives."

One of the risks of going native, of course, is becoming the public face of the movement you are documenting. Earlier in the year, Garrett's face was splashed across the British tabloid media as a de facto Urbex spokesman when his crew (whom he also refers to as his "project participants" and "research subjects," depending on the context) released an astonishing series of photos taken high atop the unfinished superstructure of London's 1,016-foot Shard, the second-tallest building in Europe. People were amazed to see shots of black-masked explorers standing casually atop construction cranes, the city glittering below as if viewed from an airplane.

There was some dismay that a city investing well over $1 billion on security in the run-up to the Olympics would be caught off guard so easily. (There were said to be more British soldiers on duty for the Games in London than stationed in Afghanistan.) The specter of terrorism was invoked, though Garrett saw his group's role-like that of "white hat" computer hackers-as probing security flaws to expose them, and even suggested, half-seriously, that he and his crew should be hired as consultants. Garrett looked at exploration more as an act of playful subversion than outright revolution. To prove it, he had invited me to come along and see their hidden world for myself.

I arrived at Heathrow on a red-eye from New York at the exact same time as Garrett was being detained. After waiting three hours for him at the baggage claim, I took a cab to Garrett's flat in South London. There the mystery deepened. The door frame was splintered, and the shattered door was held shut by a pair of fist-sized padlocks. A neighbor told me the police had smashed in the door at 6 a.m., just as Garrett was landing. It would turn out that five other members of his crew-"project participants" all-had been swept up in a series of simultaneous raids across London.

As it turned out, the police had not come after Garrett for the notorious Shard tower climb. They were interested in another hack: Garrett's foray into an old World War II bomb shelter. Hundreds of feet below the streets, the Clapham Common "deep shelter" had been mothballed for decades, until the government rented it out to an American secure-file-storage company called Iron Mountain. Garrett had found a way in through a massive airshaft a few blocks from his house. A door had been forced open, and then, accompanied by several friends, Garrett had rappelled a hundred feet down into the darkness. The magnetic door alarm was disarmed with gaffer's tape, and the group spent an evening cheerfully rummaging through box after box of bank files and legal documents. There was little to titillate in the vast archive, as none of it seemed particularly top secret, but nevertheless they recorded the entire expedition for posterity. In his 359-page dissertation, Garrett documented exactly how the entire operation was carried out in minute detail. During his interrogation, the investigators flipped through his phone-book-sized dissertation for reference. There was even a picture of him, grinning impishly, next to a stack of secure-file storage bos.

Garrett finally arrived at his apartment that evening, twelve hours after he'd been detained. The police had given him keys to the padlocks they'd attached, and the door swung open crookedly. "When they gave me the keys," he said, "I told them 'I hope you locked my house up better than you lock up your Tube stations.' "

Swigging from the bottle of Jim Beam Black he'd asked me to pick up at duty-free, Garrett surveyed the damage. They had also hoped to find Urbex paraphernalia like manhole keys, bolt cutters, lock picks, and high-visibility fluorescent vests used to pass oneself off as a utility worker. Even the curved underwire of a brassiere, which can be used to slip a latch from the outside, would have been considered evidence of criminal intent. But the police had found nothing when they arrived. Garrett had hoped to rent his small studio out on Craigslist while traveling, and the place had been left as empty and spotless as a hotel room.

In the accrued pile of mail on the floor, there was a letter from Oord University, offering Garrett a paid research position in the coming academic year. He had only to bring his passport to fill out some forms.

"Fuck," he muttered, running his fingers through his hair and pacing around the tiny studio as if caged. His passport, of course, was now in the hands of the British authorities. The Transport Police had interrogated Garrett for several hours, asking dozens of questions about his activities and affiliations, all of which he answered with "No comment."

Garrett was understandably despondent, and given the world of shit he had just entered-arrest, police investigation, the possibility of deportation-I assumed that he would wish to beg off on the extensive itinerary he had planned for my visit. I offered to leave him to deal with his problems.

"No way," he said, looking up from the wreckage around him with a grin. "I'm doubling down."

By midnight, five of us were cruising through the streets of South London in a cartoonishly tiny Renault Twingo dubbed "The Twinkie," the GPS preprogrammed with the locations of dozens of manholes and Tube stations. I was crammed into the backseat with several visiting explorers: A computer programmer from France named Marc who goes by the nom de Urbex Explo; Luca, a 28-year-old intensive-care doctor from Italy with a penchant for subterranean exploration; and Helen*, a strawberry-blonde 23-year-old photographer from northeast England, who goes by the nickname Urban Fox. Helen loved climbing bridges more than anything: Her website showed a nighttime self-portrait, taken high atop the Manhattan Bridge, posed au naturel. Given that our** **first adventure was subterranean, its only obvious omission was the group's underground guru, Greg-nicknamed Otter after going headfirst into a sewer. Otter had an almost Aspergerian level of knowledge covering the hundreds of miles of sewer tunnels, storm drainages, and underground rivers that snake beneath London. The rest of the crew joke that he's a "drainspotter." He had been arrested in the sweep that nabbed Garrett and had a prior court order banning him from exploring in London.

"He hasn't been banned from exploring," clarified Explo, whose French-and-Cockney-inflected English lent itself well to one-liners. "He's been banned from getting caught."

Still, Otter had kindly traced out a route for us to cross London entirely underground, something Garrett insisted was "a first in human history." Before we set out, Otter had asked if I had ever been in a sewer, and I admitted that I had not.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pleasant, as that would be an outright lie," he told me. "But you will be surprised to find how not as bad as you'd think it would be it actually is."

Reassuring. How about safety?

"As long as you time your route with the tides in the Thames," said Otter, "the chance of drowning will be very low."

I see. And will there be rats?

As we passed the hordes of lager louts and lasses lined up outside clubs and vomiting in dustbins, Garrett expressed his dismay that his own activities were the ones considered inappropriate. "The primary hobby in England is getting absolutely fucked and getting into a fight, or dressing like a hooker and wandering the streets." Why should an activity as wholesome as Urbex be criminalized? He was convinced the authorities found it suspect precisely because it seemed pointless to them and fit no neat theory of social order.

Following Otter's directions, we parked near a railway overpass and quickly suited up in waders and headlamps, trying to look as casual as possible as Garrett and Explo argued over the precise location we were looking for. When they found it, Explo stage-whispered "Action!" Garrett pulled out a T-shaped metal key and inserted it into a hatch in the sidewalk. It** **opened with a rusty shriek. "That's how you pop a lid," he said. In an instant we were piling down slippery rungs into a dank and pitch-black hole. Garrett descended last, and I heard the manhole cover slam shut with a funereal clang.

* Names of some explorers have been changed.

We stood in the foot-deep stream of sewer water flowing down the tunnel. So that's like, storm runoff and bathwater and such? I asked.

"That's everything, dude," replied Garrett. "Even the Fresh."

"The Fresh" is Urbex-speak for shit.

We walked for what seemed like hours along an eight-foot-high tunnel. The experience encompassed an almost laughable agglomeration of stock phobias-darkness, rats, germs, drowning-but** **Otter was right: It smelled merely musty, not toxic, like wading down an underground stream, and soon I was swept up in the general enthusiasm of the company. As we started sloshing north, the crew's whoops of delight reverberated-sounding almost Auto-Tuned in the strange acoustics. Garrett told me he had once brought an inflatable raft down here and drifted along with London's effluent flow.

I began to get an inkling of the "radical freedom" Garrett had described in Urbex. In his dissertation he described the sewers as having a "noxious comfort," and sees them as a zone of total self-reliance and personal responsibility. It was true. In a city said to have 200,000 security cameras, we were unmonitored and completely alone. The compass app on my iPhone was utterly useless, spinning in disoriented circles.

Commissioned by Parliament after the Great Stink of 1858, London's 1,200-mile Victorian sewer system is one of the great public works of the nineteenth century, rescuing the city from scourges of cholera and typhus. Their chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, might be surprised that he has become something of an Urbex hero, given the honorific "J-Bizzle."

Otter had originally calculated that our journey beneath London, well over fifteen miles, would take about thirty hours to complete. But we missed a crucial turn somewhere in the warren of tunnels and soon reached an impasse, our way blocked by a Dantean lake of sewage. Explo wanted to backtrack, and Helen wanted to sleep in the sewer, but logic and exhaustion won out. We popped out into the middle of a quiet side street as a rosy dawn broke over London. We had, by some space-time wormhole, emerged only a few blocks from Garrett's flat, and we stripped off our hip waders before crashing on his floor, filthy and beat, a chair wedged against the broken door.

We continued on, like caffeinated vampires, sleeping by day and exploring the city after dark. Midnight was the new noon. One night we popped a lid on Fleet Street, where London's largest subterranean river lay buried beneath the city, and descended into the Fleet chamber, a massive tidal gate and storm outflow with gorgeous cathedral arches of brick. Almost no Londoner would ever see it, or even be aware of its existence beneath their feet. I glanced nervously at my watch, as the journey was timed with the tide on the Thames to lessen the risk of drowning. Garrett cracked a beer.

When we came out dripping from the underworld, a double-decker bus rolled past, but the driver paid no attention to our extremely conspicuous group emerging from a manhole at 2 a.m. We circled around the city again, Garrett restless, looking for something. He spied a ten-story construction site surrounded by chain-link and scaffolding. There was a small gap in the fence, just big enough to slip through. Garrett hauled himself effortlessly through to the scaffold. Wary of security guards and CCTV cameras, I followed as silently and elegantly as a bear clambering into a Dumpster. We made our way up an internal stairwell to the roof and onto the ladder of a massive construction crane. Finally we were sitting right next to the control cabin 150 feet up, feet dangled over the void, London glittering to the horizon. Garrett pointed out landmarks, famous and less so: Big Ben, the Eye, the Shard, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, King's Reach Tower. The names sounded like constellations or rock-climbing routes. In fact, he had summited most of them.

The risks were as real as in mountaineering, of course. Explo had nearly fallen from a church steeple when a rusty ladder rung broke off in his hands, and Otter had once broken his arm in a sewer. A few weeks earlier, there had been a rumor that a Russian explorer had died falling through a skylight while crossing a rooftop. Another well-known British explorer had fallen to his death from a hotel balcony in Thailand. Predictably, the explorers minimized the risk. "The percentage of us who actually die is pretty low for what we do," said Explo. The Urbex ethos precluded suing property owners over injuries, and Garrett described the awareness and acceptance of risk, and a sort of dance with it, with a term he'd appropriated from Hunter S. Thompson: "edgework."

As if to demonstrate the concept, Garrett climbed out onto the 100-foot jib of the crane, angled like a fishing rod high above the city. There was no ladder, nothing between him and the black cabs cruising the street far below. His movements along the fog-slicked struts were as deliberate as a stalking cat's. Edgework.

For Garrett, physical exploration is merely the outward manifestation of a deeper philosophical inquiry. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of "psychogeography," defined by the French Situationist philosopher (and noted alcoholic) Guy Debord in 1955 as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment...on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Debord encouraged a practice called dérive ("drift" in French), which entailed wandering through an urban landscape guided only by shifting feelings, unmoored from the duties and associations of daily life. This means of spacily rebooting the urban environment is taken to its logical extreme with Urbex.

The canonical text of the Urbex movement is a book called Access All Areas, a work that's meant to serve as both spiritual and practical guide to a hobby that counters a consumer culture filled with "safe and sanitized attractions that require an admission fee." Its pseudonymous author, Ninjalicious, was a 31-year-old Canadian named Jeff Chapman, who had first written about his exploits in the 1990s in a self-published zine called Infiltration. Chapman died of liver cancer in 2005, just weeks before his book was published, and his death has given his life's work an aura of unimpeachable, almost Christlike authenticity.

Garrett sees his own work as restoring the true spirit of Ninjalicious, pushing the Urbex boundaries beyond the trendy venues: derelict and abandoned buildings. The Urbex term for derelict structures is derp, the sort of places made famous by the romantically postapocalyptic photography of decaying infrastructure nicknamed "ruin porn." "The roots of urban exploration are actually in infiltration, and we've forgotten that as a community," said Garrett. "We're bringing it back to its core. We're seizing it from those fucking ruin fetishists." Garrett calls for a more radical set of tactics into what he calls "live sites." He sees this kind of unsanctioned reclamation of space as the best means to regain freedom in a society that is utterly cordoned and securitized. He carries sheets of stickers that read explore everything, which he affis as a sort of calling card everywhere he goes.

Some cities are more suited to this go-anywhere philosophy than others. London's vast security apparatus, for instance, presents a set of challenges that could be described as Orwell Lite: ubiquitous cameras, by-the-book cops, and a passive-aggressively reinforced expectation of propriety. The city is infused with a sort of pre-apocalyptic nervousness. This can add to the thrill, of course, but when the State kicks in your door, it's always a bummer. Paris, on the other hand, is spoken of in the Urbex scene in the way Okies might have invoked California. "In Paris, they don't give a shit," said Garrett. "The quality of life is so much higher there, because people let you get on with what you want to get on with, they're not in your face all the time about it."

Garrett had initially suggested we go there, but given the confiscation of his passport, it was out of the question. Britain had become a prison island for him, and he didn't want to risk hacking his way out and back in again. But Explo and Helen wanted me to see it, and Otter wanted to go somewhere he wasn't legally enjoined from exploring, so we packed our gear and contorted ourselves into Explo's car and made for the Chunnel, with Garrett escorting us to the border.

We slept that night in the overgrown ruins of a Napoleonic fortress above Dover, drinking cheap port beneath a roof of stars. Garrett said he felt some kinship with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who was just then holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after seeking political asylum and fighting extradition. They had different methods, of course, but each sought to liberate information, to reveal secrets. And both were now suffering the freedom-limiting consequences.** **Garrett was pensive, feeling caged almost, and worried about the pile of legal trouble he was in and what the future might hold. There was also the matter of his outstanding student loans. In the morning, he glumly boarded the train at Dover back toward London.

The following midnight I found myself following Explo's command of Action!, climbing after him over a construction fence surrounding a half-built office tower in La Défense, the central business district of Paris. We found the main stairwell and humped thirty-eight stories up, legs burning, and gasping for breath. The building, designed by the American starchitect Robert A.M. Stern, had the unimprovable name Carpe Diem. There were a half-dozen explorers in the group, including Patch, a 25-year-old Brit who was currently wanted in London on the same warrant for which Garrett had been arrested. Patch's most recent job was as a stock manager at a Walmart, but for now he was staying in a squat and planning to return to London in a few months when the heat was off.

We came out onto the darkened concrete roof and then scaled the metal stairs of a looming tower crane, sweat freezing in the now alpine air. In the sharp wind, the crane swiveled side to side like a giant weather vane. Paris flowed and pulsed 600 feet below us, but it was eerily quiet at that height. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower erupted into a glittering laser-light spectacle to mark the hour. Several people crammed into the operator's cab of the crane, which- quelle surprise!-still had the keys in it. Someone scrolled through the crane's commands on its touch screen. I asked them to stop touching the fucking buttons, please.

Exiting the building site after the long walk down, Explo whispered in a mock video-game voice: "Level Two, complete."

It occurred to me then that Explo's cry of "Action!" at the beginning of each adventure had a double meaning. It was both a call to arms and a director's command in the fantasy movie of his own life, in which he was the auteur and hero both. The Urbex life is at heart a form of play, a pressure valve to regulate the atmospheric crush of daily life. Explo, at his programming job, might daydream of a manhole in the floor of his cubicle, of some escape from the mundane requirements of modern society. Once you begin playing this game, the entire world becomes filled with secret doors.

Some doors hide better secrets than others. One afternoon as we weaved through chaotic traffic, Explo pulled up next to a middle-aged black man with long dreadlocks and an army jacket, sitting on a park bench. " Ça va, Dirty!" he called, sticking his head out the sunroof. They conversed rapidly in French, then Explo popped back down. "That's Dirty. He invited us to a party later. It's funny, I consider him a friend and yet I've never seen him more than ten meters from a manhole. He's a cataphile."

A cataphile is an aficionado of the vast network of catacombs, quarried over centuries from the soft limestone beneath the city. Nobody knows for sure how far they extend, but hundreds of miles of tunnels have been charted, underlying a tenth of Paris-a city of darkness beneath the City of Light. They are as integral to Parisians' mythical sense of their city as sidewalk cafés and unfiltered Gauloises. Barely a mile of the catacombs are open to the public, but a wide subculture of the creative and clandestine have used the network for decades. Late that night we returned to the same spot where Explo had spotted Dirty. There was a steel hatch right on the sidewalk, and Explo pointed out the places where it had been repeatedly spot-welded shut by the police and subsequently broken open by the cataphiles. He glanced around, quickly pulled the lid open, and we descended down a dark ladder.

From down a stone side passage came a sound of echoing laughter, the smell of hash smoke, and the flickering yellow light of a carbide lantern. Dirty held court before a half dozen visitors, dripping candles affid around the room. He told me he had come down for a party sixty-two days ago and just decided never to leave except to resupply and use the facilities. (There are no bathrooms belowground.) He warned me to "respect the catas." The tunnels were originally begun as quarries, but have served over the years as smuggling routes and ossuaries. During World War II, the Nazis and the Resistance had neighboring catacomb bunkers, each unaware of the other's proximity. Explo pointed to an inscription carved in a stone monument, dedicated to the memory of Philibert Aspairt. Like J-Bizzle in the sewers of London, Aspairt is a legend of the catacombs. He had gone missing while exploring down here in 1793, but his body wasn't found until 1804. We were having a party in his tomb.

