Under the Influence

Question:

After graduating from college at the beginning of the pandemic, I tried different jobs but never found one I loved. I’ve worked for an advertising agency, been a project coordinator for a nonprofit with a mission I cared about, sold cars for my uncle’s dealership, and freelanced as a photographer. None of these jobs kept me interested.

I’m in between jobs right now, and a couple of my friends suggested I cash in on what’s happening with artificial intelligence. Although I’ve seen AI positions advertised, nothing about them appeals to me. On Friday, I came across an Udemy course on how to become an influencer. Working freelance as an influencer seems ideal. I’m addicted to social media, and that’s a perfect background for an influencer. I’d never considered influencing as a career choice or how people got into the field, but that’s what this Udemy course promises.

The only problem is I’m told that it’s not possible to make money as a newbie influencer, so I guess I’m looking for career advice.

Answer:

If you want a career, find something you love and go for it. In 1978, I set an old door on two concrete blocks in my living room and opened a consulting company. When I sold my business 39 years later, I had a staff of seven and 4,400 clients spread across the country. More importantly, I’d worked in a career I loved.

In recent years, the influencer phenomenon has exploded. People turn to YouTube, X, Nextdoor, Reddit and other platforms for advice and recommendations. Recent research suggests that 75% of people use social media for advice, and 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations. Fifty million people earn money from regularly posting videos and photos.

That said, newbie influencers have to work hard if they want a living income. Forty-eight percent of influencers earn less than $15,000 a year.

If you decide to become an influencer, it may take you months to develop and gain visibility for your brand before you make money from sponsorship arrangements, brand partnerships, ad revenue and affiliate links. You’ll need to constantly produce engaging posts. You’ll spend your days filming, scripting and editing Instagram reels and TikTok and YouTube videos. You’ll need to hone your skills at performing in front of a camera. You’ll work hard to define your value by providing specialized knowledge and “edu-tainment.”

You’ll need to search out and negotiate sponsorships. Although you won’t report to one supervisor, you’ll have many bosses, as every advertiser and public relations agency that invests in you will expect you to produce deliverables on deadline. When working for yourself, you won’t have a regular salary, health care benefits, paid time off or other benefits. You won’t be able to afford “off days,” because once you lose followers, they don’t return. You’ll discover responding to direct messages and comments to be a full-time job. Even when you’re exhausted at the end of a long day, you’ll have to send out invoices.

That said, you have much going for you if you decide to become an influencer. You love social media and have photography, advertising and sales skills. Your project coordination skills may come in handy as you’ll need to build your brand by planning and executing content across multiple social channels.

You’ll need to build a professional website that advertisers and followers can visit to learn about you. You’ll also want to get started on one, two or three social media channels, each of which require different skills. YouTube influencers promote products with video tutorials. TikTok influencers cater to GenZ. Instagram influencers leverage imagery. You’ll want to set up your posts so your followers can like, comment on and reshare them. You’ll want to create an influencer profile on Influence.co and Intellifluence.com for visibility with influencers.

Can you make money doing this? A recent LinkedIn survey of 5,920 influencers reported these influencers averaged $323.19 monthly. The more successful influencers in the group, who had at least a million followers, earned an average of $6,109.83 per month.

by Lynne Curry, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image:(iStock/Getty Images Plus)

How the Clintons Revolutionized U.S. Politics... Twice

From the mid-1930s through the mid-1960s, the Democratic Party was defined by a ‘New Deal Coalition’ that united white rural and blue-collar workers, religious minorities (Jews, Catholics) and, increasingly, African Americans. However, following Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 capture of the South, and Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey, Democratic Party insiders decided to aggressively rebrand the party — to form a new coalition that centered women, college students, young professionals, and racial and ethnic minorities. They more aggressively embraced cultural liberalism, adopted a more dovish posture on foreign policy (to appeal to former anti-war activists, despite the fact that the Vietnam War was started and perpetuated by Democrats JFK and LBJ). They de-emphasized ties to organized labor. Indeed, white rural and blue-collar workers increasingly came to be viewed as a liability rather than an asset — depicted by many party insiders as ignorant, bigoted, misogynistic and reactionary — an impediment to the party’s more ‘enlightened’ future.

 

Among these policymakers, the biggest political prize of them all was to win symbolic capitalists – elites who work in fields like law, consulting, media, entertainment, finance, education, administration, science and technology. Professionals who traffic in data, ideas, rhetoric and images instead of physical goods or services. As Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argued in his 1991 bestselling book, The Work of Nations, the future belonged to these professionals. However, securing this voting bloc would ultimately require Democrats to “kill their populist soul,” as political analyst Matt Stoller aptly put it. And as they tried to transition to a new voting base, the party faced a long period of crushing political defeats.

Despite Democratic attempts to woo symbolic capitalists on cultural issues and foreign policy, most continued to support Republicans because of pocket-book priorities. Meanwhile, the GOP managed to successfully capture those disaffected rural and blue-collar voters Democrats sought to leave behind by emphasizing cultural conservativism. As a consequence, the Democratic Party spent decades in the political wilderness. In the quarter-century between 1968 and 1992, Democrats only managed to hold the White House four years — narrowly squeaking out a 1976 win in the immediate aftermath of Watergate. Republicans, meanwhile, won landslide victories in 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988. And then Bill Clinton changed the game.

Bill Clinton was an embodiment of how symbolic capitalists liked to view themselves. He was relatively young (especially as compared to his Republican rivals in 1992 and 1996). He was smart and charismatic. He was a person from a humble background who managed to ascend into the upper echelons of power as a result of his elite education and savvy. Clinton consistently emphasized the importance of education as a means of competing in the globalized symbolic economy. He surrounded himself with demographically diverse experts from elite institutions. He painted himself as a post-ideological technocrat — as someone who followed ‘the facts’ without regard to what party insiders or his base wanted. Indeed, he regularly went out of his way to alienate remaining vestiges of the traditional Democratic base, or to align with his political rivals, in order to demonstrate his independence.

In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton formally announced the death of the Democrats’ earlier New Deal coalition, declaring, “The era of big government is over.” And over the course of his administration, the Democratic Party radically shifted to reflect not just the values, but also the economic priorities, of symbolic capitalists.

Four planks were central to Clinton’s vision of reorienting America around the knowledge economy: social investment in skills, infrastructure and research, enhancing market dynamism (through tax cuts, deregulation, privatization), international openness (through trade deals and immigration reform), and macroeconomic stability (including by using U.S. forces to uphold the global international order) – a platform now referred to as “neoliberalism.” Although versions of these ideas date back to the 1940s, and were first piloted under Democrat Jimmy Carter (accelerated under Reagan), Clinton brought the vision full circle by aggressively reorienting the Democratic Party around this vision – giving rise to what is now derisively referred to as the “neoliberal consensus” in Washington, and generating many of the faultlines that continue to define U.S. politics to the present.

For instance, the urban-rural divide first took off in the early 90s, corresponding to the Democratic Party’s reorientation around the knowledge economy (and contemporaneous moves by many left parties in Europe).

