Apple in China

Apple Used China to Make a Profit. What China Got in Return Is Scarier.

A little more than a decade ago, foreign journalists living in Beijing, including myself, met for a long chat with a top Chinese diplomat. Those were different days, when high-ranking Chinese officials were still meeting with members of the Western press corps. The diplomat whom we met was charming, funny, fluent in English. She also had the latest iPhone in front of her on the table.

I noticed the Apple gadget because at the time, Chinese state news media were unleashing invectives on the Cupertino, Calif.-based company for supposedly cheating Chinese consumers. (It wasn’t true.) There were rumors circulating that Chinese government officials were being told not to flaunt American status symbols. The diplomat’s accouterment proved that wrong.

At the time, one could make the argument that China’s economic modernization was being accompanied by a parallel, if somewhat more laggardly, political reform. But the advent in 2012 of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader who has consolidated power and re-established the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party, has shattered those hopes. And, as Patrick McGee makes devastatingly clear in his smart and comprehensive “Apple in China,” the American company’s decision under Tim Cook, the current C.E.O., to manufacture about 90 percent of its products in China has created an existential vulnerability not just for Apple, but for the United States — nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American innovation.

McGee, who was the lead Apple reporter for The Financial Times and previously covered Asian markets from Hong Kong, takes what we instinctively know — “how Apple used China as a base from which to become the world’s most valuable company, and in doing so, bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state” — and comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous reporting: “that China wouldn’t be China today without Apple.”

Apple says that it has trained more than 28 million workers in China since 2008, which McGee notes is larger than the entire labor force of California. The company’s annual investment in China — not even counting the value of hardware, “which would more than double the figure,” McGee writes — exceeds the total amount the Biden administration dedicated for a “once-in-a-generation” initiative to boost American computer chip production.

“This rapid consolidation reflects a transfer of technology and know-how so consequential,” McGee writes, “as to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

McGee has a journalist’s knack for developing scenes with a few curated details, and he organizes his narrative chronologically, starting with Apple’s origins as a renegade upstart under Steve Jobs in the 1970s and ’80s. After Jobs’s firing and rehiring comes a corporate mind shift in which a vertically integrated firm falls for the allure of contract manufacturing, sending its engineers abroad to train low-paid workers in how to churn out ever more complicated electronics.

We only really get to Apple in China about 90 pages into the book, and that China, in the mid- to late 1990s, was mainly attractive because of what one China scholar called “low wages, low welfare and low human rights.” McGee relates how one Apple engineer, visiting suppliers in the southern Chinese manufacturing center of Shenzhen, was horrified that there were no elevators in the “slapdash” facility, and that the stairs were built with troubling irregularity: with, say, 12 steps (of varying heights) between the first and second floors, then 18 to the next, then 16, then 24.

But China at the turn of the millennium was in the process of joining the World Trade Organization, and its leaders were banking on an export-led economy that would learn from foreign investors. Starting in the 2000s the Taiwanese mega-supplier Foxconn constructed entire settlements for Chinese workers building Apple electronics. First up on the new assembly lines were iMacs that were produced by what became known as “China speed.”

Less than 15 years after Chinese workers began making Apple products en masse, Chinese consumers were buying them en masse, too. Covering China at the time, I chafed at the popular narrative that reduced Apple’s presence in China to a tale of downtrodden workers at Foxconn and other suppliers. Yes, there were nets outside factory dorms to prevent suicides; and wages remained low. Even Apple admitted to alarming labor abuses in its Chinese supply chain.

But that was only half the story. The iPhone in China signified success, an individualistic, American-accented flavor that seemed to delight both veteran diplomats and Foxconn workers I got to know in southwest China. Those of us who had lived in China for years could see that life was getting freer and richer for most Chinese. By the mid-2010s, it was the United States that seemed behind in terms of integrating apps into daily life. In China, at least in the big cities, we were already living in the tech future. (...)

