Notes on The Greatest Night In Pop

A Study In Leadership, Teamwork, and Love

The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.

The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.

If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.

To us Brits, We Are The World was a mere footnote to Do They Know It’s Christmas? That record was instigated by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and recorded by a supergroup of British and Irish musicians under the name Band Aid (an underrated pun). The proceeds went to famine victims in Ethiopia. We Are The World was made for the same cause.

I knew that, but what I learnt from TGNIP is that there was an element of racial pride in the American response, which arose spontaneously from a conversation between Harry Belafonte and Lionel Richie’s manager. Belafonte said, “We have white folks saving Black folks—we don’t have Black folks saving Black folks”. Lionel agreed, and the wheels started to turn.

Ah, Lionel. The man who makes everything happen. It is perhaps not coincidental that he should emerge as the star of this documentary, given that he co-produced it. The same might be said of Paul McCartney, who emerged as the hero of Get Back. But in neither case do I sense corruption of historical truth. Richie is extraordinary, both as a talking head and in his 1985 incarnation. As chief interviewee - host might be a better word - he sparkles: mischievous, funny, a supreme storyteller. As the prime mover behind the recording of We Are The World, he is simply awesome.

After Belafonte’s prompt, Lionel calls Quincy Jones - the maestro, the master, the producer of the best-selling album of all time. Jones immediately says yes, and they call Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Both agree, Stevie only belatedly because nobody can get hold of him (a theme of the doc is that Stevie Wonder is both delightful and utterly ungovernable). With these stars on board, they know that pretty much everyone else will want to be involved, and so it proves. They decide to recruit white stars as well as black, and get Springsteen and Joel and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and others.

The first thing the principals need to do is come up with a song. Lionel goes to Michael’s house, and the pair spend several days hacking away at the piano (Stevie was invited but is AWOL). With a couple of days to go, they crack it (that is, Quincy likes it). The song is, well, fine: not a work of genius but a pleasant, gospel-inflected anthem, easy enough to sing without much preparation, catchy enough to be a hit. It does the job.

When he took up this baton, Richie was on a career high. He’d left The Commodores and broken out as a solo star. He was about to host the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, the biggest primetime music show, for which he himself was nominated for eight awards (he won six). It soon becomes apparent to all concerned that the best and perhaps only way to get all the talent in the same place to record a single would be to do it on the night of the awards, when so many of them are in town anyway. That would mean doing an all-night session, and for Lionel, it would mean first hosting a live awards show watched by millions - demanding, stressful, exhausting - then helping to run this second, private show right afterwards. No problem!

So it is that after the AMAs we see limousines dropping stars off at an LA recording studio. From a narrative point of view, a delicious premise emerges: a bunch of very famous, egotistical, impatient, nervous pop stars, most of whom don’t know each other (“It was like the first day of kindergarten”, recalls Richie) are brought together in a room to make a record of a song they barely know (they’ve heard a demo). It absolutely has to be a huge hit. They have about eight hours; there’s no coming back tomorrow.

It could have gone badly wrong. That it didn’t is testament to all involved but to Richie and Jones in particular. The two of them corral this unwieldy gaggle into making a sleek and successful product.1 The first time I watched TGNIP I enjoyed it unreflectively. When I watched it for a second time, I began to see it as a study in leadership, collaboration and teamwork.

I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.

TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.

THE DECIDER

Quincy Jones taped up a handwritten sign at the entrance to the studio: LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR. He was possibly the only person in America who would have dared to write such a sign for such a crowd and certainly the only one who would have been listened to.

To lead a team of 40 superstars was a tough task but it certainly helped to be Quincy Jones. Aged 51, he been an arranger for Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra; produced Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin; won multiple Grammys; turned Michael Jackson into the biggest artist in the world.

In TGNIP he is somewhat marginal to the action just because he is in the control room, while the camera roves the studio floor. We hear his voice over the intercom and see him when he comes onto the floor to coach someone through a difficult vocal part. (He wasn’t interviewed for the doc but we hear him speaking about the night from an earlier interview).

There’s no question he is in charge, though. His interventions are economical and precise; he doesn’t waste words. He is stern when he needs be, jocular in a restrained way; cool. Everyone in the room looks up to him, literally and metaphorically. He is friendly but not your best friend. He is here to make sure the job gets done, and done well. He is The Decider.

THE CONNECTOR

By contrast, Lionel Richie is very much your best friend. He is everywhere, talking to everyone: greeting, thanking, hugging; answering a thousand queries; soothing egos; telling stories and making jokes; giving pep talks; smoothing over potential conflicts; solving musical problems; hyping and cheerleading; raising the energy level when it flags; consoling the weary. Somebody else says of him, “He’s making the water flow.” That’s it.

Richie has a special knack for wrangling very talented, slightly nuts individuals. Cyndi Lauper, who was a massive star at that time, bigger than Madonna, decided on the evening of the recording that she wasn’t going to do it after all. The reason she gave is that her boyfriend didn’t like the demo of the song that Richie and Jackson had made. He’d told her it would never be a hit.

Lionel has to take a minute backstage at the awards ceremony which he is presenting to find Lauper, put any hurt feelings he might have aside, and cajole her into returning to the team. Later on, he’s the one negotiating with Prince over his possible participation over the phone. He also has to hide wine bottles from Al Jarreau so that he doesn’t get too drunk before recording his solo part. Details.

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Highly recommended.]

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

A few days ago, The Atlantic published an article on esteemed author John Cheever (1912-1982). But the magazine is almost apologetic, and feels compelled to admit the “final indignity” suffered by this troubled author—”less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling.”

What a comedown for a writer who, during his lifetime, was a superstar contributor to The New Yorker, and got all the awards. Those included the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature.

But that’s not enough to keep any of his books in the top 25,000 sellers at Amazon. Try suggesting any of Cheever’s prize-winning works to your local reading group, and count the blank stares around the room.

And it’s not just Cheever. Not long ago, any short list of great American novelists would include obvious names such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. But nowadays I don’t hear anybody say they are reading their books.

And they are brilliant books. But reading Updike today would be an act of rebellion. Or perhaps indulging in nostalgia for a lost era.

The list goes on—Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Agee, etc. Do they exist for readers under the age of forty?

Their era—mid-20th-century America—really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.

And what about music?

The New York Times recently noticed that mid-century American operas never get performed by the Met. It’s almost as if the 1940s and 1950s don’t exist at Lincoln Center. (...)

But I see the exact same thing in jazz. Most jazz fans want to listen to music recorded after the the emergence of high fidelity sound in the late 1950s. So they are very familiar with Kind of Blue (1959) and what happened after, but know next to nothing about jazz of earlier periods.

If I were making a list of the greatest American contributions to music, my top ten would include Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s and Charlie Parker’s recordings from the mid-1940s. But even jazz radio stations refuse to play those works nowadays. So what hope is there that these musical milestones will retain a place in the public’s cultural memory?

Jazz musicians who died in the mid-1950s, such as Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and Clifford Brown should rank among the great musicians of the century, but somehow fall through the cracks. Maybe if they had lived a few more years, they would get their deserved acclaim. But the same fans who love Monk, Miles, Ornette, and Trane often have zero knowledge of these earlier figures.

