The “real” unemployment number fell from 16.7% to 16.1% in January. The “actual” unemployment number went down to just 9% — even though there weren’t a lot of jobs created in the month. The current number of unemployed people is now 13.9 million people. (Just FYI, Canada created 69,000 jobs in January!) People are still making sense of these job numbers. One thing that helps make sense of them is that the actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers.

Alice Wright: Webmistress and Coder Girl

by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.

As a web developer, I create and maintain databases. A database is where you put data, that’s the idiot’s version of it. Basically what I do is make the internet talk to a place where information of all types is stored. Databases can store sales leads, information for sites like Tumblr, they’re used for everything. It’s a good skill to have. I originally was a web designer and eventually I learned how to code. As the internet became more complex and more and more data was looking to be stored I started getting into that so I could progress with the internet and in my career. Eventually I learned more languages as people wanted more and the transition was really easy. The fundamentals were there: a programmer’s brain works differently than normal people’s.

Do you like your job?

I love it. I love that I can take that knowledge anywhere and help people set things up and really make the internet do what they want it to do. It’s hard to describe. I like that if somebody says, “I want a website to do this,” I can do it. And nobody knows I’m the back end girl and nobody sees me in my little room. Another thing I love about my job is that I’m not “Ms. Social.” I’m very awkward. The anonymity of it is appealing. I don’t actually like being that person who shows off what they do, I like just doing it! And letting other people enjoy it!

You also operate a blog?

I do, it’s called Get Off My Internets. Basically I document what internet celebrities are doing. An internet celebrity is somebody that’s known to people who spend a lot of time on the internet and read a lot of blogs. But if you went up to Joe, your accountant, he wouldn’t know who they were. It’s like Nicole Kidman vs. Julia Allison, not a lot of people are going to know who she is. Internet celebrities are people who take things a little too seriously. For example, the guys who run Tumblr; I’m a coder, I like coding, that’s it. They want to be famous for being coders and starting their website. They throw a lot of parties for themselves, and I just think that’s so pretentious. I mean they have publicists! You don’t need an agent, that’s what blogs are for. I miss the sub-culture days, when you were just famous on the internet. Now a lot of these people are getting in magazines and stuff, it’s crossing over. I think the internet celebrity culture is going to get worse because people are only taking themselves more seriously as the medium grows. There’s this two-year internet fame cycle where people get really popular or famous really fast and then get knocked over for the next new thing. That’s the internet. It’s constantly changing.

If New York is number 1, what city is number 2?

Um, I’m going to have to say Chicago, I really like Chicago. The weather sucks, yeah, but it’s got a lot of the cultural stuff that New York has, and it also has a lot of people who are really tough in their own way. Maybe you can blame the weather for that. So the people are tough and cool like they are here, but the social scene is a bit more low-key than it is in New York. It’s sort of like New York, without all the posing crap. I’m from Dallas originally, but I love New York. I had lived here two times before for work and now I’m never leaving again. Every time I leave the city I immediately begin plotting how to return as soon as possible. There are so many job opportunities here for what I do, so many cool people here. Every time you leave your house you meet someone cool!

What part of the city do you live in?

I live in Fort Greene. I love it. It’s just seems to be more of a melting pot, it’s not over-gentrified, but it’s not over-crimed. It’s a nice racial blend, the ethnic diversity is amazing. You get all kinds of people living together and enjoying each others differences and not stabbing each other like you do in some parts of New York. There’s the park right there, Fort Greene park, with the cool tower. I love it.

Have you ever been arrested?

Oh boy. I was arrested in high school. It’s more of an embarrassing story and not, like, anything bad. My friends and I decided we wanted to play Ouija board and we went to this abandoned house at the edge of town and sat on the floor and did it. We didn’t know that the caretaker lived across the highway and saw our flashlights and saw what we were doing. The police came and did that scare arrest and took us to the police station where our parents picked us up. We had to write four page essays about why what we did was wrong. They took it off my record after I wrote the essay, which I still have. It went something like: “What I did was wrong because I got arrested for it.” I’m not much different now than I was then.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Stealing a Line Written by Hafiz and Translated by Emerson

“Not for nothing,” she tells me on the phone
in answer to why move to another borough,

“he lives between a crowded cemetery

and the elevated where I walk our pit-bulls”
to which I respond,

See how the roses burn! See how

the mother misses the daughters
who she once promptly handed over to a hundred babysitters.