In 2015, Apple was the largest corporate investor in China, to the tune of about $55 billion a year, according to internal documents McGee obtained for this book. (Cook himself told the Chinese media that the company had created nearly five million jobs there: “I’m not sure there are too many companies, domestic or foreign, who can say that.”) At the same time, Xi laid out “Made in China 2025,” his blueprint for achieving technological self-sufficiency in the next decade, dependent on Apple being what McGee calls “a mass enabler of ‘Indigenous innovation.’”

“As Apple taught the supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone,” he writes, “Apple’s suppliers took what they knew and offered it to homegrown companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo.” Today, some of these premium products come with specs that are increasingly ahead of American design, and have outsold Apple in many major markets.

by Hannah Beech, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
[ed. See also: China’s Rise, America’s Dysfunction, and the Need for Cooperation (Current Affairs):]

"Well, you’re absolutely right about that, but I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. I think that’s a noble goal that he has. I can understand why he wants to make American industries more competitive and re-industrialize America. That’s also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And one thing I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you’ve got to be cold and calculating if you want to succeed in geopolitics, and if you’re emotional, then you’re at a major disadvantage.

So, for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What they did was to work closely with the United States. Even though, technically, during part of the Cold War the U.S. was an adversary, China worked with the United States to grow its economy. And I think that’s one thing that is taboo in the United States, that actually the best way for the United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China, but to work with China. Just as in the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over the United States, what did you do? You have voluntary export restraints. You enccourage the Japanese to set up factories—Toyota factories, Honda factories—in the United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, oh, no, we can never work with China. Why can’t you work with China? If working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, it’s very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States will fail. You cannot stop a 4,000-year-old civilization that has its own civilizational cycles, and as it is rising, depriving them of this technology or that technology is not going to stop the rise of China."

Weather Report

Live at Montreux (1976) [Remastered]

[ed. Awesome.]

Henri Rivière, Vague mer montante (plage de la Garde-Guérin) (1890). 
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Andrea Calisi, ‘Blue Dragon’; rj niioka, Morning garden

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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Separated as Toddlers, Raised on Opposite Sides of the World

The men who came to snatch the toddler were from an agency known as Jisheng Ban: Family Planning.

The child’s aunt was home alone with her on the late-spring morning when the intruders began flooding through her door. Her village, amid the rice paddies and pomelo orchards of China’s Hunan Province, was isolated. But now the outside world threatened.

Some of the assailants held the woman’s arms and legs; others ripped the 21-month-old’s grip from the hem of her shirt. The men then climbed into a waiting car with the child and sped away.

The story of the stolen child — known as Fangfang as an infant and Esther as an adult — is the subject of Barbara Demick’s entrancing and disturbing new book, “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.” It follows the girl’s grotesque odyssey from a Chinese orphanage, to which she was brought by the human traffickers, to the home of the evangelical Christian family in Texas who adopted her. To make matters even more dramatic, the girl eventually came to discover that she had an identical twin sister who’d been raised by her birth parents back in China.

Demick, a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of several other books, including the National Book Award finalist “Nothing to Envy,” about North Korean defectors, is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. She hammers together strong, solid sentence after strong, solid sentence — until the grandeur of the architecture comes into focus. 

Demick’s characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop. It is impossible to forget, for instance, the young lovers in her North Korea book who look forward to power outages so that they can spend time alone together in the dark.

This book, too, will inspire strong feelings. Its backdrop and context are China’s ambitious and misguided attempts to limit family size — referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as its “one-child” policies.

Starting in 1979, and continuing for the next 36 years, Chinese authorities policed the most intimate of activities — procreation — sometimes through brutal tactics including forced sterilization, late-term abortions using formaldehyde syringes, vandalism of violators’ property and even kidnapping. Monitors who kept track of women’s menstrual cycles were derided as the “period police.” By one estimate, around 83 million Chinese worked in some capacity for Family Planning units by the 1990s.

Human rights advocates sounded the alarms. American evangelicals, in particular, viewed the initiatives through the prism of domestic abortion politics. Opponents chafed at traditional Chinese society’s preference for male children, who were relied upon to provide for their parents in old age. (Tellingly, a common girl’s name in China is Yaodi, which means “want little brother.”)