Now let’s consider cinema from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t exist on Netflix.

You might say that Netflix has eliminated the entire history of cinema from its platform. But it especially hates Hollywood black-and-white films from those postwar glory years.

Citizen Kane is the greatest American film of all time, according to the American Film Institute. But when I try to find it on Netflix, the algorithm tells me to watch a movie about McDonald’s hamburgers instead.

The second best American film of all time is Casablanca, according to the AFI. When I tried to find it on Netflix, the algorithm offered me an animated film from 2020 as a substitute.

The sad reality is that the entire work of great filmmakers and movie stars has disappeared from the dominant platform. It wouldn’t cost Netflix much to offer a representative sample of historic films from the past, but they can’t be bothered. (...)

Not all of these works deserve lasting acclaim. Some of the tropes and attitudes are outdated. Avant-garde obsessions of the era often feel arbitrary or constraining when viewed from a later perspective. Censorship prevented artists from pursuing a more stringent realism in their works.

But those reasons don’t really justify the wholesale erasure of an extraordinary era of American creativity.

What’s happening? Why aren’t these works surviving?

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!

• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!

• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

But it can act as if they never happened.

This is especially damaging to works from the 1940s an 1950s. These are still remembered—but only by a few people, who will soon die.

This is the moment when works from 80 years ago should pass from contemporary memory and get enshrined in history. But that won’t happen in an age that hates history and wants to live in the eternal present. (...)

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now. The same brand franchises get reheated over and over. The same song styles get repeated ad nauseam. The same clichés get served up, again and again.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image:Bettmann/Getty/reddit

Mai Tai Love

I’ve written about the Mai Tai many, many, many, many times in the past. There’s a reason for that. It’s my favorite cocktail of all time. It might not be the best cocktail in the world, but it’s pretty darn close. If I could only drink one cocktail for the rest of my life, this would be the one. I love rum passionately, and this drink is designed from the ground up to celebrate my favorite spirit. 

House Mai Tai

• 2 oz Hamilton 86 Rum
• 1 oz fresh lime juice
• 1 oz house orgeat
• 1 oz Ferrand Dry Curacao

Shake all ingredients over ice. Strain into a mai tai glass over ice and garnish with a lime wheel, cherry, and mint sprig.

House Orgeat

• 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 2 cups white sugar
• ¼ t orange blossom water
• ¼ sea salt

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Simmer over low heat until the sugar has completely dissolved. Pour into a sealable bottle and refrigerate. Keeps indefinitely.

The history of the Mai Tai is a tiki legend. As the story goes, Trader Vic was working late at the bar with some Polynesian friends, trying to find a good recipe for a bottle of 17-year-old Wray and Nephew rum that had fallen into his possession. He shook up the original Mai Tai and handed it to his friend, who exclaimed, “Mai tai!” —Polynesian for “you nailed it!’ The original 17-year-old rum is long gone, but Mai Tai enthusiasts have used a blend of excellent rums to recreate the original.

Mai Tais and margaritas are kissing cousins. If you squint your eyes and look at both recipes together, you can see how each ingredient replaces the other. Rum for tequila, curaçao for triple sec, lime juice, orgeat for agave syrup — it makes sense, kinda. It’s a useful analogy for bartenders. The margarita is the most popular cocktail in America; if you’re behind the pine, you’ve cranked out dozens by now, and you understand how to make one tarter, sweeter, or more spirit-forward for a given customer. Mai Tais are no different. The recipe I’ve provided is pretty balanced, but if you prefer a sharper, sweeter, or more rum-laden Mai Tai, it should be easy to tweak the recipe to your tastes. (It’s worth noting that Vic put a tequila version of the Mai Tai on the menu in the ‘70s, called the Pinky Gonzales.)

Unfortunately, modern pop culture seems to think that a “mai tai” is any sort of sweet rum and fruit juice combination, which results in some … interesting drinks. Captain Morgan is currently selling a canned (rumless) “Mango Mai Tai,” and a few cans of (coconut water flavored?) Cutwater Tiki Mai Tai cocktails are lurking in my pantry. I swear that the local hibachi joint once served me a “Mai Tai” with none of the original ingredients, up to and including the rum. Drink the original. Make it yourself. I’m on vacation. You deserve a treat.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Hamilton 86 Rum: My favorite rum of all time. Use your favorite. I’ve seen recipes for the Mai Tai that use no less than four different rums, including Smith and Cross, Plantation OFTD, and other rums I’d love to have in my liquor cabinet. An unaged Jamaican rum like Probitas would be great. If you’re using Bacardi, dial up the other ingredients and push the rum into the background a touch. Don’t use Captain Morgan. Please. I’m begging you.

Fresh Lime Juice: It is proving absurdly hard to get good limes in my corner of the world. Tiny, dry, juiceless limes are all too common. Look for a lime that’s the size of a decent lemon that isn’t rock hard to the touch.

Orgeat: It’s pronounced “Orzeat,” like Zsa Zsa Gabot. I can order some good almond syrups online, but they’re expensive and a pain in the butt to have delivered. This grocery-store version of the cocktail ingredient works just fine.

Ferrand Dry Curacao: This curacao is less sweet than Grand Marnier, which lets other flavors in the drink come forward. Use Grand Marnier in a pinch, but dial back the orgeat to compensate.

by Matthew Hooper, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For future reference. Best cocktail, ever. See also: 196 Flavors: Mai Tai.]

The Way They Were

In 1986, my most prized possession was a little pink phone message slip written by a hotel clerk.

“Miss Dowd,” it read, “Robert Redford called. He’s at the same number as last night.”

I’d never met Redford, but that piece of paper was a magic portal to all kinds of pink-cloud fantasies. I stuck it up on my cubicle in the Washington bureau of The Times and gazed at it whenever I needed a lift.

Then, one night, the bureau chief went on a crazed cleaning campaign and sent a crew in to throw out every stray piece of paper around our desks.

I came in the next morning and my beloved message was gone.

I had called Redford to interview him for a Times Magazine profile on Paul Newman. Often, movie stars won’t talk about other movie stars (it’s not about them!); Joanne Woodward wouldn’t even talk to me about her husband for that piece.

But Redford was happy to talk about his pal. When I heard that famous voice on the phone, I said: “Wait a minute, let me get a pen and pencil. I mean, a pen and pen. No, a pen and paper.”

He just laughed, accustomed to women getting flustered.

I heard from someone on his team about seven years later. Redford wanted to offer me a role in a movie he was directing called “Quiz Show.” It was just one line — “Excuse me, are you the son?” — uttered by a woman who’s at a book party trying to chat up Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, the fraudulent quiz whiz and son of the renowned Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren.

I wrote Redford a note, explaining that I was too shy to act in a glossy movie. I couldn’t even muster the nerve to do TV as myself.

He sent a handwritten letter back, telling me that being shy was not a good excuse and that he was shy and you had to push past that and take risks. It was a charming letter — and I vowed to take his advice in the future.

Years later, I got to know Redford over friendly lunches and dinners and interviews for The Times and at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And that rarest of things happened: He was everything you hoped he would be. I had the same experience when I spent that week interviewing Newman.

