Woman from Saigon, modern-day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. French vintage postcard.

via:

Todd Snider

[ed. See also: Ottoman Turks, American Male. Have a safe and happy 4th everyone.]

Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me

Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males

[...more]

The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth

A Monument to Man’s Arrogance

Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.

Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.

But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.

This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.

But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.

This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.

This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.

For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:

No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”

There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:

The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.

They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.

It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.

But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?

What if we asked them?

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: here and here 

[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it. An interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society quite advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]

 

[Haori] (Kabuki costume) Target and arrow design on light green satin ground. Edo period, 19th century.

via:

Gene Kelly & Donald O'Connor

From Turner Classic Movies: 

"For many critics and fans, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (’52) is simply the finest musical ever made. And they may be right. Everyone was at the top of their game on this film from the choreographers to the co-directors to the actors to the songwriters. The film epitomizes everything that made the musical genre such an exciting form of entertainment during the heyday of the studio era. The film tells the story of Don Lockwood, a silent-screen swashbuckler who finds love while trying to adjust to the coming of sound. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN drew as much from past popular culture as it did from contemporary references and attitudes. Most of the songs were drawn from past musicals except for "Moses Supposes," which was an original composition written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green."

[ed. Yeah... it's a dumb song. All the more amazing that they could make something this great out of it. See also: Critically acclaimed art is also popular (Thing of Things).]

Are There Any Straight Women Left?

Consensus has formed, in recent years, that womanhood consists of fending off suitors. Resentful men, perhaps hearing one narrative after the next of how to be a woman is to be drooled over, see this as a form of female privilege. “Any young woman who is even moderately attractive,” wrote critic William Deresiewicz in a 2023 Tablet essay, “will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men.”

It was an entertainingly written essay, but one that bore no relation to how I experienced my twenties. Where were these flirtation-based promotions? William, I wanted to tell him (if he would register my middle-aged presence), what you are describing is not how it goes for young women, but what it is to be Emily Ratajkowski. The misconception is not unique to Deresiewicz. If anything, he gets points for at least specifying that he meant young women—and past a certain attractiveness threshold.

Female heterosexuality has been understood almost exclusively as the experiences of women who may be nominally straight, but whose relations with men are mainly about deflecting their advances. Yes, there are a handful of women—Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mirren—who spend a half century turning heads. Most do not. A typical straight female life cycle goes surprisingly quickly from an awkward youth unsure if any of the boys you like will ever reciprocate to an adulthood where men compare you unfavourably with eighteen-year-olds. Life expectancy for Canadian women is over eighty. This means, of approximately seventy man-liking years, a woman may spend ten in love-interest mode herself.

Most women—most people—are not remarkable-looking, in either direction, but are, as the kids say, mid. The women whose physical presence screams female sexuality, whose physiques are referenced by the expression sex sells, are the exception. Yet very few women are asexual. Contrary to the images the expression a sexual woman might summon, most female sexuality is happening in the minds and bodies not of lingerie models but of women whose general-interest sex appeal is nil. I’m here to make the case for a concept of straight womanhood that includes, even prioritizes, women whose interest in men is stronger than their interest to men, rather than the other way around.

There is a long-standing myth: that men possess a general lust for life that includes sexual appetites, whereas women choose between ambition and romance. Underpinning the divergence is this notion that male sexuality is a natural and near-unstoppable force, whereas women can take it or leave it—and will, if serious people, do the latter. Straight women’s need for men is not understood as a mirror image of straight men’s need for women but rather as an entirely different category of requirement.

So here I am, reclaiming man-needing as a feminist pursuit. Women are people, after all, people who want. Maybe we shouldn’t like men, but on the whole, we do. That needs to be our starting point.

Straight women today are at a crossroads. Not obsolete, exactly, but on the decline. Straight women are, going by survey data, a smaller percentage of the population than ever before. A 2022 Gallup polling of more than 10,000 adult Americans shows that 19.7 percent of Gen Z identifies as “something other than heterosexual,” compared with 7.2 percent of the overall population, and women are more likely than men to identify as bisexual.

What is female heterosexuality, anyway? Is it a gender and sexual orientation combo like any other? Or is it a social role, one held by women with no great interest in men but who lack the courage or sense of adventure for other paths? At a moment when women are succeeding like never before in education and professional life, do men still hold any interest for women? Would all women be gay if they could, and if they say they can’t, what’s stopping them? Isn’t female sexuality fluid? Didn’t they do that study where women were equally aroused by hetero porn, lesbian porn, and monkey sex? Do women even desire men, or have we merely been socialized over millennia to put up with them?

