Let's Play Dead

Surely the most absorbing—and, more importantly, deranged—take on the story of Anne Boleyn that you shall ever read.

There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do.

Let’s make it so she can’t escape.

Let’s seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off.

*

It takes two swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn’t happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it’s a touch long-winded, and no one’s paying him any attention. And she’s dead, so it’s especially beside the point.

The ministers dither in the courtyard, chancing last looks, murmuring, Exquisite mouth, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.

Henry will return to the body later, when everyone is gone and what’s left of her has been moved to the chapel. He will stand on the threshold, halfway between one momentous decision and the next. He will kneel on the dais beside her severed head and lay one ornately rubied hand along her frigid cheekbone. Maybe he will stay five minutes. Maybe he will stay 35. Maybe he will cry softly, but it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t a nosy patron around to commission an oil painting for the textbooks, and it doesn’t matter because she’s dead, she’s still very, very dead.

He will leave as furtively as he came, wiping his hand on his smock. Anne’s headless body and bodiless head will be left to their own devices, her blood blackening, thickening on the ground, the gristle of her neck tougher with every minute. The clock ticks. Night falls.

It is her head that speaks first. It says, “Is he gone?”

Her body spasms, maybe a shrug, or maybe just a reflex.

Her head opens its eyes and looks this way, that way. It says, “It’s over? It really worked?”

*

We don’t need to stick around while her body crawls its way to her head and fits itself back together. Every excruciating inch of the stone floor is a personal coup, and every inch lasts the whole span of human history. It is slow. It is clumsy. The head falls off a couple of times. The body is floppy with atrophy. There is a lot of blood. She probably, definitely cries. It does not befit a queen.

*

He is reading the Saturday paper, still in his shirtsleeves, when she breezes in the next morning. The horizon of the paper lowers to the bridge of his nose. He is a man who wears his tension in the way of a beautifully tuned piano, and in this moment he vibrates at a bewildered middle octave.

“Anne,” he says, at an absolute loss.

“Henry,” she says, the picture of politeness.

She sits at the table. Not a hair out of place, not a leaky vein in sight. She butters her toast in four deft strokes. A servant steps out from the shadows to fill her teacup to the brim. It’s all very serene, domestic. If it takes her a few tries to put her toast back on the plate, or if he dabs his napkin with a little extra violence, well, who can say. She slurps her tea, which they both know he hates. He hoists his newspaper back up. Like this, they go on.

*

Of course she knows what comes next. Let’s not fib.

She is seized from her bed some weeks later, in a state of drowsy dishabille, the wardens bristling with royal braid. This night will have the consistency of a dream. The palace swims in sound and darkness. The youngest one, the boy or man who grips her arm with one rubbery fist and studiously avoids her gaze, reminds her of the sons she has lost in the womb. She wants to tell him, Don’t worry, the thing you’re afraid of, the girl, the job, the rising cost of real estate in London, it will all work out someday—you’ll see, it all comes to pass, but he is leading her to her death, so it seems a bit impolite.

The cooks are baking down in the kitchen. The yeasty comfort of this aroma, which reminds her of the seam of volcanic heat that escapes when she cracks a fresh loaf, of a day opening beneath her, is too much. She shuts her nostrils. Her silk nightgown flaps at her ankles. When she can, she reaches out and touches the walls, the radiators, the edges of doorframes. Reminding herself that she is here, now, she is alive, that this dream is all too real. She can’t falter yet. There’s work to do.

A gibbet stands in the courtyard beneath a lonesome moon. They thread the noose around her neck with genteel care, snugly, even though the youngest one quakes every time his skin makes contact with hers. Up in the turret window, she sees Henry watching at a distance, as he does best. A coward in his big-boy breeches.

It is a quick death. The noose is tight. The drop is long. No one’s trying to be cruel here. One person cries out but is quickly silenced. The wardens double-check, triple-check to make sure she’s properly dead this time. From the courtyard to the turret, they flash a thumbs-up to Henry. He lets the curtain fall. This time, he does not visit her tenderly. It is done.

The wardens will return to their card games, all except the youngest one, who will mourn her without meaning to. He will simmer with sorrow for hours until, without warning to himself or others, he punches a wall so hard he fractures most of the knuckles in his right hand, leaving a fist-size whorl of buckled plaster as a signature.

And when she wakes up, hours later, on a slab of wintry marble in the royal morgue, it’s with a broken neck and very little air in her lungs. She adjusts her neck the way she might correct a crooked hat—difficult without a proper mirror, but she manages. She tightens the belt on her flimsy nightgown and slips through the haunted halls, pausing only when she reaches the king’s chambers. She doesn’t knock. She doesn’t crow or look for consolation, although the pang is there, and it feels unstoppable. Instead, with great effort, she continues on to her apartments, where she goes right back to bed. She is wiped and the throb in her neck is telling her to conserve strength. But most of all, it is such a trivial insult to him, so small, so vicious, to fall asleep as soundly as she does this night.

*

For a time, it is quiet. Henry waits. He consults his advisers, who are just as baffled. He tries to get his head around the situation, but at least he has the good grace to do it far from her.

You will want to hear that Anne takes solace in these precarious days, so let’s say that’s true: She takes that trip she always meant to, an ethereal island resort where every day the indigo waters whisper Get out, get out while you still can and the jacarandas whistle a jaunty tune of existential dread. She cashes in her many retirement portfolios, she doesn’t so much throw parties as fling them, handfuls of bacchanalia into those feverishly starlit nights.

Or: She digs her heels deep into the Turkish carpets of her palatial apartments and doesn’t budge. In the bruised hours between dusk and midnight, she feels a joy so grandiose that it fills the empty canals and sidewalks within her. She takes to promenades around the gardens, drinking in the virtuous geraniums in their neat rows and the slightly ferocious hedge maze with its blooming thistles and uncertain corners. She grows sentimental about centipedes and spiders and wasps and belladonna and ragwort and nettles and every other hardscrabble weed, every pernicious pest. I’m still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I’m still here.

The joy of the narrow escape is that it unfurls into hours, hidden doors that lead to secret passages of days, even if those days are numbered, even if she knows it. None of it is hers and it’s all she’s got. She loses herself, like a woman in a myth, unstuck in borrowed time, unraveling with possibility.

And yes, maybe she feels a few inches of gratitude for the armistice he has granted her. And yes, of course, the waiting days smother her, the twinned knowing and not-knowing what happens after, imagining Henry at every turn, cartoony with rage or puzzlement, but what is she to do?

*

After that, he drowns her himself. And who could blame him? If you want a job done right, you’d better know the end of this sentence. He comes upon her in the bath. He wraps his hands around her bare shoulders and thrusts her beneath the bathwater. Soap bubbles and air bubbles bloom in multitude. An artery in his skull skitters wildly. The water fights. The walls steam with tension.

She tries to thrash away from him, of course. She tries to defend herself, of course. But he’s six foot two, built like a linebacker, and she is not. There is nothing more complicated here. He is not the first man to do this, or the wealthiest, or the angriest. He certainly isn’t the last. As they say, it’s a tale as old as time.

Eventually the water stills. Her body floats. He sits on the brim of the tub, head bowed, the cuffs of his doublet dripping, his fingers pruning a gentle shade of violet. Up close, murder is a messy business, decidedly unroyal, too much flesh and screaming. He sits in wait—for how long, who knows. When the surface moves again and she sits up, feral-eyed and vomiting bathwater, he sighs.

“What do we do with you?” he says, not so much a question as a regret. And she has no answer, of course she has no answer.

*

It is he who helps her out of the tub, although she resists. He hands her the bathrobe, courteously studying the mosaic of the floor while she covers up. He helps her back to her rooms. (...)

*

Henry is learning.

He gets crafty. He invents the portable long-barreled firearm.

Then he invents the firing squad. Then he invents acute ballistic trauma. Then he sends his wardens to find her.