Both men were elusive, private, funny, generous and self-deprecating. They both liked painting and writing poetry. (Newman’s poetry — and humor — was goofier.) And they both struggled with the sex symbol role.

“To work as hard as I’ve worked to accomplish anything and then have some yo-yo come up and say, ‘Take off those dark glasses and let’s have a look at those blue eyes’ is really discouraging,” Newman told me, adding: “Usually, I just say, ‘I would take off my sunglasses, madam, but my pants would fall down.’” What if his eyes turned brown, he wondered ruefully, and he died a failure?

Redford chafed at the chatter about his blond locks. At first, he told me, it felt great when he became a top Hollywood hunk with “Butch Cassidy” and “The Way We Were.” But then the constant references to his looks and some “out of whack” fan run-ins made it “exhausting.” He felt like he was being put in a cage and wanted to protest, “No, I’m an actor.”

When I talked to him for his solitary and horrific sailboat yarn, “All Is Lost,” in 2013, about aging onscreen and whether it became harder to do close-ups, he replied: “Well, let’s get something straight. I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me ‘hay head.’”

When Redford got kicked out of college in Colorado and lost his baseball scholarship for carousing too much, he went to be an underfed bohemian in Europe, trying his hand at painting. He wore a beret and stripy T-shirt but failed to impress French girls, who thought he was too ignorant about politics.

While being gorgeous can propel your career — can we agree that Newman and Redford were the most charismatic screen couple ever? — there is also a penalty. It’s as though you can’t have too much. Many in Hollywood were slow to realize what wonderful actors the two men were. Despite a string of indelible performances, Newman did not win a best actor Oscar until 1987, for “The Color of Money.” And Redford, an iconic American star of the sort that no longer exists, never won an Oscar for acting.

They both kept Hollywood at arm’s length, disdaining the superficiality, which didn’t endear them to Tinseltown. Newman lived on the East Coast and Redford conjured Sundance, creating a film lab and festival that transformed the movie industry and produced many great talents. (He was appalled when it got so popular that Paris Hilton showed up.)

The two friends with the raffish all-American smiles and sporting lives radiated cool and glamour, as though — to paraphrase “The Way We Were” — things came too easily to them.

But their self-images were different. Newman, the son of a Cleveland sporting goods store owner, said he thought of himself as a terrier with a bone, always working to make his acting more distilled. Redford, who grew up feeling economically insecure and suffered a bout of polio when he was 11, told me he thought of himself as climbing the hill, Sisyphus-style, never “standing at the top.” He quoted a favorite T.S. Eliot line: “There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Both men could be uncomfortable in their skins, filled with self-doubt, haunted by family traumas. Newman lost a son and Redford lost two.

And yet, over several decades, they helped define American culture with their riveting portrayals of morally ambiguous characters.

“I was not interested in the red, white and blue part of America,” Redford told NPR’s Terry Gross. “I was interested in the gray part where complexity lies.”

by Maureen Dowd, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Redford and Paul Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”Credit...Screen Archives/Getty Images

How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty

In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”

Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject. Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.

Birkin, who died in 2023, had “it”: an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool, or at least of what’s worth paying attention to. Easily mingling English reserve and European sensuality, she had a sweetness that set her apart from contemporaries such as the bombshell Brigitte Bardot or the edgier Anna Karina. “She wasn’t a hippie,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer writes in her new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria), “but rather a rising star from the upper class,” someone who radiated privilege even when she dressed down. One of the first celebrities to be regularly photographed in her everyday clothes, Birkin was an early icon of street style, traipsing around Paris in sneakers and rumpled sweaters, wicker basket in hand. The outfits could be easily mimicked and therefore easily marketed. Today, when social-media influencers praise “the French-girl look”—wispy bangs, minimal makeup, bluejeans, marinière tops—the look they have in mind is hers.

Birkin, Meltzer writes, was “nonchalance personified.” If this was not exactly an illusion, neither was it the whole story. A lifelong depressive, Birkin often thought about—and at least once attempted—suicide. Her diaries, two volumes of which have been published, reveal a wonderful writer, lyrical and self-lacerating. They also reveal her struggles with the costs and compromises of the It Girl role, how it left her feeling as though she had—as she puts it in Varda’s film—“no exceptional talents” to offset her fast-fleeting youth. What Birkin did have is je ne sais quoi, to her misfortune as much as to her advantage. After all, being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason. (...)

At fifteen, Jane became smitten with a middle-aged man named Alan, an “arty type” who lived across the street from her, in Chelsea. David Birkin let his daughter spend time at Alan’s apartment, certain he could see everything from the family’s balcony. Then Alan moved. “He invited me to his place, a basement,” Jane would say later.

I’d had too much red wine to drink for dinner—he drank whiskey and we ate ratatouille. He lay beside me and tried to get on top of me. I said it was the wrong time of the month, and he said it didn’t matter. I found that a bit disgusting and I ran away. . . . I went to my room and swallowed all the Junior Aspirin that I’d saved just in case. My sister found me at four in the morning, deathly pale. She told Ma. Stomach pump. Ma slapped me and was right to do so. Ever since I’ve always hated whiskey and ratatouille.

Afterward, Birkin wrote a poem called “Suicide Lost,” in which she presents herself as “a child who’s frightened to live . . . a person who can’t find a way out.” If Alan was the first arty, abusive man to whom she found herself drawn, he would by no means be the last.

After her suicide attempt, Birkin’s parents sent her to a finishing school in Paris, where she learned some French and hung around Versailles, the Louvre, and the Jeu de Paume. “I like poor Toulouse-Lautrec,” Birkin wrote in her diary. “He’s sad and the vulgarity and patchiness of life comes out in his painting.” (...)

How did this fragile young woman become “The Emancipated Venus of the New Age,” as the Belgian magazine Ciné Télé Revue dubbed her in 1969? Birkin was desperate for love, and when she got it she blossomed. A year earlier, in May, 1968, she had met Gainsbourg, a famous singer-songwriter and an established playboy, on the set of the romantic comedy “Slogan.” He was recovering from a breakup with Brigitte Bardot, Birkin was recovering from the breakup of her marriage, and all of France was about to be thrown into the heady days of a student uprising, when huge labor strikes brought the country to a standstill. Neither Gainsbourg nor Birkin was impressed. “He was Russian!” Birkin told Le Monde, in 2013. “It seemed anecdotal compared to the October Revolution.”

The Birkin of the Gainsbourg years is the one we know best, the It Girl of Meltzer’s title. According to Elinor Glyn, who popularized the concept in her 1927 novel, “It,” the quality couldn’t be reduced to mere sex appeal. “The most exact description,” she told an interviewer, is “some curious magnetism, and it always comes with people who are perfectly, perfectly self-confident . . . indifferent to everything and everybody.” In the blockbuster silent film “It,” based on Glyn’s novel, Clara Bow plays Betty Lou Spence, a spirited shopgirl who attracts the attention of her wealthy boss when she’s seen on the town in a chic flapper look reworked from a shabby day dress. Slicing off her sailor collar to create a deep-V neckline and attaching some fake flowers to her hip, Betty Lou marches out her tenement apartment and into a fancy restaurant with her head high, pointedly unbothered by the looks she gets from upper-crust diners.