With respect to the “urban” side of that divide, under Clinton’s tenure, the Democratic Party dedicated itself to bringing cities ‘under control’ through tough-on-crime policies — despite significant concerns from the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus about the disproportionate and adverse effects these policies would likely have (and indeed, did have) on African Americans and other minorities. Simultaneously, his party committed itself to globalization and free trade, culminating in a series of international agreements that radically expanded China’s economic and geopolitical clout, despite the Clinton Administration’s own forecast that these moves would come at the expense of key U.S. industries and manufacturing workers.

Fulfilling Clinton’s campaign commitment to ‘end welfare as we know it,’ Democrats restructured aid programs, forcing millions of Americans, mostly women, into dead-end and unstable jobs with low pay or benefits in order to continue qualifying for government assistance. Pushing low-income mothers out of the home and into the workforce led to significant increases in child mistreatment incidents and children being dumped into ‘the system.’ However, it also helped expand the pool of workers in the service economy and kept their wages low as a result of the increased labor supply. Simultaneously, the levels, quality and accessibility of government benefits were significantly reduced, as Clinton pushed to ‘downsize’ the federal government (and privatize its functions) in order to balance the budget. As a result of these reforms many low-income Americans ended up with smaller household incomes despite working more, and the share of Americans in deep poverty increased substantially. But in the new and enlightened Democratic Party, it was much better to balance the budget by squeezing the poor than taxing the relatively affluent.

Rather than worrying about the prospects of the working class, the party aligned itself firmly with the tech and finance sectors. The Clinton Administration cut many regulations on these industries, and reduced enforcement of those rules that remained. These moves contributed significantly to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, and the housing and financial crisis that came to a head in 2008 (the latter of which had a particularly pernicious and enduring impact on the wealth of black families). Indeed, virtually all of the policies described above advanced the interests and priorities of those affiliated with the symbolic economy at the expense of most others, especially those who were already desperate or vulnerable. The effects of these reforms fell especially hard on women and ethnic / racial minorities. Clinton and his party made these moves nonetheless, confident that they would be able to retain female and minority voters because the Republicans were perceived to be even worse. And, for a while anyway, the bet paid off:

Under Clinton’s tenure, Democrats continued to enjoy roughly the same margins with lower-income and minority voters, but they were able to make significant gains with symbolic economy professionals as well. Looking at the white vote, for instance, we can see that starting in the 1992 election, degree holders shifted hard towards the Democratic Party, and that alignment has only grown over time. Whites without a college degree starting moving away from the Democratic Party by the time Clinton ran for reelection, and moved aggressively away from the party when Al Gore tried to succeed him. (...)

As symbolic capitalists have shifted towards the Democrats, they have also become more “culturally” liberal. According to Pew Research estimates, only about 7 percent of postgraduates held down-the-line liberal views in 1994 (at the beginning of the Clinton realignment). By 2015, that number had more than quadrupled to 31 percent. The share of BA holders with uniformly liberal views increased nearly fivefold, rising from 5 percent in 1994 to 24 percent in 2015— and is significantly higher today.

Indeed, although the Democratic Party platform shifted hard “left” during Obama’s reelection campaign, at the outset of what is today known as the “Great Awokening,” Obama himself was largely focused on painting Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch vulture capitalist who cared too much about corporate profits, and not enough about the struggles of ordinary Americans. It was enough to get him a “win” – albeit by a much smaller margin than in 2008. It was Hillary Clinton who mainstreamed “wokeness” in the Democratic establishment during her 2016 presidential run.

Hillary Clinton had the bad sense to run as the consummate establishment candidate and as a wonky technocrat in a race when growing numbers of Americans across the political spectrum were looking to burn things down. But then she ran one of the most substance-free campaigns of any candidate in either party in contemporary history. Rather than focusing on the substance of Sanders and Trump’s populist platforms, she tried to change the conversation away from criticisms of neoliberal economics via cultural issues.

by Musa Al-Gharbi, Symbolic Capital(ism) |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Only fair after the Reagan essay below to profile the worst Democratic president we've had in my lifetime (in my humble opinion).]

Spinning the Night Self

The creative benefits of insomnia

I wake up, faintly groggy with sleep, and try to guess the time. Midnight is surprisingly noisy, with a steady stream of traffic bringing people home from the West End in London, while 3am carries a curiously muffled sound, and 4:10am is when the first aeroplane skims my house with its familiar whine of descent. As my ears strain into the darkness, I sense the soft silence of 3am. Once I would have groaned, cursed and plugged the (largely ineffectual) sound of gently lapping waves into my ears. But, tonight, I listen to the emptiness for a few pleasurable moments, then I reach for my notebook and a candle.

I’ve had insomnia for 25 years. Three years ago, after a series of bereavements, I stopped battling my sleeplessness. Instead, I decided to investigate my night brain, to explore the curious effects of darkness on my mind. I’d long felt slightly altered at night, but now I wondered whether darkness and sleeplessness might have gifts to give: instead of berating myself, perhaps I could make use of my subtly changed brain.

I’m not the first person to notice a shift in thoughts and emotions after dark. ‘Why does one feel so different at night?’ asks Katherine Mansfield in her short story ‘At the Bay’ (1921). Mansfield herself became more and more fearful after dark, often barricading herself into her apartment by pushing all the furniture against the front door. And yet, later in life, insomniac nights became one of her most creative times, as she confided to her journal:

It often happens to me now that when I lie down to sleep at night, instead of getting drowsy, I feel more wakeful and I … begin to live over either scenes from real life or imaginary scenes … they are marvellously vivid.

Mansfield referred to her nocturnal imagination as the ‘consolation prize’ for her insomnia.

Around the same time, Virginia Woolf was pondering her own feelings of ‘irresponsibility’ that struck when the lights went down. She too recognised that night rendered us ‘no longer quite ourselves’. After completing each of her books, Woolf was plagued by insomnia – which she made use of to plot out her next novel. ‘I make it up in bed at night,’ she explained of her most inventive novel, Orlando (1928). Night was also a time of epiphany: after protracted struggles with her novel The Years (1937), Woolf’s dramatic breakthrough came ‘owing to the sudden rush of two wakeful nights’ when she was finally able to ‘see the end’. A few years later, the writer Dorothy Richardson noted that, around midnight, ‘she grew steady and cool … it was herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known.’ In her fictionalised autobiography, Pilgrimage (1915-38), Richardson’s alter-ego Miriam finds her most authentic, radical and original self in the solitude of her wakeful nights. For Richardson, reading and writing when she should have been sleeping were acts of resistance, acts that revealed herself to herself, undistracted by the detritus of daylight.

My night-awakenings began during my first pregnancy. Ten years later – with four children and several years of working across time zones under my belt – a full night of sleep in a single stretch had become a rarity. Most nights, I woke between 2am and 4am, tossed and turned for an hour, then read until I drifted back for a (short) sleep before the alarm went off. I invested in sleep aids: melatonin, weighted blankets, eye masks, sleep-inducing supplements, oils, mattresses, pillows, sheets, pills, apps, bed socks. I experimented with various sleep hygiene routines proposed by ‘experts’. To no avail.

The latest statistics suggest that one in six of us cannot get to sleep, or stay asleep, a figure that is higher for women. At the last count, 8 per cent were taking sleep medication and 11 per cent were regularly splashing out on sleep aids. In 2019, the global market for sleep products was valued at $74.3 billion. Experts predict it will be worth $125 billion by 2031. Frightening, and sometimes misleading, stories appear regularly in the media linking poor sleep to obesity, heart disease, dementia and premature death. (...)

