SPACs

SPAC (n) acronym for Special Purpose Acquisition Company: a way to pay millions today, for the exciting investment idea someone promises to have tomorrow.

After the dot-com bubble exploded, Americans were forced to take a master class in the initial public offering, or IPO. When Enron blew up, we sifted through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) found in the wreckage. With the 2008 crash, the job was finding ways to explain Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, and other acronymic nightmares, under cover of which a fair portion of the world’s wealth vanished.

In the Fed-fueled Covid-19 economy, there’s one acronym worth knowing now, in case of bust later: the SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Company.

The SPAC is an IPO-for-IPOs. In essence, it’s a shell company, put together for the express purpose of raising money to acquire private companies that will eventually be taken public. Pick any absurd empty-package metaphor, and it’ll probably fit: investing in the plate one picks up on the way to a salad bar, in the tortilla you’ve been told will eventually contain the world’s best burrito, in the plain white paper and finger-paints you hope to dump in the crib of the next Rembrandt, etc.

Often called “Blank Check Companies,” the SPAC isn’t all new, but the mania has reached once-unimaginable heights. In 2021 already, 160 SPACs have raised over $50 billion, nearly matching last year’s record of $83.4 billion. An increasingly common element in SPAC announcements is the name of a celebrity, who’s enlisted to join a group that announces a plan to raise a massive sum of money for… something. It could be anyone, from A-Rod (asking for $540 million), Shaq (twice asked for $300 million), Grammy winner Ciara ($200 million), etc., etc.

The SPAC’s cash requests are often wrapped in altruistic verbiage, an example being former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick joining Phoenix Suns part-owner Jahm Najafi to form Mission Advancement. The group believes “purchasing decisions can act as instruments of change,” and therefore wants to build brands to create “meaningful financial and societal value.” In their SEC filing, they figure this will only cost $287 million:

On the opposite political end lay former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Executive Network Partnering Corporation, launched last August. Reports humorously noted that Ryan and his partner, Solamere Capital founder Alex Dunn, had “not selected a target industry” for their SPAC, which essentially meant they were asking for $300 million without knowing what for yet. The SEC filing for ENPC was inspired vagueness:

We have not selected any company to partner with and we have not, nor has anyone on our behalf, engaged in any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any company to partner with regarding a partnering transaction. We may pursue a partnering transaction with any company in any industry.

If you invest in a SPAC, your money goes in an interest-bearing account that can only be used to acquire properties or be returned to you, should the SPAC management team (called “sponsors”) fail to acquire properties in the allotted time, usually 18 to 24 months. Sponsors are paid in “founder shares,” bought at a discount and usually amounting to 20% of the common stock of the future company, a nice relatively risk-free chunk of change framed as the sponsors’ reward for not paying themselves exorbitant salaries during the brief shopping period.

The SPAC boom takes the last IPO bubble and moves the speculative mania back a regulatory step or two, allowing money to be raised before any irritating disclosures have to be made about any concrete business plans. After all, the businesses don’t exist yet. When you invest in a SPAC, you’re investing in the reputations of its sponsors, i.e. names, not businesses.

by Matt Taibbi, TK Finance |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: A Look Inside VC Firms Joining The SPAC Rush (Crunchbase).]

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Pollen
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Death, Through a Nurse's Eyes

Death, Through a Nurse’s Eyes (NY Times)

Video by Alexander Stockton and Lucy King

[ed. I can't download the video (this is a captured image), so go to the site. (If you have trouble with the paywall try this). Powerful.]

The short film above allows you to experience the brutality of the pandemic from the perspective of nurses inside a Covid-19 intensive care unit.

Opinion Video producer Alexander Stockton spent several days reporting at the Valleywise Medical Center in Phoenix. Two I.C.U. nurses wore cameras to show what it’s like to care for the sickest Covid patients a year into the pandemic.

Band Practice

Band practice, Wenatchee, WA.

via: Matt Viser/Twitter

[ed. Lots of sympathy for the tuba player.]

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Turtles Caught in Oil Spill Treated With Mayonnaise

To clean up an oily mess, one might reach for dish soap. But for cleaning tar out of the eyes, throats and nasal passages of sea turtles, a common sandwich condiment proved to be a better option this week following an oil spill in Israel. Employees at Israel's National Sea Turtle Rescue used mayonnaise to treat 11 endangered green sea turtles that washed ashore covered in tar, reports Nicoletta Lanse for Live Science.

Last week, an unknown source caused a massive oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea that left beaches coated in thick black tar. At least 120 miles of coastline was affected, leading Israel's Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) to call it one of the most severe ecological disasters the country has faced, reports Ariel Shalit for the Associated Press.

"They came to us full of tar. All their trachea from inside and outside was full of tar," says Guy Ivgy, a medical assistant at the Sea Turtle Rescue Center in Michmoret, to the Associated Press.

To aid the turtles in flushing out their digestive systems clogged with crude oil, workers at the sea turtle rescue are feeding them mayonnaise, which will break down the tar and make it easier to expel out as poop, Ivgy explained to Live Science.

Mayo and other fatty substances are used because they are emulsions, a mixture of two substances that don't usually combine easily, such as oil and water, reports Live Science. Despite being made up of oil and water, mayonnaise is held together by egg yolks. The egg yolks contain lecithin molecules that repel water on one side and dissolve water on the other. Lecithin acts as an emulsifier that mixes the water and oils, creating the sauce, reports Live Science.

