Commander in Cheat

Donald Trump plays golf more than any other modern president. And he cheats more, too. A new book is coming out Tuesday titled, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, and goes into great detail describing how, exactly, President Donald Trump cheats on the links, and the New York Post published excerpts on Saturday. To write the book, author and former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly spoke with golf professionals and celebrities who have played with the president and discovered they each had a story about his cheating.

“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,'” Reilly wrote. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

Trump’s cheating begins with his handicap—a number that is generated based on a player’s average score, ostensibly to allow players of different abilities to compete against one another. And, theoretically, the lower a player’s handicap, the better the player they are. For example, the Post points out, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus had a handicap of 3.4, higher (and therefore worse) than the 2.8 handicap Trump claims.

“If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter,” Reilly wrote.

Even Samuel L. Jackson has witnessed our president’s cheating ways: “We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey], and his caddy told him he found it!” he recalled.

LPGA player Suzann Pettersen also told Reilly she is convinced Trump’s caddy facilitates his cheating, saying, “no matter how far into the woods [Trump] hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”

But Trump doesn’t stop at making his caddy do all the dirty work. The president has also moved his fellow players’ balls to give himself an advantage. Former ESPN football announcer Mike Tirico recalled one time he played with Trump and hit one of the best shots of his life. He knew he landed close to the green, he said, but by the time he reached the green, his ball was mysteriously 50 feet to the left the hole and in a bunker.

Tirico said that Trump’s caddy later pulled him aside after the game and told him Trump had cheated: “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it,’” he said.

by Peter Wade, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Of course. See also: Rick Reilly Is Woke Now (The Ringer).]

What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend

Abigail Disney, 59, is an activist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, making her an heiress to the Disney family fortune (she declines to say how much she inherited, but has given away over $70 million since she turned 21). Raised in North Hollywood, California, with three siblings, she has a doctorate from Columbia and currently lives in New York. Here, she talks about the paradoxes of growing up in tremendous wealth; she will also be featured on the Cut’s podcast, The Cut on Tuesdays, on April 9.

Growing up, did you know you were wealthy?
At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better than anyone else.

That said, we lived in a big enough house that we would always get two doorbells on Halloween — people would ring the front and the back thinking it was two houses. But again, it wasn’t lavish. There weren’t private airplanes and things like that until I got older.

Do most people assume you’re rich when they meet you?
People do say to me, straight up, “Oh my God, you must be really rich.” In every interaction, you don’t get to make a first impression because they’re already thought about what they want to think about you before you even shake their hand.

What about situations where people don’t know you’re rich?
If I’m in a situation where people know my last name, they usually know it. But I’m not recognizable, so I can go through the world and restaurants and airports and interact with people like a normal person. That, I love. It’s great. There are very occasionally people for whom it never crosses their mind until later, and then they get freaked out.

This is the weird thing about my life: I am usually excited to meet someone in direct disproportion to how excited they are to meet me. I’m kind of a lefty, New York City, Manhattan, pointy-headed intellectual type. Those are the people who hate Disney and think it’s the worst thing on Earth, and that’s where I probably would be if I weren’t actually related to it.

When I meet people, I have an unfair advantage in being able to make them laugh because all I have to do is make a joke about Tinkerbell or Cinderella, and they love you for it. In some cases, all I have to do is not be a huge asshole. It’s like people think you’ll come in on a chariot or something. Within about an hour, invariably, they’ll say, “Oh my God, you’re so down to Earth.” I don’t know what people expect.

Did you have a moment in your life when things started getting lavish and you realized, “Oh, I’m super rich”?
When I went off to college, Michael Eisner came in and reinvigorated the company, and then the stock price, which was basically my family’s entire net worth, was ten times, 20 times, 50 times what it had been when I was growing up. So all of the sudden, we went from being comfortable, upper-middle-class people to suddenly my dad had a private jet. That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people. I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.

In what ways did your dad change, other than having a jet?
Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.

My dad’s plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seatbelt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous. We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, “No, I think this is really bad for everybody.”

How did the jet change your dad?
It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, “Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.” So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you.

When did you stop riding the private jet?
The moment for me, when I decided I couldn’t fly in the plane anymore, was about 20 years ago. I had to fly out to California for a meeting but I had to get back to New York by the next morning for a conference. And the guy who ran our family’s company put me on the 737 alone. I flew across the country overnight, by myself on that giant plane, and I was sitting there thinking about the carbon footprint and the number of flight attendants and the other pilot on-call and what it was costing, and I just wanted to be sick. By the way, my parents always made fun of the fact that I thought it was terrible and awful because they were very comfortable with what they were doing.

What lessons did your parents teach you about money?
My mom was somebody who really liked having nice things, like Chanel suits. She would spend money on things that she really, really loved. But she also dressed like a slob, and she would be more delighted by a deal on toilet paper at the supermarket than any Chanel suit.

This is often true of rich people, isn’t it?
Yes. A lot of people go back and forth between these identities. My parents’ financial life changed in the ’80s, and I was an adult by then and I watched them kind of relax into it. I think of it as slouching into money. They were in their 50s and they liked the shortcuts that wealth gave them. It’s very hard to say no to things like that. But what ends up happening is you end up being surrounded by people who don’t tell “no,” ever. And as my father’s drinking problem grew, he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t say, “You have a terrible drinking problem. You need to go get some help.” (...)

What do you enjoy spending money on?
I live in a constant state of tension about that. I really love a very good meal at very good restaurants and a very good bottle of wine. I really love a beautiful pair of shoes, and I’ll spend way too much money on that, or a purse. Luckily, I’m not a real-estate girl; I don’t need a ranch and a ski resort and whatever else. And I don’t want a private jet because it hollows you out from the inside. So I’m lucky that the things I love are really not expensive, considering. But to most normal people, what I spend on a really good dinner at a really good restaurant, that would be horrifying. They couldn’t even imagine spending that. So I wouldn’t pass muster with a lot of lefties, I have to say.

Has the way you spend money changed?
I think that people who grow up in this kind of life go one of two ways. They either go the Kim Kardashian route, which is spending, spending, spending, completely absorbing the idea that, “Yes, you are that special,” and wanting everyone to look at you. Or, and I know a lot of people who’ve gone this way — especially my women friends — you do the opposite. I wore shitty clothes around. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had. I spent most of my 20s in graduate school, and graduate school is where people shame you for having money. I was embarrassed by it. I didn’t want anyone to know. And actually, my kids are kind of that way now. They don’t want anyone to know and they want to support themselves. I keep trying to tell them that money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person. You are who you are and the least important thing about you is what you have. That was not, “You haven’t earned it,” you know. So my philosophy is you try to earn it in reverse.

