A&P

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before. 

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. 

She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty. 

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was. 

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-foodbreakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinkscrackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct. 

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint." 

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April. 

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something. 

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three realestate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years. 

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it. 

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, six packs of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice I've often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute. 

Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in icecream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stenciled on.

"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.

Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing." 

"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here." 

"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency. 

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?" 

I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking. 

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow. 

"Did you say something, Sammy?" "I said I quit." 

"I thought you did." 

"You didn't have to embarrass them." 

"It was they who were embarrassing us." 

I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grandmother's, and I know she would have been pleased. 

"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said. "I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute. 

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt. 

I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

by John Updike, Littonton Public Schools |  Read more (pdf):

Image: via

[ed. Also included: A Clean Well-Lighted Place (Ernest Hemingway); The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin); and, Girl (Jamaica Kincaid).]

Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa

I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one.

But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well.

 

In his portrait, gracefully curled back hair and expressive eyebrows sit above two wide eyes that communicate a kind of amused resignation. It is the face of someone watching from afar as a trivial misunderstanding blossoms into a full-fledged argument.

His name, I learned, was Yukichi Fukuzawa. And an English translation of his autobiography happened to be available in main stacks of the University of Tokyo library.

Fukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Osaka in 1835. He is often described as a Japanese Benjamin Franklin. But with his knack for popping up at moments of great historical importance he also slightly resembles a Japanese Forrest Gump. When Japan opens its ports to American and European ships, he’s there. When Japan makes its first diplomatic missions abroad, he’s there. And when you dive into the history of Japan’s modern institutions—the police force, the universities, the banking system, the press—Fuzukawa is there as well.

He is most famous for translating, distilling, and disseminating Western knowledge in multiple fields through books such as An Encouragement of Learning and An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. But it is his autobiography, published just two years before his death in 1901, that offers the most comprehensive record of his life and thought.

We are lucky to have the book at all. As one of Fukuzawa’s students says in the preface, for years he rebuffed requests to set down his life story in writing. But when a visiting foreign dignitary began asking him some questions about his early childhood and education, Fukuzawa summoned a stenographer to record his answers. The book we have is an edited transcript of that impromptu oral history. And—as I found to my great surprise—it’s absolutely hilarious.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: ACX uncredited

The WA GOP Put It In Writing That They’re Not Into Democracy

Political forecasters called it that the state Republican convention would feature turmoil ending in endorsements of the most extreme candidates, all to match the party’s current MAGA mood.

Among the jilted was the Republican front-runner for governor, former Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was left putting out an APB for the GOP.

“The party’s been taken hostage,” he told The Spokesman-Review.

But there was another strain to the proceedings last weekend that didn’t get much attention. Political conventions are often colorful curiosities; this one took a darker turn.

The Republican base, it turns out, is now opposed to democracy. Their words, not mine, as you’ll soon see.

After the candidates left, the convention’s delegates got down to crafting a party platform. Like at most GOP gatherings in the Donald Trump era, this one called for restrictions on voting. In Washington state, the delegates called for the end of all mail-in voting. Instead, we would have a one-day-only, in-person election, with photo ID and paper ballots, with no use of tabulating machines or digital scanners to count the ballots. All ballots would be counted by hand, by Trappist monks.

OK, I made up the monk part. I did not make up the part about banning the use of machines to count votes. All in all it would make voting less convenient and harder, by rolling it back at least half a century.

But then the convention veered into more unexpected anti-democratic territory.

A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”

We don’t? There are debates about how complete of a democracy we wish to be; for example, the state Democratic Party platform has called for the direct election of the president (doing away with the Electoral College). But curtailing our own vote? The GOPers said they hoped states’ rights would be strengthened with such a move.

Then they kicked it up a notch. They passed a resolution calling on people to please stop using the word “democracy.”

“We encourage Republicans to substitute the words ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ where previously they have used the word ‘democracy,’ ” the resolution says. “Every time the word ‘democracy’ is used favorably it serves to promote the principles of the Democratic Party, the principles of which we ardently oppose.”

The resolution sums up: “We … oppose legislation which makes our nation more democratic in nature.” (...)

It’s a hybrid system, a representative democracy, with the people periodically voting for elected leaders to do that legislating work for us. During much of our lifetimes the debate in this arena has been: How can representative democracy be made more representative? How can more voices be heard?

It’s jarring to hear a major political party declare that they’re done with that. They’re not even paying it lip service. You can’t get any blunter than “we oppose making our nation more democratic.”

Not everyone at the convention agreed with those sentiments, though they were strongly outvoted. Some of the delegates seemed to have contempt for voting and voters — at least when they come out on the losing end of it.

“The same people who select the baboons in Olympia are the ones selecting your senators,” said one delegate in remarks to the convention hall.

A party platform is a statement of principles; it has little to no chance of being implemented. So it’s tempting to ignore it. Or wish it away, as Reichert is trying to do, by suggesting the real party is out there somewhere having been abducted by impostors.

When people say “democracy itself is on the ballot” in this election, though, I think this is what they’re talking about. (...)

For years now, since Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, some Republicans have been on the defensive about charges they’re flirting with anti-democratic impulses or authoritarianism.

A while back, this newspaper ran an Op-Ed from a leading conservative, the editor of the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru. He argued that despite Trump’s attempts to block the transfer of power, and the party largely backing him up on that, the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. It’s become a myth that Democrats hold about Republicans, he suggested. It’s similar, he argued, to the misconceptions Republicans have that Democrats are committing mass election fraud.

“Republicans aren’t against democracy,” was the headline of that Op-Ed.

