Amazon As Experiment

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’s desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future, you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes has been turned into a team or maybe a product.

Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old. And, we can forget how many of the slightly dusty incumbent retailers we all grew up with were also once radical, daring, piratical new businesses that made people angry with their new ideas.

This goes back to the beginning of mass retail. In Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, a tremendously entertaining novel about the creation of department stores in 1860s Paris, Octave Mouret builds a small shop into a vast new enterprise, dragging it into existence through force of will, inspiration, and genius. In the process, he creates fixed pricing, discounts, marketing, advertising, merchandising, display, and something called "returns." He sends out catalogs across the country. His staff is appalled that he wants to sell a new fabric at less than cost; "that’s the whole idea!" he shouts. Loss leaders are nothing new.

Meanwhile, the other half of the story follows the small, traditional shopkeepers in the area, who are driven out of business one by one. Zola sees them as part of the past to be swept away. They’re doomed, and they don’t understand—indeed, they’re both baffled and outraged by Mouret's new ideas. Here’s the draper Baudu:

The place would soon be really ridiculous in its immensity; the customers would lose themselves in it. Was it not inconceivable? In less than four years they had increased their figures five-fold… They were always swelling and growing; they now had a thousand employees and twenty-eight departments. Those twenty-eight departments enraged him more than anything else. No doubt they had duplicated a few, but others were quite new; for instance a furniture department, and a department for fancy goods. The idea! Fancy goods! Really those people had no pride whatever, they would end by selling fish.

Mouret had a catalogue, but it was Sears Roebuck that used catalogs to transform retail again. The pages below come from the retailer's 1908 catalog; white label and private label products are not new either, and you can bet that Sears was using sales data to decide what market segments to enter next.

Amazon, of course, is the Sears Roebuck of our time, but it’s more than that. Amazon is systematically going through every branch of the idea tree around what retail is, and doing it without any pride. It’s trying everything that anyone has ever tried before, and anything else that it can think of that might make sense, as well. There is no-one saying "that’s a good idea, but we’re a website so we wouldn’t do that."

The clearest place to see this is in Amazon’s moves into physical retail. This is the opposite of pride or "principle." Amazon’s job is "to get you the thing," not "to be a website," so what are the best ways to do it? What else might work? The project to make a convenience store with no human checkout process is an obvious experiment, now that machine learning and computer vision offer a route to make it work. (There are a number of startups pursuing all the possible vectors to doing this.)

More interesting, though, are the Amazon Four-Star stores, physical retail stores —currently in New York and Berkeley, California—that only sell products rated highly by users on its site. I joked on Twitter that they feel as though they were designed by very clever people who have seen shops in Google Street View, but never actually been inside one. There's a sense of cognitive dissonance: the selection of products appears to be completely random. There’s a rice cooker, a Harry Potter Lego set, a cushion, a Roomba, a mixing bowl, a book about trees... It makes no sense. (In the words of Zola's Baudu, “Those people have no pride!”)

Of course, sometimes "it makes no sense" is the right reaction (remember the Fire Phone, after all). But when clever people do things that make no sense, it can be worth looking twice. Is this a new discovery model? A different way to change how people think about purchasing? Well, it’s another experiment.

All of this reminds me of stories about early Google, and how the company systematically rethought everything from first principles. Sometimes this was just a painful waste of time, as it learned the lessons everyone else had already learned, but sometimes the result was Gmail or Maps.

Sometimes the experiment is still in progress: though Amazon has managed to put Alexa into more than 50 million homes, it’s not yet clear what strategic value it will gain (I wrote about this here). But it’s better to own the experiment and get the option value than to sit on the business you already have and watch someone else try something new.

On the other hand, it’s interesting that Amazon seems to be doing as much experimentation as possible around the logistics model—from stores to drones to warehouse robots of every kind—but much less around the buying experience, other than small-scale tests of the Four-Star stores. After all, historically, department stores were about pleasure as much as they were about convenience or price. They changed what it meant to "go shopping" and helped turn retail into a leisure activity.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: Sears

Putin Denies Mitch McConnell Is Russian Asset: “He Has Never Been an Asset to Any Country”

MOSCOW - Pushing back against charges that Senator Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said on Tuesday that McConnell “has never been an asset to any country.”

“You can scour the four corners of the globe, and you will not find a nation that would ever in a million years consider Mitch McConnell an asset,” Putin said.

The Russian President urged pundits who have called McConnell a Russian asset “to look up the word ‘asset’ in the dictionary.”

“You will find that ‘asset’ means a useful or valuable thing,” Putin said. “The only part of that definition that fits McConnell is ‘thing.’ ”

Pressing his case further, he said that it was debatable whether McConnell was even an asset to his home state of Kentucky. “Maybe compared to Rand Paul he is, but that’s setting the bar ludicrously low,” he said.

Concluding his remarks, Putin said that people who ask, “Who does Mitch McConnell work for?” are asking the wrong question. “The question should be ‘When has Mitch McConnell ever worked?’ ” he said.

by Andy Borowitz, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Mark Wilson / Getty

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Slash and Burn

Meet The Right-Wing Consultant Who Goes From State To State Slashing Budgets

A few days after a powerful earthquake hit the state last November, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) issued an order increasing the power of the state’s budget office, led at the time by a woman who had lived in Alaska a mere two weeks.

In her newly empowered role, Donna Arduin — an infamous budget-slashing expert — and Dunleavy went on cut to hundreds of millions from the state budget. They aim to trim even more in her second year in the remote state.

It’s hardly Arduin’s first rodeo. The budget consultant has served in several Republican-led governor’s offices, slashing state expenses while cutting or resisting efforts to increase tax revenue. (...)

Since arriving in Alaska last year, Arduin has led the governor’s attempt to cut a whopping $1.6 billion in spending from education, social services, the arts, and nearly every other corner of state government. Between legislative cuts and line-item vetoes, Dunleavy has so far cut “almost $700 million” from the budget in his first year, Arduin said in an interview earlier this month, despite a failed recent attempt by the legislature to override his vetoes.

“We’re about halfway solved,” she said. “We’re going to be looking towards reducing the budget another $700 million next year.”

The University of Alaska’s Board of Regents, at a meeting in which they declared financial exigency last week, sounded less enthusiastic. The institution has been “crippled,” its president said, by the governor cutting roughly 40% of the school’s state funding — over $130 million. Thousands of students across the state found their state-funded scholarships suddenly defunded with the school year looming. “We will not have a university after February if we don’t make a move,” one regent noted.

Another Alaskan who had scheduled a dentures appointment four weeks after having his teeth extracted was left with gums flapping in the wind, after the governor eliminated Medicaid dental coverage for adults. That saved the state $27 million.

But the steep cuts aren’t surprising to Americans in several other states. Following an internship in the Reagan-era Office of Management and Budget and stints at Morgan Stanley and elsewhere, Arduin has crisscrossed the country slashing state budgets left and right.

“I have no sympathy for people who want handouts from the government,” Arduin told Duke Magazine for a 2006 profile.

It shows. (...)

As then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s budget director, Arduin pushed a plan that would have empowered a statewide board of appointed doctors, pharmacists and others to decide which drugs could be prescribed using Medicaid funds. To make her point, Arduin pointed to HIV-positive men receiving Viagra prescriptions. “If it were up to me, the state wouldn’t pay for it at all,” she said.