The mix gives mayonnaise hydrophobic (water-repelling) and hydrophilic (water-loving) properties that allow it to interact with the hydrophobic oily tar inside the turtle's digestive tract. The mayonnaise's oil interacts with the tar making it thinner. The lecithin from egg yolks creates a barrier between the tar and the turtle's digestive tract when its hydrophobic side binds to the tar while its hydrophilic side faces the outside, reports Live Science. This interaction makes the crude oil less sticky, so it can be flushed out, similar to how dish soap works to clean greasy dishes.

by Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty

Vaccine Emoji Comes to Life

Vaccine Emoji Comes to Life (Emojipedia)

Image: Vendor designs, Emojipedia composite.

[ed. Two takeaways: 1) this is more than I ever wanted to know about emojis, and 2) there are a lot of people putting a lot of effort into these things.]

Viruses and the Nature of Life

Since the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 last January, the scientific world has scrutinized it to figure out how something so small could wreak so much havoc. They have mapped the spike proteins the coronavirus uses to latch onto cells. They have uncovered the tricks it plays on our immune system. They have reconstructed how an infected cell creates millions of coronaviruses.

That frenzy of research has revealed a lot about SARS-CoV-2, but huge questions remain. Looming over them is the biggest question of all: Is the coronavirus alive?

Scientists have been arguing over whether viruses are alive for about a century, ever since the pathogens came to light. Writing last month in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, two microbiologists at University College Cork named Hugh Harris and Colin Hill took stock of the debate. They could see no end to it. “The scientific community will never fully agree on the living nature of viruses,” they declared.

The question is hard to settle, in part because viruses are deeply weird. But it’s also hard because scientists can’t agree on what it means to be alive. Life may seem like one of the most obvious features of the universe, but it turns out to be remarkably hard to draw sharp lines dividing it from the rest of existence. The mystery extends far beyond viruses. By some popular definitions, it’s hard to say that a rabbit is alive. If we look at our own genome, we can find life’s paradox lurking there as well. (...)

Tobacco mosaic viruses came to light in 1941, looking like a pile of pipes. Phages squatted atop bacteria, resembling lunar landing modules. Other viruses turned out to have the shape of writhing serpents. Some looked like microscopic soccer balls. SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the coronaviruses, which June Almeida named in 1967 for their halo of spike proteins. They reminded her of a solar eclipse, during which the sun’s corona of gas streams becomes visible.

As scientists like Almeida began seeing viruses in their electron microscopes, biochemists were breaking them down into their parts. It wasn’t just their size that set them apart from life as we knew it. They didn’t play by the same rules as cellular life. Viruses are largely made of proteins, as are we. And yet they don’t carry the factories for building proteins. They don’t have the enzymes required to turn food to fuel, or to break down waste.

The bizarre nature of viruses came to light just as scientists were rewriting their definition of life in the new language of biochemistry. Viruses straddled their definitions. They multiplied, but not by eating, growing, or even reproducing. They simply invaded cells and forced them to do all the work of making new viruses. (...)

In the 1940s scientists began assembling the evidence for the true nature of genes. In humans and all other cellular forms of life, they’re made of double-stranded DNA.

To unlock the information encoded in a gene, a cell makes a matching version from a molecule called RNA. Then it reads the RNA to produce a protein.

Many viruses also use DNA for their genes. Others, like coronaviruses, have genes made of RNA. Viruses, scientists realized, can hijack our cells because they have something profound in common with us: They write their recipes in the language of life. It turned out that those recipes could be exquisitely short. Humans carry 20,000 protein-coding genes. SARS-CoV-2 has 29. Other viruses need 10 or fewer. (...)

The diversity of viruses is also colossal. Some virologists have estimated that there may be trillions of species of viruses on the planet. When virologists find new viruses, they’re often from a major lineage no one knew about before. Ornithologists and bird-watchers get justifiably excited when they discover a species of bird. Imagine what it would be like to discover birds. That’s what it’s like to be a virologist.

How can we exile all this biological diversity from life? To exile viruses also means we have to discount the power that they have over their hosts. SARS-CoV-2 has killed millions of people, thrown the economy into chaos and sent ripples across the planet’s ecosystems and atmosphere. Other viruses cause devastation every day to other species.

In the ocean, phages invade microbe hosts 100 billion trillion times a second. They kill 15 to 40 percent of bacteria in the world’s oceans every day. And out of those shredded bacteria spill billions of tons of carbon for other marine creatures to feast on.

But viruses can also have friendly relationships with other species. SARS-CoV-2 may be killing thousands of people a day, but our bodies are home to trillions of phages even when we’re in perfect health. So far, scientists have identified 21,000 species of phages residing in our guts. More than 12,000 of them came to light in a single study published just this month.

by Carl Zimmer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML), U.S. NIH, CC BY-SA

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The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness

It’s something of a truism, particularly on the right, that conservatives have claimed the mantle of free speech from an intolerant left that is afraid to engage with uncomfortable ideas. Every embarrassing example of woke overreach — each ill-considered school board decision or high-profile campus meltdown — fuels this perception.

Yet when it comes to outright government censorship, it is the right that’s on the offense. Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege and microaggressions, is often blamed for fomenting what critics call cancel culture. And so, around America and even overseas, people who don’t like cancel culture are on an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory in public forums.

In September, Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’” which it described as “un-American propaganda.” (...)

Republicans in West Virginia and Oklahoma have introduced bills banning schools and, in West Virginia’s case, state contractors from promoting “divisive concepts,” including claims that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.” A New Hampshire Republican also proposed a “divisive concepts” ban, saying in a hearing, “This bill addresses something called critical race theory.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering legal scholar who teaches at both U.C.L.A. and Columbia, has watched with alarm the attempts to suppress an entire intellectual movement. It was Crenshaw who came up with the name “critical race theory” when organizing a workshop in 1989. (She also coined the term “intersectionality.”) “The commitment to free speech seems to dissipate when the people who are being gagged are folks who are demanding racial justice,” she told me.