But while he’s busy doing all that, she’s been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The telephone. The 911 call. First-response teams. Modern-day surgery. Organ transplants. Crash carts. Gurneys. Subsidized medicine. She improvises like it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

It is ugly, obviously. There is quite a lot of blood and gore and spattered internal organs. But she lives. Still, she lives.

*

Lest you think it’s all maudlin garden strolls and gallows touched by moonlight, let’s admit that Anne and Henry still have their moments. Like the time a scullery maid starts a stovetop fire and trips the palace-wide alarm. All around the castle, the sprinkler systems kick in, first in the kitchens, then in the great hall, and then everywhere, misting porous manuscripts, Brylcreemed foreign dignitaries, the throne room, everyone on their toilets, Henry’s collection of vintage cameras, and Anne in her finest silk pajamas, snoring over her watercolors. Still very much not dead.

She escapes to the nearest balcony. And as she wrings her ruined shirt and her hair in futility, a window creaks open and who should climb through but Henry, his arms filled with soaking scrolls almost as tall as himself. He sees her sodden in her night-clothes and begins to guffaw.

She says, “That’s not very kingly,” feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.

He says, “Well, you don’t look especially queenly,” and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.

“The gossip magazines are going to love this look,” she says.

“Easy fix,” he says. “Here.” He sweeps up to the balcony’s edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she’s immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.

“You need more width,” she says, with all the calm she can summon.

He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn’t say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can’t help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it’s there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the twinkle in his eye.

“What’s your plan here?” she says.

“Trickery,” he says, not missing a step. “Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength.”

You may be thinking that this would be an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. But he’s still the size of a world-class heavy-weight boxer, and she is still most decidedly not. And yes, she’s eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?

by Senaa Ahmad, LitHub | Read more:
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This Might Be the Last Thing I Ever Write: Paul Auster (Feb. 1947- Apr. 2024)

Early in Paul Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner, his eponymous lead character is speaking to a grief counsellor in the immediate aftermath of losing his wife in a freakishly violent swimming accident. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” he tells her. “You know that, I know that, everyone knows that – and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”

When we meet Sy Baumgartner, it is 10 years after Anna’s death. Now 70 and a retired Princeton philosophy professor, we find him enduring a darkly comedic and somewhat lower stakes set of unexpectedly escalating domestic vicissitudes. In rapid succession he is frustrated in the simple task of calling his sister, scalds himself on a hot pan and tumbles down the stairs during an unnecessary visit to his basement.

“I’d wanted to try my hand at a short story,” explains Auster, 76, speaking from his home in Brooklyn, New York. “Something I have done almost none of in my career. I’d always written modestly sized books and then with 4321 and Burning Boy” – his 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel of close to 1,000 pages and his 2021 800-page biography of Stephen Crane – “I’d written two door-stoppers. It really wasn’t intentional. If you dropped those books you could break both feet, so I wanted something shorter and this older man came to me, sitting in his house and looking out the window at robins pulling up worms. I wrote a story called Worms, but then didn’t want to drop him. There was more there and so I started up again, knowing that underneath this almost Buster Keaton opening was something darker lurking.” (...)

In the last two years, Auster has himself been subject to two traumatic events. Firstly, an appalling family tragedy, with widespread press coverage, saw the death of his baby granddaughter, while in the care of his son. His son, from his first marriage to the short story writer Lydia Davis, died subsequently from a drug overdose. Then in March this year Auster’s wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, alerted the world on Instagram to the fact that Auster was being “bombed with chemotherapy and immunotherapy” and the couple were now living in what she dubbed “Cancerland”.

It was around the end of last year, when Auster was finishing Baumgartner, that he began to encounter “mysterious fevers which would hit me in the afternoon”. He was first diagnosed as having pneumonia before going down some “blind alleys’’ about long Covid and eventually receiving a cancer diagnosis. “And since then the treatment has been unrelenting and I really haven’t worked. I’ve been through the rigours that have produced miracles and also great difficulties.” As for Cancerland, he says there are no maps and no idea if your passport is valid to exit. “There is, however, a guide who gets in touch right at the beginning. He checks he’s got the name right and then says, ‘I’m from the cancer police. You’ve got to follow me.’ So what do you do? You say, ‘All right.’ You have no real choice in the matter, as he says if you refuse to follow he’ll kill you. I said, ‘I prefer to live. Take me where you will.’ And I’ve been following that road ever since.”

Auster says his fascination with the notion of a life-changing moment came from a childhood incident that provided the starting point for 4321. At a summer camp, a boy standing next to him was killed by a lightning strike. “It was the seminal experience of my life. At 14 everything you go through is deep. You are a work-in-progress. But being right next to a boy who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world. I had assumed that the little bourgeois comforts of my life in postwar suburban New Jersey had a kind of order. And then I realised that nothing had that sort of order. I’ve lived with that thought ever since. It’s chilling, but also liberating. It keeps you on your toes. And if you can learn that lesson then certain things in the world are more bearable than they would have been otherwise. I guess the impulse to write and tell stories is different for each writer. But I think this is the essence of what I’ve been up to all these many years.”

In a recent interview, Auster described the American obsession with “closure” as being “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. When someone who is central to your life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s not simple, you never get over it. You learn to live with it, I suppose. But something is ripped out of you and I wanted to explore all that.” In Baumgartner, Sy reflects for a long time on phantom limb syndrome, describing himself as “a human stump” and yet the “missing limbs are still there, and they still hurt, hurt so much that he sometimes feels his body is about to catch fire and consume him on the spot”.

“I nearly called the book Phantom Limb,” Auster says. “It’s such a powerful idea. That connection we have with other people and how vital they are to our lives. The importance of love. It can be hard for us to talk about it the way it deserves to be talked about. Long-term, ongoing, lifelong love and all the possible twists and turns it will take.” He believes “the brilliant Siri” puts it best when she says people make the mistake of using a machine model to think about love and attempting to maintain the machine in its original state. “You have to think of love as a kind of tree or a plant,” Auster says. “And that parts are going to wither and you might have to cut off a branch to sustain the overall growth of the organism. If you get fixated on keeping it exactly as it was, one day it will die in front of your eyes. For a love to be sustained it has to be organic. You have to keep developing as it goes along so everything is all intertwined, even the sheer strangeness of it all.” The fact is, he says, that we never really know our partners completely. “There are mysteries we will never be able to answer. But I think this applies also to ourselves. There are so many things about my own life that I don’t understand. My actions over the years. Why did I do that? Why that impulse? People spend years in analysis trying to figure out the answers. I’ve never done that so I’ve been more or less on my own, trying to figure things out, and I honestly have to report that I don’t think I’ve made a lot of progress.” (...)

Baumgartner is set between 2016 and 2018, and there is allusion to “the deranged Ubu in the White House”. “I didn’t want to wrestle with Trump directly but of course he was lurking in the background of American life, an everyday presence.” As for the next election, Auster says he understood many Democrats’ initial lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden. “He was certainly not my first thought for 2020. But he has surprised me immensely. I think he’s been quite extraordinary. And maybe in these few years, he’s been one of the best presidents that I can remember in my lifetime. He understands that government has an important role to play in our mental, moral and economic health. That the programmes he has proposed are an advance over what we’ve been getting from the last 40 or 50 years.”

While the right wing attempts to paint Biden as a “kind of doddering old, incompetent man, it’s far from the truth”, says Auster. “He is perfectly capable and knows more about government than just about anybody in Washington. He’s made his blunders, we all know that, but he’s not a bad choice at the moment and I can’t think of anyone better than him today. So I’m praying that he manages to squeak through next year because this is going to be a very, very close and incomprehensibly weird election. And we can’t even begin to predict how the other side is going to be if they don’t get the votes.”

As for himself, Auster is not looking much beyond his treatment and recovery, but he has been gratified by the initial responses to Baumgartner. “I do things in a very old-fashioned way,” he says. “I write my novels on a typewriter and my assistant then has to put it on a computer to send to the publisher. She’s been with me for a good 15 years and has rarely said much about the manuscripts beyond something bland like ‘good job’. But this time she told me to ‘march on’ as she couldn’t wait to read the next chapter. Siri, for over 40 years my first reader, also had no comments beyond ‘keep going’. Even my agent of 40 years, who again rarely comments, was so encouraging.”