In the process of cutting $8.1 billion over five years in Florida, the Los Angeles Times later reported, “Florida eliminated money for eyeglasses, hearing aids and dentures for poor seniors and forced 55,000 low-income children onto health insurance waiting lists.”

At that point, Arduin was “on loan,” from Bush’s office to then-California-governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger’s as an unpaid budget expert, and then as the state’s full-time budget director. Arduin ultimately left California after 11 months as Schwarzenegger’s adviser. An initial budget proposed under Arduin’s leadership cut $274 million from programs for developmentally disabled people, the Los Angeles Times later reported, until furious protest led the governor to reconsider. Overall, the budget deficit she’d sought to tackle only got worse.

“We didn’t solve the problem. We made it worse,” Michael Genest, who worked with Arduin when she was California Department of Finance director and later held the same post, told the Anchorage Daily News in a profile of Arduin last week. “That was the tradeoff.”

One of her partners at the consulting firm, Moore, commented at the time to the Los Angeles Times, “I think that her attitude is, I’ve come and rescued California, and pretty soon it’s time to pass the baton to someone else and go back to Florida or privatize herself in some way.”

Later, in Illinois, Arduin spent just eight months as Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s budget adviser, receiving an estimated $165,000 for her work after failing to come up with a budget the Democratic legislature found palatable. Rauner called Arduin “the smartest state government budget person in America.” (He was subsequently defeated in a reelection bid.)

Just as Arduin’s bids to slash budgets in California and Illinois met resistance outside the governor’s office, many Alaskans are frustrated with her lack of familiarity with their unique state.

The leader of a tribal consortium, Melanie Bahnke, told Arduin not to “use the word ‘our’ when referring to our people, our state and our issues” at an event sponsored by Americans For Prosperity, the Anchorage Daily News noted.

That might sound withering, but by now, Arduin has grown used to such critiques, as she noted to Duke Magazine in 2006.

“I joined government to shrink it,” she said.

by Matt Shuhan, Talking Points Memo |  Read more:

Image: Screenshot/YouTube, "Governor Perry"
[ed. Alaska is a complete mess right now. Even the ferries are out of commission due to strikes. All this because a new governor promised to dole out more money each year to residents from the state's Permanent Fund (an oil royalty savings account) while cutting state services. See also: The lunacy of the PFD fight (ADN).]

How Science Got Trampled in the Rush to Drill in the Arctic

Every year, hundreds of petroleum industry executives gather in Anchorage for the annual conference of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, where they discuss policy and celebrate their achievements with the state’s political establishment. In May 2018, they again filed into the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, but they had a new reason to celebrate. Under the Trump administration, oil and gas development was poised to dramatically expand into a remote corner of Alaska where it had been prohibited for nearly 40 years.

Tucked into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a bill signed by President Donald Trump five months earlier, was a brief two-page section that had little to do with tax reform. Drafted by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the provision opened up approximately 1.6 million acres of the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing, a reversal of the federal policy that has long protected one of the most ecologically important landscapes in the Arctic.

The refuge is believed to sit atop one of the last great onshore oil reserves in North America, with a value conservatively estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. For decades, the refuge has been the subject of a very public tug of war between pro-drilling forces and conservation advocates determined to protect an ecosystem crucial to polar bears, herds of migratory caribou, and native communities that rely on the wildlife for subsistence hunting. The Trump tax law, for the first time since the refuge was established in 1980, handed the advantage decisively to the drillers.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference that afternoon was Joe Balash, a top official at the Department of the Interior. Balash, who grew up in a small town outside Fairbanks and describes himself as “a local kid,” referred to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a “jewel,” and predicted that the entire North Slope region was “about to change in some pretty astounding ways.” The executives were there to hear him talk about what was going to come next: Before development could begin, Interior needed to complete a review of potential environmental impacts, and then get the first leases sold to industry. He recounted for the audience that on his second day on the job—right around when the tax bill was passed—then-Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt sat him down and told him that he would be “personally responsible” for completing the legally complex environmental review process for the wildlife refuge and “having a successful lease sale.”

“No pressure,” Balash said to audience laughter.

The pressure, in fact, couldn’t be greater.

Today, Bernhardt is the secretary of the Interior, driving energy policy in the Arctic and beyond. And although the tax bill gave DOI four years to complete the first sale, top officials at the department, including Bernhardt and Balash, are determined to get it done in half that time, before the end of 2019.

The only thing standing in the way of establishing an oil and gas leasing program is the environmental review process, which includes an assessment of the proposed seismic surveys and an evaluation of the impacts of leasing and future development on the refuge. Environmental reviews are a standard part of oil and gas drilling elsewhere in Alaska, and normally, such impact statements for ecologically sensitive and undeveloped land would take at least two to three years—or even longer, according to three former DOI officials interviewed for this article. Instead, the administration is compressing it into just over one year. The environmental impact statement for leasing commenced in April 2018, and the final results, already publicly available in draft form, are expected to be published next month. (...)

Geoff Haskett, who served as regional director for the Alaska Region of the Fish and Wildlife Service during the Obama administration, said the rush to lease has undermined the scientific integrity of the review process. “In the time they’ve allotted there’s no way they can meet all the legal requirements to do an [environmental impact statement] that’s this complicated and this big and this important,” Haskett said. “They’re going to make mistakes and there will be legal ramifications.”

Why the hurry? Observers point out that the tax bill’s drilling provision is at huge political risk: If Trump is defeated next year, a Democratic administration would almost certainly move to reverse any effort to drill in the wildlife refuge, which is a far easier task if no leases have been granted. In fact, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has already introduced legislation repealing the section of the 2017 tax bill that opens the refuge. Getting a lease issued quickly may be the only opportunity to achieve what no other Republican administration has been able to do: secure leases for drilling in the refuge.

“Balash is there to follow through on the Murkowski legislation and to get at least one lease sale done in ANWR so that whatever else happens in the future with policy, there will be pre-existing rights,” a former DOI official who knows Balash told me. (...)

Even without drilling, the Refuge is already undergoing profound changes.

Climate change is warming the Arctic nearly twice as fast as anywhere else in the world, setting in motion changes that have alarmed scientists who study the region. As sea ice has diminished greater numbers of polar bears have been forced to come inland to den along the coastal plain. This has led to more encounters between humans and bears and the deterioration of the overall health of the bear population. The southern Beaufort Sea population was listed as a threatened species in 2008, which is part of the reason that FWS has resisted approving permits for ecologically risky seismic surveys. Over the next 30 years, scientists fear that the population could be driven to extinction.

In early February, I flew to Kaktovik, population 250, to attend a public hearing on the draft Environmental Impact Statement for leasing the coastal plain. The much-anticipated document had been published on December 20, two days before the government shut down.

Like the environmental assessment for seismic surveys, the draft EIS for leasing, which evaluates the potential impact of leasing on everything from polar bears and caribou to water resources and vegetation, had been produced with unusual speed, in about eight months. The required public hearings commenced less than one week after DOI announced that they were taking place so there was very little advance notice. Robert Thompson, a polar bear guide in Kaktovik and an outspoken opponent of oil and gas development who follows the issue closely, learned about the meeting when I called him a few days before the hearing. “How do you have this meeting if no one knows about it?” he said.