Many of the intellectual currents that would become critical race theory emerged in the 1970s out of disappointment with the incomplete work of the civil rights movement, and cohered among radical law professors in the 1980s.

The movement was ahead of its time; one of its central insights, that racism is structural rather than just a matter of interpersonal bigotry, is now conventional wisdom, at least on the left. It had concrete practical applications, leading, for example, to legal arguments that housing laws or employment criteria could be racist in practice even if they weren’t racist in intent.

Parts of the critical race theory tradition are in tension with liberalism, particularly when it comes to issues like free speech. Richard Delgado, a key figure in the movement, has argued that people should be able to sue those who utter racist slurs. Others have played a large role in crafting campus speech codes.

There’s plenty here for people committed to broad free speech protections to dispute. I’m persuaded by the essay Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in the 1990s challenging the movement’s stance on the first amendment. “To remove the very formation of our identities from the messy realm of contestation and debate is an elemental, not incidental, truncation of the ideal of public discourse,” he wrote. (...)

But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory. It wants to eradicate them from public institutions.

“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank once known for pushing an updated form of creationism in public schools, wrote in January. (...)

This inversion, casting anti-racist activists as the real racists, is familiar to Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in critical race theory. “There’s a rhetoric of reaction which seeks to claim that it’s defending these higher values, which, perversely, often are the very values it’s traducing,” he said. “Whether that’s ‘In the name of free speech we’re going to persecute, we’re going to launch investigations into particular forms of speech’ or — and I think this is equally perverse — ‘In the name of fighting racism, we’re going to launch investigations into those scholars who are most serious about studying the complex forms that racism takes.’”

Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. “You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,” he said.

This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play.

When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending “the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.” If it was really about free speech, they should be.

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Arsh Raziuddin, Photographs by Erin Schaff/The New York Times, Alessandra Benedetti - Corbis / Getty
[ed. I'm an American of mixed race and consider myself a progressive, but this whole culture of victimization really grates. Microagressions, cancel culture, so-called "wokeness", enhanced diversity mandates, social justice warriors, cultural appropriation, blah blah blah... all of it just puts me off (and apparently many others). As long as you identify as a victim you will always be a victim. Get over it. Or at least approach public policy development in a way that's more effectively strategic and less childish tantrum. NOTE: If you're losing people like me, you're LOSING. For example, should we defund police? Probably, in some instances, if their programs are not critical to their overall effectiveness. But not as a punishment (for racism?). And not wholesale, across the board. I'd much prefer we defund the military ($750 billion/yr) that contributes so much to overly aggressive policing in the first place (in personnel, training, and surplus equipment), and implement careful and transparent reviews of policing policies, practices and performance that lead to lasting systemic changes. And don't get me started on universities or HR departments. Anyway, just had to get this rant off my chest. Progressives and conservatives both do themselves no favors when they approach public policy as a simple black and white proposition. If I've learned anything in life, it's that everything's some shade of gray. Trite but true.]

Where Have All the Houses Gone?

Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did. Even in cities with a pandemic glut of empty apartments and falling rents, it has become incredibly hard to buy a home.

Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide. That’s a record-shattering decline in inventory, following years of steady erosion.

And it’s one flashing sign that the housing market — which can defy basic laws of economics even in normal times — is acting very, very strangely.

This picture is a product of the pandemic, but also of the years leading up to it. And if half of what is happening in the for-sale market now seems straightforward — historically low interest rates and a pandemic desire for more space are driving demand — the other half is more complicated.

“The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic? That’s what I keep coming back to. Is this a time you want to open your house up to people walking through it? No, of course not.”

A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.

There are lots of steps along the “property ladder,” as Professor Keys put it, that are hard to imagine people taking mid-pandemic: Who would move into an assisted living facility or nursing home right now (freeing up a longtime family home)? Who would commit to a “forever home” (freeing up their starter house) when it’s unclear what remote work will look like in six months?

This reluctance can take on a life of its own in a tight market, said Ralph McLaughlin, the chief economist at Haus, a housing finance start-up. When there aren’t a lot of options out there to buy, would-be sellers get skittish about finding their own next home and back out of the market themselves.

“Every additional home that gets pulled off the market incentivizes someone else to not sell their house,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “That’s a self-reinforcing cycle.”

There is another factor particular to the pandemic: At the peak, more than four million homeowners with government-backed loans were in mortgage forbearance during the pandemic (about 2.6 million still are). While that government policy, recently extended through June, has been a lifeline for many families who’ve lost income, it has also meant that some homes that most likely would have come on the market over the past year, either through foreclosure or a forced sale, did not.

Add all of this up, and for every tale of someone who ran off and bought in the suburbs or paid all-cash sight unseen in some far-flung town, the larger story of the pandemic is this: Americans have been staying put. (...)

“We’re all looking for a unified field theory for what’s going on,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We have all these disparate pieces of information. Everyone’s got their own telescope looking up into the sky, measuring different things. It’s hard to put it all together.”

But the overall effect is clear: It’s as if the market were mucked up with a lot of sand and mud, Mr. Zandi said. And that produces all kinds of other strange behaviors and patterns. The number of people 

buying homes sight unseen has soared. Median sales prices in some metros are up 15 percent or more in a single year. In other places, the trajectory of the for-sale market has become entirely detached from what’s happening in the rental market.

by Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, The Upshot | Read more:
Image: Altos Research

'Beeple Mania'

Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.

And yet in December the first extensive auction of his art grossed $3.5 million in a single weekend.

That money? It went to one Mike Winkelmann, thirty-nine, father of two, husband of a schoolteacher, resident of a Charleston, South Carolina, suburb, driver of a “fucking Toyota Corolla piece of shit.”