Auster says he still can’t quite explain where this book came from. “There was just this guy growing inside me who became more comprehensible as the book advanced. So in the face of these responses, I simply smile and offer thanks. I feel that my health is precarious enough that this might be the last thing I ever write. And if this is the end, then going out with this kind of human kindness surrounding me as a writer in my intimate circles of friends, well, it’s worth it already.”

by Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian |  Read more:

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[ed. I've only read one of Paul Auster's books, 4321 (one of his "doorstoppers" as he would call it), and was impressed as much by his prose as frustrated by the story itself (ie., following a single protagonist through four versions of himself, simultaneously - one version killed off in the first section of the book). Quite a talent. See also: Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation; and, Paul Auster – a life in pictures (Guardian).]

Yes, It’s Okay to Throw Away a Book

It’s rare that a week goes by without a new book finding its way onto my overcrowded shelves. This is partly an occupational hazard, as someone who reads and reviews books professionally; they often come to me unbidden, mailed by publicists and publishers. But I’ll admit that it’s also a personal vice. Plucking a book from a little free library or buying one (or two) at my neighbourhood bookstore is a reliable pick-me-up, and like everyone else enduring the present, I am in perpetual need of a little treat to get through the week. Books have always occupied a special status among my possessions, an exemption from the guilt of consumption that strikes when I purchase a lipstick but never a paperback. Buying books feels wholesome, even virtuous. I like to tell myself that I’m doing my part to keep the publishing industry alive, as if my steady acquisitions are chest compressions for an ailing patient.

Usually, I read these new books, but not always. My interest is usurped by library books, with their urgent loan periods, or forthcoming releases I’m reviewing for work, or a TV series that I’m binging instead of reading anything at all. Have you seen Deadloch? It’s fantastic. By the season finale, the book I meant to read has been supplanted on my nightstand by another recent addition. The pile beside my bed never shrinks; at the bottom of the stack are books I’ve been planning to crack open for months. My shelves remain full of lingering aspirations.

I doubt I’m the only person with this problem. BookNet Canada, a nonprofit that collects data and produces research on the publishing industry, found that almost a third of surveyed Canadians read daily for leisure in 2022. Last year, we collectively bought nearly 49 million books. And we prefer books that take up space: physical volumes remain much more popular among readers of all ages, compared to ebooks or audiobooks. Still, the majority of readers are finishing fewer than one book each month—the rest, I assume, are accumulating in a shameful stack beside the bed.

For some, unread books aren’t an issue as long as they fulfill their implicit secondary function: as decorative objects and social signifiers. The pandemic only made this more conspicuous, as many of us have been compelled by Zoom, Google Meet, and the like to stage our private spaces for public viewing. In April 2020, a Twitter account called Bookcase Credibility began documenting and scrutinizing the ubiquitous bookshelves on display behind public figures as they gave media interviews or sat for photographers. As journalist Amanda Hess observed, “the bookcase offers both a visually pleasing surface and a gesture at intellectual depth.”

Admitting that one thinks of books as mere decor never fails to elicit disdain, like when the actress Ashley Tisdale confessed in 2022 that she asked her husband to buy 400 books to stage their home for an Architectural Digest photoshoot. But Hess points out that many people use books this way all the time. After all, she says, “the expert could choose to speak in front of his art prints or his television or his blank white walls, but he chooses to be framed by his books.” Books have talismanic power beyond the professional realm. In 2023, a Bustle editorial went viral for suggesting that “the thirstiest thing a man can do is read” and quoted a woman who went home with a guy because she spied him reading Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, at the bar. Just displaying a book is enough to unlock its erotic potential. Director John Waters once said, “If you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” Whether or not that person actually read them is a different story.

Everyone knows that our consumption habits are problematic and environmentally destructive: Canadians send more than a billion pounds of clothing, shoes, toys, and household items to the dump each year. But we have a hard time seeing books as mass-produced consumer items that ought to be consumed more thoughtfully, even though that’s what they are. A book is different from a pair of shoes or a scented candle—but is it that different? The kinds of excess we permit—even exalt—for books is unheard of for other categories of possessions. Even speaking of books as a consumer good feels vulgar, but I wonder if this sanctimonious attitude deprives them of their true value.

I try to use anything I buy as much as possible, and it’s always satisfying to reach the end of a tube of lip balm, scrape the last bit of peanut butter out of a jar, or burn a candle down to a crater of wax. Why shouldn’t we aspire to wear our books out too? A Valentine’s Day feature by the New York Times, which surveyed New Yorkers about their romantic gestures, included one participant who triggered an outpouring of online opprobrium by describing a fairly mundane practice among backpackers: ripping pages out of a book in order to read it in tandem with a partner. But isn’t that a better fate for a book than being relegated to a shelf as Zoom decor? And if we’re never going to read them, shouldn’t we let them go?

This is easier said than done. A single volume is easy enough to offload: slide it across the table while you’re out for dinner with a friend, or stick it in one of the many little free libraries that have sprung up across Canada. (As of March 2024, there were 3,875 little free libraries registered across the country, an increase of 29 percent in the past two years alone.) But if you have a lot of books, you’ll quickly discover that almost nobody wants them, especially if they’re old. The public libraries in Toronto and Halifax will accept some books that are less than five years old, but they appear to be outliers; many public library systems won’t take donations at all. Used bookstores, understandably, only want books that they think someone else will buy. My neighbourhood thrift store owner recently lamented that people are always trying to dump carloads of dusty volumes on him; he’s had to implement a “no books” policy to keep things from getting out of hand. The way he described the problem made me think of feral rabbits: one or two is no big deal, but invariably they multiply.

The crudest solution is to take them to a big thrift store, the kind that accepts anything you can stuff in a trash bag or cardboard box: Value Village, the Salvation Army, Goodwill. But then you’re just outsourcing the physical and psychological labour of throwing them away yourself, as thrift stores swiftly cycle through an endless stream of donations by discarding unsold items. In 2022, there was a public outcry after a Quebec high school filled a dumpster with unsold books that had been donated to a book fair fundraiser; some locals even clambered inside to rescue Danielle Steel paperbacks and old almanacs. (The school principal, nonplussed by the response, told the CBC that such recycling happens after each annual book fair.)

by Michelle Cyca, The Walrus | Read more:
Image: Milkare/iStock

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The Last Vacation

Before news of the bankruptcy hit the press, ­Delta and Dizzi were already on a plane. Their grandfather sat in the row ahead with Dizzi’s Pomeranian, ­Wilfred. Ever since Delta had heard whispers of the bankruptcy, she had been on a kind of high. Fuelled by adrenaline, sure, but also a keen sense of vengeance that alerted her worst instincts. Dizzi, on the other hand, was asleep. She had left her job at the nursery school the day before without notice, sad to leave the children but moved to action by familial duty. Delta tapped her fingers on the tray table impatiently and leaned over to her grandfather. “Lolo, how are you feeling?”

He barely turned and raised a shaky hand. “Okay.” 

Dizzi had been raised by Delta’s ­mother, Elaine. The girls were cousins by blood but treated each other with the coy annoyance of sisters. They held a resemblance to each other still, and most people found the pair striking. As children, when Elaine worked late shifts at a white-tablecloth restaurant, they’d often stay with their grandfather. Lolo was in the golden hour of his life and brought the girls along to things that gave him a thrill. After school, he’d take them to a rundown boxing gym where they’d all have at it on their respective punching bags. The ­real boxers would spar, and Lolo and the girls would crunch on peanuts, laughing when a little blood was spilled.

