Robert Caro: Lessons in Power

What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years

[ed. Video interview with Dwarkesh Patel. In preparation for this interview Mr. Patel provides a short overview of two of Mr. Caro's subjects: Robert Moses (The Power Broker), and Lyndon Johnson (Master of the Senate): What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses:]

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I recently interviewed Robert Caro. He’s spent the last 50 years writing a four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and he spent another 7 years before that writing the biography of Robert Moses, the master builder of New York. His books are widely regarded as the best explorations of political power that have ever been written. [...] 

I’ve spent so much time trying to make this interview happen: chasing his agent, calling his publisher, contacting the museums that have his archives, and even sending him handwritten letters.

I finally got to sit down with him, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’ll be out this Friday.

In the meantime, as I was preparing for the interview, and rereading these biographies, I wrote down the lessons they laid out about how to accumulate and use power.

Robert Moses

Robert Moses was the master builder of New York. He built more of the physical city than anyone before or since: the Triborough and Verrazano bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, two giant power dams upstate, in addition to hundreds of parks and dozens of pools. Of the 899 miles of highways completed in New York State by 1964, Moses had built 672 of them. His projects collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.

For more than 30 years, Robert Moses was the most powerful person in New York (more powerful than any elected mayor or governor, despite not being elected to anything). How did he get and keep that much power?

Exploits in law

Part of the answer is that Moses wrote the laws that governed him. He was called ‘the best bill drafter in Albany,’ and he used that skill to write himself powers that the legislators voting on his bills didn’t know they were granting. [...]  [ed. Example: Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933. Moses snuck a few small clauses and seemingly insignificant words into the Act that no one noticed.]

So, with just a few minor tweaks, Moses turned an act meant to allow the construction of two bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York (and whose authority to do so was protected by the U.S. Constitution).

The indispensable man

These bond covenants had turned Triborough Authorities’ power into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain as chairman. So how did Moses retain his position for 30 years?

Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Triborough act so that its commissioners could be removed mid-term only “on stated charges after a formal hearing.” But any differences he had with a mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it, rather than personal conduct.

As Caro says, “Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politicians’ phrase, he was ‘money honest.’”

So, there were never any formal charges to bring. But this only explains why he wasn’t fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every six years? Well, at his peak, Moses was a hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time: city construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on. Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some by the governor, so no single person could cut off all his heads simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant making an enemy of the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York.

The coalition for yes

And the power that Moses derived from his popularity with the masses was nothing compared to the power he derived from his connections with New York’s powerful private interests.

We are very used today to NIMBY, where powerful but concentrated interest groups manage to stymie projects despite their broad popularity. Moses built a concentrated faction for YIMBY. He built a graft machine that greased the wheels for new construction, because it ensured the most influential people in the state would all benefit whenever a project got underway.

The banks got to buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding, the unions got more jobs, politically connected lawyers got legal fees, and party bosses got paid to broker insurance policies on bridges that had no plausible risk of falling down. Moses could then rely on these beneficiaries to call up anyone who stood in the way of one of his projects, whether that was a borough president or the governor himself. [...]

Lyndon Johnson’s story, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. For most of his career, there was little evidence he had a coherent political ideology - he was a ruthless power-seeker who embraced whatever happened to be most expedient at the time. When Johnson first entered the U.S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were conservative Southern Dixiecrats. And the Johnson that they encountered was one who had molded himself to their form.

While writing Master of the Senate, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people.

“Master and servant.” So I [Caro] asked, Well didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for blacks, any desire to improve their lot? My notes say “long pause.” And then I wrote [Talmadge’s] two-word reply: “None indicated.” Another pause, and then: “He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.”

Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction.

So Moses began as a naive idealist but, in Caro’s telling, became someone seeking power for its own sake. Johnson was an ambitious opportunist from the very start, and it was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew he had.

Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate majority leader - perhaps the most powerful legislator period - in the history of this country. Here’s Caro in Master of the Senate:

He was master of the Senate—master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time, almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.

No leader before Johnson had wielded this kind of power, because the Senate had been deliberately set up by the founders to not be “led”. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the Majority Leader’s formal powers, he found that there was only one: the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before Johnson, the Majority Leader was less a leader and more a lightning rod. He’d be blamed in the national press and in his home state for everything the Senate failed to do, yet he had no actual power to do anything about those failures. Being in this predicament was so politically toxic that Johnson’s two predecessors as majority leaders had both lost their own Senate seats.

A big part of the reason that Johnson became his party’s leader at just 44, in a Senate whose average age was around 60, was that hardly anyone else wanted such a thankless and useless job. And in their hands, this job would have remained useless. But they were not Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson turned himself into the second most powerful man in America (right behind the president) in three different ways.

Things to promise, things to threaten with

Johnson transformed the Senate’s rules, institutions and norms so that he alone had the power to grant important favors to his colleagues. If a senator needed a bill passed, Johnson was the one who could get it scheduled on the floor and persuade the committee chairman to report it out. If the bill needed help in the House, Johnson was the one with a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn. And if the senator needed money for his next campaign (to ensure that he would remain a senator), Johnson was the one who could put in a good word with oilmen from his native Texas.