What’s that dynamic like? Do you see other wealthy people and think, “Oh, you earned your money, whereas I was given it”?
I certainly have an inferiority complex around people who have actually earned their money. I did grow up with this doubt about myself. Like, did Yale really say yes because I was that good, or did Yale say yes because of my last name? I’ll never know. I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self. That is handing your self-esteem to the world to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to have any. And that’s a dangerous game.

by Sarah McVeigh with Abigal Disney, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Jemal Countess/Getty

via:
[ed. See also: The 'Libya Model' - aka, diplomatic cluelessness.]

The Barr Gambit

A former federal prosecutor has some thoughts on the Barr Gambit …

A few thoughts on the Barr Gambit, which I think will go down as a singular achievement in the annals of intellectual dishonesty and bad faith legal jujitsu: 

1. It is undisputed that the Russian government brazenly interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump. In so doing, the Russians and those acting on their behalf committed a variety of federal crimes including computer hacking and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those crimes were committed to benefit (a) Vladimir Putin and the interests of the Russian government; and (b) Donald J. Trump. It is also undisputed that Trump and his campaign joyfully used and weaponized the information the Russians stole against Hillary Clinton. Trump personally trumpeted the Wikileaks disclosures 141 times during the campaign, and his surrogates countless more times. While Mueller’s team apparently “did not establish” (i.e., did not find enough evidence to charge criminally) that Trump personally conspired with the Russian government to commit the underlying crimes, there is no question that he was (along with Putin) the single biggest beneficiary of those criminal efforts.

2. Mueller apparently pulled together significant evidence that the President attempted to obstruct the investigation into these crimes. But to support his decision not to prosecute the President for obstruction of justice, Barr relied in part on Mueller’s conclusion that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President was involved in an underlying criminal conspiracy. Therefore, Barr’s reasoning goes, Trump lacked corrupt intent to obstruct because, at least in part, he was not involved in any underlying crime. This argument is both legally wrong (obstruction charges don’t depend on the existence of an underlying crime, just an investigation or proceeding), and it flies in the face of one simple fact: Trump was a prime beneficiary of the undisputed criminal conduct that did occur. He of course had a strong personal interest in seeking to obstruct this investigation for a variety of reasons. If you receive and use stolen money, even if you weren’t involved in the theft, you have a strong interest in thwarting any efforts to investigate the underlying theft. Why? Because you don’t want to lose the right to hold onto your money. Same here. This investigation posed a direct threat to the Presidency. It also posed a direct threat to prying open Trump’s shady business empire. Barr’s argument might hold water if the Russian election interference was intended to help Hillary and Trump’s campaign was not the subject of the investigation. As it stands, the President had a deep personal stake in the outcome of the investigation and it appears he used his executive power to thwart it. That cannot be countenanced. 

3. The non-charging decision on obstruction by Mueller cannot be explained as a failure of evidence. On conspiracy or coordination, it appears Mueller made a clear decision not to charge because of a lack of evidence. As too many members of the media seem to get wrong, this was not a “no evidence” situation, but rather a failure to get to the required level of admissible evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. And the level of proof had to be something in between probable cause (you can’t get 500 search warrants without it) and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I have no problem with that decision from a prosecutorial discretion standpoint. There was lots of evidence of an underlying conspiracy, but it was always going to be very difficult to prove the President’s direct involvement with sufficient admissible evidence (classified intercepts from foreign governments won’t do it). And Manafort and Stone holding the line seems to have been the stopped the Mueller team short. Mueller made a decision not to charge conspiracy because of a lack of evidence, so why not obstruction? If it’s a 50-50 call and a pure “jump ball” that’s easy. You decline. If it’s “more likely than not,” the civil standard, you also decline. Even if it’s “clear and convincing” evidence that doesn’t rise to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you decline the case. So what is going on here? To me, the only answer is that they had a chargeable obstruction case but stopped short of making a decision to charge the President–because he’s the President. It could have been the policy not to indict a sitting President, it could have been the legal and policy arguments around executive authority, or it could have been out of deference to the legislative branch and its impeachment prerogatives. Any way you cut it, I just can’t see Mueller shying away from a tough evidentiary call. If we ever get to see it, I fully expect the actual Mueller report to contain a devastating case against the President for obstruction of justice. 

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:
[ed. See also: Why the Mueller Summary Is a Big Win for America (NY Mag).]

The Personal Business of Being Laid Off

When I need comfort and familiarity, I cycle through five or so different movies I’ve seen at least a half dozen times each. Nora Ephron’s 1998 classic You’ve Got Mail is a frequent go-to. Watching Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), a smug but charming business man, destroy Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) livelihood by opening a big chain bookshop beside her tiny independent while they fall in love anonymously online is somehow the perfect romantic comedy.

On my most recent watch, though, I found myself emotional over one particular exchange. Joe visits Kathleen in a bid to win her over romantically and begins telling her that destroying her business wasn’t personal. In response, she tells him, “I am so sick of that. All it means is that it’s not personal to you, but it’s personal to me. Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”

“It’s not personal, it’s just business” is a film and television trope so pervasive that up until recently I didn’t question its truth. When I was laid off from what I thought was my dream job, nearly a year ago, some version of it was repeated by almost everyone who talked to me.

One morning in mid-July 2017, nearly ten months into my employment as a staff writer, my entire office gathered for an emergency town hall where it was announced that the media giant I worked for would be cutting sixty or so positions worldwide. We were told in vague terms this was because the company was growing and resources had to be allocated elsewhere, elsewhere being our television and film studio. Headlines called this a “pivot to video.” It was a phrase popularized earlier that same year, when MTV News in New York City laid off almost its entire editorial staff.

For an entire week at my office, in hushed tones, water cooler talk turned into discussions about who would get cut and why. “This happens with every media company at some point,” was the general consensus on how to deal with the news. That week, I went for dinner with friends of mine who also worked in media. They all assured me I had nothing to worry about. “You’re too good for them to let you go.” A part of me believed it, as illogical as it was. I was far from the best writer or most efficient worker on my team, and layoffs weren’t a popularity contest. It was all about money, and not us as individuals.

It was a Thursday morning, shortly after my team’s daily meeting, when I received a Slack message from my boss asking me to come to the most secluded meeting room in our trendy, open concept office. Immediately, I knew what was about to happen. The director of HR told me my position was redundant and laying me off had nothing to do with my performance. I was then instructed to leave the office within five minutes with my coat and bag (the rest of my stuff would be mailed to me) and to absolutely not say goodbye to anyone so as to not disrupt the process. My emails and Google Docs disappeared as I was in my meeting, I was not given a chance to save anything.