Some theorize that women are inherently sexually fluid, capable of sexual and romantic feelings for men and women, and that binary sexual orientation is a man thing. Moreover, “women” is itself a category in some degree of flux and sometimes deemed exclusionary. People assigned female at birth are now more likely than those assigned male to medically transition as adolescents. And more people—in Gen Z, mainly uterus-having sorts—now identify as nonbinary. Together, this means that there are fewer people inhabiting that bit of the Venn diagram where “straight” meets “woman.”

Much of this shift can be attributed to people feeling freer to come out than in previous generations. But there is also a sense, in some quarters, that straight woman is a bit ick as an identity, that it sounds reactionary or conventional, that it comes across as staid or unadventurous. ...

Is it men that women have gone off or just the confining role of boring straight lady? It would seem, at least from the countless magazine and newspaper features on gender and sexual politics, that straight women are passé. In the world of actual people, this indifference has yet to manifest, at least in the aggregate. Well-intended efforts to counter the assumption that all women are straight give the equally misleading impression that it’s a fifty-fifty shot whether any given woman will like men, something even the Gen Z stats don’t claim. Young women are approximately as into men as ever before but less into the whole straight thing than in previous generations. [...]

My aim here is not to insist that heteroflexible women with husbands, or assigned-female-at-birth non-binary people with high heels and boyfriends, are in some definitive sense straight women in denial about their true selves. If, in an everyday situation, a woman tells you she’s queer, and then introduces her male partner, no gotcha is in order. Maybe, if she expanded upon what she meant by “queer,” you wouldn’t think she was, but politeness dictates nodding along respectfully. If you feel moved to call her a straight woman who thinks she’s interesting, have the decency to wait until she’s left the room. But I’d also urge some sympathy for the spicy straights. If you get some straight women claiming to be queer, this is because . . . straight women have internalized the idea that straight womanhood is a bit ridiculous.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Pavel Danilyuk (Pexels) / iStock / Alana Enahoro

Are Americans Too Old?

The country you live in is changing. Month by month, year by year, an insurgent group has been taking over. Its members are moving into your neighborhood, casting votes, and pushing your interests aside. These people claim to care about the community, but they’re mostly loyal to one another—and their numbers are growing. If their ascendance has been ignored, that’s mainly because of political correctness: it’s considered rude to talk about them as a group. If you do so, you must adopt a respectful, even reverential tone, observing how hard life is for them, even though they have all the power.

“They” are the old—at least, according to “Gerontocracy in America,” a new book by Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School. Moyn argues that the oldest Americans, because of their retrograde politics and ever-increasing presence, are profoundly reshaping our collective life. Historically, “elderly Americans have counted among the most oppressed,” he writes, and many still suffer abuse, or struggle in penury. But the bigger picture is that more Americans are living longer, staying healthier, and getting much wealthier as they age. As a result, Moyn says, the country’s fate and character are being determined not by forward-looking people in their youth or their prime but by backward-looking ones in the final third of their lives.

The French have a phrase for stating the obvious: “enfoncer une porte ouverte,” or “to break down an open door.” We all know that there are lots of boomers, and that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the oldest Presidents in history. Even so, Moyn writes, the extent of America’s transformation has, like aging itself, snuck up on us. His title is a play on Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: it implies that gerontocracy—rule by the old—is now the country’s essential condition. “Had she won the presidency in 2024, Kamala Harris would have taken office at sixty,” Moyn points out; only in a gerontocratic America could she have presented herself as a youthful alternative.

To really appreciate the “gobsmacking” degree to which the country has aged, Moyn suggests, you have to look at the statistics. In 1980, the median age in America was thirty. (In other words, half of Americans were younger than thirty, and half older.) Today, the median age is nearly forty. There used to be an “age pyramid,” Moyn explains, with a broad base of younger people narrowing to a small elderly population at the top. Now we have an age rectangle—more people are reaching their seventies and eighties—and it could soon become a top-heavy trapezoid, since young people are having fewer children. In 1920, less than five per cent of Americans were older than sixty-five; by 2060, according to the A.A.R.P., the number will be one in four.

The age of the median voter is now fifty-two. In primaries, it is sixty-five—meaning that the oldest voters ordain the choices for the rest of us. “The most common age of donors in recent elections can run as high as seventy,” Moyn reports; since politicians often do what donors want, even younger elected officials are likely to vote older than their age. That’s not to say that there are lots of younger politicians: the median age in Congress is more than sixty. There are four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives; only one was born in the nineteen-nineties, and only sixty-four in the eighties. Democrats in Congress trend a little older than Republicans, and “at least half of the Democrats in the House over seventy-five are running again in 2026,” Moyn writes, despite the fact that, between 2022 and 2025, eight congressional Democrats died in office.