Birkin projected just this sort of youthful insouciance. Skinny and flat-chested, with big teeth and a galumphing walk, she was no pinup and knew it. She styled herself, Meltzer notes, “in contrast to the quintessential French women of the time”: instead of hip-hugging dresses and high heels, there were Repetto flats, denim cutoffs, soft knits, and crocheted crop tops. The look was improvisational yet elegant, a perfect match for shifting social and sartorial trends. If a young Parisienne in the nineteen-twenties could feel liberated by the loose tailoring and comfortable fabrics of Coco Chanel’s new suits, Birkin’s generation wanted something even less restrictive. “I don’t care much about expensive couture clothes,” Birkin told Women’s Wear Daily, in 1969. “I like the floppy look of Saint Laurent.”

And yet Birkin was far from the self-reliant gamine embodied by Clara Bow. According to Meltzer, Birkin seemed unable “to cultivate much sense of self outside of her relationships with men and her children.” At first, life with Gainsbourg was idyllic. Shacked up on the Rue de Verneuil with Kate and another baby, Charlotte, on the way, they became a bohemian power couple. They took Kate, dressed in Baby Dior, to casinos and bought a house in Normandy, where they went boating with the children. Being Birkin’s partner was an ego boost for Gainsbourg, who had never been conventionally handsome and whose heavy drinking and smoking had aged him prematurely. (He had his first heart attack at forty-five and would die of another, at sixty-two.) “When they tell me I’m ugly,” he crows on his song “Des Laids des Laids,” from 1979, “I laugh softly, so as not to wake you up.”

Gainsbourg doted on Birkin and their girls, but he also went through periods of being, in Birkin’s words, “systematically drunk”—and, at times, violent. “I was too abusive,” Meltzer quotes him saying. “I came home completely pissed, I beat her. When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam!” Birkin’s diaries suggest a man who was insecure, moody, and controlling: (...)

In 1979, Birkin began an affair with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon, who was thirty-five to her thirty-two—an invigorating change from Gainsbourg, eighteen years her senior. The new relationship promised something less complicated, more harmonious. “I want a house full of sunlight,” she wrote, “nothing forbidden, no more orders.” She took Kate and Charlotte to a hotel, leaving Gainsbourg behind but not yet formalizing things with Doillon. The two men were “like complementary bookstands,” she wrote. “Let go one and you slide, let go both and you fall. . . . So there I am, stubbornly living my life as best I can without either.” This period of independence was short-lived. Soon, she and Doillon moved in together, and in 1982 their daughter, Lou, was born. Gainsbourg sent her a gift basket full of baby clothes, from “Papa Deux.”

It was around this time that Birkin made her most celebrated contribution to fashion. On an Air France flight, she found herself seated next to Jean-Louis Dumas, the chief executive of Hermès. As Birkin struggled to stow her signature wicker basket, spilling its contents, Dumas suggested that she needed a new bag. This prompted Birkin to complain that she couldn’t find one that both looked good and held all her stuff. She recalled sketching a roomy, wedgelike design on the back of an air-sickness bag. Dumas took the design to his studio, tweaked it, and the Birkin was born. Current models can sell for more than four hundred thousand dollars; in July, at Sotheby’s, the prototype went for ten million. It was the second most valuable fashion item ever sold at auction, behind only Dorothy’s slippers.

by Anahid Nersessian, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: via

The Uggo Police

The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.

And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.

As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?

The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.

The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait [ed. don't think so.]. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!

Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question. (...)

So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.

But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk. (...)

It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.

by B.D. McClay, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: American Eagle

[ed. Still high on winning the 'War on Christmas'. Also, have nothing against breasts.]

Buddies

Redford and Newman: A Screen Partnership That Defined an Era (NYT)

Image: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images

[ed. Time marches on, and friendships... what you make of them. See also: Robert Redford and the Perils of Perfection (New Yorker).]

Hot Dog University

A man in a Vienna Beef apron is lecturing into a speakerphone. Somewhere, someone scribbles notes in the margins of a Costco receipt. Elsewhere, a woman slices onions with the precision of a surgeon. A teenager in Chicago buffs his stainless steel hot dog cart until it gleams like a spaceship. A former landscape mogul-turned-cannabis-entrepreneur serves 20 custom hot dogs from a hand-built stand nestled between a ski mountain in Vermont and his dispensary. In Washington State, a Silicon Valley escapee helps his social media manager capture the perfect shot of his stand. A retired math professor counts out buns in Texas. In North Carolina, a man unfurls a 14-foot banner that reads BIG SEXY DAWGS, then opens a folding chair and waits for customers outside a rowdy college bar.

Different zip codes, different lives, but somehow, they all trace the same strange road back to a place called Hot Dog University.Yes, that’s a real place — tucked into the back of the Vienna Beef factory on Chicago’s North Side. Part classroom, part test kitchen, part pilgrimage for anyone who’s ever dreamed of slinging sausages for a living.

Every graduate of Hot Dog U knows the drill. They've studied the sacred script. They know the snap of the casing is non-negotiable. They've practiced the topping order like it’s a choreography: yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onions, tomato wedges, a pickle spear, sport peppers, and just a dash of celery salt.

And they all know the cardinal rule, taught by their P.H.D. (that’s Professor of Hot Dogs): no ketchup. Unless you still ride a tricycle (and can prove it), you're pregnant (we don’t argue with cravings), or it’s your wedding day (and we’d better see the dress).

It’s easy to laugh, until it isn’t.

This is serious business and the students at Hot Dog U are gearing up. Not just for summer, but for something bigger — independence, reinvention, the hope that if they can just get the cart to the right corner, maybe, just maybe, everything might work out.

It’s a little Ted Lasso, a little Abbott Elementary — big-hearted, scrappy, and, unexpectedly, profound. Our story begins in a classroom where the lessons are about hot dogs, sure. But this is also a story about failure and second chances, hustle and hope, and the deeply American belief that a sidewalk, a spatula, and a dream might still be enough.

In my family, hot dogs were never just food. They were in-between moments: passed across bleacher seats at ballgames, devoured at gas station stops, slightly charred at backyard cookouts. Hot dogs became shorthand for time spent together.

So when I set out to report this story, it wasn’t because I had a grand theory about encased meats. It was something more subtle: a soft spot for a food that always felt like home. And I didn’t expect to find much more than nostalgia.

But what I found at Hot Dog U wasn’t just a quirky trade school with a great logo. People arrive from burned-out careers and unexpected life turns, from family kitchens and military mess halls, carrying stories as varied as their menus. They leave with a cart, a diploma, and — if it works — a shot at something better.

There’s something quietly radical about that. In a country where “entrepreneur” has become a buzzword for tech bros and hustlers, the students at Hot Dog U are a different breed. They're working-class dreamers. Retired couples. First-generation families. People who don’t want to disrupt the industry. They just want a patch of sidewalk, a roll of napkins, and a line of hungry customers.

by Celia Aniskovich, Switchboard | Read more:
Image: Hot Dog University poster
[ed. From things I've heard it can be a pretty cutthroat business. Mostly about getting the right spot.]