Dirty led us down a narrow tunnel, which opened up into a large gallery. The leave-no-trace ethic of place hacking doesn't exactly apply in the catacombs; rather, they are a vast work in progress, just like the city above. Graffiti pieces and stencils covered the walls. More ambitious artists had carved relief sculptures into the stone itself, and one had spent what must have been weeks installing a graffiti mosaic out of thousands of tiny tiles. There was a lending library stocked with moisture-swollen paperbacks and a huge lounge table carved from a block of stone. There had been film screenings, and people had swum in the underground lake beneath the Paris opera house. In places along the tunnel, side shafts had been dug, called chatières, literally "cat flaps," connecting branches or forming new chambers. I followed Explo down one and nearly had a panic attack before I found a spot wide enough to turn back. All this work had been done in total darkness, fifty feet below the streets, all for the delight and edification of the relatively small group of adventurers who might find their way there.

After we made our way out, I sat in a sidewalk café in broad daylight, drinking a café au lait and eating a perfect galette au chèvre, refusing to acknowledge to gawkers that I was aware I was covered head to toe in beige catacomb mud. So much of Urbex is an exquisitely crafted inside joke, done for its own beautifully pointless sake, like the explorer who put a necktie on a statue in the pediment of the Panthéon, 120 feet above the Latin Quarter. He did tag a photo of it on Flickr, of course.

That day we fell asleep on the grass almost beneath the Eiffel Tower, its riveted latticework swooshing into the blue heavens. Surely it would be the greatest climb in all of Paris, I observed. Explo agreed, were it not for the heavily armed soldiers patrolling its base. But he said he knew somewhere else just as sublime.

At the stroke of one, the spotlights that bathed Notre Dame Cathedral in a noontime glare were finally flipped off, and a group of singing drunks gathered along the Left Bank brought out their congas. This provided excellent cover as Explo, Helen, Otter, and I crossed the Pont Saint-Louis to Île de la Cité and clambered around a corona of iron spikes forty feet above the Seine. We crossed a shaded park and scaled another spiked fence, careful not to snag backpacks heavy with camera equipment and enough mountaineering gear to assault the Matterhorn. We spoke in whispers as we pulled on climbing harnesses, and looked up through the darkness at the soaring Gothic buttresses and pinnacles of the irreplaceable monument of world heritage we were about to climb.

I felt a twinge of conscience. Or rather something more than a twinge. They warn you in journalism school-or so I'm told-about the risks of going too deep with the subjects of your work, of losing grasp of the dispassionate objectivity necessary to report a balanced story. Garrett had already dealt with this ethical quicksand by surfing gleefully across it, unashamed of his decision to "become a part of the culture under study," as he put it. I stood before the same quagmire. It wasn't really about breaking the law, as I'd already done that many times over in two different countries. Standing there at the base of the 850-year-old cathedral, I felt conflicted between my deep desire to climb it and my equally deep desire to not be splashed across the French tabloids-not to mention the French flagstones-as the idiot American who snapped off a gargoyle before plunging to his doom.

But Explo was already halfway up, and he soon anchored a climbing line to belay us from above. I let the tide of Action! bear me along and started up the rope using special spelunking ascenders attached to my harness. I promised Explo to omit a few salient details about our route from this narrative; suffice it to say, nothing was harmed in the climb. But the intimacy with the building was startling. I passed so closely by a carved gargoyle I could see the furrows of its brow, could almost smell its breath. Atop the first roof we found ourselves in a long gallery of flying buttresses, which spanned outward like the landing struts of some alien spacecraft. Each buttress framed a fifty-foot arched stained-glass window, darkened from within, and as we climbed to the next level, I pulled myself up next to one. I spun slowly on the rope, and for a heart-stopping instant my shoulder rested gently against the glass. I was so close I could see the seams of lead that connected the thousands of pieces of colored glass, the end result of centuries of labor at the hands of nameless artisans. I felt in that moment I would rather fall than damage it.

Three hours and three pitches brought us to the peak of the south transept, 180 feet above the Seine, which flowed past inkily as the drunks still drummed on the far side. My hands were black from the lead roof tiles. Carved saints and angels and a demonic bestiary of gargoyles peered from every nook, and the central steeple pierced the night sky. I'm not a believer at all, but I felt something akin to what I'd always imagined to be the intended reaction to a great cathedral, some visceral mix of awe and fear.

Across by the bell towers, you could see the corralled viewing platform where the public is actually allowed. No doubt it's great. But as the Urbex ethos has it, buying a ticket, and obediently going the way you are told, is the exact opposite of the point. So there we were, at 4 a.m., witness to a sublimity almost nobody else would ever know. As it happened, the French Resistance had rung the cathedral's bells this very night in 1944, to signal the liberation of Paris. It was not nearly the same scale of freedom, of course, but it sufficed.

It was almost dawn, and we rappelled down the way we'd come, scaling the fences and dropping back out to the street. When we returned to the car, Explo asked Helen for his car keys. She was quite certain she had given them to him. He was quite certain she hadn't. Frantic searching of bags commenced as the sky lightened. Finally Explo ran back, scaling the fences again to hunt for the keys where they had fallen from Helen's pocket and off the roof of the cathedral. Small miracle, he found them.

We pulled over at a truck stop on the outskirts of Paris, standing in line behind the bleary-eyed and glum denizens of the morning shift. Helen surveyed the scene in dismay. "None of those people know where we were two hours ago. You're just back to normal life, and it sucks."

Returning to London, we found Garrett trying to bring some order to the chaos that had spun out of his life. He had gotten his door replaced, though it would likely be months before the socialist bureaucracy got around to compensating him for it. But his fate was far from clear. Since he couldn't leave the UK, he would likely have to cancel a talk he was scheduled to give for Google in Arizona (topic: "Exploring the World Around Us"), and his job with Oord might be threatened by his tenuous legal status. For all he knew, he'd be deported after his court hearing in a few months. But his spirit, to all outward appearances, was unflagging.

Garrett wanted to show me one final site, the gargantuan Art Deco hulk of the Battersea Power Station, with its four chimneys reaching 340 feet. Battersea is the iconic structure on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, a great ruined dinosaur skeleton of industrial civilization. It's been derelict since the early '80s and the subject of an endless string of redevelopment boondoggles. Most recently it had served as a parking lot for hundreds of police vehicles during the Olympics.

Waiting for a security patrol to roll by, we squeezed through a hole in the fence, sprinted across a weedy no-man's-land, and clambered up stairwells through the pigeon-flapping blackness. The power station's control room was the size of a basketball court, a steampunk fever dream of endless dials and switches and levers, like an analog nerve center for the city-of-tomorrow of yesteryear. The sense of touching unsanitized history, of being able to measure time in the accumulation of dust, was enormously powerful. Garrett threw levers back and forth, flipping dead switches in some sort of Dr. Who fantasy. "This is what they won't let you do in museums," he said.

We climbed higher and emerged into the rainy night, onto the scaffolding surrounding one of the chimneys, and scaled it to its top, halfway up the southwest stack, which was big enough to swallow a double-decker bus. A wavering reflection of London slid by on the surface of the Thames several hundred feet below, and trains maneuvered by at tilt-shift scale. The city looked like a misty diorama.

But an explorer can never rest, least of all Bradley L. Garrett, Ph.D. "Everyone's bored here, everything's been done," he said, fretting that all London's mysteries had been plucked. "We're just sort of waiting for the next big thing."

People tend to age out of Urbex, get respectable and lose the spark of curiosity that called them to explore in the first place. There are very few people who keep exploring after 40, he told me. He hoped he could avoid that fate. He looked forward to the twenty-mile Super-Sewer project, scheduled to be finished by 2025, and the Crossrail tunnel being dug beneath London. And even if he were deported, banished from this island that had offered him such incomparable visions, there were always other options, other places. He'd heard of a secret Soviet subway system beneath Moscow. And the colossal sewers of Tokyo. And the Second Avenue subway line being dug beneath Manhattan. He had always fantasized about piloting a tunnel-boring machine. The world was full of hidden possibilities.

Matthew Power wrote about ArtPrize in the September 2012 issue.

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Best Urban Explorers and Place Hacking Stories - GQ March 2013

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By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame-each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve.

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3D MODELS OF UNBORN BABIES POPULAR IN JAPAN

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3D MODELS OF UNBORN BABIES POPULAR IN JAPAN

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3D Models of Unborn Babies Popular in Japan | Breitbart

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(AP) Pregnant women can now come face-to-face with their unborn baby, thanks to new technology which prints a solid 3D image, using data from a simple ultrasound scan.

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Exclusive: Cancer - A cure just got closer thanks to a tiny British company - and the result could change lives of millions

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Exclusive: Cancer - A cure just got closer thanks to a tiny British company - and the result could change lives of millions

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A revolution is brewing on an English business park as scientists harness our natural-born killers – the T cells – to target malign tumours

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A single-storey workshop on a nondescript business park in Oxfordshire is not the sort of place where you would expect scientific revolutions to take place. But behind the white-painted walls of this small start-up company, scientists are talking about the impossible - a potential cure for cancer.

For the past 20 years, the former academics who set up Immunocore have worked hard on realising their dream of developing a totally new approach to cancer treatment, and finally it looks as if their endeavours are beginning to pay off. In the past three weeks, the company has signed contracts with two of the biggest players in the pharmaceuticals industry which could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds flowing into the firm's unique research on cancer immunotherapy - using the body's own immune system to fight tumour cells.

Immunocore is probably the only company in the world that has developed a way of harnessing the power of the immune system's natural-born killer cells: the T-cells of the blood which nature has designed over millions of years of evolution to seek out and kill invading pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria. T-cells are not nearly as good at finding and killing cancer cells, but the hard-nosed executives of the drugs industry - who are notoriously cautious when it comes to investments - believe Immunocore may have found a way around this so that cancer patients in future are able to fend off their disease with their own immune defences.

"Immunotherapy is radically different," said Bent Jakobsen, the Danish-born chief scientific officer of Immunocore who started to study T-cells 20 years ago while working at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. "It doesn't do away with the other cancer treatments by any means, but it adds something to the arsenal that has one unique feature - it may have the potency to actually cure cancer," Dr Jakobsen said.

It is this potency that has attracted the attention of Genentech in California, owned by the Swiss giant Roche, and Britain's GlaxoSmithKline. Both companies have independently signed deals with Immunocore that could result in up to half a billion pounds being invested in new cancer treatments based on its unique T-cell therapy.

It is no understatement to say that cancer immunotherapy, or immuno-oncology as it is technically called, represents a sea change in terms of cancer treatment. Cancer in the past has been largely treated by slicing (surgery), poisoning (chemotherapy) or burning (radiotherapy). All are burdened with the inherent problem of how to spare healthy tissue from irreparable damage while ensuring that every cancer cell is killed, deactivated or removed.

Now there is another approach based on the immune system, a complex web of cells, tissues and organs that constantly strive to keep the body free of disease, which almost certainly includes keeping cancerous cells in check.

For many years, scientists have realised that the immune system plays a key role in cancer prevention. There is ample evidence of this, not least from patients who are immune-suppressed in some way - they are more likely than other patients to develop cancer.

The immune system has two basic ways of fighting invading pathogens and the body's own cells that have gone awry. One involves the release of free-floating proteins, or antibodies, that lock on to an invader, triggering other immune cells to come in and sweep them away.

Many organisations have tried to develop anti-cancer treatments based on antibodies, with limited success, Dr Jakobsen said. Part of the problem is that antibodies are not really designed to recognise cells. What Immunocore has done is to build a therapy around the second arm of the immune system, known as cellular immunity, where T-cells seek out and destroy invading pathogens.

"There are a lot of companies working with antibodies but we are virtually the only company in the world that has managed to work with T-cells. It has taken 20 years and from that point we are unique," Dr Jakobsen said.

Immunocore has found a way of designing small protein molecules, which it calls ImmTACs, that effectively act as double-ended glue. At one end they stick to cancer cells, strongly and very specifically, leaving healthy cells untouched. At the other end they stick to T-cells.

The technology is based on the "T-cell receptor", the protein that sticks out of the surface of the T-cell and binds to its enemy target. Immunocore's ImmTACs are effectively independent T-cell receptors that are "bispecific", meaning they bind strongly to cancer cells at one end, and T-cells at the other - so introducing cancer cells to their nemesis.

"What we can do is to use that scaffold of the T-cell receptor to make something that is very good at recognising cancer even if it doesn't exist naturally," said Dr Jakobsen. "Although T-cells are not very keen at recognising cancer, we can force them to do so. The potential you have if you can engineer T-cell receptors is quite enormous. You can find any type of cell and any kind of target. This means the approach can in theory be used against any cancer, whether it is tumours of the prostate, breast, liver or the pancreas.

The key to the success of the technique is being able to distinguish between a cancer cell and a normal, healthy cell. Immunocore's drug does this by recognising small proteins or peptides that stick out from the surface membrane of cancer cells. All cells extrude peptides on their membranes and these peptides act like a shop window, telling scientists what is going on within the cell, and whether it is cancerous or not.

"All these little peptides tell you the story of the cell. The forest of them on the cell surface is a sort of display saying 'I am this kind of cell. This is my identity and this is everything going on inside me'," Dr Jakobsen explained.

Immunocore is building up a database of peptide targets on cancer cells in order to design T-cell receptors that can target them, leaving healthy cells alone and so minimising possible side effects - or that is the hope.

The first phase clinical trial of the company's therapy, carried out on a small number of patients in Britain and the United States with advanced melanoma, has shown that people can tolerate the drug reasonably well and preliminary results suggest there are "early signs of anti-tumour activity", the company said.

A danger with deploying T-cells against cancer is their potency. Yet it is this very potency that it is so exciting because it could lead to a cure for metastatic disease that has spread around the body, Dr Jakobsen said. "You can never make a single-mechanism drug that would come anywhere near a T-cell in terms of its potency.

"If you want to make an impact on cancer you need something that is incredibly potent - but when something goes wrong, it goes badly wrong. I think the honest truth about all cancer treatments is that no matter how much we test and do beforehand, it will continue to go wrong sometimes."

One infamous case of something going disastrously wrong was a clinical trial in 2006 at Northwick Park Hospital in London where scientists were testing a powerful immuno-regulatory drug on six volunteers. All suffered serious side effects caused by the overstimulation of their immune systems.

But Dr Jakobsen said the clinical trial of Immunocore's T-cell drug, as well as future trials, are inherently safe because they are based on incremental rises in dose. All indications suggest it will lead to the expected breakthrough.

He added: "All the pharma companies have come to the realisation that immunotherapy may hold the ultimate key to cancer; it is the missing link in cancer treatment that can give cures."

"They have seen this technology develop. It has come over the mountain top, if you like. With our melanoma trial they have seen it is safe - and it is working."
T-cell therapy
Using the body's immune system to fight cancer is one of the most promising areas of therapy, and could prove particularly helpful in the treatment of metastatic disease, when the cancer has spread from its original site.

The immune system is complex and is composed of many kinds of cells, proteins and chemical messengers that modulate how it works. Scientists are working on ways of exploiting the immune defences to recognise and eliminate cells that have become cancerous.

One of the most interesting examples is ipilimumab, a "monoclonal antibody" made by Bristol-Myers-Squib. It recognises and binds to a molecule, called CTLA-4, which is found on the T-cells of the immune system. CTLA-4 normally keeps T-cells from proliferating, but in the presence of ipilimumab, it becomes blocked, allowing T-cells to increase in numbers, so leading them to attack cancer cells.

Other drugs based on monoclonal antibodies are designed to attack tumours more directly. When they bind to a cancerous cell, it serves as a signal for other cells of the immune system to come in and sweep the cancer cells away.

The trouble is that cancer cells are notoriously mutational. Eliminating 99.9 per cent of cancer cells in a patient may be an improvement, but it still leaves 0.1 per cent that could "escape".

One hope of using T-cells, is that this possibility of escape is narrowed down, or even eliminated. Of course, these are still early days. This is only just beginning to go through the first clinical trials. It could take five or 10 years before we know whether or not they work.

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Exclusive: Cancer - A cure just got closer thanks to a tiny British

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A single-storey workshop on a nondescript business park in Oxfordshire is not the sort of place where you would expect scientific revolutions to take place. But behind the white-painted walls of this small start-up company, scientists are talking about the impossible - a potential cure for cancer.

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If you've been to Vegas, you've heard about it or stood in line to get in. Marquee, the superest of the superclubs, sprawls over an astonishing 60,000 square feet. It allows you to party very, very hard. For just thousands of dollars! Would you like bottle service at one of our dance-floor tables? That'll be another $10,000. How about a 30-liter bottle of champagne to share with a dozen women you've never met? $250,000. How about we get Kim Kardashian to come? $100,000. Devin Friedman explores the world, adds it all up, and explains the mysteries and the pitfalls of the hottest club on the planet

11 P.M.: ONE SATURDAY NIGHT IN APRIL, BRINGING THE SHITSHOW

When you see the entrance to Marquee at 11 P.M. on a Saturday, you know why the promoters call this process "bringing the shitshow." Massing out front were, by my estimation, at least 2,000 people. Packs of Asian bachelorettes sucking on cock-and-balls lollipops. Pods of probably either Libyan or Italian princes of the overclass in blazers and exposed solar plexuses and calfskin loafers and Adrian Grenier knit caps. Teams of 29-year-old white men in untucked dress shirts and heavy cuff links who stood stunned mute by the endless throng of women wearing almost identical vagina-length dresses that perpetually seemed on the verge of revealing at least, at _least, _a butt cheek-though by some invisible force above the hemline never, never ever did. It wasn't just for show, either, this massing of people. Las Vegas isn't New York, where part of the social psychology is the difficulty of entrance. "We don't do a door-hold just for the sake of doing a door-hold, so we can look busy," one of the owners had told me. Inside, they were already at capacity.

