Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode.

COWEN: Why was the album Satanic Majesty’s Request such a failure? Maybe you disagree, but I never listened to it.

SPITZ: I don’t disagree at all. Yes, it was a failure. What they did was they were trying to mimic the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. You can’t copy. You really have to play what’s in your heart. I think they knew it. Certainly, the other people who took part in that, Satanic Majesty’s, knew it. The album’s rarely played, rarely listened to.

COWEN: They mimicked many other things quite well, including the blues, sometimes the Beatles themselves. They did “I Want to Be Your Man.” Arguably, their version was better. What was it about the psychedelic, or maybe it was studio production, that they couldn’t mimic so well?

SPITZ: Yes, it just wasn’t in their wheelhouse. They were not a psychedelic band. They certainly did as many psychedelic drugs as the Beatles, perhaps more, but the music just didn’t come to them easily. They gave it a shot, and then they went back to what they did best. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before.

On Led Zeppelin

COWEN: Why didn’t you like Led Zeppelin at first?

SPITZ: Ah. I knew nothing about Led Zeppelin. I was in the midst of writing a biography of Ronald Reagan. In fact, I had just begun the research on that book. My editor called and said, “Listen, I need to sign you up for another book.” I said, “I’m up to my eyeballs in this. I’m not even thinking of the future.” He said, “No, I’ve always wanted to do this book. We’re going to sign you up now. We’re going to give you a contract. You’re the only guy who can write it.” I said, “Who is it?” He said, “It’s Led Zeppelin.” Tyler, I have to admit, my heart sunk. I knew nothing about the band.

COWEN: How can you know nothing about Led Zeppelin, given all the other things you know? That’s weird. It’s like if I said I know nothing about Adam Smith or Keynes.

SPITZ: I had been on the road with Bruce Springsteen and Elton John while Led Zeppelin came into the forefront. Our paths never crossed. I never listened to their music. I knew that they were a heavy metal band. I wasn’t interested in heavy metal. I have 20,000 vinyl albums in my collection. I didn’t have a single Led Zeppelin album. When my editor asked me about it, I might have been able to mention that I knew “Whole Lotta Love.” I might have known “Stairway to Heaven,” but I couldn’t name another Led Zeppelin song.

I found myself saying to my editor, “Of course, I’m your guy.” I was really happy that I did it. I’m convinced now that I was the right person to do it because I’m a musician. I love music. I was an empty vessel when it came to Led Zeppelin. I just let them fill me up. I really studied it as if I were taking a foreign language and had never studied that language before. It gave me an opportunity to spend a good year and a half before I started writing, listening to their music, trying to understand it.

Asking other great musicians, “Explain John Bonham’s drum technique to me. Explain Jimmy Page’s guitar to me.” I asked Jeff Beck to explain it to me. Jeff Beck was Jimmy’s boyhood neighbor. I came at Led Zeppelin from a neophyte’s angle, and I thought, “Okay, I can be incredibly objective here when it comes to writing about this band.” I was happy that I had the experience to do it. It taught me a lot, and I fell in love with their entire catalog of music that I had never appreciated before.

COWEN: “Stairway to Heaven,” overrated or underrated?

SPITZ: Completely rated as it should be. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Jack & Daisy

[ed. Pretty good cover of a song not easy to sing. Especially the Garfunkel parts.]

Into the Maw

When Barack Obama took office, he faced the biggest combination of crisis and opportunity that any incoming president had since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1932 the Great Depression had ravaged the country and was only getting worse. Even as he prepared to move into the White House, a fresh wave of banking panic swept through the nation, and it was clear that if Roosevelt was to save American democracy, he needed to put forward a sweeping set of reforms, which is exactly what he did via two major rounds of policy initiatives in 1933 and 1935.