See, Beeple is Mike Winkelmann. Mike Winkelmann is Beeple. And in the weird worlds of high fashion, fine art, and cryptocurrency, it doesn’t get any weirder than this story.

‘Beeple Mania’: How Mike Winkelmann Makes Millions Selling Pixels (Esquire)

[ed. No kidding, this is the weirdest thing I've read in a while. Also interesting: NFTs: nonfungible tokens, calling to mind the post below about Top Shot. More pics at Beeple's reddit account here. See also: The new world of digital art on the blockchain (Marginal Utility); and, NFTs: a new disruptor in the art market? (The Art Newspaper).]

Blockchain, QR codes and Your Phone: The Race to Build Vaccine Passports

There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.

Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.

But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed.

Competing projects, similar standards

Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking food production and voting, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol.

Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."

It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another.

Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that." (...)

Something for everyone

With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. 

by Mike Murphy, Protocol |  Read more:

Image: CommonPass

A Digital Catch-22

Today’s organisations are facing a digital catch-22. On the one hand, digital transformation is difficult and costly, and short-term investment may be needed elsewhere to where it’s really hurting. On the other hand, today’s organisations cannot afford not to become tomorrow’s digital businesses. In this article I will point up the dimensions and intractability of this digital catch-22, before suggesting some ways forward.

But not so fast; firstly, what is digital transformation? Digital transformation requires digitisation – converting something non-digital (e.g., a health record, an identity card) into a digital format that can then be used by a computer system. Digital transformation also requires digitalisation – enabling, improving, or changing business operations, functions, or activities by utilising digital technologies and using digitised data to create management intelligence and actionable knowledge. All three—digitisation, digitalisation, and digital transformation—are needed to build a digital business. Digitisation and digitalisation are necessary but insufficient. My academic colleague George Westerman put it rather well: When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong (or we might add, incompletely), all you get is a really fast caterpillar. Digital transformation must focus on the whole organisation, and large-scale change. It involves radical redesign, then deployment of business models, activities, processes, and competencies to fully leverage the opportunities provided by digital technologies. I would guess you already have some idea of why it is so difficult.

Let’s find some evidence for the high level of challenge. It is notable, firstly, that organisations are surprisingly slow into digital transformation, given that this has been on many executive agendas since at least 2010. Many organisations digitise, digitalise even, but this does not add up to digital transformation, though many might think it does. The reasons for the lack of speed are complex, but failure is five times more likely than success. The high failure rate is indicative of the large number of stumbling blocks and can be very dissuading for others. Our work suggests that slow progress reflects how ‘siloed’ many organisations have become. What we call the ‘seven-siloed organisation’ points to the barriers to change inherited from older business models. The siloes include processes, technology, data, culture, structures, skills sets, and managerial mindsets. When it comes to digital transformation, any organisation with all these siloes is severely hamstrung from the start.

Yet there is another side to the digital catch-22. What happens if, putting it colloquially, you fail to sail? There are relatively few best performers on digital transformation. These are getting disproportionate gains, recording markedly higher profitability and revenues, accelerating away from the others, and may well establish a competitive advantage that becomes irreversible. What are they achieving? According to one study, they had increased the agility of their digital-strategy practices, enabling first- mover opportunities. They had taken advantage of digital platforms to access broader eco-systems and innovate new digital products and business models. They had used mergers and acquisitions to build new digital capabilities and digital businesses. A significant feature was that they had invested ahead of their competitors in digital talent.

Our own work (here and here) suggests that the best performers on digital transformation add up to around only 20% of organisations, all recording up to a 30% increase in revenues as a part outcome of their digital technology investments over the previous four years. They come from most sectors and regions of the world and are not limited to the obvious hi-tech US and Chinese firms. To add even more urgency, our evidence, consistent with other studies, shows that being slow to adopt digital technologies may reduce risk in the short term, in terms of cost, talent and time, but builds growing business risk and reduced competitiveness in the long term. And this trend will be repeated and magnified by the growing adoption of automation and ‘AI’ over the next five years.

So, there is plenty of evidence for a digital catch-22, but is there an unlikely saviour here in the form of the pandemic and economic crisis? This has undoubtedly accelerated corporate moves toward digitisation and digitalisation – primarily to survive in the short term, establish resilience, and to maintain competitiveness. But we found motives mixed, capabilities variable, and planning horizons mostly short term. That said, a McKinsey survey suggests that COVID-19 has pushed companies over a technology tipping point. Between January and October 2020, the digitisation of customer and supply-chain interactions and of internal operations had accelerated by three to four years. The share of digital or digitally enabled products in corporate portfolios had accelerated by seven years. Nearly all respondents had put in place quickly at least temporary solutions, to meet many of the new demands on them. Funding for digital initiatives increased more than for anything else. Moreover, the largest shifts in the crisis were also the ones most likely to stick – think changing customer needs and expectations, more remote working/collaboration, cloud migration, customer demand for online products and services, and increasing spend on security. Those who had invested heavily into digital technologies over the previous three years also reported a range of facilitating technology-related capabilities that others lacked in the crisis. This meant they were better prepared for the crisis.

Did COVID-19, then, make digital transformation easier? Well, the evidence is that the digital catch-22 has not gone away. Digital technologies are gaining a higher profile amongst the executives who make the key decisions, but the difficulties and complexities of large-scale organizational change on many fronts are not easily circumvented, and there remain many other pressing matters to deal with, distracting executive attention. 

by Leslie Willcocks, LSE | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The New Leviathan is An Autonomous Digital Machine (LSE).]