Well a few years have passed, and now they’re putting it in writing.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times

[ed. Unbelievable. And if that's not chilling enough, Idaho republicans recently approved a bunch of other assaults on female choice and self-determination by crafting a party plank called “Defining Human Personhood”, which states that life begins from the moment of conception, or when sperm joins egg. The “intentional taking of human life” after that point is murder. 

“We support the criminalization of all murders by abortion within the state’s jurisdiction,” the platform says. Which basically includes in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and appears to also favor bringing women up on murder charges if they have an abortion — or even if they use some post-conception birth control measures such as the morning after pill."

~ See: Once again, GOP puts its extremism in black and white (Seattle Times).]

St. Vincent

 

[ed. Her newest. Nice. Full album here.]

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud On the Future of Streaming

Today, I’m talking with Anjali Sud, the CEO of Tubi. Tubi is a free and very rapidly growing streaming TV platform — the company just announced that it has 80 million monthly active users, and according to Nielsen, it had an average of a million viewers watching every minute in May 2024, beating out Disney Plus, Max, Peacock, and basically everything else save Netflix and YouTube. All of those streaming service price hikes are driving people to free options, and Tubi is right there to catch them.

Anjali joined Tubi as CEO last September. This is actually her second time on Decoder. The last time she was on the show, she was the CEO of Vimeo, which means she has a pretty broad view of what’s going on with video on the internet and streaming in general. And we got into it — the streaming industry is basically in a moment of turmoil right now, as a bunch of huge investments in content did not result in the rapid subscriber or revenue growth most of these companies predicted.

Tubi’s model is different: it licenses content that’s already made, lets people watch it for free, and supports itself with advertising. But that means it’s competing for ad dollars across the attention economy online: not just Netflix, but TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and everything else. I wanted to know how Anjali was thinking about that, especially since the social platforms don’t spend any money on content at all.

Anjali’s plan is to make Tubi feel like a more premium home for better work from all of those creators. It just launched something called “Stubios,” which allows fans to vote on creator projects that Tubi will fund — basically setting up a YouTube- or TikTok-to-Tubi pipeline.

But all of that costs money, too: Anjali recently said that Tubi isn’t yet profitable, “but it could be,” and we really took a deep dive into that. Where does the money come from for a streamer that doesn’t have subscriptions? How much is it? How can you get more? And what will it take to make Tubi profitable?

One note before we start: you’ll hear us say “connected TV” a lot in this conversation, which just refers to TV programming that’s coming from the internet. Traditional broadcast or cable TV was one-way: it came into your house, and that was that. Connected TV excites the whole industry because they get data back and can do everything you’d expect with it: targeted ads, viewer metrics, personalized recommendations, and so on.

Okay, Tubi CEO Anjali Sud. Here we go.

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Tubi

[ed. Fascinating interview about the business and metrics of streaming (if you can get past all the jargon).]

Spreadsheet Superstars

It’s happy hour in Las Vegas, and the MGM Grand casino is crawling with people. The National Finals Rodeo is in town, the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament is underway, the Raiders play on Sunday, and the U2 residency is going strong at the giant Sphere, so it seems everyone in every bar and at every slot machine is looking forward to something. (And wearing a cowboy hat.) Even for a town built on nonstop buzz, this qualifies as a uniquely eventful weekend.

But I’d wager that if you wanted to see the most exciting drama happening at the MGM on this Friday night, you’d have to walk through the casino and look for the small sign advertising something called The Active Cell. This is the site of the play-in round for the Excel World Championship, and it starts in five minutes. There are 27 people here to take part in this event (28 registered, but one evidently chickened out before we started), which will send its top eight finishers to tomorrow night’s finals. There, one person will be crowned the Excel World Champion, which comes with a trophy and a championship belt and the ability to spend the next 12 months bragging about being officially the world’s best spreadsheeter. Eight people have already qualified for the finals; some of today’s 27 contestants lost in those qualifying rounds, others just showed up last-minute in hopes of a comeback.

The room is set up with four rows and three columns of tables, each one draped in a black tablecloth and covered in power strips, laptops, and the occasional notepad. There’s a long table with coffee in the back, and over the two days we’ve been in this room, carts have occasionally wheeled in with cookies, queso dip, and at one point, surprisingly delicious churros. The unofficial dress code is business casual, the overall vibe somewhere between summer camp and business conference.

Now the room is quieter, more focused. 26 of the contestants are furiously setting up their workspaces. They plug in their computers, clean up their areas, and refill their beverages. A number of players reach into their bags and pull out an external mouse and keyboard — everyone in the room has strong opinions on brands and features, but all agree that what you really need is a keyboard with function keys separate from media keys, and then to turn those media keys into more function keys so you can work even faster.

And then there’s me. I’m the 27th competitor, and I’m both the only person in the room using a Mac and the only person who has no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last two days in this room with this group, as they’ve taught each other new Excel tricks and compared notes on the state of the art in the world’s most important piece of software. They’ve been debating VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP and teaching each other how to use the MOD function. I’ve been desperately trying to get my app to update on the MGM’s Wi-Fi.

At 6PM on the dot, Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization hosting these championships, takes the modular stage in the ballroom. He loads an unlisted YouTube link, which begins explaining today’s challenge, known as a “case.” It’s a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.

The Potions Master case, like so many of the puzzles conquered by these competitive Excelers, is not particularly complicated. This is a flashier, faster, deliberately more arcade-y version of spreadsheeting, more like trying to win 10 simultaneous games of chess on easy mode rather than painstakingly taking on a grandmaster. If you like, you can solve the whole thing manually: figure out when the white number gets too high, count the total points until that spot, then double-check it because it’s a lot of numbers, and eventually answer the first question. That’s my strategy, and I think I get it right. Now there are 119 more, worth a total of 1,500 points, and it’s quickly clear I’m not going to finish in the 30 minutes we’ve been allotted.