In a widely circulated incident in 1983, a Chinese father, hoping for a son, threw his daughter down a well as she screamed, “Baba!” The episode outraged Americans, spurring some activists — including the parents who raised Fangfang — to adopt Chinese children as a form of rescue. “What God does to us spiritually,” “he expects us to do to orphans physically,” the megachurch pastor Rick Warren declared, “be born again and adopted.”

There is plenty to be appalled by in China’s enforcement. But the horror stories also have a way of feeding Cold War-style orientalism. The rescue narrative — civilized West, backward East — distorts a great deal. To start, China’s policies were themselves rooted in Western science and economics, as the scholar Susan Greenhalgh has shown: They were conceived by Chinese rocket scientists seeking to reduce its population and thus raise its G.D.P., making the nation more competitive in global markets as China liberalized. They were a product of capitalism as much as communism.

This was certainly true when it came to the market for babies. In 1992, Beijing opened its doors to international adoptions, eventually fueling a black market for trafficked children. As a journalist working in China at the time, Demick was early to raise awareness of the problem. She wrote a story in 2009 headlined “Stolen Chinese Babies Supply Adoption Demand,” and then followed one lead after another until she was able to identify Fangfang’s family in Texas. (...)

Demick is at her most coolly analytical when she writes in economic terms — including about herself. The essayist Joan Didion was once asked how it felt to encounter a 5-year-old child who was tripping on LSD as she reported one of her pieces. “Let me tell you,” Didion replied icily, “it was gold.” One has the sense, reading this book, that Demick knows she is in possession of gold. It is an extraordinary yarn, the kind reporters dream about. (...)

If there is a flaw in this excellent book it is only that the story of a single family — even, and perhaps especially, a story as dramatic as this one — is not a great vehicle for understanding Chinese family-planning policies as a whole. The initiatives, spread over three and a half decades, were too diverse, varying from region to region and time to time, to be grasped through a single sensational experience of this kind.

by Kevin Peraino, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Barbara Demick

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There is Nothing Stranger Than a Golfer's Brain

Just ask us.

If I'm not careful, superstitions will own me on the golf course. I'll become a paranoid, twitchy mess with 3,000 rituals to perform on every shot, and nobody will ever want to play with me. And to my credit, I mostly stay out of their clutches. I have some basic comfort-level rules I abide by—two extra balls in the left pocket, divot tool and mark in the right—but even my pre-shot routine is very basic, consisting of just a single practice swing followed by the real deal. To the naked eye, I think I seem like a normal golfer. More or less.

But inside the brain? Hoo boy. There is so much happening, and a lot of it is blatantly nuts. More than nuts, you could call it self-deluding, egomaniacal and maybe even narcissistic, because it goes beyond superstition and into the realm of self-narrated fantasy.

For example: You, the observer, might believe that my success or failure on a given shot is a matter or technique and execution, but in my mind I am being blessed or cursed by higher universal forces. If I'm having a good round, I imagine there's a secret gallery living and dying with every shot, and I'l sometimes conduct imaginary interviews about the round as it's happening. (In this respect, I am almost exactly like a 10-year-old kid shooting baskets in his driveway, imagining he's in the NBA Finals ... except I'm a 41-year-old dude with kids of my own, which is perhaps mildly more pathetic.) As we'll get to in the reader email section below, I assign character traits to individual balls based on past performance, and reward or punish them accordingly. You want to slice on me, old Callaway triple track? Guess who's staying in the pocket on the next tee. Save your tears—you brought this on yourself.

I could go on—it's one lunatic thing after another. The thing is, though, so much of it comes to the forefront of my mind unbidden. It's the constant brain noise that golf invites, and I think I do a pretty good job of letting it flow through me without indulging it to any damaging degree. As I said, if I gave in to the darker impulses, I'd probably be one of those neurotics you find on the range who own 300 sets of clubs, or I'd force myself to recite a 3-minute mantra before each swing. Luckily, I've largely fought off those demons. And I am very grateful that nobody has figured out a way to project the thoughts running through my head to a larger audience, because even in my restrained form, I'd probably be committed.