I had attended the first hearing in Fairbanks the day before, when activists holding Defend the Sacred placards protested that the format for the hearings reflected the department’s lack of transparency and its desire to stifle public participation. DOI had announced that the meetings would be “open house” style with subject matter experts on hand and that comments would be taken only by court reporters or in writing. I watched as activists seized the podium and, for the next two and a half hours, I listened to dozens of speakers, all of them opposed to developing the refuge, make their case. At one point, Balash, who in his introductory remarks acknowledged that there were “strong feelings on both sides of the issue,” conceded that DOI had lost control of the meeting.

by Adam Federman, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Nathanial Wilder

Michael Hudson Explains Money

[ed. Click on any part of this interview and find yourself nodding in agreement. See also: Michael Hudson: The Coming Savings Writedowns (Naked Capitalism).]

Enrico Pieranunzi

[ed. Interesting (and new to me) jazz interpretation of Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No.1.]

Antonello Silverini - Proust
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Stacey Kent

[ed. Photography by Steven Meisel.]

Hipster Elegies

The death and life of the great American hipster offers an alternative history of culture over the last quarter century.

On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged a decade ago at the epicenters of bohemia still filter out. Urban Outfitters is going strong. In Zürich, on the banks of the Limmat, elaborate tattoos cover the bodies of the children of Swiss bounty. The French use Brooklyn as a metonym for hip. In this context, in such saturation, hipster can no longer stand for anything, except perhaps the attempt or ambition to look cool. But since coolness venerates its own repudiation most of all, every considered choice bears hipster’s trace. Hipster is everything and nothing—and so it is nothing.

Yet even before hipster petered out, confusion dogged its meaning. Starting in 2009, Mark Greif and his colleagues at n+1 undertook the most serious attempt to date to understand and situate the hipster in context. This realized itself in essays and panel discussions and ultimately a book, What Was the Hipster? Admirable as these efforts were—and Greif’s essay of the same name remains the high-water mark in hipster criticism—something elusive always troubled the boundaries of the concept. As Rob Horning wrote for PopMatters after one such panel, “The participants never really made much of an effort to establish a stable definition of what a hipster is,” a failure that may reflect the impossibility of the task.

Still, if hipster eludes strict definition, one can nonetheless diagnose the confusion that vexed its discussion and, in so doing, back one’s way into an understanding of the phenomenon. The problem always arose in the incongruity of the use of the term and the reality of the type. The word meant to describe the figure, of course, but since the word always carried a pejorative connotation—since those recognized as hipsters would never so self-designate—no one could ever achieve clarity on what, if anything, made up hipster’s authentic core. The term registered inauthenticity. But did it describe latecomers and poseurs, second-wave adopters who appropriated an authentic style (in which case first-wave hipsters might employ it themselves as a term of abuse), or was it always an outgroup epithet for something viewed as exclusionary and pretentious (in which case first-wave hipsters were its object)? This uncertainty repeated itself in a second ambiguity: Did hipster begin as an authentic style, later co-opted by outsiders, or was it always at heart a style of co-optation, as many have argued (tracing its appropriative sweep to punk, queer, skater, hip-hop, and working-class fashions)?

Unpacking the discrepancies between the history of the term and the history of the type sheds some light on these confusions. It also drives at deeper questions about what separates a subculture from a style, and what role a subculture plays in the culture writ large. (...)

This history matters because it emphasizes the semantic crux of hipster, which like hippie always worked as an outsider designation. Those within the group did not self-reflexively adopt the term, except perhaps ironically. This dictated an overwhelmingly negative usage. To call someone a hipster or hippie meant to dismiss or deride that person, and so everything the term evoked—not just individuals, but the paraphernalia and fashion by which such individuals were classified—took on a negative cast. What fell under the “hipster” umbrella was ipso facto inauthentic, lame.

The idiom of hip bifurcated in the 1980s, first attaching to the burgeoning hip-hop movement in the South Bronx. Hipster, which begins its slow resurgent ascent in the second half of the ’90s, peaking in 2004, appears to represent a different, distinctly pejorative spur. Articles on the revitalization of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg from 2000, in the New York Times and Time Out New York, describe “bohemians” and “arty East Village types,” but neither, tellingly, uses hipster. Just three years later, when Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook appears, the term has found its way into widespread use and some consensus on its meaning has emerged.

Genealogy of the Type

The figure of the hipster may well be an example of polygenesis too. No coherent origin story has emerged, and as with any significant current in culture and fashion, multiple tributaries appear to flow together. One could, for instance, envision hip-hop and punk influences in the Lower East Side; Hispanic and skater culture in East L.A.; an Americana element in South Austin; queer and surfer aesthetics in the Bay Area; and suburban irony in East Portland and Capitol Hill, Seattle. Take each of these inflections and weave them together, as people migrate and mass media bring news of the latest styles, and one can imagine a composite fashion as liberally appropriative as hipster emerging in the late ’90s from several decades of subcultural style preceding it.

This story leaves out much nuance, but—obvious though this may be—it reminds us that the style and type precede the rehabilitated term. A new fashion or subgroup necessarily exists before the culture gives it a name and, in so doing, fixes it in the mind as something that can be thought about and discussed. The picture always gets more complicated after the name emerges, since the name introduces a meta layer—the understanding of the thing—which overlaps imperfectly with the thing itself and inaugurates a secondary discourse around authenticity. To name a thing is not necessarily to kill it, but to spark a never-ending tussle between the reality and the concept.

The ur-hipster—the turn-of-the-millennium character outfitted in aviator glasses, “wife beater” undershirt, and trucker hat—looked like your typical ironic urban scrounger at the moment when ’70s and ’80s “white trash” leftovers dominated thrift and vintage stores. The birth of hipster has always been indistinguishable from the advent of contemporary gentrification. As Greif notes, hipsterism marked the turning of a tide when, after a period of white flight to the suburbs, the children of those who had left returned to low-rent (but attractively situated) city neighborhoods that hung on as minority and working-class enclaves. For “mysterious reasons to the participants,” writes Greif, the trappings of ’70s suburban whiteness “suddenly seemed cool for an urban setting.”

But one might probe more deeply whether nostalgia in fact lay behind the aesthetic and whether the new logic of cool truly mystified its exponents. You can certainly argue that hipsters resurrected the iconography of their childhoods out of a disaffected nostalgia, ironic rather than romantic, but the ultimate catholic reach of their stylistic foraging places a certain weight on opportunism. If the style drew force from retro and referential gestures, what hipsters chose to curate their lives may simply have reflected what broader society had cast off: literally, what showed up in secondhand shops and family storage. Fifties-inspired nerd chic had little to do with the ’70s-porn look, after all, although both fed into hipsterism. One side of the style evoked the grainy, sepia-tone aesthetic of the Beastie Boys’ 1994 video for “Sabotage”; another entirely showed up in Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” also from 1994, whose music video used footage from Happy Days, a ’70s sitcom set in the ’50s.

In such cultural artifacts one sees the first stirrings of the new hipster. By 1996, in recordings such as Beck’s Odelay (and video for the track “Where It’s At”) and Wes Anderson’s film Bottle Rocket, an element of kitschy Americana had joined the mix. (Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused evinced affection for the ’70s filtered through the prism of the ’90s South Austin flâneur.) The ground for hipster was effectively laid.

by Greg Jackson, The Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Image: via

Brian and Thomas Owens

[ed. Blues Sunday.]