While I’m squinting into my 13-inch screen and carefully adding 1s and 3s, the other 26 contestants are whirring through their spreadsheets, using Excel’s built-in formula and data visualization tools to organize and query all that data. Everyone in the room seems to have their own way to chew through the ingredient lists and spends the first few minutes turning a mess of numbers and letters into real, proper capital-d Data. They start answering questions a half-dozen at a time, while I’m still checking my mental math.

Almost everybody who participates in competitive Excel will tell you that the app itself will only get you so far. If you can’t hack the puzzle or figure out what you’re trying to do, it can’t make something out of nothing. Your brain will always matter more than your software. But if you really know how to make Excel sing, there’s simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense.

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword — exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year’s competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it’s all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It’s a game. Now it hopes to become a sport.

I’ve come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing — a company’s sales, a person’s lifestyle, a region’s political leanings, a race car — and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want — the reality is you’re still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they’re doing it in Vegas.

You really can’t overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. “Electronic spreadsheets” actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. “I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers,” he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then.

Bricklin’s software, eventually called VisiCalc, gave many people their first good reason ever to buy a computer. In 1996, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called VisiCalc the first of two “explosions that propelled the industry forward” and said spreadsheets were the driving force behind the success of the Apple II. A generation later, a competitor called Lotus 1-2-3 became a key app for the IBM PC. By 1985, after briefly dabbling with a program called Multiplan, Microsoft announced a powerful spreadsheet app of its own, called Excel. At the time, it was an app for Apple’s Macintosh, which was flagging in sales; both Apple and Microsoft thought the best way to compete was with spreadsheets. They were right.

Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel “the best consumer product we ever created.”

by David Pierce, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Miles Davis and John Coltrane: Yin and Yang

Ice and fire they were: a two-horned paradox. Offstage, one was quiet, pensive, self-critical to a fault, practising obsessively. The other was cocksure, demanding; running with friends rather than running scales. But on the bandstand and on record, they reversed roles. John Coltrane, with saxophone in hand, became the unbridled one: long-winded, garrulous. When Miles Davis raised his trumpet, he played the sensitive introvert, blowing brief, hushed tones, exuding vulnerability.

Their names now command reverence, and rarely induce less than eulogy. The music they created together during an almost five-year union still resonates, entrances, influences and sells, sells, sells. Miles’ 1959 classic album Miles Davis – Kind of Blue marking the apex of their collaborative years – stands as the most popular jazz album of all time, loved by a vast, non-partisan spectrum of music consumers. Their absence has only succeeded – like Sinatra, like Presley, like a rarefied few – in intensifying their recognition and elevating their legend.

September, 1955: the trumpeter was desperate. He was preparing for his first national tour arranged by a high-powered booking agent. Columbia Records – the most prestigious and financially generous record company around – was looking over his shoulder, checking on him. 'If you can get and keep a group together, I will record that group,’ George Avakian, Columbia’s top jazz man, had promised. To Miles, an alumnus of Charlie Parker’s groundbreaking bebop quintet, ’group’ meant a rhythm trio plus two horn players, but he still had only one: himself.

For the up-and-coming trumpeter, the preceding summer had been filled with promise. He was clean and strong, six months after kicking a narcotics habit he described as a ‘four year horror show’. His popular comeback had been hailed when, unannounced, he had walked on to the Newport Jazz Festival stage in July and wowed a coterie of America's top critics with a low, laconic solo on 'Round About Midnight'. And Davis had the foundation of his dream quintet firmly in place: Texas-born Red Garland on piano, young Paul Chambers from Detroit on bass and the explosive (and his former junk-partner) Philly Joe Jones on drums.

But Sonny Rollins had disappeared. Miles’ chosen tenorman from Harlem – blessed with a free-flowing horn-style and dexterous sense of rhythm – had long been threatening to leave town. Rollins, it later turned out, checked himself into a barred-window facility in Kentucky to kick his own drug addiction. Davis – with time running out – shifted his recruiting drive into top gear. (...)

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, John Coltrane, a tenor player not on Davis' short list but with a respectable – albeit local – reputation, was playing in organist Jimmy Smith’s combo. Philly Joe made Miles aware of his availability.

Coltrane was not unknown to Davis. As early as 1946, he had been impressed by an acetate of an impromptu bebop session recorded during the saxophonist's tour of duty in the navy. Coltrane’s subsequent tenure in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band brought the two in contact. In his autobiography, Davis recalled with glee a memorable match-up he orchestrated in 1952.

'I used Sonny Rollins and Coltrane on tenors at a gig I had at the Audobon Ballroom... Sonny was awesome that night, scared the shit out of Trane.’

When Coltrane arrived in New York to audition with the group, Miles was not expecting much. But the saxophonist surprised him. ‘I could hear how Trane had gotten a whole lot better than he was on that night Sonny set his ears and ass on fire,’ Davis recalled.

What Miles heard was a sound that, though still developing, was singular and unheard. Almost all tenor players at that point blew under the spell of one of two, massively influential pioneers: the brash, highly rhythmic Coleman Hawkins or the breathy, understated Lester Young. Even the much-heralded, innovative playing of Dexter Gordon – an early stylistic model for Coltrane – vacillated between those two stylistic poles.

