Cam’ron Comes Out In Support Of Shanghai Protesters

“Catchy red signs reading ‘Pajamas don’t go out of the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo’ are posted throughout the city. Volunteer ‘pajama policemen’ patrol the neighborhoods, telling pajama wearers to go home and change. Celebrities and socialites appear on TV to promote the idea that sleepwear in public is ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized.’”
–Shanghai native Gao Yubing writes an op-ed in protest of governmental efforts to stop the local custom of wearing pajamas outside during the World Expo 2010, currently taking place in the city. You know Harlem rapper Cam’ron is with him.

Cell phones and brain tumors, continued: “The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer study called INTERPHONE found most cellphone use didn’t increase the risk of developing meningioma — a common and frequently benign tumour — or glioma — a rarer but deadlier form of cancer.” That’s the result of a decade-long study that tracked nearly 13,000 people. But-and you knew this was coming-”The tired refrain ‘more research is needed’ fully applies in this instance: without more research the public’s question about the acceptability of cancer risk from mobile phones will remain unanswered.” Also, this study did not track the effects of having a cell phone in your pocket, which, as someone who values his testicles far more than his brain, is really the area of main concern in research such as this. I guess I’ll wait the 20 years and see what the deal is then. If I survive.

World’s most useful applied mathematics explained in full.

Bill Clinton had spoken earlier in the day on global warming; Ted Turner and Russell Simmons hovered agreeably over their keynote events earlier in the week. So with most of the marquee sessions for the Washington Summit Series in the books, it’s time for the Friday afterparty, at a cavernous basement club a few blocks up from the White House called Josephine’s. The place is done up like the rec room in a Russian oligarch’s basement. The walls are adorned with black-velvet inlaid wallpaper and white chintz chandeliers hang from the ceilings. Victorian sofas abut coffee tables laden with ice buckets full of vodka at the edge of the dancefloor.

I’m here courtesy of some light-fingered credentials-swapping-actual registration for the four-day gaggle of 20-something entrepreneurs runs $3300 per attendee. Several of those fortunate souls have already noted my badge and pressed business cards on me; the semi-annual event, which informally launched in 2007 under the energetic guidance of the then 22-year-old e-newsletter impresario Elliott Bisnow is, after all, an invitation-only networking extravaganza.

Sure the former president’s appeals for international climate cooperation are diverting, and who doesn’t want to see the co-founders of Guitar Hero, or watch Kristen Bell host a panel on child soldiers in Third World armies? There’s also Tiki Barber, Olivia Munn from “Iron Man 2,” some deputy-level State Department diplomats, a couple of NASA astronauts and Mark Cuban.

But the real business of the Summit Series is this friction-seeking informal meeting of startup CEOs, brand managers, media messagers and political professionals. The club walls are blaring, in other words, with the siren song of synergy, throbbing just as persistently through the room as the 80s dance hits from Madonna and Grandmaster Flash. Indeed, as I feel the bass line of “White Lines” shake through my bones (“If you get hooked, baby, it’s nobody else’s fault”), I’ve been talking with a young Midwestern candidate for Congress about the perverse political legacy of heartland populism. The next gaggle over, a White House aide is working the room in the company of a clothing manufacturer.

Who knows what any of this signifies, in the larger scheme of things? But then again, not knowing what will come of it all is largely the point of this semi-annual scrum of the young, digitally minded and market-savvy. The last Summit convocation, back in January in Miami, featured Bisnow delivering his own slideshow on his past year’s travels and indefatigable networking schedule, called “Curating Life.” This year, a panel on the science of “reverse aging”-called “Youthanization” and led by Aubrey de Grey, head of something called the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation-precedes a breakout panel on “saving the world at work.”