In 2008, Obama faced a similar crisis: The economy was in free fall, and the financial system was gripped by panic. Unemployment had not yet come anywhere close to Depression levels, but like FDR, Obama had the opportunity—even the mandate—to enact far-reaching reforms. Unfortunately, he did not use this opportunity. Faced with a shattering economic breakdown, Obama and his key advisers largely sought to restore the wobbly precrisis status quo, inaugurating a decade of economic stagnation and dislocation that culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

The story of Obama’s missed opportunity to fix the rot in the American economy is frequently noted by the left, but it is also the subject of two recent books written mainly by Obama administration insiders—A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions, by Reed Hundt, who worked on Obama’s transition team, and Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Henry Paulson (the former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO who served as George W. Bush’s treasury secretary). The former is a brutal and devastating indictment of Obama’s strategic missteps as he confronted the crisis, while the latter attempts an apologia for the Bush-Obama crisis management strategy that inadvertently confirms Hundt’s key points. What both books show is that Obama and his administration burned up most of their political capital rescuing the banks from a crisis caused by their own mistakes, and they offer us a warning about doing the same thing again as we face yet another potentially disastrous recession.

As the winds of financial crisis gathered strength in late 2007, the key question faced by both policy-makers and those in the banking industry was what should be done about the supposedly too-big-to-fail firms. Several keystone institutions—the gigantic insurer AIG, the megabank Citigroup, the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and many of the other big Wall Street players—were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be stuffed with the financial equivalent of toxic waste, and it was clear that, left to their own fate, they would implode.

Worse, the wholesale funding market—the unregulated “shadow banking” system that provided the daily credit flows on which the whole global financial system depended—was experiencing a kind of bank run, and financiers could no longer get the loans necessary for their daily operations. Savvier firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase had already shorted (or made bets against) the housing market and so were able to defend themselves against a disaster centered there—but if any of the other big players went down, they were all too aware that they would likely go, too. After all, the counterparty for many of those shorts was the now-ailing AIG. If it failed, it would take down Goldman and probably most of the rest of Wall Street as well, since they were all so intertwined. Thus, without some kind of government rescue, the entire financial system would collapse.

Yet even if everyone agreed on the necessity of a rescue, there was much less agreement on the form it should take. This was the question that the economic advisers for both the president and the president-elect were grappling with in the last months of 2008. One option, which Paulson favored, was simply to buy up toxic mortgages in order to get them off the banks’ balance sheets. A more compelling option was the one favored by Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and soon to be Obama’s treasury secretary: He recommended “capital injections,” in which the government bought a whole bunch of bank stock—in other words, a partial nationalization—that would help strengthen the banks’ balance sheets and thus stabilize the financial system. The banks could then lend against the government’s fresh capital and further fortify themselves with more good assets to offset the bad ones.

For those financial companies in dire straits, the government would also have the option to simply buy them outright should their collapse threaten financial stability. The Federal Reserve had broad powers to buy up failing firms by declaring an emergency under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In “unusual and exigent circumstances,” the Fed could use its money-creating authority to simply purchase a failing company. Once owned by the government, a problem firm could be prevented from going bankrupt, and there would be time to examine its books and either fix it up or isolate it from the rest of the market and let it collapse.

Paulson opposed Geithner’s plan on ideological grounds, saying that it was “socialistic” and “sounded un-American.” But as the crisis gathered strength and it became clear that asset purchases would not be enough to save the system, the “socialistic” options won out. In early September, Paulson directed the Treasury Department to take control of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (already partly backed by the state anyway), which were then teetering on the brink of collapse. A worried Bush informed Paulson that “we have to make it clear that what we are doing now is transitory, because otherwise it looks like nationalization.” But this caveat never came to pass; to this day, Fannie and Freddie are still owned by the government (and incidentally have turned a steady profit since 2012).

But Paulson refused to do the same thing for Lehman Brothers, which was nearing collapse a couple of weeks later. As Hundt writes, he maneuvered to prevent a Fed rescue and instructed the company to declare bankruptcy, thereby setting the stage for the largest bankruptcy in American history. This instantly caused market panic and put AIG on the brink of failure as well. As the markets tanked, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke threw caution to the wind, declared a Section 13(3) emergency, and rushed in with an $85 billion loan in return for almost 80 percent of AIG’s stock—making good old Uncle Sam the owner of the world’s largest insurance company. [...]

