All That's Left When You Die

Last month my dad turned seventy-eight years old. A few days before his birthday, I drove down to San Diego to see him.

“What do you want for your birthday,” I asked, as we sat in his living room.

“I want to talk to you about something. Let’s take the dog for a walk,” he said, as he grabbed a leash that sat next to his recliner. “You take the shit bag,” he added, handing me a bundled up plastic baggy.

We headed up his quiet suburban street as his large brown Rottweiler mix walked ahead.

“The human body wasn’t meant to live this long,” he said.

“Seventy-eight is not that old,” I replied.

“Do we have to sit here and dignify a clearly horseshit statement such as that, or can you cease to pander to me and just have a conversation?”

“Okay. Seventy-eight is old.”

He hiked up his sweatpants and quickened the pace of our walk.

“I’m not complaining. I’m just saying people peddle this ridiculous idea that you can be an old person and go water skiing and fuck whenever you want and it’s bullshit. It’s fucking hubris that’s specific to humans and no other species,” he said, as he yanked the dog’s leash, pulling it away from the neighbor’s lawn right before it trampled their flowers.

“Well, the other option is to just accept that death is coming for you,” I replied.

“It is coming for you. You can’t beat death. It’s un-fucking-defeated. And if you fight it, it will humiliate you. It’ll chain you to a bed and make someone have to wipe your shitty ass. It’ll make you forget who your own fucking kids are. It takes your dignity and it whips its’ dick out and pisses on it. When you’re younger and it comes for you, it’s worth it to fight it and suffer through the humiliation. When you’re older, what the fuck does it get you to go through that?,” he said, then took a deep breath and stopped on the sidewalk.

I looked at him collecting his thoughts and every muscle in my stomach contracted in fear. I could barely get out my next words.

“Are you dying?” I asked.

“What? Fuck no. If I was dying I’d just call you up and say ‘Hey, I’m dying.’

“I would prefer you didn’t do it like that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Like I’m going to give a shit what you prefer when I’m dying,” he laughed, as he began walking again.

“So then why are you bringing this up?”

“Take a look at the dog,” he said, pointing at his best friend. “The dog gives a shit about three things, in this order; Living, fucking, eating. Now, if he’s eating, and the opportunity to fuck presents itself, he’d stop eating so that he could fuck. And if he’s fucking, and something threatens his livelihood, he’d stop fucking so that he could protect himself. What does that tell you?” he asked.

“I don’t know, isn’t that, like, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or something?”

“I’m okay with you just saying ‘I don’t know.’ I’d actually prefer that to a dumb answer.”

“I don’t know, dad,” I said, getting a little annoyed.

“The dog, just like every other animal including us, thinks first and foremost about staying alive and passing on their genetics. It’s in our DNA to do so. You spend all your time when you’re young making sure you do all the best eating, fucking, and living you can. But then you get old like me and you can’t even tell if you farted and nothing in your body works like it used to. And you start to think, or at least I do, about how you can spend all your most effective years on this planet, which is filled with billions of people, not giving a shit about anybody but the ten or so motherfuckers that share your blood. And I think human beings are capable of more than just that. And we should want to be. Because when you die, all that’s left of you is the people you gave a shit about. Everybody loves to say how much we’ve evolved, but the real measure of whether or not a species has evolved is if they can look their DNA in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you, I can do better than you think I can.’

by Justin Halpern, GQ |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Who Looks Like That. From the collection: Sh*t My Dad Says (recommended)]

Jean-Luc Godard, The Image Book 
via:

Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued

On the roof of a luxury building at the edge of Central Park, 585 feet above the concrete, a lawyer named David Goodfriend has attached a modest four-foot antenna that is a threat to the entire TV-industrial complex.

The device is there to soak up TV signals coursing through the air — content from NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS and CBS, including megahits like “This Is Us” and this Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl LIII. Once plucked from the ether, the content is piped through the internet and assembled into an app called Locast. It’s a streaming service, and it makes all of this network programming available to subscribers in ways that are more convenient than relying on a home antenna: It’s viewable on almost any device, at any time, in pristine quality that doesn’t cut in and out. It’s also completely free.

If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee — while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you’ll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.

Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Goodfriend, 50, said he hoped to cover the entire nation as quickly as possible. “I’m not stopping,” he said. “I can’t now.”

The comment is basically a dare to the networks to take legal action against him. By giving away TV, Mr. Goodfriend is undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies — a sum that will exceed $10 billion this year, according to the research firm Kagan S&P Global Market Intelligence. For cable customers, the traditional network channels typically add about $12 to a monthly bill.

With consumers increasingly willing to piece together their own bespoke packages of content — paying a few bucks to Netflix here, a few to HBO there — anything that encourages people to cut their cable cords is a challenge to the cable TV empire. That calculus makes tiny Locast, whose modest website (“Help us free your TV!”) asks for donations starting at $5, perhaps the most audacious media experiment in years. (...)

Mr. Goodfriend is not a rich tech entrepreneur or a wealthy heir — just a lawyer who has made a decent living. Locast could still meet the fate of Aereo and be sued into financial oblivion by the networks. So why is he doing this?

The answer is partly principle, and partly intellectual mischief: With his public-private background, he has spotted an imbalance in the media ecosystem, he said, and decided to give the whole thing a shake.

“I ask people all the time, ‘Do you know you’re supposed to get television for free?’” Mr. Goodfriend said during an interview in Central Park, gesturing to a gaggle of visitors. “Most people under 50 don’t get it.”

by Edmund Lee, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeenah Moon

Smoked Out

Last spring, my wife, wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the climate change books I had agreed to write about for this paper in a cardboard box and put the box on top of the others starting to fill our garage, and soon spring turned to endless, destructive summer.

The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.

I first heard about the smoke problem from a publisher of religious and philosophical books who had lived in Ashland for 24 years, raising his three children in a blue, three-bedroom house near the business district. Now they were grown up and publishing was dying and he found he had trouble breathing in the summer months because there were an increasing number of fires in the surrounding hills. The forests here are dense and dry. The valley is shaped like a trough. When wildfires burned, the smoke lingered in the valley for weeks, and he had to stay indoors. It had happened almost every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at the beginning. The house wasn’t quite right for us. I decided we should rent instead and found a place a few blocks away, across the creek.

Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.

When a building is burning, firefighters usually try to extinguish every last flame. It’s a fight to the death, over in a matter of hours. When thousands or tens of thousands of acres of forest are burning, the major goal is containment, a kind of negotiated peace with a force greater than man. Wildland firefighters try to halt a blaze’s progress, encircling it with natural or manmade firebreaks. They work to keep the flames away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions – humidity, wind speed and direction – change and the autumn rains finally arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be.

On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.