A series of velvet ropes tranched the guests into classes-extreme VIPs, semi-VIP hot ladies, unrich ladyless dudes who probably wouldn't get in before 2 A.M. I guesstimate the general-admission line was a quarter mile long, stretching past the Cosmopolitan hotel's curated "shopping experience" and into a recessed hallway of Pentagonian proportions.

This was maybe the sixth or seventh night I'd been to Marquee. On other nights I would show up before the club opened, so I could observe the hidden machinery and ascertain how the people who run the place go about manufacturing the communal fun-gasm that made Marquee the highest-grossing nightclub in Las Vegas and very likely the universe. But tonight I was with a bachelor party, and in honor of the occasion we'd decided to avail ourselves of a table reservation. A table reservation requires guests to spend between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on the night, and among its perks is access to a special line. The table line is the line you're supposed to see from other lines and think: Why am I not in that line? Or: _Why didn't my boyfriend get me into that line? _

A trim woman wearing smart business attire and a clear Secret Service earpiece greeted me as if she had been waiting all night to see me. She had a tiny envelope with my name on it, and into this tiny envelope she deposited my driver's license and credit card. She then passed the envelope to a man in a dark suit, a VIP host, who shook my hand with similar warmth. All the suited functionaries at Marquee that night treated me as if I were an important business partner in a business where important business partners may or may not be bought prostitutes.

An elevator car with glass walls, lit like a lounge, was waiting. The desperate sounds of human beings begging doormen and imploring homeys to hurry up because I'm waiting for you at the entrance, son, were silenced by the shush of the closing doors. A woman in a white short-sleeve shirt, whom you might call an elevator host, pressed a button on the control panel and then began a speech prepared to last precisely the duration of one elevator ride to the fourth floor.

Hello, gentlemen, she said. My name is Laura. When you step out of the elevators, you will find our Boom Box bar, down the stairs. Upstairs is the Library, our exclusive lounge. And just outside, you'll find our main level. There is a bar straight ahead, and to our right the dance floor, where your table is. Benny Benassi will be DJ'ing tonight. We have 60,000 square feet of nightclub. Our outdoor space is open. Roam the club. Find some ladies. Bring them back to your table. The elevator jostled us gently as it stopped. Welcome to Marquee, gentlemen. Your party starts...now.

11:45 P.M.: THE MAIN ROOM, CLUSTERFUCK DAY, SHITSHOW HOUR

Part of the branding concept at Marquee is: Overwhelm the guest. And when we walked into that main room, we were indeed overwhelmed. Like it physically drew the air from our lungs and then replaced it with something that felt and tasted like vaporized Red Bull. The room had no visible ceiling. It was a clamshelly cavern of a place that glowed reddish and pulsed, with a dance floor at its focal point, layers of bottle-service tables perched around it, and a forty-foot LED screen above the DJ stage. The sound system cost $1.5 million and was built to rock a space as big as Madison Square Garden. Facing the speaker arrays was like walking into a strong headwind.

At our table, our VIP host handed us off to Joe, our semipersonal security guard. Joe wore the same suit and earpiece that all our assorted hosts wore. He told us how pleased he was to hang with us tonight and then stepped back into the human flow-stream, crossed his arms, and waited for a chance to protect us.

At the same time, a team of men in all black, like the people who change sets in off-Broadway plays, arrived at our table with the parts of our movable bar unit: a two-tiered silver tray for cut citrus, several carafes of mirs, and finally, a bowl of ice embedded with glowing battery-powered ice cubes, carried by a man with an LED flashlight in his mouth to further illuminate the thing as if it were bearing the Heart of the Ocean (from Titanic). Our waitress, Jessica, gave us a menu. We chose what it seemed like we were supposed to choose, a $950 bottle of Grey Goose vodka identical to the $950 bottle of Grey Goose vodka that every other table had. When Jessica disappeared into the gyrating throng, Joe approached.

"Do you just want to sit back and chill?" he said to us. "Or do you want me to go find you some girls? Do you have any preference on girls?" What were the five of us-four married, one affianced-supposed to say? I would like someone without any of the hepatitises? I would like someone who will get impossibly turned on when I'm taciturn at cocktail parties?

Later another security officer would tell me, "Some guys get racial and say, 'I only want Asian girls' or 'white girls.' Or they'll be like, 'We only want blondes' or 'brunettes.' But a lot of guys say, 'We don't care, just bring us some sluts.' "

For the moment, we told Joe, we would just chill. You know. Because we're cool like that. Because for right now, we were still busy being overwhelmed-by the Funktion-One sound system, by all the bottles of champagne and vodka being consumed (conspicuously), by the overwhelming scent of sex (the room was perfumed with bosoms and tushies), overwhelmed by the oontz and oontz and above all by all these fucking people.

Thirty-five hundred: That was the club's capacity. Over the course of the night, 6,000 souls would enter and exit Marquee. How exactly do you get 6,000 people to want to come to the same nightclub on any given night? How do you get 6,000 people, all from different places, who don't know one another, many of whom have never been to this nightclub, many of whom don't ever really even _go _to nightclubs, to decide communally that they're going to Marquee? Especially when there were twenty-five other nightclubs right here in Las Vegas that could have strobed them with the same seizure-inducing lights, where equally busty women in similar magician-assistant outfits could sell them the same Grey Goose and cranberry while exactly the same music played in rotation every single night (and by "exactly" I mean, like, more or less the same ten songs).

"That," the owners of Marquee told me, "that is our secret sauce."

The Proprietors

The story of Marquee begins-which makes sense if you think about it-circa 1993 in Cancún, Mexico. One enterprising high school senior from Manhattan had organized a spring-break trip for nearly a hundred of his classmates at various private schools in, or affiliated with the culture of, Upper East Side Manhattan. It makes sense because maybe what we've got at Marquee is spring break for grown-ups circa 2012. And also because spring break in Cancún was probably the closest thing you could get to the club lifestyle if you were 18 years old. Jason Strauss, the enterprising senior in this story, organized the trip with a contact he had cultivated in the travel-agenting business and sold the packages himself. Among that cohort was the daughter of Peter Gatien, a man who pretty much dominated both the nightclub world of the 1990s and the headlines of the New York Post almost a decade later, when he was on trial for various charges, of which he was later acquitted, related to the sale of Ecstasy at his nightclubs-plus there was a scandal involving the murder of a club promoter named Angel Melendez, which didn't actually have anything to do with Gatien but happened in his world and became tied to him and was also the basis of the movie Party Monster.

"Peter's daughter heard that I did these parties uptown at the Surf Club," Jason said. "That was where all the Waspy preppy-type high school kids went when they graduated college. Very synonymous with the Dorrian's crowd. So she went once and told [her father] about us. When this happened, it was the pinnacle of his career. He had all four megaclubs going at full blast in Manhattan. Limelight. Palladium. Tunnel. Club USA. All of them packed every night of the week. Doing numbers like the world's never seen. Four megaclubs of that level. She convinced him on a Thursday to give us the upstairs room, which was overlooking the Thierry Mugler room."

Now, I didn't know what any of those things were back in the '90s, when they meant something. But what you have in the paragraph above is the whole of the '90s New York nightlife scene in shorthand. If you fully footnoted every proper noun in that paragraph (the club-kid Ecstasy movement basically started in Gatien's clubs; Dorrian's is where Robert Chambers, the "Preppy Murderer," met his victim; Limelight, the dominant club of the decade; Thierry Mugler, a fashion designer whose perfume my grandmother once asked me to buy for her as a Hanukkah present), you'd have a workable outline for a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The salient point here is that Jason and his partner, Noah Tepperberg, were promoting at Peter Gatien's Club USA when they were in high school.

Marquee is owned by a kind of syndicate. A chunk is controlled by the Cosmopolitan hotel, which is owned by Deutsche Bank. But practically speaking, it belongs to the Tao Group, a collection of "hospitality industry" veterans, which is itself basically controlled by five New Yorkers. (Their group is named for their restaurant Tao in New York, a 300-seat den of conspicuous consumption that came to be an emblem of pre-crash excess and brought the Las Vegas ethos of spectacle, volume, and unchallenging menus to New York City. Tao in Las Vegas was opened in 2005 and has been the highest-grossing restaurant in the country since then.) And among those five partners, it is Jason and Noah who are responsible for creating the parties, for filling every nightclub property they own every single night they are open. Jason and Noah are 38 and 37 years old, respectively. They now own, in whole or part, or run four nightclubs in Manhattan (Avenue, PH-D, Lavo, Marquee New York), three in Vegas (Lavo Las Vegas, Tao Nightclub Las Vegas, Marquee Las Vegas), and a restaurant and pizza chain in New York, plus a new franchise of Marquee in a casino in Sydney, Australia. It's fair to say that they are among the most, if not actually the most, powerful people in the nightclub industry in America who are not named Rihanna.

Over the course of a month or two, we had several conversations. One of them was the day after Noah had returned from opening the Sydney property.

"Even the bathrooms were clubs," Noah said, talking about the innovations they built into the club in Australia. "Our bar in the bathroom did $7,000 in one night. Just a rollaway bar."

Jason nodded his head: That's right, you fuckin' heard it. "I haven't seen a bar in a bathroom since Tunnel."

You can kind of see how the chemistry between Jason and Noah works. Jason is handsome and prone to fixing his hair while he speaks to you. He is just tan enough so that you wonder whether he is naturally that color. He's superserious about electronic dance music and keeps the satellite radio in his Denali tuned to "Electric Area" and presents as the kind of guy you want to be with on the night when occasion lands you at a fancy nightclub. It's wrong to say that Noah is a lovable schlub, because he's not that schlubby. I'm not implying that he isn't handsome, though I am implying that he is bald and sweats more than Jason, and I don't think he's ever had a tan in his life. When he opens his mouth, accentwise, the Manhattan of the 1990s, of the Beastie Boys and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, comes out. Jason is pals with millionaire DJs from Amsterdam; Noah is friends with, like, Jay-Z and Paris Hilton. And also everyone. It's just very, very easy to like him.

They opened their first nightclub-Conscience Point in the Hamptons-when they were in their midtwenties. "It was a big pair of balls," Jason said, "putting up half a million dollars" when they were fresh out of college. Then, to confuse the metaphor, he added: "To lift up our skirt like that? Big balls."

Conscience Point became a symbol for an era of excess in the excessive Hamptons, when celebrities and old-money debutantes and new-money superrich decided to realize their similarities were greater than their differences, so why not go to parties at one another's mansions? Conscience Point was where the debutante/publicist Lizzie Grubman famously drove her Mercedes SUV into a crowd outside the club, possibly on purpose. You can't overstate the amount of media attention that got. It was an incident that captured both the indecency of the scene and our indecent fascination with it.

"Sixteen people laid out," Jason said. "It was pretty scary."

One other tabloid moment that came to represent an era: when Rachel Uchitel, Tiger Woods's sometime mistress, revealed he was hooking up with quasi hookers in Las Vegas nightclubs. Another of Rachel Uchitel's purported boyfriends? Jason Strauss.

The point being that Jason and Noah have come of age in, and presided over, an era of nightlife when the industry, and the culture in general, moved away from a kind of authenticity-based, gritty, underground quasi-scary trip-to-another-world experience in favor of an exultant celebration of $3,000 bottles of champagne, a change Noah and Jason endorse.

"Starting our career right when Peter Gatien was in trouble is probably a sign," Jason said.

Then Noah said, "We were the only two guys who didn't do drugs. That's the type of nightlife I created. This safe, professional, legitimate nightlife. We created a Disneyland-type experience for adults. Where there's no feeling of living on the edge by going there. When J and I started, a lot of the people in nightlife were these half-shady people, and we saw that as the totally straight ones, we could create something."

Part of that innovation, especially in Las Vegas, was removing what had been considered a vital part of the lure of the _exclusive _nightclub: the exclusivity part. When you party with Jason and Noah, you don't need to be cool; you only need to be able to pay.

"Here's what I think the driving force behind Vegas is," Noah said. "The people who go there, very few are from New York or L.A. or even Miami, where they have great clubs. Where do they have clubs like the ones they have in Vegas? They have mini versions of them in New York and L.A. But those don't exist in the other forty-six states. You can find it, but you have to go to Vegas. That's what's happened to Vegas. It's become kind of the nightlife capital of the world."

1 A.M.: If You Thought You Were Going Apeshit Before, It's Nothing Compared to How Apeshit You Go Now

We watched the two DJs who opened for Benny Benassi press buttons, clap their hands over their heads, and smile unconflicted, sunny smiles for two straight hours. They had matching straw porkpie hats and might have been twins. We had our ice changed, and we had it changed again, even though we didn't need to. We watched Marquee's "mood director" come out in a giant felt robot head and go absolutely ape on the dance floor. Then, around midnight, Benny Benassi took the stage. It turned out Benny Benassi is a guy from a town near Milan, Italy, who looks like a well-tanned menswear-shop owner who uses leave-in conditioner. He had one really giant club hit ("Satisfaction") in the early aughts and is now one of the class of maybe a dozen and a half DJs who get paid anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 to show up at a Las Vegas nightclub and play music for three or four hours.

This is a function of the electronic dance music (EDM) phenomenon, which blew up in America about three years ago when the Black Eyed Peas recorded "I Gotta Feeling" with the French DJ David Guetta. If you want to understand the message and vibe of the music, go YouTube that one. It's cotton candy, it's confection, pure upness, not so much a song as an anthem, almost remedial in the simplicity of its message and lyrics (tonight's gonna be a good night), that sounds a little like if the heightened heartbeat of someone on Ecstasy were amplified and musicalized. It means only one thing: _Yay! Fun! Yay! Fun! Woo! Yay! _For a more recent version, see Rihanna's collaboration with Calvin Harris, "We Found Love."

Benny clapped his hands over his head and smiled a smile identical to that of the porkpie twins, a smile that could be called Mentos-commercial happy. And when the people cast their eyes upon him, suddenly the needle of the apeshitometer got buried. People went almost as ape as the mood director. Though, you know, no one could go as ape as the mood director. That's his job.

The Promoter

All around us women were dancing on makeshift stages-tabletops, banquette benches, dancing plinths. There must have been a hundred of them, and all of them, like really _all of them, _were wearing virtually identical tiny dresses and platform shoes that used to be a kind of sartorial wink that meant: I get paid money to give blow jobs. Which, this being Las Vegas, a few of them really do. It's like all the women banded together to try to camouflage the actual hookers. You know that scene in V for Vendetta when everyone has to wear the Guy Fawkes mask so no one knows who the real terrorist/freedom fighters are? It's like that, only with magic butt dresses. Now, some of these people-the go-go dancers, the waitresses, the bartenders, etc.-work for the club. But not most of them.

Like straight pornography, a nightclub is essentially about girls, in that both males and females spend most of their time, and judge the quality of the product, by looking at the girls. (And it's girls, not women. You won't hear a single person at Marquee use the word women.) Management displays girls in the nightclub with the same kind of gaudy extravagance with which hotel owners in Dubai display fountains and pools and other profligate uses of water. One of the superhuman tasks that management performs nightly is to stock the club, like a trout pond is stocked, with thousands of women. (The doormen try never to let the Y-chromosome level get north of 50 percent.) And for that task, the club employs more than eighty full-time promoters.

On another night, I met one of them: Bhagya, a man of thirty years with a shiny bald head and lethally sharp trouser creases. In other cities-New York, Los Angeles, Wichita Falls for all I know-a promoter is supposed to bring in an assortment of cool people. In Las Vegas, promoters specialize in either rich people or women. And mostly it's women. On the night we first meet, Bhagya has about 200 women on his guest list. He is from New Orleans and moved to Las Vegas five years ago, after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his family's chain of gas stations. Over the course of that time, he's diligently built a clientele of women. He used to wear a fake wedding ring so he didn't seem threatening, but now he knows how to approach women-at another club or at a hotel pool-using only his innocuous charm to protect him from getting maced. I asked Bhagya what kind of women in particular he looks for.

"Elite girls," he said.

Elite?

"You know. Good-looking. Up girls."

Noah and Jason told me that in New York, they take great care to curate the girls; if you're not a model, if you don't have an avant-garde fashion sense, if you can't maintain a look of aloof boredom even while seated next to Jay-Z, you may not get past the velvet ropes. In Las Vegas, all you really need to get into a club is the lack of a visible penis. Which isn't to say they don't prefer some women to others.

If a woman is "elite," she's given drink tickets and delivered personally to a bottle-service table so that there's some nice ornamentation when the table customers arrive. The "filler" girls-that's what they're called, filler, like the cornstarch in the McNugget mix-are taken to a special line near the Boulevard Pool, filtered through an entrance, and set loose to roam the club. All this is done before the crush starts, before the bottle-service customers arrive, so that dudes who are paying thousands of dollars don't have to walk into an empty club. This is called "painting the room," and it's also the reason all the waitresses are obligated to dance for an hour before the shitshow begins in earnest. If you come early, you'll see them all standing at attention, smiling, doing this kind of torso twist, with feet planted, that looks kind of like the central agitator in a washing machine.

Being "elite," though, doesn't just mean that you're attractive.

"They don't want reserved girls at the table," Bhagya said. "They want people who are up there going crazy, jumping around, drinking." He laughs. His Sri Lankan accent is barely noticeable: It registers merely as a kind of playful singsonginess. Then he said the only thing there was to say: "I mean, at the end of the night there's only one thing that guys want. They want it to be, you know, a good night."

