The Trump Mind-Set Is Not Complex

[ed. Best assessment I've read yet.]

Peering into the Trump mind-set — the logic underpinning his priorities, his morality, his decision making — is like opening up a garbage pail left out for days during a summer heat wave.

The dominant theme is governing by narcissism: Make Trump Great Again.

President Trump can be persuaded with money, the purchase of his crypto coins, contributions and sometimes with plain old obsequious flattery.

The two shining lights that guide his notion of morality are his self-interest and the enhancement of his self-image, both of which crowd out consideration of the national interest and the public welfare.

The strongest example: his refusal to accept the humiliation of defeat in the 2020 election, resulting in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by his followers determined to “stop the steal,” and Trump’s subsequent pardoning of the insurrectionists.

He is blind to the harms, up to and including death, that he and his policies have inflicted here and abroad. The notion that his actions have worsened the economy is, to Trump, intolerable. Asked by Politico to rate his handling of the economy, Trump replied, “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Trump relishes his hatreds. Revenge brings him joy. “I hate my opponent,” Trump told mourners for Charlie Kirk at a memorial service in Phoenix, with a tone of relish. “I don’t want what’s best for them.”

The profit motive — for himself, for his allies and for his donors — dominates Trump’s decision making across the gamut, from his pardons of convicted criminals to negotiation strategies with foreign leaders to the formulation of tax legislation.

Trump lacks a basic sense of fairness, exemplified by his disregard of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, and he feels no obligation to honor alliances designed to protect democratic states.

The key measure Trump uses in defining justice, on the one hand, is whether an individual, group, corporation or country supports him (the Jan. 6 insurrectionists), contributes to his wealth (crypto) or elevates his stature (Vladimir Putin’s praise.) On the other hand, he condemns and calls for criminal prosecutions of all those who challenged the legality of what he has done or suggested anything untoward about his relations with Russia.

Trump does not think strategically. Instead, his compulsive need to be a winner, to have his ego or bank account rewarded, precludes anything but short-term tactical calculations shaped by the pursuit of his self-interest.

To quote a once-famous Washington sportscaster, Warner Wolf, “Let’s go to the videotape”:

On Nov. 4, a delegation of Swiss industrialists gave Trump a high-end Rolex desktop clock and a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) gold bar worth $130,000 inscribed 45 and 47. Ten days later, the Trump administration agreed to cut the 39 percent tariff on Swiss imports to 15 percent.

The initial 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, drawn by Russia and the United States, makes no mention of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, providing instead for Russian retention of land it now controls. The 28 points do provide for substantial American business investment in the region and the end of sanctions against Russia.

In a key article, “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine,” the Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson wrote that the architects of the plan were “charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, posted a denunciation of the plan on X on Dec. 8:

It’s being described as a peace plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine, but if you look at the details, it has nothing to do with peace. It is a business deal to make the people around Donald Trump rich. It’s just corruption, through and through.

Rich Trump donors, Murphy continued,

are right now trying to get in on the action. One donor just recently paid hundreds of 1000s of dollars to a lobbyist that’s really close to Trump’s inner circle to try to buy the Nord Stream two pipeline that’s a Russian gas pipeline, once again, something that is only possible for these investors to get rich on if the war is over and the US lifts its sanctions. Another close Trump associate is in talks about acquiring a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.

What does Ukraine get? Murphy asks and answers:

Nothing, nothing. This deal sells out Ukraine. In fact, this deal would require Ukraine to give to Russia territory that Russia doesn’t even currently control. It provides amnesty for all of the war crimes that Putin has committed.

There is no question that Trump is a sucker for praise. (...)

Trump’s transactional mind-set translates into a zero-sum mentality driving his trade and tariffs wars, based on his conviction that other countries are ripping off the United States, causing, in turn, self-inflicted damage through inflationary pressures and strained relations with allies and adversaries alike.

I asked Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively on the rise and fall of constitutional government, to step back and describe the Trump administration. She replied by email:

Many autocrats have used their positions for self-enrichment — Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Modi and more. But none have raised this possibility for self-enrichment to the heights we have seen here in the U.S., in less than one year of Trump. Economists have called their governments predatory states because instead of providing services, these governments use public wealth for private benefit.

In the forward to a book about Hungary, “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” Scheppele wrote about the regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, but she said in her email that her comments apply equally well, if not more so, to the Trump presidency:

When a mafia-like organization goes from underworld to upperworld and controls the state itself, the resulting mafia state takes its newly acquired tools of governance and deploys them with the principles of a mafia — holding its own loyalists in line with rigorously enforced rules of discipline while benefiting them with the spoils of power, and threatening its enemies with criminal prosecutions, libel cases, tax audits, confiscation of property, denial of employment, surveillance and even veiled threats of violence.

Mafias also have another quality: They do not operate through formal rules, bureaucratic structures and transparent procedures. Because mafias have the mentality of criminal organizations, even when they are part of the upperworld, they are accustomed to making their crucial decisions in the shadows. Like in families on which they are modeled, the political relatives in mafias are rewarded for loyalty, not merit, and divorces occur on grounds of disloyalty rather than bad performance. The distribution of available resources within the family rewards solidarity and punishes improvisational deviation. It is precisely not based on law.

Along complementary lines, Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of authoritarian politics, replied by email to my inquiries:

We know that strongman rule — where power is concentrated in the leadership — is associated with greater corruption. Examples from Viktor Orban in Hungary and Alberto Fujimori in Peru illustrate this well. The more power grows concentrated, the more that we see the leader, their close friends and family and loyal business elites profit.