Lolo had been a mathematician in his youth and had a gambling streak. He’d won a humble sum in the eighties and used it as a down payment on their house. You’d think he’d stop trying his luck—after all, who wins the lottery twice? But every night before dinner, they’d all walk to the convenience store and play Lolo’s lottery numbers. Lolo taught the girls card games and eventually, when they were good enough, introduced poker chips. Delta was a natural talent, confident and unreadable. Dizzi played so believably naive that it disarmed most of her opponents. Lolo would later say that the early presence of these skills was the greatest indicator of how the girls would turn out—more than anything like ­education or astrology.

The plane landed in Miami, and the girls helped Lolo into a wheelchair. A rush of humidity met them on the ­tarmac. Delta tied a silk scarf over her hair and slipped her sunglasses on; it was not a disguise per se. Dizzi plopped Wilfred on Lolo’s lap as they wheeled him to baggage claim. Delta’s eyes narrowed at the dog. “Why did you have to bring him?”

Dizzi ignored her tone. “Who is ­going to stay with Lolo when we’re out doing business?”

They checked into the Fontainebleau, right on the beach. After some persuasion, the hotel gave them an ocean view at no extra charge. Delta was good at things like that. She told the concierge that Lolo had never been to Miami and, because of his age, who knew if he’d ever come back. The girls diligently unpacked their things and discussed their strategy for the week ahead. Wilfred sat on Lolo’s lap as they watched the waves from the balcony. Delta pulled on one of Dizzi’s dresses. “We’ll have to shorten some of these a few inches. I can send it down to the hotel tailor if you want.”

Dizzi hit her hand away. “I don’t want to look like we’re out to fish.” The girls had mostly brought a collection of “night-time” clothes for the trip. Beaded dresses, satin skirts, and only the tallest of heels. Daytime would be reserved for strategic planning; some might even have called it scheming.

Parkinson’s had taken over, and Lolo had been on a steady decline for the past few years. His dry humour only showed through in brief episodes, and when it did, the girls would start crying. Some days, he got their names wrong, and others he lived in decades past, still thinking he needed to drive the girls to school. As the first born, Delta was taking it ­hardest. The thought of him fading away unmoored her, and she was scared for when he would go. She was torn between her life as a playgirl and being around for Lolo’s advancing age. It was Dizzi who’d always been the nurturer, and between balancing all her pursuits, she took on the role of Lolo’s caretaker whenever she could. She wanted Lolo’s time to be as comfortable as possible, even though, day by day, she noticed the sly sparkle in his eyes disappear.

Lolo was a Freemason. For all their lives, the girls did not know what that meant. They grew up with the insignia around the house and thought nothing of it. Last year, the nephew of one of his Masonic brothers had come to Lolo with a proposition. At the time, Delta had been in Paris, working through an exhausting romance with a diplomat, and though she’d made it a habit to check in weekly, calling home often slipped her mind. Dizzi was steadfast about making daily visits to the house, but on the day in question, she’d been stuck in class at the local culinary school. Lolo would never deny a visitor and had invited the nephew in for coffee. It was lonely when the girls weren’t there.

The nephew had spoken of a new kind of currency that was free from the plain rules of stocks and bonds. It lived somewhere in the ether. It was enticing to Lolo, especially when the nephew spoke of high returns on retirement funds. The value went up for no rhyme or reason. Later, the girls found out that the nephew had approached all the aging Masons with this proposition, targeting their wallets like a cold caller. They were at the end of their lives and had an urge to make a last-ditch effort to provide. By the time Dizzi came home with a fresh batch of eclairs, it was too late. Lolo had signed away his life’s savings. (...)

All these new schemes to make a quick buck had the bones of an old-world con. The face of the con was always someone who embodied the fashion of the time—a slob, a genius, or finally, a charismatic dum-dum. Now, for this particular exploit, the windfall had been swift for early investors. It made the front pages of all the newspapers. The figurehead was Adam Mercer-King, and after poring over articles about him, Delta determined he was half dum-dum, half slob.

It was December, and Delta was having coffee at Claridge’s with a well-known entrepreneur. It had been months since Lolo’s investment, and she’d almost forgotten about it. The entrepreneur excused himself to take a call, and though he tried to be discreet, his voice rose. It was his financial adviser calling to tell him that he could not cash out assets from a certain venture. Delta had known enough businessmen who went bankrupt, but her ears pricked up when she heard the name Adam Mercer-King.

Delta predicted that it would be a matter of days before the venture imploded. The high rollers would try to withdraw their deposits, with no luck, and it would leak to the press. Once the government’s interest was piqued, the Securities and Exchange Commission would come calling. Delta rang Dizzi from London to say she was on her way home and to pack her bags; they were going to Miami. As she threw clothes into her luggage, Delta yelled, “Why couldn’t he have been defrauded by the air duct cleaning people!” (...)

Success in wealthier circles depended on being pretty and agreeable. If you really worked it, you could find your way into any room. People found Delta attractive, and she had a sly, back-handed way of seeming docile. From her widespread network, Delta had gotten a tip that AMK (what the press called him) would be in Miami for the art fair, ignoring his upcoming disaster. The girls respected this: to act like nothing is wrong for as long as possible and to live in a dream for just a few moments more. December in Miami imported all the worst characters. Finance people, art people, people who made a living from being looked at. It only made sense to come to a town where the end of the world feels so much closer.

For the first few days, the girls cased the art fairs, talking to dealers and art advisers who loved to brag. They would say, “I can’t tell you who, I can’t tell you how much,” and later, with little persuasion, lean in and whisper names and numbers. On the way to one of the big galleries, the girls ended up sharing a car with a reporter. He was in town to cover the Art Basel party circuit, though his preferred mode of journalism was investigative. Stuck in Miami traffic, he told them stories of Baltic crime lords and corrupt politicians that he had finagled time with.

As he got out of the car, the girls shook his hand. “It’s your lucky day having met us by chance.” They took down his number for future use.

AMK was staying at a suite in the Faena Hotel. The girls heard he had quietly been in talks about the purchase of a few blue-chip pieces, something about “mobile assets.” The few dealers who were in on it knew they’d have to close fast and ship the pieces out of the country. Dizzi had started to bite her nails. “Why waste time on this stuff?” Delta reassured her. “Be patient.” (...)

That night, Dizzi and Delta dressed to compete with all the other girls in Miami. Though they could not mimic the high art of synthetic beauty, they put in enough effort to look at the very least expensive. They blew out their hair and mixed tanning drops into their lotion, even consulting a Kevyn Aucoin book on how to contour. Dizzi pulled on her silk dress slowly, careful not to get lotion on it. Delta zipped her up and said, “You waste all this on taking care of kids. Unbelievable.” Delta wore a tight Cavalli dress that had a glittering snake wrapped around the neckline and cabochon earrings that gave her the sheen of a socialite. Her shiny dark hair was flipped out at the ends. The girls helped Lolo put on a suit and slipped his Masonic ring on his pinky. They had dinner plans they could not be late for.

It was one thing to snag a reservation at a Michelin star restaurant but another to have a good table. After slipping the maître d’ a $100 bill, the three of them were sat in the section with the best view. The section was raised a few steps above the other tables, and scanning the room took only a few seconds. The crowd was polished and coiffed, not just for dinner but for the many parties that lay ahead of them. Dinners in Miami were more of a formality, an obligation to sit through out of politeness before you went off into the night. They established a civilized pretense in an otherwise raucous town. The table was the perfect vantage point to be looked at from all angles. And everyone did look. It was sweet to see two beautiful girls with their aging grandfather splitting the côte de boeuf.

Dizzi cut the steak for Lolo into small bite-sized pieces as he tried his best to eat without incident. There were times when he put a fork to his mouth and missed. She patted him on the knee. “You’re doing great.” A man sitting alone at a corner table caught Delta’s eye. He was wearing a baseball hat and glasses. She squinted, having disavowed optical aids. “I can’t tell. Dizzi, you look.”

Dizzi put the wine list up to her face and peered over. “I think so.” She wanted to be sure. As Lolo was mid-bite, Dizzi took him by his arm. “Don’t worry, Lolo, I’ll take you to the washrooms.”

A server came to untuck Lolo’s chair, and confused by the frenzy, Lolo took his cane and got up. “Did I say I needed to go?”