But Coltrane was searching for something original, and that search was part of his sound. He repeated phrases as if he was wringing every possibility out of note combinations. He was determined never to play predictable melodic lines; instead, unusual flourishes and rhythmic fanfares cut through the structure of the tune. Many writers would puzzle over – some actively denounce – this new, 'exposed' style. They were familiar with polish, not process. Was he practising or performing? Was that harsh rasp intentional, or just a loose mouthpiece? Why were his solos so long?

Miles could not have cared less about the critics (though he later responded when Coltrane admitted difficulty ending his extended improvisations: 'Try taking the saxophone out of your mouth’). As Davis proved time and again through his career, he had an uncanny ability to detect greatness in the bud. 'People have creative periods, periods where they (snaps fingers three times), like that, you know?’ Miles humbly informed Ben Sidran in 1986. 'I recognise it in other people.'

Miles recognised it at that first rehearsal, but kept his excitement hidden. Coltrane, unaware of his reaction and used to a sideman role, requested direction. Davis responded curtly and discourteously, unnerved that a self-professed jazz player required spoken instruction. ‘My silence and evil looks probably turned him off,’ he admitted later.

by Ashley Kahn, Jazzwise |  Read more:
Images: Dan Hunstein, courtesy of Sony Music; and via:

Bill Russell, Lord of the Rings
Image: via
[ed. See also: Celtics win 18th NBA championship with 106-88 Game 5 victory over Dallas Mavericks (AP).]

Israel’s Descent

When Ariel Sharon​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree. Over the last eight months, Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. An untold number remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease. Eighty thousand Palestinians have been injured, many of them permanently maimed. Children whose parents – whose entire families – have been killed constitute a new population sub-group. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s housing infrastructure, its hospitals and all its universities. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, some of them repeatedly; many have fled to ‘safe’ areas only to be bombed there. No one has been spared: aid workers, journalists and medics have been killed in record numbers. And as levels of starvation have risen, Israel has created one obstacle after another to the provision of food, all while insisting that its army is the ‘most moral’ in the world. The images from Gaza – widely available on TikTok, which Israel’s supporters in the US have tried to ban, and on Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem office was shut down by the Israeli government – tell a different story, one of famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.

The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch.

The charge of genocide isn’t new among Palestinians. I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in Israel-Palestine. The game had been rigged against Palestinians because of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.

This time it’s different, however, not only because of the wanton killing of thousands of women and children, but because the sheer scale of the devastation has rendered life itself all but impossible for those who have survived Israel’s bombardment. The war was provoked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn’t arise on 7 October. Here is Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’ Today this reads like a prophecy.

Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms of persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as possible, including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation. All of these have been features of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people since its founding. What causes persecution to slide into mass killing is usually war, in particular a war defined as an existential battle for survival – as we have seen in the war on Gaza. The statements of Israel’s leaders (the defence minister, Yoav Gallant: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’; President Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible’) have not disguised their intentions but provided a precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.

Israel’s methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, but this doesn’t mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that Israel has killed ‘only’ a portion of Gaza’s population. What, after all, is left for those who survive? Bare life, as Giorgio Agamben calls it: an existence menaced by hunger, destitution and the ever present threat of the next airstrike (or ‘tragic accident’, as Netanyahu described the incineration of 45 civilians in Rafah). Israel’s supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.

In Israel, this belief amounts to an article of faith. Netanyahu may be despised by half the population but his war on Gaza is not, and according to recent polls, a substantial majority of Israelis think either that his response has been appropriate or that it hasn’t gone far enough. Unable or unwilling to look beyond the atrocities of 7 October, most of Israel’s Jews regard themselves as fully justified in waging war until Hamas is destroyed, even – or especially – if this means the total destruction of Gaza. They reject the idea that Israel’s own conduct – its suffocation of Gaza, its colonisation of the West Bank, its use of apartheid, its provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, its continuing denial of Palestinian self-determination – might have led to the furies of 7 October. Instead, they insist that they are once again the victims of antisemitism, of ‘Amalek’, the enemy nation of the Israelites. That Israelis cannot see, or refuse to see, their own responsibility in the making of 7 October is a testament to their ancestral fears and terrors, which have been rekindled by the massacres. But it also reveals the extent to which Israeli Jews inhabit what Jean Daniel called ‘the Jewish prison’.

Zionism’s original ambition was to transform Jews into historical actors: sovereign, legitimate, endowed with a sense of power and agency. But the tendency of Israeli Jews to see themselves as eternal victims, among other habits of the diaspora, has proved stronger than Zionism itself, and Israel’s leaders have found a powerful ideological armour, and source of cohesion, in this reflex. 

by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty Images
[ed. I imagine Hamas could not be more satisfied. Israel has fallen into the same trap Al-Qaeda set for the US after 9/11. If there's any possible silver lining to this horrendous and continually unfolding disaster it's that Israel's armed-to-the-teeth belligerance in the Middle East (thanks, US!) might eventually be transformed into something more like rational diplomacy. Certainly, they've succeeded in alienating and politically radicalizing a whole new generation of young people and many others around the world who had previously not been paying much attention, which doesn't bode well for future support or security. See also: American Leaders Should Stop Debasing Themselves on Israel (NYT):]

***

"Israel is up against a regional superpower, Iran, that has managed to put Israel into a vice grip, using its allies and proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Right now, Israel has no military or diplomatic answer. Worse, it faces the prospect of a war on three fronts — Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank — but with a dangerous new twist: Hezbollah in Lebanon, unlike Hamas, is armed with precision missiles that could destroy vast swaths of Israel’s infrastructure, from its airports to its seaports to its university campuses to its military bases to its power plants.