Published and unpublished letters and journals show that, for centuries, many women embraced nocturne, finding within it a time of solitude and creativity. The literary critic Greg Johnson in 1990 noted that female writers seemed to have a peculiar talent for making ‘creative profit’ from their insomniac nights. He is right, and not just about writers. Over eight months of wakeful nights, the artist Louise Bourgeois produced her Insomnia Drawings (1994-95), a series of 220 sketches. The Insomnia Drawings were immediately snapped up by the Daros Collection in Switzerland, making instant ‘creative profit’ for Bourgeois, who also credited their production with easing 50 frustrating years of nocturnal tossing and turning. Lee Krasner’s ‘night journey’ paintings, made between 1959 and 1962 in the wake of two bereavements, are now among her most valuable and coveted. Meanwhile, Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel (1965), her most brilliant and acclaimed poetry collection, ‘in the blue dawns, all to myself, secret and quiet.’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Margaret Thatcher used the sleeping hours to increase the volume of their (arguably bold) output. Enheduanna watched the stars and produced the poetry that made her literature’s earliest known author. And Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, later saying of these wide-awake and alone nights at the telescope: ‘There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night.’

I call these women my Night Spinners.

Several years ago, when I lost loved ones, my flimsy sleep disintegrated and I lost all appetite for battle. Inspired by aeons of Night Spinners, I put away my sleep aids and let my grieving brain lean into the dark nights. When I woke (which could be any time between midnight and 4am), I got up and wrote, drew, watched the stars. I slept outside (night after night), went for long walks, swam in lunar-light, and taught myself the constellations and the phases of the Moon. I tracked and surveyed glow worms and moths. I watched badgers, and followed the call of owls and nightingales. I discovered a mesmerising nocturnal world.

My nocturnal mind was different. Why did I feel both more fearful and more tranquil? Why was I more inclined to fret and fume? To behave with greater recklessness? Why did images, ideas, memories so often collide in a curious collage of colour and novelty? Writing problems I encountered during the day found solutions as I ambled round the darkened house, peering at the night sky from every passing window. In the middle of sleepless nights, my mind felt less logical, less methodical. My grip on assessing and prioritising less assured. But in return, my inner critic fell silent. Ideas and thoughts meandered, melded and merged. I refused to pass judgment, but in the morning, when I looked afresh at whatever I’d written in the night, I often liked it. (...)

The prefrontal cortex (sometimes called our command and control centre, and thought to be the most highly evolved brain region) is very sensitive to sleep and sleep deprivation. Researchers speculate that it takes a restorative break at night – leaving us fractionally less rational, less organised and a little more at the whim of our emotions.

A resting prefrontal cortex might also explain why studies indicate that we are more likely to feel enraged and fearful at night. Or why reformed gamblers, drinkers and smokers are more likely to succumb to old temptations. Or why the celebrated writer Jean Rhys – who frequently wrote at, and about, night – was described by her biographer as ‘a lap-dog’ by day and ‘a wolf’ by night. Rhys liked to rise at a ‘wolfish’ 3am and ‘smoke one cigarette after another’, describing this dark hour as ‘the best part of the day’, when her thoughts were subtly altered. At night, it seems, the filter between us and the outside world is fractionally thinner and frailer. It’s not that our emotions change, but that our ability to control changes. We experience the world more viscerally: the highs are higher and the lows are lower. 

by Annabel Abbs, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Bright Light at Russell’s Corners (1946) by George Ault

Chappell Roan’s makeup artist breaks down her VMAs look (CNN)

Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

[ed. See also: The best red carpet looks from MTV’s Video Music Awards 2024 (CNN). Yikes, who are these people?]

What Does a Busy President Want to Eat? This White House Chef Has the Answer

You know that old line, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are"? If that's true, then Cristeta Comerford knows the last five presidents of the United States better than almost anyone.

Comerford just retired after nearly 30 years as White House chef. She cooked for presidents from Clinton to Biden, making everything from family snacks to state dinners.

Just days before she left D.C. and moved to Florida, she came to the NPR studios to look back on her career, and said she didn't think about the barriers that she broke when she became the first woman and the first person of color to hold the top job in the White House kitchen.

“I didn't even realize that, because I was just doing what I wanted to do. I love to cook. It just so happens that I'm a minority woman,” she said. “But when I broke the glass ceiling, I didn't realize that it was, like, news all over!”

That was in 2005 during the George W. Bush administration that she took the executive chef position. (...)

Interview highlights

Ari Shapiro: You were born in the Philippines. You grew up one of 11 children in Manilla and you came to the U.S. at the age of 23. Did any of the presidents you worked for ask you to cook the food of your childhood, the food you grew up with?

Cristeta Comerford: President Obama, he lived in Hawaii for a while, so there's a lot of Filipino communities there, so he's very familiar with the Filipino food. So every now and then I’m, like, on the grill, and he's like, “Hey, is that smelling good right there.”

Shapiro: Give us an example.

Comerford: The skewered pork, you know, that's like a street food, but that's something that I love very much. And then whenever I did that — I do beef as well, and chicken — he loves it.

Shapiro: That must have been so nice to share the food of your roots, of your childhood, in your job at the White House with the president

Comerford: Exactly, yes.

Shapiro: I think the last time the White House hosted a state dinner for the Philippines, if I'm not mistaken, was 2003 during the George W. Bush administration. What was that day like for you?

Comerford: It was amazing. Because actually, chef Walter Scheib — the executive chef then — asked me to write the menu. I actually did the press preview for [Philippine President Gloria] Macapagal-Arroyo at the time. So I was so excited. They chose lamb. I clearly remember, because it was, like, kind of unusual, like, “Lamb? For Filipinos?” But I'm like, “OK, if that's what the guests want, we're gonna do lamb.”

Shapiro: What did cooking for presidents show you about those leaders that even their chiefs of staff or their closest advisors might not have understood?

Comerford: I think at the end of the day, those presidents, they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. So the only thing that they want when they come home after working the Oval Office, dealing with whatever world or domestic events, is just to come home to a nice, home cooked meal.

So on a daily basis, we just really take care of them: “Hey, what do you like to eat?” And a part of being a chef is just reading the room, but reading a big room, because you have to watch the news. You have to keep up with what's happening, because you almost kind of know what mood is your principal going to be in.

Shapiro: Oh interesting. You're watching the news to see if it was a stressful day for the person you’re cooking for. So it’s like, “Oh, he's gonna need grilled cheese and tomato soup” and the end of this day?

Comerford: Yeah exactly. And people don't teach us that. We just kind of know. I learned it from, actually, one of our butlers, because he was the one who explained to me, “Cris, he's gonna be feeling tired today and just worn out. So give him what you got.”

Shapiro: If I were to ask all five presidents what dish Cris is best known for, do you think more than one of them would give me the same answer?

Comerford: I think two of them would give you the same answer. Because President Clinton's favorite is enchiladas. And of course, so is President Bush's. So they'll give the same answer. I make a mean enchilada — homemade tortillas. It has to be homemade.