As I was packing up what I could, trying to blink back tears while also not alerting my coworkers I had been let go, I couldn’t believe it was over in such an unceremonious way. I meant nothing to this job that had meant so much to me.

I had nowhere to go. Not wanting to cry on public transit I ended up in a Burger King down the street. I openly sobbed in public for the first time in my adult life. Nobody in the restaurant noticed.

It’s not personal, it’s business. (...)

I was let go just a few days before my 26th birthday and two weeks before a holiday to the Netherlands and Germany with my brother and cousins. After announcing the layoff on Twitter, my inbox was flooded with opportunities from people who wanted to work with me. I’m privileged enough to have the support of my family, I knew I’d never be destitute. Still, I felt sorry for myself. I went to my brother’s house in Ottawa and played video games until late into the night in a dark basement. Each time I remembered what had happened, I’d burst into tears. I deactivated my Instagram and Twitter because I felt too much pressure to show my followers a brave face. My friends and family gave me endless pep talks, but my mind would always go back to feeling like I had lost a part of myself I couldn’t get back.

My more experienced friends told me I’d get a job in no time. This still hasn’t happened, but I’m not surprised. Job scarcity and low pay from traditional media companies means dozens of my former colleagues and peers have pivoted to working for tech companies that are “creating content,” a concept that not many people can define when I ask. They’re getting paid enough to live comfortably in Toronto, something they couldn’t do before. Now, without a regular 9-5 job, I’m freelancing again, doing about any type of writing or media adjacent work I can.

by Sarah Hagi, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: You've Got Mail

The Gurus of Tidiness: If You Like Marie Kondo …

Spring cleaning started early this year, with the January release of the Netflix series “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo” initiating something of a national closet-clearing frenzy.

Charities have been inundated with donations, and Instagram feeds have overflowed with tidying hash tags like #sparkjoy and #konmari, nods to the Japanese organizer’s method of keeping only items that bring you joy.

Ms. Kondo, who leapt into the American consciousness in 2014 with the release of her book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” is not alone in her fascination with order. Three new books also grapple with the topic, offering clutter-weary readers various perspectives, and strategies, on managing their stuff.

There’s “Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness,” by Gretchen Rubin, author of the best-selling book “The Happiness Project.” And “The Home Edit: A Guide to Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals,” by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, a home-organizing duo with a million Instagram followers. And also Joshua Becker’s “The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life.”

The books hit shelves at a moment when Americans are collectively looking into their closets and wondering what could go.

When Ms. Kondo’s show first aired on Netflix, thredUP, the online consignment shop, reported an 80 percent surge in requests for Clean Out kits, the bags customers fill with everything they want to sell. And Housing Works saw a 15 percent increase in donations to its New York City thrift stores.

No longer a mundane household chore, home organizing now falls squarely into the wellness category, another step on the endless road to self-improvement. Clean up your living room and you can clean up your life.

Each of the recently released books espouses the need for a more streamlined approach to life, but with slightly different recommendations on how to get there, and different expectations for how much stuff you need in your home. (...)

Tidying, it turns out, is big business, with the home-organization industry growing at 4 percent a year, and earning $16 billion in retail sales in 2016, Mr. Becker said in “The Minimalist Home.” And it’s no wonder. As baby boomers downsize, they have less room to store stuff, and their grown children have little interest in taking their parents’ bureaus and dining sets.

by Ronda Kaysen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Tito & Tarantula

Grooveless Metal Engineering

[ed. Cool. h/t via:]

In Search of Generation Z

The marketing gurus have only recently completed their lovingly assembled profile of the millennial generation, and their work is a true wonder to behold: a trail of mangled slang, twitching meme-gifs, and fast food brands masquerading as witty, clinically depressed twenty-somethings. But now a new generation—61 million strong—is marching to maturity, wreathed in Juul vapor and wielding billions of dollars in purchasing power.

The brands, naturally, want to know about them. What are these creatures like? What are their hopes, their dreams? Do they value fresh ingredients? What is their attitude, in aggregate, toward shopping at the mall? And what might that imply for Nabisco’s bottom line?

The ethnographic entrepreneurs who cut their teeth on the millennials are rapidly expanding into the Generation Z racket. None of them could reasonably aspire to the glory of a William Strauss or Neil Howe—the pop-historians who coined the term “millennial”—but that is not for want of trying. They are throwing out catch phrases and neologisms, seeing what will stick. Out of case studies, stats, and raw intuition, they are conjuring a character—the representative Z—who will haunt public discourse well into the next decade. And they are, inevitably, going to get it very wrong.

Though “Generation Z,” as a moniker, has gained a toehold in the public consciousness, this fledgling cohort, whose birth-range most experts place between 1995 and 2005, is so green that its very name is still up for grabs. Jean Twenge, a tirelessly meme-generating psychologist and brand consultant, went with “iGen” in her book of the same name. Futurecast, a subsidiary of a major ad agency and the force behind a couple of millennial marketing guides, has settled on “Pivotals” (because “they are pivoting away from common millennial behaviors and attitudes”). David Stillman, one of the field’s biggest names, and Jonah Stillman, his college-aged son, offer “weconomists” in their book Gen Z at Work, in reference to the younger generation’s supposed affinity for the sharing economy. Also in the running: Digital Natives, the Homeland Generation, the Meme Generation, the Throwback Generation, post-millennials, Plurals, Founders, and “Philanthroteens.”

But if Gen Z’s name is in flux, a narrative has already started to emerge about what makes this generation tick. Experts tend to subvert the expected narrative of Zs as “millennials on steroids”: screen-poisoned shut-ins reared on benzos and niche porn, readying the kill shot on Olive Garden, monogamy, and the traditional nine-to-five. By their lights, a generation that grew up on reboots and revivals has itself, somehow, become one: a kind of woke Silent Generation. (...)

Much is made of the fact that, unlike millennials, these Zs have never known a world without the internet. Lifelong immersion in a “phigital” environment (the Stillmans’ portmanteau), in which “the real world and the virtual world naturally overlap,” has wrecked their attention spans—down to an average of eight seconds from the millennials’ comparatively ample twelve, according to Fromm and Read. The Stillmans address this generational twitchiness from a workplace perspective, suggesting that employers dice their training into dozens of short, easy-to-digest tutorials, each instantly followed by hands-on practice. To the marketing crowd, Fromm and Read suggest exploiting this deficiency with “direct, quick, and simple” ads—“snackable” content memorable enough to make an impact before the eight-second window closes.