But Israel is led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has to stay in power to avoid potentially being sent to prison on corruption charges. To do so, he sold his soul to form a government with far-right Jewish extremists who insist that Israel must fight in Gaza until it has killed every last Hamasnik — “total victory” — and who reject any partnership with the Palestinian Authority (which has accepted the Oslo peace accords) in governing a post-Hamas Gaza, because they want Israeli control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza.

And now, Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet has fallen apart over his lack of a plan for ending the war and safely withdrawing from Gaza, and the extremists in his government coalition are eyeing their next moves for power.

They have done so much damage already, and yet not President Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, nor many in Congress have come to terms with just how radical this government is. (...)

No friend of Israel should participate in this circus. Israel needs a pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis — and seize the offer of normalization with Saudi Arabia that Biden has been able to engineer. This can come about only by removing Netanyahu through a new election — as the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, bravely called for in March. Israel does not need a U.S.-sponsored booze party for its drunken driver.

You wonder if the “friends” of Israel have any clue about the nature of its government. This government is not your grandfather’s Israel and this Bibi is not even the old Bibi."

U.S. Open 2024: Rory McIlroy and the U.S. Open He Will Never Escape

PINEHURST, N.C. — Within seven minutes of Bryson DeChambeau’s ball landing in the cup, the ripping sound of tires skirting on pavement whipped through Pinehurst Resort as Rory McIlroy’s courtesy Lexus SUV pulled out of his 2011 U.S. Open champion parking place and drove away from the day he’ll never escape. He stared into the distance as his agents and caddie spoke around him. No interviews. The 35-year-old Northern Irishman simply tossed his clubs and workout bag into the trunk, slipped into the driver’s seat and threw it into reverse. The U.S. Open ended at 6:38 p.m. At 7:29 p.m., McIlroy’s Gulfstream 5 took off, leaving the Sandhills of North Carolina without his fifth major championship but with the collapse that will define him forever.

Just 90 minutes earlier, McIlroy strutted down the 14th fairway prepared to redefine his career. Ten years without a major. Ten years of pain and close calls, a man who won four majors by the time he was 25 then fell short again and again. And here he was, with five holes remaining at the U.S. Open, leading Bryson DeChambeau and the field by two strokes.

But Rory McIlroy did not win the 2024 U.S. Open.

Three bogeys and a pair of missed three-foot putts later, McIlroy lost it to DeChambeau. It will be remembered far more than any of his four wins.

Chewing a nutrition bar walking off the 14th tee, McIlroy leaned over to peek at the 13th green to his right. McIlroy had a two-shot lead because he had just birdied 13 as DeChambeau — playing in the final group as the 54-hole leader — had bogeyed No. 12. But DeChambeau put his drive safely on the par-4 13th with a putt for eagle, and McIlroy wanted to get a look. DeChambeau ultimately birdied to get back within one.

McIlroy entered Sunday at Pinehurst three shots back of DeChambeau. He was not supposed to win this, but he seemingly went and grabbed it. For 13 holes, we saw the version of McIlroy many pleaded for during the past decade. He looked like a killer, or some version of it. He opened with a birdie on the first hole and birdied Nos. 9, 10, 12 and 13 with lengthy putts. He was winning this major.

But golf is not a sport kind to the premature formation of narratives.(...)

He parred No. 14. Then, he bogeyed the par-3 15th after overshooting the green, but that was acceptable. It was one of the hardest holes of the day, and DeChambeau bogeyed it too.

It was on 16 that the fear kicked in. McIlroy had a simple-seeming par putt from two feet, six inches. And he missed. It wasn’t really close, rounding the left edge. Yet McIlroy remained on a mission to stay calm. The instant it missed, he flattened both his palms to give the “calm down” signal. Yet throughout the Pinehurst No. 2 a familiar sentiment was whispered. Not again.

And no matter how hard he tried to steel himself, McIlroy sent his tee shot on the par-3 17th into the left-side bunker. Credit to him, he hit a beautiful, soft pitch out from the sand and saved par.

But what happened next signaled it might be over far before it truly was.

McIlroy put his putter back into his bag, leaned over to grab his driver and his eyes bulged into a fearful grimace. The game plan was out the window. The thoughts that got him here were gone. He was flying blind.

See, McIlroy had a plan this week. He talked about it nearly every day from Tuesday through Saturday. Boring golf. Disciplined golf. Bogeys will happen, so never get flustered. “Just trying to be super stoic,” McIlroy said Tuesday. “Just trying to be as even-keeled as I possibly can be.” And he was for 71 holes, through it all. His tournament could be defined by how impressive that demeanor was, making the kind of ugly, tough par saves he historically missed.

But somewhere between 16 and 18, McIlroy stared into the headlights and wasn’t prepared to look away. He was now a different golfer. His eyes looked like they were playing through each heartbreaking scenario, in turn putting them into fruition. Maybe then, we should have known.

So, for some inexplicable reason, McIlroy pulled out driver. Why, oh why, did he want his driver? The day before, he hit a 3 wood and left himself only a 133-yard wedge shot in. There was no need for extra length on the 449-yard hole. Maybe McIlroy, likely the best driver of the golf ball in recent memory, thought this would be his signature moment. Maybe he was chasing even though he was tied. Either way, McIlroy launched a drive too far left — into Pinehurst’s infamous native area, just in front of a patch of wiregrass. He had no play. He punched out an awkward little roller up to the front of the green. And again, his short game came to play with a nice little chip to three feet, nine inches from the 18th pin.

He missed. Again.

It was as if Bill Buckner let a second ball go through his legs. There is no explanation nor any defense. McIlroy’s short, softly hit putt broke right immediately and rode the right edge of the hole. Rory McIlroy had just bogeyed three of the final four holes to hand away the 2024 U.S. Open, giving Bryson DeChambeau room to earn it with an incredible up and down out of the 18th bunker to par and take the title. If McIlroy made both three-foot putts, he wins the U.S. Open. If he makes one, he goes to a playoff. But he made neither.