But Bhagya, that's not really something that you can guarantee, right? It's part of my theory about how the nightclub is fundamentally a lie, the same way going to Disney World ends up being fundamentally a lie: the fallacy of fantasy fulfillment. Like the nameless sorrow one feels when one realizes one will never really meet Dumbo or become friends with Snow White, so is the nameless sorrow one must feel when one exits the club realizing none of those breasts were for you.

"It's not something anyone would want to guarantee," Bhagya said. "But listen, guys come to Vegas for one reason? Trust me, girls come to Vegas for the same reasons. I have [female] friends, and I go to their rooms to hang out, and they open their suitcase, and they have all their condoms in there. They have prepared! That's got to say something about how, when they come out here, nothing matters."

And Then, Like Ten Minutes Later, It's 3:30 in the Morning

We watched Benassi. We had Joe take us to the private bathroom (that's a service he provided, "bathroom walks") and felt as if we had paid to pretend we were kind of famous. We had our ice changed twice in fifteen minutes. (We were now timing it.) We watched people raising their hands in the air, either in a kind of Euro tomahawk chop or in an uncomfortably heil-like gesture-this has replaced the booty grind now that electronic dance music has replaced hip-hop in some clubs-and dancing pretty much without moving their feet.

We saw that our ice hadn't been changed in half an hour and started feeling kind of irate. We let Jessica pour rounds and rounds of drinks for these female Asian chem majors from Cal who kept waving and winking to their boyfriends who were railbirding it on the lower level of the dance floor, watching as their dates got their free drinks on. We saw, at the table behind ours, that a member of the bro posse we figured was either Lebanese, French, or Israeli had vomited. Like really vomited. It was as if a Hale and Hearty Soups had exploded at table 96. But it didn't take a full minute before a team of men in black materialized, equipped with an arsenal of towels and cleaning solvents, to scrub the area, and the puker, absolutely pukeless. They were a vomit pit crew. In no time at all they had propped the guy up, faced him toward the dance floor, poured him a glass of ice water, and disappeared. This puke would not derail the (extremely lucrative) fun at table 96.

And the music never stopped. Like there was never a pause, there was never a caesura or anything. EDM is essentially a series of buildups and "crashes" (that's when you're really supposed to go ape) that are totally predictable and seemingly interchangeable and make you feel-as DJ Spider, who works at clubs owned by Steve Wynn, told me-like you're on a roller coaster that just keeps going. Like forever. Which makes it super fun if you're on Ecstasy (or "molly," which is pure MDMA without, say, amphetamines), and sometimes maybe like you're the only one who doesn't get it if you're not.

It's one of a thousand different ways the management invisibly kept the club fires stoked, the energy level impossibly high. Like how, as we drank more and more and it got later and later, three o'clock and then four, they began emptying the outer reaches of the club-the pool deck, the Library-and pulled everyone in toward the dance floor. So that from our high-priced bottle-service real estate we still had the valuable sensation that we were at a place where the party, like the music (or the Ecstasy), would never, ever end, where more and more girls could be fed in from still more flights out of Kansas City and Sacramento and you could start to think that the you who has a job back in Pittsburgh or Irvine doesn't exist, and also that after this you'd better go find some coke or else deal with the reality that awaits you back in the rollaway suitcase in your hotel room. Or if you're the fourth-generation heir to a toothpaste fortune who doesn't have a job in Pittsburgh (and there are people who come here they can drop $500K in a night and not feel bad about it), that there's a world where _no one _has those jobs, that this is the one place built for you.

2 P.M.: The Nightclub with the Lights Turned On

But Marquee isn't just a nightclub. It is also what's called a dayclub. If you think about it, it's just logical. What's the invisible barrier to the expansion of the nightclub? The _night _part. Why not keep the cash registers going from noon until six as well?

On a Saturday at the end of April, Marquee held the grand-opening party for its dayclub season. At the door a large man was filtering the crowd. "So this is the first day the dayclub is open?" I asked him.

"No," he said. He looked like a Samoan linebacker and smelled like a fine barbershop. "It's been open. It just hasn't been _grand _open."

I could hear the roar before I got there, and when I walked onto the pool deck, the dayclub provided, if it's possible, an even more dramatic entrance than the nightclub. The sun was hot and bright in a surgical, shadowless way. You could take in the entire tableau in extreme midday-in-the-desert detail. Every pair of pink bikini bottoms, the glint off each nipple ring, the desert grit glommed to sweaty skin. With the dry air, and the sense that there's no atmosphere here, it felt like we were all partying on one of the lonely moons of Mercury, if Mercury had any moons. There were no fewer than 1,500 people here. Hundreds of them were glued together on the dance floor in front of the DJ booth at the far end of the club, where a tiny Swedish DJ named Avicii was performing. In the center of the deck was a rectangle of green-blue pool with water so cloudy you couldn't see your hand in it. (One security guy told me, "I'd never go in there. Semen, feces, blood, vomit-that's what makes that pool cloudy.") Some patrons lounged near the entrance, where the casino had installed outdoor blackjack tables and posted dealers in bathing suits. One row of private cabanas lined the left side of the club, and another lined the right. But the majority of the square footage was taken up by $500-plus chaise longue chairs so tightly packed together it seemed like a vast first-class cabin on a new carrier called Ecstasy Airlines. On a round daybed at the foot of the pool, an Asian man in a headband lay diagonally, as if felled by a tranquilizer dart.

Jason Strauss met me at the door. He was in shorts, a pressed dress shirt partly unbuttoned, and sunglasses. He took my wrist in the way he does-it makes you feel the way a woman wants to feel with a man-and led me through the crowd. He and Noah had one of the cabanas that overlooked the trippy web of taxi and limo approaches to the new CityCenter across the street. I met a French model who was having her twenty-first-birthday party. I met someone who owned a gold mine and had Tom Cruise's new haircut. I met a guy who worked for the royal family of Abu Dhabi. I met an investment banker from Deutsche Bank who helped broker the deal with Jason and Noah. He never stopped dancing or put a shirt on.

The New England Patriots receiver Wes Welker had rented the cabana two down from Jason and Noah's. In a couple of months he would be marrying a woman named Anna Burns, who was once crowned Miss Hooters International. But today he was enjoying his bachelor-party weekend, lounging in the "infinity" hot tub all the cabanas are outfitted with. Champagne, being the featured beverage of clubs, was everywhere. People drinking it in flutes, holding it aloft as they danced, receiving bottles of it from conga lines of bikinied cocktail waitresses who tried their best to make an "event presentation" without the use of sparklers or glow sticks. Wes Welker himself-because the hot tubs are Plexiglas and the water is in a constant bubbly churn-looked like he was submerged, with board shorts, in a giant overflowing glass of champagne. And overlooking the crowd, another man was holding a bottle between his legs and in great thrusting motions spraying a $1,000 magnum of Dom Pérignon while below him women opened their mouths to receive his gilded French ejaculate. Let's just say that everyone seemed to understand the subtext of the lifestyle.

(A note to dayclubgoers: If you don't want quite this much of a scene, a weekday might be more your speed, and while it's not officially "toptional," like the pool at, say, Mandalay Bay, on the weekday I was there, three women-who looked like they were either Iranian, half Indian, Brazilian, Azeri, Peruvian, or possibly just white American-lay sunny-side up on a daybed. And while only one woman was dancing that afternoon-she had on a pool-soaked Burberry tie-the music was still so powerful that I believe I could see the Azeri breasts vibrate almost imperceptibly along with the bass line, the way water glasses do when a giant robot is approaching.)

At the grand opening, Noah appeared and smiled at me:_ This is crazy, right? _The cabanas are raised from the main floor, and from a plinth we could overlook the crowd. The Funktion-One was blasting Avicii, and when the song crashed, the pool erupted into yet another round of synchronous splashing, so that I was surprised there was any water left to piss in. Confetti was occasionally splooged from cannons near the DJ stage, and at really exciting moments a "cryo" system would shower down actual snow. One plinth over, a professional handstander in lollipop sunglasses and a polka-dot bikini was standing on her hands. She lowered her chest almost all the way down and dangled her legs over the revelers, trying to blink away the sweat dripping into her eyes. No one paid her the slightest attention.

The VIP

One night I met a man named Brad Honigfeld at one of Marquee's tables. Brad is the single largest owner of T.G.I. Friday's franchises in the world-seventy of them, plus forty-three Wendy's and some chain hotels. He is 53 years old, balding, with a belly, and he loves nightclubs. He goes to one of Jason and Noah's clubs in New York or Las Vegas five nights a month. We spent an hour or so together at his table on the dance floor at Marquee while he mid vodka cranberries and occasionally disappeared into his mindscape to feel the music in some deep, deep part of himself where only DJs tread.

When he resurfaced, he poured himself another drink and said, "Nothing gets me high like this music. It's like Circa Lay at a nightclub."

What?

"Circa Lay! You know. The people running on the wheels."

He meant Cirque du Soleil. He'd had a lot of vodka cranberries. He ordered more.

"Another bottle, another thousand bucks!" he said. As a businessman, he gets a little giddy thinking about the profit margins of this place. He also considers himself part of the hospitality business, and he appreciates the way Noah and Jason do hospitality.

"I don't know these guys. I've spoken to Jason five times in my life. But they have guys who know who I am. They have a way of knowing all their clients."

It's Brad's vision to bring the high he feels, the nightclub vibe, to the world we all live in even when we're not in Las Vegas. A couple of years ago he opened a yogurt shop in New Jersey that's basically a yogurt dayclub. "I do a yogurt concept with the music," he told me. "It's based on DJ culture. When you come in, it's like a nightclub." And if you think that sounds like a stupid idea, consider that this 1,100-square-foot yogurt shop netted a million dollars last year, and Brad is opening ten more.

The Waitress

When you see them moving through the nightclub in their black platform boots, the cocktail waitresses seem like comic-book characters: tough and giant-breasted, in fishnets and heavy eye makeup. It's kind of jarring to see them with the lights up at the pre-service meeting before Marquee opens. At seven thirty or eight they're all couched-out near the dance floor in love pink sweatpants and leggings and furry Uggs, eating salads out of Tupperware and applying astonishing amounts of complexion-altering makeup from little clear plastic makeup bags they all stow near the service bar. They look older and more tired, and they look more average and less fantastical. I hardly recognized Nikki Bee, a waitress I'd met a few nights before, when I saw her sitting cross-legged discussing the takeout from a salad concern.

Nikki Bee, 25, is from San Jose, California. Before moving out here, she'd helped open up a Hooters back home, managed a hair salon. She once had a job driving the little Red Bull Mini Cooper around, doing events. She has braces and seems at once to be brittle and unsure of herself and incredibly determined. She worked sixteen-hour days all last year-waitressing from noon until 4 A.M. in platform heels-so she could buy a house out near Spanish Trails.

"I just feel like I've seen it all," she told me when I asked her about her job.

"Like Pitbull throwing thousands of dollars in the air like it's just napkins," she said. And there was the prince from Indonesia who would spend, like, $90,000 a day at the club, for weeks at a time. "He lived in the bungalows out near the pool, and he'd come to the club in, like, slippers."

Nikki told me about Kim Kardashian's birthday party last year; Kim was reportedly paid $100,000 for throwing it at Marquee. Nikki's friend had waited on her.

"She came an hour and a half late, and then she left after twenty minutes," Nikki Bee said.

I asked Nikki Bee if she liked her job. She said the same thing pretty much all the cocktail waitresses told me about working here. "People come here to have a good time," she said. "I'm seeing everyone at, like, the best night of their year. The best night of their life!"

But doesn't it get tiring, acting like you, too, are having the best night of your life every night?

She won't say that, but what she will say is that she likes that no one knows what she is actually feeling. It was almost as if her point was that it's not hard for her as long as it's mostly fake.

"Like no one knew the day I bought my house," she said. "I loved that no one knew that but me."

4:30 A.M.: Before exiting, please make sure the ride has come to a complete stop

Marquee is one of those places in which it's impossible to tell that you're drunk until you leave. And even here, there does come a time when you do have to leave. Either because you're just too drunk or because you want to check out some other spots too so hit me up later I'll tell you where I'm at, bro, or because it's 5 A.M. and the nightclub is closing and the dayclub won't open for another five hours.

The night of the bachelor party, we were among the last to leave. You exit the club through a dedicated exit, totally discrete from any of the various ingresses. Whether you walk out at midnight, right as the party is at its apogee, or at 4:30 A.M. as we did, there's just this tidal flow of women carrying their painful heels while they walk barefoot down the stairs like ladies leaving a wedding, and bros carrying other bros down like firemen carrying smoke-inhalation victims. We entered in a tranched class system, but we all exited together into an echoey sheet-metal-and-spray-on-fire-retardant stairwell devoid of any kind of, as Noah calls it, wow factor. It gives the lie to the notion that you were ever anywhere other than a converted convention space. Our _experience _was no longer being managed. Laura the elevator host wasn't here to deliver a speech about how much fun we'd just had.

And did we? Have fun?

Going to a nightclub, like going on vacation, sometimes gives rise to this really stressful internal-feedback loop that initiates when some dark part of your brain transmits a pretty obvious question: "Am I having fun?" Then: "Is this fun? What about that?" Or, "Those people look like they're having fun-are they pretending like I am?" Or, "I should be having fun, but am I really? How about now? Or...now?" And then this other part of your brain says, "Shut up, this is your dedicated night for fun, you paid all this money for it, and if you're not having fun now, maybe you're not capable of fun, so please for the love of God just shut up." "Okay. Okay... But how about now?"

I think this is what Ecstasy is for. I think it closes the door to that part of your brain. Another way to deal with that anxiety, the balm Jason and Noah offer, is to make the customers believe they are at the party that other people wish they were at. Marquee must always feel like the place to be tonight. "We always have photographers on hand," Jason told me. "The key is to recap it the next day so we can be like, 'Look what you fucking missed.' " For the club to be hot (or in the parlance of people who go out, "good," as in "Is CLUB GQ good on Thursdays?" or "CLUB GQ used to be good, but isn't anymore"), you have to feel like you're walking into a party that's reaching that brief apogee one party in a dozen reaches. And the corollary of the principle is that this apogee must be sustained for at least four hours, predictably, every night. That they are able to pull that off, that's the special sauce.

And the beauty is that none of it needs to be real. That's beside the point. People _want _to believe. Las Vegas works because the dupes are willing parts in the con. You don't gamble because you think the odds are in your favor. You don't pay $3,500 for a table because you think that's how much the drinks should cost. You pay money to go on the ride.

And now the ride was over. The reason they keep exiters separate is for the benefit of the people entering: How can it be _the place _if people are streaming out? Seeing exhausted women carrying their ho shoes under their arms while they search for a cigarette just kind of breaks the spell.

Outside, there was a long line of weary clubgoers waiting for taxis. But there was no line for the VIP limousines. What's $100 more, on a night that costs $3,000? We slumped into the back of the limo. The driver aimed the car, shot us from the concrete driveway chute and out into the early morning. If you guys like, he told us, _I could arrange a table at a strip club. Any strip club you want. _

MORE STORIES LIKE THIS ONE

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If you've been to Vegas, you've heard about it or stood in line to get in. Marquee, the superest of the superclubs, sprawls over an astonishing 60,000 square feet. It allows you to party very, very hard. For just thousands of dollars! Would you like bottle service at one of our dance-floor tables?

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Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week. Surgeon Marty Makary on five simple ways the health-care system can be made safer.

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How an Enterprising Author Sold a Million Self-Published Books

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How an Enterprising Author Sold a Million Self-Published Books

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The publishing industry is in turmoil, and there is no shortage of people lamenting the passing of the old order.

We've previously had wailing and grinding of teeth from the music and movie moguls. Now the publishers are the latest to tell us the digital revolution is the end of civilization as we know it.

But the changes are also creating fantastic opportunities for writers willing to take an alternative route to success - and novelist CJ Lyons is living proof.

To date, CJ has sold over a million self-published novels, hitting the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists in the process. At one time, her books held five of the top ten slots on Amazon.

Success on this scale doesn't happen by chance. CJ is an inspiring example of the emerging author-entrepreneur who is thriving in the new era of publishing. I'm delighted that she has agreed to share the lessons she's learned with Copyblogger readers.

I know the writers in the audience will be eager to learn how CJ topped the charts. But when you look at the strategies she used, you'll see they are also applicable to any nimble content-driven 21st-century business.

1. Mine your experience

CJ spent several years working as an ER doctor, dealing with the real-life dramas that came through the doors at all hours of the day and night. This gives an unmistakeable authenticity to her novels with medical settings, that would be next-to-impossible to achieve with mere research.

She has also worked with victims and law enforcement, and had to overcome post-traumatic stress after the murder of a close friend. This range of first-hand experience has enabled her to extend her reach as a writer into the mainstream thriller venue.

I believe these experiences have helped me to make my novels feel 'as real as it gets' while still being entertaining. ~ CJ Lyons

Takeaway: No one else on earth has lived your life, had your experiences, or seen the world through your eyes. Ask yourself what you can share from your unique story that will help you attract the right audience.

2. Put in the hours (even when they're in short supply)

For most people, the punishing schedule of an ER doctor would be more than enough to fill their week. Not CJ.

She wrote her first novels in the gaps between shifts, which required extraordinary levels of energy and commitment. And like all aspiring novelists, she learned that perfecting the art of storytelling takes time, patience and persistence with no guarantee of success.

