Saturday, September 5, 2015
How Social Media Is Ruining Politics
Our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. The latest evidence came on Monday night, when Barack Obama turned himself into the country’s Instagrammer-in-Chief. While en route to Alaska to promote his climate agenda, the president took a photograph of a mountain range from a window on Air Force One and posted the shot on the popular picture-sharing network. “Hey everyone, it's Barack,” the caption read. “I'll be spending the next few days touring this beautiful state and meeting with Alaskans about what’s going on in their lives. Looking forward to sharing it with you.” The photo quickly racked up thousands of likes.Ever since the so-called Facebook election of 2008, Obama has been a pacesetter in using social media to connect with the public. But he has nothing on this year’s field of candidates. Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” at stops along the trail. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush spar over student debt on Twitter. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million likers on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.”
And then there’s Donald Trump. (...)
Twice before in the last hundred years a new medium has transformed elections. In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate. Politicians, used to bellowing at fairgrounds and train depots, found themselves talking to families in their homes. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.
In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. With its jumpy cuts and pitiless close-ups, TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they could project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life.
Today, with the public looking to smartphones for news and entertainment, we seem to be at the start of the third big technological makeover of modern electioneering. The presidential campaign is becoming just another social-media stream, its swift and shallow current intertwining with all the other streams that flow through people’s devices. This shift is changing the way politicians communicate with voters, altering the tone and content of political speech. But it’s doing more than that. It’s changing what the country wants and expects from its would-be leaders.
What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.
by Nicholas Carr, Politico | Read more:
Image: AFP Getty
‘Purity’ and the Great American Novelist
[ed. Wow. Don't see book reviews like this very often.]
Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen, and this is frustrating because his novels are awful, excellent but awful, books you read quickly and remember ponderously, books of exhaustive craft and yet a weird, spiraling cluelessness about the data they collate. They analyze the wave frequency but don’t hear the sound. They are full of people who talk and act exactly as you imagine such people would talk and act in real life; everyone in them is forever buying the right brand of granola bar or having believable thoughts about their mother or fantasizing in a particularly characteristic way about fucking on a hotel-room air conditioner. And yet they don’t feel like real life. They feel like real life irritably recreated from a spreadsheet, by someone who is a genius at reading spreadsheets. Whether a novel ought to feel like real life is of course a separate question. Many novels that I love don’t, but those novels aren’t trying to, and as far as I can tell, Franzen’s are.I’m going to voice the obvious caveat here and say that I mean Franzen’s novels don’t feel like real life to me. It’s possible that I am simply wrong, that my own equipment for measuring life is faulty. “Who are the judges of reality?” Virginia Woolf asks, and when I try to think of an answer to that question, the image that floats into my mind looks a lot like the committee that decides on the cover of Time magazine and not very much like yours truly. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m so worried about my own judgment, so ready to believe that there is something strange or distorted in how I view the world, that I find reading Franzen so disorienting. Strangeness and distortion are crucial elements of contemporary American culture as he portrays it; they surround and afflict his characters, are in some way his literary quarry. But the way he goes about pursuing them leaves me feeling like an addict in an opium den listening to a preacher deliver a speech outside. That isn’t what it feels like, the addict thinks. But the preacher has all the statistics, and the addict is too blurred to respond, and if the addict drags himself to the window he sees a crowd of sensibly dressed and sober onlookers nodding at the preacher’s explication of the drug problem. (...)
It’s a good book. But this is where I worry about my reality sensors again. Because the feeling Purity left me with was disquiet, not with the theme or form of the book but with the nature of its gaze. I think Franzen is trying to capture a kind of dissonance in contemporary reality, one of which many people are acutely aware, one that many people experience now as the undertone of their everyday experience. Only I don’t have the sense that Franzen himself is acutely aware of it, except by secondhand report. And I have the sense that he is addressing himself to it less out of inner urgency — as, say, Dickens did to the reality-dissonance of his moment — than simply because addressing it is the condition for realizing novelistic ambition in 2015, and he happens to be the best novelist alive.