A slideshow currently making the rounds at conferences and corporate headquarters breaks Generation Z down further. Called “Reign Makers,” it is the product of Bustle Digital Group, which, in addition to its slate of lifestyle sites, hosts a robust thought leadership division—“a consultancy within a consultancy,” as Jessica Tarlov, head of research at BDG, describes it. Tarlov’s division had noticed that, more and more, their presentations on millennials were being interrupted by questions about Gen Z. “Reign Makers” represents the stolid if nonsensical effort of BDG marketers to draw a bright line between the two.

The presentation sections Zs into four types—The Gypsy Kings and Queens (“eclectic and entrepreneurial risk-takers”), The Free Radicals (“independent, alternative thinkers”), The Challengers (“strong, steadfast, educated doers”), and The American Dreamers (“optimistic team players”)—and explains the best ways to market to each one. (...)

I was talking to Lavigne-Delville at the Bowery Hotel in New York, shortly before six Zs were set to arrive for an informal focus group. It was a Wednesday night in January, midway through a ruthlessly cold week, but Lavigne-Delville looked strikingly unmiserable, her perma-smile never wavering. A self-described proud Xer who could pass for old millennial, Lavigne-Delville got her start over a decade ago, deciphering her own generation for Creative Artists Agency. She prospered through the millennial boom (the late aughts: a terrible time to be a millennial, an excellent time to be a millennial-expert) and is now among those leading the way on Gen Z.

Tonight’s batch of Zs—all women or non-binary people—had been curated by Abby Spector, Lavigne-Delville’s laid-back millennial-aged research manager. They were there to provide insights for the next issue of Humanly, Culture Co-Op’s calling card, a more or less yearly distillation of the company’s research. The last installment highlighted trends like “rogue vogue” (the embrace, among Zs, of the trashy or obscene, as a punkish rebuke to Instagram’s lifestyle cult) and “nouveau beat” (a resurgence of Kerouac-style counterculturalism, but expressed via podcasts and DIY urban farming initiatives).

“You guys are literally the guinea pig group,” said Lavigne-Delville, once the Zs had settled in around a low glass table cluttered with candles, free pizza, and three strategically positioned iPhones (Melissa’s, Abby’s, and my own, all set to recording mode). The Zs checked texts, sipped meager flutes of rosé, discreetly wiped pizza grease on their coats and pants. Most of them had come here from the fringes of the culture class: prestige-scented drudgework at design studios, museums, experimental theater clubs.

Lavigne-Delville wanted to know what had caught the group’s attention lately. “It could be a person, it could be an advertising campaign, it could be a movement,” she said. Her only request was that, at least at first, they “veer clear of politics” (as Lavigne-Delville told me, once things land on a political subject “good luck getting off of it”). In response, a 21-year-old in track pants and an oversized thrifted sweater asked if anyone in the group had seen the Netflix show You, which led to a lengthy back-and-forth about internet privacy, creepy men, and the politics of hotness.

A white woman named Maddie then praised ZocDoc, specifically its utility in screening out white male physicians. The next person went with safe spaces. The person after that went with the new Ariana Grande album, occasioning a discussion of cultural appropriation. By the time the Zs were gathering their coats and providing Abby with their PayPal info (each was being paid $75 for their time) Lavigne-Delville had gotten them to open up on MAGA Kanye (“it’s not even a disappointment”), money (“we have no money”), and their future careers (one was mulling some combination of photography, marketing, fashion directing, performance art, and philanthropy).

The conversation culminated in a complex, impassioned discussion of gender as it relates to The Wing, the Women’s March, and #MeToo. “Why would we go forward in any sort of revolution without being able to revolutionize ourselves?” asked the track-panted Z, with real feeling. You could almost picture the question, tweaked and decontextualized, in an eight-second Instagram ad. Yoga pants, maybe, or online banking.

by Daniel Kolitz, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: Peter Strain

[ed. Barf. How to exploit and manipulate another generation. See also: Gen Z: In Their Own Words (NY Times).]

Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018

Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018 (Axios):

Over the past few years the fire beneath Apple's red-hot stock price has largely been stock buybacks. The company has dwarfed other companies in terms of the number and amount of buybacks last year and for the past decade.

Driving the news: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Monday that companies bought back $806.4 billion worth of their own shares, including $223 billion in just the fourth quarter in 2018. It was short of the $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicted in August, but still an all-time record.

Of that record total, Apple bought back $10.1 billion worth of its own stock in Q4 and $74.2 billion for the year, more than a third of the entire S&P 500 total. The closest company to that total was Oracle, which spent $29.3 billion.

• Over the past decade, Apple has bought back more than $260.4 billion of its own shares. The No. 2 company on the buybacks list is Microsoft, which has bought back less than half that amount, $118.5 billion.

Between the lines: Companies have shown a very clear preference for buybacks over dividends so far this decade, with a major uptick in this trend in 2018 after the passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

by Dion Rabouin, Axios | Read more:

Image: Data: S&P Dow Jones Indices; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios

[ed. See also: here, here and here.]

A Blizzard of Prescriptions

In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’

The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including Percocet (where it is mixed with paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone-based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and came in small doses. While people did become addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates they contained made it hard to overdose on them, and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.

OxyContin distinguished itself from these medications, and received a patent, on the basis of an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to serve an urgent public health need but because the patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a time-release morphine pill called MS Contin. Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry often makes small adjustments to existing medications in order to patent and market them as new. OxyContin was one such drug.

OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive system, titrating the oxycodone into the body. Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the manufacturers claimed a patient could take OxyContin once in the morning and once at night and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-acting nature of OxyContin justified the manufacture of pills that contained much higher quantities of oxycodone than had ever been available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at first; 160 milligrams a few years later.

‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum describing the addiction she developed to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. (...)

The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the number of deaths from opiate overdoses increased by a factor of six in the US between 1999 and 2017 – is the subject of several recent books. Dopesick, by Beth Macy, describes the effects of opiate use in Appalachia, where she worked as a newspaper reporter. Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, describes the rise of a super-efficient network of dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go unchecked by the healthcare industry, government or law enforcement.

Each of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country’s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can’t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world. (...)

McGreal, Macy and Quinones all document the rise in the late 1990s of pill mills, where in some instances doctors dispensed as many as 200,000 prescriptions for painkillers over the course of a few years. Complicit with the doctors were pharmacies, drug distribution companies, sales representatives and, of course, Purdue itself, whose executives knew very well they were flooding the market with a highly addictive substance. Young people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’ medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall prescription at a party were now taking a much more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who had had her wisdom teeth taken out had no reason to suspect that OxyContin would affect them differently. A common theme in interviews in these books reveals how little scepticism there is towards pills – many people had no idea what they were taking until they were deep into their habit. A generation raised on televised ‘this is your brain on drugs’ propaganda and pop cultural depictions of addicts had no warning system in place for prescription drugs. It is common in the US for people who would never dabble in cocaine or LSD to take psychoactive pills without shame or suspicion. (...)