I've been writing all my life, so motivation wasn't an issue, but finding the time to write was. The stories would ferment in my subconscious during my work week, and then when I had a day off, I'd blitz write as it all poured out of me. It actually was a pretty efficient way to work and has helped me to write faster - a bonus now that I have such tight deadlines to meet. ~ CJ Lyons

Takeaway: There are no shortcuts to excellence. Whatever your line of work, make the effort to master it. There's no firmer foundation for your business than being the best in your customers' world at what you do.

3. Use creative positioning

CJ describes her novels as 'thrillers with heart', as they focus on people and relationships, not just the crime, technology, and conspiracy that are the staple of the thriller genre.

I created the term after trying unsuccessfully to explain my unique brand of thriller/romance/women's fiction to agents and editors. 'Thrillers with heart' says it all. My stories promise the reader an emotional journey in addition to the typical thriller roller coaster adrenalin rush. ~ CJ Lyons

By combining elements of the thriller and romance genres to produce something new and original, CJ is using classic crossroads positioning. Brands with this positioning combine previously unrelated elements to create something new.

The movie Alien was pitched to studios as " Jaws in space," combining the horror and science fiction genres. Primal Scream started out as an alternative rock band, but they really took off when they mixed in elements of house music to create a hybrid sound.

In the online space, obvious examples of crossroads positioning include NeuroMarketing (brain science + marketing) and you guessed it ... Copyblogger, combining copywriting and blogging (which was certainly a novel combination back in 2006 when Brian launched the site).

Of course, CJ didn't come up with her positioning as a cold, calculated formula - like many artists, her positioning is a natural extension of her creativity.

Thrillers with heart are the kind of books she found herself writing, so it made sense to put that front and center for the kind of reader who would enjoy her books. You could say that her positioning comes (ahem) from the heart. 🙂

Takeaway: Does your work or business combine different elements in an unusual (and valuable) way? Could that give you the basis of a remarkable brand?

4. Be generous

You're probably familiar with the idea that it makes good business sense to be generous in sharing digital content online, as a content marketing strategy.

But have you ever considered mailing hundreds of your physical products out to strangers, for free?

Because that's exactly what CJ did. Back in 2008, when her readers were getting impatient for the follow-up to her novel Lifelines, she decided to keep them happy in the meanwhile - much to her publisher's dismay - by offering to mail them a free copy of the book, personalised as a gift for their friends or family.

The publisher refused to participate, so CJ bought 350 copies of the book and paid all the postage herself. It was expensive and hard work, but as CJ told me,

I realized that not only was I making my audience happy, I was hopefully growing it by getting my books into the hands of new readers, and that's when the light bulb went off and I realized my best promotion was getting my books into the hands of readers.

Since then the proliferation of ebooks has made it possible to do this without lugging so many parcels to the post office, but the principle remains the same: be generous, let people experience your great work and your business will grow.

And real generosity is more than a marketing strategy. Now that she's achieved extraordinary success, CJ is using her platform to give back, with her Buy a Book, Make a Difference project:

I began writing thrillers as a way to cope with the pain of losing a close friend who was murdered. So now that my readers have helped me build such a successful career, I wanted to give something back. The Buy a Book, Make a Difference project provides money to charity as well as scholarships for police officers to receive forensic training.

I named the scholarship after my friend and my readers get the chance to become heroes as well as they'll determine the amount we raise for each new release. So far in 2012, we've raised $12,000 and have provided six forensic scholarships. I hope to double that in 2013 - actually, I'm pretty certain we can because my readers rock!

Takeaway: Generosity doesn't just feel good, it's also a smart strategy for growing your business. Be generous in sharing valuable ideas online (mailing free products is optional). As Brian is fond of saying, if it feels like you're giving away too much, you've probably got it about right!

5. Price strategically

Some online entrepreneurs, used to charging a healthy price for digital products, look at the low price of ebooks on Amazon and shudder. And there's no shortage of voices from the traditional publishing industry condemning self-published authors for 'devaluing books' by charging as little as .99 cents a title.

What both of these groups fail to appreciate is the strategic function of pricing in a high-volume dynamic marketplace such as the Amazon book store.

Is a novel that took months or years to write worth more than .99 cents? Of course.

But supposing you could achieve exponentially more sales by pricing at .99 cents versus $9.99 or even $4.99?

That's what CJ did. When her novel Blind Faith picked up enough momentum at $4.99 to pay her monthly mortgage, she decided to take a risk and drop the price to .99 cents.

Far from eroding the value of her book, she saw sales take off like a rocket - she hit the Amazon best seller chart (a powerful form of social proof in its own right) and the magic Amazon algorithms kicked in, promoting her book on "customers who bought this book also bought" lists and elsewhere in the store.

I have to give Mark and Brian and their Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap course credit for giving me the courage to try this and several other initiatives (like giving away 50,000 free ebooks!). Once I got over my ego being tied to the price of my books and realized that my readers were far more valuable, I began to make every business decision with my readers in mind.

My new mantra when faced with a dilemma is: Will this make my readers excited and delighted and ready to jump for joy? If the answer is yes, it's the right thing to do - and so far that philosophy has paid off in spades! ~ CJ Lyons

As Seth Godin puts it:

For books under $20 (which means just about all ebooks), all that matters is volume. Not margin, but volume.

Takeaway: When pricing your products, consider context as well as intrinsic value. If you're selling in a marketplace with a potential for high volume, consider pricing low (maybe temporarily) to achieve a strategic advantage.

6. Earn permission to stay in touch (and know when to ask for a favour)

I left out something really important from the last section.

CJ didn't just drop the price of her book. She did something that distinguished herself as a creative entrepreneur, as opposed to the average self-published author who uploads her book and crosses her fingers that a low price will entice readers to take a chance.

In fact, CJ had been doing this something for years ... earning the trust of her readers, asking for permission to stay in touch via email, and sending them valuable content over time (like those books in the mail).

So by the time she decided to drop the price of Blind Faith, she was able to send a friendly email to more than 10,000 readers.

The only promotion I did for that sale on Blind Faith is I sent out an e-mail to my readers and I said, 'Hey, help me make a dream come true. I want to hit the Amazon Top 20 and we'll see, maybe that will also lead to hitting another list.'

Well, two weeks later Blind Faith was number four on the USA Today list and a week after that it debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. So my readers really started that momentum that built into something that I just couldn't even imagine doing on my own. ~ CJ Lyons

The massive dent CJ made in the best seller lists came from a smart combination of an irresistible offer and a well-timed call to action to legions of eager fans.

She was only able to do this because she had spent years focusing on the big picture, building her permission asset through hard work and generosity. In her case, overnight success was anything but.

Takeaway: Make it a priority to build your email list, by sharing valuable, inspiring and/or educational content with your biggest fans. Never forget that these people are the future of your business, and treat them accordingly.

7. Accelerate when you build momentum

CJ was not satisfied with one big hit, nor even a string of them - she has kept up her remarkable rate of production, expanding her book range vertically, by writing series of books, and horizontally, by writing different types of books and creating other products.

As well as her 'Angels of Mercy' and 'Hart and Drake' thrillers with a medical background, she has 'Shadow Ops' and 'Lucy Guardino FBI Thriller' series, as well as standalone thrillers, collaborations with Erin Brockovich and appearances in anthologies. She also teaches what she has learned on her journey, in courses and blog posts via her NoRulesJustWrite site.

In one sense, this is down to the natural enthusiasm of a creative person who loves her work and likes exploring new avenues.

It's also a smart entrepreneurial strategy, as it allows her to accelerate her success, giving her readers more of what they love, and keeping them interested by taking them in new directions.

I'm bored easily, guess that's why the ER suited me so well, so I love being able to keep my promise to my readers of providing Thrillers with Heart while exploring every aspect of that brand, including some future series cross-over novels.

My newest projects are YA (young adult fiction) - I love reading YA and as a pediatrician love having the opportunity to empower kids when they're at this very vulnerable age. But the cool thing is I can actually go darker and edgier with my YA than my adult fiction because kids crave emotional honesty and for adults sometimes being 'as real as it gets' is actually too real and too frightening. ~ CJ Lyons

Takeaway: When you feel your momentum building, look for ways to accelerate your success vertically (by giving your audience more of the same) and horizontally (by creating complementary products or services).

Doing great work isn't enough

CJ has an artist's dedication to the craft of writing, which is a necessary condition of her success. In an ideal world, it would be nice to think that just writing great books would also be sufficient to achieve what she has done.

But the reality is that, over and above the effort CJ puts into her writing, she has also approached her work as a creative entrepreneur, applying her creativity to the process of moving her business forward as well as her story lines.

One of the things that helped CJ accelerate her success was taking a course called the Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap ...

A quick note from Brian Clark ...

Mark was a little shy about highlighting the fact that C.J. is a student of his. In fact, she's a student of mine as well, in the form of a course Mark and I created called the Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap. I'm not as modest as Mark is 🙂 so I'm perfectly willing to tell you that the course distills some powerful thinking about how a small-scale creative business can keep their creative energy high and still make a profit.

The course also includes lessons from Sonia Simone, Jon Morrow, and Tony Clark. It's all high-quality material and if you're a creative entrepreneur, you should go check it out.

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How an Enterprising Author Sold a Million Self-Published Books - Copyblogger

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The publishing industry is in turmoil, and there is no shortage of people lamenting the passing of the old order. We've previously had wailing and grinding of teeth from the music and movie moguls. Now the publishers are the latest to tell us the digital revolution is the end of civilization as we know it.

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Historians of science and medicine are often terrible killjoys when it comes to great stories about discovery and genius. We have been quick to point out that the apocryphal story of Fleming discovering penicillin mould "by accident" when it blew in through a window and landed on a discarded Petri dish is, well, apocryphal. We are less unanimous about the way penicillin became a drug. Although the 'Oxford Group', led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, developed the chemical extract as far as clinical trials, in the end it was American agricultural, pharmaceutical and military researchers who produced the first useful quantities of purified antibiotic, and who subsequently made the biggest profits from it. Scientists and historians will tell you that this shows what happens when science is underfunded, or that it warns us how much war can retard or skew scientific research.

You can hear very similar arguments made today about funding, commercialisation and patenting, so maybe we can learn something useful about drug discovery from the history of penicillin?

Hints from History

1. Use a public/private partnership.

This might seem like an unlikely suggestion, but the Almroth Wright Laboratory that Fleming worked in would probably be a sort of public/private enterprise today. It was based at the St Mary's hospital, a voluntary - that is charitable - hospital which largely served the working classes. The laboratory earned its keep by making commercially viable vaccines, sometimes using the pus and bacteria from staff and patients. In 1914 Fleming himself produced a rather expensive vaccine against acne, costing £1 and 5 shillings for just 25 cubic centimetres.

At almost every stage penicillin was developed by mixed-interest groups - from Universities, the Medical Research Council and private pharmaceutical companies in the United Kingdom, to the complicated mix of government, private, military and agricultural funding that eventually produced antibiotics in the United States.

2. Buy your vegetables locally.

Agricultural scientists at the US Department of Agriculture's Northern Regional Research Laboratory (based in Peoria, Illinois) decided to hunt out a more productive strain of penicillum mould. They initiated a global search. The most promising new strain was Penicillium chrysogenum. And where was it found? On a melon, in a vegetable market. In Peoria.

3. Concentrate on pressing contemporary problems

The death rate from wound infections for those treated on the front lines in First World War was about 12-15 per cent. For the Second World War that figure was just 3 per cent, due in large part to penicillin. With thousands of young men being injured, the pressure to reduce deaths from raging infections in otherwise non-life-threatening injuries was huge (not to mention the men who were being invalided out with venereal disease). The military support for penicillin research was crucial, not only for financing, but also facilities and human guinea pigs.

From the first grant bid to the Medical Research Council onwards, those working on antibiotics repeatedly and explicitly linked their research - whether "basic" or "applied" - to the immediate contemporary needs for infection control, particularly in wartime.

4. Ignore pressing contemporary problems

Why didn't Fleming "invent" antibiotics? Possibly because he was too busy concentrating on immediate contemporary needs. Fundamentally, he was interested in vaccines. It is how he made his living, after all. His 1929 paper on the mould was titled "On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium with special reference to their use in the isolation of 'B. influenzae'".

What was useful about Penicillin was not just that it killed bacteria; it was that it killed most bacteria but not influenza. "B. influenzae" was already immune to the mould's action. This meant that researchers could use the mould to kill off other contaminating bacteria, while letting the rather fussy "B. influenzae" grow on a Petri dish, making it much easier to study this temperamental bug in the laboratory. It also improved the sensitivity of culture tests for influenza; it seemed that in many cases flu infections were missed because the bacteria in a sample were outcompeted by more robust bugs, and so never grew into identifiable colonies on a Petri dish.

Although the deaths from infected wounds in the First World War were shocking, this was nothing compared with the incredible death toll of the influenza pandemic that followed. Fleming's understandable focus on tools to study and understand influenza and make vaccines may have stopped him seeing the other potential uses of penicillin.

5. Be imaginative and spontaneous

Sometimes you have to use something in a way its inventors never intended. The Oxford team showed great imagination in making the leap from what penicillin was (a chemical tool useful for some experiments) to what it could be (an incredible drug); they also showed great creativity with their equipment, with Norman Hartley suggesting they try using hospital bedpans as growing tanks.

6. Be plodding and systematic (and read a lot).

There was no guarantee that the Oxford Group would ever find Fleming's 1929 paper: today researchers are swamped with publications, and even digital indexing and open access doesn't mean that the "right" paper will find the "right" researcher. A lot of careful, methodical reading might be necessary to find the unexpected connection in papers that don't, at a glance, seem relevant. Fleming wasn't the first, after all, there was John Tyndall's 1875 paper suggesting Penicillum acted as an antibiotic, and Ernest Duschesne's work in the 1890s curing guinea pigs of typhoid with the cheese mould "Penicillum glaucum" was waiting to be exploited...

7. Get lucky

In the 1940s, while the US concentrated on trying to grow the mould and harvest penicillin, British researchers tended to think that the antibiotic chemical itself could be cost-effectively synthesised. If this particular type of bacteria-destroying mould had no easy-grow variant (or if that melon had never been bought in Peoria), or if the chemical produced had been easier to synthesise, then the story of the Antibiotic Wonder Drug could have been very different - with Britain the first country to successfully produce industrial quantities, not the US. So, most importantly, remember to season your hard work with lots of lucky choices.

-Guardian News and Media Ltd

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Historians of science and medicine are often terrible killjoys when it comes to great stories about discovery and genius. We have been quick to point out that the apocryphal story of Fleming discovering penicillin mould "by accident" when it blew in through a window and landed on a discarded Petri dish is, well, apocryphal.

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June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Teddy Roosevelt once said "the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." Recent research suggests he may have been more right than he knew: Life's "best prize" might actually extend life itself.

Our common perception is that retirement is a time when we can relax and take better care of ourselves after stressful careers. But what if work itself is beneficial to our health, as several recent studies suggest?

One of them, by Jennifer Montez of Harvard University and Anna Zajacova of the University of Wyoming, examined why the gap in life expectancy between highly educated and less-educated Americans has been growing so rapidly. (I have explored this topic in several previous columns, and have also agreed to be co-chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel that will delve into it in more detail.)

Examining the growing educational gradient in life expectancy from 1997 to 2006, Montez and Zajacova focused on white women ages 45 to 84. In addition to differential trends in smoking by education, they concluded that among these women "employment was, in and of itself, an important contributor." The life expectancy of less-educated women was being shortened by their lower employment rates compared with those of highly educated women.

The researchers tried to test whether the problem was that less-educated people had worse health, and therefore couldn't work. But they found that "the contribution of employment to diverging mortality across education levels is at least partly due to the health benefits derived from employment."

Unhealthy Retirement

Researchers at the Institute of Economic Affairs in the U.K. have also recently identified "negative and substantial effects on health from retirement." Their study found retirement to be associated with a significant increase in clinical depression and a decline in self-assessed health, and that these effects grew larger as the number of years people spent in retirement increased.

Similarly, a study published in 2008 by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that full retirement increased difficulties with mobility and daily activities by 5 percent to 16 percent and, by reducing physical exertion and social interactions, also harmed mental health.

The broader literature on the question of whether retirement harms health has been more mixed. The big question is whether the observed physical deterioration after retirement occurs because it is underlying poor health that leads people to end their working life. Some studies that try to control for this reverse causality, such as a 2007 paper by John Bound of the University of Michigan and Timothy Waidmann of the Urban Institute, find that retirement doesn't harm health -- and may actually improve it. Another study, by Esteban Calvo of the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, Natalia Sarkisian of Boston College and Christopher Tamborini of the Social Security Administration, finds harm from early retirement but no benefit from delaying retirement beyond the traditional age.

My own reading of all of these studies is that there is at least strongly suggestive evidence that not working, in and of itself, can be harmful to your health. And this raises the question of what it means for the puzzling finding that overall life expectancy appears to rise, not fall, during recessions.

Now I'm only speculating, but the answer could lie in the fact that, even during a recession, most people still work. Because a larger-than-usual minority don't, pollution is reduced, traffic fatalities decline and the quality of staffing at nursing homes improves -- and these changes boost the health of the people who are still working. It's terrible to say, but the research seems to suggest that being out of work yourself may hurt your health -- but having other people out of work may help it.

Which brings us back to Mr. Roosevelt. Most of us seem to think that we would be in better health if we won the lottery and spent our days on the beach, rather than struggling with sometimes stressful jobs. Yet the next time you think your job is killing you, just remember that the evidence, if anything, suggests the opposite. Your job may be saving your life.

(Peter Orszag is vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration.)