We are observing this play out in the U.S. context, where Trump and those in his entourage are growing richer through a range of activities, from cryptocurrency to real estate deals in the Middle East.

At the extreme, Frantz continued, “this becomes a kleptocratic system.” (...)

While I agree in the main with Scheppele and Frantz, I think that in key respects Trump stands apart from Putin, Narendra Modi, Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, distinctions that get lost when they are lumped together under such categories as the rulers of mafia states or nascent kleptocracies.

The most important characteristic separating the four foreign autocrats from Trump is that they think in the long term, calculating the broad implications of their decisions, while Trump’s thinking is short term, if not childlike.

Jonathan Martin, a senior political reporter for Politico, described this Trump characteristic well in his Dec. 4 essay, “The President Who Never Grew Up”:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-”Big,” ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

Trump is one part Orban, Martin wrote,

making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions. But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or Trapper keepers.

Yet, as with all children, there are also outbursts in the middle of restaurants. Or in this case, the Cabinet Room.

Trump’s petulance is one of the reasons Putin, armed with the discipline of a former lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., runs rings around our president. At the same time, Trump’s childishness underpins his submissive adoration of his Russian counterpart.

Finally, in an administration known for its erratic adoption and sudden abandonment of policies, Trump has demonstrated an unwavering determination to enhance the fortunes of the rich while doing little or nothing to ameliorate worsening conditions for the working-class MAGA electorate that helped bring him to power.

I wrote about this before, but the MAGA electorate stands out from other political constituencies in its disproportionate share of lower-middle-income and middle-income voters, whose families make from $30,000 to $100,000 a year.

When the effects of the “big, beautiful” domestic policy act — tax cuts and reduced spending on health care and food stamps — are combined with the effects of Trump’s tariffs, these moderate to middle-income voters come out behind.

The Yale Budget Lab calculated that virtually everyone in the $30,000 to $100,000 range would come out a net loser. Households making $75,730, roughly the middle of that range, would lose, on average, $1,060 this year.

The only group that would gain significantly is composed of households in the top income decile, with an average income of $517,700, who would make $9,670 more.

The one group that has done very well during Trump’s second term is made up of stockholders, who have gained at every income decile, according to my back-of-the-envelope estimates.

The gains, however, are tilted heavily toward the very rich, who hold a majority of the equities. Gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution do not exceed $8,000 for any decile. For those in the sixth through ninth deciles, gains range from roughly $10,750 to $51,000. In the top decile, the gain balloons to just under $280,000.

The more than quarter-million dollars going to families in the top decile is, however, chump change compared with how well Trump and his family made out during the first months of his second term.

On Oct. 16, Cryptonews reported that “the family of U.S. President Donald Trump has generated pretax gains of around $1 billion in the past year from their diverse array of crypto-related ventures, a new investigation reveals.”

In the meantime, the Trump family’s search for ways to profit continues unabated, with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, taking the lead in the most recent ventures.

On Dec. 11, The New York Post reported that Kushner had initiated talks with Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management and Henry Kravis’s KKR “to assist with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine.”

At the same time, Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has put money up in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, joining the sovereign wealth firms for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

For Trump and his family, there is no separation of holding government office and making money.

by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Stier for The New York Times. Source photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
[ed. I'm still in denial that this country voted him into office not once, but twice. As George W. Bush once famously said "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” (ed. but apparently you can, over and over). See also: Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions (NYT:]

***

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.

Loggins & Messina (Single Version)

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The Story of Art + Water

For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of years.

Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education.

For years, I mentioned this issue to friends in and out of the art world, and everyone, without exception, agreed that the system was broken. Even friends I know who teach at art schools agreed that the cost was out of control, and these spiraling costs were contributing to the implosion of many undergraduate and postgraduate art programs.

Then I brought it up with JD Beltran, a longtime friend prominent in the San Francisco art scene, who herself was suffering under the weight of $150,000 in art-school debt, which she’d incurred in the late 1990s. She’d been carrying that debt for thirty years—for a degree in painting she got in 1998 from the San Francisco Art Institute—and together we started mapping out an alternative.

It’s important to note that the current model for art schools is very new. For about a thousand years, until the twentieth century, artists typically either apprenticed for a master artist, learning their trade by working in a studio, or attended loose ateliers where a group of artist-students studied under an established artist, and paid very little to do so. These students would help maintain the studio, they would hire models, they would practice their craft together, and the studio’s owner would instruct these students while still creating his own work—usually in the same building.

Somehow, though, we went from a model where students paid little to nothing, and learned techniques passed down through the centuries, to a system where students pay $100,000, and often learn very little beyond theory. A recent graduate of one of our country’s most respected MFA programs—not in the Bay Area—told me that in her third year as an MFA student, she paid over $100,000 in tuition and fees, and in exchange, she met with her advisor once every two weeks. That third year, there were no classes, no skills taught—there was only a twice-monthly meeting with this advisor. Each meeting lasted one hour. Over the course of that third year, she met with this advisor twenty times, meaning that each of these one-hour sessions cost the MFA student $5,000. And during these sessions, again, no hard skills were taught. It was only theory, only discussion. At the rate of $5,000 an hour (and of course her instructor was not the recipient of this $5,000/hr!) This seems to be an inequitable system in need of adjustment.

So JD Beltran and I started thinking of an alternative. For years, it was little more than idle chatter until one day in 2022, I was biking around the Embarcadero, and happened to do a loop around Pier 29, and because one of its roll-top doors was open, I saw that it was enormous, and that it was empty.