So Empty

"Rock and roll, which entered global consciousness in the mid-1950s, has lost the great majority of its founders, and enough time has gone by to amply confirm the thesis, which we have already considered above, that rock and roll is for the young, and aside from a few exceptions a middle-aged balding schlub on a rock-and-roll reunion tour is as painful a sight as a man in his forties who suffers from the knowledge that his life peaked in his brief season as a high-school quarterback."

So Empty (Hinternet, Substack)

Image: dead link

[ed. Beg to differ.]

Top Shot, the New Crypto Highlight Phenomenon, Explained

Take a stroll around social media and you’ll see no shortage of people talking about “NBA Top Shot,” a collectible, blockchain-based highlight repository that has been around since July of 2019, but caught fire in the last week with over $50M in revenue hauled in by people still trying to get in on the ground floor of the pseudo crypto currency.

The scarcity is what is bringing people in to Top Shot, and the system is going wild. Right now the highest-priced Top Shot available for auction is a block by Zion Williamson against the Nuggets from January, 2020 — with a ludicrous asking price of $250,000.

It’s addictive and exciting for those involved, and to outsiders the dumbest thing in the world. Why are people paying for trading card-esque “packs” of random highlights, which you can watch for free on YouTube, with no material value? Is this the future of sports collectibles, or a massive grift? And will early adopters be millionaires in 10 years, or the new generation of Beanie Baby collectors?

What is NBA Top Shot?

NBA Top Shot in an online-only collection of NBA highlights which can be obtained by buying “packs” or purchased via auction. Think of it like buying sports cards, but in video form. You might crack a pack and get a highlight of a Steph Curry three-pointer, which is only being produced 99 times. When those 99 clips are gone nobody else will ever get that same highlight, and Top Shot claims you’ll own that clip forever.

The clips are created through Blockchain, which is the same technology that powers Bitcoin, Etherium, and other cryptocurrencies. I’ll spare you doing an extremely poor job trying to explain complicated Blockchain technology, which you can read in detail about here, but the important part is that it’s completely encrypted, impossible to hack, and ensures that it’s impossible to duplicate these files. So, for whatever it’s worth, when you buy an NBA Top Shot it is absolutely yours as a collectible.

So, for the price of an entire house, you could instead buy a highlight of Zion blocking a shot, that exists only on the internet, and can only be bought and sold on Top Shot.

Before you say “well, people can ask whatever they want, it doesn’t mean they get it,” understand that Top Shots of Zion Williamson and LeBron James both sold last week on the site for $100,000 each.

So you can make money off NBA Top Shot?

Theoretically yes, but it’s a little more complicated than you might expect. The tech behind Top Shot is a product of Dapper Labs, a Blockchain service that boasts on its own website that it “uses the power of play to deliver blockchain-based experiences that are made for you and ready for the real world.” What this means is that the NBA and a Blockchain service teamed up to replicate the sporting card market in an online medium, replicating scarcity and rarity to turn these moments into a commodity.

by James Dator, SB Nation |  Read more:

Image: Top Shot

[ed. See also: What is Top Shot? (The Irrelevant Investor).]

Thomas Danthony
via:

Tiger Woods Car Accident Eerily Similar to Ben Hogan’s

Golf legend Ben Hogan was once also seriously injured in a violent car wreck eerily similar to Tiger Woods’ crash on Tuesday — and came back to win six more majors.

Hogan, who died in 1997 at the age of 84, nearly lost his life in February 1949 when a Greyhound bus smashed into his black Cadillac while he was driving with his wife in Texas, according to the Golf Channel.

The crash left Hogan with a broken collarbone, fractured ribs, a broken ankle, a double fracture to his pelvis, and deep contusions to his left leg.

It took nearly one hour for emergency personnel to extract him from the wreckage.

His wife, Valerie, escaped with minor injuries, in large part because the golf great shielded her with his body just moments before the impact.

Doctors at the El Paso hospital where Hogan was taken feared he wouldn’t survive his injuries — but Hogan did recover and was back on the green in under a year.

Hogan played in pain for the rest of his life but continued a stellar career that has him ranked as one of golf’s greatest players with 64 total Professional Golfers Association Tour victories, according to his PGA Tour profile.

On Tuesday, Woods suffered injuries to both legs and was rushed into surgery after his SUV rolled over in Rancho Palos Verde in Los Angeles County.

by Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, NY Post | Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Dennis Lee Royle

[ed. Just home from a golf outing today and heard the news. I'm afraid this is it (for competitive PGA Tour golf). We may see Tiger on the Champion's Tour someday, maybe not, but there's always coaching, broadcasting, course design and other pursuits he could still be successful at, too. Still, a very sad end to a phenomenal career.]

Tadeusz Baranowski

via:

The Limbaugh Whisperer

His radio show was once a vital outlet of conservative news—and I was one of his sources. But it became increasingly divorced from reality, like much of right-wing media.
New Republic, February 18, 2021

As most of my readers know, I was a card-carrying conservative for many years. I was working in the Reagan White House when Rush Limbaugh went on the air in 1988 and remember having to go out and buy a desk radio so I could listen to him, which I did almost every day. Even then, however, I didn’t care for his callers—I thought they were ignorant, obsequious fools. But I liked Limbaugh’s monologues at the top of the hour because I learned useful stuff from him.

I know many liberals will disagree with me on this, but in 1988 there really was a liberal media. I found it very hard to get honest-to-God news that interested me as a conservative, even as a White House staffer. It had to be sought out in small-circulation magazines like Human Events and National Review, or from the very few conservative columnists in major newspapers.

I didn’t need validation of my views, as was the case with many grassroots conservatives. I wanted intellectual ammunition I could use to design and promote conservative policies in government. Contrary to popular belief, the Reagan administration took analysis and research seriously. Unlike the Trump White House, which often sent out documents with typos in them (a firing offense when I worked there), the policy development process in the Reagan White House was reasonably competent.