All of this has made younger voters more cynical and disengaged. And with good reason: there is ample evidence that older people favor policies that emphasize security for themselves over investment in the young. Broadly speaking, laws now make it much easier for older people to buy property and make investments while avoiding taxes. Meanwhile, being healthier, they have kept working into their seventies, occupying positions that might otherwise be filled by those younger than them. The result has been a widening economic rift between the old and the young, with the net worth of older households rising and the wealth of younger households falling. “The age group most likely to own a home in America, at a rate of over 80 percent, is seventy to seventy-­four,” Moyn writes. The second most likely group is people seventy-five and older.

There are nearly sixty million Americans over the age of sixty-five. Can we really generalize about their attitudes and opinions? “As the individual life dwindles, playing for time in the face of impending catastrophe is a psychologically appealing stratagem of avoidance and denial,” Moyn suggests. At the very least, it seems reasonable to say that our opinions grow less au courant as we age. Surveys find that, among people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, the most important foreign-policy issue is climate change; among “old people,” Moyn writes, “the biggest issue is terrorism.” We face all sorts of big civilizational challenges—and yet, if Moyn’s analysis is right, the people who are most directly invested in building the future are being dominated by those who indulge the status quo. “Gerontocracies are prone to let long-term problems fester and worsen,” Moyn warns. But the power of older Americans is hardly despotic; it’s democratic, deriving from the principle of one person, one vote. What, if anything, should be done about it? [...]

Is gerontocracy the right diagnosis for what ails us? In an essay titled “Old People Aren’t the Problem,” Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. Not all older people are wealthy and powerful; in fact, in 2019, seventy per cent of the wealth owned by those over sixty-five belonged to just ten per cent of American seniors. “Wealth is not actually concentrated among old or young people,” Robinson writes. “It’s concentrated among rich people.” He points out that, in modern America, the politician who has done the most to advance progressive ideas is Bernie Sanders, who is now eighty-four years old (and, to all appearances, totally with it). Would the world be a better place if Sanders were mandatorily retired? “The class struggle overlaps a bit with age, but the policies we should adopt have to be aimed around redistributing wealth and power, period,” Robinson concludes—otherwise we’ll just be “exploited by a younger ruling class.” [...]

The fault lines between young and old are real. I’m in my mid-forties, with two small children, and I live in one of only a few school districts on Long Island where the school budget failed to pass; most of the people I know reasonably assume that it was older voters, wary of even modest tax increases, who voted it down, happy to risk the drastic cuts to programs like tutoring, music, and sports that will occur if a new budget isn’t passed. (On Facebook, there are arguments between parents who want services for their kids and older residents who say those services didn’t exist “back in my day.”) There are vacant lots and empty buildings in town where new housing could be built, but residents, defensive of their property values, keep nixing new development. The status quo rules. And yet it’s not just older people who cling to the past. A mood of retrospection seems to have settled everywhere. In conversation, almost no one will express hope for the future. Maybe one sign that we’re living under gerontocracy is that so many people yearn for the old version of America, in which dynamism abounded and everyone was young.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Josie Norton

[ed. I'm old, and old people drive me nuts. But, the slow, steady transfer of accumulated wealth over the next couple of decades will have a big impact on these issues. Will lucky recipients act any differently?]

Authenticity in Music

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today. [...]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music. [...]

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often us to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Rob Verhorst/Redferns via

In Praise of Shadows

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a familiy and lives I the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life—heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities— merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary mild glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. [...]

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the faroff shrill of an insect, lost in contemplation of flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance. The experience must be something like that of the tea master who, at the sound of the kettle, is taken from himself as if upon the sigh of the wind in the legendary pines of Onoe. 

It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark. Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; it is not indeed a color to call forth meditation? The cloudly translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun; the complexity and profundity of the color— nothing of the sort is to be found in Western candies. How simple and insignificant cream-filled chocolates seem by comparison. And when yōkan is served in a lacquer dish within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yōkan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor. 

In the cuisine of any country efforts no doubt are made to have the food harmonize with the tableware and the walls; but with Japanese food, a brightly lighted room and shining tableware cut the appetite in half. The dark miso soup that we eat every morning is one dish from the dimly lit houses of the past. I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well. Much the same may be said of soy sauce. In the Kyoto-Osaka region a particularly thick variety of soy is served with raw fish, pickles, and greens; and how rich in shadows is the viscous sheen of the liquid, how beautifully it blends with the darkness. White foods too—white miso, bean curn, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room. And above all there is rice. A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness. 

I possess no specialized knowledge of architecture, but I understand that in the Gothic cathedral of the West, the roof is thrust up and up so as to place its pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible—and that herein is thought to lie its special beauty. In the temples of Japan, on the other hand, a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows creates by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto—Chion’in, Honganji—and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves. 