This could be totally unfair to Franzen. Is likely to be, even. I am talking about something vague, an impression, and the terms are necessarily imprecise. Still, I can only speak up for my own small portion of the real, mistaken though my idea of it may be. And maybe you have had these moments yourself. You have been, say, in the parking lot of a Walgreens just after dusk, when the sky behind the Walgreens was huge and purple and wild, and a man in a cowboy hat was standing under the overhang looking at himself in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, smoothing out his mustache with his thumb. Or you have been driving across the plains at night, on some skinny black yardstick of a highway, watching tiny lights blink at indecipherable far-off elevations, when the strangest song came on the radio and you all at once started to cry.
by Brian Phillips, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Arpad Kurucz/Anadolu Agency/Getty
The Only State Where Everyone Gets Free Money
[ed. I remember thinking I'd frame my first PFD check because distributing free money to people for just living in the state seemed like a dumb political stunt (and there were many of those back then). It didn't take long to be disabused of that view. All of my son's checks were saved over the years and helped considerably in funding his college education.]
Every year, the state of Alaska hands each of its citizens hundreds to thousands of dollars, no strings attached. The only requirement for receiving the cash is that a person has a) held residence in Alaska for more than one year and is b) alive.
To citizens in the state, the Permanent Fund Dividend is a deeply beloved if sometimes controversial policy. To those outside it, it’s often regarded as a curiosity. The annual payout makes headlines when it happens—Alaska’s giving people free money!—and has, typically, been forgotten just as quickly.
Recent years, however, have seen a groundswell of attention to the underlying concept. Interest in basic income ideas continue to percolate worldwide. As grim studies portend incoming job shortages, as inequality festers, and as automation threatens to throw economies into turmoil, the notion that a state could give a regular, guaranteed income—a minimum salary distributed to every citizen, regardless of age, employment, or social standing—has been sounding better and better. And Alaska’s been doing it for years. A miniature version of it, anyway.
“The Alaska dividend is pretty much the closest thing the world has to a universal basic income anywhere,” Scott Santens, who is perhaps the web’s most active basic income advocate, told me. Not only that, he says, but a basic income could help citizens fight the impacts of climate change. President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska was focused on highlighting the calamity that human-induced warming is bringing to the region; perhaps we should be paying attention as well to a policy, found only here, that may help keep society stable and more equal in the face of a warmer, job-scarce future.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established in 1976, in the midst of a black gold rush; the massive Trans-Alaska pipeline was in the process of being built, and the state had reaped $900 million in revenue from the sale of drilling leases in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, in a matter of years. In a matter of a few more, it’d spent it. Alaskans soon recognized that their enormous oil reserves were nonetheless limited, so, with a kind of longterm forward-thinking rarely seen in politics today, they voted to add an amendment to the state constitution to establish a fund that would protect a portion of all incoming oil wealth for future generations.
“There was a general recognition that the mineral royalties the state was creating weren’t going to go on forever,” Valerie Mertz, the CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund, told me. “The idea was to take this nonrenewable resource and turn it into a sustainable resource for the state. A way to lock some money away from a time when the state’s doing well, to save it for a rainy day, if you will.”
The amendment stipulates that "at least 25 percent of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royalty sales proceeds, federal mineral revenue-sharing payments and bonuses received by the state be placed in a permanent fund, the principal of which may only be used for income-producing investments." The Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned corporation, was created to manage and invest that revenue.
The governor at the time was Jay Hammond, a rugged, barrel-chested New York transplant and army vet. As the mayor of Bristol Bay, the story goes, Hammond saw the unfairness inherent in a foreign company coming in and profiting off of natural resources that belonged to everybody. He enacted a three percent tax on fish caught in the area, which was distributed directly to everybody else.
Once in the state’s highest office, according to The New York Times, “Mr. Hammond, a Republican, persuaded voters to approve the establishment of a permanent fund to handle the state's petroleum royalties.” (His original plan, which was passed but ruled unconstitutional, was known as “Alaska, Inc," and was designed to bequeath shares in the fund to every Alaskan once a year.) In 1980, Hammond pushed another amendment to the state constitution, creating the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD) that would pay out a portion of the Fund to everyone. The first payment, of $1,000 to each citizen, was made in 1982.