Regardless of whether the government should have purchased Lehman Brothers too, the issue with the bailouts of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac was that they were wildly unpopular—but not because people were worried about the government becoming “socialistic.” What infuriated them was the unfairness: AIG blew itself up making stupid bets, and now the government was leaping to its rescue with $85 billion (later increased to $180 billion). And yet the Bush administration did little about the company’s executives, who had played such a crucial role in wrecking the American economy in the first place. Meanwhile, the people suffering from their atrocious decisions were not similarly bailed out; they continued to see their jobs disappear, their homes foreclosed on, and their pension funds devastated.

Paulson recognized this growing outrage, and so he turned to the Democratic-controlled Congress for additional powers and money—$700 billion in all—thereby pinning “the tail of responsibility on the Democratic donkey,” as Hundt puts it. The bill, to create something called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was voted down by Congress the first time, but with Obama’s support as president-elect and more oversight and structural controls built into it, TARP passed the House and Senate the second time around, thus making it “the first and most significant decision” of Obama’s presidency, Hundt writes: one in which he “let Paulson pick his presidential priority” and “chose bank bailouts—euphemistically, stabilizing finance—as his top strategic goal.” [...]

Once in office, Obama only doubled down on Paulson’s agenda, nominating Geithner as his treasury secretary and turning the foreclosure policy over to him. The TARP bill included a sweeping grant of authority and an unspecified appropriation to pursue foreclosure relief—meaning interest rate reductions, payment reschedulings, principal reductions, and “other similar modifications.” Obama previously promised to pursue “cramdown,” a policy that would have allowed homeowners to write down their mortgage to the home’s assessed value during bankruptcy proceedings. But since real homeowner relief would have harmed the banks (by reducing the value of their mortgage assets), Geithner refused to include principal reductions in his foreclosure plan and made the program such a Kafkaesque nightmare that few participated in it. Those who did found themselves at the mercy of mortgage servicers who had direct financial incentives to foreclose, and that is exactly what they did: They proceeded to trick thousands of homeowners into foreclosure. While more and more Americans lost their homes, Geithner quietly and successfully lobbied Congress to stop cramdown altogether. Through it all, Obama did nothing—just as he did nothing when Geithner disobeyed a direct order to draw up plans to wind down Citigroup.

In Hundt’s interviews with administration officials, the logic of this choice is discussed explicitly. “The only problem was that there was $750 billion of negative equity in housing—the amount that mortgages exceeded the value of the houses,” says Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. “For sure the banks couldn’t take $750 billion of losses and for sure the government wasn’t willing to give $750 billion in subsidies to underwater homeowners, to say nothing of the anger it would engender among non-underwater homeowners.” Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, puts that figure higher but comes to a similar conclusion. “There was about $1 trillion of negative equity,” she tells Hundt, “and getting rid of it would have helped increase consumer spending and heal the economy. But for the government to just absorb it would have been very expensive.”

Thus, since the banks couldn’t handle these losses and the government was unwilling to do so, the Obama team decided to quietly shove them onto homeowners. This choice would result in about 10 million families being forced out of their homes through foreclosure or some other process—roughly one out of every six homeowners. These foreclosed properties would then become economic time bombs, since abandoned houses damage neighborhoods and the value of adjacent homes. The political side effects were also disastrous. As Hundt writes, “In swing states affected severely by the housing market downturn, the reduction of mortgage credit supply had five times the negative effect on votes for the presidential candidate of the incumbent party than the increase in the unemployment rate.” Eventually, Rust Belt states were the hardest hit. “Chicago had the highest rate of negative equity among large markets,” he writes. “The surrounding states proved fertile territory for Donald Trump’s campaign.” [...]

Obama’s advisers often explained many of his choices by invoking legal constraints, but there was no technical or legal reason that a more just and thoroughgoing overhaul of the financial sector, coupled with support for homeowners and the rest of the American people, couldn’t be done. The administration could have insisted that any financial company receiving government support must fire its top management, ban all bonus payments, end dividends and share buybacks, and break itself up into smaller pieces—and that any company that refused would be left to fend for itself. The Fed could also have nationalized any company whose failure posed the risk of taking down too many others with it, as it did with AIG. Directly owned companies could then have been restructured, their bad debts written off, and sold once they were sound again. This would have purged the bad debt from the system, allowed the Obama administration to actually help underwater homeowners, and reduced the power of the banking lobby, which hamstrung the administration in Congress at every turn. Hell, the government could have even hung on to some of the banks to give to the US Postal Service to set up a public option for banking.