The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the visitors’ centre, where they sang songs about the forest and built fairy houses out of bark and moss and acorns. Some days, the AQI dropped into the orange zone, and at least once into the yellow, but the smoke always returned when the wind shifted. I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt.

By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives. I had brought the long neglected box of climate change books with me, and now, safe in the mountain air, I began reading.

There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.

by McKenzie Funk, LRB |  Read more:

Image: 

Eurythmics

[ed. Go Annie]

Nihilist Dad Jokes, Part 2

What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Every bite is a flavorless and hollow lie. Every meal gives me less pleasure with each passing day.

- - -

“Dad, can you put my shoes on?”

“No, they won’t fit me. I have outgrown small shoes, just as I have outgrown feeling awe at the sun’s rise, joy at your mother’s smile, and belief in a just and loving God.”

- - -

I’d tell you a chemistry joke… but I doubt I’d get a reaction! Laughter is worthless. It is a servile submission reflex to avoid being singled out and crushed by the group alpha.

- - -

“Dad, I’m hungry”

“Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad.”

“Why’d you name me ‘Hungry,’ Dad?”

“Because every day you will consume food and entertainment until you are sick, yet every night you will fall asleep empty inside.”

- - -

Have you tried eating a clock? It’s time-consuming! Soon I will stand on the precipice of eternal sleep, and the tides of time will sweep away everything I have ever known. So I’m not feeling motivated to perform kitchen renovations right now. (...)

- - -

How many apples grow on a tree? All of them!

Deer, raccoons, and greedy children will devour the apples, thoughtlessly, for years. One day our poisoned climate will collect its debts and choke all life. Tsunamis will flood the lands, trees and fruit will wither in a miasma, and the remaining scavengers will scream in the face of extinction. Mother Nature’s last word will be blind, despotic, and final.

That’s the deal with the apples.

- - -

“Dad, did you get a haircut?”

“No, I got them all cut! Hair is dead skin, and a barber’s scissors are a sneak preview of the reaper’s scythe.”

- - -

I bought a cheap elephant ride yesterday… I got it for peanuts!

I sat on the beast hoping to excavate some boyish excitement. Yet I felt nothing. When I was young I dreamed of changing the world with my ideas. But people care not for ideas — they value conformity, popularity, and the fantasy of having sex with someone who has never thought about them. So I gave up on philosophy. Now I spew jokes like a trained circus animal.

“What’s the leading cause of dry skin? Towels!”

“I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something!”

“Dad, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”

My son stares at the television, hypnotized by a pop culture I no longer understand. I am now an obsolete machine: begging to be noticed, desperate to feel relevant, and doomed to annihilation. I run from the house trembling and screaming and throw my fist toward a darkened sky — only to find a thundercloud in the shape of an elephant. “WHY DO YOU MOCK ME LIKE THIS!? THESE ELEPHANTS DO NOTHING FOR ME!!” But this cloud, like all clouds, is meaningless: just random water droplets that will vanish like every wisp of cotton candy I’ve ever used to purchase a brief smile from a boy who once revered me.

by Alex Baia, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Haydée Milanés

[ed. See also: Siempre Que Te Vas]

Why We Care (and Don’t Care) About the New Rules of Golf

If the rules of football worked the way that the rules of golf work, the Saints, not the Rams, would be playing in the Super Bowl. With one minute and forty-five seconds to go in the N.F.C. championship game, Nickell Robey-Coleman, a cornerback for the Rams, would have penalized himself for pass interference and a helmet-to-helmet hit—flagrant violations that the officials on the field inexplicably failed to call—and the Saints would have run down the clock before kicking an unanswerable field goal.

Golf tournaments have officials, too, but their role is mainly advisory; the golfers are responsible for policing themselves, and, to a remarkable extent, they really do. The most famous example occurred during the U.S. Open in 1925, when Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself for an infraction that only he had observed: his ball, he said, had moved slightly when he addressed it in the rough. His honesty possibly cost him the title, but he dismissed those who applauded him: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as praise him for playing by the rules.” By contrast, a running back who didn’t try to steal an extra foot by sliding the ball downfield after being tackled would be considered almost negligent. Robey-Coleman, to his credit, said, after the game, that he should have been called for pass interference. But, in football, what a player does matters only if it matters to a referee.

Not that golfers don’t cheat. There’s an old joke about a weekend player who is so accustomed to fudging his score that when he one day makes a hole-in-one he marks it on his scorecard as a zero. Nevertheless, even at the recreational level—and certainly on the tour—when golfers break rules it’s usually not because they’re trying to get away with something but because they don’t know what they’re doing. The rules of golf are hard even for rules officials to keep straight. Every few years, the United States Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews address confusions, anachronisms, and other issues by revising the rulebook, which they’ve published jointly since 1952. Sometimes the changes make things better, and sometimes they make things worse. The 2019 revision, which was unusually extensive, does both.

Golf’s first written rules were set down, in 1744, by the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, whose home course, in Edinburgh, Scotland, had five holes. There were thirteen succinct “articles,” of which the tenth was “If a Ball be stopp’d by any person, Horse, Dog, or any thing else, The Ball so stop’d must be play’d where it lyes.” That last clause contains what can be thought of as the game’s foundational commandment. Many of golf’s other rules—in a book that now runs to two hundred and forty pages—are, in effect, exceptions to it.

Several of the 2019 changes were made in the hope of speeding up what has become a painfully slow game. Players used to be allowed five minutes to search for a lost ball; they now get three. The old rulebook said little about pace of play; the new one recommends (though it doesn’t require) taking no more than forty seconds to hit each shot, and it encourages “ready golf” in stroke play rather than requiring, as the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith did, that the player “whose Ball lyes farthest from the Hole” play first. There used to be a penalty for hitting an unattended flagstick with a putted ball; that penalty is now gone.

Putting with the flagstick in the hole really will speed up play if all golfers do it—but if only some do, as is certain to be the case, it will actually make things slower, by creating a whole new layer of pointless putting-green housekeeping: flag in for me, flag out for you, flag back in for my partner, flag out again for yours. Nevertheless, I welcome this rule change, because I think that putting with the flagstick in the hole makes me a slightly better putter, both by forcing me to focus on a skinnier, more visible target, and by giving me a backstop for overly energetic strokes. The tour player who has taken the greatest advantage, so far, is Bryson DeChambeau, who has said that putting with the flagstick in the hole is “statistically proven to be a benefit in 99 per cent of situations.” He won last weekend, in Dubai. (...)

The U.S.G.A. and the R. & A. used to publish a supplemental volume, called “Decisions on the Rules of Golf,” which came out every two years and was hundreds of pages longer than the rulebook. Its purpose was to “clarify matters which may not be entirely clear” from the rules themselves, based on issues that the governing bodies had had to settle for baffled players and rules officials. What used to be called “decisions” have now been renamed “interpretations.” Some of them have been incorporated into the rulebook itself, while others have been collected in a new publication, “The Official Guidebook to the Rules of Golf,” which contains other explanatory material as well.