The restaurant was lit by a large chandelier that took up a quarter of the ceiling, filling the room with an orange sultry glow. Diners sat on red velvet chairs and leopard banquettes as the uniformed servers walked a steady stream in and out of the kitchen. Dizzi led Lolo slowly through the restaurant while people glanced over and smiled. “What a nice girl,” they would say or, “I should call my grandparents.” As Dizzi and Lolo neared the corner table, the man in the baseball hat asked his server about dive bars nearby. “Coocoo’s Nest,” the server responded. “It’s where we all go after our shift.”

Dizzi made the swift decision to make contact. She knocked Lolo’s cane out of his hand and paused for effect. As Lolo slowly bent down to reach it, the man in the baseball hat jumped out of his seat to help. “Don’t worry, I got it, I got it.” As he handed Lolo the cane, Dizzi and Adam Mercer-King locked eyes.

She smiled. “Thank you.” (...)

Coocoo's Nest was tacky, even by Miami standards. Plastic palm trees were nestled in the bar’s corners, and the floor was gummy with a history of spilled drinks. It was still early, and the only other patrons were at a table in the back. Adam Mercer-King sat at the bar with his hood up. Delta approached slowly and asked the bartender for a dirty martini and glanced over at AMK as though she were doing a double take. “Weren’t you just having dinner at the Robuchon restaurant?”

He barely turned his head to her. “Yeah.” Delta noted that AMK smelled cleaner than she thought he would. His recognizable mop of curls peeked out from under his hood, framing his face. It gave him a cherubic quality, one that had clearly convinced many investors of his pure intentions. He did not have the frenetic energy you might expect from someone who’d allegedly lost $8 billion. Rather, he seemed grumpy, like someone getting over a brief heartbreak.

Dizzi leaned over the bar. “He’s the one that helped me with Lolo.”

AMK arranged himself to face them. Sizing them both up with a grin, he said, “You’re the girls with the grandpa . . . or is that an older patron?”

“Oh! Can you imagine?” The girls giggled, inventing a bashfulness that did not come naturally.

He put their drinks on his tab and ordered a round of shots for them and the bartender. The girls threw their heads back and let the tequila fly past their mouths. AMK asked them what they were doing in Miami. Delta slid back on the bar stool and told him that they’d decided to take their Lolo on vacation after they realized he hadn’t had one in twenty years.

Dizzi put her arm around Delta. “We’re the only ones left who can take care of him.”

AMK tapped his fingers on the bar. “That’s really, really nice.”

“It’s terrible how we treat the elderly. There’re just no proper structures in place.” Delta sighed, taking a sip of her drink. She was being genuine. As children, the girls would walk past a retirement home on their way to school and wave to the people inside. Sometimes they would forget, and they’d run back out of guilt. The people all reminded them of their Lolo, and they would never want their grandpa to feel forgotten.

Dizzi’s face fell. “Sometimes we feel powerless to help . . . ”

Delta interrupted, “ . . . but we do everything we can.”

by Marlowe Granados, The Walrus | Read more:
Image: Franziska Barczyk

Robert Stephenson, Train Station
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The Fun Scale

Everybody likes fun. And fun, like anything, can be nuanced; not all fun is created equal.

But it wasn’t until June 2001, while bushwhacking through thickets of Alaskan devil’s club—home to hungry grizzly bears—that I learned of the Fun Scale. Fun, it turns out, is quantifiable.

The bushwhacking came about because my friend Peter had invited me to join him on a low-key outing: a boat ride across a gorgeous bay to climb a small, mellow mountain. It sounded like the perfect finish to my trip, as I’d spent the previous month climbing in the Alaska Range. My climbing partner, Scott, and I had had a terrific trip. Though we were often terrified while actually climbing, we loved it later.

I tried to keep up with Peter as branches whacked me in the face.

“You know that there are three types of fun,” Peter said, bushwacking onward.

“Hey, bear!” I responded. We were trying to return to his sailboat—home to a cooler of cold beers.

Peter kept going, and described the Fun Scale. Here it is:

Type I Fun

Type 1 fun is enjoyable while it’s happening. Also known as, simply, fun. Good food, 5.8 hand cracks. Sport climbing, powder skiing, margaritas.

Type II Fun

Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing. Also surely familiar to mothers, at least during childbirth and the dreaded teenage years.

I remember that very trip to Alaska, just a week before learning about the Fun Scale, when Scott and I climbed Mt. Huntington. Huntington might be the most beautiful mountain in the Alaska Range, but the final thousand feet was horrifying—steep sugar snow that collapsed beneath our feet as we battled upward, unable to down-climb, and unable to find protection or anchors. On the summit, with the immaculate expanse of the range unfolding in every direction, Scott turned to me and said, in complete seriousness, “I want my mom so bad right now.”

By the time we reached Talkeetna his tune changed: “Ya know, that wasn’t so bad. What should we try next year?”

Type III Fun

Type 3 fun is not fun at all. Not even in retrospect. Afterward, you think, “What in the hell was I doing? If I ever come up with another idea that stupid, somebody slap some sense into me.” Many alpine climbs. Failed relationships that lacked Type I fun. Offwidths. Writing a book.

Into which category a given experience falls, of course, is highly subjective and highly subject to shifts (particularly from III to II) born of the rosy reflections afforded us by the passage of time.

by Kelly Cordes, REI |  Read more:

Image: Kelly Cordes

[ed. Additionally, some people suggest a Type 4: fun in the moment, awful afterward. Binge drinking, sex with an ex, etc. You can hair-split this even further (as some in the comments have). Everyone seems to value Type 2 the most:

***

4 Benefits of Type 2 Fun

Type 2 fun may not mean a good time in the moment, but for many, the sense of satisfaction that comes later is worth it. Here are some of the benefits of experiencing Type 2 fun:

1. Increased self-esteem and pride. Pushing yourself through difficult terrain—both physically and metaphorically—allows you to prove to yourself that you’re stronger and more capable than you think. This leads to increased confidence, as well as a lasting sense of accomplishment.

2. Memories. The challenging nature of Type 2 fun can make it more memorable than Type 1 fun. You’ll remember the sense of pride and may develop deep bonds with people who shared the experience. That’s what keeps rock climbers chasing the rush of deep water soloing and other risky but rewarding adventures. Plus, the experience often makes for a great story.

3. Self-discovery and perspective. When you push yourself beyond your preconceived limits, the opportunity to audit your strengths and weaknesses prompts you to learn more about yourself. Additionally, embracing the difficult parts of a journey is a lesson that you can apply to other areas of life, broadening your perspective. Difficult undertakings may seem more doable in the future, once you’ve faced tougher obstacles.

4. Strengthened resilience. Type 2 fun is difficult and almost always involves getting out of your comfort zone. You may get frustrated and want to give up in the middle of such arduous efforts, but persevering proves your tenacity. Imagine backpacking the Appalachian Trail: Looking back, you’ll remember the moments when completing the task felt impossible, as well as the fulfillment of pushing through those moments. The experience can build your tenacity for new, more challenging ventures.  ~ Type 2 Fun: Benefits and the Fun Scale

Nirvana

Polly

Polly wants a cracker
I think I should get off her first
I think she wants some water
To put out the blow torch

Isn't me, have a seed
Let me clip, your dirty wings
Let me take a ride, hurt yourself
Want some help, please myself
Got some rope, haven't told
Promise you, have been true
Let me take a ride, hurt yourself
Want some help, please myself

Polly wants a cracker
Maybe she would like some food
She asked me to untie her
A chase would be nice for a few

[Chorus]

Polly said
Polly says her back hurts
She's just as bored as me
She caught me off my guard
Amazes me, the will of instinct

[Chorus]

Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation

Ben Leventhal, who co-founded the reservation site Resy, in 2014, agreed to meet me for dinner to fill me in on the new restaurant-booking landscape. He left Resy four years ago, after American Express bought the company, and he has since created a customer-loyalty app called Blackbird, which doesn’t make bookings but rewards customers with the restaurant equivalent of frequent-flyer points. Earlier, he’d told me, “The average diner in New York City is massively disadvantaged, and they don’t even know it. It’s as if they’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.” He’d suggested we meet at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, on East Fifty-fifth Street—one of the most sought-after tables in town. (He booked it.) I found him, wearing a trim blue suit and sitting at a table by a fireplace in the equestrian-themed bar. (You also need a reservation to get a drink; I watched as a hostess in a camel-hair coat gently turned away a well-dressed couple who looked unaccustomed to being disappointed.) Leventhal ordered a tequila and jumped right in, “mapping the reservations ecosystem,” as he called it, on a cocktail napkin.