“Oil is not the most important thing about what's been happening in Alaska since 1982,” Santens says. “The most important thing is that instead of resources being freely given away, rent is instead being earned on shared resources and every resident is receiving an equal share of the fruits of that rent.”
In 2014, the net income of the fund was $6.8 billion dollars and the dividend doled out $1,884 to 640,000 citizens, despite a decline in oil revenues that year. Once the tally for the earnings of the fiscal year is made, the corporation makes a transfer to the state, which determines the size of the dividend. The calculation that figures the amount of the payout in a given year is enshrined in state law and is based on the average cash earnings of the Fund over five years—the whole formula is here—but generally, the higher the earnings of the Fund and the revenue from oil leases, the higher the payout. It's a somewhat confusing process, and even Alaskans are apt to confuse the Permanent Fund, the corporation that manages the oil wealth, and the Permanent Fund Dividend, the annual mass payout by the state.
This year, the payment to every man, woman, and child (yes, children get the payment too, though it is entrusted to their guardians) is expected to surpass $2,000. The Fund, in other words, is huge. Interestingly, Mertz credits the payouts with driving the investment success of the corporation, which now employs 42 people. “It’s been very successful,” she tells me, “the dividend component of the program keeps people tuned into the Fund, and that in turn motivates us to do the best we can.” When it began, the Fund was worth barely more than one billion dollars.
“At the end of the fiscal year on June 30th the Fund was worth $51.2 billion,” Achee says.
Every year, the state of Alaska hands each of its citizens hundreds to thousands of dollars, no strings attached. The only requirement for receiving the cash is that a person has a) held residence in Alaska for more than one year and is b) alive.
To citizens in the state, the Permanent Fund Dividend is a deeply beloved if sometimes controversial policy. To those outside it, it’s often regarded as a curiosity. The annual payout makes headlines when it happens—Alaska’s giving people free money!—and has, typically, been forgotten just as quickly.Recent years, however, have seen a groundswell of attention to the underlying concept. Interest in basic income ideas continue to percolate worldwide. As grim studies portend incoming job shortages, as inequality festers, and as automation threatens to throw economies into turmoil, the notion that a state could give a regular, guaranteed income—a minimum salary distributed to every citizen, regardless of age, employment, or social standing—has been sounding better and better. And Alaska’s been doing it for years. A miniature version of it, anyway.
“The Alaska dividend is pretty much the closest thing the world has to a universal basic income anywhere,” Scott Santens, who is perhaps the web’s most active basic income advocate, told me. Not only that, he says, but a basic income could help citizens fight the impacts of climate change. President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska was focused on highlighting the calamity that human-induced warming is bringing to the region; perhaps we should be paying attention as well to a policy, found only here, that may help keep society stable and more equal in the face of a warmer, job-scarce future.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established in 1976, in the midst of a black gold rush; the massive Trans-Alaska pipeline was in the process of being built, and the state had reaped $900 million in revenue from the sale of drilling leases in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, in a matter of years. In a matter of a few more, it’d spent it. Alaskans soon recognized that their enormous oil reserves were nonetheless limited, so, with a kind of longterm forward-thinking rarely seen in politics today, they voted to add an amendment to the state constitution to establish a fund that would protect a portion of all incoming oil wealth for future generations.
“There was a general recognition that the mineral royalties the state was creating weren’t going to go on forever,” Valerie Mertz, the CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund, told me. “The idea was to take this nonrenewable resource and turn it into a sustainable resource for the state. A way to lock some money away from a time when the state’s doing well, to save it for a rainy day, if you will.”
The amendment stipulates that "at least 25 percent of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royalty sales proceeds, federal mineral revenue-sharing payments and bonuses received by the state be placed in a permanent fund, the principal of which may only be used for income-producing investments." The Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned corporation, was created to manage and invest that revenue.