JD and I started making inquiries with the Port of San Francisco, a government agency that oversees the waterfront. They’re the agency that helped the Giants ballpark get built, who helped reopen the Ferry Building, and made it possible for the Exploratorium to relocate from the Palace of Fine Arts to their current location on the waterfront. In the forty years since the collapse of the wretched highway that used to cover the Embarcadero, the Port of SF has done great things to make that promenade a jewel of the city...

The core of our proposal was this: Ten established artists would get free studio space in the pier. At a time when all visual artists are struggling to find and keep studio space in this expensive city, this free studio space would help some of our best local artists stay local.

In exchange for this free studio space, these ten established artists would agree to teach a cohort of twenty emerging artists, who also would be given free studio space in the pier.

That was the core of the idea. Simple, we hoped. And it would bring thirty visual artists all to Pier 29, to learn from each other, and the emerging artists would get a world-class, graduate-level education. And because thirty artists would be occupying the pier, the staffing required to maintain the program would be minimal. The thirty resident artists would become caretakers of the space.

Thus began fourteen months of meetings, proposals, and permitting discussions. The Port’s staff were encouraging, because that part of the Embarcadero is a very quiet zone, with few restaurants or cafés—and those who were there, struggle. (The famed Fog City Diner of Mrs. Doubtfire, recently went under.) But finally, after fourteen months and thousands of hours put in by Art + Water and CAST, the Port and the City granted us a lease on Pier 29.

OUR NEW MODEL, WHICH IS A VARIATION ON THE OLD MODEL

For the educational component of the Art + Water program, I did some napkin math and discovered something so simple that I assumed it couldn’t work: If each of these ten established artists taught just three hours a week, together they would provide these twenty emerging artists with thirty hours of instruction per week. These three hours wouldn’t put too great a burden on any one of the established artists, but the accumulated knowledge imparted each week by these ten established—and varied, and successful—artists would be immeasurable. And they would be able to do it for free.

And because the thirty artists, established and emerging, would be sharing one pier, they’d be able to consult with each other regularly, even outside of class hours, and more mentorship and camaraderie would occur organically. (One of the strangest things about many advanced art-school programs is how distant the teachers’ and students’ studios are from each other. For hundreds of years, apprentices were able to see, and even participate in, the making of the established artists’ work. Now, that’s largely lost. Professors work across town, or in distant cities; the two practices are miles apart, and so much knowledge is never transferred. When BFA and MFA students are around only other students, they can’t see how successful working artists make their art, or indeed how they make a living.)

With Art + Water, the hope was that if these emerging artists had their studios right next to successful artists, they could see how the work was created, they could ask questions, and they could even assist (just as apprentices used to assist the master artists). Infinitely more knowledge would be transferred through this proximity than could ever be in a classroom-only program.

So when I did my 3 × 10 = 30 napkin math, JD Beltran, who had not only gotten an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute but had also taught at SFAI, the California College of Art, SF State, and Stanford, shocked me by agreeing that my napkin math made sense to her, too. So we kept pressing on.

by Dave Eggers, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: McSweeny's

[ed. Great idea. Why did mentorships fall away?]

Short field landing
via:
[ed. A favorite at every Alaskan airshow. Right on the money.]

Lukas Nelson on His Favorite Song

Lukas Nelson Reveals His All-Time Favorite Song and No, He Didn’t Pick It for the Reason You Think

Competing for the same Grammy Award with someone who wrote your all-time favorite song is one type of daunting challenge. Competing against a close loved one, let alone a relative, is another. Lukas Nelson is one of the few musicians who can say they’ve experienced both. The eldest living son of country music icon Willie Nelson has enjoyed a prolific and successful music career himself. That has inevitably put him in the same ring as his father, who remains busy as ever well into his 90s.

Both Willie and Lukas Nelson received a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Country Album for Oh, What a Beautiful World and American Romance, respectively... During a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lukas discussed what it was like competing against his father for a Grammy. “Against is a strong word,” Lukas said with a smile.

“Alongside is better,” he continued. “I mean, the Nelsons have a 40% chance of winning, which is pretty good.” Later in the interview, Lukas cited “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” as his favorite song. Once again, he pointed out the irrelevance of his relation to the track. “That’s probably my favorite song,” Lukas said. “The fact that it happens to be written by my father is mind-blowing.”

Willie Nelson wrote and recorded “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” for the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose, in which Nelson plays country singer Buck Bonham. Lukas Nelson, Willie’s second son, wouldn’t be born until eight years later on Christmas Day, 1988...

“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is a beloved addition to the songwriter’s catalogue—and not just because of the rogue performance at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas when Willie’s guitarist, Bee Spears, put on tights and a tutu and strapped himself into a harness from an earlier performance of Peter Pan. “He was having a terrific time swooping and sailing and doing his impression of an angel flying too close to the ground,” Willie wrote in his autobiography, Willie. “It was the funniest thing I ever saw onstage.”

Of course, the song also has plenty of opportunities to be reflective and sincere. Willie has often used the song as a way to pay tribute to his eldest son, Billy Nelson, who died by suicide on Christmas Day, 1991. His younger brother, Lukas, was only three years old. The grieving father told a friend at the time, “I’ve never experienced anything so devastating in my life,” per People.

by Melanie Davis, American Songwriter |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Willie had some chops.]

Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right

By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.

Ever since she’d pulled me out of school, she had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blonde of its baby color. After reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.