His list of possible approaches went like this: phone call, e-mail, Instagram D.M., in-person (“Before you leave a place, you could make another reservation. It’s a great way to get one”), texting someone you know (the maître d’, a chef, even servers and line cooks), hotel concierges (some residential buildings—432 Park Avenue, 15 Hudson Yards—have their own), élite credit-card partners (“Chase has tables, Amex has tables”), membership reservation clubs like Dorsia, new apps (TableOne claims to show every available publicly listed reservation at the most in-demand restaurants, in real time), secondary marketplaces (in the manner of ticket scalpers, Web sites like Cita Marketplace and Appointment Trader will sell you a reservation, often procured by a bot, usually made in someone else’s name), the restaurant’s Web site, and online-reservation systems (OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Yelp). Leventhal described this last category, by far the most common way to book a table, as “the land of democracy, the land of first come, first served.” Then he smirked and said, “In theory.” (...)

By 1999, a crop of new Web sites—RSVIP.com, Reservemytable.com, Foodline.com, OpenTable.com—were competing to automate the process. Tavern on the Green’s owner, Warner LeRoy, started taking reservations on the restaurant’s Web site. Other restaurateurs were skeptical. OpenTable charged restaurants a monthly fee, plus a dollar for every guest seated. Asked by a reporter what he thought about online reservations, the director of operations at Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe scoffed, “There is no substitute for a kind, human voice on the phone.’’ But Meyer became an early investor in OpenTable, and, later, in Resy. Last year, he invested in an A.I.-powered reservation platform called SevenRooms, which most people haven’t heard about because it’s been designed for diners not to know it exists.

To be clear: every night in New York, there are hundreds of perfectly good seven-thirty tables available at perfectly good restaurants. For a lot of diners, though, the pleasure is in the scarcity; and the smaller, noisier, and more crowded a restaurant is, the better. Some restaurateurs claim to hate the buzz that comes with being popular. Ariel Arce, who operates Roscioli, told me, “If it’s a room full of people who just flock there for a reservation, the vibe ain’t gonna be very fun.” Roni Mazumdar, who owns the Unapologetic Foods group (Semma, Dhamaka, Adda Indian Canteen), told me, “We only value one thing: those who care about us. How do we know you care about us? When you show up and you are cordial to the staff.” He showed me an e-mail with the subject line “Urgent VVIP Request,” from a high-end concierge service that also brokers yacht sales (mission statement: “Dedicated to understanding everything you want and giving you more than you imagined”), demanding a five-top for an extremely powerful person, who “represents Matthew McConaughey, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Rock, Katherine Heigl and Tony Hawk.” Mazumdar’s team sent a reply saying that the client could try to reserve through Resy. (...)

In Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho,” the sociopathic Wall Street protagonist is obsessed with a fictional restaurant called Dorsia—a place so exclusive as to be almost mythical. A new, members-only app by the same name promises to deliver what the status-mad bros in the novel cannot secure for themselves: a tough table. Aspiring users download the app and allow it to scan their contacts (“The fastest way to get in is with your network,” the site declares), and then answer a few questions: employer, job title, Instagram handle, LinkedIn URL. Dorsia is trying to figure out if you are the kind of person who will shell out.

If you pass muster (I only did, I think, because I had saved the numbers of a lot of chefs in my contacts while reporting this piece), you can log on to Dorsia and search for the solidly booked restaurant of your choice. (You enter your credit-card information immediately, of course.) The first reservation I spotted was an eight-o’clock Saturday two-top at Carbone; there was also a slew of prime-time tables at Le Gratin, one of Daniel Boulud’s offshoots. Then I read the fine print: the table at Carbone would cost me a thousand dollars—not as a booking fee but as a prepayment for the meal. For two of us to get our money’s worth, we’d have to down three plates of Calamari Marco, three orders of lobster ravioli, two veal Marsalas, a funghi trifolati, and two bottles of Barolo Gramolere.

Restaurants that utilize Dorsia see it as a way to collect data about their customers, and also to increase revenue by guaranteeing that those customers are big spenders. Other minimum prepayments listed on the app: two hundred and eighty-five dollars per person at Le Pavillon, Boulud’s midtown seafood palace; two hundred and thirty-five at Marea, on Central Park South; and three hundred at Torrisi (on a Monday), a sister restaurant to Carbone. This summer, as Dorsia’s members go on vacation, the app promises to be ready with tables at the chicest restaurants in Ibiza, in Mykonos, and along the French Riviera and the Amalfi Coast.

In promotional materials for restaurateurs considering listing their tables on the app, Dorsia claims that it saves twenty minutes per party (no waiting for the check) and so helps turn tables faster—a key to restaurant solvency. (Gabriel Stulman, of Sailor, which is not on Dorsia, told me that he needs to turn his tables three times a night to make money.) Still, several restaurateurs who have opted out told me that they find the colossal-prepay concept unseemly, in part because it encourages binge eating. “It’s psychotic,” one owner said. “We don’t want to put people in that situation.”

Dorsia understands that, like the N.S.A. and TikTok, successful restaurants know more about us than we want to imagine. How many times have you eaten there? Are you a friendly regular, an asshole neighbor, an expense-account out-of-towner? Do you prefer a cocktail or the house white? Do you linger after coffee? In the old days, much of that information—and your wife’s birthday, your secretary’s name—lived inside a maître d’s head. Many restaurants have always kept handwritten notes on their guests, relying on abbreviations: “H.S.M.” (heavyset man), “eagle” (bald guest), “o-o” (wears glasses), “l.o.l.” (little old lady). These days, guest notes are “data,” which tech platforms help restaurants keep track of. Oenophiles might be labelled “W.W.” (wine whale), or, simply, “drops coin.” If you got a surprise appetizer on the house, you might have been marked down with “S.F.N.” (something for nothing), or “N.P.R.” (nice people get rewards). Did you sit for hours over a bowl of soup, tip poorly, get wasted, or shush the young family sitting at the next table? You might be demoted to “P.N.G.” (persona non grata) or “D.N.S.” (do not serve) status.

Resy has a data-driven feature called Notify, which puts diners on a waiting list for a restaurant. (OpenTable and SevenRooms added similar features to compete.) Using it is a little like buying a fistful of lottery tickets. Diners add themselves to lots of restaurants’ Notify lists for a certain night with the hope of scoring just one. The moment a host decides that a table is a no-show, or if there’s a cancellation, a push notification—“New Table Alert”—is sent to everyone on the Notify list for that night. The table goes to whoever claims it first on the app. Curious, I added my name to the Notify list at every fully booked restaurant in my neighborhood, over a six-week period. I didn’t get a single e-mail or notification.

I thought I just had bad luck, until a conversation with Resy’s C.E.O., Pablo Rivero, clarified things. Over dinner at Txikito, a buzzy Basque restaurant in Chelsea, he explained that I would likely always be near the bottom of the Notify queue. After American Express acquired Resy, in 2019, anyone with a fancy Amex card—Centurion, Platinum, Reserve, or Aspire—has an advantage. If you have one of these cards (Centurion: ten-thousand-dollar initiation fee, five thousand dollars per year), Rivero said, “You will get a Resy notification before other people do.” (He also said, somewhat puzzlingly, “What we are trying to do is, honestly, democratize dining a bit more.”) (...)