The governor at the time was Jay Hammond, a rugged, barrel-chested New York transplant and army vet. As the mayor of Bristol Bay, the story goes, Hammond saw the unfairness inherent in a foreign company coming in and profiting off of natural resources that belonged to everybody. He enacted a three percent tax on fish caught in the area, which was distributed directly to everybody else.
Once in the state’s highest office, according to The New York Times, “Mr. Hammond, a Republican, persuaded voters to approve the establishment of a permanent fund to handle the state's petroleum royalties.” (His original plan, which was passed but ruled unconstitutional, was known as “Alaska, Inc," and was designed to bequeath shares in the fund to every Alaskan once a year.) In 1980, Hammond pushed another amendment to the state constitution, creating the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD) that would pay out a portion of the Fund to everyone. The first payment, of $1,000 to each citizen, was made in 1982.
“Oil is not the most important thing about what's been happening in Alaska since 1982,” Santens says. “The most important thing is that instead of resources being freely given away, rent is instead being earned on shared resources and every resident is receiving an equal share of the fruits of that rent.”
In 2014, the net income of the fund was $6.8 billion dollars and the dividend doled out $1,884 to 640,000 citizens, despite a decline in oil revenues that year. Once the tally for the earnings of the fiscal year is made, the corporation makes a transfer to the state, which determines the size of the dividend. The calculation that figures the amount of the payout in a given year is enshrined in state law and is based on the average cash earnings of the Fund over five years—the whole formula is here—but generally, the higher the earnings of the Fund and the revenue from oil leases, the higher the payout. It's a somewhat confusing process, and even Alaskans are apt to confuse the Permanent Fund, the corporation that manages the oil wealth, and the Permanent Fund Dividend, the annual mass payout by the state.
This year, the payment to every man, woman, and child (yes, children get the payment too, though it is entrusted to their guardians) is expected to surpass $2,000. The Fund, in other words, is huge. Interestingly, Mertz credits the payouts with driving the investment success of the corporation, which now employs 42 people. “It’s been very successful,” she tells me, “the dividend component of the program keeps people tuned into the Fund, and that in turn motivates us to do the best we can.” When it began, the Fund was worth barely more than one billion dollars.
“At the end of the fiscal year on June 30th the Fund was worth $51.2 billion,” Achee says.
by Brian Merchant, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: via:
Friday, September 4, 2015
How to Use a Looper
[ed. I've wanted one of these for a while but thought there might be a bit of a learning curve. If you'd like to see a Master (Mistress?) of looping, check out someone we've featured here before: Josie Charlwood, Feel Good and Electric Feel.]
A Reporter at Wit’s End: The Firebombing of Japan
On the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29 bombers burned 15 square miles of Tokyo, killing 100,000 civilians and leaving more than one million homeless. It was the greatest of the incendiary air raids, but it was far from the last. On March 11, American B-29s bombed Nagoya; March 13, Osaka; March 16, Kobe; March 18, Nagoya again. Five raids in nine days, 32 square miles destroyed in Japan’s four most populous cities — 41 percent of the area the Army Air Forces destroyed in all of Germany during the entire war, and at a total cost of only 22 B-29s and their crews. General Curtis LeMay, who was in charge, quit, at least for a time. He had run out of napalm. Two months later, his stocks replenished, he systematically burned 62 smaller Japanese cities. (...)
St. Clair McKelway, a veteran reporter for the magazine, had taken a leave of absence from the magazine to serve as a public relations officer in the Army Air Forces (AAF). He was stationed with the Bomber Command in Guam at the time, taking his orders directly from General LeMay, and he fully supported LeMay’s belief that the bombing would bring about a swift end to the war. The New Yorker’s managing editor, Harold Ross, accepted McKelway’s reporting. He should have been cautious for two reasons: first, McKelway was no longer his reporter, but was a lieutenant colonel under military orders. And second, Ross knew that McKelway had a history of playing fast and loose with facts. McKelway twisted the bombing story to match the AAF line, changed dates and facts to put himself at the story’s center and flatter his military superiors. Most importantly, he whitewashed what many now view as a war crime: the US’s concerted strategy of incinerating civilians wholesale in their homes.