Bert Hardy, Down the Bay [aka Street shelter], 1950
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Nothing Matters: It’s Like the Whole Market Has Gone Nuts

You see, Tesla is different. It just reported another doozie, a loss of $408 million in the second quarter, after its $702 million loss in the first quarter, for a total loss in the first half of $1.1 billion. In its 14-year history, it has never generated an annual profit.

It has real and popular products and surging sales, but it subsidizes each of those sales with investor money. And here’s where it’s different this time: investors don’t care. They dig how the company has been consistently overpromising and underdelivering. They dig the chaos at the top. They dig everything that should scare them off.

Yeah, its shares plunged [TSLA] 11% afterhours today, but that takes those shares only down to where they’d been on May 1. Big deal. Shares are down 32% from the peak. But their peak should have been a small fraction of that. Even today, the company is still valued at over $40 billion.

Tesla lacks a viable business model in the classic sense. Its business model is a new business model of just burning investor cash that it raises via debt and equity offerings on a near-annual basis because investors encourage it to do that, and love it for it, and eagerly hand it more money to burn, and they’re rewarding each other by keeping the share price high. It’s just a game, you see. And nothing else matters.

Then there is Boeing [BA]. It just reported the largest quarterly loss in its history of $2.9 billion due to a nearly $5-billion charge related to its newest bestselling all-important 737 Max, two of which crashed, killing 346 people, due to the way the plane is designed. The flight-control software that is supposed to mitigate this design issue is not working properly. And a software fix that is acceptable to regulators remains elusive.

The plane has been grounded globally since March. No one, especially not the regulators, can afford a third crash. So today, Boeing announced that it may further cut production of the plane or suspend it altogether if the delays continue to drag out. This is big enough to start impacting US GDP.

The entire 737 Max episode has been tragic from the first minute, and the cost in human lives has been huge, and it has cost and continues to cost billions of dollars to deal with, among calls that the plane should never fly again.

And what does Boeing’s share price do? It dipped 3% today and is up 2% from a year ago, before all this happened. In essence, two crashes and the grounding of its bestselling plane, and the potential suspension of production of this plane, and its uncertain future … and the stock has ticked up over a 12-month period.

Instead of spending the resources necessary to design a modern plane from ground up, Boeing kept basing its new models on versions of its many-decades-old 737 airframe that wasn’t designed at all for what it is being used for today. This was a decision Boeing made to save some money and pump up its share price.

But here we go: From 2013 through Q1 2019, Boeing has blown a mind-boggling $43 billion on share buybacks (buyback data via YCharts):

Blowing these $43 billion on share buybacks has caused Boeing to have a “total equity” of a negative $5 billion. In other words, it has $5 billion more in liabilities than in assets. This company is out of wriggle room. If it can’t borrow enough money to make payroll, it’s over.

But nothing matters.

If Boeing had invested some of this money that it blew on share buybacks to design a new modern plane from ground up to replace the ancient 737 airframe, these tragedies could have been prevented, and Boeing wouldn’t have this nightmare on its hands. But the corporate cost-cutters and financial engineers, rather than real engineers, had the final word.

Markets don’t care about any of this. They don’t care about real engineers either. They love corporate cost-cutters and financial engineers. They want share buybacks, and if something bad happens, they’ll overlook the $5 billion to pay for the fallout because it’s just a “one-time item.”

And now Boeing still has this plane, instead of a modern plane, and the history of this plane is now tainted, as is its brand, and by extension, that of Boeing. But markets blow that off too. Nothing matters.

Companies are getting away each with their own thing. There are companies that are losing a ton of money and are burning tons of cash, with no indications that they will ever make money. And market valuations are just ludicrous.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

Image: YCharts and Wolf Street

[ed. See also: The Companies with the Most Debt in America (Wolf Street).]

Sally Mann
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One Nation Under Fear

Among the puzzling questions of world history and national identity, a few stand out. How, one might ask, did the Vikings, once the roving terrors of the world, manage to become equable Nordic socialists with lessons to teach us in the arts of decency and fairness? And how did the tough, soldierly Romans, conquerors of the world, manage to evolve into the charming, pleasure-loving Italians, with their gifts for good food, good wine, and civic instability?

Soon, a similarly unexpected question may be asked about Americans. How did a people who settled a continent, created enormous wealth, and fought and (mostly) won war after war devolve into a nation of such tremulous souls? And how did it happen so quickly? Where once there was the generation of the Second World War, ready to leave home and fight fascists on the far sides of the world, we now have a nation that at times seems composed largely of field mice, prone to quiver when they detect an unfriendly shadow. As a people, we seem to value security and prosperity above all. When someone threatens either, or seems about to, we become (in this order) confused, then terrified, and then very angry.

Those who dislike us around the world (and of course there are more than a few) tend to see us as a powerful, imperial beast, brutally pursuing our own ends across the globe. We are strong and violent, and when we want something, we assert ourselves with overwhelming force. But is that really the case?

Our Shrinking Tolerance for Risk

What appear to the outside world as instances of bullying, and what appear to us as expressions of strength, may reveal themselves, on closer examination, to be actions driven by fear. We are a people obsessed with security. Our imagination of what counts as a threat to our security is hyperactive and becoming more so all the time. Two years into World War II, it took the fierce attack on Pearl Harbor to persuade Americans that it was finally time to fight. Once persuaded, they did. Now it takes only the least incitement to make us feel threatened. When even the most shadowy forces and conditions imperil what we call “our security,” we assault them with the furor of the easily scared.

The most salient instance: We went to war with another nation, Iraq, because we believed that it had weapons that threatened us. How could these weapons have threatened the peace and prosperity of the United States of America? Even had the weapons existed, there is no way that they could have done us harm. Saddam Hussein had no viable delivery system, and he wasn’t going to create one anytime soon. But we went at him, and at Iraq. A display of imperial will? That’s how it looked to the rest of the world, no doubt. But the deeper reason, I suspect, was fear. We have become a nation and a people that simply cannot abide risks.

On September 11, 2001, we were attacked in a cowardly and devastating way. We needed to do something about it. But rather than seek out and punish the perpetrators of this heinous crime, we invaded an entire country, Afghanistan. A small radical group, Al Qaeda, was able to push the most powerful nation in the world into war because its members perceived, rightly, that we were too insecure to live with any level of risk. Fear creates overreaction; fear leads to overkill.

Why do we call our enemies terrorists as often as we do? At first glance, calling someone a terrorist seems to be a way to denigrate and diminish him. Terrorists are sneaky and invisible. They fight dirty. A terrorist lacks the nerve to put on a uniform and face his enemy directly. He plants bombs and attacks civilian targets. OK, one gets the point.

But it’s possible that the word terrorist and its promiscuous use tell us more about ourselves than about our antagonists. A terrorist is—it’s so obvious that one can readily miss it—someone who is capable of terrifying us, of inspiring fear. And it seems that all of our antagonists are now called terrorists. Saddam Hussein, the head of a large country, was a terrorist, and so was Gaddafi and so is Assad. So were the members of the Taliban. And so, it sometimes seems, is every angry male with a computer, a peculiar ideology, and a random thought or two about disrupting our tranquility.

We call them terrorists because they terrify us. We call them terrorists because, large and small (mostly they are small), these figures make us afraid. And why do we feel fear so readily?

It is not an easy question to answer. But manifestations of that fear are all around us, as much in our domestic lives as in what we call our foreign policy—America is now devoted to the protocols and the apparatus of security. We strip down at the airport; we worry about identity theft; we fret about having our passwords stolen. (Like kids in a dozen insignificant clubs, we have a dozen passwords each.) Every door we approach is a locked door; every entry requires that we be checked and vetted. The metal detectors are everywhere; the man always wants to see your identification. Are your papers in order? Are you who you say you are?