Here's the thing, though ... that's kind of the appeal. Right? Golf has a way of absorbing 100% of your mental energy in a way that can be freeing. If your mind is consumed with technique, and score, and routine, or even the broader narrative of your round, you're not thinking about the world burning or wondering why your kid suddenly seems really into watching videos of sharks eating seals or fantasizing about telling off your terrible boss/wife. (For the record, I love my bosses and my wife, albeit in different ways.) In the escapism that golf provides, it's very much like a drug, which is why a lot of recovering addicts find golf so useful—you can spend four-plus hours free of your cravings. I used to play with a recovering heroin addict who would literally play 54 holes every weekend day for that exact reason.

As such, it's a salutary madness. I have a secret opinion that almost every human on earth is about 50% weirder than you'd think, and I can't think of a better way to safely indulge that insanity than golf. One of my friends, for instance, mutters to himself after mistakes in extended monologues that are just barely audible to the rest of us. He looks like a headcase, but he is in fact a very successful human being and plenty of fun to be around. Clearly, he needs this outlet.

by Shane Ryan, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Karl Hendon
[ed. I say golf is a negative game (for most of us). What other sport involves so much focus on not screwing up? See also: Nobody cares about your golf game.]

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All the Children of the World

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

— President Ronald Reagan

[ed. From his last speech as president,  remarks made by President Ronald Reagan on Jan. 19, 1989, during White House ceremonies presenting the Medal of Freedom to Mike Mansfield and George Schultz. See also: All the children of the world.]

Guadalupe River, Kerrville, Texas

As the Texas floodwaters rose, one indispensable voice was silent 

Image: Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas, on July 4, 2025. Carter Johnston/The New York Times

Carol Kaye and Louie Shelton
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[ed. The Wrecking Crew. Probably everybody knows about Carol, but Louie not so much. But there's this, this, this (and more).]

My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And, besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible. For God’s sake, he said, you can talk to the kids later. Now, listen to me, send them out to play. You are so distractable.

We should probably begin at the beginning, he said. Change. First there is change, which nobody likes—even men. You’d be surprised. You can do little things—putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet. But here is the main thing. Oh, I wish your mother was alive—not that she had time—

But Pa, I said, Mama never knew anything about cream. I did not say she was famous for not taking care.

Forget it, he said sadly. But I must mention squinting. DON’T SQUINT. Wear your glasses. Look at your aunt, so beautiful once. I know someone has said men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, but that’s an idea for a foolish person. There are many handsome women who are not exactly twenty-twenty.

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember. For instance, I said to it yesterday, Heart, heart, do you remember my brother, Grisha, how he made work for you that day when he came to the store and he said, Your boss’s money, Zenya, right now? How he put a gun in my face and I said, Grisha, are you crazy? Why don’t you ask me at home? I would give you. We were in this America not more than two years. He was only a kid. And he said, he said, Who needs your worker’s money? For the movement—only from your boss. O little heart, you worked like a bastard, like a dog, like a crazy slave, bang, bang, bang that day, remember? That’s the story I told my heart yesterday, my father said. What a racket it made to answer me, I remember, I remember, till I was dizzy with the thumping.

Why’d you do that, Pa? I don’t get it.

Don’t you see? This is good for the old heart—to get excited—just as good as for the person. Some people go running till late in life—for the muscles, they say, but the heart knows the real purpose. The purpose is the expansion of the arteries, a river of blood, it cleans off the banks, carries junk out of the system. I myself would rather remind the heart how frightened I was by my brother than go running in a strange neighborhood, miles and miles, with the city so dangerous these days.

I said, Oh, but then I said, Well, thanks.

I don’t think you listened, he said. As usual—probably worried about the kids. They’re not babies, you know. If you were better organized you wouldn’t have so many worries.

I stopped by a couple of weeks later. This time he was annoyed.

Why did you leave the kids home? If you keep doing this, they’ll forget who I am. Children are like old people in that respect.

They won’t forget you, Pa, never in a million years.