See how the mother longs for each — 
the one who overlooks tombs

and the other who texts from Village bars. See
how the mother wishes for a daughter

to stop in for cake and coffee — 
it is spring, time for buds then bushes

of blossoms and thorns, as she burns
with an ardor she thought she’d lost.

The young woman replies,
“What can I say except come over on the Q —

I make a serious espresso.”
I’ll first stop by the bodega, partial as I am to lemon peel,

then burn those roses myself
(today the mother won’t perish).

Solitary & Gregarious

Playing with the First Line of Keats’ “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”

I agree that “The poetry of earth is never dead”
but wonder about the grasshopper:

of course not objectively awful,
especially a solitary one as in Keats’ poem,

by the billions they bring famine and dread. Or is that the locust?

I try googling grasshopper
and find no taxonomical difference. Furthermore

Sir Boris Petrovich Uvarov who, studying the desert locust,
realized that what was considered two separate species

was merely two phases, solitary and gregarious. In fact,
they form bands as nymphs then swarm as adults

covering hundreds of square miles,
stripping fields and causing, as we know from Sunday School, famine.

I also see that transformation is induced by overcrowding

and constant contact. Aside from the Plagues of Egypt,
the horror of a cloud of locusts descending on one’s person and property

has inspired horror films including the 1971 cult classic,
The Abominable Doctor Phibes starring Vincent Price

where Nurse Allen is devoured by said species.

Although the reverse is true, too: that some cultures take a kind of revenge
consuming them as a delicacy. In general I find insects

awe-inspiring but prefer to read about them in books or online.
Maybe viewing them in the garden but certainly not inside.
The same with guests to our home, a cul-de-sac on Long Island.

On a Line from Valéry by Way of Carolyn Kizer: Tout le ciel vert se meurt. Le dernier arbre brûle.

The whole green sky is dying
in a riot of blue leaves and levees, a tumult

of sandbags and groceries. Also
the frantic seam in the hill, desolate wheat in the silo,

rank tap water, as well as swollen lobsters in the trap
and hands assembling tractors.

The one who condemns poverty of purse and spirit
will be a spinner without faith,

because the atheist’s heart is far less
contaminated, truth to tell.

Kimiko Hahn’s latest collection, Toxic Flora (W. W. Norton, 2010), contains poems triggered by science. She is collaborating on a translation of Japanese zuihitsu and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

As cutbacks and labor strife roil the waters at venerable magazine institution Harper’s, perhaps now would be a good time to look back at our chat with Paul Ford, who was then serving as the publication’s web editor. Many of the issues discussed there still resound today!

Who will win the Superbowl this Sunday between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers? If the comparative performances of the teams’ high profile rap-star fans can be used as a predictive gauge, Green Bay will win. Lil Wayne’s Packer’s-boosting remix of Wiz Khalifa’s hit Pittsburgh anthem “Black and Yellow” is better than the original.

To give credit where it’s due, Wiz Khalifa is a perfectly likeable pothead. And it’s really great to have a rap star emerge out of Pittsburgh. A great city, Pittsburgh, with a strong tradition of heroic sports teams living the high life and grooving to good music. And it is pretty cool kizmit that the success of the Steelers has dovetailed so nicely with that of his first national hit — one that celebrates the team colors, his city’s colors, over a super-catchy keyboard riff. It must have been a hug thrill for him to get to perform it at Heinz Field Stadium before the Steelers beat the Jets in AFC conference championship game last week.

“Black and Yellow” currently sits at no. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100

singles chart, down from no. 3 last week. But you have to think if Pittsburgh wins Sunday, it might push it up to no. 1.