Shared Custody Laws Are Changing Divorce Forever

Our society today is legally and normatively gender egalitarian. Women are empowered to pursue high-powered careers or anything else in life. Men are expected to help out with the housework and child-rearing. Now, many men don’t do that, but there’s an expectation that they should.

It was second wave feminism that brought about this revolution. But it also laid the groundwork for cultural changes that some feminists don’t like, such as in the area of divorce law.

Traditionally, divorce courts were very favorable to women. In the event of divorce, sole custody almost always went to the mother, with fathers relegated to limited visitation and hit with child support obligations. The “deadbeat dad” who failed to pay up was the target of even conservative ire. Women could even get alimony, which is financial support intended for the ex-wife herself, not the children. The logic here was that since women didn’t have careers, they couldn’t support themselves and so needed to continue to be provided for by their ex-husbands.

Men basically didn’t stand much of a chance in divorce court in this regime. The father’s rights movement publicized a litany of horrors such as men forced to pay child support for kids that were genetically proven not to be theirs, fathers being forced to pay for graduate school for kids who are well into adulthood, fathers denied access to their children at all, poor black men jailed for being too broke to pay child support, and men who can never retire because they are forced to pay lifetime alimony to their ex-wife (who may actually be shacked up with another guy).

But in this egalitarian world, where women have careers and men are spending more time with the kids, this old regime became increasingly unsustainable.

The most logical and fair divorce system in this egalitarian world would have a strong presumption of joint equal-time custody with no child support payments.

The divorce regime in general has been trending this direction, and some states have actually begun to enshrine this system in law. One of them is Kentucky, whose system was the subject of a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal.

It was 2017, and across Kentucky, divorced fathers were coming together against a common enemy: a custody system they felt favored their ex-wives.

Although custody laws in Kentucky and elsewhere granted judges discretion to decide what split was in a child’s best interest, aggrieved fathers claimed that this typically meant relegating them to the role of every-other-weekend “Disneyland dads,” forced to cram two days of fun into what mothers had two weeks to create.
…
Around the country, the fathers’ rights movement was gaining momentum. Dividing time and decision-making equally between parents, advocates argued, reduced children’s feelings of abandonment, promoted gender equality and lowered tensions between feuding couples
…
In 2018, Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations. Four other states—Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida and Missouri—have since passed their own versions of Kentucky’s custody bill. Around 20 more are considering or close to passing similar laws, according to an analysis by the National Parents Organization.

The article notes that one effect of this law was a steep decline in the number of divorces in Kentucky.

The law has become a model for other states, not least because Kentucky’s divorce rate has plummeted. Between 2016 and 2023 it fell 25%, compared with a nationwide decline of 18%, according to an analysis by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

I don’t know that we have enough evidence to say that this law is what produced these outsized declines in the divorce rate. Divorce is very complex. People who are getting divorced tend to be extremely emotional and often irrational.

But I think there are reasons to believe this would discourage divorce in some cases. It’s extremely well-established that women initiate the vast majority of divorces - about 70% of them. But I’ve never really seen completely compelling findings on the reasons why they are filing for divorce.

But there is some evidence that custody laws do influence this. There’s an oft-cited study by Brinig and Allen called, “These boots are made for walking': why most divorce filers are women.” The authors note the many financial and power benefits to women under the traditional divorce regime:

Divorce, despite its many shortcomings, allows the woman to exercise control over household spending when she is awarded custody. If the court names her primary custodian, she makes most, if not all, of the major decisions regarding the child. As custodial parent, she will be able to spend the money the husband pays in child support exactly as she pleases—something she may not do during marriage. Finally, although the court will usually have ordered visitation, she can exert some control over her former husband by regulating many, although not all, aspects of the time he spends with the child.

After doing a lot of quantitative analysis, the authors conclude:

Our results are consistent with our hypothesis that filing behavior is driven by self-interest at the time of divorce. Individuals file for divorce when there are marital assets that may be appropriated through divorce, as in the case of leaving when they have received the benefit of educational investments such as advanced degrees. However, individuals may also file when they are being exploited within the marriage, as when the other party commits a major violation of the marriage contract, such as cruelty. Interestingly, though, cruelty amounts to only 6% of all divorce filings in Virginia. We have found that who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property, as when the separation is long. [emphasis added]

This would be consistent with an interesting study I saw some years ago out of Stanford which found that although women are more likely to initiate divorce, men and women are equally likely to initiate breakups in non-marital relationships.

The Brinig and Allen study suggests that a presumption of equal custody might reduce divorce rates.

If it is custody outcomes that most influence divorce filings, changes in custody rules (or their likely outcomes) rather than in divorce grounds should most shape the patterns of both marriage and divorce. In particular, this could take the form of a presumption of joint custody or a rule that made post-divorce patterns mirror preseparation time shares as closely as possible, with sole custody only in cases where one party can show the other parent unfit. An appropriate custody rule mitigates the incentive for one-party filing for the purpose of gaining unilateral control over the children and, to the extent both parents remain involved through visitation or child support, the other spouse.

Again, we can’t draw too many conclusions from just one or a couple of studies out of the vast literature out there. But it’s intuitive from an economics perspective that a presumption of joint custody would significantly change the incentive structures around divorce.

However, this might not always lead to fewer divorces. Among upper middle class families, joint custody divorces might actually incentivize divorce in some cases.

It’s no secret that having kids dramatically constrains your lifestyle, particularly when the kids are younger. A joint custody divorce in which the father and mother alternate weeks with the kids allows them to have “the best of both worlds.” They can still be very involved in their children’s lives and be in parent mode on the weeks they have children, but they can live the single life of fun with friends, concerts, etc. on the other weeks. This might be more appealing to a would-be wife than a situation where she more or less has to have the child full time.

So I think the dynamics might be more complex than we expect here.

Still, these arrangements are undoubtedly more beneficial to fathers than the previous regime. Naturally many feminist advocates hate it. There’s basically no compelling moral or fairness argument against it within the framework of our contemporary egalitarian culture, so they have to raise the specter of abuse. Back to the Journal article:

Some people are staying married to abusive partners, critics of the law say, because they are terrified of leaving their children alone with a parent with a history of violence. “They know their kids are safer if they stay,” said Elizabeth Martin, chief executive of the Louisville-based Center for Women and Family, which provides services to victims of domestic violence (most but not all of whom are women). “Even if it means taking some beatings.”
… (...)

What the article does not state is that it’s well established that one of the leading threats to children is mom’s new boyfriend. As sociologist Brad Wilcox writes:

This new federal study indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.

Also, many mothers themselves have a variety of their own problems that endanger their children, such as substance abuse. But I doubt these advocates want mothers with a drug problem to automatically get stripped of custody of their children.

In short, the danger to children from being with a particular divorced parent includes being with their mother as well as their father. (...)

A presumption of equal time joint custody is the obviously fair approach in cases of divorce. This is a powerful reason why the world has been moving in this direction.

by Aaron Renn |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Pahlka/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0
[ed. Some residual bitterness over this issue, so I'll just say: it's about time. Way past time.]