You think so? God has not been so good about a million years. His main interest in us began—actually, he put it down in writing fifty-six, fifty-seven hundred years ago. In the Book. You know our Book, I suppose.

O.K. Yes.

Probably a million years is too close to his lifetime, if you could call it life, what he goes through. I believe he said several times—when he was still in contact with us—I am a jealous God. Here and there he makes an exception. I read there are three-thousand-year-old trees somewhere in some godforsaken place. Of course, that’s how come they’re still alive. We should all be so godforsaken.

But no more joking around. I have been thinking what to tell you now. First of all, soon, maybe in twenty, thirty years, you’ll begin to get up in the morning—4, 5 A.M. In a farmer that’s O.K., but for us—you’ll remember everything you did, didn’t, what you omitted, whom you insulted, betrayed—betrayed, that is the worst. Do you remember, you didn’t go see your aunt, she was dying? That will be on your mind like a stone. Of course, I myself did not behave so well. Still, I was so busy those days, long office hours, remember it was usual in those days for doctors to make house calls. No elevators, fourth floor, fifth floor, even in a nice Bronx tenement. But this morning, I mean this morning, a few hours ago, my mother, your babushka, came into my mind, looked at me.

Have I told you I was arrested? Of course I did. I was arrested a few times, but this time for some reason the policeman walked me past the office of the local jail. My mama was there. I saw her through the window. She was bringing me a bundle of clean clothes. She put it on the officer’s table. She turned. She saw me. She looked at me through the glass with such a face, eye-to-eye. Despair. No hope. This morning, 4 A.M., I saw once more how she sat there, very straight. Her eyes. Because of that look, I did my term, my sentence, the best I could. I finished up six months in Arkhangel’sk, where they finally sent me. Then no more, no more, I said to myself, no more saving Imperial Russia, the great pogrom-maker, from itself.

Oh, Pa.

Don’t make too much out of everything. Well, anyway, I want to tell you also how the body is your enemy. I must warn you it is not your friend the way it was when you were a youngster. For example. Greens—believe me—are overrated. Some people believe they will cure cancer. It’s the style. My experience with maybe a hundred patients proves otherwise. Greens are helpful to God. That fellow Sandburg, the poet—I believe from Chicago—explained it. Grass tiptoes over the whole world, holds it in place—except the desert, of course, everything there is loose, flying around.

How come you bring up God so much? When I was a kid you were a strict atheist, you even spit on the steps of the synagogue.

Well, God is very good for conversation, he said. By the way, I believe I have to tell you a few words about the stock market. Your brother-in-law is always talking about how brilliant he is, investing, investing. My advice to you: Stay out of it. (...)

I’ll go in a minute—but I have to tell you something, Pa. I had to tell him that my husband and I were separating. Maybe even divorce, the first in the family.

What? What? Are you crazy? I don’t understand you people nowadays. I married your mother when I was a boy. It’s true I had a first-class mustache, but I was a kid, and you know I stayed married till the end. Once or twice, she wanted to part company, but not me. The reason, of course, she was inclined to be jealous.

He then gave me the example I’d heard five or six times before. What it was, one time two couples went to the movies. Arzemich and his wife, you remember. Well, I sat next to his wife, the lady of the couple, by the way a very attractive woman, and during the show, which wasn’t so great, we talked about this and that, laughed a couple times. When we got home, your mother said, O.K. Anytime you want, right now, I’ll give you a divorce. We will go our separate ways. Naturally, I said, What? Are you ridiculous?

My advice to you—stick it out. It’s true your husband, he’s a peculiar fellow, but think it over. Go home. Maybe you can manage at least till old age. Then, if you still don’t get along, you can go to separate old-age homes.

Pa, it’s no joke. It’s my life.

It is a joke. A joke is necessary at this time. But I’m tired.