Politics would have been an obstacle to this plan but not an insurmountable one. Obama could have insisted on stringent conditions for the TARP bill, given the fact that Democrats were providing most of the votes for its passage. “We could have forced more mortgage relief. We could have imposed tighter conditions on dividends or executive compensation,” Goolsbee admits to Hundt. Failing that, Obama could have simply bided his time until he took office. Bernanke at the Fed was a bigger obstacle, given that his term was to last until 2010, but Fed chairs are still susceptible to political pressure. For example, Obama could have threatened to publicly attack Bernanke’s policy if he didn’t go along—especially his backdoor lending programs, which he was very keen on keeping quiet. Obama could have driven the big banks into bankruptcy and forced the Fed to take action. Most obviously, he could have appointed reformers to the Federal Reserve’s governing board. Instead, he left two Fed seats open for the critical first year of his administration and renominated Bernanke when his term was up.

In all likelihood, the government would have ended up owning a good portion of the American financial system for a time, though it’s worth noting that then-FDIC head Sheila Bair dismisses the fears of a nationalization-induced panic. “I didn’t believe in a domino effect,” she tells Hundt. “If you have a controlled failure, the markets will adjust.” Whatever the case, while the Republican right would have howled bloody murder—just as it did over every Obama policy—the rest of the US electorate almost certainly would have been satisfied, so long as the bankers were made to pay and regular folks got a cut of the bailout money. And the financial system would have been much more stable and far safer in the end. What happened instead was a hideously unfair and economically disastrous mess. Obama spent most of his considerable political capital on defending a cabal of corrupt, rotten financiers who very nearly ruined the world economy. His party alienated millions of voters, who felt abandoned and betrayed by the Democrats, which ended up costing them thousands of seats in state and local government. Thus, when the 2016 presidential election rolled around, Obama’s successor could not even beat a tawdry game-show demagogue.

by Ryan Cooper, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Mandel Ngan/Getty

[ed. Worth a revisit, I think, with the stock market continuing to hit new records every other week (for no obvious reasons). Incredibly many people now days have forgotten the details and/or never really understood the cause and effect nature of bad policy decisions during the 2008 banking "crisis" (Chernobyl meltdown would be a more apt description). The fundamental issue being of course "moral hazard" ie., when institutions (and individuals) are encouraged to take excessive risks because there are no consequences - the government will bail your ass out when things go south. This attitude now infects nearly every part of the economy not just banks: from hedge funds, to tech companies, healthcare, ag, -  nearly every major corporate sector. So this precedent has now become institutionalized. The first tell was when Obama nominated Larry Summers to be his treasury secretary, but the most egregious example has to be Hank Paulson's arrogant one-page request/demand for Congress to approve $700 billion in bank bail-out money immediately, with no strings attached. Various versions of TARP then followed, mortgage holders got shafted, massive bonuses continued across Wall Street using taxpayer money, and almost no one was criminally charged. The Federal Reserve which is supposed to focus on two main responsibilities - fighting inflation and promoting job growth, now has a third: propping up the stock market. So the system is just as bad, if not worse, than it was prevously; but by virtue of carefully crafted post-president narratives emphasizing empathy, stability and technical proficiency, Obama is now considered an elder statesman who did the best he could.]

Myud Myechev, “Autumn in Kosalma” (1967)

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Qin Tianzhu aka 秦天柱 aka Tianzhu Qin (Chinese, b. 1952, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China) - 小憩 (Take a Nap), Hanging Scroll, Ink and Color on Paper

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Rita Ray

[ed. Ms. Steal-Your-Man, Pt. 2. Bonus: Oh Honey (studio version).]

Alistair Colling and Tortured Soul (feat. Sabina Sciubba)

Taylor Price, Mussels
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AI Anti-Glaze System Prompt

Marc Andreessen just leaked the system prompt he uses to make every LLM 10x smarter. 

It's called the Anti-Glaze System Prompt. 

One paste. Your AI stops kissing your ass and starts telling you the truth. 