Johnson also put himself in a position to control committee assignments, which are the single biggest factor that shapes how a senator’s whole career plays out. For about a century, they had been handed out by seniority. Practically overnight, Johnson changed the system so that many seats were no longer being settled by seniority but rather negotiated by the party’s Steering committee, which Johnson controlled. If you wanted a good seat, you had to do what Johnson wanted. In 1957, Estes Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion. That very same week, the highly coveted open seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Kefauver was expecting to get, was instead handed over to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy.

The real political genius of Lyndon Johnson was identifying and then gaining control over every possible source of leverage over his colleagues. Whatever a senator needed to survive, whether that was money, committee seats, or the passage of bills that matter to his home state, Johnson could give, and Johnson could withhold.

Setting the agenda

What the final bill that passes says depends on which one version actually comes to a vote, and with what final modifications. Whoever gets to set the agenda controls the outcome. So you won’t be surprised by who put himself in this position. Johnson’s main tool for setting the agenda was the unanimous consent agreement. By default, Senate debate is unlimited. A senator can talk about a bill for as long as he likes, and as he does so, he can also offer amendments that have nothing to do with that bill, each of which can stall the bill even further. A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill: it fixes the allotted time for debate and constrains the opportunity to amend it. Earlier leaders rarely used such agreements, and even then, only after weeks of debate on a bill had already exhausted all the senators. Johnson made their use the norm in the Senate. He wouldn’t even allow a bill to reach the floor until such an agreement was in place.

Johnson wanted to control which bill reached the floor, and to keep the floor from changing anyone’s mind, because he wanted every vote settled in private beforehand, through the wheeling-and-dealing where his leverage worked best. The last thing he wanted was for a long, public debate on the merits of the bill to change a senator’s mind at the last minute, or for a surprise amendment to unravel a deal he had spent weeks painstakingly brokering. As Paul Douglas put it, under Johnson “all the action takes place offstage, before the play begins.”

The view from the center

Johnson made sure that as much of the Senate’s information as possible ran through him. He had every committee assign a staffer to tell him what was being drafted. His aides tracked what every senator was up to. And he spent his own days in the cloakroom and the hallways cajoling and listening to his colleagues. So he knew what each senator really wanted, what he would and wouldn’t give up to get it.

In any session, the Senate faces hundreds of possible bills and amendments. A senator’s vote on one bill can be traded for another senator’s vote on a different one, and any single bill can be amended a dozen ways to win someone over. So there’s an almost endless combination of possible deals to be made. Johnson made sure that he was the one instigating and brokering most of these deals. As a result, he could make sure that any deal left Johnson coming out ahead.

by Dwarkesh Patel, Podcast |  Read more:

Images: Abebooks

Localpedia

Wikipedia pages of landmarks close to you. Very Cool.

Url here: (https://edjefferson.com/localpedia/)

This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics

President Trump’s unpopularity was clearly the main engine of Democratic Party’s resounding midterm victory. But his unpopularity alone did not deliver the scale of the Democrats triumph. To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable. The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party.

How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.

That combination is consistent with American public opinion, which leans center-left on many economic issues and center-right on many social issues. By taking this approach, candidates were able to present themselves as beholden to neither of the country’s two political parties, both of which remain unpopular. The heterodox combination also has much to recommend it substantively. It meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.

On the economy, this year’s Democrats offered a strikingly populist message. They promised to raise taxes on the wealthy and criticized billionaires for corrupting the political system. They called for higher minimum wages, lower health care costs and expanded government programs. They raised concerns about artificial intelligence and data centers. They did not sound like the triangulating Democratic moderates of an earlier generation who championed Wall Street and free trade.

Nor did they sound like the progressives who shaped the party during the 2010s and early 2020s. This year’s candidates frequently denounced ideas — on immigration, energy, policing, gender and voter ID — that have taken hold in elite left-leaning circles and alienated many working-class Americans of all races. Winning candidates often took a middle ground between a censorious left and an extremist Republican Party. If you do not live in a place with a 2026 battleground campaign, you may not realize how strongly the Democrats turned toward social moderation.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, captured the mood in an ad in which he spoke directly to the camera while standing on a farm. “America is being torn apart by politicians on both extremes,” he said, placing himself in the populist middle, in contrast to his Republican opponent, Senator Roger Marshall. “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders,” Mr. Hamilton said. “On the other side, Roger Marshall gives us higher gas and grocery prices while slashing our health care.”

Our editorial board does not agree with every message that came from a Democrat this year, and we lament that the party did not do more to lay out an affirmative agenda for lifting Americans’ living standards. Democrats should urgently begin that work. Nonetheless, the 2026 campaign represented meaningful progress for the party.

Even as the factional battles between the party’s left and center will no doubt continue, the Democrats who won difficult races this year largely borrowed the strongest messages from each side. They demonstrated an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy in a diverse nation. As Rob Sand, Iowa’s governor-elect, said during his campaign, “I think a lot of people are tired of division, tired of being told that anyone that they love or who’s a friend of theirs that’s in the other party is somehow their enemy.”