She had me crawl whenever I was at home, which was most of the time. Mom home schooled me between fourth and eighth grades, and even today, as a parent who has come to see plainly how damaging those years were, I know that she believed that her choice was in my best interest.

It was the lack of state oversight or standards that allowed our situation. It was the laws that failed me. Today, as home-schooling numbers continue to surge, similar laws fail to protect millions of kids.

Mom called what we did “unschooling,” a concept championed by the home-schooling pioneer John Holt. She agreed with his assertion that “schools are bad places for kids,” or at least for a certain kind of kid; my brother Aaron, she decided, was better suited for public school and was sent off on the bus each morning.

I, on the other hand, was a “creative global learner,” and Mom said that she was going to give me a “free-form education” in order to “pursue passions.” Other than math, which I began to do by correspondence course, I mostly spent my days with her visiting shops, libraries and restaurants of our rapidly-growing suburb, or else having “project time” — drawing superheroes, rereading my David Macaulay and Roald Dahl books, or writing short stories by the pool as Mom reapplied my hair bleach.

Mom had been going through a hard time — ever since we’d moved to Plano, Texas, her social life was dim, her career as a children’s magazine editor had been put on hiatus, and her own mother had begun a long decline into dementia — but my presence by her side seemed to lift her spirits. “You are better than any grown-up, Stef. You are more than all I need,” she told me.

I felt proud to help her, but silently I worried. The longer I spent at home with her (Dad was at work five days a week), the more impossible it seemed that I might ever go back into the world. I knew how badly my return to school would hurt her, and increasingly school seemed to me a terrifying place. I’d mostly lost my friendships from my old school, and my few attempts to re-enter the land of other kids had been failures; after just a day or two at a Boy Scout camp, I’d actively tried to contract conjunctivitis so that I could be sent home early.

Sometimes, flipping through one of my brother’s old textbooks, I’d see how far behind I’d already fallen. But who could I speak with about any of that?

As the years passed, my isolation deepened. My mom needed to take on part-time work, so now I largely spent my afternoons alone in my room, where there was no one to witness the long AOL Instant Messenger romance I carried on with a supposed teenage girl, who in fact turned out to be an older sexual predator. No one noticed the track of scars I’d been making on my hip with the tip of a compass. No one saw how I’d spend countless hours alone in my room with a portable TV inches from my face, wanting to disappear into the worlds onscreen.

Not once, in the four and a half years I spent at home, did anyone from the state come to assess what sort of education I was receiving, or even just to check on me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view. For much of the 20th century, the law was essentially silent with regard to home-schooling. The 1972 Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder granted Amish parents the right to withdraw their children from school after eighth grade due to unique religious beliefs and practices, but the U.S. Supreme Court has never specifically addressed a constitutional right to home-schooling in general.

In the absence of any federal law or Supreme Court decision, home-schooling regulation was left to the states. In large part driven by fundamentalist Christian lobby groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association (H.S.L.D.A.), home-schooling had become formally legalized in nearly every state by the time Mom pulled me out of school in the 1990s. Over the following three decades, H.S.L.D.A. and an associated network of smaller organizations have been staggeringly successful in furthering their anti-regulation agenda and quashing dissent. Current home-school laws still differ by state, but in nearly all states the lack of oversight beggars belief.

In 48 states, registered sex offenders and adults with a conviction of crimes against minors can still home-school a child, effectively removing the child from the observation of other adults and peers, even if that child’s safety is under active investigation by child protective services. In 12 states (including Texas), parents aren’t required to submit any documentation to home-school. They can simply remove a child from school, and then they will no longer be subject to any mandatory state assessments or contact with officials. In another 17 states, families are required only to provide notice to the state of their intention to home-school, but they too face no state-mandated assessments.

In 19 of the 21 remaining states that do have laws requiring assessments of home-schooled children, the laws are not enforced in all home-schooling situations. In 49 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have their children screened for medical issues or ensure that they receive care. In 40 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have a high school diploma.

As the number of home-schoolers has surged — around half a million when I was a kid, driven to around 3.5 million since the pandemic — the country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots, where the fate of home-schooled children has been left almost entirely to their parents. States continue to allow parents to operate with little or no oversight, resigning the fates of millions of kids to the assumption that parents know best, even if evidence abounds that this is not always the case...

Legal definitions of abuse vary, but the choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive. I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to limit a child’s access to learning materials, or to indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives, or to willingly limit a child’s ability to function in a larger society.

Each home-school is different, and of course most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children. Indeed, for many parents, the choice to home-school is about prioritizing a child’s safety and better meeting a child’s special learning needs.

But what home-schooling experiences — good or bad — have in common is that they remove what schools provide: a place where children learn and are with one another, a place where adults outside the home interact with children and can intervene on a child’s behalf, and also a transparent, public minimum standard of education. (...)

In my research, I met a 45-year-old woman who was home-schooled in Mississippi in the late 1980s and 1990s, and her experience resembles a woefully familiar pattern. When she was in second grade, she says, her parents found a simple way of avoiding the questions that her teachers might ask if they saw the bruises on her body: They simply removed her and her siblings from that school and so from the gaze of concerned adults. She says that once she and her siblings were behind the legal veil of home-schooling, their parents continued to beat them, locked away any educational materials in the house, and forced the children to spend their days doing chores on the property.

Those who oppose regulation claim that such cases are rare, and they rightfully argue that educational neglect and abuse happen at school as well. But we’ve created a system in which it’s impossible to know how common home-schooling abuse might actually be. Because home-schoolers in many states are not even required to officially register, proper data collection can be nearly impossible, and children who exist under the sovereign power of a home-schooling parent face enormous risks by speaking out.