I own several old editions of the “Decisions,” and they have long been my favorite bathroom reading. They have made me appreciate the tremendous challenge involved in trying to behave as Bobby Jones expected all golfers to behave, in addition to providing an agreeable exercise in Schadenfreude: “A player misses a shot completely and, in swinging his club back, he accidentally knocks his ball backwards. Was the backward swing a stroke? If the ball comes to rest out of bounds, how does the player proceed?” Also: “A tumbleweed blowing across the course strikes a ball at rest and knocks it into the hole. What is the procedure?” Furthermore: “Is a worm, when half on top of the surface of the ground and half below, a loose impediment which may be removed? Or is it fixed and solidly embedded and therefore not a loose impediment?”

All these problems are given definitive solutions, but the real pleasure in studying them lies not in learning the answers but in imagining the situations in which they arose: “After a player putts, the flagstick attendant removes the flagstick and a knob attached to the top of the flagstick falls off. The knob strikes the player’s moving ball and deflects it. What is the ruling?” You can easily picture the scene: the imbecile tending the flag; the brilliant fifty-foot putt that would have dropped if the detached knob hadn’t struck it; the ensuing screams. Next question!

by David Owen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Martin Parr/Magnum

The Twisting Nature of Love

Water comes over the screen in waves for long minutes as the film opens. Offscreen, we hear the scrubbing of a straw bristle brush, as soapsuds float in and out of the frame, and at last the shot widens to reveal a young woman, tin bucket in one hand, long-handled squeegee in the other.

The tiled area under the brush is the carport of a home in one of the older parts of Mexico City, and if you’re a Mexican viewer you’ll know without thinking that the person with the bucket is a servant, doing the daily morning clean-up. You’ll know her occupation even before you really see her face because she is dark-skinned and too poorly dressed to be anything else in a house of that size, and because she exudes an air of calm and ingrained patience. What you won’t necessarily realize is that she, Cleo, is the protagonist of the film, because no Mexican film, other than the farcical and offensive comedies featuring la India Maria, has ever had a household servant at its center.

(It is only later that we’ll understand that what Cleo is so busily scrubbing away is the filthiest of all filth: dog shit, supplied in large quantities by Borras, a cheerful mutt who is the house dog, but not exactly the house pet. American-style pets didn’t really exist in Mexico back in 1970, when the film begins.)

For an American viewer—or at least for those viewers who have never met or been a domestic employee, known anyone who employs a full- or part-time servant, or hired a woman to provide domestic help—reading the character of Cleo, and by extension those of her employers, is possibly even more complicated. But start by looking carefully at the house: it is in the no longer elegant Roma neighborhood. Large but not enormous, and somewhat run-down, it’s certainly not luxurious. In addition to Cleo and her best friend, the household cook, seven people live here: four children, who share two bedrooms; their father, who is a doctor, and his wife, a chemist; and the wife’s mother. The furniture, heavy and dark, most likely belongs to the wife’s mother, as, in fact, the whole house probably does. (How do I know this? Because in the 1960s professionals like Cleo’s employers lived in newer, more comfortable houses in the suburbs, or in apartments that were cheaper and easier to care for.)

This is the house that Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Roma, grew up in. Or at least it’s the recreation, meticulous to the point of madness, of that house. And this is the story of Cuarón’s memory of a turbulent time in his childhood. The movie is shot parallel to the action, as if the camera were the ghost of Cuarón revisiting his childhood and looking on it silently, with the compassion and distance we are sometimes lucky enough to muster for our sinning youth and that of our parents. The hero, though, is Cleo, the nanny whose affection, unlike the parents’, is never wavering or disconcerting, and who, unlike a different, infinitely tiresome nanny on other screens around the city, performs true miracles. (...)

So who is Cleo? The subtitles tell us that the language she speaks with Adela, the cook, is Mixteco, so we know she is from a desperately poor highland area of southern Mexico comprising parts of the states of Puebla and Oaxaca. Her small size and the shape of her face tell us so, too, because the dozens of nationalities, languages, and customs of the first peoples in Mexico were as highly distinct as those of Europeans; there were, among others, long-boned Apaches in the north, Purépechas and Mexicas in the middle, and delicately built Zapotecs, Mayas, and Mixtecos in the south. (Both the real-life Liboria and the first-time actress who plays her, Yalitza Aparicio, a recently graduated preschool teacher, are Mixtecas. Aparicio was living in her native village in the highlands of Oaxaca when Cuarón recruited her to play Cleo.)

Lastly, Cleo is part of a family, or rather two. She belongs to a family back home, of course, but Roma is about the family she works for and lives with. Nannies everywhere are often considered part of the family, and families tend to reflect the societies of which they are the building blocks. In this particular case, Cleo is and will remain throughout the film—and, we understand, beyond it, as the real-life Libo has remained to this day—part of a hierarchical, exploitative, unequal, unstable, and nevertheless unstintingly loyal and, yes, loving, Mexican family.

Cleo and Adela (played with relaxed authority by another Mixteca nonprofessional actress, Nancy García) are probably kin. Adela, the older of the two, may have emigrated first to the city, in search, like Cleo, of a life better than the parched subsistence she and her family eked out back home, with its grueling workload of endless days that transformed women into hags before they turned forty. But Cuarón is not interested in portraying Cleo anthropologically: he wants to show us what she was to him, and to tell the story of Mexico City and what happened to Cleo the year that his own family shattered.

by Alma Guillermoprieto, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Carlos Somonte/Netflix

Kamala Harris on Truancy

[ed. Ok, this is not the kind of politician we need going forward (listen to her talk about the intimidating power of her letterhead). Apparently, Kirsten Gillibrand was there too and thought it was hilarious. See also: this (Twitter).]

Facebook Pays Teens to Install VPN That Spies on Them

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits, and it has no plans to stop.

Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.

We asked Guardian Mobile Firewall’s security expert Will Strafach to dig into the Facebook Research app, and he told us that “If Facebook makes full use of the level of access they are given by asking users to install the Certificate, they will have the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.” It’s unclear exactly what data Facebook is concerned with, but it gets nearly limitless access to a user’s device once they install the app. (...)

Facebook’s surveillance app

Facebook first got into the data-sniffing business when it acquired Onavo for around $120 million in 2014. The VPN app helped users track and minimize their mobile data plan usage, but also gave Facebook deep analytics about what other apps they were using. Internal documents acquired by Charlie Warzel and Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed News reveal that Facebook was able to leverage Onavo to learn that WhatsApp was sending more than twice as many messages per day as Facebook Messenger. Onavo allowed Facebook to spot WhatsApp’s meteoric rise and justify paying $19 billion to buy the chat startup in 2014. WhatsApp has since tripled its user base, demonstrating the power of Onavo’s foresight.