To contact the writer of this article: Peter Orszag at orszagbloomberg@gmail.com

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Mary Duenwald at mduenwald@bloomberg.net

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June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Teddy Roosevelt once said "the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." Recent research suggests he may have been more right than he knew: Life's "best prize" might actually extend life itself.

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Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too

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Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too

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Just in time for my daughter starting her freshman year. Oh joy!

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How Military Counterinsurgency Software Is Being Adapted To Tackle Gang Violence in Mainland USA

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How Military Counterinsurgency Software Is Being Adapted To Tackle Gang Violence in Mainland USA

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Analysts believe that insurgents in Afghanistan form similar networks to street gangs in the US. So the software for analysing these networks abroad ought to work just as well at home, say military researchers.

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In the last 10 years or so, researchers have revolutionised the way military analysts think about insurgency and the groups of people involved in it. Their key insight is that insurgency tends to run in families and in social networks that are held together by common beliefs.

So it makes sense to study the social networks that insurgents form. And indeed that's exactly what various military analysts have begun to do, including those in the US Army. A few years ago, a group of West Point cadets and offices developed some software for gathering information about the links between the people who make and distribute improvised explosive devices.

In testing this tool in Afghanistan, they found they could perform the same tasks as a traditional analyst in just a fraction of the time.

Now the US Army is adapting this technology to help the police tackle gang violence. Damon Paulo and buddies at the US Military Academy at West Point say there are a number of similarities between gang members and insurgents and that similar tools ought to be equally effective in tackling both.

To that end, these guys have created a piece of software called the Organizational, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer or ORCA, which analyses the data from police arrests to create a social network of links between gang members.

The new software has a number of interesting features. First it visualises the networks that gang members create, giving police analysts a better insight into these organisations.

It also enables them to identify influential members of each gang and to discover subgroups, such as "corner crews" that deal in drugs at the corners of certain streets within their area.

The software can also assess the probability that an individual may be a member of a particular gang, even if he or she has not admitted membership. That's possible by analysing that person's relationship to other individuals who are known gang members.

The software can also find individuals known as connectors who link one gang with another and who may play an important role in selling drugs from one group to another, for example.

Paulo and co have tested the software on a police dataset of more than 5400 arrests over a three-year period. They judge individuals to be linked in the network if they are arrested at the same time.

This dataset revealed over 11,000 relationship among. From this, ORCA created a social network consisting of 1468 individuals who are members of 18 gangs. It was also able to identify so-called "seed sets", small groups within a gang who are highly connected and therefore highly influential.

This approach has also highlighted another aspect of gang culture. The size of the seed sets varies from one gang to another and this turns out to be a useful measure of how centralised the organisation is. Gangs with smaller seed sets are clearly more centralised.

What's more, ORCA also shows that decentralised gangs have more clearly defined subgroups, such as corner crews. So this feature, known as modularity, is another measure of centralisation.

"Police ofﬁcers working in the district have told us that gangs of Racial Group A are known for a more centralized organizational structure while gangs of Racial Group B have adopted a decentralized model," say Paulo and co adding that the results of their analysis seem to clearly show this.

Perhaps most impressive of all, Paulo and co say they did all of the number crunching for this dataset on a standard Windows 8 laptop in just 34 seconds.

The team is currently working to introduce a software in a major metropolitan police department throughout the summer of 2013.

However, there is more work ahead. The next stage is to introduce geographic data into the analysis so that analysts can study how gangs are organised throughout the district. The team also wants to introduce a temporal element to examine how gangs change over time, an important factor since gang members are known to switch allegiances and to regularly start new gangs.

There is clearly some value for the police in this work. "Currently the police are employing this analysis for one district. There are plans to expand to other districts in late 2013," say Paulo and co.

All that means that the counterinsurgency techniques used by the US Army in Afghanistan may soon be in operation in the urban streets of mainland USA.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1306.6834: Social Network Intelligence Analysis to Combat Street Gang Violence

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How Military Counterinsurgency Software Is Being Adapted To Tackle Gang Violence in Mainland USA

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In the last 10 years or so, researchers have revolutionised the way military analysts think about insurgency and the groups of people involved in it. Their key insight is that insurgency tends to run in families and in social networks that are held together by common beliefs.

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What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

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What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

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Procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era.

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What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called "my own ineptitude in such matters" meant that doing so was going to be a hassle-indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz's clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it's possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz's shirts did.

There's something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called "Procrastination and Obedience" (1991), "each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box." He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn't just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in "The Thief of Time," edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)-a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical-the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch "How I Met Your Mother," that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is "as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse."

Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning "to put off for tomorrow") entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as "one of the general weaknesses" that "prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind," and lamenting the tendency in himself: "I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment's idleness increased the difficulty." And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it's possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.

It's also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don't file their taxes on time. The Harvard economist David Laibson has shown that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan. Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments. The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government's dithering, and the decline of the American auto industry, exemplified by the bankruptcy of G.M., was due in part to executives' penchant for delaying tough decisions. (In Alex Taylor's recent history of G.M., "Sixty to Zero," one of the key conclusions is "Procrastination doesn't pay.")

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It's a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia -doing something against one's own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you're simply saying "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," you're not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that's the most efficient use of your time doesn't count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn't do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time-in particular, from a tendency that economists call "hyperbolic discounting." A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they're thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put "Hotel Rwanda" and "The Seventh Seal" in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of "The Hangover."

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren't consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don't know what's right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the "visceral" rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, "The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp." Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we'll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls "the planning fallacy." Elster thinks that people underestimate the time "it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur." When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn't have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

Still, ignorance can't be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren't what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don't. A magazine editor I know, for instance, once had a writer tell her at noon on a Wednesday that the time-sensitive piece he was working on would be in her in-box by the time she got back from lunch. She did eventually get the piece-the following Tuesday. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. A useful example can be found in the career of General George McClellan, who led the Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War and was one of the greatest procrastinators of all time. When he took charge of the Union army, McClellan was considered a military genius, but he soon became famous for his chronic hesitancy. In 1862, despite an excellent opportunity to take Richmond from Robert E. Lee's men, with another Union army attacking in a pincer move, he dillydallied, convinced that he was blocked by hordes of Confederate soldiers, and missed his chance. Later that year, both before and after Antietam, he delayed again, squandering a two-to-one advantage over Lee's troops. Afterward, Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck wrote, "There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass."

McClellan's "immobility" highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. Although when he took over the Union army he told Lincoln "I can do it all," he seems to have been unsure that he could do anything. He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, "he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped." Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.

Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in "The Thief of Time" have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they're different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called "the divided self." Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel "Solar": "At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy." Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, "Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic." In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn't admitting that you have a problem. It's admitting that your "you"s have a problem.

If identity is a collection of competing selves, what does each of them represent? The easy answer is that one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. But, if that's the case, it's not obvious how you'd ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another-one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it's interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in "The Thief of Time," call "the extended will"-external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses' decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don't deliver on their promise it'll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.

Not everyone in "The Thief of Time" approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn't a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it's easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation-in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren't allowed to touch-had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester's end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you'd be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn't get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

Beyond self-binding, there are other ways to avoid dragging your feet, most of which depend on what psychologists might call reframing the task in front of you. Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. That's why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book "Getting Things Done," lays great emphasis on classification and definition: the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it. One German study suggests that just getting people to think about concrete problems (like how to open a bank account) makes them better at finishing their work-even when it deals with a completely different subject. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choice we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. So companies might be better off offering their employees fewer investment choices in their 401(k) plans, and making signing up for the plan the default option.

It's hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options-in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he'd be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: "Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all." In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that's telling you that what you're supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator's challenge, and perhaps the philosopher's, too, is to figure out which is which. ♦

James Surowiecki is the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" and writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine.
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Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off.

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You really cant. Here's why.

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Lessons from famous college dropouts

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Lessons from famous college dropouts

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We need to make college more accessible to smart people from all backgrounds, while also being careful not to judge talent, character or competence primarily by higher education credentials. Our nation should be a ladder of opportunity for the best talent, regardless of background.

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A college degree can be an important gateway to employment, a career and a better standard of living. But a college degree does not equate to someone's level of intelligence or talent. For those seeking the best workers or leaders, there is a plethora of intelligent, inventive people without degrees who should not be overlooked.

Recognizing this does not negate the importance of a college education -- the intellectual knowledge, access to a wide array of subjects and experience gained on a college campus can be transformative. Studies demonstrate clearly that without a college degree, you will likely earn less, be more liable to be unemployed and have fewer opportunities for career advancement.

The challenge is that access to college has become more limited. At a time when degrees are so important to income potential, they are going increasingly to privileged and affluent young people. As the 2010 book "Rewarding Strivers" points out, among those who scored in the highest quartile of a national standardized test, those from affluent families were twice as likely to attend college as those from poorer families.

So a lot of talent goes unrecognized and undeveloped. And those without college degrees aren't necessarily less driven or intelligent than those with degrees. Michael Ellsberg, author of "The Education of Millionaires," argued in The New York Times recently that the skills of entrepreneurs are not learned "crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams." Indeed, years ago Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance created a research-based entrepreneurship test that deducts a substantial number of points if you were a high achiever in school.

This is what we have found at Public Allies over the past two decades. We have worked with thousands of young adults without college degrees and have seen many achieve incredible success (with many eventually completing degrees). We've seen a single mom in community college become a White House lawyer, a former gang member create a youth development organization and a woman raised in foster care work for a foundation reforming foster care systems.

I share these and many other stories in my book, "Everyone Leads." When we equate talent, competence and character with credentials, we block a lot of superstar leaders our businesses, communities and country need.

Here are examples of other superstars who did not complete college on their rise to the top:

-- We all know the story of Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Reed College. Since the days of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, many business leaders got their starts without the benefit of degrees, including Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Brian Dunn of Best Buy, Anna Wintour of Vogue, Barry Diller of IAC, John Mackey of Whole Foods, David Geffen, Ralph Lauren and Ted Turner.

-- David Plouffe, senior advisor to President Barack Obama and architect of his innovative and historically unprecedented campaign, dropped out of the University of Delaware to work in politics (returning to complete his degree in 2010). President George W. Bush's top adviser, Karl Rove, and John McCain's 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, also lacked degrees.

-- Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of Marquette University. He is joined by Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah, U.S. Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska and 33 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

-- Maya Angelou has received many honorary doctorates but never attended college to learn her craft. She's in good company with many other great American writers, such as Gore Vidal, August Wilson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Joseph Brodsky and Harper Lee.

-- Woody Allen is loved by intellectuals for his philosophical films, but he did not gain his style on a campus, having flunked out of City College of New York. Other Oscar winners without degrees include Clint Eastwood, James Cameron, Robert Redford, Michael Moore, Sidney Pollack, George Clooney, Hillary Swank, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Steven Spielberg (who completed a degree in 2002).

-- Oprah Winfrey left Tennessee State University in 1976 to begin her career in media (completing her degree in 1986). Top talkers without degrees include Larry King, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Kimmel, Joy Behar, Rosie O'Donnell and conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

-- Brian Williams attended three schools and completed 18 undergraduate credits before working his way to NBC News anchor. Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were also anchors without degrees. And many reporters and columnists never completed college, including Nina Totenberg of NPR, Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and former New York Times columnist and wordsmith William Safire.

-- Alicia Keys has made a name for herself as a singer, songwriter and political activist. She joins an exclusive club of singer/activists without degrees that includes Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Steve Earle and Jon Bon Jovi.

The point of this list is not to disparage higher education -- it is still the best pathway to success. But imagine if venture capitalists had denied Steve Jobs or Bill Gates support because their resumes lacked a diploma, or if producers had denied Oprah Winfrey a television show because she had not completed her degree.

We need to make college more accessible to smart people from all backgrounds, while also being careful not to judge talent, character or competence primarily by higher education credentials. Our nation should be a ladder of opportunity for the best talent, regardless of background.

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lessons from famous college dropouts - cnn

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A college degree can be an important gateway to employment, a career and a better standard of living. But a college degree does not equate to someone's level of intelligence or talent. For those seeking the best workers or leaders, there is a plethora of intelligent, inventive people without degrees who should not be overlooked.

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If You Suffer From Shoulder Pain Or Weakness

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If You Suffer From Shoulder Pain Or Weakness

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This is a great group of science based exercises that can really help

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Features to Predict Success with Nonoperative Treatment of Rotator Cuff Tears Impact of Postoperative Management on Outcomes and Healing of Rotator Cuff Repairs

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The view from these bars can be very cool. If you are looking for hot rooftop bars, those would'nt be this

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It also grows its own jalapeños for a spicy margarita, which is not your everyday Manhattan agrarian occurrence.

The Roof Terrace is not fancy. You pass the hotel's compact fitness center on the way in, and the cups are, yes, plastic, but it is low-key fun. Red awnings cover some of the seating areas and the bar. The music is pop - Katy Perry, Enrique Iglesias, Pink - played at medium volume. Fashion runs from guys in sport coats to a guy in an Iron Maiden T-shirt (the far better choice on a steamy night in late June). There always seems to be something of a breeze on this 14th-floor space, and it is a comfortable place to kick back while appreciating a memorable perspective.

The drinks, fittingly enough, tend toward the resort-y: a piña colada, an apple martini and a decent, weather forecast-appropriate Dark and Stormy, made with Gosling's dark rum and Saranac ginger beer. (Most specialty drinks are $15.) Beers on tap include Brooklyn Lager, Blue Point Summer Ale and Harpoon I.P.A. (all $8).

There were no homegrown jalapeños to be found on a recent visit, but a margarita with Patron tequila ($16) worked out O.K.
The Roof Garden
The rooftop bar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the second in a week at which a customer was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt (it was definitely not the same guy who was at the Hotel Metro's terrace), which just goes to show that every now and then a headbanger has to take a break from listening to "El Dorado." (Although it should be noted that you can see the El Dorado apartment building on the Upper West Side from here.)

This being the Met, there is art. The current installation, which has the terrace painted in red-and-white patterns, is by Imran Qureshi, and previous summers have showcased work by Tomas Saraceno and Anthony Caro.

There are also some strong drinks and sweeping views of Central Park, the Chrysler Building and the famous apartment buildings on Central Park West, including the San Remo.

It's a great place to have a drink - though the limited seating and an 8 p.m. closing time make it hard to imagine anyone's having two - and to spend some of an early evening applauding the skyline. The crowd here includes people of all ages, from a young woman in booty shorts to an older woman wearing a boot cast.

The specialty drinks, priced at $14 and served in (am I repeating myself?) plastic cups are fine: a martini made with Svedka vodka; a rosewater cocktail made with cachaca, rosewater essence, sparkling water, sugar, lemon juice and topped with yellow rose petals; and an iced black tea made with Jim Beam bourbon, simple syrup and cardamom pods.

"I don't know if the cardamom seeds really add anything," one of my son's friends remarked - because at a museum, everyone's a critic. (Beers, including Brooklyn Summer Ale, are $9, and Hayes Ranch wines are $12. Museum admission should be considered a cultural cover charge.)

The exit is down a mirrored stairwell, which constitutes something of an art installation of its own.
Rare View
There is an odd piece of art hanging on a wall at Rare View at the Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue, a mural of a showgirl in a champagne glass surrounded by hamburgers, a green beer bottle and some skyscrapers.

It's not going to be hanging in the Met anytime soon - it's pretty ugly - but it does seem to capture the agreeably kooky atmosphere of this 16th-floor bar.

To gain admittance, guests wait for an elevator in a cramped entryway on the ground floor and have their hands stamped by an attendant. (There were about a dozen people waiting in line at 7:30 on a recent Friday night.) Romeo y Julieta cigars are sold at a small table on the rooftop, and cocktails are summer-centered, including a John Daly (Grey Goose Le Citron, iced tea and lemonade) and a mango Margarita (Riazul Silver tequila, mango nectar, Cointreau, fresh lime juice). Each is $15. The wine, priced at $10 a glass, is mostly San Huberto from Argentina, and is best described as rudimentary. (It also seems excessively priced for what it is; bottles at retail go for $9 to $11.)

All of the drinks - in plastic cups, again - are served by an upbeat staff against a backdrop that includes the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. The seating is comfortable - cushions on the benches, tables for the drinks - and it's a nice place to hang out for a while on a summer night.

But maybe only for a while. The music, which included some Sinatra on a recent night, segued into a propulsive but not overly loud dance track that featured remixes of "Black Magic Woman" and "Riders on the Storm," which tended to lose its charm after 20 minutes.

But if you want to get down to the Doors while drinking a Daly, this is your place.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks, on the 14th floor of the Library Hotel, doesn't have the impressive landmark vistas found at a number of other destinations -you can see the MetLife Building on Avenue of the Americas and some of the antenna on the Empire State Building - but it does deliver an experience that is more refined than that at many rooftops. It feels more sleek saloon than party cove.

Tables on the open-air terrace go fast, but the views along the window from the inside are good; inside is the place to be when the weather turns rainy, as it did on a recent weekend night.

Cocktails are served in glasses - real rooftop luxury - and they are solid. The Pulitzer is made with Plymouth gin, St.-Germain elderflower liqueur, Fernet Branca, agave nectar and fresh lemon juice; the Hemingway has Santa Teresa rum, muddled mint, lime juice and a splash of Champagne. (Specialty drinks are $15.50; beers range from $8 to $8.50; and sparkling cocktails made with juices and purées are $15.)

Servers are pleasant and efficient. When Bookmarks is full, the noise doesn't interfere with conversation.

On the way in, the song was "My World Is Empty Without You," by the Supremes. On the way out, it was "Sunshine Superman," which prompted a discussion of whether any of us ever owned an entire album by Donovan.