Those in favor of home-schooling also point to a multitude of home-school successes under current laws, and certainly there are a great many. I agree with the pro-home-school lobby that the close attention of parent-educators and the student-interest-led learning model can teach children how to learn in creative and uncommon ways.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that this same lobby fights so fiercely to keep these children from even minimal oversight. Indeed, it would seem that these parents would invite outside assessments to demonstrate the success of their approach. At the very least, it’s hard to understand why home-schooling parents would not warmly welcome routine checks of health and wellness, in order to protect those children whose parents misuse home-schooling to abuse and isolate their children.

My father and brother, reading my account of those years, tell me that they recognize the episodes I describe, but that even they — the closest observers of that time — did not know how alone and often lost I felt while they were at work and school, or how desperately I wished someone would put an end to the situation. “I just assumed your mom knew what was best,” Dad says. 

by Stefan Merrill Block, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos

[ed. Boggles the mind. We have truancy laws for school attendance but no oversight or standardized testing for home-schooling?]

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

Billionaires had a great thing going. The ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, among others, invited the super rich to exert all the influence on policy and politics that their money could buy — and then enjoy all the wealth that influence secured for them in return. Thanks to ever-more-obliging tax policies, the billionaire class grew absurdly rich over the years that followed. In the last five years alone, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion, Forbes reported.

And they did it in many cases without the rest of us even having a clue. It took the investigative reporter Jane Mayer five years of relentless digging to figure out how the Koch brothers gained a chokehold on the Republican Party. The title of her 2016 book, “Dark Money,” became synonymous with a particularly effective form of influence that was all but untraceable. The billionaires could have kept on like that forever. All they had to do was keep their mouths closed.

Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

Elon Musk bragged about his support for President Trump, to whose campaign and allied groups he donated more than $250 million. He loudly attempted to buy votes in Pennsylvania. Then he leveraged it all into a cruel and chaotic effort to dismantle federal agencies. Marc Andreessen’s tech-heavy venture capital firm publicly pledged $100 million to target lawmakers who attempt to regulate artificial intelligence; Mr. Andreessen then mocked the pope for suggesting some ethical guardrails around the technology. Bill Ackman announced that he and his pals were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and urged Mr. Trump to call in the National Guard if that effort failed and Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty met his worst expectations.

And all the while they’re out there lecturing us about their fitness routines, their weird personal philosophies, their conspicuous consumption and more. Jeff Bezos staged a three-day, celebrity-packed, $50 million wedding to Lauren Sánchez, the whole cringe affair optimized for global paparazzi interest. Mr. Ackman is advising young men to try the line, “May I meet you?”, a strategy that in his own experience, he says, “almost never got a no.” Owning the world isn’t enough for these people; they must also go in search of the cheap high of influencer culture.

But no amount of auramaxxing can hide the new reality. Just six years ago, 69 percent of respondents to a Cato Institute poll agreed that billionaires “earned their wealth by creating value for others.” An only slightly smaller majority agreed with the statement “we are all better off when people get rich.” Today, one poll after another shows that Americans want the rich to be taxed at higher, even much higher rates. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have attracted an increasingly large national following with an anti-billionaire message that previously would have sounded extremist. And New York City, the richest metropolis in the nation, just elected a democratic socialist who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist at all.

The billionaires have only themselves to blame.

It’s as if the sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy. Peter Thiel, the crucial funder of JD Vance’s ascent, talks extensively about his desire to escape democracy (and politics generally) in favor of some kind of bizarre techno-libertarian future. Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and former crypto exec, calls for tech elites to take control of cities and states — or build their own — and run them as quasi-private entities. Alex Karp, who along with Thiel founded the high-flying military intelligence company Palantir, shares his predictions about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, pausing to brag, “I think I’m the highest-ranked tai chi practitioner in the business world.” In another era, this would all be laughable. But as the MAGA moment emboldens them to drop any pretense of civic virtue and just go full will-to-power, their nutty ideas are now borderline plausible. And terrifying.

Billionaires control the cable channels, social media platforms, newspapers, movie studios and essentially everything else that we consume, but for their own information sources they are in some cases more likely to trust their own kind. Semafor documented one ultraexclusive group chat that included Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Srinivasan, among others, in which the self-reinforcing discourse is reported to have pushed many Silicon Valley tycoons toward right-wing politics. “If you weren’t in the business at all,” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams said of a similar group chat he was a member of, “you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently.”

Such disconnection goes a long way to explaining why billionaires can’t grasp how the real world is convulsing outside their well-secured gates.

And convulsing it is. According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.

A realignment may be underway. The recent push for the Epstein files, a previously unimaginable collaboration between conspiracy-addled MAGA true believers and anti-corporatist Democrats, was just the latest sign. At a moment when income inequality, the looming threat of A.I. and the rise of authoritarianism seem to be straining American societal cohesion, a revolt against self-dealing elites may be the only cause compelling enough to bring us together. (...)

The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms. OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not quite Voltaire. But there was a pedophilia scandal involving Louis XV: Public obsession with the king’s many mistresses helped give rise to so-called libelles, cheaply printed, semi-factual pamphlets that speculated on, among other matters, the king’s supposed never-ending supply of teenage girls. It would have fit right in on TikTok. Reverence turned to mockery; mockery begot contempt; and then …

That story did not end well.

by Michael Hirschorn, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

[ed. Actually, it did end well, just not for the rich. Think about it, the sheer scale of 2900 people owning over One Thousand MILLION dollars apiece ($16 trillion total) - not $100 MILLION, or even $500 MILLLION - (Larry Ellison has $274 thousand MILLIONS alone). It's like saying "Ok, we're taking over the world and the other 99 percent of you have to go live in Australia."]