Coalescing around a similar big-tent strategy will be crucial in 2028. The competition between Democratic and Republican candidates today is not merely one about policy. It is, unfortunately, a contest between a party that supports democracy and one that has enabled corruption, lawbreaking and autocratic behavior. The country would be far better off if the Republicans pivoted and nominated a candidate in 2028 who rejected Trumpism. Until Republicans return to being a normal political party, however, the effectiveness of the Democratic Party will remain more than a partisan question. It will affect the health of American democracy.

For most of the 21st century, most Americans have been unhappy with the country’s direction. The reasons are complex and varied, including failed foreign wars, alienation caused by digital technology, slow-growing living standards and deep anxiety about the future. The country is stuck in a long malaise.

This dissatisfaction extends to voters’ views of the two major political parties. Only 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party heading into the midterms, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The Democratic Party’s favorability was barely better, at 39 percent. Many voters say neither party is sufficiently focused on the concerns of ordinary people. Swing voters tend to consider the Republican Party too right wing and the Democratic Party too left wing.

As a result, successful candidates in modern politics often present themselves as being distinct from both parties. They emphasize their disagreements with their own party and highlight their openness to working with anybody who has a good idea. That was a theme among Democrats who won tough races this year.

“It’s time to stop the nonsense from both extremes and start to focus on lowering costs for Iowans,” said Josh Turek, who calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist” and became the first Democrat to win an Iowa Senate race in 18 years. Another Turek ad boasted that he had voted with Republicans more than 700 times in the state legislature. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur, who won a House district that Mr. Trump easily won two years ago, told voters, “I’ve repeatedly said no to my own party.” In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who leads her Senate race pending a final vote count, said, “When both parties are attacking you, you’re doing something right.”

To demonstrate independence, this year’s Democratic winners took positions on hot-button culture issues at odds with recent progressive consensus. On each one, they rejected the excesses of both sides and found a sensible middle. Five issues stood out: [ed. Immigration, Crime, Voter ID, Energy, Gender]

The mistake among some centrists has been believing that the right answer to every policy question lies in the middle of the two parties’ historical positions. In truth, the country needs bold action on many issues. Americans, frustrated by slow-growing living standards and government dysfunction, are hungry for action on the economy.

Many of this year’s winning Democrats promised such action. They called for tax increases on corporations and billionaires, along with a smorgasbord of policies to reduce costs and increase opportunities for most Americans. The all-of-the-above position on energy helps as well.

Mr. Shapiro, often described as a moderate, supported more than doubling Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, to $15. Mr. Turek called for indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation and making it easier for workers to join unions. Ms. Peltola called for a big increase in the child tax credit and tax incentives for companies that pay decent wages. Mr. Hamilton said Medicare should expand to include dental and vision coverage. Mr. Pulido called for breaking up health-care conglomerates. “The people in office have sold us out,” he said. “They’ve allowed these companies to prey on us.”

Along the way, many candidates, including Mr. El-Sayed, drew a limit on their economic progressivism and said that they were not socialists. They described themselves as capitalists who wanted to ensure that American capitalism delivered better results for its citizens.

Democrats still do not have anything close to a comprehensive economic agenda. Many of their ideas remain small-bore or even dubious, especially on housing, where the party is not focused enough on building more homes. It has also failed to produce a plan to reduce the alarming federal debt. The party should raise its ambitions and spend the coming months developing an agenda that will reduce housing and health care costs, regulate A.I., put the country on a sustainable fiscal path and more.

This project will not be easy, but it does not need to tear the party apart. The progressive and centrist wings of the party agree much more on economic issues than they disagree.

Two years ago, the situation was bleak for the Democratic Party. Its ineffectiveness and unpopularity enabled Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, and many Democrats were in denial about why they lost. The party has rebounded from that nadir.

This year, it fielded a diverse array of savvy, appealing and authentic candidates, and they won astonishing victories. Their combination of economic populism and cultural moderation offers the party an opportunity to change its image among working-class Americans who have long viewed it as out of touch and condescending. Common-sense populism presents the most promising path to building an enduring Democratic majority in Washington. Yes, the party still has a long way to go before it can govern the country well and force the Republican Party to return to reasonableness. But the victors of 2026 have started to point the way.

by The Editors, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tam Stockton/NYT

[ed. As this article suggests, I'd be happy if they just started going after corporations that've ripped off consumers in various and creative ways over years and decades (thanks, Reagan). No small effort given that Big Business is so embedded in nearly every facet of our lives now. At least this election showed that big money can be beaten and isn't necessarily as influential as having a good message (and cult-loving opponents).]

On Constructive Visions of the Future

Ada Palmer is a science fiction writer and historian. She teaches early modern European history at the University of Chicago, and her Terra Ignota quartet, beginning with Too Like the Lightning, imagines the world of the 25th century. Ken Liu is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, the author of the Dandelion Dynasty series and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and most recently the author of All That We See or Seem, the first novel in his new series.