You’ll see, in thirty, forty years from now, you’ll get tired often. It doesn’t mean you’re sick. This is something important that I’m telling you. Listen. To live a long time, long years, you’ve got to sleep a certain extra percentage away. It’s a shame.

by Grace Paley, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

The 21st century collapse in American literary fiction’s cultural impact, measured by commercial sales and the capacity to produce well-known great writers, stems less from identity politics or smartphones than from a combined supply shock (the shrinking magazine or academia pipeline) and demand shock (the move away from writing books that appeal to normal readers in order to seek prestige inside the world of lit-fiction)

People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on?4

It’s obvious that the “distraction” angle is untenable. It hasn’t directly impacted the number of readers enough to matter. Still there are other angles here, what about taste? Blythe’s piece can also be read as saying that phones, the internet, short-form content, etc have changed the way people consume books such that literary fiction is out and poorly written genre-fiction and steamy romance are in.

On face, this is a far more compelling theory: the fiction market is dominated by genre fiction, romance, and James Patterson. Literary fiction makes up something like 2% of the market. People are still reading books, they’re just reading worse books. Why? Ensloppification or something. We’ve explained the fall of literary fiction and it’s still the computer’s fault.

But there is some data that fits very strangely into this picture. For one, people still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction. And look at any survey of contemporary audiences' favorite books. Plenty of literary fiction there. So I think there’s a strong enough warrant here that the ‘taste-change’ hypothesis can’t be right either — unless the internet made people’s tastes magically shift away from contemporary literary fiction but not classics.

To understand what’s happened to literary fiction, then, perhaps it’s worth trying to disentangle two tightly linked problems: the commercial failure of literary fiction and the critical failure — the lack of a young Great writer. By now it’s obvious that the former problem exists, but you might be skeptical of the latter.

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

Some books widely praised as classics and masterpieces in their time are forgotten soon after. Many books that a lot of people like are simply not any good. But far rarer than these cases are books that are forgotten in their time and “discovered” as masterpieces. For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

I first got the sense that something had gone wrong when, in high-school English class, we read One Hundred Years of Solitude followed by Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning Salvage the Bones. It’s not that Salvage the Bones was not a serviceable book: well-plotted, believable characters, etc, but it was impossible to not deny that these two books could even be put on the same level.

“What about x, y, z? They’re really pushing the boundaries of fiction as a medium.” I don’t want to be mean, but I doubt it. At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65. If we can argue about it, you’re wrong. This was not the case in 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960, etc. Before we even get to the problem of sales, we need to know what’s gone wrong with the talent pipeline.

The Supply Side

Blythe is right about one thing—the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable and currently has a paid circulation of 1.3 million, more than double what it had in the heydays of the 1950s and 1960s.

Still, the magazines that survived could no longer afford to give as much space to short stories or compensate their writers well — as crazy as it sounds it was possible to make a living writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals both in pulp publications and more prestigious magazines.

The collapse of the magazine ecosystem is important not because it meant less people were reading literary fiction, but because it thinned the talent pipeline — there were less opportunities to get published and less money for you if you did.

But the magazine-side is only part of the picture, the other problem was in academia. From US Doctorates in the 20th Century:

“Earning a doctorate during the first 70 years of the 20th century typically assured the graduate of a position in academe…Humanities Ph.D.s had the highest rate of academic employment—83 percent in 1995–99—but lower than the 94 percent level in 1970–74.”

Since a peak in open positions in 1984, the number of new English teaching positions has plummeted while the number of PHDs has held steady.

The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.

Writers can no longer make a good living writing freelance for magazines, and they’re unlikely to find solace in the academic job market either. Worse — even if they do get credentials and manage to find a publisher, most likely their book will have meager sales of a couple thousand copies. If they want to write and make a decent amount of money, where can they go?

From a financial perspective then, one attractor away from the pipeline into writing literary fiction comes from the rise of prestige-television over the last several decades. The showrunners of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and True Detective all have creative-writing MFAs. Before the advent of prestige TV and the decline of magazines and academia, there was little risk that writers of literary fiction would turn from writing novels to the screen.

The talent pipeline for literary fiction has shrunk considerably over the past several decades. Anyone with a shred of care for financial success has essentially been filtered out. And even if literary fiction started to sell again this would still largely be true — Writing a book has always been a lottery ticket, even when the market was in a better condition — a small percentage of books drive almost all of the sales.