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The Utah Look

There’s a Reason You Can’t Tell the ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Cast Apart

Does Hulu’s Secret Lives on Mormon Wives season 3 have you squinting at the TV, struggling to tell Jessi Ngatikaura and Demi Engemann apart with their identical, long, sleek waves and indistinguishable wide, thick lashes? Even diehard fans of the show admit to frequently mixing up the cast. And viewers regularly post about getting castmates confused. “Anyone else watch ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ but can’t keep up bc they all look exactly alike??” wrote one fan on Facebook.

It’s been a hot topic since season 1 and, according to some, this isn’t a simple case of women on reality TV wanting to be conventionally attractive. It’s the dogged pursuit of what many call the “Utah look.”

“Utah has insanely high standards for girls,” says fitness TikToker eharmany95. “Everybody is competing with the girl next to them to be just as perfect, just as tan, just as fit.” Or take it from Vanna Einerson, a 21-year-old Salt Lake City native on the most recent season of Love Island, whose filler and breast implants were a source of judgment and fascination online. “There’s a Utah girl stereotype,” she told castmate Ace Greene. “All the girls are, like, tan, blonde.”

“I have never felt uglier than I did living in Utah,” says TikToker @avemarin in a video explaining Vanna's look. “It’s not just being white and thin that is desired here, but what has been praised the most is extremely tiny bodies, blonde hair, blue eyes, big lips, immediate boob job—like right out of high school—and a very symmetrical face. Hence the filler and lip injections.”

Utah—and Salt Lake City, its capital—is a mecca for cosmetic procedures that help women conform to these standards. Salt Lake City has more surgeons per capita than Los Angeles (and almost as many as Miami). Residents google “breast augmentation” and other cosmetic surgeries in higher numbers than pretty much any other city. One particularly popular surgery is the “mommy makeover,” a combination of multiple procedures, including but not limited to a breast lift, tummy tuck, liposuction and labiaplasty. 

Although Utah is hardly the only place where women feel pressure to be thin and have long hair, by many accounts the expectation here is more intense. At least some of this has to do with the Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A cultural behemoth across the state, LDS members are 90 percent white and, according to some experts, this sameness—in religion, race, and region—leads to an extreme pressure to conform to a very conventional standard of beauty...

Aubree Bunderson, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mom and lifelong member of the LDS church, says she can always tell a fellow Deseret native down to the “Utah curls” (think beachy waves with straight ends achieved with a clamped curling iron) and her very blonde dye job.

“You see a different kind of blonde in different states. It’s not as rich, and it’s not as soft,” she says. “Anytime I’m traveling anywhere, you can almost tell who’s from Utah and who’s not. She’s that bleach-blonde girl with Utah curls. You know she has a woman that specializes in platinum blondes do her hair. There’s not very many blondes out there. And then, here in Utah, we’re full of blondes. We’re full of athletic wear. We love the idea of the gym and being healthy and having the perfect body and beauty standards when it comes to skincare and makeup. We want to look our best and feel our best.”

For Bunderson, the widespread conformity to these ideas of beauty is inspiring. “I’m encouraged by other women that I find attractive. I’m like, I want that body. I want her hair. I want her eyelashes. I want her skin. So many influencers are from Utah. They’re in my face, looking beautiful. They look fake, but they just look amazing in my eyes.”...

Is this religion or just Utah? Can we even separate the two? Bunderson and several other women who spoke with Cosmopolitan mentioned physical “perfection” as the goal of the blonde curls and mommy makeovers. Perfection is a core value in the LDS Church, the Book of Mormon commands followers to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”...

While reality TV stars are anecdotal evidence of this tendency for sameness in the quest for “perfection,” data also bears this out. A recent survey on body image in the LDS church found that 14 percent of church members had a cosmetic procedure compared to 4 percent nationally. The report also concluded that although the LDS church promotes a positive body image, many religious Mormons (particularly wealthy ones) “may erroneously believe that religion is tied to perfection in a variety of ways, including physical appearance or finances, and they may attempt to conform to what is referred to as the ‘thin ideal’ in U.S. culture. Perhaps appearing to be a perfect, worthy, righteous member of the church means ‘looking the part’ as well.”

by Hannah Malach, Cosmopolitan |  Read more:
Image: Mary Fama/Disney/Pamela Littky/Getty Images
[ed. The Stepford look, updated. There's even something called Christian Girl Autumn Look. Maybe we'll see Recovering Tradwife in Therapy look or Housewives of Bulimia look.]

Albert Kiefer, Tokyo Storefront, 2022
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Federal Government Blocks State AI Regulation

President Trump issued an executive order yesterday attempting to thwart state AI laws, saying that federal agencies must fight state laws because Congress hasn’t yet implemented a national AI standard. Trump’s executive order tells the Justice Department, Commerce Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies to take a variety of actions.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones. The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order… Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation,” Trump’s order said. The order claims that state laws, such as one passed in Colorado, “are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.”

Congressional Republicans recently decided not to include a Trump-backed plan to block state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), although it could be included in other legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also failed to get congressional backing for legislation that would punish states with AI laws.

“After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump,” US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said yesterday. “With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet.”