Over the years since, Onavo clued Facebook in to what apps to copy, features to build and flops to avoid. By 2018, Facebook was promoting the Onavo app in a Protect bookmark of the main Facebook app in hopes of scoring more users to snoop on. Facebook also launched the Onavo Bolt app that let you lock apps behind a passcode or fingerprint while it surveils you, but Facebook shut down the app the day it was discovered following privacy criticism. Onavo’s main app remains available on Google Play and has been installed more than 10 million times.

The backlash heated up after security expert Strafach detailed in March how Onavo Protect was reporting to Facebook when a user’s screen was on or off, and its Wi-Fi and cellular data usage in bytes even when the VPN was turned off. In June, Apple updated its developer policies to ban collecting data about usage of other apps or data that’s not necessary for an app to function. Apple proceeded to inform Facebook in August that Onavo Protect violated those data collection policies and that the social network needed to remove it from the App Store, which it did, Deepa Seetharaman of the WSJ reported.

But that didn’t stop Facebook’s data collection.

by Josh Constine, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Zucked: An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor (NY Times)]

A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Into Podcasts

As a content-obsessed millennial, podcasts have long been ingrained in my daily routine. I listen while commuting, cooking, running errands, putting away laundry, washing dishes or during any relatively mindless activity that can be done while wearing wireless headphones.

My bond with podcasts is so cemented that it comes as a shock when someone I meet at a party — or someone in my family, or a friend I thought I knew — tells me that they, in the year 2019, do not listen to podcasts. And never have. And don’t really get what it’s all about. And, worse, don’t quite know how to start.

Their reasons range from “I don’t have time” to “It’s passed me by” to “What should I even listen to?” Luckily, those concerns are easily answered and dispatched. For anyone who wants to become a full-fledged podcast listener, here’s what you need to know to get into it, from experts who know best.

Find the right app

To keep and organize your podcasts, you’ll need a podcast app that allows you to subscribe to new shows and listen. If you’re brand-new to podcasts, the stock podcast app already installed on your smartphone is the easiest point of entry; for iPhone, you have the Apple Podcasts app, and for Android users, the easiest option is to play podcasts through the Play Music app.

Beyond that, there is a huge range of third-party apps to choose from, but the app I use regularly and like best — and the favorite among the podcast experts interviewed for this article — is Pocket Casts, which costs a one-time payment of $3.99 on both Android and iOS.

Nicholas Quah, who writes the podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod and is a podcast critic for Vulture, uses six different podcast apps, but prefers Pocket Casts. Dana Gerber-Margie, co-founder of the Bello Collective, a volunteer-run podcast review website and newsletter, has used many apps, most recently Stitcher, and made the switch to Pocket Casts because others “couldn’t handle the amount of subscriptions that I was maintaining.” (Currently, she subscribes to 1,427 podcasts in all and regularly listens to between 40 and 50.) (...)

Find the things you really want to hear

Now that you have your app and gadgets, you’re ready for the fun part: finding podcasts you’re going to love.

If it feels overwhelming, it’s not just you: Though podcasts have been around for at least a decade, there’s still no central database or clearinghouse for the thousands of podcasts out there, Ms. Gerber-Margie said.

“A lot of discovery happens via the way you choose to listen. There’s no ‘New York Times best-seller list,’” she said.

However, big podcasting powerhouses are a great first place to look. National Public Radio produces many worthwhile podcasts, including “Invisibilia,” “Planet Money” and the daily news show “Up First.” Likewise, public radio stations across the country produce a ton of great shows, like “Last Seen” by Boston’s WBUR and “Making Obama” by Chicago’s WBEZ, and large podcasting studios — Radiotopia, Gimlet Media, Maximum Fun — will give a range of solid choices with excellent production value. (We list some of our favorite shows below.)

by Rachel Holliday Smith, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via

Into the Dark

Heroes of the Thai Cave Rescue

The day before the rescue, everything is ready. Several options have been duly considered and politely dismissed. The kids won’t be confined to airtight metal coffins, as Elon Musk has proposed, or made to crawl through a several-kilometres-long inflatable bouncy castle tube, as one Bangkok construction company suggested. No: their faces will be covered by full-face masks and their bodies dragged underwater. Separately, in 45-minute intervals, four lead divers will each take a child through two kilometres of watery passageways and treacherous boulders with only their hands to guide them along a single thread, before delivering them to Station 3—call it Grand Central—where teams of medical support will await to hurry them through the rest of the cave, pumped mostly dry. The terrain the divers will traverse will be dotted with four manned diving stations, banks of land in air chambers equipped with air and oxygen tanks, with only a couple of support divers at each. These support divers, with only their dive buddy, will wait to offer assistance to each lead diver bringing a child through. Most support divers will be European; all lead divers will be British. At least that is the plan. Onward to the drills.

First, the pool drills. Little boys plucked from a local school shiver in a nearby pool, testing the smallest full-face masks sourced from around the world. Divers practice hauling the boys face-down through the water to see if the masks leak. Unlike the more common half-masks, with which a diver uses a regulator mouthpiece to breathe, full-face masks use pressure to push air out, making it more difficult for water to seep in. Full-face masks must be sealed airtight, though—if water were to seep in through a too-large mask, the mask would flood and the child could drown. They don’t make full-face masks for children. These masks may not be small enough. But onward.

Next, the rock drill. Like a special forces team drawing lines in the sand with rocks and branches to map out an attack, the divers walk through a miniature mock-up cave in a parking lot. Police tape wrapped around sticks signifies the route along the main guide line the divers will follow out of the cave. Plastic half-litre water bottles wrapped with different colours of tape signify people and tanks: red for the children and the coach, blue for air tanks for the divers, green for oxygen tanks for the children. (If something goes wrong, it will be easier to revive someone who has been breathing pure oxygen.) Here, enacted in the rock drill, is “the plan”: extract four of the cave’s prisoners, one at a time, dead or alive, on each of three rescue days—plus a fifth on the third day. Thirteen red bottles are placed near the stick marking the spot where the soccer team has been stranded for two weeks. It begins: Is Station 6 that bit of mud or that bit of mud? Do we need more tanks here and fewer there? Fewer here and more there? This is the only time divers see the cave in anything approximating light. Still, onward.

To the sedation drill.

by Shannon Gormley, Maclean's | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Rolling Stones

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How Premium Mediocre Conquered Fashion

Last year the blogger Venkatesh Rao coined the term “premium mediocre.” He was referring to a segment of economic activity largely dreamed up by marketers to give the masses the illusion that they are consuming luxury, when in reality they were doing nothing of the sort. Some examples of what is proving to be a highly profitable sector — craft beer, artisanal pizza, $25 “signature” burgers, and my personal favourite, premium economy on domestic flights.