A key reason for making sure that there was proper analysis and documentation for administration proposals is that they would have been picked apart in the media otherwise. Not only was the American press generally skeptical of our philosophy, but it was vastly more powerful in those days and could make or break a policy proposal very easily. Frankly, I think Democrats on Capitol Hill, who controlled the House of Representatives during Reagan’s entire eight-year term, tended to outsource their criticism of Republicans to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Beat reporters for the major newspapers were gatekeepers, refusing to even mention any proposal or idea that was insufficiently worked out, lacked empirical data or academic support, or just seemed stupid. Back when I worked for Jack Kemp, it took me years to get the Wall Street Journal tax reporter to mention Kemp’s tax cut plan—even after it had been endorsed by the Journal’s editorial page.

And in those days before the internet, politicians were very heavily dependent on the mainstream media to get their message out. About the only other way of doing so was direct mail. But printing and mailing newsletters was very expensive, and it took an enormous amount of effort to build a mailing list. Like it or not, conservatives in the pre–talk radio, pre–Fox News, pre-internet era had to work through the liberal media and play by its rules.

I should add that the rules of the once-dominant mainstream media were mostly good ones. When the established media lost its gatekeeper function, it led to a vast proliferation of crackpot ideas that circulate unimpeded today. Even members of the prestige media have found themselves unable to keep nutty conspiracy theories from affecting their reporting, as they document what is in fact motivating Republican voters and politicians. But in reporting the existence of crackpot ideas and fake news, the mainstream media implicitly validates them and publicizes them.

When Limbaugh first went on the air, he was a breath of fresh air for conservatives—even those working in the White House—and an essential source of news. As all of his listeners know, he had a vast “stack of stuff” consisting of news clippings, press releases, faxes, and whatnot that caught his eye and formed the basis for his monologues. He was as much a news consolidator and reviewer as he was a commentator in those days. And he frequently had an intelligent spin on the news, often picked up from the many politicians and policymakers he talked to off the air.

Of course, Limbaugh was also a blowhard, and his massive hubris was off-putting. But it was part of his schtick and one of the reasons he was popular. Say whatever else you like about him, but Rush was a masterful radio personality. He really understood and loved the medium. His foray into television just didn’t suit his style and was soon abandoned. (...)

Perhaps the most important long-term effect Limbaugh had on the media is that his success helped convinced Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News. Longtime Republican political consultant and television producer Roger Ailes drew up the plans for Fox and helped Limbaugh go national with his radio show. (For almost 20 years before meeting Ailes, Limbaugh had labored in the vineyards of small radio stations in Kansas City, Sacramento, and elsewhere.) Without Ailes’s help, Limbaugh would have never become what he was.

It’s also well known that liberal commentators have never been able to duplicate the success of Limbaugh. Even Al Franken, a skilled entertainer with deep political knowledge, failed to find an audience for a contra-Limbaugh radio show. I think the reason for this failure is simpler than it appears: Progressives already have their own talk radio network with a broad reach—National Public Radio. It’s not as ideological as conservative talk radio, of course, but NPR produces exactly what liberals want radio to do, and it does so very, very well. Moreover, I think liberals are basically content with the mainstream media: The New York Times fulfills their news needs almost perfectly. That’s why they get so upset when it strays from the liberal path by publishing conservative commentary.

In truth, the Times attracts precisely zero conservative subscribers by publishing the likes of Bret Stephens. I know this from many years in the conservative movement. I even remember the first moment when I realized how closed the conservative mind had become.

by Bruce Bartlett, Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: Jim Watson/Getty

[ed. See also: Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse (TNR); and, Don’t Read This If You Were a Rush Limbaugh Fan (Atlantic).]

The Elephant in the Room

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy—$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

As the RAND report [whose research was funded by the Fair Work Center which co-author David Rolf is a board member of] demonstrates, a rising tide most definitely did not lift all boats. It didn’t even lift most of them, as nearly all of the benefits of growth these past 45 years were captured by those at the very top. And as the American economy grows radically unequal it is holding back economic growth itself.

Even inequality is meted out unequally. Low-wage workers and their families, disproportionately people of color, suffer from far higher rates of asthma, hypertension, diabetes, and other COVID-19 comorbidities; yet they are also far less likely to have health insurance, and far more likely to work in “essential” industries with the highest rates of coronavirus exposure and transmission. It is no surprise then, according to the CDC, that COVID-19 inflicts “a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” But imagine how much safer, healthier, and empowered all American workers might be if that $50 trillion had been paid out in wages instead of being funneled into corporate profits and the offshore accounts of the super-rich. Imagine how much richer and more resilient the American people would be. Imagine how many more lives would have been saved had our people been more resilient. (...)

Of course, America’s chronic case of extreme inequality is old news. Many other studies have documented this trend, chronicled its impact, and analyzed its causes. But where others have painted the picture in terms of aggregate shares of GDP, productivity growth, or other cold, hard statistics, the RAND report brings the inequality price tag directly home by denominating it in dollars—not just the aggregate $50 trillion figure, but in granular demographic detail. For example, are you a typical Black man earning $35,000 a year? You are being paid at least $26,000 a year less than you would have had income distributions held constant. Are you a college-educated, prime-aged, full-time worker earning $72,000? Depending on the inflation index used (PCE or CPI, respectively), rising inequality is costing you between $48,000 and $63,000 a year. But whatever your race, gender, educational attainment, urbanicity, or income, the data show, if you earn below the 90th percentile, the relentlessly upward redistribution of income since 1975 is coming out of your pocket.

by Nick Hanauer and David M. Rolf, Time |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt—Getty Images

Tricky

 

[ed. See also: Massive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good (TNR).]