The answer was no.
Hi Bar
Even though Hi Bar is just off Columbus Circle, in the 6 Columbus Hotel, it can feel a bit like a hideaway. That is still true even when the front of the bar, along 58th Street, is the site of a networking event for app developers, as was the case one night last month.

After determining that I was not among them, the bartender suggested that I head over to the patio on the other side of the elevator bank, where there were plenty of places to sit on wooden benches and enjoy a nice litchi martini with Ketel One ($13). The menu lists shochu as the drink's liquor, but the bartender suggested vodka: "Less sweet." Another night a smart recommendation was a Manhattan made with Suntory 12-year Yamazaki whiskey, on the rocks. The draft beer is Sapporo ($8 a pint).

The view from the 14th floor? The Hearst Tower is right there. The southwestern corner of Central Park. The hotel's water tank, which would not look out of place in one of the Edward Hopper paintings currently on view at the Whitney. (Cocktails are served there too, but not on a roof.)

The conversation in the elevator was about apps, including one that would facilitate recommending music to friends.

Among this group, at least, there was no mention of anything involving Donovan.

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Open-Air Bars Serving Summer Cocktails in Manhattan

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It also grows its own jalapeños for a spicy margarita, which is not your everyday Manhattan agrarian occurrence. The Roof Terrace is not fancy. You pass the hotel's compact fitness center on the way in, and the cups are, yes, plastic, but it is low-key fun.

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I have always been fascinated by moments in time. I wonder: "Do people know they are part of this special moment?" I was a little boy during the Summer of Love and experienced it with my father in Greenwich Villiage. But, I had not idea what I was experiencing.

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In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. If you were between 15 and 30 that year, it was almost impossible to resist the lure of that transcendent, peer-driven season of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism. It was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft a media plan. Yet the phenomenon washed over America like a tidal wave, erasing the last dregs of the martini-sipping Mad Men era and ushering in a series of liberations and awakenings that irreversibly changed our way of life.

The Summer of Love also thrust a new kind of music-acid rock-across the airwaves, nearly put barbers out of business, traded clothes for costumes, turned psychedelic drugs into sacred door keys, and revived the outdoor gatherings of the Messianic Age, making everyone an acolyte and a priest. It turned sex with strangers into a mode of generosity, made "uptight" an epithet on a par with "racist," refashioned the notion of earnest Peace Corps idealism into a bacchanalian rhapsody, and set that favorite American adjective, "free," on a fresh altar.

"It was this magical moment ... this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special," with "a lot of trust going around," says Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. "The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love," says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer's two queens, Janis Joplin. "And it became the new status quo," he continues. "The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."

Well, here is that source, according to the people who lived it.

"Old-Timey"

Certain places, for unknowable reasons, become socio-cultural petri dishes, and between 1960 and 1964 the area of Northern California extending from San Francisco to Palo Alto was one of them.

San Francisco's official bohemia was North Beach, where the Beats hung out at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore, and where espresso was sipped, jazz was worshipped, and hipsters did not dance. North Beach was not unique, however; it had strong counterparts, for example, in New York's Greenwich Village, L.A.'s Venice Beach and Sunset Strip, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What was unique was happening across town, where a group of young artists, musicians, and San Francisco State College students became besotted with the city's past. "There was a huge romanticism around the idea of the Barbary Coast, about San Francisco as a lawless, vigilante, late-19th-century town," says Rock Scully, one of those who rented cheap Victorian houses in a run-down neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury. They dressed, he says, "in old, stiff-collared shirts with pins, and riding coats and long jackets."

"Old-timey" became the shibboleth. Guys wore their hair long under Western-style hats, and young people decorated their apartments in old-fashioned castoffs. Scully recalls, "Michael Ferguson [an S.F. State art student] was wearing and living Victoriana in 1963"-a year before the Beatles came to America, and before costuming-as-rebellion existed in England. They were not aping the British. "We were Americans!, " insists musician Michael Wilhelm. Architecture student George Hunter was yet another in the crowd, and then there were the artists Wes Wilson and Alton Kelley, the latter an émigré from New England who frequently wore a top hat. "Kelley wanted to be freeze-dried and set on his Victorian couch behind glass," says his friend Luria Castell (now Luria Dickson), a politically active S.F. State student and the daughter of a waitress. Castell and her friends wore long velvet gowns and lace-up boots-a far cry from the Beatnik outfits of the early 60s.

Chet Helms, a University of Texas at Austin dropout who had hitchhiked to San Francisco, also joined the group and dressed old-timey. He had come to San Francisco with a friend, a nice, middle-class girl who had been a member of her high school's Slide Rule Club and who had also left the university, hoping to become a singer. Her name was Janis Joplin.

Helms, Castell, Scully, Kelley, and a few others lived semi-communally. "We were purists," says Castell, "snooty" about their left-wing politics and esoteric aesthetic. All their houses had dogs, so they called themselves the Family Dog. As for Wilhelm, Hunter, Ferguson, and their friends Dan Hicks and Richie Olsen, they took up instruments that most of them could barely play and formed the Charlatans, which became the first San Francisco band of the era. Wes Wilson, distinct for keeping his hair short, became the eventual scene's first poster artist, creating a style that would be epoch-defining.

Soon they came to share something else: LSD. It had been more than a decade since Sandoz Laboratories made the first batches of lysergic acid diethylamide, the high-octane synthetic version of two natural consciousness-altering compounds, psilocybin and mescaline, when, in 1961, the Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary had his life-changing experience with psilocybin mushrooms, in Mexico. Leary, a charismatic womanizer, and Richard Alpert, a colleague at Harvard and a closeted bisexual, would invite friends and a few grad students to drop acid with them off campus, and they endeavored to apply scholarly methodology to the sense-enhancing, cosmic-love-stimulating, and sometimes psychosis-abetting properties of LSD.

While Leary and Alpert were raising consciousness in their way on the East Coast, Ken Kesey, a young Oregonian, was doing it on the peninsula south of San Francisco far more outrageously-by buying a school bus, painting it in jubilant graffiti, and driving around in it, stoned, with a group he called the Merry Pranksters. In 1959, Kesey had been a volunteer in a C.I.A.-sponsored LSD experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park. His 1962 novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, was the result of his work there. In 1963 he assembled the Pranksters, including Stewart Brand, later famous as the author of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac's best friend and the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

At the same time, the Peninsula was incubating a music scene. In 1962 a young guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen, the son of a State Department official from Washington, D.C., went to a hootenanny (a sing-along folk event) and met another young guitarist, a music teacher who had been named after the composer Jerome Kern. Open-faced with wild hair, Jerry Garcia led a jug band, and Kaukonen recalls him as "absolutely the big dog on the scene: he had a huge following, was very outgoing and articulate. People gravitated to him."

The same weekend Kaukonen met Garcia, he says, he met Janis Joplin, "who was in her folky stage." Later, after amphetamine addiction made her return to Texas to straighten out, "she would be R&B Janis, peerless as Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie," Kaukonen recalls. But that night she was singing her Texas heart out on folk classics.

Two years later, a flirtatious Neal Cassady picked up Carolyn Adams near her cabin in the hills above Palo Alto, and they drove to Kesey's house. Adams, who came from a good Poughkeepsie family and had been kicked out of a private high school, would soon be known as Mountain Girl because she lived in the woods and rode a motorcycle. "I was frolicking about," she says. That night, she recalls, "I saw the bus and fell in love." She found Kesey to be "this Promethean figure, [who] saw psychedelics as a gift to mankind."

Carolyn Adams became a Prankster, and she and Kesey, who was married, became lovers. Their group soon initiated the Acid Tests, "happenings around the Bay Area," she says, where "we were creating a safe place for people to get high." They'd put a "low dose" of acid "in a big picnic cooler or garbage can, something that would hold 10 or 12 gallons," often diluted in "Kool-Aid or a big bucket of water.... It was a voyage," she says, adding, "At a 'graduation,' [we] gave out diplomas to people who passed the test. Ken was wearing the silver lamé space suit I made for him."

These were parties without alcohol. The drug engendered a hyper-reflective state of mind and languid, sensual body movement, both very new at the time. Even the usually gimlet-eyed Tom Wolfe, whose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a dispatch from that front, recently admitted having "felt like I had been in on something very spiritual" during his "all-night sessions with Kesey and the Pranksters."

Carolyn Adams and Jerry Garcia became a couple in the late 60s, had two daughters, and married in 1981. (They divorced in 1993.) Today she says of Garcia when they met, "He was brilliant. He read omnivorously. He was obsessed with music I think he had synesthesia, which is the professional word for when you [hear a sound and it causes you to] see color and sculpture."

Soon Jerry Garcia ditched his jug band and formed the Warlocks, made up of young men who had mostly never left Northern California-Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and Bill Kreutzmann. The Warlocks became the Acid Tests' resident band, and Rock Scully became the Warlocks' manager. Scully and Garcia were brought together by Owsley Stanley, a young Berkeley chemist who was said to make the purest acid on earth. The scion of a prominent Kentucky political family, Owsley, as he was always called-as was his product-was a true believer. He once said, about the first time he took acid, "I walked outside and the cars were kissing the parking meters."

Responding to a high whistle audible only to hidden soulmates, seekers in their 20s started moving to San Francisco. A random slew came from Brooklyn, including a schoolteacher turned poet named Allen Cohen, who eventually started The San Francisco Oracle, the newspaper that would define the new Zeitgeist, and two artists, Dave Getz and Victor Moscoso, both lured by the suddenly popular San Francisco Art Institute, which Jerry Garcia had briefly attended. Getz would become a drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company (all the new acid bands had wildly esoteric names), and Moscoso would turn out to be one of the scene's poster artists. Heading for the Bay Area "was like a calling; it was very strong," says Stanley Mouse, a shy, rebellious painter of hot rods from Detroit. As he was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, a friend with him asked, "How long you staying?" Mouse answered, "Forever."

The Family Dog and the Charlatans spent the summer of 1965 in Virginia City, Nevada, an old mining town. The Charlatans played in the Red Dog Saloon, which was run by hipsters like them, who romanticized the days of the Gold Rush. Their acid-dosed friends moved and swayed to their music in improvised, communal, free-form dancing. Dancing to pop music until this time mostly meant doing prescribed steps, in male-female pairs, to three-minute Top 40 hits, which, whether they were very bad ("Wooly Bully"), very good ("[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction"), or sublime ("My Girl"), still had a danceable arc. But the combination of this fantasy venue and the riffy, amateur music stoked abandon and in-group narcissism. And so psychedelic dancing, which would become the new dancing, was launched in an old-timey saloon, where one of the country's first light shows threw liquid globs of color on the walls.

Once they were back in San Francisco, the Family Dog couldn't wait to replicate the experience. As Luria Castell Dickson says, "With LSD, we experienced what it took Tibetan monks 20 years to obtain, yet we got there in 20 minutes."

Nirvana

On October 16, 1965, the Family Dog rented the Longshoremen's Hall, near Fisherman's Wharf, for the first of their bacchanals. "About 400 or 500 people showed up-it was such a revelation," Alton Kelley recalled a few years before his death, in 2008. "Everybody was walking around with their mouths open, going, 'Where did all these freaks come from? I thought my friends were the only guys around!' " People were dressed in "kind of crazy Edwardian clothes," says Stanley Mouse. But they were "also, now, getting more ecstatically dressed," says composer Ramon Sender, who'd witnessed the scene grow more rapturous since the Acid Test he had participated in. The Family Dog then had more parties, each with a sly wink of a name. Victor Moscoso remembers seeing a poster, made by Kelley and Mouse, for "A Tribute to Ming the Merciless." Moscoso says, "I thought, like Bob Dylan, Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" Moscoso did know, though. They all knew.

In January 1966, the Pranksters held the Trips Festival, also at the Longshoremen's Hall. Stewart Brand set up a tepee. Ramon Sender provided synthesizer music. LSD was in the ice cream that time, and it was not one but "three nights of craziness," Carolyn Garcia remembers. "That's the first time any of us met Bill Graham," she says. Graham was the manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater organization. Rescued, as a child, from the Nazis, Graham had later earned a Bronze Star in the Korean War. Watching this new scene, says Carolyn Garcia, "Graham decided that he could take everything he saw here and make a fortune."

From then on, two shuttered San Francisco halls-the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium-sprang to life as venues for the ongoing music and dance parties. Chet Helms ran the Avalon; Bill Graham ran the Fillmore. A growing group of bands-Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Sopwith Camel-played both halls. The clothes on the dancers got so wild it was like "seven different centuries thrown together in one room," an insider noted. "They were only 'costumes' to the straight people," says Rock Scully. Richard Alpert, who had traveled to India that year and had been renamed Ram Dass, visited and announced that the acid sybaritism in San Francisco trumped anything on the East Coast.

The parties were advertised by posters on every lamppost and coffeehouse wall in the Bay Area. The artists included Mouse, Kelley, and Moscoso-who all say they felt like Toulouse-Lautrec in 1890s Montmartre-but Wes Wilson was the pioneer. He'd seen a gallery brochure for the Austrian Art Deco painter Alfred Roller and was taken by Roller's Viennese Secessionist typeface-thick, with heavy horizontals, lighter verticals, and rounded serif edges. Wilson filled every inch of his posters with the boxy typeface and sensuous illustrations. Moscoso says, "Wes freed us! It clicked: Reverse everything I have ever learned! A poster should transmit its message quickly and simply? No! Our posters were taking as long as they could to be read, and were hanging up the viewer!" All four (and the late Rick Griffin) churned out flyers for the Fillmore and Avalon that people had to work to comprehend. "You'd see crowds standing there, grooving on them," Mouse recalls.

The star band called itself Jefferson Airplane. Jorma Kaukonen and his D.C. friend Jack Casady joined folksinger Marty Balin, local boy Paul Kantner, and Spencer Dryden, a nephew of Charlie Chaplin's, and labeled their sound "fo-jazz," for folk-jazz. Signe Anderson, the wife of one of the Pranksters, was the Airplane's female vocalist.

Anderson was a folksinger, as most of the girls on the scene were. But the lead singer of another group, the Great Society, was notably different. Grace Slick "was not a Beatnik girl," says Kaukonen. "She washed her hair every day." The self-assured beauty with the thick black hair, piercing blue eyes, and fiercely enunciated alto had an air of high society about her. Slick had attended Finch, the now defunct college for debutantes in New York City, and had, at 20, married the son of friends of her parents' in a lavish wedding in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. But she and her crowd were soon into smoking grass. As she says, "Forget that Leave It to Beaver shit-I wanted Paris in the 20s." She was modeling $20,000 couture gowns at I. Magnin when she walked into the Matrix club-of which Marty Balin was part owner-one night and heard Jefferson Airplane. "I said to myself, This looks better than what I'm doing. Modeling was a pain in the ass." But the blasé attitude masked real talent. "Grace had one of the great voices of all time," says Kaukonen. Casady adds, "Very few women back then walked to the edge of the stage like a guy and sang right into the eyes of the audience."

One night, listening to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain when she was stoned, Slick thought of the sly drug references in Alice in Wonderland and composed, of all things, a bolero. She took the song to Jefferson Airplane when she replaced Signe Anderson. Called "White Rabbit," it began, "One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small," and it would become the anthem of the coming summer.

Needy Janis Joplin was the opposite of cool Grace Slick. Chet Helms lured Joplin back to the Bay Area in 1966 to audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company. "Janis was not attractive-she had bad skin and was wearing funky sandals and cutoffs," Dave Getz recalls. But her singing, he continues, "knocked us out, instantaneously." Getz perceived what audiences would love about Joplin: "Janis was one of the most vulnerable people I have ever met. She'd been voted Ugliest Man on Campus-not even Ugliest Woman!-by a bunch of fraternity boys, and that had really hurt." She was a drinker, not a psychedelics user, though "there was really no place she wouldn't go; she was gonna knock on every door." Her bisexuality and her roiling emotions could be excruciating for her. One night she bolted out of a club because, as she wailed to Getz when he ran after her, "that black chick in there-she turns me on too much. " She soon became involved with Joe McDonald, from whose perspective (his parents were Communists) she was a "politically naïve, intelligent, hardworking" girl. She was always primed for rejection. "One day she went running down Haight Street, crying, 'Joe stood me up!' " when he was only late, according to her eventual lover Peggy Caserta.

Joplin's creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz's gave her acid for the first time-slipping it into her cold duck-and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. "Janis told me she invented the 'buh-buh-buh- ba-by ... ' after seeing him," says Joe McDonald. "She wanted to be Otis Redding." Grace Slick salutes her 1967 co-queen (who died of a drug overdose in 1970), her soul sister in prodigious "swearing and drinking," by saying, "She had the balls to do her thing by herself. A white girl from Texas, singing the blues? What gumption, what spirit! I don't think I had that fearlessness." Slick sadly regrets, "I was so Episcopalian that when I saw a certain sadness in Janis's eyes I felt it was none of my business." If she could turn back the clock, she says, she would have tried to help her.

Victor Moscoso says that 1966 was "when it worked. You'd walk down Haight and nod to another longhair and it meant something." Rock Scully adds, "We painted our houses bright colors. We swept the streets." The Grateful Dead all crammed into a house at 710 Ashbury; so did Carolyn Garcia, with Sunshine, her baby daughter with Kesey. Barely 20, Carolyn cooked every meal for that "boisterous, wonderful" band, and she saw how "competitive to a fault" Jerry was. "He would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and with these intricate fingerings-always wanting to excel, to be the best" at the acid-fueled improvisations he now played, which he described as "something like ordered chaos." (Garcia died of heart failure in 1995.)