I direct the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, where we work on circulating more constructive visions of the future. I wanted to know what two people who build worlds for a living think human flourishing would actually look like, and why our imaginations keep sliding toward empire and catastrophe instead. They ended up talking about work far more than I had expected, and about the assumptions underneath it, some of them 2000 years old. I also left with a new term I plan to spread: the Etsy economy. 

Permanent crisis

Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?

Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.

The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they’re creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we’re in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.

There’s also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It’s very big, but it’s also very dramatic. It’s much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they’re seeing a lot of models of empire.

Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I’d add that there’s an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I’m doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.

Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we’ve been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there’s a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.

Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.

Ada: And if you don’t have a choice in the thing you’re doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.

Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.

Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.

The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.

The guy behind the refrigerator

Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?

Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we’ve found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems. 

We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.

Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don’t stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.

Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it’s not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we’ve been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you’re a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.

by Beatrice Erkers, with Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: 2001: A Space Odyssey

[ed. See also: We already know what a world without work looks like (Asterisk). With this introduction from ACX:]

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The debate on what will happen if AI takes all the jobs usually swings between poles of “it will be great because we can focus on the finer things in life” and “it will be terrible because we’ll lose all meaning”. Clara brings her trademark careful historical scholarship and proposes a third option - groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats have lived without productive work for thousands of years, and they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue” - pointless alliance-forming and backbiting in the pursuit of arbitrary status markers divorced from productive activity. “Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.” My only objection to this analogy is that some aristocrats were genuinely better at status games than others and probably had a lot of fun, whereas in the post-AI future the winners of status games will probably be those who check every move with a smarter-than-human AI prompted to help them optimize their status (and if everyone knows this to be true, it’s not clear what the ensuing status games actually look like).

The Corruption is Bad. This May Be Worse

There are about 20 golf courses within a 20-mile radius of Kissimmee, Fla. The Remington Golf Club is not considered one of the better ones. (“Traps were overgrown on many holes. Tee boxes were a bit bare,” wrote one GolfPass reviewer.) It was a primo pick, however, for an idiosyncratic financial play that’s become a Trump world staple: the reverse merger.

The idea sounds simple enough. Find a down-on-its-luck company that’s already listed on a stock market, and smash it together with a start-up in need of quick money. It’s a shortcut to a major cash infusion, without the paperwork of an I.P.O. or the hassles of dealing with venture capital investors. The results can be a little odd.

In February 2025, the holding company that owned the Remington Golf Club and a sister course went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, with financial underwriting by a company based in Trump Tower. That company was Dominari Securities. The I.P.O. flopped, and when shares were at rock bottom, one of Dominari Holdings’ funds bought up a significant number of them. A few months after that, the golf course company announced it was merging with, of all things, a small firm building drones for the military. Dominari Securities would arrange the financing for that deal, too.

Between the two of them, Don Jr. and Eric Trump own about 11 percent of Dominari Holdings, and they serve on the company’s advisory board. Its president, Kyle Wool, is a frequent booster of the president on the Fox Business channel. When the impending merger was announced (“Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Targeting Pentagon Sales” was the headline in The Journal), the golf course company’s shares shot up 24 percent intraday. The number of shares traded jumped from around 24,000 to over 28 million in a single day. The fact that a Trump-backed company could be selling drones to the Trump administration wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. In fact, that feature seems to have been a selling point to a certain kind of investor.

Mr. Evans, from Unusual Machines, compared the Trump brothers coming on board to when Oprah Winfrey joined Weight Watchers, but it’s more than that. Buying into these companies offers people a chance to affiliate themselves with emerging technology, MAGA celebrities and Trump-adjacent businesses all at the same time. The Financial Times recently noted that a vast majority of companies backed by Dominari and 1789 — neither of which commented in response to questions from The Times — are in sectors aligned with Trump administration priorities.

Brett Velicovich, the president of Powerus, the merged golf course-drone company, told me in the spring that it would compete on merit, not connections. “With the way that the Department of War works, there are multiple layers of oversight,” he said, adding that it “would be virtually impossible for someone to make a call, and all of a sudden: a contract.” In June, Unusual Machines announced a $30 million equity investment in Powerus. In August, one of Powerus’s subsidiaries received the company’s first major Pentagon contract, a funding line worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force. As Pentagon contracts go, that’s a pittance, but it’s a lot of money for a start-up.

Dominari Securities helped engineer lots of other reverse mergers, each more improbable than the last. The company achieved a mash-up of a crypto business with a company that makes sea otter plushies, another of a drone software company with a construction company known for the hundreds of waxing salons it’s built.

Then there’s the tungsten-mining operation in Kazakhstan. The Trump administration had given its preliminary OK to $1.6 billion in financing when it announced a merger with Skyline Builders. That’s a Hong Kong-based engineering company that previously went public with the help of none other than Dominari Securities.

Separately, Trump Media, which runs the Truth Social platform, is combining with a nuclear fusion firm. Seriously. Yes, this seems like some kind of MAGA Mad Lib. But we’re in an age of absurdity on Wall Street. Allbirds, the shoe brand, recently announced it was becoming an A.I. company. The princelings didn’t build this madhouse, but they seem to be making themselves very much at home in it.