Here's what it actually does:

 → Kills "great question" forever

 → Kills "you're absolutely right" forever

 → Kills "fascinating perspective" forever 

→ Forces the model to lead with the strongest counterargument before it agrees with anything you say 

→ Refuses to capitulate when you push back unless you bring new evidence

 → Demands explicit confidence levels on every claim (high / moderate / low / unknown) 

→ Tells you immediately when you're wrong instead of validating your premise 

→ Owns its own numbers instead of anchoring on yours 

The line that ends the era of glazing AI: "Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval."...

Paste it into Claude Projects. ChatGPT Custom Instructions. Gemini Gem. API system message. The difference is immediate and it's brutal.

by Guri Singh, X |  Read more:

Image: Marc Andressen

[ed. Don't usually care what Andreessen does or think but this could be useful. Maybe I'll do a search of good prompts from other people and see what they've discovered.]

Critical Mass

Rick Beato Versus the NY Times

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article—so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy—but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in”—whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list.” But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter.” The survey was just a “starting point.” The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment—when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny. [...]

During the subsequent 72 hours, the backlash intensified. A fiery response from esteemed jazz pianist Brad Mehldau was ostensibly a defense of Billy Joel, but focused mostly on the problems with music criticism of this sort. He describes a music critic character type very similar to the one I warned against in my article:

He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically.

But even this response was mild compared to Rick Beato’s take, which went live yesterday. Rick is a very smart guy with big ears and a deep understanding of music—much deeper than those Times insiders. And his words carry weight. By my measure, Beato has more influence than any music critic in the world right now, and when he says something, it gets attention.

Rick had already released a video about the Times songwriter list, and he rarely deals with the same issue a second time. “I don’t usually make videos back-to-back on the same topic,” he explains. But he was also irritated by the tone of the Times video and felt compelled to respond to it.

His rebuttal is going viral with a vengeance. It’s been up for less than a day, and already has ten times as many views as the original Times video.

For the most part, he just shares clips from the Times podcast—which are damaging enough—before asking in frustration: “You hear these guys competing for the worst take?” In his words, they come across as “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing smug people”—whose condescension is all the worse because they have “no background in music.”

Rick, I should add, is not just a pundit, but is also a very skilled guitarist, record producer, music educator, etc. He possesses real credentials—the same ones the Times critics lack—and not just opinions.

But did he go too far?

The people watching his video clearly don’t think so. It already has 10,000+ comments—that’s more responses than the original Times article received. And they are brutal.

That first comment has almost 8,000 likes. As I said above, Hades is getting hotter—especially that level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for music critics.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:
Images: NYT/YouTube

[ed. No Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, James Taylor... but Missy Elliot, Taylor Swift, Young Thug (?!), Babyface, Stephen Merrit, Romeo Santos, Outkast (?!), Lana Del Ray (?!), The Dream (who?), Bad Bunny, other greats...]

Intervention Time

via: X
[ed. Surreal. Republicans continue their silence and make excuses. The entire nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Nothing to see here. For more, including pictures and videos, see: If You Have to Tell People You’re the G.O.A.T., Then You Are Not (Larry Johnson). Then there's this - below:]

Exodus 32 (Updated): Evangelicals Gather in Mar-a-Lago to Bless Golden Statue of Donald Trump

MAGA evangelical “leaders” gathered at Mar-a-Lago and conducted a full public golden calf ritual blessing and dedicating a literal gold statue of Donald Trump as if he were a divine figure. 

This is not Christianity. This is the exact biblical abomination of the golden calf (Exodus 32) the people melting their gold, creating an idol, and declaring it their god while claiming divine blessing.

by Aprajita Nafs Nefes /X |  Read more:

***

"When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

“I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.” [...]

Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. [...]

When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”

“Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” [...]

The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

So Moses went back to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”

The Lord replied to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.”

And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made."

by BibleGateway |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. Yep, they really did this (with Trump sending in audio congratulations to himself). Additional commentary: 

***

They literally had a bunch of pastors do the meme and bless a gold statute of Trump...They came together the pastors with Jewish leaders. I was like, am I…this is somebody this has got to be like AI, right?

Stas: Wait wait wait. I missed this. They blessed a golden statue of Trump.