Shapiro: Did a president ever say to you, “Cris, you're an extraordinary cook. But you know what? I don't want the handmade tortilla. I want the American cheese wrapped in plastic that I grew up eating”?

Comerford: Actually, it was President Obama. I was making this fancy cheeseburger for him. I made my own brioche dough, and he looked at it and he said, like, “I'm OK with just the grocery bun that you get.”

Shapiro: One of your former colleagues, the pastry chef Bill Yosses, told me that your philosophy of American cuisine is that it's like jazz. What does that mean?

Comerford: It was a New York Times reporter who asked me the question of like, “Do you think French food is the best?” And we were in France. But what I said was true. I'm like, “Hey, look, all of the chefs, we're all classically trained. Like, you know, a pianist is classically trained in music. But in America, we play jazz.”

Shapiro: And what does that mean in terms of food?

Comerford: In terms of food, it's like, every community, every minority groups — we're a land of immigrants, so we share everything that we have. So by the time a food is made, it's a totally different one than it was intended to be. It's because it's a beautiful melting pot.

Shapiro: It's less about authenticity and more about improvisation, is that it?

Comerford: Exactly, yes.

by Ari Shapiro, Elena Burnett, and Katia Riddle, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Susan Walsh/AP

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[ed. I wish I could show a video of this artist's amazing work but he seems as accomplished at preventing that as he is at creating it. Just visit this site. See also: whether AI art should really be considered art: Imagination Mode (Perspective Agents)]

What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?

For many people, the 2016 election was a catastrophe. For Max Boot, it was a betrayal. He’d been a movement conservative: a loud voice for the Iraq War, an editor of The Weekly Standard, and an adviser to the campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. Boot took heart when Republicans initially closed ranks against Donald Trump’s candidacy. Trump is “a madman who must be stopped,” Bobby Jindal said. “The man is utterly amoral,” Ted Cruz agreed. Rubio called him “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the Presidency.” For Rick Perry, he was “a cancer on conservatism.” Then, one by one, they all endorsed him, and he won.

Trump’s election shook Boot’s world view. Was this what Republicanism was about? Had Boot been deluded the whole time? He wrote a book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism” (2018), about his breakup with the G.O.P. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, he could now admit, made good points. His advocacy of the war in Iraq had been a “big mistake,” and he felt guilt over “all the lives lost.” Boot was like a confused driver who had arrived at an unintended destination and wondered where he’d missed the off-ramp. When was the right moment to have left the Republican Party?

For many anti-Trump conservatives, the lodestar remains Ronald Reagan. In his sunny spirit and soothing affect, he was Trump’s opposite. Their slogans differed dramatically: Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” versus Trump’s “Build the wall”; Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” versus Trump’s “American carnage.” Both men survived an assassination attempt, and their instinctive responses were telling. Reagan, though gravely wounded, reassured those around him with genial humor. (To his wife: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To his surgical team: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”) Trump, in contrast, wriggled free of his bodyguards, raised his fist, and commanded the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Three days later, he released a sneaker line featuring an image of him doing so, the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT high-tops, priced at two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

Boot grew up idolizing Reagan. “How I loved that man,” he recalled. In 2013, he started writing a book about the fortieth President. His “Reagan: His Life and Legend” (Norton) aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one. One might expect, given Boot’s trajectory, that this would be a full-throated defense of Reagan, the Last Good Republican. But it is not.

Although Boot once felt “incredulous that anyone could possibly compare Reagan to Trump,” he now sees “startling similarities.” Reagan’s easygoing manner, Boot acknowledges, concealed hard-to-stomach beliefs. Reagan viewed the New Deal, which he’d once supported, as “fascism.” He raised preposterous fears about the Soviet capture of Hollywood, and fed his fellow-actors’ names to the F.B.I. When Republican legislators largely voted for the landmark civil-rights laws of the nineteen-sixties, Reagan stood against them. (He’s on tape calling Black people “monkeys.”) He also campaigned against Medicare, insisting that it would lead the government to “invade every area of freedom as we have known in this country.” For unconscionably long into his Presidency, he refused to address a pandemic, AIDS, that was killing tens of thousands of his constituents, and he privately speculated that it might be God’s punishment for homosexuality. Then there is his campaign motto, ominous in hindsight: “Let’s make America great again.”

Recent events have forced Boot to ask if Reagan was part of the rot that has eaten away at Republicanism. Boot now sees him as complicit in the “hard-right turn” the Party took after Dwight D. Eisenhower which “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Trump.

And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Reagan famously quipped. But he delivered that line while announcing “record amounts” of federal aid. He viewed the world in black-and-white, yet he governed in gray.

Reagan tolerated a gap between rhetoric and reality because, for him, rhetoric was what mattered. “The greatest leaders in history are remembered more for what they said than for what they did,” he insisted. (The example he offered was Abraham Lincoln, apparently rating the Gettysburg Address a more memorable achievement than the defeat of the Confederacy.) When it came to policy, Reagan was happy to hand things off to “the fellas”—his generic term for his aides, whose names he could not reliably recall.

This, too, sounds familiar. Like Trump, Reagan held facts lightly but grasped larger emotional truths. When he uttered falsehoods, as he frequently did, it was hard to say that he was lying. “He makes things up and believes them,” one of his children explained. Reagan’s lies, like Trump’s, were largely treated as routine, as if he were a child who couldn’t be expected to know better. Fittingly, both came from the spin-heavy world of sales and entertainment. Boot points out that Reagan and Trump are the only Presidents who had television shows.

“Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” Boot asks. Usually, that’s a question about each man’s beliefs. Looking at Reagan’s life through Boot’s eyes, though, one wonders about their styles, too. Was there something about Reagan’s way of operating that got us here? (...)

Reagan hovered above the material plane, and others indulged him. “You wanted to help Reagan to float through life,” his longtime adviser Michael Deaver explained. “You’d be willing to do whatever it took to take the load off of him of all the shitty little things that normal people have to do.”

Those “shitty little things” included running the country. Deaver was sometimes called the “deputy President,” but others bore that title, too—the whole Administration ran on delegation. The President offered little guidance even when it came to taxes, his signature issue. “In the four years that I served as Secretary of the Treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy or fiscal and monetary policy with him one-on-one,” Don Regan recalled. “The President never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish.” Without direction, Reagan’s aides—the fellas—held extraordinary power. He accepted their views (though he sometimes fell asleep while they presented them), and he rarely sought outside counsel.