Can This Tree Still Save Us?

ʻUlu, bia, uru, mā: Breadfruit has been lauded as a climate-resilient solution to world food security. That’s not proving true in the Marshall Islands, where some have relied on it for centuries.

A breadfruit tree stands in the middle of Randon Jother’s property, its lanky trunks feeding a network of sinewy limbs. The remnants of this season’s harvest weigh heavy on its branches. Its vibrant leaves and football-sized fruit may appear enormous to the untrained eye, but Jother is concerned.

They used to be longer than his hand and forearm combined. He points to his bicep, to show how fat they once were. Now they’re small and malformed by most people’s standards here in the Marshall Islands. Mā, the Marshallese term for breadfruit, used to ripen in May. Now they come in June, sometimes July.

 

It’s been headed this way for the past seven years, Jother says as he toes the tree’s abundant leaf litter. It’s a concerning development on this uniquely agricultural and fertile part of Majuro Atoll, home to the country’s highest point: eight feet above sea level.

“I think it’s the salt,” Jother says. His home is less than 100 yards from Majuro lagoon, a body of seawater that threatens to overflow onto the land during a storm or king tide, which over the past decade years has happened several times in Majuro and across the islands. The Pacific Ocean also threatens to salt the island’s ever precious groundwater, which Jother says is already happening. When he showers, he can feel it in his hair, on his skin.

The record heat waves, massive droughts and an increasing number of unpredicted and intense weather events don’t help his trees either.

Most assume the assailant is climate change, to which researchers and experts have said the Indigenous Pacific crop would be almost immune — a potential salve for the world’s imperiled food system. For places like Hawaiʻi, they have predicted breadfruit growing conditions may even get better.

But here, on Majuro and throughout the Marshall Islands, the future appears bleak for a crop that has helped sustain populations for more than 2,000 years.

 

Rice has overtaken the fruit’s status as the preferred staple over the past century, along with other ultraprocessed imports, a change that feeds myriad health complications, including outsized rates of diabetes, making non-communicable diseases the leading cause of death across these islands.

The diseases are a Pacific-wide issue, one Marshall Islands health and agriculture officials are eager to counter with a return to a traditional diet. Climate change is working against them. (...)

Mā is part of an important trinity for the Marshall Islands, which also includes coconut (ni) and pandanus (bōb), that made their way to the islands’ shores on Micronesian seafarers’ boats somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Six varieties are most common in the Marshall Islands, though at least 20 are found throughout the islands. Hundreds more breadfruit types can be found in the Pacific, tracing back to the breadnut, a tree endemic to the southwestern Pacific island of New Guinea.

The tree provided security for island populations, requiring little upkeep to offer abundant harvests. Each tree produces anywhere from 350 to 1,100 pounds of breadfruit a year, with two harvest seasons. Every tree produces half a million calories in protein and carbohydrates.

 

Like many Pacific island countries, the mā tree’s historic uses were diverse. Its coarse leaves sanded and smoothed vessels made with the tree’s buoyant wood. Its roots were part of traditional medicine. The fruit was cooked underground and roasted black over coals. And it was preserved, to make bwiro, a tradition that survives through people like Angelina Mathusla.

For Mathusla, who lives just over a mile from farmer Jother, making bwiro is a process that comes with every harvest.

The process begins with a pile of petaaktak, a variety of breadfruit common around Majuro and valued for its size and lack of seeds. On this occasion, a relative rhythmically cleaves the football-sized mā in half with a machete, then into smaller pieces, before tossing them into a pile next to a group of women. Some wear gloves to avoid the sticky white latex that seeps from the fruit’s dense, white flesh, used by their forebears to seal canoes or catch birds.

Mā trees use that latex to help heal or protect themselves against diseases and insects. The tree’s adaptation to the atolls and their soils has traditionally been partly thanks to symbiotic relationships with other flora. (...)

A Shallow Body Of Research

Four framed photographs hang on a whitewashed wall of Diane Ragone’s Kauaʻi home. Two black-and-white photos, taken by her late videographer husband, show Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia playing guitar on stage. The other two are of breadfruit.

Now in the throes of writing a memoir, of sorts, Ragone is revisiting almost 40 years of records — photos and videos, and journal entries, some of which leave her asking “Damn, why was I so cryptic?”

But Ragone’s research, since her arrival to Hawaiʻi from Virginia in 1979, forms the bedrock of most modern research into the tree’s history and its survival throughout the Pacific. The most obvious example spans 10 acres in Hāna, on Maui, where more than 150 cultivars of the fruit Ragone collected thrive at the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden.

Less obvious is how her work has helped researchers like Noa Kekuewa Lincoln track the plant’s place in global history and the environment. Lincoln, who says “Diane’s kind of considered the Queen of Breadfruit,” has been central to more recent research into how the plant will survive in the future.

Together with others, they act as breadfruit evangelists, promoting the crop as a poverty panacea and global warming warrior — a touchstone for Pacific islanders not only to their past but a more sustainable future.

Ragone, as the founding director of the 22-year-old Breadfruit Institute, helped distribute more than 100,000 trees around the world, to equatorial nations with poverty issues and suitable climes, like Liberia, Zambia and Haiti. But it all started in Hawaiʻi with just over 10,000 young breadfruit.

 

In some places, rising temperatures and changes in rainfall will actually help breadfruit, according to research from Lincoln and his Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory, which assessed the trees’ performance under different climate change projections through 2070.

Running climate change scenarios on 1,200 trees across 56 sites in Hawaiʻi, Lincoln’s lab found breadfruit production would largely remain the same for the next 45 years.

“Nowhere in Hawaiʻi gets too hot for it,” Lincoln says. “Pretty much as soon as you leave the coast, you start getting declining yields because it’s too cold.”

Compare breadfruit to other traditional staples — rice, wheat, soybeans, corn. The plant grows deep roots and lives for decades, requires little upkeep or annual planting, resists most environmental stressors and can withstand high temperatures.

Few nations know the urgency of climate change better than the Marshall Islands, its islands and atolls a bellwether for how heat, drought, intense and sporadic natural disasters and sea level rise can upend lives.

The trees can even survive some saltwater intrusion, according to Lincoln’s research. But a consistent presence of salt is another matter, attacking the roots and making trees unable to absorb freshwater and nutrients. As roots rot, leaves and fruit die.

“The salinity,” Ragone says, before letting out a sigh. “How do you even address the salinity issue?”.

Marshall Islands government officials have turned to the International Atomic Energy Association for help, asking its experts about using nuclear radiation to create mutant hybrids of the nation’s most important crops — giant swamp taro, sweet potatoes and, of course, breadfruit.

The technique has been used for almost a century by the atomic association and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, predominantly on rice and barley, never on breadfruit or for a Pacific nation.

They have their work cut out for them. To find a viable candidate, immune to salty soils and heat, about 2,000 plants would need to be irradiated, according to Cinthya Zorrilla of the atomic energy association’s Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. One of those plants, once mutated, might exhibit the desired traits. (...)