Bisnow, a college dropout who’d attended the University of Wisconsin on a tennis scholarship, cites as a key professional inspiration the Timothy Ferriss business-advice bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-to5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (he has also, of course, since recruited Ferriss as a Miami Summit presenter; this year, the carpe-diem spot on the agenda seems to be claimed by the cast of MTV’s bucket-list reality franchise “The Buried Life,” who have convened an after-midnight chat session-the after-after party, as it were.) The series launched when he maxed out his credit cards by convening a bunch of his young CEO acquaintances for a Utah weekend getaway to solicit advice on the business-end of his e-newsletter service, which he was then co-managing with his not especially business savvy dad. (That service, which blasts out 10 different industry-themed letters to about 130,000 free subscribers, may have required management guidance at the startup end, but the finished product is all about customized, just-in-time synergy, as the website’s promotional copy explains: Bisnow will send a reporter to your office to cover a story in our newsy way highlighting something of interest to our readers that you do. We disclose that you are a sponsor in the piece, but make it interesting so that our readers consume it as they do the rest of our editorial.)

The next quantum leap for the group’s development came last February, when Bisnow’s mother called him from an Oscars party she was attending to report that Yosi Sargent, the short-lived NEA communications director who had been demoted to White House director of public engagement, was on the scene. “I wasn’t even going to go,” Bisnow told New York Times reporter Mark Cohen, “I’d been playing tennis and I was tired, but my mother called and said, ‘Elliott, you really need to be here.’” By the following week, the White House had agreed to sponsor a Summit Series event.

In other words, if I were writing an e-newsletter dispatch with the Summit Series as the designated client-subject, I’d lead with something like: Talk all you want about the 4-hour workweek: A well-connected mother can net you $3300 a head in the terminally self-enamored conferencing circuit. And that’s why, when the present cohort of twentysomething digital CEOs come fully into power, I’m reasonably certain I’ll never have lunch in this town again.

It should be noted that Chris Lehmann’s wife’s employer, GQ, was a cosponsor of this boondoggle.

Brooklyn Grange, the 40,000-square-foot rooftop farm in Queens that got a nice little write-up in the Times on Friday, got a taste of the downside of publicity pretty quickly: That afternoon, the New York State Department Of Buildings stopped by because the farmers had neglected to file paperwork showing that the building’s roof could withstand the million pounds of mass that the farm’s soil, irrigation lines, and plant life (not to mention the workers) would bring to it. “Our enthusiasm to get plants in for the season outpaced our paperwork,” said farmer Ben Flanner’s contrite statement on the matter. Whoops! I’m also somewhat worried about the subversive attempt to turn parts of western Queens into Brooklyn that seems to be going on with the nomenclature here — I know that part of Astoria/Long Island City is gentrifying, but this is a bit much? [Pic via]

Alabama’s Dale Peterson is running for the Republican nomination to be that state’s Commissioner of Agriculture, and, well, he’s got a lot on his mind. As does his horse. I don’t know why this should be, but it has become pretty clear that the best political ads of the cycle are coming out of the Heart of Dixie. [Via]

Over the weekend, the microblogging service Twitter changed its “trending topics” feature to focus on terms that were “the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion”, a la Google Trends, as opposed to those words that were steadily appearing a lot on the service. This would seem to be one way to break the trending-topic domination of the windswept Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber, who has been a steady presence on said list since before the first of this year thanks to his talent at whipping up his very devoted fanbase. “WOW,” Bieber said (via Twitter, of course) upon hearing the news — it’s unknown if the “wow” was a peeved one or a personally amazed one, thanks to the subtleties that are lost when official statements are distilled from 140 characters to three. But a grass-roots movement took that all-caps amazement as a call to action: There are now two brand-new terms, coined by unnamed sufferers of what has been catchily named “Bieber Fever,” that have returned Bieber to his rightful place on the Twitter homepage’s right-hand rail: Twieber and Jieber. Taunting them just makes them grow stronger, Internet!