Auteur theory interprets films as fundamentally the creations of directors. A similar notion prevails in politics: the idea that Presidents are fully in charge. But when has that ever been true? Reagan knew, from his years on film and television sets, that the face of a production is just a part of it. There was something refreshingly honest in his ceding policymaking to those who knew more than he did. There was also something ironic: Reagan, the foe of bureaucracy, surrendering to the state.

by Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis/Getty
[ed. Having lived and worked through the Reagan presidency (on the receiving end of some of his policies) there's no doubt in my mind that he (and especially his wife, Nancy) were more interested in cultivating his image than in running the country. Which is not to say he didn't install some of the worst ideologues one could find at the time in key positions - Anne Gorsuch at EPA (Supreme Court justice Neil's mother); James Watt at Interior (Rocky Mt. Legal Foundation); Cap Weinberger, Secretary of Defense (Bechtel); and many, many others. He encouraged Grover Norquist (Mr. drown government in a bathtub) to form the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), which advocated for big corporate tax breaks and opposed any effort to regulate health care, and worked closely with Newt Gingrich, eventual House Minority Whip, who is credited with creating the extreme party polarization we see today. So, after that, it was game over for moderate, responsible Republicans. Talk about revisionist history, it's always been baffling to me how Repubicans nowadays almost confer sainthood on Reagan who checked out early with dementia, destabilized Latin America, and blew potential lasting world peace and nuclear non-proliferation by underming Russia's recovery after the Soviet Union collapse (see previous: How the Neocons Subverted Russia’s Financial Stabilization in the Early 1990s. In my mind, the last great GOP president was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who'd be considered a flaming liberal these days. Sad.]

Your Book Review: The Pale King

For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes, sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.

No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.

***

Prelude: First Encounter

David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks. And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.

What to say about Infinite Jest? It remains Wallace’s masterpiece, widely considered the greatest novel of Generation X. It takes place in a near future where the US, Canada and Mexico have been merged into a single state. Each year is corporately branded, with most of the action taking place in “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” It’s set in three locales: a drug rehabilitation center, an elite tennis academy, and a Quebecois terrorist cell. The novel clocks in at over a thousand pages, two hundred of which are footnotes. It includes sentences of absurd length, with some descending into multi-page molecular descriptions of various drugs. The book pulls the kind of stunts that shouldn’t work, but in Infinite Jest they do, because the book is that good, the characters that deep, the subject matter that prescient. Infinite Jest is often considered the “first internet novel,” predicting in particular its addictive allure.

The Project of David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest made Wallace a star. The book was both a literary sensation and cultural phenomenon, described by one commentator as “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Nonetheless, Wallace wasn’t totally satisfied. “I don’t think it’s very good,” he wrote, “some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” He grew determined to surpass Infinite Jest with something new.

Wallace aimed to write fiction that was “morally passionate, passionately moral.” He believed that “Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.” His active period spanned the late 80s to the 00’s, cresting during the cynical 90s, the age of the neoliberal shrug, when on one hand,“Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy,” and on the other, the average American parked himself in front of the television for six hours a day.

His major concerns were:

1) How to transcend postmodernism

2) The deforming effects of entertainment culture

Postmodernism can be understood as the idea that we’re so trapped within language that reality remains remote. At its most extreme, postmodernism seems to suggest that language is all that exists. In politics, this manifests as movements that focus on how people speak, much more than movements of the past; and in literature, as writing that aims not to immerse the reader in a plausible world, but to keep the reader hyper-focused on the fact that they’re reading a work of fiction. Wallace began his literary career as a postmodernist, before swerving away mid-career, most dramatically with Infinite Jest.

He wasn’t some simple reactionary. His work wove in postmodern self-awareness, metacommentary and irony, all while arguing that we had to transcend it. And to do so, we need the very principles postmodernism had spent the past half-century deconstructing: decency, sincerity, responsibility, neighborliness, sacrifice. (...)

The Pale King: Central Concerns

After Wallace’s death, his editor Michael Pietsch assembled the manuscript, winnowing it down to a set of consistent characters and generally forward-moving narrative. Infinite Jest famously ends before the climax, major plot threads dangling, and so does The Pale King—but while the former is cruelly deliberate, The Pale King remains unfinished through tragic happenstance, major themes underdeveloped, story nascent.

The plot: a group of IRS hires converge on an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. There’s the sense that once they’re there, things will start happening, but nothing really does. The chapters alternate between the 1985 story, character background, debate/discussion of the deeper philosophical meaning of the IRS, metanarrative written in the voice of 2005 David Foster Wallace, scraps of trivia/world building/slices-of-life. (...)

Pale King: Themes

The plot builds towards a war over the future of the IRS: with one side wanting the IRS to remain committed to civic virtue, its tax examinations carried out by humans; and the other wanting the IRS focused on maximizing profits, its examiners to be replaced by computers. The IRS here is standing in for all institutions where people operate both as individuals and as part of a larger collective: the conflict between the IRS as civic organization and the IRS as corporation reflects a general conflict taking place in the 80s, and arguably still today.

Wallace is, of course, on team human. His criticism of the profit motive parallels his rejection of minimalism, the aesthetic of postmodernism: when we reduce reality to a thin, abstract variable, whether that be profit or discourse, we mutilate it. And once we’re there , all that’s left is our role as solipsistic consumers. (...)

Chris’ story is located close in the book to a philosophical dialogue concerning the nature of the IRS and the moral crisis in society. As one character expounds (emphasis mine):

‘It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’

This speech is set in the 80s, but was written in the 00s, when the internet was nascent and social media hadn’t yet taken off. Wallace’s diagnosis is prescient: between Quiet Quitting and Live to Work, young people are rejecting the tedium of office life and embracing the life of the influencer, which does indeed involve both the trappings of rebellion and conspicuous consumption.

It hasn’t gone down exactly as Wallace predicted. He was concerned about the withering effects of hedonism (which true to his predictions have persisted), but he underestimated the resurgence of doctrinaire political ideology.

The Pale King is in many ways revanchist, arguing for reclamation of territory lost to hedonism in the name of old-fashioned ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day. And revanchism has certainly made a comeback: today we face a proliferation of conservative/Trad movements, but very few seem interested in rehabilitating old fashioned civic virtue. Cynicism in societal institutions is endemic on both the right and the left, perhaps with good reason: while a bureaucrat in the 80s could expect to own a home and support a family, these days an ‘ordinary’ job doesn’t cut it. The IRS’s of the world have taken the path that Wallace warned against, embracing automation and the bottom line, and neglecting the real, human realities of the people they’re meant to serve.

The Millennial/Gen Z complaint is real: the economic conditions are harder than they were in the 50s/70s/90s; the world of our parents no longer exists; starting a family is exorbitant. So why should we subject ourselves to bureaucratic tedium and keep society running, when society doesn’t seem to care much about us?  (...)

The Path Forward

Wallace suggests that boredom, far from being something to avoid, might point the way to deeper self-knowledge. “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.” Boredom might even gesture towards enlightenment: “It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”

In Wallace’s conception, boredom isn’t only personally enlightening—it can also be a heroic sacrifice for the collective good. At one point Chris Fogel wanders into the wrong classroom and ends up in the exam review for Advanced Tax, taught by a capable and dignified Jesuit (possibly the eponymous “pale king”). The Jesuit makes a speech which sparks an epiphany in Chris, where he declares the profession of accounting a heroic one: “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.’”

There it is: the vision, the cure, the path forward. We accept the burden of adult responsibility, go to work every day and engage in the important but unglamorous work that keeps society running. We orient our institutions not towards money but principle. We refuse to treat people like numbers or cogs or some great undifferentiated mass—we treat them as fully human, always, even and especially when they’ve chosen to subsume some part of their individuality to a soul-killing institution, because we recognize this as a heroic sacrifice they’re making for the good of the collective. And we withstand our negative emotions, embrace them fully, travel through their every texture until we transform and open to a deeper and richer experience.