Even if those obstacles were overcome, it wouldn’t be a quick fix. Hybridizing plants through radiation can take about 10 years, Zorrilla says, with a need to compare, contrast and correlate results from labs and field plots and laboratories. For breadfruit, the timeframe may be even longer.

“It’s really complicated,” Zorilla says. “All this is a huge investment, in monetary terms and also in time.”

by Thomas Heaton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Images: Thomas Heaton/Chewy Lin

A.I. Is Coming for Culture

In the 1950 book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” the computer scientist Norbert Wiener—the inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies, and automated systems control themselves—argued that modern societies were run by means of messages. As these societies grew larger and more complex, he wrote, a greater amount of their affairs would depend upon “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine.” Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than we can, and in far greater volume—that’s one source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

The messages around us are changing, even writing themselves. From a certain angle, they seem to be silencing some of the algorithmically inflected human voices that have sought to influence and control us for the past couple of decades. In my kitchen, I enjoyed the quiet—and was unnerved by it. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be left in which we can speak? (...)

Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been a few experiments in fully automated podcasting—for a while, Perplexity published “Discover Daily,” which offered A.I.-generated “dives into tech, science, and culture”—but they’ve tended to be charmless and lacking in intellectual heft. “I take the most pride in finding and generating ideas,” Latif Nasser, a co-host of “Radiolab,” told me. A.I. is verboten in the “Radiolab” offices—using it would be “like crossing a picket line,” Nasser said—but he “will ask A.I., just out of curiosity, like, ‘O.K., pitch me five episodes.’ I’ll see what comes out, and the pitches are garbage.”

What if you furnish A.I. with your own good ideas, though? Perhaps they could be made real, through automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive,” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called NotebookLM. To create an episode, you upload documents into an online repository (a “notebook”) and click a button. Soon, a male-and-female podcasting duo is ready to discuss whatever you’ve uploaded, in convincing podcast voice. NotebookLM is meant to be a research tool, so, on my first try, I uploaded some scientific papers. The hosts’ artificial fascination wasn’t quite capable of eliciting my own. I had more success when I gave the A.I. a few chapters of a memoir I’m writing; it was fun to listen to the hosts’ “insights,” and initially gratifying to hear them respond positively. But I really hit the sweet spot when I tried creating podcasts based on articles I had written a long time ago, and to some extent forgotten. (...)

If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase. But, because A.I. will have peculiar strengths and shortcomings, more won’t necessarily mean more of the same. New forms, or new uses for existing forms, will pull us in directions we don’t anticipate. At home, Nasser told me, he’d found that ChatGPT could quickly draft an engaging short story about his young son’s favorite element, boron, written in the style of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” The periodic table x “The BFG” isn’t a collab anyone’s been asking for, but, once we have it, we might find that we want it.

It’s not a real collaboration, of course. When two people collaborate, we hope for a spark as their individualities collide. A.I. has no individuality—and, because its fundamental skill is the detection of patterns, its “collaborations” tend to perpetuate the formulaic aspects of what’s combined. A further challenge is that A.I. lacks artistic agency; it must be told what’s interesting. All this suggests that A.I. culture could submerge human originality in a sea of unmotivated, formulaic art.

And yet automation might also allow for the expression of new visions. “I have a background in independent filmmaking,” Mind Wank, one of the pseudonymous creators of “AI OR DIE,” which bills itself as “the First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show,” told me. “It was something I did for a long time. Then I stopped.” When A.I. video tools such as Runway appeared, it became possible for him to take unproduced or unproducible ideas and develop them. (...)

Traditional filmmaking, as he sees it, is linear: “You have an idea, then you turn it into a treatment, then you write a script, then you get people and money on board. Then you can finally move from preproduction into production—that’s a whole pain in the ass—and then, nine months later, you try to resurrect whatever scraps of your vision are there in the editing bay.” By contrast, A.I. allows for infinite revision at any point. For a couple of hundred dollars in monthly fees, he said, A.I. tools had unlocked “the sort of creative life I only dreamed of when I was younger. You’re so constrained in the real world, and now you can just create whole new worlds.” The technology put him in mind of “the auteur culture of the sixties and seventies.” (...)

Today’s A.I. video tools reveal themselves in tiny details, producing a recognizable aesthetic. They also work best when creating short clips. But they’re rapidly improving. “I’m waiting for the tools to achieve enough consistency to let us create an entire feature-length film using stable characters,” Wank said. At that point, one could use them to make a completely ordinary drama or rom-com. “We all love filmmaking, love cinema,” he said. “We have movies we want to make, TV shows, advertisements.” (...)

What does this fluidity imply for culture in the age of A.I.? Works of art have particular shapes (three-minute pop songs, three-act plays) and particular moods and tones (comic, tragic, romantic, elegiac). But, when boundaries between forms, moods, and modalities are so readily transgressed, will they prove durable? “Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?,” the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier told me. (Lanier helped invent virtual reality and now works at Microsoft.) “But it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” Today, there are A.I.-generated songs on Spotify, but at least the songs are credited to (fake) bands. “There could come a point where it’ll just be ‘music,’ ” Lanier said. In this future scenario, when you sign in to an A.I. version of Spotify, “the first thing you hear will be ‘Hey, babe, I’m your Spotify girlfriend. I made a playlist for you. It’s kind of sexy, so don’t listen to it around other people.’ ” This “playlist” would consist of songs that have never been heard before, and might never be heard again. They will have been created, in the moment, just for you, perhaps based on facts about you that the A.I. has observed.

In the longer term, Lanier thought, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single “A.I. hub.” There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences; for these reasons, even people who don’t want to experience culture this way could find the apps they use moving in an A.I.-enabled direction.

Culture is communal. We like being part of a community of appreciators. But “there’s an option here, if computation is cheap enough, for the creation of an illusion of society,” Lanier said. “You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it’s shared with a bunch of other people—some of whom might be real biological people, some of whom might be fake.” (I imagined this would be like Joi introducing Gosling’s character to her friends.) To inhabit this “dissociated society cut off from real life,” he went on, “people would have to change. But people do change. We’ve already gotten people used to fake friendships and fake lovers. It’s simple: it’s based on things we want.” If people yearn for something strongly enough, some of them will be willing to accept an inferior substitute. “I don’t want this to occur, and I’m not predicting that it will occur,” Lanier said, grimly. “I think naming all this is a way of increasing the chances that it doesn’t happen.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight

Withnail and I

Vivian MacKerrell

Vivian MacKerrell – who really did drink lighter fluid – shared a house with Withnail and I director Bruce Robinson. (Guardian).

Image: Sotheby's

[ed. Never seen the movie, but this arresting photo caught my attention. Who is this guy? See also: Disdain, decay and a half-dead eel: Withnail and I:]

***

"This is an age of rackety behaviour. Withnail is a story about rackety behaviour. More than that, it is about decay and disdain for the authorities that contrive to make us miserable. And who can say they haven’t felt the misery of life now? (...) Withnail taught me many things. I might not have understood the film when I first saw it. But the sense of freedom, even if ill-conceived, spat at me like water from a fatted pan. These were my people. I recognised the nihilism, the attraction of necking booze from the bottle at lunch, and the hard, unspoken words of love."