At Polo Bar, Leventhal had talked a lot about the challenge that restaurants face in deciding who to let in the door: “We need restaurants to be democratic,” he said (a sentiment I heard over and over). “But they can’t be—in order for them to be sustainable. The margins are so thin, and there’s not enough room for everyone.” That’s why restaurants like to identify and reward V.I.P. and regular customers. If a restaurant deems you important enough—and decides to label you as a “V.I.P.,” “P.P.X.,” (personne particulièrement extraordinaire), “reg,” “$$$$” or “soi” (short for soigné) on its in-house system—you might notice a little gold-and-black crown emoji and more available tables next time you sign in to Resy.

“Good operators know the best practice is saying yes, but how do you say yes while maximizing revenue?” Leventhal said. “It’s about saying yes to the person who’s going to spend the most money over the long haul.”

by Adam Liscoe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ralph Lauren Polo Bar; Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Jimi Hendrix, 1959
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War Or Nothing

A tale across the years; seven lessons learned from a quarter-century in a war-oriented society, where the greatest crime is any opposition to killing.

Flying planes into buildings is a sick and vile act. It is also a terrorist act. I don't think that's controversial to say no matter what else you think about what happened before or after. Terrorism is sort of an amorphous word, but I'd say it applies to acts of mass killing of civilian populations by a person or entity that doesn't have the requisite power to wage something called war. War used to be when armies met armies and kept civilians out of it, or that was the idea, but if that was ever the case it hasn't been the case for damn near a century now; now war is a matter that touches civilian populations most of all. When you're a person or entity powerful enough to make other people validate your reason for bringing death and terror to civilian populations, then you're powerful enough to call it war and make it stick, and then it is war, and it is more official and respectable for that. If you're not the aggressor, then war isn't as distinguishable from terrorism; like terrorism, it's something that you didn't choose that is happening to you for as long as you can survive it, and then after it is over, if you survived, then its a thing that was done to you, and if you don't survive it, nothing is happening to you anymore, and you probably don't care so much which one it was.

And sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. I reckon this was the first lesson of a war-oriented society that we are all learning. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional. Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.

Afghanistan is not the country where most of the people who attacked us hail from, incidentally. It is a country where the perpetrators have frequently operated in the 80s and 90s, and they operated there in part because we were secretly funding them with cash and weapons to help install some very bad guys into power, because doing so served our national interests, or at least the interests of those leaders in the 80s and 90s who got to decide what our national interests were and in some cases broke the law to do so. So we've already been bringing death to the region for a while now, something millions of us notice it has made us less safe, not more safe.

And millions of ace students who have already learned all a war-oriented society's lessons very well inform us that pointing this observable fact out means that we are suggesting that those who died in the terrorist attacks deserved it, that we would prefer to denigrate their memories by doing nothing.

These are the choices, we're learning: war, or nothing. The only two flavors, when you have been attacked. The only way to honor the dead is with more death.

Some millions of us notice that this alignment toward death also seems to be how terrorists seem to think about things. Our noticing this is offered as further proof that we love the terrorists. I am told that I want to invite them home for tea. I am told that I must not have any children, because if I had children, I would be willing to support maximum killing to keep them safe. Don't worry, though; speaking from the future of 2024 using the magic of narrative device, I can assure you that my children are still alive—thanks, I suppose, to maximum killing, and no thanks, I suppose, to me and my opposition to a non-optional war.

War sometimes isn't optional, it's true. When you are a weaker power and a stronger power decides to attack you, you're at war until they decide to stop or you make them stop, and you don't get to decide about that. For example, here in 2001, the people of Afghanistan aren't going to get to decide whether or not to experience the war we are bringing them. Still, there are some millions of us who wonder—do we have to go to war? And millions of others tell us with breathless certitude that even wondering that means that we are aligned with the terrorists, with the ones who want to bring death to America; that we, too, for the crime of wondering about whether war is optional, also want to bring death to America.

This strikes millions of us as odd, because the terrorists, who are not a country, do not have the ability to force us into war. This is why they attacked us in the way they did. Flying the planes into the buildings was an act of terror—everyone agrees. This suggests military or political objectives. What were they? Here in 2001, millions of us believe that it doesn't matter much; we will crush the terrorist's objectives by crushing them, which we will accomplish by showing them just how much more death we are able to deliver to them then they are able to deliver.

And millions of us wonder how increasing the killing opposes an entity that wishes to increase killing. Many of us in opposition are still fresh-faced students, and because many of us are students we have not yet learned all the lessons of a war-oriented society, and due to our inexperience we are dismissed as ignorant fools. And many of the millions of us—student or otherwise—are ignorant, to be sure, and some of us are fools, and all of us are dismissed by our institutions of power and influence, but millions of us who are not ignorant and not fools can't help but notice that within a war-oriented society, the most ignorant and foolish within any anti-war group is always given the most attention by our institutions of power and influence, and this attention is used to apply ignorance and foolishness to the whole, and then the group is dismissed on those grounds, divested of all power and influence even as they are framed as an empowered threat to the inherent safety of war. And this is the second lesson of war in a war-oriented society: the worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.

And now it is 2003, and we are fixing to go to war in Iraq, which means the people of Iraq will not have a choice about whether or not to experience war, and we do have a choice, but we are saying we do not. We are going to deliver something called "shock and awe" to them; not just killing, but a lot of killing. This is the third lesson of war we're all learning: the only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing—a hundred times more killing, a thousand times more. This suggests that we believe almost instinctively that we are much more valuable as human beings than any other human beings from any other places—a hundred time more, a thousand times, so much more valuable, that it might be said we don't even think of those other people as human beings. We lost over 3,000 people on that terrible day of terror, so perhaps we intend to kill 300,000 terrorists. Millions of us wonder if there are even 300,000 terrorists to kill, but that's not a problem for a war-oriented society, because Iraq is a country of millions, so we'll have enough people to kill soon enough. (...)

And now it is 2005, and we have brought a lot more death to Iraq and Afghanistan than was ever brought to us, and we've brought it to people who did not attack us. It's true that some of the people to whom we delivered this death weren't involved in the attack but have been very eager to get involved in a war killing American and seem to be delighted to finally have been given such a ready and open forum. But hundreds of thousands of others (or maybe even over a million) to whom we have delivered death are just people who were hoping to live their lives, who aren't going to get to do that now, because we were attacked in 2001, and the only choices for us are war or nothing. And some 10,000 of our troops have died or will eventually die in these conflicts, and tens of thousands more have suffered or will suffer horrible physical or mental injuries, and have been or will be abandoned by the same people who were so eager to send them into danger in the name of safety. And the war has cost us most of our reputation and more money than the attacks ever did. And the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan have been broken in ways that seem irreparable, hi-ho.

And millions of us find all this death and maiming tragic. And we're told by millions more—the same people who told us that we were aligned with terrorists for predicting this exact eventuality—that finding the death and injury of foreign civilians tragic means we are aligned with the terrorists; that we hate our country and love the terrorists, because we have failed to recognize that the United States is not to blame in any way for the wars that it started and continues to wage. This is the fifth lesson of war in a war-oriented society: Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense. Anyone who suffers and dies is a victim not of us but those who threaten or harm us, or of themselves. Those who had no choice about whether or not to be at war are the ones who are blamed for not ending the war, which is not something that is in their power to do. Our violence is not only pure; it is self-purifying. It doesn't just make us safe; it is safety itself. (...)

The people who were wrong about everything are presumed to be right and normal and interested in our security and safety. The very people who created the danger, then failed to prevent the attack, then increased our danger, are still invited to opine as trusted sources on what we should do about future dangers, and their answers always involve more killing. They are considered real Americans, extended an indestructible credulity by our institutions of influence and power not in spite of wanting to create a world of killing, but because of it.

The millions of us who were right about what would happen are presumed to be wrong, not real Americans but dangerous traitors, a threat to safety; we are extended an indestructible skepticism by our institutions of influence and power, not in spite of our opposition to killing, but because of it. There are still ignorant fools among us, and they still receive the most attention, to cast us as ignorant and foolish against the wisdom of those who know that the choices are war or nothing.