McIlroy signed his scorecard in the scoring tent and watched the finish on TV with the slightest, faintest sense of hope. He ate another nutrition bar during DeChambeau’s bunker shot. His hat sat loosely crooked on top of his head for the final putt with hands on his hips. He took one last nervous, sick-to-his-stomach gulp down his throat before the putt fell in. When it did, he turned, looked down, swallowed once more and exited out the door behind him. He gathered his belongings and made his way to the Lexus.

The golfer known for his ability to speak eloquently on all subjects declined to speak to media. There was nothing left to say.

McIlroy’s career began with a collapse. He was just 23 and entered Sunday at the 2011 Masters with a four-shot lead but shot a disastrous 80 to fade away. People will always remember that day, but he won the U.S. Open two months later. It was the first of four majors in as many years. He seemed on pace to chase the greats.

He’s never won a major again.

But unlike so many other sports figures who burned bright early only to fade out, McIlroy’s game didn’t dissipate. He’s remained one of the three or four best players in the world for most of these last 10 years. He’s won 26 PGA Tour events. He’s finished top 10 at 21 of the 37 majors since. By most metrics, the past three years have been his best. He just couldn’t win. Most wouldn’t have even called him a choker. First, he just got off to a bad starts and finished hot. Then, the last three years, somebody else grabbed it from him. At the 2022 Open Championship, he shot a perfectly fine Sunday 70. He just couldn’t hit the 50-50 birdies, and Cameron Smith did to shoot a 64 and steal it. At the 2023 U.S. Open, he entered one back of Wyndham Clark. They shot the same Sunday score. He didn’t hand these away.

The 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst? Rory McIlroy choked.

by Brody Miller, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Jared C. Tilton

[ed. Absolutely brutal, every golfer's worst nightmare. Two missed putts - a three and then a four footer - to lose the US Open Championship (the hardest test in golf). Credit to Bryson, he pulled off some amazing shots, and it was a thrilling tournament. But this is going to leave a scar on Rory's psyche for the rest of his life. See also: Rory McIlroy and the Newest Shade of Heartbreak (GD); ‘Sport at its finest’: Bryson vs. Rory became an agonizing U.S. Open brawl (Golf.com; and, Rory McIlroy faces huge challenge to overcome major US Open heartbreak (Guardian).)

On the Crisis of Men

On a Saturday morning this winter, while my wife trained for a half-marathon, I was tasked with taking our eighteen-month-old daughter to the neighborhood synagogue for “Shabbat for Tots.” Shabbat for Tots was exactly what it sounds like: about two dozen children between one and four years old gathered in a preschool classroom with their parents while a woman in her twenties played guitar and sang songs very loudly. Some of the songs contained ostensibly religious content; one, about “Shabbat feelings,” caused the woman with the guitar to shudder, weep and laugh hysterically in turn—none of which cleared up for me what these emotions had to do with the Jewish day of rest. Others were simple and didactic; the kids were asked to identify their knees, then to bend their knees, to identify their feet, then to stomp their feet. At one point they were all handed rattlers, with which they made hideous sounds for a few minutes before being asked to return them to a large bucket—an instruction that led to my daughter being nearly stampeded by two heedless three-year-old girls, toward whom I felt an unwelcome spasm of hatred.

Notwithstanding my neighborhood’s reputation for avant-garde family arrangements, I was the only man at Shabbat for Tots who had not come with his wife, something I noticed because, whenever I was not preventing my daughter from drinking cleaning detergent or unplugging the window air-conditioning unit, I was looking at the other men in the room. Looking at other men is a somewhat novel experience for me. In my former life as a non-father, if I took any notice of another man in the same room, it was probably to appraise him physically, on the off chance that we were to become locked in some form of primitive combat. (Would I be able to beat him in a race? How easy would it be for him to strangle me?) As a father, however, I find myself looking at other men—at other fathers—all the time, and not at all as competition. Often they look back, just as quizzically, at me. I think we are trying to figure out how we should look, how we should act, how we should deal with the perennial awkwardness of being a father in public.

I was reminded, or in truth was already interpreting my experience in light of, a scene in Book Two of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel, My Struggle. In the scene, which comes as part of a much longer reflection on modern fatherhood, Knausgaard takes his eight-month-old daughter Vanja to “Rhythm Time,” a music class in Stockholm. As one of the few men sitting on the floor in a room full of mothers, babies and soft pillows, he imagines how he must look to the attractive young woman who is leading the class:

I wasn’t embarrassed, it wasn’t embarrassing sitting there, it was humiliating and degrading. Everything was gentle and friendly and nice, all the movements were tiny, and I sat huddled on a cushion droning along with the mothers and children, a song, to cap it all, led by a woman I would have liked to bed. But sitting there I was rendered completely harmless, without dignity, impotent, there was no difference between me and her, except that she was more attractive, and the leveling, whereby I had forfeited everything that was me, even my size, and that voluntarily, filled me with rage.

I was not worried, at Shabbat for Tots, about what the guitarist thought of me. What she was tasked with doing—the singing in the too-loud voice, and the stomping, and the exaggerated Shabbat emotions, all in front of not only a bunch of toddlers but also their adult parents—struck me as nearly unspeakable. My own burdens seemed light in comparison. I could, however, identify with Knausgaard’s feeling of being rendered soft and harmless, of having to forget that there were such things as potency or masculine dignity. The fact that we were helping our wives take care of our children on the weekend was not the problem: this was a responsibility we had all signed up for, approved of and—at least theoretically—accepted. But Shabbat for Tots asked more of us than to help take care of our children; rather, everything in that room signaled that we were expected to become children, or someone’s fantasy of a child: that is, harmless, asexual, insensible to any non-family-friendly desires. To fully inhabit the role that had been laid out for us there was not, it seemed, to be a good father; it was to be a good little boy, whereas the only reason we were there was because we had become fathers, and thus were no longer little boys. Or so we wanted to believe. But were we really fathers?