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. 

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference in color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own. 

Of course the Japanese room does have its picture alcove, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers serve not as ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows. We value a scroll above all for the way it blends with the walls of the alcove, and thus we consider the mounting quite as important as the calligraphy or painting. Even if the greatest masterpiece will lose its worth as a scroll if it fails to blend with the alcove, while a work of no particular distinction may blend beautifully with the room and set off to unexpected advantage both itself and its surroundings. Wherein lies the power of otherwise ordinary work to produce such an effect? Most often the paper, the ink, the fabric of the mounting will possess a certain look of antiquity, and this look of antiquity will strike just the right balance with the darkness of the alcove and room. 

We have all had the experience, on a visit to one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, of being shown a scroll, one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide, follow as best we can the all-but-invisible brush strokes, and tell ourselves how magnificent a painting it must be. Yet the combination of that blurred old painting and the dark alcove is one of absolute harmony. The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems rather to suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care. 

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time. 

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance. 

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, (Leete’s Island Books, 1977) |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. When I realized this famous Tanizaki essay was published in 1933, I thought surely it must be out of copyright by now. And here it is. From Wikipedia:]

***

In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In'ei Raisan) is an essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki's observations include cultural notes on customs and tradition, people, historical places and buildings, discussion of various materials and craft techniques, as well as food and even unusual recipes as seen through the author's metaphorical lens of light and shadow. [...]

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of East Asian art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety, closely relating to the traditional Japanese concept of sabi. In addition to contrasting light and dark, Tanizaki further considers the layered tones of various kinds of shadows and their power to reflect low sheen materials like gold embroidery, patina and cloudy crystals. In addition, he distinguishes between the values of gleam and shine.

The text presents personal reflections on topics as diverse as architecture and its fittings, traditional crafts, finishes, jade, food, cosmetics and mono no aware (the art of impermanence). Tanizaki explores in close description the use of space in buildings, lacquerware by candlelight, monastery toilets and women in the dark of a brothel. The essay acts as "a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age".

Bridesmaid Boxes - the Influencer-ification of the Bridal Party

Bachelorette parties and bridesmaid proposal boxes look increasingly like brand trips and PR mailers.

It had started with four words — “Will you marry me?” — which led Alaina to make a proposal of her own. About three months after her fiancé got down on one knee, a “complete surprise on an otherwise regular Sunday afternoon,” holding an elongated cushion-cut diamond, Alaina posed a question of her own. Five words this time, and six gift bags.

Each bag was tied together with a personalized silk ribbon that read each bridesmaid-to-be’s name and was filled with custom-monogrammed makeup, toiletries, travel perfumes (Kilian Paris’s Love, Don’t Be Shy), and other goodies you’d find stocked at Sephora — and some you wouldn’t, like mini-shooters and Crate & Barrel glasses. Inside, a note on beautiful cardstock made the same request, verbalized to her lifelong friends: “Will you be my bridesmaid?”

They had taken her only about three hours to complete. And about $345 — per box.

For Alaina, it was a reasonable price “given that these women have been with me for my whole life, and they’ll be spending a similar amount to attend the wedding festivities,” the 28-year-old says. Her inspiration for these ceremonial boxes, and what to include inside, was “Instagram, of course.”

The internet is awash with these so-called bridesmaid proposal boxes, a now-ceremonial way of asking the person who loved you through every season of life, through every bad ex and bad haircut, to stand beside you on your big day — wrapped in tissue paper or embossed with a custom monogram. Each bag is seeded with photogenic products like full-size Nécessaire bodywashes, expensive lip oils, and silk pillowcases. Sometimes, during a scroll, you’ll even catch a box with Maison Margiela Replica candles ($72) that match the scent, or vibe, of the wedding each of the girls is enlisted to participate in.

It stretches beyond the proposal box, too, as bachelorette parties now have welcome bags and curated itineraries. It all feels like a sliver of influencer culture unsurprisingly encroaching on the wedding universe: These moments are looking more sponsored than bridal.

Charissa, a 36-year-old New York–based bride-to-be, says that’s exactly the point: for these gift bags to feel like a brand present or mailer. Charissa gave her six bridesmaids Moët & Chandon and handwritten notes (done by an Etsy calligrapher for $30 per note, wax seal and all) during such pre-wedding events because she wanted the experience to feel elevated, like something you’d get at a luxury hotel. Like something you’d see brides doing for their girls on Instagram.

“I never felt like I had to do it — I wanted to,” she says, adding that if her friends are spending money to celebrate her, she wants to spoil them in return with a curated experience.