And this is the sixth lesson of war in a war-oriented society: wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence. You don't have to have been correct about why you wanted to kill, and you don't have to have been correct about what the result of the killing would be—simply wanting to kill is right enough to make you perpetually right. Most of all, you can act in fathomless bad faith in favor of killing, and use as rationale the exact opposite of the thing you are creating. For example, you can send Americans into two standing wars of choice and opportunity, and say you want to do it to make Americans safe. Or you can stand from a position of most power and influence and claim you are powerless, and that those with least power and influence have all power and influence, and are to blame for the reality you have created. Or (to use an example that is more speculative for the year 2007), you could spend 20 years demanding that student protests against antisemitism and every other bigotry and even literal Nazism on college campuses be quashed in the name of promoting free speech, only to turn around and use antisemitic framings to demand that student protests against killing be quashed in the name of fighting antisemitism. 

But never mind, because now it is 2020, and the police in the United States are rioting—not for the first time. (...)

On that subject, a police officer was recently waging war in one of our nations residential occupied zones—an area that just so happens to be predominantly Black—and while doing so, he murdered a Black man named George Floyd. Floyd begged for his life as he was being killed, but the officer killed him all the same, using practices that were standard practice for cops, we all later learned, which is how you can tell that murdering Black people is sort of standard operating protocol. And this was in no way the first such murder, nor has it in any way been the last.

In 2020, millions of us all over the country have found, almost to our surprise in some cases, that we are opposed to this, and in response millions of us all over the country took to the streets and demonstrated for an end to police brutality.

The police have taken this questioning of their right to kill as an act of violence. In response, the police are rioting and waging war all over the country against American citizens. All over the country, all summer long, they are brutalizing protesters. They've welcomed white supremacist militias toting massacre weapons as unofficial deputies and kettled large groups of unarmed people into tiny inescapable areas, then demanded the people leave those inescapable areas, then drove their heads into the concrete with their knees for not complying, tased them, shot them with rubber bullets, hog tied them and left them bleeding on the ground, hauled them into prison, pushed them to the ground, and more.

Millions of us are horrified by all this. And we are told by millions of others that this means we are aligned with crime and murder and death, that because we want to abolish this standing army of white supremacy and stop waging war against our neighbors, we want to leave ourselves open to danger, even as we further empower the force that creates danger for us all. We are asked: what is our solution—nothing?

In the minds of millions, opposing the violence of the police justifies any violence the police might do against any of us.

This is the seventh and final lesson of war in our war-oriented society. Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county's citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.

Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn't nothing but isn't war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.

And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don't see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn't nothing, either.

Maybe the terrorists in 2001 and the ones who came after weren't anticipating our response. Maybe they didn't realize we had a powerful military, or that we had a history of using it extensively in retaliation for attacks. But millions of us think it's safe to assume they knew, that they might have been expecting a violent response, and it's always been curious to us that people who understand that the terrorists wanted to create a world of violence were always so eager to create far more of it than the terrorists themselves were ever equipped to deliver.

It makes me wonder: who is aligned, practically speaking, with terrorists? Who is endangering us? The ones who oppose using our fear as a pretext for increasing war and killing, however ignorant or foolish many of us may be? Or is it the ones who fund the terrorists for political advantage and then use the danger of them as a pretext to bring the war they want to bring?

Some days it seems to me that what the terrorists most feared is that their work would be for nothing, and we wouldn't have a maximally violent response—which would have been something other than decades of war, but I'm hard pressed to say it would be nothing. It's hard to say. People who bring violent death to civilian populations aren't always upfront about what they intend. Not being upfront about what you intend is called bad faith, by the way, as is deliberately mis-framing somebody else's position, like for example saying that people who don't want to give terrorists exactly what they seem most likely to want are aligned with the terrorists, or pretending that they have nobody in their number who are not threatened or harmed parties, and none who are not ignorant fools. (...)

But never mind, because now it is 2024, and the protesters against killing are coming out once again, and the police are coming to meet them and brutalize them for the crime of asking what are you doing? And those who want the killing to continue are equating a country's entire population with its violent government, as if doing so protects the people rather than the government. And they are equating Jewishness with allegiance to Israel, as if doing so isn't a foundation of antisemitism. And none of the protesters have power or influence to stop the killing they would like to see stopped, but all of them are being treated by our institutions of power and influence as if they have all power and influence, particularly those who are most ignorant and foolish, even though most protesters are not ignorant fools. All those opposed to the killing are being told that opposing killing means that they love terrorists, and hate safety. And all of those opposed to the killing are being told that their opposition means that they think that the victims of a terrorist attack deserved it. All of the protesters are being told that they don't understand the danger, even though many of them are the ones most in danger. All of them are being told that they don't care about the victims of an attack, even though many of their number identify directly with those attacked. All of them are being told that opposing killing means they love war, even though many of them have no choice as to whether or not war is something they experience. All of them are being asked what exactly it is they want, if they want the war to stop—nothing?

by A.R. Moxon, The Reframe |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

I should note that I’ve previously — and erroneously — referred to the “code yellow” as something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google’s ads side getting too close to search. The truth is much grimmer — the Code Yellow was the rumble of the Rot Economy, with Google’s revenue arm sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn’t laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 years that built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for a real principle, destroyed by and replaced with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of the problems was that there was insufficient growth in “queries,” as in the amount of things people were asking Google. It’s a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because drivers weren’t putting enough miles on their trucks.

Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a “code yellow” to “close the search gap [it was] seeing,” vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed “company plan.” To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is “nothing” that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that ads had demanded.

Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and declaring that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fidelity” business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur also said something that I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read these emails: that there was a good reason that Google’s founders separated search from ads.

On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple-day-long debate about Google’s sudden lust for growth. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want” and what search was doing.

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.”

On March 22 2019, Google VP of Product Management Darshan Kantak would declare the end of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails until Gomes responded congratulating the team, saying that the plans architected as part of the code would do well throughout the year.

Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed “by heroic RPM engineering” and that “core query softness continued without mitigation” — a very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth wasn’t happening. (...)

Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.

A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. McKinsey has paid nearly $1bn over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. I’m getting sidetracked, but one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labor. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they’re often there to advise on how to “cut costs,” which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want. (...)

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo's search and ads products.

When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. (...)

A Near-Anonymous Villain

It’s very, very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history — it took me hours of digging through Google results to find the three or four articles that went into any depth about him — but from what I’ve gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,” ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he caused. In a WIRED interview from 2021, Steven Levy said Raghavan “isn’t CEO of Google— he just runs the place,” and described his addition to the company as “a move from research to management.” (...)

Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable, less transparent, and is dominated by search engine optimized aggregators, advertising, and outright spam.

As I’ve argued previously, we — with good reason — continually complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, but I’d argue Raghavan (and, by extension, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) deserve as much criticism, if not more, for the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.

by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At? |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Google search has been so awful for so long that I've given up. I'm using DuckDuckGo now and couldn't be happier. See also: Managing Up, Google's rebuttal and a follow-up reply re: "rot economics":

"Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class.

These vile management consultants — like Sundar Pichai and Sheryl Sandberg — and their acolytes who exhibit the same destructive traits (in particular Raghavan) are the faithful foot soldiers in the war to ruin technology products, dampen innovation, and destroy otherwise-flourishing companies in the name of short-term market gains that benefit only the investor class. They didn’t build these products, and they certainly don’t use them - all they care about is market share, revenue and organizational power."

***

[ed. This seems like a good example: Search Engine Land:]

What are RSAs?

RSAs are responsive search ads. Advertisers upload multiple headlines and descriptions, then let Google’s machine learning optimize the ad versions in real-time. The goal is to increase engagement (click-through rate).

Google allows up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions to be considered when creating the ad combinations shown in the search results.

Think of all the possibilities for Google’s machine learning to optimize ad messages. There are more than 43,000 different variations available to keep your messages fresh and keep the ad engagement on an uphill trajectory.