●

I grew up in the age of the crisis of men. Already a frequent subject of national headlines when I became a teenager in the early Nineties (extensively catalogued by Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed), by the early 2000s, when I was in college, the burdens of contemporary manhood had become the dominant theme of prestige television and film. There were the belated men, the ones who had come “too late,” as Tony Soprano memorably put it to his psychiatrist, and thus instead of getting to build the country with their biceps were stuck in therapy and a rapidly feminizing suburbia, watching helplessly as the old codes were violated and then forgotten completely. There were the nostalgic men, like Don Draper, who aspired to live in the sepia-toned world that he famously pitched as an advertising template to Kodak executives on Mad Men. There were the men who found in violence and criminality a temporary respite from the confines of contemporary manhood—Tony again, but also Walter White on Breaking Bad and Frank Lucas in American Gangster. And there were the ones who impersonated a clearly disintegrated authority to unconsciously comedic effect, like Michael Scott in The Office. If you had to choose, the best among bad options at the time was to become one of Judd Apatow’s hapless husbands; sure, these were pudgy man-children destined to be remembered as footnotes even by their own families, but at least they seemed to be in on the joke.

Knausgaard’s My Struggle, whose six books were published between 2009 and 2011 (they appeared in English between 2012 and 2018), can be understood as belonging to the crisis-of-men genre. Indeed, we might say that in Knausgaard’s novel the crisis of men reaches its full dialectical self-consciousness. Whereas for the protagonists of those millennial TV shows, internal contradictions often displayed themselves in morbid psychoanalytic symptoms—depression, violence, sleeping with the closest available woman—Knausgaard’s autofictional narrator drags his inner conflict out into the open, then subjects it to thousands of pages of merciless analysis. For Knausgaard, as for Apatow, this is partly a source of comedy, and the scene at Rhythm Time is just one of several comic set pieces about family life in a Scandinavian welfare state. But it is not all comedy.

In Book Six, some three thousand pages after Knausgaard has wheeled his daughter out of her music class, he investigates the difference between the social roles of “son” and “father,” which for him describe the two essential paths for the modern man. Knausgaard’s own father, he alleges, was a restless and often volatile man who managed to discipline himself for barely long enough to remain in the house as his children were growing up but who never truly became a father. In the “absence of any inner peace or gravity,” his father’s behavior was thus guided “by the outside, and for someone born in 1944, this was the authoritarian, rule-setting father.” (Never one for understatement, Knausgaard claims to be reminded of his father while watching videos of Hitler, though to be fair he also says he is reminded of himself.) Knausgaard is desperate to avoid being like his father, whose arbitrary temper and alcoholism had terrified him for most of his childhood, but, having seen only this defective model up close, he is unsure what it would take to improve upon it. “Being a father is a commitment,” he hazards. “But what are you committing yourself to?”

Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.”

Although the father-son dichotomy comes late in My Struggle, it can be read back into the long conflict that the narrator of the novels has undergone between his desire to become a writer, which is tied up with all his inner dreams and yearnings for what he calls the “unlimited”—and therefore with his status as a son—and his desire to become a father, which is to say a good man as his society and his wife Linda define it. Yet in contrast to the crisis-of-men shows, whose drama was predicated on their protagonists remaining in a state of immaturity and indecision, Knausgaard makes a choice. At the end of Book Six, he proclaims that he is no longer a son, and therefore no longer a writer. He chooses the role of father over the role of artist. In a sense, he suggests that this is the only defensible choice, that all the rest is egotism, dissipation and role-playing. But having made this choice, he leaves behind him a work of art that documents voluminously, and with a rare honesty, the full spectrum of its consequences. For all he loathes the repetitive tasks of childcare, not to mention the Dantean trials of endurance known as kids’ birthday parties, Knausgaard affirms that his involvement in the everyday lives of his children allows him a “closeness” that never existed between his father and him. He also enumerates, often at length, the cost of this commitment—not only to him as an artist but also to him as a man. “When I pushed the stroller all over town and spent my days taking care of my child,” he writes in Book Two:

It was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result, on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. It was not my intellect that made this clear to me, because my intellect knew I was doing this for a good reason, namely that Linda and I would be on an equal footing with regard to our child, but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mold that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move. (...)

One way to put Knausgaard’s achievement, against this backdrop, is to say that he succeeded in depicting the struggle to become a modern man and father—the kind of non-authoritarian father who assumes the duty of taking their child to Rhythm Time, however reluctantly—without either falsely suppressing or unduly exaggerating that struggle’s costs. Another way to put it is that, by continuously testing his own experience against the prefabricated narratives that were supposed to explain it to him, he dragged our public conversation about men at least a little closer to the conversations that actually existing men are having among ourselves, and with ourselves.