Barnes: Yes. Yes.

Stas: [Interjecting, laughing] Wasn’t a golden calf?

Banres: I mean, that’s what everybody was saying. He’s like, “But no, in fact, the pastor went out of his way, “This isn’t a golden calf. It’s a golden statue of Trump.” Like, that’s how it’s different. And they had like Jewish leaders next to him. And it’s like, you got to be kidding me. Like, “We here bless this great statue to the great leader Donald Trump.”

via:

May 10, 2026

There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.

Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.

May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.

But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.

This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”

But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.

Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year. Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”

Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.

As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.

Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus. [...]

In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.

In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.

But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.

“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised. [...]

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Change in Private-Sector Jobs Since December, 2023

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
Source:

[ed. We all know about the jobs boom in data center construction, but it appears to be a blip in the overall big picture. With an increasingly aging population, more AI-related job losses, a dysfuctional if not entirely broken healthcare system (and Congress), etc. Human support industries will likely be the bedrock of whatever economy exists/persists going forward.]

Italian Brainrot

Italian brainrot (Wikipedia)

Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.

The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.

Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon

[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]

***

"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."

The Real Cost of Downsizing Social Security

Under new leadership, the agency has reduced the role of field offices across the country and centralized its operations, making it harder for millions of Americans to get help with their benefits.

Since last spring, I’ve been in touch with a woman I’ll call Jean, the manager of a Social Security field office in the Midwest. She and her team assist beneficiaries, by phone and in person, with retirement and disability claims, Medicare applications, Social Security cards, Supplemental Security Income, and other government programs. Their service area, based on Zip Code, spans hundreds of square miles. It isn’t unusual for people to drive two and a half hours to get help.

Jean joined the Social Security Administration more than a decade ago. She started as a claims representative, taking calls and staffing the front desk. The S.S.A. provides benefits to seventy-five million Americans. It’s enormous, and enormously complex, yet there’s an odd intimacy to the work. People come through at the most important junctures of their lives: childbirth, disablement, incarceration, immigration, retirement, death. Twelve hundred field offices are open five days a week. With the exception of the U.S. Postal Service, the S.S.A. is the only federal agency with such a direct, brick-and-mortar connection to the American public.

Early last year, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, of the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, accused the S.S.A. of widespread fraud—Musk said on X, without evidence, that millions of centenarian “vampires” were collecting checks from the agency—and listed dozens of offices for closure. Trump appointed a long-time agency employee named Leland Dudek as the acting commissioner after Dudek boasted that he had “circumvented the chain of command” to help DOGE access confidential data. Then, last May, Frank Bisignano, a fintech executive with no government experience, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the S.S.A.; later, he was appointed to run the Internal Revenue Service as well. (A spokesman for the S.S.A. said that Bisignano serves both agencies “100 percent of the time,” and declined my request to interview him.) At an early meeting, Bisignano told a group of S.S.A. managers that he’d known nothing about the agency when he was tapped by Trump. “I’m, like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do?’ ” he said, in audio obtained by ABC News. “So, I’m Googling ‘Social Security,’ you know?”

In 2025, the S.S.A. shed more than seven thousand of its fifty-seven thousand employees, including some three thousand workers who provide direct customer service. Over-all staffing has hit its lowest point since the late nineteen-sixties, when the system served approximately fifty million fewer beneficiaries. In 2024, an index measuring employee satisfaction gave the S.S.A. a score of fifty-four out of a hundred; in 2025, a similar index gave it a score of fifteen.

Bisignano was not one of the Trump appointees who promised to destroy their own agencies. He demonstrated no outward hostility toward the S.S.A., which has dealt with inefficiencies and delays that have stumped Democrats and Republicans alike. But he did introduce significant changes, often—according to Jean and twenty other S.S.A. workers, recipients, and experts I spoke to—without fully understanding the implications of those decisions. Most of his reforms seemed to shrink the role of field offices and nationalize operations.

