“in this effort to ‘simplify’ these routines by making the office paperless, Zuboff found that the implementation of computers wound up eradicating the basis of the clerks’ situated knowledge. Suddenly, making changes to a client’s account meant simply inputting data in an order that was constrained by the computer itself. Work became a process of filling in blanks; there was no longer anywhere for the clerks to experience decision-making in their jobs. What Zuboff observed was that as intellectual engagement with the work went down, the necessity of concentration and attention went up. What the computer did was make the work so routine, so boring, so mindless, clerical workers had to physically exert themselves to be able to focus on what they were even doing. This transition, from work being about the application of knowledge to work being about the application of attention, turned out to have profound physical and psychological impact on the clerical workers themselves.”

(Source: Vice Magazine)

“For many heterosexual women, their same-sex best friend was someone with whom they shared more emotional intimacy than with their male lover. For many heterosexual men, their same-sex best friend represented ease of interaction and a sense of humour – someone you could truly relax with. Further, both sexes had more in common with their best friend – that is, they were more similar to them in terms of education, interests, etc – than with their lover. These results perhaps point to the inherent tension that exists at the centre of all heterosexual romantic relationships. Cross-sex cooperation is cognitively the costliest of all cooperation ­– the most time-consuming and emotionally draining of relationships ­– because of the need to trade unequal currencies, and because you must ‘mind read’ a brain that probably operates in a distinctly different way than yours. With best friends, particularly of the same sex, these tensions aren’t there, meaning that you can truly relax and reveal your authentic self.”

(Source: aeon.co)

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Many restaurants, not just those pushing quasi-innovative, social-media-famous degustation ‘experiences,’ transformed themselves into vehicles to reconnect with a lost innocence: the innocence of childhood, of a culinary past, or of 'authentic’ food locales like the diner, the street cart, the roadside stall, and the snack stand. Hence the curious obsession, among chefs and the food media apparatus that recycled their PR, with 'elevating’ existing ethnic and historical cuisines: elevated red-sauce Italian, elevated Korean, elevated dim sum, elevated cucina povera, elevated soul food, elevated diner food, elevated street food. Restaurants became stages for chefs to display their mastery of the highbrow-lowbrow genre via the deconstructed taco, the reimagined gyro, the momo given a helping hand, and the pumped-up pupusa. Even French brasserie food got the elevation treatment, which raised the question, if only intellectually, of exactly how high seafood towers really needed to go.

It didn’t matter that most of these cuisines were already perfect and had no need to operate beyond their existing altitude (and that in many restaurants, outside the capitals of taste, they didn’t). The point of these exercises in digestive manipulation was to promise the diner something more while delivering, on the plate, an experience at once less satisfying and more expensive than the original. In New York, places like Momofuku, Pok Pok, and Mission Chinese Food were at the vanguard of a new generation of supercharged “ethnic” restaurants. Their success did not, however, represent a victory for the subaltern, or some dramatic turning of the historical-culinary tables, but a recolonization—another way, ultimately, of pining for the past. Chefs like Empellón’s Alex Stupak domesticated the foods of the Other, rendering them acceptable for white tastes while stripping away everything that made them interesting to begin with. 'Elevation,’ with its connotations of jet setting, hockey-stick graphs, and compound growth, became a fitting mode for a decade in which the advancement of the wealthy and the debasement of everyone else, though traveling in opposite directions, both showed signs of tending to infinity. The rich got asymptotically richer, drunker, higher, and happier, while the rest of us, imagining we were joining their gastronomic party at high altitude, remained as earthbound as ever, and sold a lie.

”

(Source: nplusonemag.com)