I hadn’t really caught on to the whole David Shields thing because I always get him a little confused in my mind with Chris Hedges, who had to quit his job at the Times to be himself, and who I admire. This is only because they both have these bland guy names. (And lots of S’s and H’s and things.) So imagine my surprise when I read a little bit of what David Shields’ project is and what he has to say and it’s all pretty off-putting. Today Shields publishes a defense of his new book, Reality Hunger, which is a manifesto of some sort: he’s responding to “numerous bloggers” who think he’s “the anti-Christ,” a controversy that didn’t reach the Internet that I am on. Apparently the gripe is 1. he hates fiction (fine! Welcome to the club!) and 2. that big chunks of his books are quotations from other writers, and his point was that he “never wanted the reader to not quite able to tell who was talking-was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or Frank Rich or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?” Well, okay, great, fine with me, as I already read me some Kathy Acker twenty-five years ago. He sums up the objections to his work as from people who “don’t genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property.” This is around the time I started to really differentiate between Chris Hedges and David Shields, because one of them is super-irritating.

The super-weird and super-invasive current strain of anti-single bias has popped up in a whole new Elena Kagan-centric way this past week. It was fine when people just thought she was a striving, careerist lesbian, because that’s how lesbians are, but now that everyone actually understands she’s straight, it is apparently repellent that she hasn’t spawned. Because you know what’s wrong with these sterile (emotionally, at least!), career-oriented, success-craving women who make it to the judiciary and the Supreme Court? They just never took time out to have babies. You know what babies give you? Well-roundedness! And I guess therefore the ability to issue Supreme Court decisions! If you have a baby, that means you have had a life. Otherwise you have just had a job. Take it away, Washington Post non-careerist, obviously anti-single Ann Gerhart! “Motherhood offers a one-word verifier. It signals a woman with an intensity of life experiences, jammed with joys and fears, unpredictability and intimacy, all outside the workplace. Much of the time, it’s the opposite of being strategic and assiduously prepared.” Oh, so she’s actually saying that mothers really are unfit for the judiciary because they’re never prepared or strategic? Good to know! Let’s make sure we never let women have children and jobs at the same time.

My favorite and longest-running Dungeons and Dragons character, during the two or three years when playing the game was the most important thing in my life, was a Dwarf named Gimli. A chaotic good thief with a strength of 25 and a gruff, dogged demeanor like the Tolkien creation who inspired him, Gimli ransacked the castles and mountain lairs of Middle Earth with his compatriot, my friend Chris’ wizard, Gandalf. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which my own pre-pubescent identity was wrapped up with that of Gimli. I saw him as embodying all the qualities I hoped I might have in myself: courage, loyalty, a good sense of humor in the face of danger, a rebellious streak. He was short, like I was, but overcame his disadvantages with a big heart.

Chris and Blair Bryan and Brad Brokaw and I would play the game for twelve hours at a time, getting into screaming arguments, and sometimes fist fights, over the results of the rolls of the 20-sided dice. My dad sat me down for a talk once after he read an article in the paper about people reenacting their role-playing battles with real weapons in the subway tunnels in the city. “You and Chris aren’t doing anything like that are you?” he asked. Of course we weren’t. (Like I could have lifted a real battle-axe more than two inches of the ground. My dad must not have understood how heavy those things were; how strong Gimli was.)

After months of adventures, when Gimli was finally killed-I forget what got him, whether it was a geryon or a morkoth or a pit fiend or yellow mold or what; I think Brad was dungeon master-I remember burying my face in a pillow in Chris’s room. We were of an age and social status that assured that none of us would be talking to any girls anytime soon, but it was still not cool to cry in front of your friends. I walked home with an aching empty feeling in my chest, like I had lost a part of myself.

I was reminded of that feeling yesterday, when I read that Ronnie James Dio had died of stomach cancer at the age of 67. One of heavy-metal’s all-time great voices, the New Hampshire-born Dio sang for Elf, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Black Sabbath (with whom he wrote classics like “Heaven and Hell” and “Children of the Sea”) and, of course his own band, Dio.

And no one has ever wielded a two-handed broad-sword more convincingly in a music video.