McKelway’s deception is a cautionary lesson worthy of coverage in the “Wayward Press” series, but it is also a recurring tale in the media. The New Yorker editors were delighted to find they had a reporter working, living, and relaxing with the commanders and the bomber crews destroying Japan. No other publication had that sort of access. Fifty-eight years later, The New York Times would publish accounts of its own reporter, Judith Miller, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. She based her stories on exclusive access to Ahmad Chalabi and to high-level Pentagon officials, an exclusivity she protected fiercely. Like McKelway, much of Miller’s story proved to be false — a mixture of lies, unverified claims, and vanity. Both McKelway’s and Miller’s editors knew their reporters were personally erratic, but the stories were just too good. They had to be published.
St. Clair McKelway, a veteran reporter for the magazine, had taken a leave of absence from the magazine to serve as a public relations officer in the Army Air Forces (AAF). He was stationed with the Bomber Command in Guam at the time, taking his orders directly from General LeMay, and he fully supported LeMay’s belief that the bombing would bring about a swift end to the war. The New Yorker’s managing editor, Harold Ross, accepted McKelway’s reporting. He should have been cautious for two reasons: first, McKelway was no longer his reporter, but was a lieutenant colonel under military orders. And second, Ross knew that McKelway had a history of playing fast and loose with facts. McKelway twisted the bombing story to match the AAF line, changed dates and facts to put himself at the story’s center and flatter his military superiors. Most importantly, he whitewashed what many now view as a war crime: the US’s concerted strategy of incinerating civilians wholesale in their homes.McKelway’s deception is a cautionary lesson worthy of coverage in the “Wayward Press” series, but it is also a recurring tale in the media. The New Yorker editors were delighted to find they had a reporter working, living, and relaxing with the commanders and the bomber crews destroying Japan. No other publication had that sort of access. Fifty-eight years later, The New York Times would publish accounts of its own reporter, Judith Miller, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. She based her stories on exclusive access to Ahmad Chalabi and to high-level Pentagon officials, an exclusivity she protected fiercely. Like McKelway, much of Miller’s story proved to be false — a mixture of lies, unverified claims, and vanity. Both McKelway’s and Miller’s editors knew their reporters were personally erratic, but the stories were just too good. They had to be published.
---
Robert Guillain, an eyewitness, wrote of the Tokyo bombing in his book I Saw Tokyo Burning (1981) that the bombers “circled and criss-crossed the area, leaving great rings of fire behind them,” that a house could be hit by 10 or even more small bombs, which scattered “a kind of flaming dew [napalm] that skittered along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed.” The houses, made of wood and paper, were “lighted from the inside like paper laterns.”
The napalm-bombing campaign worked so smoothly that it had its own momentum, yet it did not receive the press coverage it merited. The bombers’ very efficiency made its operation less newsworthy: there was little to photograph from 30,000 feet, and American military casualties were light. AAF press releases minimized Japanese civilian casualties, and even President Truman seems not to have fully realized what LeMay’s bombers had done. He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing began to do real damage to Japan only in midsummer 1945. Victory in Europe, not the incineration of Japan, was the big story.
The hurricane-force winds puffed up great clots of flame and sent burning planks planing through the air to fell people and set fire to what they touched … In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood … [I]t was often the refugees’ feet that began burning first: the men’s puttees and the women’s trousers caught fire and ignited the rest of their clothing. Proper air-raid clothing as recommended by the government consisted of a heavily padded hood … to protect people’s ears from bomb blasts … The hoods flamed under the rain of sparks; people who did not burn from the feet up burned from the head down. Mothers who carried their babies on their backs, Japanese style, would discover too late that the padding that enveloped the infant had caught fire … Wherever there was a canal, people hurled themselves into the water; in shallow places, people waited, mouths just above the surface of the water. Hundreds of them were later found dead; not drowned, but asphyxiated by the burning air and smoke … In other places, the water got so hot that the luckless bathers were simply boiled alive.And here’s what General LeMay, who had masterminded the raid, wrote in his memoirs (Mission with LeMay: My Story, 1965):
Drafts from the Tokyo fires bounced our airplanes into the sky like ping-pong balls. According to the Tokyo fire chief, the situation was out of control within minutes. It was like an explosive forest fire in dry pine woods. The racing flames engulfed ninety-five fire engines and killed one hundred and twenty-five firemen … About one-fourth of the city went up in smoke that night anyway. More than two hundred and sixty-seven thousand buildings.He quoted the Air Force history of the war, and he italicized the quote out of pride for what he and his men had done: “No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property.”