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Despite or maybe because of how uncomfortable I was at Shabbat for Tots, I felt a vague sense of pride that we—the men—were there at all. That we were sticking it out with only an occasional grimace as opposed to, I don’t know, spontaneously combusting. This was an idiotic thought, I know, especially when one considers how uselessly we would otherwise be spending our Saturday mornings. It was even more idiotic in view of the fact that we were hardly Vikings. For the most part, we worked sitting in front of computers; for exercise we ran on treadmills, or got screamed at by (usually female) Pilates instructors, or dragged ourselves up and down a basketball court at the Y, hoping to avoid serious injury. (Unlike my wife, I could not run a half-marathon if my life depended on it.) Perhaps what was really humiliating was not how out of place we were at Shabbat for Tots, but how familiar the underlying dynamic felt to us, as if we were only now being forced up against the bedrock of our daily reality. We had chosen to live in this soft, progressive world, just like Knausgaard had. More than anything else in that synagogue, this was the limit we had committed ourselves to accepting as fathers.

by Jon Baskin, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Laura Czirják, Fatherhood, 2023
[ed. Father's Day, 2024. See also: Dad Brain Is Real, and It’s a Good Thing (NYT):]

"But a shrinking paternal brain may also have downsides. We found that fathers who lost more gray matter volume had worse sleep and more symptoms of depression and anxiety in the first year after birth. More studies with larger samples of men are needed, but our preliminary takeaway was that the same brain adaptations that seemed to track with engagement in fatherhood also signaled risk to men’s well-being.

Infant care can be exhausting and isolating, so it makes sense that it might take a toll on involved fathers, just as it can on mothers. Our lab has found similar patterns for men’s testosterone, which can dip around the transition to new fatherhood. Dampened testosterone seems to bolster fathers’ investment in parenting, yet also may confer risk for postpartum depression.

Even so, most fathers tell us that they derive tremendous meaning and purpose from their connection to their children. Contemporary fathers are almost as likely as mothers to say that parenthood is central to their identity, and men are even more likely to report that children improve their well-being than women are. (...)

The take-home message for men is that brain change is likely a good thing, even if it exposes vulnerability. Podcasters and pundits have exhorted men to pump up their manliness by raising their testosterone through cage fights, ice baths, weight-lifting and red light therapy, but these influencers miss the mark on men’s health. A well-lived life requires a physiology that adapts to changing demands."

Stuart Russell, "AI: What If We Succeed?" April 25, 2024

[ed. This has to be one of the scariest, insightfull, and most forward thinking things I've ever heard, read or seen about AI. Click anywhere on this extended lecture and be prepared to be floored.]

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Japanese man from the Meiji era

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Welcome to the Era of Garbage Film and Television Streaming

If there’s an iron law for twenty-first-century capitalism, it’s that private equity and big corporate capital will enshitify anything it can get its grubby hands on. Most recently, the finance class was in the news for destroying the Red Lobster chain, depriving us regular folks of a decent meal out. The same forces are also setting out to ruin the entertainment industry and those who work in it.

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Bessner, a contributing editor at Jacobin, penned “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” a must-read feature on Hollywood. He deconstructs the streaming industry, tracing the history of film and television through their early years, into the deregulation 1980s and ’90s, through to industry consolidation and derisking. He highlights how the promise of creativity, freedom, and decent work in the industry have been slaughtered at the altar of intellectual property milking, worker exploitation, and the race to profit.

As Bessner writes, the original strategic streaming play was to pump up subscriber numbers, dominate market share, and cash out at scale. But the strategy failed, particularly as credit became more expensive, and now the industry is flailing, bilking its writers and actors and foisting ads on subscribers in a grotesque return to something a lot like cable TV.

Land of IP-Milking Garbage

In his piece, Bessner recounts screenwriter Alena Smith’s experience in Hollywood during the streaming era, and it’s not a pretty picture. It’s what you’d expect from Apple, though: demanding too much, offering too little, and wringing a worker dry without regard for them as a human being.

Smith explained to Bessner how the rush of money into streaming ultimately left writers feeling swindled.

“It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” she said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

If you stream television or film, you’re familiar with the contemporary frustrations of the model. You were promised no ads and endless choice. Instead, you got ads and, well, endless choice — but it was a Faustian bargain.

Now, you’re subscribed to half a dozen increasingly expensive services, increasingly supported by ads, and increasingly filled with intellectual property (IP)–milking garbage and countless other options that are indistinguishable from one another and from what you got on cable a decade or two ago.

Cable TV Strikes Back

John Koblin, in the New York Times, writes

Ads are getting increasingly hard to avoid on streaming services. One by one, Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and Max have added 30- and 60-second commercials in exchange for a slightly lower subscription price. Amazon has turned ads on by default. And the live sports on those services include built-in commercial breaks no matter what price you pay.

The reason is predictable — the companies want to make a profit and they’re struggling to do so. They can only hack away labor costs so much, which they’ve long tried to do, even as writers and actors went on strike last year. And the market, already stretched thin, can only afford so many price increases. Ads are one way to boost the balance sheet.

Another cash source, as Koblin points out, is cheap, low-risk standards — a shut-up-and-play-the-hits approach. That means streaming companies are, as he writes, “ordering lower-cost, old network standbys like medical dramas, legal shows and sitcoms.”

Put this all together and it becomes really hard to distinguish streaming from cable, even if the ad burden is lower with the former. You still have ads, the cost of subscriptions adding up to the equivalent of a cable TV package, and familiar programs chock-full of stock settings, plots, and tropes. (...)

Private equity and big corporate giveth capital and they taketh away. They have essentially become arbiters of fortune in the entertainment industry. Now, as the tide turns, we are left with the worst of all worlds. The industry is collapsing, workers are bearing the brunt of the fallout, consumers are inundated with ads and saddled with ever-higher bills, and the once vibrant landscape of creativity is being suffocated by a low-risk, IP-exploiting monoculture. This grim scene is made worse by the looming specter of artificial intelligence promising more of the same — at best.

by David Moscrop, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas via AFP via Getty Images