Fat & Skinner

In the coming decade, 
online primaries and elections might loosen 
America’s gridlock politics.


From my Impatient Futurist column in the September issue of Discover Magazine

Feuding between Democratic and Republican leaders has rendered the U.S. government nearly dysfunctional, with the summer 2011 deficit standoff only the most egregious recent example of gridlock run amok. As growing numbers of Americans say they are fed up with both parties, the door would seem open for an alternative. Historically, third parties have failed miserably: Ross Perot, the most successful independent presidential candidate in modern times, did not win a single state 
in 1992. Technology is changing the electoral rules, though, inspiring reformers to envision a new and more open brand of politics, one built around online voting and Facebook-style campaigns.

For a brief, shining moment last spring, it seemed as if that revolutionary concept might take hold in the United States. Americans Elect, founded and initially bankrolled by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Ackerman, launched plans to create a virtual third party via…read more.

The worst industrial spills call for something stronger than the old-fashioned bar sitting in your soap dish.

From my Impatient Futurist column in the June issue of Discover Magazine

Between freak arctic melting, Japanese nuclear melting, and antibiotic resistance popping up everywhere, I can’t help but see the world as tiptoeing into pre-apocalypse. If there is some sort of crapstorm coming and I’m lucky enough to survive it, there’s one thing I know for sure: I’m going to need a really good hand-cleaner for the aftermath. When I come in from a hard day of zombie hunting, it won’t be just dirt that I’ll need to get out from under my fingernails.

Actually, I could use that doomsday soap now—or rather, we all could. That’s because most of the human race has no intention of patiently waiting for an unspecified apocalypse and has already gotten a head start on mass despoiling. So far the tides of toxic waste and exploded-oil-rig crude haven’t made it as far as my sleepy burb. But right now somebody somewhere is facing a mess that Softsoap…read more.

All you need is $400,000 and the patience of Job.

From my Impatient Futurist column in the May issue of Discover Magazine

Like many people with limited social skills, I’ve always wanted a robot. And I’ve never been the least put off by the strict movie rule that having a robot can only result in its owner being pushed down the stairs, sucked into the vacuum of outer space, or enslaved with what’s left of humanity. I’m well aware that movie rules are hardly ever wrong, but it hasn’t been fear of betrayal that’s kept me from having a robot helper. It’s been the lack of their existence, in spite of a century of big talk. And this has left me not only without the sort of non–emotion-experiencing companion who could really understand me but also with a lot more laundry, cooking, dirty dishes, and child care than a technophilic citizen of the 21st century should have to put up with.

Useful home robots have always been about 20 years in the future, according to experts—a discouraging estimate, since the same experts assure me every other exciting technology under development is only 5 years away. Yes, I know, you can drive over to Walmart and pick up a carpet-vacuuming “robot” to keep your lawn-mowing “robot” company. While you’re there, why don’t you also grab a “house” in the camping department? I’ve got no interest in keeping company with hundreds of dumb, whirring little things. Scampering scrubbers and pot-stirrers are way too small and stupid to push me down the stairs when I’m not looking. …read more.

B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.

From my cover story in the June 2012 issue of The Atlantic

My younger brother Dan gradually put on weight over a decade, reaching 230 pounds two years ago, at the age of 50. Given his 5-foot-6 frame, that put him 45 pounds above the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s threshold of obesity. Accompanying this dubious milestone were a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes and multiple indicators of creeping heart disease, all of which left him on a regimen of drugs aimed at lowering his newly significant risks of becoming seriously ill and of dying at an unnecessarily early age

He’d be in good company: a 2007 study by TheJournal of the American Medical Association found that each year, 160,000 Americans die early for reasons related to obesity, accounting for more than one in 20 deaths. The costs are not just bodily. Other studies have found that a person 70 or more pounds overweight racks up extra lifetime medical costs of as much as $30,000, a figure that varies with race and gender. And we seem to be just warming up: cardiologists who have looked at current childhood obesity rates…read more

How Jason Freedman (no relation) and 42Floors cooked up a killer business idea that could turn commercial real estate on its head.

From my article in the May issue of  Inc. Magazine

Jason Freedman hunches his shoulders against New York City’s December chill and walks faster, nudged both by the cold and by being late. He and David Woodworth, co-founders of an Internet company called 42Floors, both stand out a bit with their buoyant, vulnerable Californianess as they swim against the trudging, elbowing crowds.

Focused on the iPhone he clutches a foot in front of his face for navigational purposes, oblivious to how dorky and unsafe this seems on these streets, Freedman races on to the next stop in a two-day string of meetings, Woodworth trailing a few feet behind.

Freedman and Woodworth are several months into the creation of 42Floors, which aims to… read more

An introduction to the visionaries planning tomorrow’s high-tech, ultra-efficient, green, and even mood-altering spaces designed for much more than cooking.

From my article in the April 2012 issue of Gourmet Live

The kitchen of the future has a long past. At world fairs and trade shows going back more than a century, crowds have been tantalized with slick visions of the extraordinary ways we’d be preparing foods in the coming decades. In particular, notes Ruth Oldenziel, a professor of American and European history at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and coeditor of the book Cold War Kitchen, futuristic kitchens have long been used by marketers to excite us about new technologies. In the 1900s, it was the magic of natural-gas stoves, then in the 1920s and 1930s, the spread of electric and telephone utilities, then refrigeration in the 1940s, on through microwave ovens in the 1950s and even nuclear power in the Atomic Age kitchen (to say nothing of today’s quesadilla presses and single-serving coffeemakers). “In every generation, the kitchen of the future is a sort of passport photo for innovation,” says Oldenziel.

But lost in all the fuss over electromechanical, thermal, and radiative marvels, according to Oldenziel, was much discussion about changes…read more

From my article in the Small Business Blog of The New York Times

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about two small businesses that were taking different approaches to employing Groupon-style social-network marketing as a way of drumming up business.

One of them, a restaurant called Acropolis in Needham, Mass., went with Living Social, whose service closely follows the Groupon model — meaning the coupon company sends the offer out to its large database of local consumers, takes a big chunk of the revenue that comes from selling the discount vouchers, and doesn’t share much customer information with the small business that buys the deal.

The other, the Urban Escape Day Spa in Golden, Colo., tried a new service called SaveLocal, which is offered by Constant Contact, a company best known for its e-mail marketing tools. With SaveLocal, there are some important differences…read more