For some brides, the bridesmaid proposal box is simply the first installment in a fully branded wedding universe, one that begins long before invitations go out. What starts with a proposal to join the bride at the altar often extends into the destination bachelorette party, where trips come with themes (“Palms and Prosecco,” “Million-Dollar Cowgirl”) because it’s no longer enough to just go to Palm Springs or Jackson Hole. You now have to play into the larger concept, too.

That often means a chunk of the cost quietly falls to the bridesmaids. Sometimes it’s buying entirely new outfits to dress for the theme; other times it’s funding it outright. “There’s, like, a fully cohesive aesthetic rollout before a trip even begins,” says Mallory, 28, a Chicago-based attendee of four weddings this year — three of which she’s in. As a result, she’s become “deeply” familiar with personalization sites like Minted and Zazzle, where bridesmaids create custom branding for the weekend. “Custom logos are printed on everything: Champagne bottles, menus, posters, itineraries,” she says, which can sometimes total anywhere from $250 to $300 for a bride who is all in. “And the other times when the brides pay for it, we’re still expected to match the theme.”

Kate, 31, says she had “already shelled out thousands for the bride’s plane ticket to St. Pete for her bachelorette, plus meals and a chartered boat,” but what really sent her over the edge was the “$80 Venmo request from the maid of honor for matching ‘Bride Tribe’ sunglasses, T-shirts, and palm-tree earrings.” She adds that she never agreed to the Amazon and Shein orders but was charged anyway.

At least the bride is expected to reward such falling in line. At a bachelorette party’s rented Airbnb, you can expect balloons and matching PJs she’s laid on the bed for her girls; L.L.Bean totes stuffed with costly lip balm or eye masks. Mason Pearson brushes are in the bathroom — or, if the budget doesn’t stretch that far, Wet Brushes will do. An embroidered cowboy hat for their arrival in Aspen; matching Alo sets for a group workout no one particularly asked for. “That’s $397.90 per girl,” one TikTok commenter points out in a video of one of these tote bags with similar-style products. [...]

If you can’t charter a private plane to St. Barts like influencer Danielle Pheloung, better known as @acquiredstyle, for her “Acquired a Husband” bachelorette, the very least you can do, according to TikTok, is DM brands for freebies. This usually looks like brides or bridesmaids directly messaging businesses or PR contacts on Instagram with a quick pitch (“We’re planning a bachelorette trip — would love to try your product”) in hopes of getting gifted items in exchange for tags or social posts. “I reached out to 425 companies to ask for PR,” says @endo.adeno.girlie in one of many viral videos explaining how to do it, telling her followers which specific brands will send free products. Videos like hers follow a simple logic: The more products you can get for free, the less likely anyone is to get hit with a moan-inducing post-bachelorette Venmo request. Michelle, 29, calls herself a “failed maid of honor” because her group didn’t cold-email enough brands for freebies after watching TikToks that explained how to score sponsored Liquid IV packets and hangover kits in exchange for social-media exposure. [...]

Lindsay, 28, a Michigan-based bride who is getting married in August, says she “understands” how it’s easy to get carried away; when you’re freshly engaged, you want every moment to feel as big as the proposal or the wedding. “I don’t regret it, no,” she says, looking back at the Dutch chocolates and silk pillowcases that she gifted to each bridesmaid. The bridesmaid proposal is something she will remember forever, because she was able to present the boxes at a girls’ lunch, with a table reserved for the most important people in her life. “But it does add up fast. And now, with hindsight, I realize I could’ve maybe budgeted it differently.”

by Morgan Sullivan, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: The Cut/Getty

[ed. Influencer-ification. How to take a nice ceremony and turn it into a (more) stress-filled nightmare.]

How Everthing Became Left or Right “Coded”

In America today, there are conservative and liberal jeans (Levi Strauss versus Wrangler), beer (Heineken versus Coors), and footwear (Birkenstocks versus cowboy boots). The MAGA movement itself is seen as tied to Kid Rock and eating steak.

In an era when partisan division is so febrile that acceptance of political violence has grown and violent political attacks are on the rise — the Charlie Kirk assassination being the latest of great note — it is hard to remember that it wasn’t always so.

As recently as the 1950s, Americans were politically calm — so calm that a committee of the American Political Science Association urged the two parties to accentuate their differences, to provide a “true choice.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater campaigned for president as the Republican who would provide “a choice, not an echo” and was badly defeated for his pains. Some political scientists applauded the political apathy of the era as both a sign of popular satisfaction and a shock absorber for the system. Four generations on, there seems to be too much party difference and too little political apathy.

Why have we gotten to a place where even open-toed sandals are left-wing?