Liziqi Channel

[ed. Liziqi. She can do everything (even make her own furniture). Some favorites: here and here.]

Beyond Burgers: 3D-Printed Steaks

Plant-based burgers that taste a heck of a lot like the real thing are now at your local Burger King. And you can find realistic meatless ground beef and sausages at grocery stores. As the next big thing in sustainable and cruelty-free meat, some startups are growing it in labs from animal cells. In December, Singapore became the first country to allow sales of lab-grown chicken from U.S. startup Just Eat.

But the founders of Barcelona-based Novameat want to take a bigger leap. They plan to go beyond chicken strips and processed “meat” to the chewy, muscle-y, juicy taste of whole meat cuts. “We want to create the Tesla Roadster or iPhone moment for the future of food,” says CEO and founder Giuseppe Scionti. “Alternative meats shouldn’t just be for the environment or animals or health, they should be superior compared to what they’re trying to compete with. The Holy Grail is pork and steak.”

The company is using 3D-printing to get there. In what could be a game-changer for the alternative meat industry, they have now made the world’s largest piece of 3D-printed whole-cut meat analog. And they say their 3D-printing process 150 times faster than their competitors, allowing them to make 1.5 tons of meat substitute per hour.

Creating a sirloin steak, with its fibrous protein and marbled fat, from plant-based proteins is a tough recipe to perfect. Novameat’s microextrusion technology, which produces 100–500 micrometer-wide fibers from different ingredients and combines them in precise ratios and organized microstructures, is key to mimicking the mouthfeel, taste, appearance, and nutritional properties of animal meat, says senior food engineer Joan Solomando Martí. The three-year old startup has been using vegetable fat and non-soy plant proteins to make realistic 3D-printed steaks.

The latest 3D-printed whole-cut prototype was made with the company’s new hybrid meat analog, which they make by adding mammalian fat cells to a biocompatible plant-based scaffold. The cells are grown separately using traditional cell culturing techniques, and then added to the scaffolds, where they produce fatty acids or proteins. “This allows us to create beef muscle cuts, pork muscle cuts, and we are now also exploring fish and seafood.”

by Prachi Patel, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Novameat

"Hale Huna" a Tucked-Away Rural Hawaiian Retreat (Architectural Digest)

Images: Douglas Friedman

[ed. Rich people with nice houses. More pictures at the link.]

The Problem With Influencers

The Problem With Influencers (Current Affairs)

Image: Kostsov/Shutterstock
[ed. Hey... I learned two new things today: Sadfishing and Mukbang. And the day's just getting started.]

On Your Own

[ed. M. Emmet Walsh from the Coen Brother's Blood Simple. See also: this (CNN).]

How to Write About Iran: A Guide for Jounalists, Analysts, and Policymakers

1. Always refer to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” and its government as “the regime” or, better yet, “the Mullahs.”

2. Never refer to Iran’s foreign policy. The correct terminology is its “behavior.” When U.S. officials say Iran “must change its behavior” and “behave like a normal country,” write those quotes down word for word. Everyone knows that Iran is a delinquent kid that always instigates trouble and must be disciplined.

3. Omit that Iran has a population of 80 million with half a dozen ethnicities, languages, and religions. Why complicate when you can do simple? Just write “Iranians” or “the Iranians.” They are all the same and consequently think alike – when they get to think, that is.

4. To illustrate your article, pick a photo of brown, bearded men screaming with fists punching the air. An image of brown, bearded men setting a U.S. flag on fire with fists punching the air is also on point. A photo of brown, bearded men sitting crossed-legged on the floor of a mosque harboring their habitual anger just before they explode into raised fists punching the air is perfectly fine too.

5. If your article is about Iran-U.S. relations and even if it is not, include a photo of a woman in a head-to-toe black chador walking past the famous anti-U.S. mural in Tehran. (Note: that go-to mural in downtown Tehran of the Statue of Liberty with a skull face set against the American flag has been painted over, but it can easily be found in online image archives.) Always include a picture of a woman in a black chador walking down the street so it’s clear that this is Iran where women are oppressed, voiceless, and invisible.

6. For a business story, choose a photo of long queues at the gas station and a brown man filling his tank to show Iran is a dysfunctional country with a dysfunctional economy. Or one of Tehran’s busy Haft-e-Tir square to show Iran has roundabouts and shops while still being dysfunctional and chaotic. Remember the random woman walking by in a black chador? Make sure there is one somewhere in the photo. (...)

8. If you travel to Iran, refer to yourself not as being “in” Iran but “inside” Iran. Be transparent about the risks you are taking to spend as many as five consecutive days in the Iranian capital. Start your dispatch with the queasy feeling that you — a white man — have upon landing in Tehran.

9. When inside Iran, write about meeting key sources to shed light on the realities in the Islamic Republic: the exclusive interview with your cab driver, the secret meeting with a female student in a café in northern Tehran, that overwhelming expedition to a mosque in southern Tehran. Wrap up your article with comments from an English-speaking political analyst with loose ties to the regime who can predict the next impulses of the Mullahs in one quote.

10. Never mention that there are theatres, cinemas, art galleries, museums, concert halls, bookshops, gyms, yoga studios, hair salons, or bakeries in Iran. It’s more informative to write about how you experience the Islamic Republic during your short stay rather than how Iranians live every day.

11. Always remind readers that Iran is a dangerous country, more dangerous than any other country in the Middle East. Underline at any chance you get that it poses an imminent threat to the future of the entire world and more particularly to the U.S. and Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons.

by Ladane Nasseri, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image:Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/EFE via

Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun

For the Ishiguro household, 5 October 2017 was a big day. After weeks of discussion, the author’s wife, Lorna, had finally decided to change her hair colour. She was sitting in a Hampstead salon, not far from Golders Green in London, where they have lived for many years, all gowned up, and glanced at her phone. There was a news flash. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop this,” she said to the waiting hairdresser. “My husband has just won the Nobel prize for literature. I might have to help him out.”

