(From The New Yorker
by Andrea Denhoed)
A very informal office poll reveals that while the name Lisa Frank can provoke vivid competing flashbacks of psychedelic warm fuzzies and elementary-school social hierarchies among women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, readers outside that demographic might have only vague knowledge of Frank’s shiny rainbow- and animal-themed school-supply empire. If you never owned or coveted a Trapper Keeper featuring a unicorn, do a quick Google search and get a sense of the extreme cuteness of the Frank aesthetic before reading Tracie Egan Morrissey’s recent piece for Jezebel, “Inside the Rainbow Gulag: The Technicolor Rise and Fall of Lisa Frank.” Morrissey uncovers the severe mismanagement, erratic behavior, and personal drama that has plagued the company in recent years, leading to missed opportunities, shrinking profits, and a slew of disgruntled employees. (“Rainbow gulag” is actually a phrase used by one such former employee.) The piece would be interesting as a well-reported exposé of any infamously inaccessible business, but the fact that this story concerns an organization dedicated to cute and colorful critters makes it all the more bizarre. Or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a company that puts out such a very, very happy product would have something sinister lurking behind it.
There’s more dark irony to be found in two very similar recent stories about people who make pilgrimages to the spot where Chris McCandless perished in 1993 while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. Twenty years after his death, McCandless (whose story was told in the book “Into the Wild,” which was then made into a movie) remains a controversial figure—a hero of bold individualism to some, and an emblem of foolhardy youth to others. (We saw evidence of the persistent interest in his life and death here at The New Yorker when Jon Krakauer’s post offering a new theory of what caused his death quickly became one of our most-read stories this year.) Diana Saverin, at Outside, and Eva Holland, at AOL, have both written reports about their time with McCandless pilgrims, who risk injury and death to reach the abandoned bus where McCandless’s body was found. The irony, of course, is that the trail of individualism is now quite crowded, the bus where McCandless found shelter is now a useless structure, and the devotees of a hero of personal independence have become something of a burden on the local Alaskan community, which has to airlift many of them out of the wild.
We move from rugged adventurers in the great wide open to techno geeks in poorly lit basements with Walter Isaacson’s piece in Medium about the convergence of cultures in the Bay Area in the nineteen-seventies that led to the development of the personal computer. In the early days of computing, the technology was not moving in the direction of little computers for personal use in people’s homes; it was all about mainframes and centralized computing for large institutions. Here, Isaacson tells the story of the thinkers and innovators who anticipated and developed personal computing, from Vannevar Bush, who predicted a Wikipedia-like information source as early as 1945, to Stewart Brand, who ran the computers behind Ken Kesey’s acid-fuelled spectacles. This history interprets our modern, wired lives as a legacy of the anti-establishment counterculture. Isaacson prefaces the piece by saying that it’s a rough draft of a chapter from his upcoming book, and he invites “notes, comments, and corrections.” So if you’ve ever wanted to fact-check Walter Isaacson, this is your chance.
Finally, as you prepare to let your hair down for the holidays, read this interview with Daisuke Inoue, the man who invented the karaoke machine. It originally ran in the now-defunct Topic Magazine, in 2005, and was reprinted by The Appendix earlier this month. Inoue was something of a rebel in nineteen-sixties Japan. He grew his hair “two or three centimeters longer than the other kids,” and left the business world to become a drummer. He talks about developing the original karaoke machine for bars in Kobe, then watching as his invention spread throughout Japan and around the world. He never got a patent on the machine, but he doesn’t seem particularly regretful, and is happy that the impediment of getting a patent didn’t keep the invention from catching on. Shortly before he gave this interview, he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. He recalls that the award letter from Harvard told him he was being honored for an invention “which teaches people to bear the awful singing of ordinary citizens, and enjoy it anyway. That is ‘genuine peace,’ they told me.”
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