Simple answers might point to combative politicians, President Donald Trump above all, to aggressive social movements like the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter, or to changes in the media such as the rise of cable television and then online feeds like Facebook and TikTok. But the key dynamic, many researchers have found, is the increasing proportion of Americans for whom political affiliation is central to their identities — to what they think, to what they feel, to who they feel they are.

I need to stop right here: This assertion does not directly apply to most Americans. In 2024, only 30 percent of Americans described themselves as “strong” Democrats or Republicans (only about half even claimed a political party). The largest chunk of Americans are not partisans. About politics, they care little, talk little, consume little, and know little — and they vote little (although when they vote they determine who holds power, the partisans being evenly divided).

Still, the politicization of so many Americans matters even for the apolitical. The latter are the audience for the political theater — which Americans find “exhausting” — and when they do vote, usually only every four years, they are presented with polarized options. For the nation as a whole, it means less constructive cooperation and more animosity and anger. 

Still, the politicization of so many Americans matters even for the apolitical. The latter are the audience for the political theater — which Americans find “exhausting” — and when they do vote, usually only every four years, they are presented with polarized options. For the nation as a whole, it means less constructive cooperation and more animosity and anger. [...]

A different story of political polarization

But politicization entails much more than the parties dividing on policies. Politicization has now gone beyond shaping many Americans’ stances on issues or even their cultural tastes, to shaping who they are — whom they date (and marry and befriend), what communities they join, what religious faiths they profess, what life-and-death choices they make.

In the last several decades or so, more Americans have sorted or changed their views on many disparate policies — for instance, on immigration, abortion, war, climate, gender, and crime — to better fit with their identities as Democrats or Republicans. Views on abortion, so deeply tied to one’s moral intuitions, provide a dramatic example. In the early 1970s, Republicans were about as likely as Democrats to agree in the NORC/University of Chicago General Social Survey that it should be possible for “a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if she is married and does not want any more children.” Fifty years later, overall American opinion had not changed, but Republican support for such abortions had dropped by about 20 percentage points and Democratic support had increased by about 15 points; abortion had become a defining party issue. Similarly, in 1997 members of the two parties had, as recorded by a Gallup poll, the same level of concern about whether the effects of global warming had begun; by 2021, there was a 53-point gap between increasingly worried Democrats and increasingly sanguine Republicans.

One way this polarization could happen is that people switched parties to fit their evolving views on subjects such as abortion or the climate. Some of that surely happened. But much research shows that people as or more often switched their views to fit their political identity. This shows up in studies that follow people over several years and find that people often change their positions on a substantive topic after they first change their political affiliation, having adopted the new affiliation perhaps because of political events unrelated to that topic or because of new personal circumstances such as a marriage, a new job, or a new neighborhood. In other words, to follow the abortion example, many became Republicans (perhaps because of racial beliefs or new friends) and then became pro-life.

Increasingly, even survey respondents’ reports of what is real, such as whether the economy is getting better or worse or whether inequality is growing, vary by party. Party has become so important that opinions on how much racial discrimination exists now differ more between Democrats and Republicans than between Black people and white people; views of income inequality differ more by party than by individuals’ incomes.

Political position has come, for more Americans, to connect with all sorts of tastes far beyond government policy— e.g., listening to Kid Rock or Beyoncé, going to museums or playing golf, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or Antiques Roadshow. Consumption as political signaling — for example, coffee branded by political affiliation — has been vividly demonstrated in (my own) Berkeley, California: First, high rates of Tesla ownership displaying climate liberalism (as well as displaying a healthy bank account), and then high rates of protests against Tesla, displaying DOGE-fighting liberalism.

Some of this politicization might be dismissed as simply posturing, owning the libs, or what pollsters call “expressive responding.” But the politicization goes deeper than that.

Party affiliation seems to increasingly determine, and not just reflect, Americans’ important personal decisions. Much of the discussion about “affective polarization” — that more Democrats and Republicans nowadays actually hate the other side — started with a study reporting that more Americans were displeased in 2010 than were in 1960 with the prospect of gaining a son- or daughter-in-law of a different party. Years later, many single Americans rule out dating someone with differing political views.

A 2020 survey found that about half of both Democrats and Republicans have intimate social networks made up exclusively of people who share their politics. Survey respondents often see more agreement with the people in their lives than actually exists, but nonetheless, this homogeneity is substantial and has increased. (Social homogeneity, in turn, encourages partisanship and hostility.)

Such political homogeneity results in part from who individuals choose to spend time with and who they choose to avoid. Strong partisans prefer to be with the like-minded and to avoid conversations with the unlike-minded. And they tend to drop friends (not so much family) who disagree with them politically. By one estimate, 15 percent of Americans “have ended a friendship over politics.” Political homogeneity also results in part from the influence of family, friends, and neighbors to conform to their views.