Imagine the pool of potential writers, people who, if they had the opportunity, would spend their entire lives writing literary fiction and a few of them even having the innate talent and capacity to go on and become “Great” writers after many years at work. The recent loss of two clear pathways to live such a life has shrunk this pool drastically. No wonder then that we haven’t seen any genius fiction writers in quite some time.

The Demand Side

But this is only half the problem. The public used to gobble up literary fiction, and not just groundbreaking masterpieces: fiction that was just good. John O’Hara was a good writer. No one today remembers his book Elizabeth Appleton, but it was the fifth best-selling book of the year in 1963. No one has ever called Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools a masterpiece (she herself eventually dismissed it as ‘unwieldy’ and ‘enormous’), but it was the best-selling book of 1962. And so on with many of the lesser novels of the Greats and many middling works of literary fiction by authors that have been forgotten today. But from the 1970s onward, fewer and fewer works made it onto the best-sellers lists. Why is this no longer the case?

It can’t be because book readers have drastically changed their preferences: they still like to read literary fiction (including plenty of non classics/masterpieces — A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Outsiders, A Secret History, Rebecca, etc all sell very well to this day) and only seem to have a problem with contemporary literary fiction.

Something about literary fiction has changed in recent years that has put it off to mass audiences. Han locates the change in “wokeness,” but the timing doesn’t work — this shift was already in full swing before the 2010s when “woke” became a salient issue.

On her excellent blog, Naomi Kanakia notes the following:

Our literary culture has lost faith in ‘the general reader’

Since starting this newsletter, I have become very familiar with…intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse.

However, I find that, in practice, it is very difficult to convince the literary world that folks like [this] actually exist. They believe readers exist, but they tend to think most readers are stupid and don’t like to read smart books. They think that readers of smart books are an endangered species, and that a critic’s primary role is to convince the readers of dumb books to read smart books instead.

But, recently, literary people have started to lose faith even in this rather-condescending goal. Nowadays, literary people have started to conceptualize reading itself as being an endangered activity—they believe that the general public’s actual ability to read has somehow been diminished by the rise of smartphones.

The key here is the following thought: “it is very difficult to convince the reader that [intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse] actually exist.”

The principal reason self-conscious contemporary literary fiction sells no books is because it’s all insider-baseball so to speak. There’s nothing in most of these books for the general reader. The books are written for the critics.

by Owen Yingling, OY's Substack | Read more:
Image: see chart references
[ed. Read the comments section to see how muddled this topic can be and what little agreement there is for defining great literary fiction. Idk...read Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Stephenson, Marlon James, Donna Tartt, Ted Chiang, etc. and tell me there aren't great fiction writers these days. I could go on and on. But to the author's point, maybe there is a long tail involved and 'greatness' requires some time and context for perspective. Maybe all the great themes in life have already been covered (greatly) and don't need much revisiting? Maybe the world we live in now is just not that interesting?]

School

“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - G.K. Chesterton

What Do Schools Do?

Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

Context

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.

Thesis

Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

Motivation for What?

So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?

by Anonymous, ASX |  Read more:

Drowning in Sludge

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.

In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.

I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.

It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.

I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.

What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.

That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)

“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”

Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.

“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.

“Might,” he said. “Might not.”

I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.

“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”

This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.

Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.

Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.

“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.

“I understand your frustration.”

Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.

“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!

As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.

Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.

“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”

On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.

Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?

Turns out there’s a word for it.

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.

The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.

by Chris Colon, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Timo Lenzen

[ed. Coming to your Medicaid and SNAP offices soon. Bureaucracy to the moon.  See also: Accountability Sinks (Less Wrong).]

Something that used to be a matter of human judgement gets replaced by a formal process. Suddenly, nobody makes any deliberate decisions. Instead, a formal process is followed. In fact, the process may be executed on a computer, with no human involvement at all. There's nobody to blame for anything. There’s nobody to complain to when the process goes awry. Everybody’s ass is safely covered.