The Age of Anxiety

This security obsession cuts two ways. It can make us feel better: The cameras are on at the public event and on the subway. My bank checks my online password every time and asks a few personal questions to boot. The officials from the Transportation Security Administration tear into my luggage when I go to the airport. But there’s a subtext to it all, isn’t there? If we expend so many resources, material and temporal, on security, then there must be something we need to be secured against. If the monster isn’t out there, why are we be putting all these resources into keeping it at bay?

But then comes the realization: They’re doing all that for a reason, aren’t they? There really is something to be afraid of out there. It’s only logical: Be afraid.

Why, we repeatedly ask, are there so many guns in America? Because the law says we can possess them—at least that’s part of the reason. But there’s more to it than that. There’s a part of gun ownership that gun control advocates never understand. They simply don’t listen to the gun owners who tell them time and again why they believe they need all those guns. People who would add limits to firearms possession tend to think of gun owners as dangerous brutes, inclined to violence and bullying, who live in blood-red states, hunt their meat, beat their women, and scream Scripture at their kids.

But listen to what gun owners actually say when they talk about the need to defend themselves. They put it simply: My gun is here for protection. I use it to prevent harm from coming to myself and to my family. They know that having a gun is dangerous. They know that accidents happen and that family members shoot each other and themselves by horrible chance. But they honestly believe they are in so much danger day to day that only by having a gun can they breathe easily. I believe they mean what they say.

Forget the fact that it is probably safer not to have a gun than to have one, at least if what you’re afraid of is dying violently. More people shoot themselves or their family members by accident (or in a moment of rage) than shoot dangerous assailants. But this reality doesn’t sway gun owners. It’s hard to think straight when you’re scared. And gun owners—at least the majority of them—are scared. They tell us so all the time, but we don’t listen.

Perhaps we are too anxious to pay attention. We are told, and told again, that anxiety is the default emotional setting of our day—that we live in the Age of Anxiety. In 2013, The New York Times recently ran a series on anxiety, written mostly by anxious people. The assumption was that these people were talking about a condition that afflicts us all, at least to some degree. It turns out there are a million kinds of anxiety, a million signs and symptoms. People fall apart in subway cars because they believe that the train is going to crash; pulse rates and blood pressure go through the roof when people go for a job interview, see a boss, bump into a former lover. A competitor sends nervous volts through our systems. Everyone, it seems, is in a state of anxiety.

Anxiety isn’t easy to define, but it might generally be described as trepidation about what will come our way in life. We are anxious about our prospects, our future dignity, our prosperity, our security, the humiliating specter of poverty and neglect.

What is the remedy? Everyone knows the answer. Take Paxil. Take Zoloft. Take what you need to steady your nerves. And when that stops working, take something else. Buy confidence, buy serenity, buy assurance, buy calm, and buy it from the doctors and the drug companies. If you have a stronger disposition, you can exercise, you can meditate, you can change your diet, and conquer anxiety, as it were, organically. (...)

If there is a monument to our abiding culture of fear, it is the American prison. Prisons rise up like enormous tombs all over the country. They and the 2.5 million people who live in them chart the geography of twenty-first-century American fear. America sends a larger percentage of its people to prison than any other country—a greater percentage than Russia, China, even North Korea. America’s inmate population is proportionately bigger by far than that of India, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. And these prisons are not there primarily to rehabilitate. Inmates in US prisons, 37 percent of whom are black (although African Americans make up only 13 percent of our population), are there primarily to be punished and kept apart from us, the ever-fearful ones.

America, some say, is a brutal nation. America functions under the principle of an eye for an eye. We are a stern, severe country that tolerates no wrongdoing. I disagree. I think we are a scared country. Young black males frighten people. So, in disproportionate numbers, they swell our prisons, often serving out mandatory sentences after being arrested in legally questionable searches and convicted for transgressions so slight as the possession of a joint or a hit of cocaine. Are we feeling any safer yet?

It would seem not. Sometimes, the more you do to quell your fear, the more frightened you become. Not long ago in my town, the authorities took it upon themselves to arrest two young men who allegedly were making false identification cards and selling them online. One is not in favor of false IDs. They can be put to all sorts of nefarious uses, although I’d wager their most common use is to persuade doormen that a young man or woman of twenty or so years is actually twenty-one. When it came time to arrest the malefactors, one might have expected the authorities to send two officers to the front door and one around the back, just to be sure.

The authorities sent an armored car. Yes, a fully rigged-out combat vehicle that might have rolled down the streets of Fallujah a few years ago. They sent it into a residential neighborhood in an out-of-the-way southern town along with a squad of paramilitary troopers armed and equipped, you might think, to storm a bunker filled with, yes, terrorists!

by Mark Edmundson, The Hedgehog Review |  Read more:
Image: Robert Pizzo

Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Tony Rice

Tainted by Association

When I first heard the allegations of serial sexual misconduct against the American folk-rock singer Ryan Adams earlier this year – that he had emotionally and psychologically abused several women and underage girls, using his status in the music industry as leverage – I didn’t want to believe it. Yet this desire to not-believe strongly preceded any acquaintance I had with the actual facts. Indeed – and as I am now ashamed to admit – I initially read the facts with great skepticism, hoping that they were wrong. Only with effort have I forced myself to put aside my initial disbelief, and consider things impartially, making a more balanced assessment. Why?

One answer comes from feminist theory. As a man who has been raised in a male-dominated society, one that tends to privilege the status and testimony of men, and to cast aspersions on those of women – most especially when it comes to issues of sex – I am ideologically conditioned to react this way. Sadly, I suspect there is much truth in this. But it is not the only explanation in play. Another consideration is that I didn’t want Adams to be guilty because I like his music. And the worry that I had – initially, without even realising it – was that, if Adams is indeed guilty, then I won’t be able to enjoy his music any more. And I don’t want that to be the case. Hence, I initially read the accusations against Adams with skepticism, precisely because I (subconsciously) wanted to protect my future enjoyment of his records.

It is not uncommon to find that one’s enjoyment of something is irrevocably damaged if that thing turns out to be closely connected to somebody who has committed serious wrongs. Many people will now feel deeply uncomfortable watching films associated with Harvey Weinstein. Similarly, critically acclaimed movies starring Kevin Spacey – even if made long before any accusation of wrongdoing was levelled against him – will no longer seem the obvious choices for Saturday night viewing that they once were. And this is not simply because we want to take a moral stand against Weinstein or Spacey (though that might certainly be true). It is because we feel that the films themselves are tainted.

But this is odd. A film or TV show, after all, is a thing ultimately independent of the private actions of the actors or producers who happened to help make it. And yet one seems to bleed inexorably into the other. Once you know the charges levelled against Weinstein, you can’t simply carry on watching his films as you did before. The same, I fear, will be true of Adams’s music if it turns out that he is as bad as they say. Many people are currently experiencing precisely such anxiety regarding the music of Michael Jackson, given the latest and most distressing of the allegations made against him. (...)