The problem with all this, of course, is that in the middle of writing the book, Wallace killed himself.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: The Pale King/Amazon

[ed. I've met three people in my life who've read Infinite Jest in its entirety - which is exactly three more than The Pale King. I guess a 600-page novel about boredom and the IRS doesn't exactly scream best-seller. But I enjoyed it (like I enjoyed Infinite Jest, more for certain component parts than as a complete/coherent whole). For example, the happy hour/after work get-together, with the beautiful Meredith Rand's sudden appearance and effect on group dynamics still makes me laugh. See also: Maximized Revenue, Minimized Existence (NYT); and, Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me (Electric Lit).]

The Prince We Never Knew

A revealing new documentary could redefine our understanding of the pop icon. But you will probably never get to see it.

It’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.

The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.

Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.

In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.

These four moments happen back to back, about three hours into the film. I watched it for the first time on a winter evening in 2023, and during this particular sequence, my body clenched as it registered contradictory intensities: amazement, pity, disgust, tenderness. Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I had an image of Prince emblazoned in my mind: wonderfully strange; a gender-bending, dreamy master of funk. He flouted and floated above all categories and gave permission to generations of kids to do the same. Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music — a release for me and a release, above all, for Prince.

Behold him writhing at the microphone, shrieking out the chorus of “The Beautiful Ones,” a song about the pain of love. Wendy Melvoin, a member of his band the Revolution and one of the people with whom Prince was most intimate (though only briefly, only ever briefly), tells Edelman that when “he’s screaming, there is a look in his eyes of pure torture.” She quotes the lyrics “Do you want him, or do you want me? ’Cause I want you!” “It feels like the big struggle of his entire life,’’ Melvoin says. “The consequence of you not choosing me is too much to bear.”

The sequence I just described is 20 minutes long. Imagine sustaining this density of character analysis for 520 more, which is what Edelman has done. In the process, he offers one answer to a question that has agonized the culture at large for the last decade. How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed? Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity. Wesley Morris, a critic at The Times and one of a small group of people who have seen the film, told me, “It’s one of the only works I have ever seen that approximates the experience of suffering with and suffering through and alongside genius.”

The film took Edelman almost five years to finish, and it nearly broke him. Whenever he makes a documentary, he told me, “It’s like willingly walking into the jail or locking myself up into a box like Houdini and being like, ‘Can I get out?’ ” But he had been locked in for a long time, often working nights and weekends, chasing down recalcitrant subjects who seemed haunted by their friendships with Prince and researching in Prince’s personal archive, which was filled with gaps and elisions. Prince kept slipping away from him. “How can you tell the truth about someone who, when you’re talking to people, they all had different things to say?” Edelman told me. “How can you tell the truth about someone who never told the truth about himself?”

Over a year and a half, I had observed as Edelman continued to perfect his film, working to capture the essence of Prince, even as it became slowly, painfully clear that it would most likely never air. The Prince estate had changed hands, and the new executors objected to the project. Last spring, they saw a cut and, claiming that it misrepresented Prince, entered into a protracted battle with Netflix, which owns the rights to the film, to prevent its release. As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out. It has been like watching a monument being swallowed by the sea. (...)

What ultimately persuaded Edelman to take on the film was a potential treasure trove of new material. For tens of millions of dollars, according to a source familiar with the negotiation, Netflix had secured from the estate exclusive access to Prince’s personal archive, referred to among Princeologists as “the vault.” It had been an actual room, in the basement of his fortresslike home and studio, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., filled with unreleased recordings and concert footage and the master copies of all his music and drawings and photographs and who knew what else. In life, Prince was defiantly private. He rarely sat for interviews, and when he did talk to the press, he often spoke in koans. There were so many unexplained oddities. The changing of his name to a symbol — a move that was widely mocked and that no one ever fully explained. His many battles with record companies, including the years when, feuding with Warner Brothers over control of his output and his master recordings, he took to performing with the word “slave” written on his face. His decade of perfect albums, followed by years of uneven, often impenetrable ones. There was, most perplexing of all, his death from a fentanyl overdose, when he always seemed to disdain drugs and alcohol. Access to the vault presented a chance to tell a more detailed story about Prince than had emerged before.

Prince’s estate, which was then being administered by a bank in Minnesota, would have no editorial influence over the project, Edelman was told. Edelman and Netflix would retain final cut, though the estate could review the film for factual accuracy. He decided to sign on.

Edelman and his team, including the editor Bret Granato and the producer Nina Krstic, spent a full year watching tape they found in the vault. At first, they were excited by the material: hours upon hours of band rehearsals and music videos, all of Prince’s never-before-seen performances, including pristine 16-millimeter film from his tour for the 1981 album “Controversy” and elegiac scenes from one of his final Piano and a Microphone shows in 2016. The footage moved the film’s editors to tears, but though he would make ample use of it, Edelman knew he didn’t want to make a concert film. What he wanted was to tell the story of the arc of those years, of the person who resided in the gaps among Prince’s many metamorphoses.

But it soon became clear that there was almost nothing that was spontaneous or personal in the vault, almost no footage of him recording or writing. At one point, they were excited to discover a few home movies of Prince horsing around with girlfriends, but when they watched the tapes, they appeared to have been deliberately damaged. As Granato, one of two main editors on the film along with Gabriel Rhodes, put it, the vault was “not all that different from an Instagram account or a Facebook page.” It was manicured, curated, just the way Prince wanted it.

After a year, some of the most revealing material was scraps of unintentional candor — moments when Prince thought a camera wasn’t rolling and “would transition into a different person,” Granato told me. “He’d turn inward, look at the floor.” At first, “it looks like nothing, because he’s just looking, quiet,’’ but the accumulation of these moments was revelatory: “Within these things, there’s a lot of vulnerability. There’s shyness. There’s a lack of confidence that butts up against confidence in this really interesting way.” What did these moments mean? They needed the people who knew Prince to tell them.

Edelman, with the help of the producer Tamara Rosenberg, carefully tried to penetrate the concentric circles around Prince. “It’s a complicated culture in that Prince world,” Rosenberg told me. “People are very protective for various reasons.” It’s no surprise that interview subjects would be guarded about the personal life of a world-famous celebrity, but the vehemence of the refusal in some cases, combined with a sense of suspicion about their motives, was a continual source of frustration for Edelman and his team. Edelman sometimes felt as if Prince was still dictating what could and couldn’t be said. “What are you not telling me?” he found himself wondering. “What’s the big secret?”

Rosenberg spent hours each day on the phone, trying to reassure everyone. As the months went by, the team slowly persuaded more people — former bandmates, sound engineers, assistants, bodyguards, managers, a hairstylist, girlfriends, childhood friends, record-company executives and Prince’s sister — to come on camera.

Edelman’s collaborators spoke of his supreme skill as an interviewer, how he builds rapport with his subjects, prodding them to reveal shockingly honest feelings about their lives. His method is simple but profound: preparation and duration. He inhales every document he can, synthesizes all he learns, prepares pages of questions and then, when he is in the room with an interview subject — often for many hours at a time — sets the notes aside. He knows so much about the people he is speaking to that he disarms them, producing obscure episodes from their pasts that intrigue them. He is “offering them a real space to talk about their experience. To really roam around and find the right words,” Rosenberg told me. “You see people thinking on camera,” and their buried memories begin to surface.