Markey said that “a broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said the “executive order’s overly broad preemption threatens states with lawsuits and funding cuts for protecting their residents from AI-powered frauds, scams, and deepfakes.”

Trump orders Bondi to sue states

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said that “preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is absurd and dangerous. Congress has a responsibility to get this technology right—and quickly—but states must be allowed to act in the public interest in the meantime. I’ll be working with my colleagues to introduce a full repeal of this order in the coming days.”

The Trump order includes a variation on Cruz’s proposal to prevent states with AI laws from accessing broadband grant funds. The executive order also includes a plan that Trump recently floated to have the federal government file lawsuits against states with AI laws.

Within 30 days of yesterday’s order, US Attorney General Pam Bondi is required to create an AI Litigation Task Force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 2 of this order, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”...

It would be up to Congress to decide whether to pass the proposed legislation. But the various other components of the executive order could dissuade states from implementing AI laws even if Congress takes no action.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Kamikaze pilot WWII via:

[ed. Umm... state's rights? Whatever. The main intent of course is to do nothing, allowing AI to progress without any external oversight or regulation. This decision will go to court, lose, be appealed, lose, and then a couple years later get dumped on the Supreme Court - pretty much the same game plan we've seen over and over again on other issues. In the mean time, AI models will become so dangerous (and imbedded) that even if the Supreme Court renders a negative ruling it'll be too late.]

Multi-Talented

Orchestral Job Interview
[ed. "I'll play anything"! Don't know her name unfortunately.]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

The Real Charley (Hull)

Charley Hull’s Instagram tells a story. A trip to her English home told the real one (The Athletic)

Image: Sarah Stier/Getty Images/Getty Images

[ed. No BS free spirit.]

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What Happens When an NFL Ball Goes Into the Stands?

It was Dec. 11, 2022, and Philadelphia Eagles third-year quarterback Jalen Hurts was building a campaign that would earn him MVP runner-up and his first Super Bowl nod.

In a Week 14 win against the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium, Hurts found a coverage gap and darted for a 10-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. It made him the first quarterback to post back-to-back seasons with at least 10 rushing touchdowns. The Pro Football Hall of Fame later announced that Hurts’ jersey and pants worn in that game would be put on display.

The broadcast showed Hurts running through the end zone and handing the ball to an Eagles fan in the first row. Paul Hamilton, the fan at the receiving end of that celebration, won’t forget that moment. But it’s not because he shook hands with the star player of his favorite team. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end of his Eagles and NFL fandom.

One year later, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against the NFL, MetLife Stadium, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and New Jersey State Police, claiming false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, abuse of process and negligence. The NFL and Eagles were dismissed as defendants earlier this year, but the lawsuit remains unresolved against the other parties and is expected to extend into 2026.

Hamilton’s lawsuit says he was approached by stadium employees after Hurts handed him the ball, and “they misrepresented and lied to Mr. Hamilton claiming the football was not his property, and that he was violating law if he kept it and demanded that the football be returned.”

The lawsuit claims that an alternative gift was offered, but Hamilton did not want to give up the game ball. When he tried to leave, the lawsuit says Hamilton “was then thrown into a gate and forcibly held against it.” The lawsuit also claims that approximately 10 New Jersey State Police officers swarmed Hamilton and threatened arrest if he didn’t turn the ball over. Hamilton eventually exited with the ball and still has it in his possession...

Hamilton, now 34, hasn’t been back to an NFL game since the incident, nor does he plan to. He says he is “absolutely not” an Eagles fan anymore, nor a fan of the NFL.

“It’s any sports fan’s all-time high, followed by an all-time low. It’s emotionally very hard to comprehend how that feeling started and how that feeling ended,” Hamilton said. “I still struggle with it every day; it’s not like it’s gone away. It’s 2025, and it still feels like it was yesterday that they destroyed something for me.

by Jayna Bardahl, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images

MacKenzie Scott Announces $7 Billion of Charitable Giving This Year

The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced on Tuesday that she had made donations in the past year totaling nearly $7.2 billion, vaulting the total value of her gifts to over $26 billion.

Since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Ms. Scott has come to embody a new brand of philanthropy. She has made large gifts to nonprofits that were distinguished not just by their dollar value but by the fact that she gave without dictating how the money should be spent.

Ms. Scott also has devoted a sizable share of her giving to groups that promote equity and racial justice. In a political climate where many donors have pulled back from such giving, Ms. Scott has made gifts to groups that support refugees and work to address climate change, and to historically Black colleges and universities. Conservatives, such as Elon Musk, have attacked Ms. Scott for her progressive leanings.

Her disclosure came one week after Michael and Susan Dell traveled to the White House to join President Trump in celebrating the more than $6 billion they had committed to so-called Trump accounts. That donation is expected to put $250 in accounts for 25 million American children to use when they turn 18, though some progressives criticized it for burnishing the president’s reputation in the process.

When, in 2019, she committed to giving away at least half of her wealth as part of the Giving Pledge, Ms. Scott said, “I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” As her net worth has waxed and waned in the ensuing years, some observers have questioned whether she would give her money away faster than her wealth could appreciate.

Having given more than $26 billion away, Ms. Scott is not only one of the biggest givers in absolute terms, but she has also given away a significant share of her total wealth, which Bloomberg estimates at nearly $40 billion. The Dells, for instance, are still worth more than $150 billion.

Ms. Scott is employing a subtly different public-relations strategy. She usually announces her gifts once or twice a year in blog posts and has criticized media coverage of her philanthropy that centers on the donations and not the recipients.