Political identity affects people in less explicit ways, too. Americans have increasingly segregated themselves geographically — not primarily because they are seeking neighbors who are fellow party members, although some of that is going on, but because the reasons people move — or decide not to move — increasingly connect with party. Those, for example, who like large houses and big yards tend to end up in red neighborhoods, while those who like to walk to local amenities tend to end up in blue neighborhoods. Both ways, party and neighborhood have become more linked. A 2021 study concluded that many “voters live with virtually no [local] exposure to voters from the other party.”

Yet more striking, Americans have increasingly lined up what they profess religiously to fit what they profess politically. Religion and politics have long been entangled in the United States — in 19th-century fights over alcohol prohibition, Sunday postal service, and which version of the Bible should be read in public schools, for instance; this was Americans’ faith driving their politics. For about 30 years now, politics have been joining with religion and, importantly, political identity is driving expressions of faith.

It first became clear in the 2000s that those identifying as Democrats, liberals, and moderates were leaving organized religion and describing themselves as having no religion (as “nones”) in great part as a reaction against what they saw as the conservative politicization of the church, especially on lifestyle issues.

Then, evidence in the last decade or so accumulated that more conservatives were starting to profess faith, especially evangelical faith, probably for mirror-image reasons: to reject the secularism associated with liberal positions such as supporting gender transition. Ryan Burge, the dynamo researcher of Graphs about Religion, suggested to me that the recent leveling off of the growth of “nones” might be explained by conservatives’ view that non-affiliation had “become so linked to left-wing politics.” These conservatives “are functionally non-religious… but they still can’t bear to not ID as Christian on a survey.” That political affiliation has come to alter a significant number of Americans’ religious identities is profound testimony to the politicization of many Americans’ lives.

And then there is politics’ connection to life-and-death decisions. As might be expected, left and right differ on many health-related matters — childhood vaccines, cancer preventatives, and the dangers of tackle football, for example. But left and right also differ in health behavior, from diet, such as how much meat people eat, to exercise. One result is that residents of red counties more often tend to be obese than residents of blue counties, even taking into account race, poverty, and education.

The most tragic example was the Covid-19 pandemic. People in red states, where the vaccines were most resisted, died at higher rates than those in blue states; individual Republicans died at higher rates than individual Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of deaths can likely be attributed to political identity.

So what happened?

Seventy years ago, gender, race, and region determined Americans’ lifestyles, fortunes, and identities more than they do now; educational attainment and, increasingly, politics have become the key answer for many people to who they are.

by Claude S. Fischer, Vox | Read more:
Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images

What Women See in Men and Vice Versa: Estimates Based on Sex Ratios and Marriage Patterns

Abstract 

Much of what looks like changing marriage preferences over the twentieth century is actually demographics. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in sex ratios across U.S. birth cohorts (1870, 1930, 1950), we jointly identify preferences, match quality dynamics, and the costs of marriage and divorce. Demographics alone explain two-thirds of cross-cohort differences. Women’s premium for older husbands collapsed across cohorts; men’s preferences barely changed. Love that survives its early years becomes permanent, but the odds of surviving fell from 97% to 44%. Divorce costs fell six-fold and depend on life stage. A horse race across behavioral channels shows that the match quality process—not mate-age preferences—is the primary dimension of generational change. Declining divorce costs and fragile match quality are substitutes: either alone fits the data, but together they reveal two independent dimensions of social change. The model validates out of sample on the 1910 and 1970 cohorts.

Introduction 

Much of what looks like changing marriage preferences over the twentieth century is actually demographics. Variation in sex ratios and mortality across U.S. birth cohorts—driven by immigration and differential longevity gains—accounts for two-thirds of the cross-cohort differences in marriage and divorce behavior, with no change in behavioral parameters at all. This paper provides the first joint identification of marriage preferences, match quality dynamics, and the costs of marriage and divorce in a unified equilibrium framework, exploiting the large demographic variation across the 1870, 1930, and 1950 birth cohorts.

The variation we exploit is plausibly exogenous to marriage preferences. The sex ratio at marriageable ages fell from 1.056 men per woman (1870 cohort) to 0.942 (1950 cohort)—a swing from male surplus to female surplus driven by the closing of the frontier, declining male immigration, and faster female mortality improvements. These forces operate through the population’s age and sex structure, not through tastes over partners. They change who is scarce and who must compete in the marriage market, so that equilibrium marriage and divorce patterns shift even if no one’s preferences change. We estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of marriage and divorce, matching 84 moments of marriage and divorce behavior across the three cohorts. Beyond the aggregate role of demographics, the estimates reveal sharp findings about what people value and how relationships work:

• Women’s preferences changed; men’s did not. Women in the 1870 cohort placed a premium on older over younger husbands large enough to delay marriage by several years relative to a world with symmetric preferences (Figure 3). By 1950 this premium had collapsed to near zero. Men’s preferences over partner age are essentially constant across all three cohorts. The marriage age gap is driven not by men preferring younger (more fecund) women, as Siow (1998) suggests, but by women’s preference for older, more established men—a preference that erodes as women gain economic independence. 