The fact that good things can come from bad people is a separate issue from the fact that knowledge of somebody – or something – having done a bad thing can deeply affect how we view the status of the thing itself. Take a simple but effective example, borrowed from the philosopher Simon Blackburn’s recent paper on this topic. Imagine I invite you over to dinner and, while carving the roast, I casually mention that this is the very knife that the assassin used to murder my wife and children. Would you still be comfortable eating the slice of beef I’ve just plopped on to your plate? And it can work in the other direction, too. Imagine I have a room filled with 20 Fender guitars. I tell you that you can have any of them you like – but one of them was the very guitar that Jimi Hendrix used during his last performance! I bet I know which one you’ll pick, whether you want to keep it for yourself or quickly take it to auction. (...)

Yet, when you think about it, this is rather strange. After all, it is simply a matter of luck that these particular objects have these particular histories. The assassin could well have used her own knife, or picked a different knife from the drawer. But she picked this knife – and so this knife is now the one that disturbs us. Hendrix (let us suppose) could have picked any of the available Fenders in the shop that day, he just happened to favour that one – and so now that one is special. The examples of Adams, Spacey and Weinstein fit the pattern, too. How come we extend our discomfort backwards, to cover artistic products associated with them from a time when they themselves were not (let us suppose) morally compromised? Weinstein is only one producer among many in Hollywood. Why is his financing of a film once upon a time – when it could easily have been someone else – enough to make us dislike that film today? (...)

Why does bare luck make such a difference to how we feel? Are we simply irrational when it comes to such matters? Perhaps not – and perhaps because asking about whether it is rational for us to have these luck-dependent aversions and attractions is not the right way to think about what is going on.

The best discussion of why we react in these varying – and perplexing – ways comes from the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith. Nowadays much more likely to be known (somewhat misleadingly) as the ‘father of economics’, Smith was employed as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow for around 12 years, and hence spent much of his time teaching and writing on such matters. Indeed, his first book – The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – puts forward not just the earliest sustained discussion of the issue of what philosophers now call ‘moral luck’, but one of its most compelling evaluations.

Smith’s discussion didn’t just cover objects or people, and the taint that can be associated with them because of their good or bad histories. It also covered the irregularity of our responses to outcomes that are heavily affected by luck. Imagine the following case: I carelessly throw a brick off the top of a building, but fortunately it doesn’t hit anybody, and shatters harmlessly on the pavement below. You’re likely to think that I’m a bad and irresponsible person, and deserve to be admonished accordingly. But you’ll probably also think that the matter should end there. Now vary the scenario: imagine that the brick does hit somebody, and kills them. The likelihood is that you will now think that I deserve much more in the way of blame, and indeed of punishment. (Prison seems a perhaps not unreasonable response.)

Let us suppose that my motivations – eg, sheer indifference to the safety of others – and my actions – chucking a brick without looking – are identical in both cases. Why, Smith asked, do we feel that the latter is so much worse than the former? It was, after all, simply a matter of luck that somebody walked along at that precise moment, got hit by the brick, and died. (It works in the other direction, too: we would surely feel it too harsh to send a person to prison simply because the brick might have hit a passerby, when in fact it didn’t.)

Yet this kind of scenario led to a puzzle. Smith thought it undeniable that we assess the morality of actions not by their actual consequences, but by the intentions of the agent who brings them about. To see that this is indeed true, consider the following example. Imagine that you see me rescue a cat from a tree. When I get to the ground, the cat wriggles free and scurries away. Assuming that my intention was to save the cat, you’ll likely think that I did a good thing. But what if you now find out that my intention was to barbeque the cat for dinner? In both cases, the consequences are the same – the cat is brought down from the tree, wriggles free, and runs away. Yet your evaluation of the morality of the act will shift markedly once you learn of my culinary intentions. Try any example you like, and you’ll get the same result: it’s the underlying intention that determines whether or not we approve of an act, not the consequences of the act alone.

For Smith, it is a truism that we assign different moral weight to intentions, not to consequences, and one that nobody will deny, at least when it comes to philosophical theory. Nonetheless, in practice, we often find ourselves heavily swayed by consequences even when, on the face of it, those consequences shouldn’t matter. Take the brick-throwing example again. In both cases, my intention was bad, because in throwing the brick I showed callous disregard for the safety of others. In theory, then, I am equally culpable whatever the outcome, at least if intentions are supposed to be what counts. But, in practice, we feel far more strongly in the case where the brick does hit somebody. So consequences do matter after all – even though moral philosophers tend to think that it’s only intentions that should matter.

by Paul Sagar, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Detail from Nelkenstrauss (1910), by Adolf Hitler. Photo by Christof Stache/AFP/Getty

Whole 60

When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.

Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.

One was The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.

The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”

It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.

But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.

Every girl remembers her first diet. Usually, it’s her mother’s.

My mother was (and continues to be, at the age of 88) slender and fit. As a child, she was part of a group of underweight campers “ordered” to drink daily milk shakes. On her wedding day, she weighed 102 pounds. Why do I know these facts? I know only that I know them. Her wedding dress hung in the hall closet outside my bedroom, sealed in a plastic bag, but I was never going to wear it. When I was little, that dress — a lovely knee-length shift — was too plain to fit into my future wedding fantasies. And by the time I was 10 or 11, it was clear that I was never going to fit into a dress made for someone who weighed 102 pounds.

In her mid-30s, my mother gained some weight and decided to go on a diet. This seemed like an adult rite of passage to me, a journey that I would inevitably undertake one day, heading out on the bounding billows of Tab. My mother’s diet was a topic of much discussion in our family — and much teasing by my father. My father also was rail thin; at the age of 12, I managed to shimmy into his old Navy uniform for the 4th of July parade. My older sister was thin as well. Many, many, many years later, a good friend saw me with my family at my stepson’s bar mitzvah and asked: “Did you get all the nutrients?” This was the first time that anyone had ever suggested there was anything attractive about my size relative to my family’s.

In case it’s not clear, I was never thin. I am tall, big-boned, with a belly that tends toward protrusion. I was maybe 10 or 11, close to the age my own daughter is now, when my mother cupped her hand over my convex midsection and said, “Look at your little pot belly.” Because I was a weird kid who sneaked into the adult side of the library to read adult books — you may sense a theme emerging — I had read Max Shulman’s Barefoot Boy with Cheek. In that comic college novel, a girl goes to a party where guests are instructed to dress as song titles. She chooses “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and wears a gown with a bare midriff, a smudge pot “cunningly hinged” to her navel. This is how I saw my pot belly — a literal pot, a growth, a foreign object hinged, not so cunningly, to my navel.

By the time I was 14 — 14! — I was plotting furiously in my diary: How To Get a Man. Step 1, of course, was to get a flat stomach. At the age of 15, about the same time I was reading books standing up at the mall, I signed up for a dance class, God knows why. The dance teacher, the mother of a close friend, screamed at me: “LAURA LIPPMAN YOU HAVE A POT BELLY YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO HAVE A POT BELLY I AM ALLOWED TO HAVE A POT BELLY BUT YOU ARE NOT!”

My first summer home from college I worked as a lifeguard at a small apartment complex where no one knew me, which gave me license to wear a two-piece bathing suit. An older man kept asking me out. After my third or fourth turndown, he guessed my weight almost to the decimal point, then assured me: “If you lost 20 pounds, you would be a knock-out.”

Then there was the man I loved so much and he loved me, too, until he fell in love with someone else. “It’s funny,” he mused. “You’re not really my type. I like petite women.” And off he went with a waif.