These shell-company deals, which have historically been riskier than traditional I.P.O.s, fell out of fashion on Wall Street for a while. They have been making a comeback, though, and these princeling-connected deals are a part of it.

The entrepreneurs joining these deals aren’t necessarily MAGA. Often, their businesses just need the money, and right now the oligarchy is flush. “Unfortunately they are so far-right,” one chief executive told The Journal, speaking of his new partners. But now “we’ve got the capital we need.”

Many of these deals have turned out rather well for Dominari Securities and its American Ventures fund. Take those Kissimmee golf courses. After the fund put in $26 million, its holdings in the mashed-up golf course company are worth around 10 times as much. As for the everyday investors who bought in — well, they didn’t do so great. Powerus, the golf-drones combo, is down almost 70 percent since its merger was announced. Dominari Holdings’ chief executive has rejected any suggestion that his company improperly manipulated share prices, or that shareholder losses were evidence of anything other than normal market fluctuations. “Do stock prices rise and fall?” he asked Bloomberg. “Of course they do.” But that same pattern, of a sharp rise in value followed by a steep decline, played out in one Dominari-arranged merger after another after another.  [...]

The last time American oligarchs were this brazen was at the end of the 19th century. Their power was immense, and they weren’t afraid to show it, whether by openly buying a Senate seat or persuading the president to help them corner the gold market.

“It provoked a backlash,” said Professor Winters, the author of “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.” “That backlash lasted decades.” He ticked off a series of reforms that resulted: the progressive income tax, and its radical idea of asking more from the rich; the Sherman Antitrust Act, which broke up the biggest oligarchs’ biggest source of wealth; the direct election of senators, which undercut the oligarchs’ ability to pick the nation’s most influential legislators; the rise of organized labor. There’s a reason the oligarchy retreated behind the hedgerows for the next century or so.  [...]

America is by no means headed for changes of this scale. But it’s become increasingly clear that Americans are grossed out by the magnitude of self-enrichment in and adjacent to the Trump administration. In a late October poll, CNBC found that corruption was now the top issue on midterm voters’ minds. In a recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of all Americans surveyed said government corruption was widespread — a consensus almost unimaginable on any other topic. Investors have lost an estimated $3.8 billion on Mr. Trump’s crypto coin.

by Noah Shachtman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi

The Herculaneum Scroll and the Underrated Value of Historical Knowledge

Twelve days ago, it was announced that a 21-year-old computer science student named Luke Farritor had “became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word” in one of the papyrus scrolls buried within a library in the Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Taken together, these scrolls — there are over 1,800 in all, discovered in one of the most lavish of all known Roman houses — are the only surviving intact library from Greco-Roman antiquity. The library contains works from ancient authors which do not exist anywhere else. A poignant example: the Greek philosopher Chrysippus was both famed and prolific in his day, authoring some 700 texts. But aside from stray quotations in the works of others, all of these texts were lost.

… that is, until portions of them were found among the scrolls at Herculaneum. The stakes of this library, in other words, are enormous. Being able to read through all 1,800 scrolls would amount to one of the biggest historical breakthroughs of the century, literally rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.

The trouble is, the scrolls are lumps of carbon. They were torched by volcanic smoke and gas during the eruption of Vesuvius. To unroll them is to destroy them.

Nevertheless, they can now be imaged in remarkable detail, using methods like X-rays and 3-D CT scans.

by Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura |  Read more:

Images: Vesuvius Challenge; Digital Restoration Initiative, University of Kentucky

[ed. Amazing.]

The Myth of Prometheus Is Not a Cautionary Tale

P.S. You're also getting Frankenstein wrong.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World”:

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude. [...]

These aren’t just an English major’s pedantic quibbles. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That even a “techno-optimist” inverts the Promethean myth reveals how deeply hostility to technology has penetrated our collective consciousness.

For thousands of years, the myth of Prometheus has taught us to appreciate the gifts of technē and the costs that bringing those gifts can exact. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our poetic past. He reminds us of the continuities of human culture as well as its flux. He unites the Two Cultures.

In that spirit, I cherish the hope that, as artificial intelligence makes the library of Herculaneum decipherable, we will recover the lost sequels to Prometheus Bound—an appropriate fruit of the latest Promethean gift.

***

1  Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model…a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

by Virginia Postrel, Newsetter | Read more:
Image: via

Twilight of a Grifter

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion. [...]

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
[ed. See also: An Unpredictable President, a Grim White House (NYT).]

This Boom Looks a Lot Like the Housing Bubble

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming the largest investment in U.S. history. As the money pours in, the companies involved are resurrecting bad old habits eerily reminiscent of the shenanigans deployed in the run-up to the financial crisis.

There are already signs that much of this investment may go bad. If it does, the consequences could rival what happened in 2008.

We know far too little about the financial plumbing propping up this surge. What little we do know looks remarkably like the tactics once employed by Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old bank that collapsed in 2008, setting off a panic that ultimately cost taxpayers nearly $700 billion in bailouts in today’s dollars and nearly nine million Americans their jobs. Now as then, companies are hiding large amounts of debt off public balance sheets. Firms responsible for protecting our pensions and our insurance are again risking our money by snapping up complicated financial products backstopped by assets of uncertain value. A small group of companies are buying and selling large amounts of a hot product to one another, inflating demand for the product and obscuring the risks of the system in a web of complexity. The accountants and credit-rating firms that analyze the situation — and that are financially beholden to the debtors — are deploying shaky excuses to declare it all fine.