The idea is simple — by dressing up something mediocre as premium with a few extra touches, real and imagined, companies play on people’s aspirational drive to give them the illusion that they are purchasing into something elevated. The marketing-speak created around the premium mediocre sector uses terms like “preferred,” “signature” and “collection” — best used piled on top of each other to make, say, “signature collection.” Here, the paradox of providing an air of exclusivity without excluding anyone is key.

This is an old story in fashion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Starbucks and Delta executives have taken a page out of fashion’s playbook. What’s relatively new is how pervasive premium mediocre fashion has become. Take a look around, and it won’t be hard for you to spot premium mediocre fashion virtually everywhere — from Uniqlo cashmere (that doesn’t feel like cashmere at all) to Balenciaga baseball hats and Gucci headbands, from logoed Burberry keychains to pretty much anything at the fragrance counter in Bloomingdale’s. (...)

Premium mediocre extends to the higher echelons of fashion as well, largely at its entry-level product range. Premium mediocre is the Prada nylon backpack, the Louis Vuitton bag in coated canvas, the $375 Celine card holder. This segment of luxury fashion has been doing extremely well, because the margins in the premium mediocre segment are uncommonly high. As far as 2015, according to Euromonitor International, luxury small leather goods accounted for $5.7 billion in sales, projected to grow to $7.5 billion by 2020. On Lyst.com, the fashion shopping aggregator, plastic sandals by Givenchy and Gucci routinely top the most sought-after product category.

Premium mediocre in fashion is not a new phenomenon. During the ‘80s some Parisian couturiers licensed their name to mass market manufacturers. All of a sudden office workers could buy fifty-dollar Pierre Cardin button-up shirts. What followed was brand dilution and the perception that those names were no longer associated with luxury. During the ‘90s licensing was broadly reigned in and the image of those luxury houses had to be rebuilt.

What’s different this time around? Several things, such as the culture of entitlement of the millennial generation (and everyone else), its impact on consuming experiences rather than products, democratisation of fashion, and the rise of the curated life on social media. (...)

The impact on shopping as an experience also plays well into premium mediocre. Smart stores know this. You go to Dover Street Market to buy a Comme des Garçons PLAY t-shirt as much, if not more, for the experience as for the t-shirt itself. The new 10 Corso Como store in New York feels more like a gift shop with a high-end boutique attached to it. The first half of its space is devoted to 10 Corso Como merch, where you can buy a $5 Bic lighter ($1 at your local convenience store, but without the logo).

You can also buy a bunch of coffee table books that you could get in your local bookstore or on Amazon, only on Amazon you won’t get a nice shopping bag to go with it. At Gucci Garden in Florence, nominally a museum, but really a show space attached to a gift store and a restaurant, you can buy a $20 box of matches and a $90 box of pencils with the Gucci logo on it.

The logo is key, because in the age of Instagram, where people curate their lives in two dimensions on a small screen, the logo is more important than the product itself. And the best part about consuming premium mediocre today is that no one will scoff, because it’s no longer in good taste for the rich to turn their noses up at the rest of us.

by Eugene Rabkin, BoF | Read more:
Image: Getty

PG&E Files For Bankruptcy Protection With $50 Billion In Debt

In what's expected to be one of the most complicated bankruptcies in recent memory thanks to the involvement of indignant state and federal regulators, activist shareholders, worried bond holders and angry fire victims, PG&E has officially filed for bankruptcy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that as we previewed last night, the troubled utility which serves 16 million California customers, filed for bankruptcy early Tuesday, claiming more than $50 billion in debt. Facing what some analysts estimate could be some $27 billion in fines relating to the role of malfunctioning equipment in causing wildfires, the bankruptcy process is expected to be a protracted mess as state and federal regulators try to figure out the best plan for holding the country's largest utility accountable. When it's all said and done, the outcome is expected to have wide-ranging implications for utility customers, fire victims, shareholders and wholesale power providers.

In the filing, the utility revealed that it's facing some 750 complaints on behalf of 5,600 fire victims, with fire-related liabilities amount to some $30 billion.

Though PG&E was cleared last week of involvement in the 2017 Tubbs fire that tore through the state's wine country, its equipment has been implicated in 18 other wildfires that burned nearly 200,000 acres, destroyed 3,256 buildings and homes and killed 22 people during the 2017 wildfire season. And investigators are still working to figure out whether PG&E's equipment played a role in starting November's Camp Fire, which killed 86 people, making it the deadliest fire in state history. The company's shares soared on the news that it would be freed from liability in the Tubbs fire, which reduced its potential liabilities by as much as $11 billion.

While it's true that utilities rarely declare bankruptcy because of state guarantees, California law allows utilities to be held responsible for fires caused by their equipment, even if the company wasn't negligent. PG&E previously declared bankruptcy back in 2001 thanks to the California energy crisis.

One thing is clear: the bankruptcy is bad news for Californians, who could face double-digit increases in their energy bills despite already paying some of the highest rates in the country. (...)

"There are some bankruptcy cases that get finished very quickly," said Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This is just not one of those cases."

Some state officials have publicly mulled a state-sponsored plan to break up the utility, the country's largest. At one point, lawmakers had considered a plan to help PG&E pass on fire-related liabilities to its customers, but reluctance to be seen as bailing out the utility ultimately killed that plan and led to PG&E trying - and failing - to call lawmakers' bluff.

by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Last sentence is the kicker.]

via:

The Tao of Wi-Fi

In the fall of 2009, Alexandra Janelli, an environmental consultant, was sitting in a bar on the Lower East Side, fiddling with her iPhone. A window popped up asking if she’d like to join a wireless network called Alcoholics Shut In. “I was, like, well, that’s really odd,” Janelli recalled recently. “I’m not a huge techie, but I thought to myself, There must be other funny names out there.”

Janelli started taking long walks around Manhattan with her dog, Finnley, a miniature Australian shepherd. (Her thirty-pound cat, after whom her own network, Don Gato, was named, stayed home.) In every neighborhood, she collected wireless names—a city dweller’s version of catching butterflies. The specimens were strange and wonderful. Janelli started a Web site, wtfwifi.com. “The more I started looking at it, the more I realized that it was really just a new form of media that people were using to express themselves,” she said. You used to send a pigeon, or post a note in the vestibule of your apartment building. Now you come up with an S.S.I.D.

Janelli calls herself a “WiFi detective,” stalking the fragmentary consciousness of the city. “People are taking it to the next level in terms of being able to be really cryptic and send a message,” she said. Her site is a treasury of passive-aggressive messages to neighbors (Stop Cooking Indian!!!), self-promotion (FutureLawyersofCharlieSheen), flirtation (*~*~cOuGaRviLLe~*~*), and frustration (We can hear you having sex). Some of the names are poetry (Dumpling Manor, More Cowbell). Some of them are mere description (taco breath 2). Janelli says that wireless names can act as welcome mats, luring their beholder into a store or a discussion, or as gargoyles, patrolling a patch of virtual turf. A certain genre of befuddling names are meant to send a wireless poacher scrambling to Google, and then to Urban Dictionary, to learn something he wishes he hadn’t. “You also find really creepy ones, like I Eat Babies,” Janelli said. “There’s weird stuff. I could see an amazing ‘Law & Order’ episode coming from this.”