Here's a Story For the Kids

The other day, on Twitter, people (“people,” you know who I mean, the disorganized blob of posting addicts, ahistorical teenagers, and semi-employed journalists and academics who on the right day constitute a plurality of social media discourse) were submitting bids for the worst song of all-time. And it wasn’t long before someone posted a clip of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes performing their 2010 hit “Home” on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

(Twitter embeds don’t work anymore, but it’s around the 5:00 mark below.)

The clip went viral in a way that other suggestions for WOAT did not, even though “Home” isn’t that bad. Really, it’s not. Sentimental and cloying, yes, and the whistle is grating; I did not like the song when it came out, and no false nostalgia descends upon me now. But if I put on my “neutral cultural critic” monocle, strip away all associated memories, and attempt to hear it for what it is, “Home” is basically cut-rate folk-rock. Maudlin, but not ontologically objectionable. Tinker with the production and you can imagine the Carter Family singing it. There are worse songs in this genre, for sure, and way worse songs beyond that. (...)

And that’s not getting into the hundreds of god-awful filler tracks, novelty cash-ins, and self-recorded demos that litter the deepest recesses of Spotify’s library and Instagram Reels, though I grant that when people say “worst song of all-time” they usually refer to “worst song of all-time that listeners have heard of.”

But what made people (again, “people”) respond so strongly to “Home” was the video, in which singers Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos duet face-to-face in that stripped-down and “real” Tiny Desk way. They make affectionate eye contact, and in particular Castrinos is making a face that says “I am sort of kooky but I really love you,” while Ebert’s face says “I am communicating a secret that only we know, which is that I really love you” A love song sung by two people who are in love—this is a formula that listeners usually fall for, and “Home” was sort of popular when it came out. It’s easily the band’s most popular song.

Still, much of what I just described is considered ontologically objectionable in 2025. Partly it’s because of the way they look: Ebert is long-haired, bearded, and shirtless underneath a white suit jacket (Father John Misty as a cult leader), while Castrinos hides very short hair beneath a knitted beanie, and lolls her head around as she sings. I cannot speak to the spiritually liberating experience of performing this song, but a ruder interpretation is that she looks like she’s clearly on drugs, thereby making her behavior insincere. Partly it’s the received understanding that this song is emblematic of the widely mocked “stomp clamp” genre that symbolizes millennial culture of the early ‘10s—music regarded as unilaterally embarrassing because the young have come for the old even though lots of us also hated it at the time!!!!!!! We didn’t all work for BuzzFeed!!!!!!!

Anyway. That “Home” seems “cringe” is possibly its worst sin—get a load of these two 20-something white people drawling at each other about moats and boats and waterfalls when they should be taking a dang shower. Actually, Ebert and Castrinos resemble the type of people who Father John Misty is so good at skewering, the self-serious flower child artiste types who are horrible to talk to at parties.

(A pet peeve: Everything is “cringe” from the right perspective. Even the haughtiest people I know have made—or enjoyed—art filled with emotions and ideas that are, to me, flatly wack. One of the most judgmental snobs I ever knew is now a fitness influencer. Another paints the worst paintings I’ve ever seen in my life. Another writes fiction. Calling something “cringe” is usually a confession of vulnerability, a sign of weakness. Projecting your own aesthetic and emotional insecurities onto other people? That’s cringe, bro.)

Watching all this discourse unfold about a song I never liked inspired a familiar feeling: the need to correct someone on the internet who is wrong. I particularly feel this feeling when the discussion involves a period of time I lived through, and still remember pretty well. It’s obnoxious to be confronted with the crude stereotypes of how people allegedly behaved and thought back then. I understand that history is always being re-remembered by the pedantic, but sometimes you go, “whoa, that’s my history.” (...)

It’s funny that the song is seen as “cringe” now, though, because my first thought watching the clip is that these two people—both thin, and attractive in the face—are obviously having sex with each other. Perhaps today they look like back-to-the-land types, or MAHA believers, or simply homeless—but back then, this look said “we are going to take drugs and fuck,” which is categorically not cringe. (Unless you’re talking too much about your polycule, but I don’t want to open that can of worms.) Sex can be gross and shameful, but two hot people giving in to unbridled desire is one of the most powerful forces alive. It’s why people watch movies, or pornography, and it’s why many were—and are—skeptical of the hipster, this fear that attractive people were fucking. And when you remember, as I said above, that “hipster” was at some point applied to literally everyone under the age of 25 who voted for Barack Obama, it all reduces to a fear that young people are having fun.

Ebert is a particularly funny vector for this accusation of “cringe” because he was formerly the lead singer of Ima Robot (nobody remembers this), a sexed-up dance-punk band from the early ‘00s that the art kids of my high school were obsessed with. The line “No, I want to wait for someone like you” from Ima Robot’s single “Dynomite” is as earnest as anything in “Home,” and it’s sung by the same person: a handsome white man who was probably having a lot of sex with other good-looking people. That the same guy with a different haircut could go from making cocaine music to marijuana music (to paraphrase an old Chuck Klosterman observation) is the stronger criticism about the meaninglessness of this stuff: It was all lifestyle content sold by intellectually bankrupt sex addicts. (...)

Yet it’s easy to imagine Ebert coming by all of this authentically, in that girls and boys alike just want to have fun. This is uncomfortable to think about, the possibility that strangers may just be enjoying their lives. I watch a lot of TikTok videos, which I’m still unpacking, and a frequently encountered affect in the comments is a sort of smug tut-tutting. Like if you’re watching a video where a cat eats a slice of turkey, you’d better believe you’ll read a comment where someone tells a whole sob story about how you’d better make sure the turkey isn’t cooked in any herbs because my sister’s cat ate a piece of rosemary and died. If there’s any opportunity to judge from a removed vantage point, a commenter will take it. More and more I wonder if culture isn’t just cresting toward the inevitable endpoint of art not mattering so much as whether it is produced by someone worth rooting for—someone who doesn’t make other people regret their own personal choices. We’re already there, maybe.

I regret very few things in my life, and I am lucky to feel this way. But I’m certainly aware of the choices I didn’t make. And the truth is, in 2010 I was definitely envious of people like Ebert and Castrinos, so confident and happy in their crunchy earthy hedonistic bubble. I lacked the confidence to be so romantically available, in a way that might allow me to have my own full eye contact love affair with a sprightly and interested person. I was the type to pine, and ruminate, and this is not pining or ruminating music—this is stuff for dropping acid and frolicking in a field. My father had died a few years before, and I’d moved past the immediate shock toward a deeper understanding that I was now different, and sadder, in a way that often prevented me from letting loose. But really, my father’s death only sharpened and clarified feelings that were going to come out at some point. People my age who enjoyed this song—I don’t even think I felt like we were part of the same species.

This is why the clip of “Home” offends, I think, because it’s visual evidence that two young people were maybe in love. Without the video, it sort of sounds like Paul Simon. With the video, it’s everything you’re not, and everything you never were, and everything you will never be, which is a scary thought.

by Jeremy Gordon, Air Gordon |  Read more:

Image: YouTube