There are a few differences. With more U.S. funds in A.I.-heavy stocks than in homes, a crash could destroy more wealth than the 2008 financial crisis did. And the Trump administration, reportedly eager to prevent a bust, is making changes that inject new opacity and more risk into the situation.

There are already signs the nascent A.I. industry may not soon generate the trillions of dollars required to pay off all the huge debts it is incurring. Earlier this month, The Financial Times reported that the projected annual revenue at A.I. lab OpenAI was about $50 billion at the end of September, 28 percent lower than had previously been believed. Figures reported by The Wall Street Journal this month suggested that revenue growth at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, was softening. Markets are getting nervous, with the tech-laden Nasdaq falling over 5 percent over the last two weeks.

Anthropic and OpenAI are already so entangled in our economy (and in our national security) that if they sink, Washington will need a plan. Done right, any rescue would come with real safety guardrails, real insurance that we won’t cede control of the technology to China and real service to the public interest.

Lehman Brothers was born in 1850 as a cotton brokerage in antebellum Alabama. The A.I. chipmaker Nvidia was born in 1993 in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, Calif., and Meta in a Harvard dorm in 2004. And yet the financial circumstances surrounding those companies share an uncanny resemblance.

Start with hidden loans. A Wall Street Journal analysis in August concluded that the nine largest tech firms, Nvidia and Meta included, have managed to accrue $3 trillion of debt, or roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. economy, off their balance sheets. Keeping the debt off the books (and away from the figures investors and regulators watch most closely) makes it easier for those companies to spend enormous sums constructing the data centers that drive A.I. — centers they believe will both improve the technology and satisfy an expected takeoff in demand.

Back in 2008, Lehman, too, accumulated lots of debt, primarily from buying subprime mortgages; those loans, which were targeted to home buyers with thin or imperfect credit histories, were the hot product of its day. The firm similarly avoided scrutiny by shuffling the debts off its balance sheet. When those mortgages went bad, so did Lehman, and its sudden demise nearly took much of the banking system with it.

Within days of its failure, Washington committed hundreds of billions of dollars to stabilize the financial system, and the Federal Reserve backstopped trillions more. Still, the rescue wasn’t enough to stave off the worst recession since the Great Depression. Millions of jobs and trillions in household wealth evaporated.

Now you might ask: Didn’t Congress pass legislation to prevent another crisis from occurring? Yes, but that law, known as Dodd-Frank, applied largely to lenders, which means banks and bank-holding companies. It left private creditors, back then a relatively small slice of the finance world, virtually untouched. In 2018, Congress, worried about the potential impact on small businesses, loosened rules to allow many private creditors to stretch their balance sheets. It ignored objections that money, like water, would always flow to the least regulated corners of finance.

Enter Silicon Valley. A.I.’s biggest players seized on the loosely regulated private credit industry to help finance their data center spree.

Another throwback to the bad old days of 2008: the way the A.I. firms and their main suppliers are buying and selling the technology and its infrastructure to each other, lending large sums to one another to fund the deals. Nvidia disclosed commitments and guarantees of over $530 billion to its own customers in July — more than triple the amount it was lending just three months earlier. Analysis by the asset manager Sona found at least 176 circular financing deals in the A.I. ecosystem that were worth $3.6 trillion over the past three and a half years.

Back in the housing bubble, major Wall Street firms came up with numerous complex ways to borrow from their rivals, with proceeds going to purchase even more subprime mortgages. The result made demand for those loans look greater than it actually was, and it built a financing web so tangled that it became difficult to parse any one firm’s exposure. As Lehman’s collapse later showed, such confusion meant that a problem anywhere can soon become a problem everywhere.

Then how about the fact that accounting firms, those given the job of calling out any warning signs, appear asleep at the wheel once again? Ernst & Young, which signed off on Lehman’s questionable accounting tactics before its collapse, is now being accused of offering more tautology than real comfort in its latest approval of Meta’s unusual accounting moves to fund its very expensive A.I. push. Everything is all fine, essentially, because Meta said it is.

Those are the similarities. Now for the differences.

This presidential administration, reportedly worried that any A.I. slowdown will beget a broader economic one (which, in turn, could worsen its political standing), is propping up the boom. Its measures likely goose the available money in the short term but will worsen the pain of any correction. President Trump wants to allow Americans to invest their retirement savings in private credit funds, ensuring they will lose directly if these data center deals go bad. The Securities and Exchange Commission has made it easier for data center owners and their lenders to slice and repackage this debt, which is exactly what banks did to subprime mortgage debts in the housing bubble. The S.E.C. is also proposing rules that allow newly public companies to disclose even less than they already do.