Back home, Kazuo Ishiguro was having a late breakfast when his agent called. “It’s the opposite to the Booker prize, where there’s a longlist and then a shortlist. You hear the rumbling thunder coming towards you, often not striking. With the Nobel it is freak lightning out of the blue – wham!” Within half an hour there was a queue of journalists outside the front door. He called his mother, Shizuko. “I said: ‘I’ve won the Nobel, Shon.’ Oddly, she didn’t seem very surprised,” he recalls. “She said: ‘I thought you’d win it sooner or later.’” She died, aged 92, two years ago. His latest novel Klara and the Sun, in part about maternal devotion and his first since winning the Nobel, is dedicated to her. “My mother had a huge amount to do with my becoming a writer,” he says now. (...)

In Nobel terms, at 62 Ishiguro was a relative whippersnapper. Precocity is part of the Ishiguro myth: at 27 he was the youngest on Granta’s inaugural best of young British novelists list in 1983 (with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes et al), appearing again the following decade. In between he won the Booker prize for The Remains of the Day, which was given the full Merchant Ivory treatment in 1993. Indeed, his claim that most great novels were produced by writers in their 20s and 30s has become part of literary legend. “It is Martin Amis who goes round repeating this, not me,” Ishiguro says, laughing. “He became obsessed with the idea.” But he still maintains that your 30s are the crucial years for novel writing: “You do need some of that cerebral power.” (Which is lucky for Naomi, who at 28 also has her first novel, Common Ground, out this month, much to her father’s delight.) Whenever anybody brought up the question of the Nobel, his standard line used to be: “Writers won their Nobel prizes in their 60s for work they did in their 30s. Now perhaps it applies to me personally,” the 66-year-old notes drily.

He remains the supreme creator of self-enclosed worlds (the country house; the boarding school), his characters often under some form of lockdown; his fastidious attention to everyday details and almost ostentatiously flat style offsetting fantastical plot lines and pent-up emotional intensity. And Klara and the Sun is no exception.

Set in an unspecified America, in an unspecified future, it is – ostensibly at least – about the relationship between an artificial “friend”, Klara, and her teenage owner/charge, Josie. Robots (AFs) have become as commonplace as vacuum cleaners, gene-editing is the norm and biotechnological advances are close to recreating unique human beings. “This isn’t some kind of weird fantasy,” he says. “We just haven’t woken up to what is already possible today.” “Amazon recommends” is just the beginning. “In the era of big data, we might start to be able to rebuild somebody’s character so that after they’ve died they can still carry on, figuring out what they’d order next online, which concert they’d like to go to and what they would have said at the breakfast table if you had read them the latest headlines,” he continues.

He deliberately didn’t read either the recent Ian McEwan novel Machines Like Me or Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, which also take on artificial intelligence, but from very different angles. Klara is a sort of robotic parent, “Terminator-like in her determination to look after Josie”, but she is also a potential surrogate child: when Josie gets sick, Klara is being programmed to take her place. “What happens to things like love in an age when we are changing our views about the human individual and the individual’s uniqueness?” he asks. “There was this question – it always sounds very pompous – about the human soul: do we actually have one or not?”

The book revisits many of the ideas behind Never Let Me Go, his 2005 novel about three teenage clones whose organs will be harvested, leading to certain death before their 30s: “only a slight exaggeration of the human condition, we all have to get ill and die at some point”, he says now. Both novels hold out the possibility that death can be postponed or defeated by true love, which must be tested and proved in some way; a fairytale bargaining that is also made explicit in the boatman’s challenge to Axl and Beatrice in his previous novel The Buried Giant. This hope, even for those who don’t believe in an afterlife, “is one of the things that makes us human,” he reflects. “It perhaps makes us fools as well. Perhaps it is a lot of sentimental hogwash. But it is very powerful in people.”

He is unapologetic about repetition, citing the “continuity” of great film directors (he is a huge cinephile), and likes to claim that each of his first three books was essentially a rewrite of its predecessor. “Literary novelists are slightly defensive about being repetitive,” he says. “I think it is perfectly justified: you keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” He gets away with it, he says, by changing location or genre: “People are so literal they think I’m moving on.” For him, genre is like travel, and it is true that he has enjoyed genre-hopping: When We Were Orphans (detective fiction); Remains of the Day (period drama); The Unconsoled (Kafkaesque fable); Never Let Me Go (dystopian sci-fi) and The Buried Giant (Tolkienish fantasy). Now, as the title Klara and the Sun hints, he visits what he calls “children’s storyland”. But be warned, we are still very much in Ishiguroland. (...)

Each novel takes him around five years: a long build-up of research and thinking, followed by a speedy first draft, a process he compares to a samurai sword fight: “You stare at each other silently for ages, usually with tall grass blowing away and moody sky. You are thinking all the time, and then in a split second it happens. The swords are drawn: Wham! Wham! Wham! And one of them falls,” he explains, wielding an imaginary sword at the screen. “You had to get your mind absolutely right and then when you drew that sword you just did it: Wham! It had to be the perfect cut.” As a child, he was mystified by swashbuckling Errol Flynn films when he first came to the UK, in which the sword fights consisted of actors going “ching, ching, ching, ching, for about 20 minutes while talking to each other,” he says. “Perhaps there’s a way of writing fiction like that, where you work it out in the act, but I tend towards the ‘Don’t do anything, it’s all internal’ approach.”

by Lisa Allardice, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Howard Sooley

[ed. See also: this extract from Klara and the Sun.]