Like other forms of self-expression, wireless names are subject to trends. For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van. Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood. “You cruise through all the streets, and there are certainly some areas that are much more affluent, I guess, in WiFi names,” Janelli said. “The Lower East Side has funny ones”—for example, DieTrustFundersDie—“as opposed to uptown, where it will be much more like Robinson Family. You also get, like, Empty Sighs and Wine,” evoking “the really lonely person on the Upper West Side.” Janelli’s favorite name is one that she found in 2009, in the financial district: fat man on 7fl is douche. “There aren’t that many residential buildings around,” she said. “You could probably narrow down who it is.”

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Sila Tiptanatoranin / Alamy

Emotional Support Alligator

A Pennsylvania man says his emotional support alligator helps him deal with his depression.

Joie Henney, 65, said his registered emotional support animal named Wally likes to snuggle and give hugs, despite being a 5-foot-long alligator. The York Haven man said he received approval from his doctor to use Wally as his emotional support animal after not wanting to go on medication for depression, he told Philly.com .

“I had Wally, and when I came home and was around him, it was all OK,” he said. “My doctor knew about Wally and figured it works, so why not?”

Wally was rescued from outside Orlando at 14 months old and is still growing; Henney said Wally could be 16 feet long one day. Henney says Wally eats chicken wings and shares an indoor plastic pond with a smaller rescue alligator named Scrappy.

Wally, who turns 4 this year, is a big teddy bear, in Henney’s words. The cold-blooded reptile likes to rest his snout on Henney’s, and “he likes to give hugs,” he said.

by Associated Press |  Read more:

Image: Ty Lohr

The Feud That Birthed the Electric Guitar

“More circuitry was necessary.”

How is it that in a book as rich in description, as full of imagist sound-summonings, spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars as Ian S. Port’s The Birth of Loud, this rather bald little line should be my favorite? Two reasons, I think.

First, it comes at a mythic moment in the story. It’s 1966, and Jimi Hendrix, newly arrived in London, is looking for a heavier sound. The universe, in other words, is tensing up for another leap in self-awareness; dimensions of noise are about to disclose themselves. Hendrix already has some of the required equipment. He’s got his Fender Stratocaster (quite atypical—most of his fellow guitar heroes like the Gibson Les Paul); he’s got his 100-watt Marshall amplifier; and he’s got his own supple and godlike relationship with electricity. He’s got power. But he wants more; he wants, as Port puts it, “nuclear distortion.” To achieve that, somebody—some wizard/boffin/mad professor—is going to have to invent something. More circuitry is necessary.

Second, in these four words is contained, philosophically, the whole book. Les Paul, born in 1915, was an auteur, a pop star, a musical innovator, and an unstoppable tinkerer who could hear sounds just beyond the rim of the technically possible. Leo Fender, born in 1909, was a low-key workshop sorcerer who ate a can of spaghetti for lunch every day and would scramble onstage with a screwdriver, while the musicians were playing, to fiddle with the gear he had built for them. Opposites in style and temperament, both men had the Promethean itch; both men sought, in the name of music, to master the strange and volatile element of loudness. And it led them both in the same direction—toward the creation of the solid-bodied electric guitar. More circuitry was always necessary.

At the beginning they were fellow voyagers, companions in obsession. Port conjures the scene at Les Paul’s Hollywood garage in the late 1940s, where Paul, Fender, and like-minded gearheads would mingle with a seasoned crew of country-and-western sidemen, swapping tips and stories. “None could have foreseen the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, but it was clear that music was growing louder and more driving, challenging the limits of acoustic instruments … There was a sense among these men that the potential for electric amplification in music hadn’t yet been realized, that there was still a lot of power waiting to be harnessed, incredible new tools waiting to be built.” Later they became competitors and rivals in the legend, with different versions of the origin story.

by James Parker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: AFP/Getty

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Linda Ronstadt/Nelson Riddle Orchestra

via: YouTube

[ed. See also: What's New and Lover Man]

When the Top U.S. Tax Rate was 70 Percent—or Higher

This post has a simple purpose: to remind people of the historical realities of tax rates in the United States. It’s mainly setup for the chart you’ll see a few paragraphs below.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, was asked about the idea of raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. (It’s now 37 percent.)

He said—to laughs—that from his personal perspective it would be a bad idea. But he also thought it would be bad for the country’s growth. When the moderator, Heather Long of the Washington Post, asked him to explain why, Dell said, “Name a country where that’s worked. Ever.”

You can see the exchange in a CNN video here.

Sitting on the same panel was the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, of MIT, who spoke up immediately to say: actually there is such a country. It is the United States, through most of its post-World War II expansion.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Tax Policy Center

Patrick Modiano Acceptance Speech: Nobel Prize in Literature

I would just like to tell you how lucky I am to be here and how moved I am with the honor you have bestowed on me by awarding me this Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is the first time I have to give a speech to so many people and I am apprehensive about it. One would be tempted to believe that for a writer, it is natural and easy to engage in this exercise. But a writer - or at least a novelist - often has difficult relationships with speech. And if one remembers this academic distinction between the written and the oral, a novelist is more gifted for the written than the oral. He has the habit of keeping quiet and if he wants to penetrate an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. He listens to the conversations without seeming to, and if he intervenes in them, it is always to ask a few discreet questions to better understand the women and men around him. He has a hesitant speech, because of his habit of scratching his writings.

Of course, after multiple erasures, his style may seem limpid. But when he speaks, he no longer has the resource to correct his hesitations. And I belong to a generation where children were not allowed to speak, except on rare occasions and if they asked permission. But we did not listen to them and often they were cut off. This explains the difficulty of speech of some of us, sometimes hesitant, sometimes too fast, as if they feared every moment to be interrupted. Hence, no doubt, this desire to write that took me, like many others, out of childhood. You hope the adults will read you. They will be obliged to listen to you without interrupting you and they will know once and for all what you have on your heart.

The announcement of this prize seemed unreal and I was eager to know why you had chosen me. That day, I think I have never felt so strongly how a novelist is blind to his own books and how much readers know more than he does about what he wrote. A novelist can never be his reader, except to correct mistakes in his manuscript, repetitions, or to delete one paragraph too much. He has only a confused and partial representation of his books, like a painter busy making a mural on the ceiling and who, lying on a scaffolding, works in the details, too closely, without an overall vision.