The story of Prince that was emerging was a story of a person bent on fame and control. From the very beginning, when he signed his first contract with Warner Brothers at age 18, he insisted on a level of independence unusual for an artist so green. When Warner Brothers suggested that Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire produce his debut album, Prince refused and did it himself. He became a domineering band leader — ruthlessly extracting from his musicians the sounds he was hearing in his head, often subjecting them to 10-, 12-hour days and growling in their faces about their insufficiencies. Edelman was finding that the people Prince worked with were still afraid of him — yet in many cases were also tenderly protective.

As Edelman completed his interviews — more than 70 of them — he realized there wasn’t some big secret that people were hiding. Instead, what he found were the defining traumas of Prince’s childhood and his constant recapitulating of them. The story unfolds slowly, hauntingly, over the course of the film.

by Sasha Weiss, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: Prince in 1983. Allen Beaulieu

Eleven Predictions: Here's What AI Does Next

We truly live in interesting times—which is one of the three apocryphal Chinese curses.

(The other two, according to Terry Pratchett, are: “May you come to the attention of those in authority” and “May the gods give you everything you ask for.” By tradition, the last is the most dangerous of all.) (...)

But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived—the unleashing of AI agents.

And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for.

Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore.

That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission.

It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.

But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.

We got a glimpse of this future last week, when the company Altera announced that it had unleashed one thousand autonomous AI agents on to a Minecraft server.

Almost immediately things got very strange.

In this AI agent community, the biggest winner was a priest, who created a huge religious cult—but by bribing people to join. In another simulation, Democrats and Republicans battled via conflicting constitutions driven by ideology (not rights, which are boring and passé in the digital world).

But it could get much worse—in an earlier simulation, AI revealed a disturbing tendency to resolve conflicts with nuclear weapons. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The Minecraft simulation also demonstrated how AI agents can change their minds at the drop of the hat—as the successful cult bribing incident suggests. In other instances, a farmer needed for the food supply decided spontaneously to give up agriculture and go on an adventure. In another instance, an entire village stopped working because of a single missing bot.

Right now this is happening in test environments. But soon AI agents will be changing the real world—and at a pace none of us are prepared for.

So let me offer eleven predictions for our interesting times. Or maybe I should call them warnings. You be the judge.

1. Stop worrying about AI taking over. It’s the people who own the AI who pose the biggest threat.

I still hear foolish predictions about some big computer taking over the world—like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sorry, but it won’t happen that way. Those big Sumo-sized computers aren’t the threat. It’s the people who own them you need to worry about. That’s why most of the debate about the threat coming from AI is worthless.

Yes, there is a threat. But it’s very much a human-driven one. Psychology and game theory will tell us more about how this plays out than any tech knowledge.

In fact, tech people may be the least prepared for these changes, because they’re still thinking in terms of software code, not human behavior.

2. You also have to stop thinking of AI as a single force. Hundreds of governments and corporations are already competing in building their AI empires.

AI will soon turn into a plural noun. Governments, corporations and other entities (hackers, billionaires, scammers, etc.) will each have their own AI agents—empowered by the largest computers in the history of the world, sucking up juice from the electricity grid the way Popeye swallows spinach.

Some people vaguely grasp that the US is in competition with China in AI, but that’s a misleading way of viewing this dynamic. There will soon be thousands of competing agendas in the AI space.

And that’s why….

3. We will soon be living in an AI war zone—because competing AI agents will constantly battle each other for control (often over us).

We will look back fondly at the simple days when the bots just talked to us. Soon they will be big and strong, and start making demands—or just do whatever they want without asking.

With so many conflicting AI programs ramping up, the bots will inevitably go to war with each other. As soon as they are given agency and responsibility, battles will ensue.

Like gunslingers in a Western town, they will shoot it out—metaphorically, and possibly in real terms.

Here’s my advice: Try not to be collateral damage.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Video: Altera/YouTube

Nvidia: Nothing to See Here... Move Along

Nvidia Corp.’s stock continued to bleed in the aftermath of last week’s earnings report.

The stock has fallen in four of the six sessions since that report, and it saw especially heavy pressure this week — so much so that it delivered its worst weekly performance in two years, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Nvidia shares lost 13.9% this week; they fell 16.1% in the week ended Sept. 2, 2022.

In all, Nvidia erased $406 billion from its market value on the week, the most for any U.S. company on record, and more than the combined market capitalizations of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Nvidia shed $406 billion in market cap this week. What’s next for the stock? (Market Watch)

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has sold more than 5 million shares of the chip maker in recent months, totaling about $633.1 million, according to a new filing.

According to a filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Huang sold nearly 5.3 million shares, in tranches of 120,000 shares each, in a series of transactions between June 13 and Sept. 4. (...)

Huang is Nvidia’s largest individual shareholder, according to data from FactSet, holding about 3.5% of the company’s outstanding shares as of Aug. 9.

Huang has a personal fortune worth about $94.2 billion —an increase of about $50 billion year to date — according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, which ranks him as the 18th-wealthiest person in the world.

CEO Jensen Huang has sold more than $633 million in Nvidia stock since June (Market Watch)

[ed. The guy's got $94.2 billion. Consider that for a moment. And he's only the 18th wealthiest person in the world. I'm thinking of investing in pitchforks (especially for spineless politicians and courts that allow these levels of inequity to persist).]

Paul Simon on Almost Everything: "Errand to Brazil (1987-1990)"

Above: Simon and the Bahian drum troupe Olodum perform “The Obvious Child,” the first track on The Rhythm of the Saints. I was impressed to learn that the fade that occurs at 2:30 was accomplished not via studio manipulations, but by Olodum itself. I was less surprised, but equally delighted, by a falsetto vocal lick, at 4:00, that Simon had clearly lifted from somewhere in his deep catalogue of Fifties doo-wop. Yes, he said, it was from “Deserie,” a 1957 hit by the doo-wop quintet the Charts. As in the song “Graceland,” in which the South African guitarist Ray Phiri had dipped, without thinking twice, into American country music, “The Obvious Child” was a true musical exchange (or, if you will, mutual appropriation).

***

Shrugging off renewed accusations of musical tourism, Simon set his course for Brazil. His original plan was to follow the diaspora to its third stop, Cuba. But he was so thrilled by what he found in Brazil, and probably so exhausted by what turned into a two-and-a-half-year project, that he never got to Cuba. Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints stand as Paul Simon’s two great experiments with world music.

When Simon arrived in Brazil, Nascimento’s producer, Marco Mazzola, got things underway by introducing Simon to Grupo Cultural Olodum, the majestic drum troupe and cultural collective from Salvador, Bahia’s capital city, with whom Simon recorded the track that opens The Rhythm of the Saints, “The Obvious Child.”

Whereas township jive, mbube, and the other South African genres that Simon incorporated into Graceland are secular, Simon saw The Rhythm of the Saints as purely and simply an exploration of its title (...). The Yoruba religion, Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ, recognizes a Supreme Being, Olódùmarè, from whom Olodum takes its name. Olódùmarè reigns over the orishas, or lesser gods, of whom there are anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand. Olódùmarè has no gender, but orishas can be male or female. It goes without saying that they have supernatural powers.