Kelley and Mouse made their posters at 715 Ashbury, across the street; Janis Joplin was down the block, often calling out to the others from her window. The poet Allen Cohen and his live-in girlfriend, Laurie, hosted "soirées for everyone who was anything on the scene," says Laurie Sarlat Coe today. "Drugs were a sacrament. Everything was spiritual. Everyone read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. " The brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened what was likely the country's first head shop, the Psychedelic Shop, devoted so much more to peace than profit that they wound up giving everything away.

Allen Cohen's psychedelic newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle, gave readers Eastern-religion-tinged illustrations and Founding-Fathers-on-acid declarations: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to cease [obeying] obsolete social patterns which have isolated man from his consciousness ... we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all hate-carrying men and women." Peggy Caserta's boutique, Mnasidika, was where "Wes and Mouse and Marty and Janis and Jerry and Bobby [Weir] and Phil [Lesh] hung out. We felt we'd achieved Nirvana, a Utopian society," she says. "If you extended your hand, 10 hands would come back." Herb Caen, the *San Francisco Chronicle'*s columnist, strolled into Mnasidika one day and was struck by these unique new bohemians. They needed a name, and Caen supplied it. He took a little-known slang term and launched it into perpetuity: "hippies."

More and more young people were flooding the Haight, including four beautiful girls from Antioch College, in Ohio. A sexy anarchist movement, the Diggers, had sprung up, and the girls joined in. One day two of them, Cindy Read and Phyllis Wilner, "were walking down Haight Street," Cindy recalls, "and Phyllis said, 'Isn't this how you thought the world would be, except it wasn't? But now, for us, it is! ' "

Inventing a Culture from Scratch

It was an extraordinary moment in history. The Vietnam War was raging, anti-war protests were surging, civil rights had morphed into Black Power, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were voicing a cultural revolution on FM airwaves. Second-tier Haights were soon popping up in every American city. In New York's East Village, James Rado and Gerome Ragni were writing the musical that would limn the era: Hair. The somewhat startled media were using the word "youth" for the postwar baby-boomers, whose demographic bulge they'd just discovered, and whose females had reached maturity just as the Pill had become available. Newsweeklies added "youth beats." Youth was leading the way.

This hubristic brio was rich soil for the Diggers. Taking their name in part from a group of 17th-century English anarchists, they aimed to "invent a new culture from scratch," says Peter Coyote, who was born Cohon, the son of a New York investment banker. "I was interested in two things: overthrowing the government and fucking. They went together seamlessly." He and the actor-director Peter Berg helped lead the San Francisco Mime Troupe: "doing street theater, touring the country, getting arrested, and pulling in girls like mad."

Berg and Coyote had just won an Off Broadway Obie Award for their play Olive Pits when into the Mime Troupe one day stormed "a guy you couldn't take your eyes off of. He was dangerous, he was compelling, he was funny," says Coyote. He was Emmett Grogan, a Brooklyn Catholic-school boy turned actor-anarchist. "Emmett would be in a room, on his knee, with all these strangers surrounding him, telling them things they'd never think of on their own," says the most beautiful of the Antioch girls, Suzanne Carlton (now Siena Riffia), who became his girlfriend. Coyote recalls Grogan's buddy, the far less flamboyant Billy Murcott, who made complex charts "of the relationship between persona, wealth, and status." With Murcott as his brain, Grogan dared Coyote and Berg to take Berg's concept of "life acting" into the streets: Remake yourself as you want to be, now! Remake society as you want it to be, now! Assume freedom! Putting "free" before any word-"food," "store," "love," "human being"-changed everything, Berg argued. Coyote and Berg left the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the Diggers-"Dig this!," Murcott would shout-were born. A burgeoning group, the Diggers were passionately leaderless. Every member, Coyote insists, was "a magical autonomous being. There were no followers." Caen's "hippies" now had not only their music, drugs, spirituality, and art but also a political philosophy.

The Diggers wore animal masks and held up traffic in down-with-money demonstrations. They drove a flatbed truck of belly dancers and conga drummers into the financial district and passed out joints to the crowd. They dispensed fake dollar bills printed with winged penises. They cadged day-old food from markets and fresh food from farmers and turned them into Digger Stew. (Joe McDonald was in a Digger kitchen one day, he says, "and the women were saying, ' They're out fighting the fucking revolution? And we're making goddamn dinner again?' " Siena Riffia, who later became a lawyer and a single mother of twins fathered by blues singer Taj Mahal, concurs: "Yep, it was a man's world.") The Diggers ladled out their stew in Golden Gate Park while Joplin sang or the Grateful Dead played. The music was as free as the food. Stanley Mouse says, "With the Diggers, the Haight became a city within a city-a real community."

Collecting everything from machinery to clothes, the Diggers opened the Free Store. All the merchandise was gratis, which frustrated shoplifters and made some neighboring merchants "quite nuts" and "pretty defensive," Digger Judy Goldhaft once recalled. (Goldhaft and the late Peter Berg subsequently founded the ecological organization Planet Drum.) At one point, one of those merchants actually volunteered to pay the Free Store's rent, probably out of admiration of the Diggers' idealism and their nerve. Another of the Diggers' patrons, the socialite Paula McCoy ("always naked under her mink coat," Coyote recalls), opened her Haight apartment to them and laid out lines of cocaine for their pals the Hells Angels.

Coyote and Grogan once hitchhiked to L.A. and swaggered into the Bel Air homes of young producers, where their defiant eschewal of money actually made them seem glamorous. "I never made more than $2,500 a year from 1966 to 1975," brags Coyote, who today is a successful actor and a familiar voice on commercials. (Grogan died of a suspected overdose on a New York subway in 1978.) The Diggers created the poverty-is-sexy ideology for young panhandlers. They also purportedly coined the motto "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." They tutored the then unknown Abbie Hoffman. "Abbie literally sat at our feet," says David Simpson, who, like many ex-Diggers, has been for decades an ecology activist in Northern California. Digger ideas were later introduced to America under Hoffman's Yippie movement. "The Diggers, in a way, were like a street gang," says Simpson. "We really believed the socio-economic structure of America was completely unsustainable. We were trying to build a new, free society in the shell of the old."

This "new, free society" required public celebrations-and its citizens lobbied the city to be able to hold them. In late September 1966, a Haight coalition that included the Oracle staff wrote letters to the city fathers about an October "love-pageant rally" for which they were seeking a permit. Then, after that gathering (which protested LSD's becoming illegal), on January 12, 1967, a similar collection of activists issued a press release for a "Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In" to be held two days later. "[A] new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old," it began. It ended, "Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see."

The Human Be-In drew about 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park. Costumes, music, incense, and marijuana abounded. ("There was so much dope rising in the air," Rock Scully recalls, "Jerry and I thought we'd walked into a geodesic dome.") Allen Ginsberg was on hand, leading a massive om chant. Timothy Leary, then 46, premiered his mantra, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." A consequential witness was the *Chronicle'*s revered jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason. "No drunks," a stunned Gleason wrote in his column. The event was "an affirmation, not a protest ... a promise of good, not evil This is truly something new." He described it as "an asking for a new dimension to peace ... for the reality of love and a great Nest for all humans."

As news of the Be-In trickled out, media coverage increased. In early spring, a group of Haight insiders held a homespun version of a press conference, welcoming the youth of America to San Francisco to experience the magic for themselves, as soon as school let out. The Diggers braced to house and feed the hordes. And hordes there would be, given the seductive name coined for the beckoning season. The proposed gathering would be called "the Summer of Love."

"Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair"

They came even before school let out, by VW, by Greyhound bus, by thumb. Siena Riffia remembers that some charitable individuals rented cheap apartments and transferred the leases to the Diggers so that young visitors could flood into them. Jane Lapiner (another former Digger who is now an environmental activist) recalls that somehow those kids found them. "I started waking up every morning with 10 or 12 people I didn't know sleeping on my floor." In June, San Francisco's public-health director, Dr. Ellis D. Sox (inevitably nicknamed LSD Sox), complained that there were already 10,000 hippies in the city and warned that by summer the cost of fighting hippie diseases would skyrocket.

Lou Adler, the producer of the Mamas and the Papas, the premier hip L.A. group, brought out a song written by Papa John Phillips and recorded by Scott McKenzie: "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)." Adler and Phillips saw the fetching anthem through their "commercial minds," Adler admits, but it was also a flat-out exhortation for kids to come flocking in. It became an immediate hit, which pissed off the Grateful Dead. "We were the total opposite of Haight-Ashbury," says Adler. "We were Bel Air, we were slick." Rock Scully scoffs, " 'Put a flower in your hair.' It didn't say, 'Bring a blanket and some money; tell your parents where you're going.' There were no redeeming features to that song."

Spurred by that song, however, and by the success of Jefferson Airplane's first album, as well as the swelling underground buzz about Janis Joplin, kids from all over the country flooded the Haight. One estimate put the summerlong number at 75,000. Digger happenings got bigger, with giant puppets, paper tunnels for people to tumble through, and girls in silver hot pants and tie-dyed tops reciting poems from Lenore Kandel's The Love Book, which had been seized by the police and deemed obscene. The Dead stopped traffic when about 25,000 people jammed a mile of Haight Street to groove while they played. "Every day it was a parade, a procession," says Stanley Mouse.

Harry Reasoner, of CBS, arrived with a camera crew. Look magazine rushed its youngest writer, William Hedgepeth, who was living with his wife and child in Westport, Connecticut, to go underground at the scene. "I hopped out of the cab and was shocked that people's hair was longer than the Beatles'," he recalls. He met some kids from the suburbs doing their best to be veteran hippies, shared their pad for weeks, jotted notes on the sly, and was sorely tempted by all the sex. Hedgepeth then flew back to New York and wrote his cover story. "I never wore a suit and tie again," he says today. "Consciousness is irreversible. It changed my life."

The Diggers broached the idea of a free clinic to two doctors, and Dr. David E. Smith, who had lived in the Haight for years, volunteered. He signed a $300-a-month lease for a suite at Haight and Ashbury, rounded up volunteers who utilized all the samples of penicillin, tranquilizers, and other supplies from the hospitals at which they interned, and started a clinic to treat patients suffering from bad acid trips or venereal disease-all with no malpractice insurance, "which was totally insane," says Smith today. On June 7, 1967, the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic opened for business with "a line around the block," according to Smith. After the doctor learned that the D.E.A. was doing surveillance-"They said, 'David, your patients are dealing in your waiting room, and if you don't stop it we're going to close you down' "-he put up a sign on the door: no holding. no dealing. we love you. As the summer wore on, Smith served 250 young people a day, seven days a week. "We met a lot of people at the clinic," says Rock Scully. "A joke I made, but it was true, was: You want to meet girls? Go down to the clinic." He says that the Grateful Dead so disliked one arrogant national reporter, "who was always pushing us to fix him up with hippie chicks, that we fixed him up with a girl we knew had the clap. We never heard from him again."

Some of the older reporters were not amused. Nicholas von Hoffman, of The Washington Post, who covered the Haight in a suit and tie, was, he says now, "appalled" by what he saw. It wasn't that he didn't like a lot of the people-he was fond of Joplin, for one-or wasn't impressed by the numbers. In fact, this was, he says, "the same tactic that Gandhi used; he had 100 million people with no money, no guns, no nothing-these were his troops." The Haight troops were, likewise, "this mass of young people who had no political knowledge, were not particularly well educated, but the thing you could get them to do was sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," and that bait, von Hoffman felt, was enough to achieve "enormously political" ends.

The overnight change in the attitude toward drugs was what alarmed von Hoffman. "A generation and a half before, you could back a dump truck full of cocaine into a Jesuit schoolyard and none of those boys would get near it." Now, suddenly, he continues, "middle- and working-class kids were doing 'vice tours,' like American businessmen in Thailand: coming to the Haight for a few weeks, then, when the dirt between their toes got too encrusted, going home. This was when American blue-collar and middle-class kids became drug users. This was the beginning of the Rust Belt rusting."

When two Russian diplomats requested a personal tour of the Haight, von Hoffman obliged them. (They ran into his son, who'd grown his hair and joined in the merriment.) Then von Hoffman persuaded Ben Bradlee, the *Post'*s managing editor, to come to San Francisco and see "all the shit that's happening" for himself. By that time, recalls Stanley Mouse, "if a tour bus's air-conditioning broke down, the tourists would be afraid to get out, even in 95-degree heat." Von Hoffman ended Bradlee's tour by taking him to a drug lab. "Then Ben flew back in a state of shock," says von Hoffman, who, soon after, fled back east himself.

Monterey Pop

The summer's three-day crescendo started on June 16, and John Phillips and Lou Adler organized it. The idea was to produce a grand event that would give rock, pop, and soul music the respectable status of jazz. Soon the Monterey International Pop Festival's board of governors (including Paul McCartney, Donovan, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, and Smokey Robinson) was lining up acts, among them a black Seattle guitar wunderkind, formerly a 101st Airborne paratrooper, who had just become a sensation in Britain though no one in the U.S. had heard of him: Jimi Hendrix.

"But we needed the San Francisco groups," says Adler. "Haight- Ashbury was becoming known all over the world." The Airplane were willing, but Big Brother, Dave Getz says, was "infused with the Diggers' mentality"-no stardom, no profit, everybody equal, "including Janis." The Grateful Dead, whom Adler traveled north to see, were vehemently against it. Adler recalls his conversations with Rock Scully and co-manager Danny Rifkin as "heated. 'Why are you guys here? What do you want? Why should we do it?' Heated! " It was Ralph J. Gleason, whom the groups trusted, Adler says, whom they had to convince. "Gleason asked very tough questions: Where was the money going? [To various drug and music charities.] How is San Francisco going to be presented? And we had the right answers."

The Monterey Pop Festival-more than 30 acts, sublime weather, 90,000 attendees-was magical. "And, as hard as it is to believe now, most of these stars had never met one another," says Adler. "I had never seen Jimi Hendrix live," says Grace Slick. "I'd never seen the Mamas and the Papas [or] the Who live [or] Ravi Shankar. It was stunning for us."

Director D. A. Pennebaker filmed the event, creating the movie Monterey Pop. The Grateful Dead refused to be filmed. (Their hardcore-hippie integrity would eventually help make them America's most venerated and enduring rock group.) Big Brother refused, too, but Joplin's delivery of "Ball and Chain" was such a showstopper that when she heard that it hadn't been captured on film she was devastated. Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, talked Janis into persuading her group to be filmed. Adler had them perform a second time. The camera was only on Joplin, and a star was born. Thus the precious egalitarianism of the Haight bubble was pierced by the real world. Even Jerry Garcia had pedestrian ego issues. He and his band were, according to his wife, Carolyn, chagrined that, "after Otis Redding put on the show of a lifetime, they did not play a great show. Jerry was scowling horribly.... They felt like nobody even noticed them."

That October, the Diggers and the Thelin brothers led a "Death of the Hippie" march, complete with coffin, down Haight Street. Then everyone moved away, the musicians and artists to Marin County, the Diggers to a series of communes stretching up to the Oregon border. The lessons of that summer-from the cautionary (you can't build a social movement on drugs) to the positive (love and liberation should be core principles of life)-are still with us. Joe McDonald sums it up: "We discovered there was a 10 on the knob. Everybody else was saying, 'Don't turn it up to 10! It will blow up!' "

Well, the people who created the Summer of Love dared to turn the knob up to 10, and, miraculously-in that long-ago ecstatic and prosperous time-it did not blow up.

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LSD, Ecstasy, and a Blast of Utopianism: How 1967's "Summer of Love" All Began

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In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. If you were between 15 and 30 that year, it was almost impossible to resist the lure of that transcendent, peer-driven season of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism.

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The Presentation Mistake You Don't Know You

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The Presentation Mistake You Don't Know You

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Hugely important food for thought for marketers.

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Heed warning at bottom of post!

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My first Swiss Army knife had a can opener attachment that I was forbidden to use. Even though the tool had four other actual blades on it, the can opener was deemed a source of peril since I would surely slice off my finger on the roughly cut can lid. Who knew a tin of baked beans could be so dangerous?

Fortunately, a friend taught me the method in the video above and we did not starve during our backyard camping adventure.

There are several tricks to opening cans that might come in handy on your next camping trip or family outing.

If you have access to a chef's knife, try this method:

If all you have is a spoon, this is the way to go:

Warning: With any of these methods, there is a risk of losing a finger: the can lids will be as sharp the knife you're using. Please use caution!

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Three Ways to Open a Can Without a Can Opener

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My first Swiss Army knife had a can opener attachment that I was forbidden to use. Even though the tool had four other actual blades on it, the can opener was deemed a source of peril since I would surely slice off my finger on the roughly cut can lid.

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Wonderful piece about paying attention

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Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent's, or friend's, or partner's undivided attention - even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn't always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It's easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone's machine is easier than having a phone conversation - you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it's easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

Shooting off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there's no chance of accidentally catching someone. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step "forward" has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

THE problem with accepting - with preferring - diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too, become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.

With each generation, it becomes harder to imagine a future that resembles the present. My grandparents hoped I would have a better life than they did: free of war and hunger, comfortably situated in a place that felt like home. But what futures would I dismiss out of hand for my grandchildren? That their clothes will be fabricated every morning on 3-D printers? That they will communicate without speaking or moving?

Only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. It's possible that many reading these words will never die. Let's assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers.

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It's not an either/or - being "anti-technology" is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly "pro-technology" - but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks "getting it wrong" and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

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Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.