Macy is the author of another book, Factory Man (2014), about the effects of globalisation, automation and the decline of coal in Virginia, which once had thriving textile and furniture industries. Dopesick could be read, in part, as a sequel to that book. ‘The federal disability programme was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed,’ she writes, ‘a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivising poor people to stay sick with mental illness and chronic pain.’ In both the Ohio towns Quinones writes about, as well as the Appalachian towns described by Macy, pills became currency. Elderly people or those on disability who received government-funded health insurance through Medicare or Medicaid would get prescriptions for pain pills that were paid for by the government. At a going rate of $1 per milligram on the black market, thousands of dollars could be made from a 30-day OxyContin prescription. ‘Peddling pills was now the modern-day moonshining,’ Macy writes. In small towns where independent commerce had disappeared, addicts would shoplift goods from under the noses of unmotivated, underpaid Walmart employees and trade them for pills. Pill dealers would keep stores of stolen goods, where pills could buy everything from stolen televisions to nappies to laundry detergent – all at a discount. ‘Some large though immeasurable amount of the merchandise supporting addiction, as the opiates settled on heartland America, was mined from the aisles of Walmart, where Main Streets had gone to die,’ Quinones writes. ‘The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them.’

In 2010, Purdue introduced an ‘abuse deterrent’ to the drug which caused it to congeal when crushed, making snorting or injecting impossible. Conveniently, this also allowed Purdue to renew OxyContin’s patent, which was on the verge of expiring. (Through minor tweaks and reformulations, Purdue has re-patented OxyContin 13 times. Under its original patent the company would have lost exclusive rights to the drug in 2013. Now it maintains them until 2030.) It was in part the 2010 reformulation that provoked many users of OxyContin to try heroin and realise that it could also sate their cravings. By 2010 most of the pill mills had finally been shut down. Heroin was also significantly cheaper, especially for people who had built up tolerance to Oxy and required multiple pills a day to avoid the debilitating symptoms of withdrawal.

As the market for opiates expanded, heroin dealers stepped in to supplement the pharmaceutical supply. Of all the books available about the epidemic, Dreamland is by far the best account of how heroin dealers quickly came to understand the market opened up for them by prescription opiate painkillers. Quinones was a reporter for the LA Times when he first wrote about a network of heroin dealers who came from a small city in Mexico called Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit, where a sticky kind of heroin known as black tar is made from poppies that grow in the hills. The Xalisco boys, as Quinones calls them, were no Medellin cartel. They ran efficient, low-profile businesses, averse to violence and with a premium placed on customer service.

by Emily Witt, LRB |  Read more:

Image: CBS via
[ed. See also: Opioid Overreaction (NY Times).]

Robert Doisneau, Bike lesson, 1961
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Ernst Haas, Reflection, Revolving Door, NY 1975
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The Matrix at 20

When The Matrix came out 20 years ago, the internet was still in its infancy, confined by the limits of dial-up modems, Netscape browsers and the startup discs that EarthLink and AOL tucked in mailboxes across the country. If you wanted to use the internet, you usually had to sacrifice your phone line, and those with constant busy signals were regarded as hopeless shut-ins, like a flannel-swathed Sandra Bullock ordering a pie from Pizza-dot-net. To the extent that films were thinking about the possibilities of online life, they were usually defined by suspicion and terror, such as the VR corporate sabotage of Disclosure or sick allure of a chatroom sadist in Dee Snider’s StrangeLand. The landscape was changing, but all they could think to do was freak out and disconnect.

The Matrix wasn’t about the internet per se – it takes place in a dystopian future, approximately 200 years from the present – but it understood where things were headed far better than any film did at the time. Back in 1999, the mind-expanding adventures of Neo, Trinity and Morpheus in a world ruled by machines felt more like a technical revolution than a cultural one, an ultra-stylish Hollywood thriller that wedded the balletic cool of Hong Kong action cinema with the stunning elasticity of CGI. Its influence was felt most immediately in the look of summer blockbusters that followed, which mimicked its gothic sheen and made a cliche of its “bullet-time” effects.

Yet objects tend to shift during flight, and in the year 2019, The Matrix has endured as both touchstone and Rorschach blot, a way for people of vastly different ideologies to make sense of the world around them. The effects are still a marvel, but the film’s ideas have taken root in a destabilized culture where conspiracy theories flourish and individuals are defining for themselves what is and isn’t real, and what constitutes freedom in a heavily monitored, highly synthetic technological space. Neo may “follow the white rabbit” into a Wonderland of personal discovery, but we’re citizens of Wonderland now, having made a second home for ourselves where the laws of gravity don’t apply. (...)

It’s clear to anyone who watches The Matrix who the heroes and villains are – there are no “the Galactic Empire is right” counter-theories floating around – yet the takeaways have diverged to opposing ends of the political spectrum. The film advocates for freedom, but different people have different ideas of what that means, which makes it possible for the film to be embraced by the far right and the transgender community, and both can get what they need out of it. Its malleability is its defining quality – “there is no spoon,” Neo learns, it is yourself that bends – and so naturally it can accommodate many different readings at once.

There are essentially two ways of looking at the film: 1. The world as you know it is a lie. 2. The world as you know it is changeable. The first way is narrow and pessimistic, but it explains why the notion of “red-pilling” has become so popular in the far right, which seeks to recruit new members by showing them the ugly truth about their environment. When you can persuade someone that their assumptions and perceptions are wrong – that everything they know is sanitized propaganda – they can then see things through an entirely new lens, one helpfully provided by the red-piller. This is how grand unifying theories like QAnon take root.

Yet the idea of the world as changeable seems far closer to what the film’s creators, the Wachowskis, had in mind. In the time between then and now, the Wachowskis have both gender transitioned and The Matrix seems at least a subconscious reference to the evolution to come. Much has been written about the film as trans allegory, and the reading bears out in the possibility for humans to define themselves however they like, outside the fixed identities enforced by the machines. Whenever Agent Smith snarls “Mr Anderson”, it feels like a menacing taunt, his refusal to allow Neo to untether himself from the matrix and discover who he actually is. That goes beyond red-pilling, which is about the authoritarian business of telling someone how things really are, and grants them the latitude to figure it out on their own.

by Scott Tobias, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
[ed. Umm...not sure about the trans interpretation but interesting anyway. See also: Did We Take the Blue Pill? (Forbes) and The Matrix 20 Years On: How a Sci-fi Film Tackled Big Philosophical Questions (The Conversation).]