Every woman on the planet knows the rest of this story. Diet blah blah blah body dysmorphia yadda yadda yadda Atkins Scarsdale etc etc. We can all write list poems of the eating plans we have undertaken, the measurements on which we obsessed, the various low-carb sects to which we converted. I have nothing new to say about any of this.

What is new is that I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout. Like Dorothy at the end of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had the power I sought all along. I rub my thighs together — sorry, couldn’t resist — and tell myself over and over that I am beautiful and, what do you know, suddenly I am. Then I cup my hand over my 9-year-old daughter’s gorgeous, solid abdomen and tell her she is beautiful, too.

She’s not sure. She asks: “Is there a way to eat that makes a person lose weight?”

No, I tell her. Eat what you want when you want it and your body will figure out what it wants to be. Trust your body.

And then I leave the room and cry a little. I helped to do this. Although I never said the word “diet” in front of my daughter, never spoke about anyone’s weight, I did this to her. Kids don’t miss a trick and my daughter saw how I used to dress in the morning, how I turned to examine my profile, standing tall, sucking in my gut, smoothing the front of my pants or skirt. She noticed when I stopped eating bread the year she was 3. Yes, I tried Whole30 six years ago and yes it worked for a while, how could it not? You try not to lose weight while abstaining from alcohol, grains, dairy and legumes.

Now try deciding what you actually want and tell me which is harder.

Thanks to our modern world, I can pinpoint almost to the minute when I decided to give up dieting. As a former Weight Watchers customer — of course I am a former Weight Watchers customer — I received an email when the company announced it was rebranding itself as WW — “wellness that works.” Suddenly, the whole con was clear to me. On Sept. 24, 2018, at 11:42 a.m. I DM’ed a screenshot of the email to a friend and added: “fuck it NO MORE DIETING. EVER.”

I continued:

“I have been worried about my weight for 45 years, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this to my kid. I’m almost 60 years old and some part of me is still worried that not enough men find me fuckable. People talk about the White House distracting us, nothing has distracted me as much as this stupid battle with my weight and my looks, both which are fine, almost everybody’s weight and face is [sic] fine, and way too many benefit from getting us to think otherwise.

What would happen to the global economy if all the women on the planet suddenly decided: I don’t care if you think I’m fuckable.”

by Laura Lippman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Evgeny Buzov / Getty

The $60 Gadget That’s Changing Electronic Music

Derrick Estrada, an electronic musician who performs under the stage name Baseck, had just showered and was nursing a cup of yerba mate in the back room of the Los Angeles home that a musician friend dubbed the “synth flophouse.” It was 10 a.m. on a recent Thursday; very early, he explained, for a house full of musicians.

Estrada had promised a demonstration of a remarkable new instrument, one that had changed the whole way he made music. Two walls of the room were dedicated to racks of synthesizers — row after row of buttons and knobs and unwieldy wiring, a veritable museum of advanced technology spanning decades and costing thousands of dollars. Estrada ignored all of it. Instead, he plucked a small device from the spot where it was hanging from a hook. It looked like the exploded innards of a calculator, with a splat of knobs and buttons. There was no keyboard. Estrada plugged it into a set of speakers, held it in both hands and hunched over it slightly, as if handling a phone while texting, and began to play.

He punched the buttons, and a rapid-fire sequence of clicks began to repeat. Then he twisted one of the knobs, and the clicks deepened into a more hollow sound, like that of a kick drum. More button punches, more knob twists, more sounds: a spacey high-hat, a background static roar, a tonal burst that altered slightly and quickly became a repeated phrase. Suddenly there was more than a beat; there was a little song.

And just as suddenly — more punches, more twists — the sounds changed, and the song evolved. This went on for about 10 minutes, with Estrada nodding slightly, in a concentrated semi-trance over the device, coaxing out new sounds every few seconds. This was all in real time, and it sounded fantastic — ready for radio.

Estrada was playing a Pocket Operator, a device released four years ago by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago — cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.

Because it is mass-produced, cheap and easy to use, the Pocket Operator is closer to an acoustic guitar or a harmonica than it is to the telharmonium — a new kind of instrument for popular music, with new kinds of possibilities. Just as folk and rock musicians took the humble guitar and harmonica onstage and played music that was exciting and modern for thousands of people, electronic musicians can now do the same.

After he finished playing, Estrada told a story that illustrated the kind of range the device had. He recently traveled to Tokyo for a synth festival with his kit of bulky synths, but when he plugged them into the big sound systems in some venues, they sounded muddier than he might have liked. One night, nearing the end of a set, he thought, What the hell? He plugged in his Pocket Operator.

“The sound just, like, punched through,” he said. “People poured onto the dance floor. Afterward, everyone was like: What was going on at the end? It was the Pocket Operator.”

The four founders of Teenage Engineering started the company in 2007, with a more traditional keyboard synthesizer, the highly regarded OP-1. But they quickly became involved in a wide variety of modish design-oriented projects. They updated and reintroduced a ’70s-era speaker designed by another Swedish engineer, Stig Carlsson. They also did some outside work — for Ikea, it was a cardboard camera and forthcoming Bluetooth speakers; for the Chinese search-engine giant Baidu, a colorful smart speaker. The Pocket Operator was more of a lark. A friend at a clothing company called Cheap Monday told them the company had some extra cash on hand, because it had been bought by the fast-fashion giant H&M. Maybe Teenage Engineering could develop something for Cheap Monday to sell? The first three Pocket Operator models worked as drum, bass or “lead” sequencers, and they could all be synced up to play together as — in the promotional language of Teenage Engineering — a “pocket band.” Later models introduced new sounds (“noise percussion”) and capabilities (sampling).

Nearly all of Teenage Engineering’s 45 employees are in fact engineers (audio, computer, mechanical), and the style of the company’s products — playful, a little rebellious, definitely strange — does indeed evoke the slouchy insouciance of teenagers, but it draws as well from an even more youthful gestalt. “Everything must be simple, primary colors and shapes,” says Jesper Kouthoofd, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders. “If we cannot draw it quickly on a pad of paper, it is too complicated.”

by Ryan Bradley, NY Times Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Lernert and Sander for The New York Times

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‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ Review: We Lost It at the Movies

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rather than obsessive.

Don’t get me wrong. Tarantino is still practicing a cinema of saturation, demanding the audience’s total attention and bombarding us with allusions, visual jokes, flights of profane eloquence, daubs of throwaway beauty and gobs of premeditated gore. And yet “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” whose title evokes bedtime stories as well as a pair of Sergio Leone masterpieces, is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie by far, both because of its ambling, shaggy-dog structure and the easygoing rhythm of its scenes.

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.”Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

The friendship between Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) functions for Tarantino as both keystone and key. It’s an organizing principle and a source of meaning, and a major reason that “Once Upon a Time” is more than a baby-boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit brought to life.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV western series, he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography.) Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

Cliff is his longtime stunt double, but as Rick’s roles have shifted, his role has changed too. His duties include driving Rick (whose license has been suspended) to and from auditions and sets, performing minor household repairs and generally being available as a sounding board and drinking partner. You can’t really call Cliff a sidekick — we’re talking about Brad Pitt — and he’s not really a servant, either, even though Rick pays him for his time. An older vocabulary is needed: Cliff is a gentleman’s gentleman, a man Friday, a dogsbody, a squire. “More than a brother but less than a wife” is how the movie puts it.