In any organization, incentives to replace human judgement by process are strong. Decisions may be controversial. More often than not someone's interests are at play and any decision is going to cause at least some bitterness, resentment and pushback. Introducing a non-personal process allows the decision to be made in automated manner, without anyone being responsible, without anyone having to feel guilty for hurting other people.

What is Downforce?

Each minute exterior detail on top-tier consumer performance cars like a McLaren 620R and professional race cars like an IndyCar or Formula 1 car is designed to make mechanical physics work to the driver’s advantage. Every millimeter of bodywork makes a difference in how the vehicle drives and performs, and the car’s relationship to the air it’s cutting through is paramount. A crucial part of this relationship is downforce, which can be harnessed and applied by aerodynamic parts throughout the car’s shape. The science of downforce can get fairly deep, but we’re here to give an overview of what it means and a breakdown of why it’s important to driving execution.

To define downforce with just a couple of words, it is vertical load created by a vehicle’s aerodynamic parts as it’s in motion. To boil it down even further, a car’s exterior components split, route, and direct airflow in a way that pushes the vehicle down and increases traction and stability. Front splitters, canards (also known as dive planes), rear spoilers, front spoilers, those massive adjustable air foils that Chaparral affixed to their badass Can Am race cars back in the day, and other aerodynamic bits all create downforce. Downforce keeps cars planted on the road at speed and ensures the tires are pressed firmly onto the road for maximum grip.

What’s cool about downforce is it can be used at both high and low speeds relative to the capabilities of the vehicle. Downforce is often associated with high-speed driving, especially cornering, such as an IndyCar that needs every teeny bit of grip it can muster as it courses through the Long Beach Grand Prix circuit. The Dallara-designed chassis is a prime example because of its heavy use of aerowork.

However, downforce plays into low-speed performance, too—this is why you’ll often see heavily modified autocross cars with massive wings. Despite autocross courses often featuring low-speed sections in their tight courses, cars with wings that have a lot of surface area can still use that air to help stay planted and shave thousandths of a second off of their run times.

by Peter Nelson, The Drive |  Read more:

Image: Peter Nelson

 

Lovers Kissing In Tiananmen (2006)
via:

Everyone Should Order These 25 Italian Dishes At Least Once

 

Everyone Should Order These 25 Italian Dishes At Least Once (Daily Meal)
Images:Framarzo/Shutterstock; Io Giloso/Facebook
[ed. Endorsed by Frank Bruni, former food critic for the NY Times.]

via:

Recent Supreme Court Decisions

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
― Jonathan Swift

~ US court strikes down ‘click-to-cancel’ rule designed to make unsubscribing easier:

A federal rule designed to make canceling subscriptions as easy as signing up for them has been struck down by a US federal appeals court just days before it was scheduled to take effect.

The US court of appeals for the eighth circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required companies to allow consumers to cancel subscriptions using the same method they used to sign up, after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process.

“While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission’s rulemaking process are fatal here,” the court wrote, adding that “vacatur of the entire Rule is appropriate in this case because of the prejudice suffered by Petitioners as a result of the Commission’s procedural error”.

The vacated rule meant to go into effect on 14 July would have covered all forms of negative option marketing – programs that allow sellers to interpret customer inaction as acceptance of subscriptions, often leading to unintended charges. The FTC’s original 1973 rule only covered limited forms of these practices.

It would have also stopped businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chat sessions with agents or creating other barriers to cancellation.

by Joseph Gedeon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: filadendron/Getty Image

***

~ US supreme court clears way for Trump officials to resume mass government firings:

Justices lift lower court order that froze ‘reductions in force’ federal layoffs while litigation in case proceeded.

The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.

The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies. (...)

Illston had argued in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration. “As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” she wrote.

The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programmes. Illston also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.

Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul pursued by Trump and Doge. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programmes or have been placed on leave.

The administration had previously challenged Illston’s order at the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals but lost in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May. That prompted the justice department to make an emergency request to the supreme court, contending that controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority. (...)

On Tuesday the Democracy Forward coalition condemned the supreme court for intervening in what it called Trump’s unlawful reorganisation of the federal government. It said in a statement: “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.

“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”

by David Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Anadolu/Getty Images