Push to Nullify Health Law

The Trump administration’s surprise decision to press for a court-ordered demolition of the Affordable Care Act came after a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, where the president’s acting chief of staff and others convinced him that he could do through the courts what he could not do through Congress: repeal his predecessor’s signature achievement.

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff and former South Carolina congressman, had spent years in the House saying that the health law should be repealed, and his handpicked head of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, supported the idea of joining a Republican attorneys general lawsuit to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act.

That suit, and the Justice Department, initially pressed to nullify only the part of the law that forces insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions as well as a suite of health benefits deemed “essential,” such as pregnancy and maternal health, mental health and prescription drugs.

But a district judge in Texas ruled that the entire law was rendered unconstitutional when President Trump’s tax law brought the tax penalty for not having health insurance to zero, and the administration faced a choice: stick with its more limited intervention or back the judge’s decision.

by Maggie Haberman and Robert Pear, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. Third paragraph (but read on, there's more!). See also: Bad Times in Trumpville and What Happens if Obamacare Is Struck Down? (NY Times).]

The 7-Eleven of the Future

A trip to 7-Eleven, the country’s most recognizable convenience store, is not an experience that most would describe as aspirational. Influencers don’t flock there in search of the perfect selfie moment; no chic, strikingly lit Instagrams of perfectly arranged spreads of hot dogs and Slurpees populate social media. 7-Eleven exists largely to feed people who need to eat cheaply and quickly if they want to eat at all.

Countless words have been written about how to make convenience store meals, snuck in between double work shifts or on lengthy road trips, more nutritionally virtuous. Skip the sugar-laden candy aisle and grab one of those sad oranges from the cooler, they implore. Avoid chips and crunch on water-logged celery slices instead. But in these moments of pure, desperate hunger, nothing is more deeply satisfying than greasy, gas station goodness chased down with a giant, radioactive green Slurpee.

But 7-Eleven plans to shed its identity as a junk food staple. As America’s obsession with wellness and “clean eating” shows no signs of slowing down, the chain wants to figure out how to change customers’ perceptions that convenience food doesn’t always have to be deep-fried or nutritionally sketchy. In early March, the chain debuted its first “lab store,” a real-time testing ground for new, bougie conveniences, next to a busy Dallas highway, just a stone’s throw away from a tony Italian market and one of the city’s most popular ramen joints. Outside, the store looks largely like any other 7-Eleven, with the familiar signage and gas pumps — until you notice the giant selfie-friendly mural painted by a local artist. Inside, it looks a lot like a Whole Foods or any other sleek modern grocer, with natural wood accents and towers of trail mix ingredients sold in bulk.

Unlike most other 7-Eleven stores, this outpost offers a range of hot and prepared food items that goes far beyond the typical roller-grill hot dogs that have been the chain’s bread and butter for decades. Right next to the roller grill sit warmers full of soups like vegetarian tomato basil and gluten-free chili. Across the aisle awaits what press releases call the “better for you” refrigerator case, filled with grab-and-go lunch items: sandwiches, salads, and plastic bowls filled with a “seasonal blend” of mushy kiwi, grapes, cantaloupe, strawberries, and a single pineapple spear. Thanks to the current dominance of the keto trend, hard boiled eggs; portion-controlled packets of cured meats; cheeses; and cured meats wrapped around cheeses are abundant.

There is also a small restaurant, complete with a sit-down cafe and small patio off to the side of the store, arguably the best place to find food in the place. It’s the first Dallas outpost of Laredo Taco Company, a South Texas mainstay that has been selling serviceable breakfast tacos on freshly made tortillas to working people for years. Laredo Taco was part of the Stripes convenience store chain, which 7-Eleven acquired in 2018. With that came Laredo Taco Company, which has scored praise from Anthony Bourdain.

In the aisles, this 7-Eleven is stocked with enough gluten-free, paleo, vegan, organic, and naturally sweetened options to feed an entire army of wellness-obsessed snackers, with just enough “normal” food to resemble a small grocery store. (...)

And then, of course, there is the Slurpee, both an American icon and an engineering marvel. The fluffy, frozen beverage is a sweet-tooth staple; the lab store’s innovation is the organic Slurpee, made with “farm to fountain” flavors like coconut, blood orange, and cucumber from Idaho’s Tractor Beverage Company, which boasts that its syrups are USDA certified organic, GMO-free, and “entirely” natural. In the organic Slurpees, buzzy superfoods like celery and turmeric are ingredients in the cucumber flavor; allegedly stomach-soothing licorice root adds an extra veneer of health to the cherry cream flavor; the blood orange flavor also features turmeric, along with black carrot. Unlike most of the original flavors, the organic options are not carbonated, which means they lack the fluffy, smooth texture of a typical cherry Slurpee. Instead, they’re packed with crunchy ice crystals that always seem to find their way to the most sensitive parts of your teeth.

It’s not surprising that even the Slurpee, much maligned for its hefty sugar content and the presence of preservatives like sodium benzoate, is getting the organic treatment. 7-Eleven is a corporation interested in making profits, and the organic food market is currently worth upwards of $45 billion. But there is something deeply unsettling about seeing the Slurpee stripped of its vibrant colors and cloyingly sweet flavors. It’s depressing to think that, someday, the Slurpee won’t represent a decadently sweet treat, but just another way to get in your daily dose of superfoods. It’s like if all the milkshakes in the future were Soylent, and every Red Bull was replaced with 7-Eleven’s locally-sourced “Yerbucha,” a mix of kombucha and yerba mate. (...)

It is this bizarre juxtaposition of the organic and the chemical-laden, the sacred and the profane, that makes 7-Eleven’s “lab store” such a fascinating — and disorienting — concept. In attempting to please literally everyone — gentrifiers, working-class families, young professionals, and kids looking for after-school snacks — it’s possible that they’re going to alienate everyone. No one on a tight budget wants to accidentally pay $2 more for organic tomatoes when they meant to grab the cheap ones, and no one wants to be tempted by the allure of a quick Velveeta and Rotel queso served with fried tortilla chips when they’re trying to eat “virtuously” and choose the gluten-free granola instead. Being guilt-tripped into buying fruit and hard-boiled eggs is particularly dehumanizing when you can only afford nachos.