The orishas represent specific aspects of human or natural life. Ayelala is the female orisha of justice and punishment, Babalú-Aye, who is male, of illness and health. In an Afro-Brazilian rite, which typically involves drumming, singing, and dancing (beautifully captured in David Byrne’s movie) a worshipper calls on one or another of the orishas to inhabit his body. Every orisha has a specific rhythm associated with it, of a complexity, power, and seductiveness which left Simon entranced.

~ Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 5 of 5: "Errand to Brazil (1987-1990)" - Tony Scherman (Among the Musical)

Dave Jordano - Coffee Break, Detroit (1972)

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Delivery Fees Have Seattle Diners, Drivers and Restaurants Reeling

Mia Shagen has delivered for DoorDash via electric bicycle and scooter since 2020. She moves between cities throughout the year but has always called Seattle her home. She isn’t sure she can stay, though.

Shagen says she’s never made so little delivering for DoorDash. Take Wednesday, Aug. 14: Shagen worked five and a half hours, hanging around Belltown during the busiest time of day. She delivered two orders; over 40 minutes of “active time,” she made $23.71.

Why are Seattleites using food delivery apps less these days? Check the receipts.

Fees on third-party delivery apps have ballooned in Seattle since the January implementation of the PayUp ordinance, which requires delivery workers be paid a minimum wage based on mileage and time spent delivering. In response, companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats swiftly instituted a blanket $4.99 fee on Seattle orders, which they say is necessary to offset the increased cost of doing business in the city.

Some consumers say the fees have caused them to ditch the apps altogether, or at least to order less frequently. It’s not just consumers feeling pinched. More than a dozen Seattle delivery drivers and restaurant owners told The Seattle Times that the fees have yielded a decrease in demand that has hurt their livelihoods. Some have shuttered businesses, while others have left the industry — and Seattle — altogether.

The debate over fees and wages has been contentious, boiling over inside City Council chambers and around the internet. There’s no unanimous solution or culprit. But all parties can agree: Food delivery in Seattle has lost any remaining sheen of affordable convenience — and it’s impacting everybody’s bottom line.

Anxiety rises with fees

The PayUp ordinance — which requires the delivery companies to pay their drivers at least 44 cents per minute, plus 74 cents per mile during orders, or a minimum of $5 per order — went into effect in January.

Days later, Uber Eats and DoorDash added a $4.99 fee to all orders. Other services like Instacart followed suit. Labeled a “Regulatory Response Fee,” the companies argue the charge is necessary to remain profitable. More than half a year later, the fees remain — and Seattle orders are down by as much as 50%, according to DoorDash and local restaurant owners.

Though all parties agree there’s an issue, there’s no prevailing solution. And tensions seem to be reaching a boiling point.

Seattle City Council didn’t vote on a hotly contested amendment that would’ve lowered the pay standard before heading to a recess in August. It’s unclear whether the council will vote on any amendments or new pay laws, despite council president Sara Nelson repeatedly calling its passage “urgent.”

Meanwhile, food delivery companies are pressuring lawmakers to act. DoorDash, which estimated a dip of 590,000 Seattle orders on its app between February and May (the most recent data available), began issuing an additional $1.99 regulatory response fee on certain long-distance orders on Aug. 1.

Shagen, who lives frugally and spends her free time writing books, plans on moving out of Seattle if order volume doesn’t increase within a month.

Delivery couriers like Shagen say the discrepancy between active time — time spent responding to an order — and the time spent waiting on food is the root of the problem. The PayUp legislation only requires delivery drivers be paid for time actively completing an order, whereas similar ordinances in New York and California require workers be paid for time spent waiting for orders.

As orders slowed in response to fees, Shagen and other couriers have seen their active time plummet, even when working the same number of hours. So has pay.

And the drop in deliveries came with a secondary effect, said bike courier Gary Lardizabal. Tips have also plummeted. Lardizabal says he’s never declined a DoorDash or Uber Eats order, fielding more than 11,000 transactions. He made about $1,600 delivering for DoorDash in May, down from around $5,000 in January. In response, he got part-time jobs at Marination and Whole Foods.

Heather Nielson, a bike racer who grew to love the freedom that delivery offered after working for years as an office manager, recently returned to a job at a commercial real estate company. She says that many delivery workers, especially bike couriers who rely on volume to make up for the fact their vehicles travel shorter distances, have left the industry. Still, she understands why higher prices have led to the decrease in orders.

“Customers are suffering, too,” Nielson said. “Everybody is suffering.” (...)

Delivery-industry-sponsored nonprofit Drive Forward, which represents gig workers, leads a contingent intent on making change. In a July survey completed by more than 800 Seattle-area delivery workers, those drivers reported earning about $16.30 per hour — less than minimum wage, and less than the average hourly wage reported by workers in a 2021 survey. Drive Forward executive director Michael Wolfe criticized the PayUp law as a “one size fits all” policy. “It really is the law of unintended consequences,” he said.

Pro-labor groups disagree, arguing that the law is working as intended, and that cuts to the current wage would have negative impacts on couriers. Hannah Sabio-Howell, communications director at statewide labor group Working Washington, said the problem can be traced back to the delivery companies.

“It’s very convenient for the corporations to claim that these fees are somehow necessary, without ever having to answer for why,” said Sabio-Howell, adding that money spent on lobbying, as well as recently announced earnings reports, demonstrate that the companies are financially stable and able to afford higher wages.

DoorDash reported 645 million total orders in the second quarter of 2024, up 19% year over year, while revenue, at $2.6 billion, was up 23%. Though Uber does not report earnings by sector of its business, the company reported a similar increase of revenue in this year’s second fiscal quarter (gross bookings were up 19% year over year, with revenue up 16%).

Low order volume has meant local restaurants have suffered, too.

Karan Singh, owner of Mirch Masala and Pizza Twist on Capitol Hill, said order volume at his restaurants has dropped 50% on Uber Eats and Grubhub and 30% on DoorDash since the implementation of the PayUp law. While Singh considered hiring in-house delivery drivers to tamp down on prices for consumers, it wouldn’t have been financially viable for his business.

Businesses that employ their own drivers, like Seattle pizza chain Pagliacci, are on the hook for issuing payroll and paying associated taxes. The employees may not be able to choose their own hours, a benefit of delivering for third-party companies, but they are offered more protections as employees rather than independent contractors. (...)

Footing the bill

Skyrocketing delivery prices have pushed some customers off the apps entirely.

Approaching 6 p.m. on an April Monday, it was dinnertime for Robby White of First Hill. White opened DoorDash and placed an order from 8oz Burger & Co: a burger for himself, a plant-based sandwich for his partner, a large order of fries and two drinks. The subtotal was $59 — pricey for a simple meal, but an expected expense for a convenient meal after a hectic workday.

Then came the sticker shock. The grand total, bloated after service charges, the $4.99 flat fee, taxes and tip, was $87.73.

White was so incensed that he filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

“Maybe the $5 fee isn’t going to the drivers at all; maybe it’s going to the companies,” White remembered thinking. “I think we’re just getting ripped off.”

by Xavier Martinez, The Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Ellen M. Banner/Seattle Times

[ed. Law of unintended consequences, or something else? I vote for 'something else'.]