Curious lonely activity than writing. You go through moments of discouragement when you write the first pages of a novel. You have every day the impression of going wrong. And then, the temptation is great to go back and engage in another way. We must not succumb to this temptation but follow the same path. It's a bit like driving a car, at night, in the winter and riding on the ice, without any visibility. You do not have a choice, you can not go back, you have to keep going, telling yourself that the road will eventually be more stable and that the fog will dissipate.

On the verge of completing a book, it seems to you that he is beginning to break away from you and that he is already breathing the air of freedom, like children, in the classroom, on the eve of the summer holidays. They are distracted and noisy and do not listen to their teacher anymore. I would even say that when you write the last paragraphs, the book shows you some hostility in its haste to free yourself from you. And he leaves you scarcely have you drawn the last word. It's over, he does not need you anymore, he's already forgotten you. It is the readers now who will reveal it to himself. You feel at that moment a great emptiness and the feeling of having been abandoned. And also a kind of dissatisfaction because of this link between the book and you, which was decided too fast. This dissatisfaction and feeling of something uncompleted pushes you to write the next book to restore balance, without you ever reaching it. As the years go by, the books follow each other and the readers will speak of a "work". But you will have the feeling that it was only a long flight forward.

Yes, the reader knows more about a book than its author himself. It happens, between a novel and its reader, a phenomenon similar to that of the development of photos, as it was practiced before the digital era. At the time of its drawing in the dark room, the photo was gradually becoming visible. As one moves forward in reading a novel, the same chemical process unfolds. But for there to be such an agreement between the author and his reader, it is necessary that the novelist never force his reader - in the sense that a singer is said to force his voice - but the imperceptibly and leaves a sufficient margin for the book to permeate it little by little, and that by an art that looks like acupuncture where it is enough to prick the needle in a very precise and the flow is spread in the the nervous system.

This intimate and complementary relationship between the novelist and his reader, I think we find the equivalent in the musical field. I always thought that writing was close to music but much less pure than this and I always envied musicians who seemed to me to practice an art superior to the novel - and the poets, who are closer to the musicians as novelists. I started to write poems in my childhood and it is without doubt thanks to that that I understood better the reflection that I read somewhere: "It is with bad poets that one makes of "And then, as far as music is concerned, it's often a novelist's job to train all people, landscapes, the streets he could observe in a musical score where we find the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but a musical score that seems imperfect to him. There will be, in the novelist, the regret of not having been a pure musician and not having composed "The Nocturnes" of Chopin.

The lack of lucidity and critical distance of a novelist vis-à-vis all of his own books is also a phenomenon that I noticed in my case and in that of many others: each new book at the time of writing, erases the previous one to the point that I have the impression of having forgotten it. I thought I wrote them one after the other in a discontinuous way, with successive mistakes, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences come back from one to the other, like the patterns of a tapestry woven into a half-sleep. A half-sleep or a waking dream. A novelist is often a somnambulist, so much he is penetrated by what he has to write, and one may fear that he will be crushed when he crosses a street. (...)

It also happens that a writer of the twenty-first century feels, at times, prisoner of his time and that the reading of the great novelists of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - inspires him a certain nostalgia. At that time, time was running slower than today, and this slowness was in keeping with the novelist's work because he could concentrate his energy and attention better. Since then, time has accelerated and moved by jerks, which explains the difference between the great Romanesque massifs of the past, the architectures of cathedrals, and the discontinuous and fragmented works of today.

In this perspective, I belong to an intermediate generation and I would be curious to know how the following generations that are born with the internet, the laptop, emails and tweets will express by literature this world to which everyone is "connected" in permanence and where "social networks" begin the part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our good until recently - the secret that gave depth to people and could be a great novelistic theme. But I want to remain optimistic about the future of literature and I am convinced that the writers of the future will take over as each generation has since Homer ...

And, moreover, a writer, like any other artist, may be so closely bound to his time that he can not escape it and that the only air he breathes is what is called "The air of the times", he always expresses something timeless in his works. In the staging of Racine's or Shakespeare's plays, it does not matter whether the characters are dressed in antique style or that a director wants to dress them in bluejeans and leather jackets. These are unimportant details. We forget, while reading Tolstoy, that Anna Karenina wears dresses of 1870 as she is close to us after a century and a half. And then some writers, like Edgar Poe, Melville or Stendhal, are better understood two hundred years after their death than by those who were their contemporaries. (...)

It is the role of the poet and the novelist, and also of the painter, to unveil this mystery and this phosphorescence which are at the bottom of each person. I think of my distant cousin, the painter Amedeo Modigliani whose most moving paintings are those where he chose as models anonymous, children and street girls, maids, small farmers, young apprentices. He has painted them with a sharp line reminiscent of the great Tuscan tradition, that of Botticelli and the Sienese painters of Quattrocento. He gave them - or rather he revealed - all the grace and nobility that was in them in their humble appearance.

The work of the novelist must go in that direction. His imagination, far from distorting reality, must penetrate deeply and reveal this reality to itself, with the power of infrared and ultraviolet to detect what is hidden behind appearances. And I would not be far from believing that in the best case the novelist is a kind of seer and even a visionary. And also a seismograph, ready to record the most imperceptible movements.

by Patrick Modiano, LeMonde |  Read more:

Image: Nicola Lo Calzo for The New York Times via

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview

When Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006, he had no idea he and his colleagues were creating what would become a universally accessible, global, seamless, 24/7 platform for tens of thousands of people to yell at him. In any case, back then, billionaire tech execs were still — at least in some circles — figures of admiration, rather than a locus of fear and suspicion for many on the left and right alike. Social media has succeeded all too well in its disruptive mission, reshaping societies in ways they’re still struggling to understand. That leaves the likes of Dorsey, who’s been the CEO of Twitter since 2015 (after an abortive initial run from 2006 to 2008), grappling, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, with an ever-growing slate of issues of daunting complexity.

In two interview sessions — one over dinner (fried chicken, oysters; the day’s only meal on his intermittent fasting regimen) at New York’s Blue Ribbon Brasserie, where he brought his own bottle of organic, low-alcohol wine; the other in a glass-doored conference room in Twitter’s bustling San Francisco headquarters — Dorsey addressed those challenges, and talked about his life, work, career and ideas. The night of the first conversation, he was headed for the airport to kick off a three-week trip to India and Myanmar. His decision to spend time at a grueling silent-meditation retreat in the latter country — where the military is perpetrating atrocities against minority Rohingya Muslims — sparked a significant backlash. Addressing that subject in our second meeting was the only time an ounce of irritation broke through his otherwise formidably tranquil demeanor.