For a hook, the phrase “black and yellow” is a good one, it certainly rolls off the tongue more easily than “green and yellow.” But other than that, as far as the rhyming goes, “Black and Yellow” strikes me as lazy — nothing terrible, but nothing much inspired, either. Which, again, Khalifa is a super-stoner. You find a nice beat, ride it on the radio. It’s fine. But Lil Wayne is a virtuoso, and he just completely eats Khalifa alive over his own beat. From the minute he calls him “Cheez Whiz,” you know what’s happening, and by the time he toasts the Steelers as “pop tarts,” it’s a done deal: there’s ten times as much cleverness and verve in Wayne version. And it’s nice of him, too, to repeatedly point out that this is not a diss song, but the friendly ball-breaking that goes on between fans of rival teams. You wouldn’t want a real rap beef to break out over something so trivial. (Not that such things haven’t broken out over less in the past.)

It’s supposed to be a close game this year, so maybe this will help with the gambling. I’m taking the Packers by three.

Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that “the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts — people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties — but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up.” There’s a lot to chew on here; you will agree or disagree, but, if you read it, you will almost certainly print it out for your commute home; it’s a long one.

There has been, probably since the economy fell apart, a bagpiper who busks around Union Square. I have only seen him once, but I hear him every day. Because I live in an extremely sweltry apartment I keep all the windows open throughout the winter, and am thus treated to his daily routine, which seems to involve piping three songs, taking a break, moving to another area of the park, and playing those songs again. The process repeats itself about four times a day, creating a bizarre stereophonic effect where it seems like the music is on repeat and coming from a different speaker each time. As to the songs: One of them is “When the Saints Go Marching In.” One of them is unrecognizable to me. The third is “Amazing Grace.” And that’s the one that sticks in my head for the rest of the day. I am a fan of “Amazing Grace.” I appreciate its power. I enjoyed that Bill Moyers documentary about of many years back. And yet… there is something about standing in your kitchen in the evening, when the dark has settled in, and suddenly being treated to an unsolicited mental performance of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes — even though no one is actually performing it — as night is coming on and you’ve nothing to do but stare at the wall and let its bleating cadences play out that makes one hate “Amazing Grace,” the bagpipes, New York City and pretty much everything. I try to handle it by drinking myself blind, and then I see. Anyway, yes, it’s all rather glamorous. Thanks for listening.

“It will be back to business as usual with a repressive, U.S.-backed military regime, only now the opposition will be much more radical and probably yet more Islamist. The historic opportunity to have a democratic Egypt led by those with whom the U.S., Europe, and even Israel could do business will have been lost, maybe forever. Uncle Sam will have to eat yet more humble pie, served up by the dictator who has just been insulting him.”
 — Foreign Policy’s Robert Springborg says that with the military now controlling the future of government in Egypt, any chance at democracy has been lost

.

The human mind, for whatever reason, is built for challenges and puzzles. (What are running and jumping and fighting games but a great use for the part of our brain that used to have to hide from and hunt mammoths and tigers?) At their best, they get to engage the front of your mind while the back focuses on thinking through bigger life challenges. Worst case scenario? Mobile and flash games let you tear up a few idle hours and set aside the worries of the day.

The casual game market is divided into a few distinct types. And most people will really only love one or two genres of game! Minds are just like that, it turns out. In the wake of the Angry Birds phenomenon, much attention has been paid to physics-based tossing and throwing and smashing variety of games. But there’s so much more out there than just repetitively tossing things around!

Read the rest.

(Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Intel: My Life Scoop; advertisers do not produce the content.)

Perhaps the greatest appetizer I have ever eaten is Oysters en Brochette at Galatoire’s in New Orleans. The oysters are wrapped in bacon, dredged in flour, deep fried and then drizzled in butter sauce. It is exactly as amazing and unhealthy as it sounds. So I am sad to learn that “oyster reefs around the world are disappearing so fast that more than 85 per cent have been lost to disease and over-harvesting.” I had better get back to New Orleans but quick; this heart isn’t going to attack itself.