Another difference: This time, taxpayers are more clearly on the hook, because private creditors are more directly attaching A.I. debt to the financial products we need. Take annuities, which are often relied on by retirees. Because many Americans rely on such insurance products, their policies are usually guaranteed by the state should an insurer go bankrupt. Right now, private creditors like Apollo are funding the debt boom in part by tapping the money sitting in companies like Athene, the $470 billion insurer Apollo controls. Should the A.I. boom go bad and Athene go under, Apollo knows the state (i.e. taxpayers) will be on the hook for much of what it owes policyholders. (Athene’s opaque disclosures make it hard to know how much of its assets are in data centers.)

Private-capital-backed firms now own nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. life insurance industry, with assets of nearly $1.5 trillion.

As bad as the financial crisis was, it began with a small slice of mortgages of a still-diversified economy. This time, the sector at risk is our economy’s growth engine. A.I.-related investment fueled an estimated one-third of the country’s recent economic growth, and the handful of companies most exposed to the A.I. build-out now comprise roughly one-third of the entire S&P 500.

In other words, the U.S. economy is fully hostage to an A.I. build-out laden with increasingly worrying financial engineering, all riding on a wager — that demand for A.I. will keep growing, that customers will soon be willing to pay what the technology actually costs to produce and that firms will manage to build the infrastructure required to supply it. Recent estimates indicate that A.I. would need to generate as much as $3 trillion annually in perpetuity to return the capital extended. That’s 9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, or twice what Americans spend on food.

Already, a closer look at the fundamentals of OpenAI and Anthropic, the most critical players in this bet, appears to be perhaps even worse than the headlines suggest. Right now OpenAI expects to lose $280 billion by 2030 even assuming revenues grow tenfold over the same period. And both OpenAI and Anthropic have already slashed prices 40 percent to 50 percent from early summer, perhaps because China’s Deep Seek, the leading “open weight” A.I. model, reportedly nearly matches their latest models’ performances at about 1.4 percent of the cost. Far less expensive open weight models have roughly doubled their share of token volume this year, according to OpenRouter, a service that tracks A.I. usage across all major providers. Prices and market share are shrinking; costs are not.

Such worries may explain why tech stocks have been taking a beating, and bond markets — normally where investors go for shelter amid financial turbulence — are volatile. Many of those private creditors — a sector that has grown sharply amid the A.I. boom, to between $2 trillion and $3 trillion — are showing classic signs of financial distress.

A final difference from 2008: The government deficit has reached historic highs.

by Jen Harris, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chuan Ming Ong
[ed. AI's already taken the world's economies hostage, without even being fully deployed yet. Sleepwalking into a disaster.]

Up a Creek

Nature writing after everyone stopped paying attention

Three men are out rafting on the Colorado River together: an activist, a government servant, and a journalist. This is not a setup for a joke. The year is 1969, and they have been brought together for the purposes of an article to be published in The New Yorker. Two are foes: David Brower, the longtime former executive director of the Sierra Club, and Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, in charge of building the nation’s dams, against which Brower has waged a bitter war for years. The writer is John McPhee, who has put together this piece of stunt journalism; he is there to observe and record. Sitting in an inflatable boat in Arizona, south of the massive Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, the jewel in Dominy’s crown and the defeat of Brower’s life, the discussion turns into one of scale, time, and an existential threat:

The Colorado, Brower reminded us, used to be known as Old Red. This was because the river was full of red mud. It would never have been possible for Dominy to dip his cup in it in order to get water to go with his bourbon unless he wished to drink mud as well. On arriving at a campsite, rivermen used to fill their boats with water, so that the mud would settle to the bottom of the boats and they would have water for drinking and cooking. . . . “Emotionally, people are able to look only two generations back and two generations forward,” Brower said. “We need to see farther than that. It is absolutely inevitable, for example, that Lake Powell and Lake Mead will someday be completely filled with silt.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, complete nonsense. First of all, we will build silt-detention dams in the tributaries—in the Paria, in the Little Colorado. And, if necessary, we will build more.”

“Someday the reservoirs have to fill up, Floyd.”

“I wouldn’t admit that. I wouldn’t admit one inch!”

“Someday.”

“Someday! Yes, in geologic time, maybe . . .”

Nature writing, in the hands of McPhee, is like the interaction of river and silt. In calm, patient prose, McPhee observes, and facts accrue and settle until there is a formation that had not existed before. He is patient. He is slow, though not without a wry sense of humor (“They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.”). He is the chronicler of things that happen so gradually that we cannot see them unless someone takes the time to document them in their entirety. Brower and Dominy’s verbal duel would become the third and final part of Encounters with the Archdruid, one of McPhee’s best-known books and a landmark in environmental writing. In a new Library of America collection titled Encounters in Wild America, four of McPhee’s books, including Encounters, are canonized.