He is, especially judged against certain Silicon Valley stereotypes, highly personable; he makes (sometimes very intense) eye contact, laughs easily, has excellent manners. Dorsey, 42, is a serious music fan (the Twitter masses were unimpressed when he designated Kendrick Lamar his “favorite poet”), who is at his core a digital aesthete, à la Steve Jobs. He even followed Jobs’ exile-and-return career path. After Dorsey was cast out of Twitter in 2008, he co-founded Square, the now-multibillion-dollar mobile-payment company (it’s the reason you can use a credit card at your local food cart) — and his old company eventually pulled him back in. He’s now CEO of both.

In San Francisco, he wore black jeans, running sandals that facilitate his daily five-mile walk to work, and a hooded cashmere sweater that he notes is more than three years old. His nose ring and voluminous facial hair — which prompted a Republican congressman to inform him last year that he doesn’t look like a CEO — make more sense in light of his peripatetic pre-Twitter life, in which he trained as a massage therapist, studied botanical illustration and considered a career in fashion design. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversations. (...)

The model in Silicon Valley for a long time was “we are a neutral platform.” It’s obviously not quite the case anymore. So if it’s not a platform, what is it?

People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square. Washington Square Park, for instance — I just had an hour and a half there, today. I sat, and I did my phone calls, and I watched people. There’s a lot going on in Washington Square Park. There’s tourists, students, filmmakers, musicians, street hustlers, weed dealers, chess players. And there’s people talking out in the open. The park itself is completely neutral to whatever happens on top of it. But if you stop there, you don’t realize what I believe the park actually is. It does come with certain expectations of freedom of expression, but everyone is watching one another. So if someone gets up on a little soapbox, with a megaphone, and starts yelling, a crowd comes around them and listens. That person can also yell across the park and say, “Hey, you idiot, yeah, you, I’m talking to you, come over here.” Then it’s really harassing behavior and people notice that, and they’re like, “Hey, man, don’t do that. Stop.” And then there’s the park police as well, who maintain the standard of decency within the park.

Dealing with harassment seems easy compared with grappling with the idea of false information. Sometimes it seems like your approach is “If there’s false information, the nature of Twitter is such that we count on the real information to overcome it.” Is that correct?

Well, I think it happens, but it’s not something that we should make a model. It can unfold that way, but that doesn’t mean we can rely upon it. An example, there was this tweet, before the [2016] elections. Someone tweeted out an image of a code that supposedly allowed you to register to vote. It was misinformation. So the way that this plays out on Twitter is that the tweets calling it out as false got more impressions than the original. More people saw the tweets calling it out as false than saw the original tweet.

What do you conclude from that?

We could just sit back and be neutral and passive, like, “OK, we’re good,” because the thing self-corrects. But instead we should learn what that means and how we can make more of those things happen. We can’t be arbiters of truth. I think that would be dangerous for anyone to want us to be. So what can we do? What we’re deciding to do is [focus on] misleading information, which intends to lead someone in a particular direction, intends them to take a particular action. The voter-suppression tweet was certainly misinformation, but more dangerously it was misleading people to take an action that would harm society and maybe themselves. I don’t think we should just say, “The network takes care of itself.” We need to say, “How do we not determine true or false, but how do we determine is it misleading?” Then, how do we stop the dissemination of misleading information before it reaches significant exposure? (...)

Do you yourself have any degree of Twitter addiction? Do you compulsively check Twitter the way many of the rest of us do?

In context, I do. During events, I do. During election night it was nonstop, during a basketball game it’s nonstop. That’s when I have the recent-tweets feature on; all the other time I have the most-relevant tweets on. I know this is gonna sound way out there, because we’re nowhere near what I’m about to say, but when I close the app, I want to have learned something new. We’re just so far off. If I asked anyone in this restaurant, “After closing Twitter, did you learn anything?” Most of them are gonna say no, or they learned something they already knew. Ultimately, I want every single person that uses Twitter to not spend hours, or days, or minutes consuming content, but [instead] to be notified when there’s something that potentially they could learn from, and, to the highest degree, that they’d want to participate in a conversation around it. That, to me, would contribute to the health aspect. Like, I’d walk away from Twitter feeling empowered, I’d feel more informed, I’d feel happy. Right now, I just feel overwhelmed, because I don’t think I’m learning anything new, ultimately.

There’s obviously been an overall shift from a techno-optimism to a techno-pessimism. What’s your case for Twitter, in particular, as an overall force for good?

I think it’s a net positive that everyone has more potential to have a voice. Because it benefits those who traditionally didn’t the most. The thing I’m most proud of Twitter for is that it has been a vehicle for historically marginalized groups to share their story. (...)

How are you not in a constant state of agitation that something terrible is going to trend, or that a war or some other calamity is going to start over a tweet?

We have a global team. And I trust them to make decisions. And I trust them to make decisions without me having to interject or oversee them at all. And I trust that we have a learning mindset. That we’re gonna do retros on what we fucked up. And we’re going to learn from that. And we’re not going to repeat the same mistakes. So in terms of what happens in the platform, I am concerned. I am a citizen in this world. I feel the weight of how our tool is used in society and how it’s been used for good and how it’s used for stuff I’m not proud of.

For instance?

Like creating bubbles and echo chambers. I’m not proud of that. Like, we definitely help divide people. We definitely create isolation. We definitely make it easy for people to confirm their own bias. We’ve only given them one tool, which is follow an account that will 90 percent confirm whatever bias you have. And it doesn’t allow them to seek other perspectives. It contributes to tribalism. It contributes to nationalism. And it’s counter to what we need the world to consider, which is, how do we solve climate change? There’s no country anywhere on the planet that’s gonna solve it alone. How do we solve AI taking all of our jobs or nuclear war? These are global conversations, and it’s gotta be pointed in that direction. Right now it’s pointed inward. (...)

Based on the time you spent with him, would you be able to lay out your philosophical differences with someone like Mark Zuckerberg? Twitter and Facebook have approached the world in different ways.

I would love to. I just don’t know what his philosophies are. I don’t know what their purpose is.

Facebook’s purpose?

Mm-hmm. I know what they say, but I don’t know. I see Mark as a very, very smart businessman. He will excel to gain as much market share as possible.

If you were CEO of Facebook instead, would you know what to do with them?

No. I’ve got enough on my plate. I think the intention of a lot of people at the company is right. If the philosophy is helping the world realize that we’re all facing the same problems. We should end this distraction of nationalism. That is a promise of the internet. I would rather us be proactive around solving these problems together than reactive. If that’s the goal and that’s the stated intention, then I would know a few things to do.

What was your most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg?

Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat.

In front of you?

No. He killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife. Then they send it to the butcher.

A . . . laser gun?

I don’t know. A stun gun. They stun it, and then he knifed it. Then they send it to a butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.

It’s hard to find a metaphor in that.

I don’t know what you’re going to do with that, but hopefully that’s not the headline. Revenge is a dish best served warm. Or cold.

by Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Jimmy Turrell. Photograph used in illustration by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images