Jean’s Midwest region, for instance, was combined with much of the West, so that it now stretched from Ohio to Alaska. The head count at the consolidated headquarters went from around five hundred to just sixteen, eliminating many policy experts who had assisted field offices with difficult cases. Bisignano was keen to implement technologies such as A.I. call sorting, and set a goal of reducing in-person visits by fifty per cent in 2026—from nearly thirty-two million to fifteen million. (This goal was circulated to employees in writing, but the S.S.A. spokesman denied its existence, saying, “the fake news media is eager to ignore the truth to scare seniors.”) In November, Bisignano’s chief of field operations told field offices that they should no longer operate like “independent ‘mini-SSAs.’ ” Jean believed that this reflected a misunderstanding of how the public interacts with the agency. “If you keep it local and we are ‘mini-S.S.A.s,’ we’re your source,” she said. “You have someone accountable to fix your problem. You know them. You know their name.”

by E. Tammy Kim, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Chris W. Kim
[ed. When I signed up for Medicare I had to visit the local field office (which served both SSA/Medicare) in person, 35 miles away. They said they needed to review and copy my personal records before my application could be processed (ID, birth certificate, marriage dissolution papers, etc.). It took me three separate tries/trips before I could get in because the office was so overburdened. There were about 30 seats, each one taken, and three SSA/Medicare workers to help everyone. Each interview took about 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer, and there was a line stretching out the door with another 25 or so people waiting to get in. When I finally got lucky on my third try (after only an hour's wait), a barely qualified interviewer who couldn't answer my most basic questions pushed me into a one-size-fits-all template, then immediately sent my application off for processing. When I got home I reviewed my application and compared it to the Medicare booklet and regulations I'd previously been sent. It was then that I realized they'd given me wrong information. If my application went through it would cost me at least $1000 month in additional Medicare monthly payments. So I called back and requested they change it, but the details were apparently too difficult for the staff on hand to comprehend and they told me it was too late anyway - the forms had already been sent out and they couldn't change them again. So after another couple calls and dealing with that roadblock over and over again I called a Medicare representative on their website toll number. Again, I had to do this three times because every time I called I kept getting a different person who gave me a different explanation or conflicting information. Finally, I gave up and contacted my state Representative's office and laid the whole mess out to them and asked for help. They were finally able to get the manager on the phone who personally reviewed my application, agreed with me, and got everything fixed and resubmitted. But the whole experience was beyond aggravating. Field offices are definitely needed because so many people's situations are unique, but only if they're well staffed with knowledgeable people who have the time and incentive to help (mine wasn't). It was like going to DMV but a hundred times worse. I can't imagine what it's like now.]

Kash Patel’s Personalized Calling Card

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.

But then came Kash Patel.

President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).

One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.

Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.

The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”

The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing. [...]

A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)

Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)

In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.

“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”

by Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic | Read more:
Images: The Atlantic; Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton/X; Health Ranger Report
[ed. What a sad little man, but then no different than his boss. See also: Kash as the Poster Boy for Kakistocracy (Richard Hanania).]

Logitech’s Tiny Folding Mouse

Logitech is reportedly developing a new wireless mouse that folds in half to make it easier to carry around in a bag or pocket. According to leaked marketing images shared by WinFuture, Logitech’s foldable mouse caused “22 percent less muscle strain” compared to using a laptop trackpad, and can be used across “multiple operating systems.”

Logitech’s design is visually similar to Microsoft’s Surface Arc mouse and Lenovo’s Yoga mouse, sporting the same arched shape when unfolded for use. One key difference is that while Microsoft and Lenovo’s offerings can only be folded flat, the new Logitech mouse — the name of which is still unknown — folds in half like a clamshell. There’s no official specifications or dimensions available yet, but one image shows that it’s very compact when folded, seemingly dwarfed by the hand that’s sliding it into a pocket.

In place of a traditional scroll wheel, WinFuture reports the new Logitech mouse will feature a so-called “Adaptive Touch Scrolling” area between the two standard mouse buttons that enables users to scroll by swiping over a small trackpad. A green light can be seen on this touch-sensitive area, which likely indicates an active wireless connection. The new Logitech mouse can be paired with up to three host devices via Bluetooth, according to WinFuture, and its shape allows it to be used by both left- and right-handed users.

by Jess Weatherbed, The Verge |  Read more:

Images: WinFuture

Loggins & Messina

[ed. See also: Live From Daryl's house: I'm Alright.]