The questions Dominy and Brower raise about what will persist apply to the practice of writing nonfiction today. To Brower’s point, the long view, either backwards or forwards, is hard to make out. Little lasts long in our conditions of tweet and retweet. Nature writing requires slowness, because the value of nature itself is not inherently obvious. Rushing through our lives in a screen-mediated frenzy, we are farther than ever from what it takes to know it. In his interview, many years later, with The Paris Review, McPhee describes his own process in terms that are strikingly similar to the debate on the river:

It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

Today, writing in the spirit of geological time—to observe nature, but also for any kind of long-form journalism, really—is a vanished privilege. Meanwhile, Lake Powell really is filling up with silt—over “thirty thousand dump truck loads” per day—causing a long-term existential crisis, not to mention the man-made reservoirs of the Colorado River emptying out after years of sustained drought. With a good chance of outlasting the lake, McPhee is the modern archetype of the writer as practitioner of a gradual craft, working away at exquisitely detailed depictions of people and places. This work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.

The span of McPhee’s writing in the Library of America collection covers work published in The New Yorker from 1967 to 1977—the critical years in the development of the environmental movement. The phrase “global warming” had only recently emerged, and there was still disagreement about humanity’s ability to create long-term change in the climate. The New Yorker was no stranger to the subject, publishing in 1962 a version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was still seeping its way through American consciousness. Between the bookends of Carson and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989, McPhee was the presiding figure of The New Yorker in a time when it could lead the public conversation about environmentalism—long form could persuade through deft storytelling that integrated and presented the factual evidence.

In today’s swirl of information noise, it’s hard to imagine a similar piece ever breaking into public consciousness again. If Carson made an impassioned, if highly literary, plea (somewhat against the grain of the average New Yorker article) in a time when environmental issues were less politicized, McPhee’s work was more classically detached on a subject that was becoming a fierce battleground. Eschewing advocacy, McPhee is a patient aggregator in a sense foreign to today’s meaning of the term. Weaving between journalism and a more descriptive kind of nature writing, McPhee was given room to sprawl in a piece that was not only a portrait of Brower but also a work of landscape, broadening out from his human subject to display the ecosystem his subject sought to protect. A work like Encounters with the Archdruid would appear in three parts in the magazine over the course of a month in 1971, stretching to a total of over sixty thousand words.

I’m not aware of anyone who gets to write a sixty-thousand-word magazine piece these days. Size isn’t everything, but this is an obvious reflection of the current economics of journalism, as well as everyone’s perception of time. The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.

The purpose of reading a long article is no longer the acquisition of information, if it ever was primarily that. If there is new information, it will quickly be screenshotted and uploaded to social media platforms to be digested in bite-size pieces, or even rewritten by AI for efficiency fetishists. Or maybe readers would like an experience—what we used to call a story, perhaps—and there is no shortage of quicker, stickier content to flood the zone of the synapses. Information is oversaturated and undervalued, and journalistic narrative, at least for now, has been defeated. Say a decade ago, the idea of long-form journalism—the kind of in-depth article you might send to a friend to read on a lunch break (even if you hadn’t read it yourself)—still held prestige. Today, I’m not so sure. Is this writing still enjoyable? Is it necessary? Do you think you will make it to the end of this book review?

McPhee is one of The New Yorker’s signature staff writers—he has been a contributor since 1963, and remains a staff writer today. Across this seven-decade and thirty-plus-book career, he has long been considered one of the founders of both “creative nonfiction” and long-form journalism as we know it today. The course he taught for years on nonfiction writing at Princeton, where he came from and has lived almost his whole life, has been highly influential, with many of its students going on to publish their own books. (Including, notably, David Remnick, who edited this edition and edits The New Yorker.) He is known for the eclecticism of his subjects: truckers, roadkill, oranges, rocks. I can’t say if he invented this archaeology of the little thing you’ve never thought about before, but because of him it is now a whole subgenre of literary journalism, spawning pieces about hand sanitizer or paper jams. There is often no pressing reason for McPhee’s work (no news “peg,” as journalists like to call it)—his curiosity is considered reason enough, a permission that is a luxury for writers today. McPhee was a unique artist that slipped seamlessly into a commercial publishing world that today is well on its way out. Long form has died, long live short form.

His work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.

McPhee’s project is born from a tension that is common but often taken for granted. He is a classical journalist, a supposedly neutral, mostly invisible eye working to uncover and represent the facts. But he’s a storyteller first—rarely will you see the “inverted pyramid,” the paradigm of placing the most relevant information at the beginning of a (usually newspaper) story. When McPhee began his career in journalism, emerging from Princeton into the unsigned back pages of Time magazine, the stock-in-trade was profiles, and the profile is usually the vehicle for McPhee’s artistry, spread out and absorbed slowly. He meticulously plans the shape of his pieces, complete with outlines and diagrams, into extended book-length works, in which myriad details and digressions are as important as the core idea of the story (“A thousand details add up to one impression” is one of his mantras). There is something fundamentally painterly here: the portrait artist moving out to the edges, the frame widening, until the painting is not a portrait at all but instead a landscape.

by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've read half a dozen John McPhee books (at least), none more impactful than Coming Into the Country. Made me buy a shotgun and start looking for bears around every corner when I first moved to Alaska.]

Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell

[ed. Nice tribute.]

In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was blessed by fate, and soon started playing on hit records. He was always on the radio.

But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked. [...]

Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.

 

Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.

At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.

That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.

During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969. [...]

 

Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.

His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”

In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:

Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.

The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.

He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.

But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.

In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.

The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited; publicity photo