Between its fancy coffee machines that grind beans to order, a dessert bar serving soft-serve gelato and non-fat frozen yogurt, and counters serving kombucha, nitrogen-infused hibiscus tea, and cold brew made with fair-trade, organic coffee beans, this store is also a panic attack in four walls. While browsing for more than an hour, I actually longed for a regular 7-Eleven, one where the cashiers would definitely look at me like a lunatic for asking where to find the cold brew coffee on tap, a place where it’s perfectly normal to buy three different types of gummy candy.

by Amy McCarthy, Eater | Read more:
Image: Seika Chujo/Shutterstock

Let's Call a Truce in the Helmet Wars

Maybe five or ten years ago, the tweet would’ve passed unnoticed. Denver surgery resident (and cyclist) Jason Samuels mused:

The comment thread promptly turned into a pro-con debate about whether wearing helmets is helpful or may actually worsen safety for cyclists. It’s a fairly regular topic these days.

The argument against Samuels’s position unfolded more or less like this: Cycling’s not an inherently dangerous activity; drivers and motor vehicles are the problem. So don’t pin the safety responsibility on cyclists by telling them to wear helmets. Put it on motorists, and build better infrastructure that keeps riders out of harm’s way. (This is entirely rational.)

The counterargument, from the pro-helmet crowd: Great idea, but it’s fantasy. The vast majority of U.S. cities don’t have large networks of safe riding routes and won’t for some time, but cars and bad drivers exist now and will for a long time. So wear a helmet anyway. (Also valid.)

Ah, said the pro-barehead contingent: If helmets help when riding, we should also wear them—or maybe even personal airbags!—for walking, driving, and showering. (Fair point.) Also, helmets don’t protect against all urban bike crashes. (Also fair, although benefit estimates vary widely across studies.) Finally, some even argue that merely wearing a helmet makes cycling seem like a dangerous activity, which means fewer people ride. So don’t wear one. (Wait, what?)

Pro-helmet shamers have been around for decades; what’s new is the rise of anti-helmet scolding. And I’m wary of the debate, because the whole argument over whether you should or shouldn’t wear a lid is beside the point. It’s time and energy not spent speaking with a unified voice about changes that have a larger effect on safe cycling, like protected bike lanes and driver awareness.

Often the debate over wearing or not wearing a helmet turns on familiar studies that purport to show that helmets do—or don’t—protect against crash impacts. Broadly speaking, the pro-helmet crowd’s territory here is shrinking. Reviews have challenged earlier studies that championed helmets as overwhelmingly effective. Actual protective benefits in a crash are likely lower than initially assumed, perhaps by a lot. And some innovative research—like Ian Walker’s famous observational study from 2007 that found drivers pass helmeted cyclists slightly more closely than they do unhelmeted riders—suggests that helmet wearing may have some collateral drawbacks.

Even taking Walker’s work into account, though, no scientific evidence has emerged showing that in a crash you’re more likely to be hurt wearing a modern bike helmet than not. (Emphasis in honor of the dude I saw last weekend wearing an eighties-era soft shell.) The knock, if you’ll pardon the pun, is that bike helmets were simply never designed to protect against the violent impact of a rider getting hit by a car, because they’re tested only at lower levels of force. That provides a false sense of safety, to say nothing of the fact that many cyclists hit by cars suffer grievous and sometimes fatal injury to other parts of their bodies. After decades of research of varying quality, the verdict on how well helmets work is unclear. (Virginia Tech’s recent work is a welcome advance in testing, at least.) The result: each side is dug in deeply enough that even new research is discounted if it comes from a sourceone group considers suspect. (Not that the author of said study helps his case much with comments like this.)

I understand where the helmet backlash comes from. For decades cyclists have been told that wearing a helmet is both our personal and social responsibility. Helmet effectiveness was overstated, which helped lead to mandatory helmet laws that are thought to reduce rates of cycling. Safety campaigns like this demon-weed-style PSA from Phoenix routinely put the onus on cyclists to wear protective gear and pay attention, even while often failing to tell drivers to slow the fuck down and pay attention. News stories about cyclists hit and killed by drivers often use victim-blaming language, like mentioning whether the rider was wearing a helmet even in cases where they’re crushed by multi-ton vehicles. It’s quaint by current presidential scandals, but when then President Obama skipped the helmet during a 2009 ride on Martha’s Vineyard, it was covered by Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Daily News, among other outlets.

All that was highly effective at turning cyclists into arguably the most vigilant helmet enforcers. But in the past decade, cyclists have broadly started to wake up to the fact that helmet shaming is itself some pretty shameless gaslighting that might well be slowing bike-safety efforts. The backlash against wearing helmets is a collective fuck you to decades of societal guilt-tripping that we’re at fault for our injuries if we aren’t wearing a helmet and get hit.

The irony is that pretty much everyone arguing about helmets is A) a cyclist, and B) wants more cyclists to be able to ride more safely. We know that ridership increases (sometimes dramatically) when protected bike lanes are put in. And we know instances of crashes with riders drop as well. Given how clear that is, and how ambiguous helmet-safety data is, it suggests we’re all arguing amongst ourselves about something that may be a rounding error in the grand scheme of improving public safety. We’d be better served focusing our energies on what we all want: more bike lanes (especially protected ones), and a hard stop to victim-blaming cyclists when they’re hit by drivers.

by Joe Lindsey, Outside |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Let people manage their own risks. See also: here, here, here and here.]

Does Life Have to Have a Purpose?

An acquaintance recently theorized that my main problem in life is that I have no purpose. It was weird to hear but also welcome.

What is a life purpose? It sounds good, but what does it mean? Helping others, raising a family, creating beauty, making money, working with plants, solving addiction, going to space? Do most people feel like they have a purpose? How often does it change? Do people without a purpose want one? And if you do have a purpose, can you take a break? (And if so, for how long? Two days, 20 years? Does any of this matter?) I Googled “do most people …” and the first auto-prompts were funny, at least: have herpes / have hpv / dream in color / have presidents day off.

In case anyone else is ever feeling concerned or confused about life purpose — or life passion — two recent stories sort of alleviate the pressure. Briefly, anyway. Purpose and passion seem similar, but one distinction suggests that purpose involves reason while passion involves emotion, although both are engines and maybe the line between them is not so important.

In a short essay for Outside, author Brad Stulberg writes about the “lies” we’re often told about the concept of “finding” your passion. Number one is, “You don’t find it. You cultivate it.” Change your expectations of coming across something “perfect” to developing something “interesting,” he suggests, and work from there. (Stulberg also has a new book out on the topic — The Passion Paradox.)