And so Tuesday, she included the $7 billion figure quietly, by updating the fourth paragraph of a blog post she had published in mid-October. She also updated the database maintained by her philanthropy, Yield Giving, with an additional 225 donations.

“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she wrote in the post that was updated on Tuesday, “but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”

About 70 percent of those gifts went to organizations she had previously backed.

The largest disclosed donation was for $90 million, according to the database, going to an organization called Forests, People, Climate, which focuses on halting tropical deforestation. The next largest disclosed gifts were of $70 million each to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the United Negro College Fund, which offer scholarships.

As she often does, Ms. Scott used her post to talk about all the ways that people with fewer resources give. “Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave $50 to a local food shelter: These are not news stories. But all of it matters,” Ms. Scott wrote.

by Nicholas Kulish and Theodore Schleifer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press
[ed. History will look kindly upon her. It's not an easy process.]

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect?

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect? 

[ed. From me, certainly. In the late 50s and 60s East Coast jazz seemed all about pushing experimental boundaries, and some of it just became too effortful to listen to (Bill Evans an exception). I'm thinking about later Coltrane and especially the burgeoning 'free jazz' movement, as typified by artists like Ornette Colman, Cecil Taylor and others. Just beeps, squawks, honks and atonal solos that didn't seem to have any clear grounding or destination. West Coast jazz on the other hand sounded cool, laid back, and melodic, and projected a sense of style and energy that I found much more appealing (complex but still accessible).]

Music, Forest, Body

The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound. This initial impression evaporates, though, when I let go of the idea that this is a space for direct experience of sound. Instead, we can marvel here at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures. (...)

Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context. Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music emerged from human relation- ship with the beyond-human world, its varied sounds around the world revealing not only the many forms of human culture but the diverse sonorous, reverberant properties of rock, soil, and living beings...

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonizers picked out the material most pleasing to their ears and most useful to instrument-making workshops. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as “exotic” woods and animal parts became more readily available. Spruce and maple, especially, remained the favored wood for the bodies of stringed instruments and the soundboards of pianos. Calfskin topped tympani. These European materials were joined by ivory, favored for its workability and stability, and tropical woods whose density, smoothness, elasticity, and tones met musical needs: mpingo’s tight, silky grain; Pernambuco’s extraordinary strength, elasticity, and responsiveness; rosewood’s warmth and stability; and padauk’s resonance. These tropical woods all belong to the same taxonomic family, tree cousins to the beans, and have tight-grained, dense wood from slow-growing trees. Most take seventy or more years to reach harvestable age. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders. (...)

The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Nineteenth-century exploitation has turned to twenty-first-century ruination. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. The volume of ivory used for violin bows and bassoon rings was dwarfed by exports for tableware handles, billiard balls, religious carvings, and ornaments, although piano keys consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of tusks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. The country Brazil gets its name from brasa, “ember” in Portuguese, for the glowing-coal color of the wood whose trade was so important in the founding of the country.

Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than ten percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly.

The sound of contemporary music is therefore a product of past colonialism and present-day trade, but, with very few exceptions, it is not a driver of species endangerment. Indeed, the relationships between musicians and their instruments—often built over decades of daily bodily connection—serve as an inspiring example of how we might live in better relationship to forests. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. For example, we threw out more than twelve million tons of furniture in the United States in 2018, eighty percent of it buried in landfills, most of the rest burned, and only one-third of one percent recycled. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the “world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products.” If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased.

Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods. It is therefore now possible, with some searching, to find instruments made from wood certified to come from sustainable logging operations. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, puts its stamp of approval on several new lines of instruments. The Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative in southeastern Tanzania promotes community-based forest management where local residents own, manage, and benefit from mpingo and other woodland species, managing forests sustainably to help the local economy. Instrument makers are also introducing new materials, relieving pressure on endangered woods. Until the late twentieth century, only twenty tree species provided most of the wood for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, and other Western stringed instruments. Today the variety of wood sources for instrument making has increased to more than one hundred species. Alongside this diversification of natural products, manufactured materials like carbon fiber and wood laminate are substituting for solid wood.

In the decades that come, unless our path changes, it will not be the overharvesting of particularly valuable species that challenges our sources of wood and animal parts for instruments. Instead, the loss of entire forest ecosystems will remake the relationship between human music and the land. The forests from which we now draw our most precious musical raw materials are in decline...

A few old instruments—carefully tended by musicians—now evoke the memory of the departed or degraded forests. On the stage at Lincoln Center, we hear woods from past decades and centuries. Sherry Sylar plays on oboes whose woods were harvested decades ago in the early twentieth century. Each one has a “passport” documenting the wood’s provenance, showing that it was not obtained through recent cutting of now-endangered trees. When we talked, she described how some colleagues scour the country for sales of older oboes, hoping to find instruments with good wood from ages past. The music of Sylar’s violinist colleague, Sheryl Staples, comes from a Guarneri violin. Its woods are at least three hundred years old, harvested from spruce and maple forests that grew on a preindustrial Earth. Although wood for instruments still comes from the Fiemme Valley forests in northern Italy that supplied Guarneri and Stradivarius, springtime there now comes earlier, summer is hotter, and winter snowpack is diminished compared with that of previous centuries. This yields wood with a looser, less sonorous grain than the tight woods of past centuries. In another hundred years, it is likely that heat, droughts, and changed rainfall will push alpine forests off these mountain slopes. Music often now speaks of the Earth as it was, not as it is, a memory carried in wood grain.

by David Haskell, Orion |  Read more:

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