The relationship isn’t defined by money or sex, but by a difference in rank accepted without comment or complaint by both parties. The inequality between the men — Rick lives in a spacious ranch house up in the hills, Cliff in a cluttered trailer down in the valley — is what dignifies their bond, just as the contrast of their temperaments sustain it.

Rick, a sloppy drinker and a furious smoker, wears his feelings close to the surface. He weeps aloud over the state of his career, throws an epic tantrum in his trailer when he messes up a scene and is moved to tears by the exquisiteness of his own acting. Cliff is a different kind of cat — lean, taciturn, self-effacing, slow to anger but capable of serious violence. Some say he’s a murderer; he himself occasionally alludes to a criminal past. Better not to ask. Apart from Rick, his main attachment is to his dog, Brandy, whose loyalty is the mirror of his own. (DiCaprio’s baroque, exuberant emotionalism perfectly complements Pitt’s down-to-the-bone minimalism. They’re both terrific.)

If the guys aren’t quite Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, their companionship nonetheless takes shape within a fundamentally aristocratic social order. Joan Didion, in an essay first published in 1973, described the Hollywood of that era as “the last extant stable society,” and Tarantino’s tableau confirms this view. Life isn’t perfect, but it is coherent. People know their place. They respect the rules and hierarchies. Rick’s neighbors, Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), live higher up in the canyon (at the end of a gated driveway) and also on the status pyramid. They are regarded not with envy or resentment, but with awe.

The governing virtue in this world is courtesy. The things produced within it are ridiculous, but also beautiful. Residents take seriously things that are objectively silly, which lends a measure of charm to otherwise pedestrian moments. A series of on-set interactions between Rick and two other actors — a leading man played by Timothy Olyphant and a juvenile played by the phenomenal Julia Butters — demonstrate the workings of this code. What they’re collaborating on might look like disposable commercial trash, but making it involves craft and tradition, folk wisdom and spiritual discipline, trust and integrity. (...)

Alongside the knight and his squire, there is a princess — Tate — who lives in something like a castle and is married to a man who looks a little like a frog. Tarantino has never been much interested in sex or romance — violence and vengeance are what makes his stories run — but he has a sentimental investment in marriage and a thing about wives.

by A.O. Scott, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Cooper/Sony Pictures

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Mother Earth Mother Board

For one thing, it’s 42,535 words long. This lets you know that you’re into Serious Business right there, before you even get started. Then comes the opening, torn straight from a 19th-century adventure novel and refracted through a cyberpunk prism: “In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents…”

This is no accident. In “Mother Earth Mother Board,” Neal Stephenson aims to reveal the very physical underpinnings of the virtual world. He’s going to tell you the tale of how the postmodern world was wired together. This requires reaching back to Victorian England, and forward, just a little bit, into the future. Accordingly, the form mirrors the content. A bit of travelogue, a bit of pulp adventure novel, a bit of technothriller, a bit of postcyberpunk sci-fi.

Wired published “Mother Earth Mother Board” in December 1996. Yahoo! was 2 years old. Google did not yet exist. We were coming to the end of year two of the five-year dot-com boom. The Internet was called “cyberspace” and “the information superhighway.” eCommerce ruled the future to the point that we developed a derisive term of art for regular old (actually profitable) retail operations; they were “brick and mortar” stores (first use, 1992). The implication being that these were dangerously dated operations, tied as they were to the mundane world of atoms. The future lay in the exuberant exchange of weightless virtual wealth.

The dot-com world’s dangerously myopic narcissism was visible to those with the right kind of eyes, and “Mother Earth Mother Board” is 42,535 words of emergency optical surgery. Stephenson wants to show you that everything’s been done before, only crazier.

by Tim Maly, Nieman Storyboard |  Read more:

Mother Earth Mother Board

In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired. 

Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. This can be accomplished in three basic ways: moving physical media around, broadcasting radiation through space, and sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for a short time anyway, be the biggest and best wire ever made. 

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan. 

Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed supernatural. Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God wrought!" - almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil, was behind it. 

During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. A web of wires was spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information onto them. 

This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never been perfectly transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the information put into them. In general, this gets worse as the wire gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks spanned greater distances, the people building them had to edge away from the seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of practice today. 

Still, telegraphy, like many other forms of engineering, retained a certain barnyard, improvised quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and shockingly formidable technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches in the persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William Thomson, respectively, and brought the conflict between them into the highest possible relief in the form of an inquiry and a scandal that rocked the Victorian world. Thomson came out on top, with a new title and name - Lord Kelvin. 

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting. 

Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would acquire in later decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction between countries and companies is hazy in the telco world) became very good at it, and some didn't. AT&T acquired a dominance of the field that largely continues to this day and is only now being seriously challenged by a project called FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe. 

In which the Hacker Tourist encounters: Penang, a microcosm of the Internet. Rubber, Penang's chief commodity, and its many uses: protecting wires from the elements and concupiscent wanderers from harmful DNA. Advantages of chastity, both for hacker tourists and for cable layers. Bizarre Spectacles in the jungles of southern Thailand. FLAG, its origins and its enemies. 5° 241 24.932' N, 100° 241 19.748' E City of George Town, Island of Penang, Malaysia 

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, "What the hell am I doing here?" 

You might well ask yourself the same question before diving into an article as long as this one. The answer is that we all depend heavily on wires, but we hardly ever think about them. Before learning about FLAG, I knew that data packets could get from America to Asia or the Middle East, but I had no idea how. I knew that it had something to do with wires across the bottom of the ocean, but I didn't know how many of those wires existed, how they got there, who controlled them, or how many bits they could carry. 

According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Compared with Morse's "What hath God wrought!'' this is disappointingly banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had uttered the words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?'' It's as though during the 32 years following Morse's message, people had become inured to the amazing powers of wire. 

Today, another 120 years later, we take wires completely for granted. This is most unwise. People who use the Internet (or for that matter, who make long-distance phone calls) but who don't know about wires are just like the millions of complacent motorists who pump gasoline into their cars without ever considering where it came from or how it found its way to the corner gas station. That works only until the political situation in the Middle East gets all screwed up, or an oil tanker runs aground on a wildlife refuge. In the same way, it behooves wired people to know a few things about wires - how they work, where they lie, who owns them, and what sorts of business deals and political machinations bring them into being. 

In the hopes of learning more about the modern business of really, really long wires, we spent much of the summer of 1996 in pursuits such as: being arrested by toothless, shotgun-toting Egyptian cops; getting pushed around by a drunken smuggler queen on a Thai train; vaulting over rustic gates to take emergency shits in isolated fields; being kept awake by groovy Eurotrash backpackers singing songs; blowing Saharan dust out of cameras; scraping equatorial mold out of fountain pens; stuffing faded banknotes into the palms of Egyptian service-industry professionals; trying to persuade non-Englishspeaking taxi drivers that we really did want to visit the beach even though it was pouring rain; and laundering clothes by showering in them. We still missed more than half the countries FLAG touches. 

Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense but what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism: travel to exotic locations in search of sights and sensations that only would be of interest to a geek. 

I will introduce sections with readings from my trusty GPS in case other hacker tourists would like to leap over the same rustic gates or get rained on at the same beaches.

by Neal Stephenson, Wired |  Read more (pdf):

Image: Alain Bousquet via

[ed. If you haven't hit the Wired paywall yet (hint: incognito) the original (non-pdf) article is available here.]