The idea of demoting passion is sort of sad but also funny. I don’t have to dream of becoming an amazing artist; it’s enough to enjoy using these pleasant pens. Where did this belief in passion come from, anyway? Is “find your passion” a cousin to “happily ever after”? Maybe passion appears at certain points in life and not at others, and the ebb and flow is natural. Or maybe it appears in one life arena in one season, and another arena in a different season. Is my former passion for finding funny YouTube videos my current passion for eating fiber? It could be.

Meanwhile, in an especially calming story on one of my favorite knitting blogs, Mason Dixon Knitting, writer Max Daniels makes a compelling case for swiping the whole concept of “Discovering Your Life’s Purpose” off the table, gently. “What if there is no predefined life purpose?” she writes. “What if you don’t need to spend your precious life searching for one, because there isn’t one to discover?” Daniels suggests, instead, doing things that sustain one’s “physical situation,” like cleaning, working, and paying bills; activities that have “no purpose other than pleasure,” like watching Netflix and spending time with friends; and, whenever possible, activities that “cover both bases.” Maybe the concept of purpose also comes and goes, like passion, and forcing it to emerge when it’s not obvious is similarly unnecessary.

For what it’s worth, I used to think my life purpose and passion were the same: to make certain kinds of jokes. But that no longer seems right, and now I think mostly about having a baby and a family. And knitting. And, like, three other things that I’m keeping to myself. Okay, maybe life purpose is a rope with a series of knots in it, and the space in between the knots is how long it takes to feel your way to the new ones?

by Edith Zimmerman, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Ismail Sadiron/Getty Images/EyeEm

Steely Dan

[I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong. I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that.     ~ Almost Gothic]

Roy Lichtenstein
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Forgotten, Not Gone

As the population surges into young old age and old old age, the number of books wrestling with that question has grown from a trickle to a tsunami. Today the field of gerontology is, dare I say, older and wiser and I am older and warier. “Old age” has crept up a decade or two, reflecting the steady rise of people living into their nineties and, the fastest-growing category, into their hundreds. Many are living well, without mental or physical incapacitation, but anywhere between a quarter and a half of the population will show signs of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia by the age of eighty-five. The cost of care – emotionally and financially – is already immense. Understanding the social, physiological and economic consequences of this massive demographic change has thus become more pressing. So has the need to help people cope psychologically, now that old age can arrive almost without warning. People may go along feeling youthful and vigorous, but pain or infirmity caused by injury, bone deterioration, illness, arthritis, stenosis, or any other condition, can alter that overnight. A seventy-four-year-old friend who has spent a decade hiking in exotic places abruptly developed excruciating back pain, forcing her to curtail her adventures. “I suddenly feel old”, she said.

Apart from the science journals and science-fiction novels debating whether is it possible or desirable to prolong the lifespan by fifty or a hundred years, or (might as well go for it) eternally, books designed to help readers navigate the treacheries of ageing fall roughly into three categories: the scientific, the personal and the political.

Books in the first category may provide empirical research on all aspects of the ageing boom, from biology to demographics. Sue Armstrong, the author of Borrowed Time: The science of how and why we age, is an appealing guide through the evidence and the controversies. She is a woman in her late sixties, “still swimming happily in the mainstream of life”, who watched her mother “lose her sight, her hearing, her beloved life partner and most of her friends, and finally her mind, across her ninth and tenth decades of life”. (This also describes my mother, who lived to be ninety-seven.) Armstrong goes right to the crucial issue: “what will life be like for us as we reach these venerable ages? No matter how positive and philosophical one’s general disposition, one cannot ignore the evidence that for too many of us old age is nasty, brutish and long”. A five-year-old child in the UK today can expect to live to be about eighty years old, but, for many, around twenty of those years, she observes, “will likely be dogged by ill health” – a fact that has generated immense research and argument. Is ageing (and its attendant cellular damage and decline in immune function) an inevitable result of normal wear and tear, in which case might it possibly be delayed or repaired, or is it a result of genetic programming, over which we have no control? The controversy is especially pressing today given that, in the words of one gerontologist she quotes, “health care hasn’t slowed the ageing process so much as it has slowed the dying process”. (...)

Michelle Pannor Silver’s Retirement and Its Discontents: Why we won’t stop working, even if we can provides a thoughtful investigation of a specific transition of ageing – retirement “For many people,” Silver begins, “retirement is a much-awaited and enjoyable time in life. This book is not about those people.” It’s also not about people who retire because of health issues or who have financial struggles. Silver’s research focuses on a narrower constituency, five groups of people – doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors and homemakers – who were discontented in retirement because they loved what they used to do and because that work was woven into their identities. What happens now that it’s over, and over not by choice but because they felt forced to leave, or because circumstances dictated it? How do they decide what to do next? How do they structure activities, in ways that provide the social connection, fulfilment and meaning that they enjoyed throughout their careers?

These are crucial questions now that people are living longer, in many cases well beyond official “retirement” age. The answers do not necessarily come through travelling, volunteering, learning a language, or taking up art lessons – activities that can certainly be enjoyable but which for many people do not provide meaning, deep satisfaction or a new identity. I recently met a man in his seventies, a radiologist, who, once retired, spent all his time carving wood pieces of exceptional artistry. “When did you begin to develop your skill in this hobby?” I asked, expecting to hear that he was sixty or so. “At sixteen”, he said. “And my hobby was being a radiologist.” In my experience, friends and colleagues who retired with glowing fantasies of learning to play the lute, becoming a woodcarver, or acquiring another skill that takes years to master, often discover that it will take too long to make performing or creating intrinsically enjoyable. Silver’s interviewees concur, leading Silver to explore “the larger structural problems that society must grapple with as individuals confront the mismatch between an idealized retirement and the reality of giving up identity, income and status”: becoming invisible where once they were centres of attention, the person others went to for advice, help and wisdom; feeling unneeded where once they were essential. The heart of the dilemma, she writes, is that retirement, a life without the “burdens” of work, can be a burden itself: “Herein lies the irony of retirement’s lack of boundaries and lauded freedoms, which can feel like a forced rupture from our core identity”. That irony captures the bittersweet feelings that people may have at their retirement parties: “Sure, thanks for your tributes – but now what? Tomorrow you’ll have forgotten me”. (As George S. Kaufman famously noted when he saw his fellow playwright S. N. Behrman in his office the morning after the latter’s farewell party, “Ah, forgotten but not gone, eh?”) While some of the retirees Silver interviewed enjoyed a honeymoon phase – time, at last, for lute playing – most went directly to the disenchantment phase, followed by efforts to forge new identities and satisfactions. Some succeeded. Some still struggle.

by Carol Tavris, TLS |  Read more:

Image: Same Old Future” by Darren Smith, 2019