• Love that survives becomes permanent—but surviving got harder. A good match, once achieved, is permanent: the implied duration exceeds the remaining lifetime. But in the 1870 cohort a new marriage had a 97% probability of reaching the good state; by 1950, this had fallen to 44%. The 1950 cohort uniquely allowed recovery from bad matches with 16% chances, generating dynamics that resemble cohabitation. 

• Divorce costs depend on life stage. The middle-age group (“young” in our model) faces the 2 Throughout we consider only opposite-sex couples, reflecting the historical period studied. For historical mortality rates, see Haines (1998) and Arias (2012); for historical patterns of gender-biased immigration to the U.S., see Donato and Gabaccia (2015). 2 highest effective divorce cost—roughly six times the utility value of a standard-deviation match shock—substantially above both adolescents and the old. This generates the age-declining divorce rate profile observed in every cohort. The base cost declined six-fold across cohorts, with a structural break between 1910 and 1930 coinciding with the liberalization of divorce laws and the entry of women into the labor force. 

• Divorce costs and match quality are substitutes. Cohort-specific match quality process alone— without any cohort variation in divorce costs—achieves the same fit as the Baseline specification. Both channels govern marital dissolution, one through the price of exit, the other through the probability of wanting to exit. Combining both yields a further 14% improvement, revealing two independent dimensions of social change: the liberalization of exit and the increasing uncertainty of relationships. 

How can these mechanisms be separately identified? The key is that different moments respond to different parameters, and the three cohorts provide 84 moments under very different demographic conditions. Marriage rates by age for male and female reveal how each sex values partners of different maturities: when the sex ratio shifts from male surplus to female surplus, the scarce sex becomes pickier and marriage patterns change in ways that depend on the preference parameters. Divorce rates and their age profile reveal the cost of exit: the pervasive pattern that divorce declines with age identifies the age-dependent component of divorce costs, because without it the model would predict flat or rising divorce with age. The fraction never married by age 50 disciplines marriage frictions: a high never-married fraction signals that substantial frictions prevent matches from forming. The persistence of marriages—how quickly divorce rates fall with duration—reveals match quality dynamics: if good matches are permanent but medium matches are fragile, divorce concentrates in the early years. The cross-cohort variation in these moments overdetermines the parameter vector. [...]

This paper contributes to the literature on marriage and matching in three ways. First, it provides a framework to separate demographic forces from behavioral responses in equilibrium matching markets. Second, it identifies the dynamics of match quality and the role of divorce costs using variation that is orthogonal to preferences. Third, it shows that much of the long-run change in marriage and divorce patterns can be understood as the consequence of demographic shifts rather than changes in tastes.

by Jose-Victor Rios-Rull; Shannon Seitz; Satoshi Tanaka, PIER/University of Pennsylvania |  Read more (pdf):

My Horrible, No Good Weekend at the UFC White House Fight

[ed. I didn't waste ten brain cells thinking about this 'celebration' - before or after. I guess it happened.]

If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. [ed. Yow.]

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters.

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being. [...]

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment. [...]

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action. [...]

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party!

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Oiled-Up, Half-Naked Men Entertain President On 80th Birthday (Wonkette):]

***

Something around $30 million dollars was spent to turn the South Lawn of the White House into a giant cage fighting ring called “The Claw.” Behind it, on The Ellipse, was a small UFC festival. There was a large stage; scantily clad ring-girls; dumpy MAGA dudes in America-themed sleeveless T-shirts; bars shilling $12 Budweiser, $20 whiskey or tequila cocktails, $4 12 oz. cups of water; $25 burgers and kielbasas called “Giant Western Sausages”; portable chemical toilets; and two “free water” stations. There were two or three large stores offering a seemingly endless supply of UFC and Freedom 250 merchandise, like trading cards, T-shirts, hats, fingerless gloves and novelty championship belts. [...]

It should be noted that general admission tickets to the Fan Experience on the Ellipse were free, and seemingly given out at random to anyone who signed up on the UFC site. There were also some special VIP packages for deep-pocketed investors that ranged up to $1.5 million. [...]

But why not? It’s a goddamn UFC fight on the South Lawn! It’s like a grisly highway crash that backs up traffic for miles. Eventually, you creep close enough to submit to your lesser human instincts and gawk like a shaved ape when you finally pass the smoldering wreckage.