The napalm-bombing campaign worked so smoothly that it had its own momentum, yet it did not receive the press coverage it merited. The bombers’ very efficiency made its operation less newsworthy: there was little to photograph from 30,000 feet, and American military casualties were light. AAF press releases minimized Japanese civilian casualties, and even President Truman seems not to have fully realized what LeMay’s bombers had done. He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing began to do real damage to Japan only in midsummer 1945. Victory in Europe, not the incineration of Japan, was the big story.
by Patrick Coffey, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
And Now I Have to Say Something About Kim Davis
I've pretty much ignored Kim Davis—save the odd tweet—since she first made the news for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. Davis is the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, an elected position, and everyone from the governor of Kentucky to the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Davis to comply with the post-Obergefell law-of-the-land and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Davis has refused because she's a Christian, you see, and, as a Christian, she believes same-sex marriage to be sinful and unbiblical. Being forced to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples would violate her religious freedom, Davis insists, and lawyers from the odious rightwing Christian special rights group Liberty Counsel have stepped in to protect Davis from the horror of having to do her fucking job.
So, anyway, yesterday afternoon the Supreme Court ordered Davis to immediately start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This morning Davis refused to comply.
Davis and her supporters would like to see the "rule of law" replaced with "the rule of your imaginary friends." The trouble with that, of course, is that people have very different ideas about who their imaginary friends are and what their imaginary friends think is sick, sinful, or icky. (Their imaginary friends, in fact, might not think much of your imaginary friends.) So empowering people—particularly public servants—to violate the rights of their fellow citizens based on the opinions of their various imaginary friends is an invitation to civic chaos.
I would say I can't wait for a Muslim county clerk in, say, Dearborn, Michigan (which has a huge Muslim community), to refuse to issue a marriage license to a Christian couple on the grounds that the this kafir couple hasn't been paying jizya... but that's not going to happen. Religious minorities in this country intuitively understand that to empower religious bigots like Davis is to paint bullseyes on their own backs. So the Jesus-freak goons at the Liberty Counsel work to frame discrimination as a "religious freedom" because they're confident that American Christians will be the ones doing the discriminating, not suffering from it.
Anyway, I haven't written much about Kim Davis because I knew how this was going to play out after Davis first made the news: Davis would continue to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, she would disobey multiple court orders, she would take it all the way to the Supreme Court, she would disobey the Supreme Court's order, she would be charged with contempt (her contempt hearing is scheduled for Thursday), she would possibly wind up in prison and definitely wind up losing her job. Then she would "write" a book about her traumatic experiences—that book is doubtless being ghostwritten for her already—and finally she'll spend the rest of her life on the rightwing speaking circuit playing the persecuted Christian martyr lady. I saw it coming and I didn't want to help build Davis up—I didn't want to help cash in—but my efforts to ignore Davis didn't slow her rise to fame. The events this morning in Rowan County have led the news summary on NPR all day and are currently the top story on the homepage of New York Times.
But no one is stating the obvious: this isn't about Kim Davis standing up for her supposed principles—proof of that in a moment—it's about Kim Davis cashing in. There's a big pile of sweet, sweet bigot money out there waiting for her. If the owners of a pizza parlor could rake in a million dollars just by threatening not to cater the gay wedding no one asked them to cater... just imagine how much of that sweet, sweet bigot money Kim Davis is going to rake in. I'm sure Kim Davis is already imagining it.
And speaking of Kim Davis' principles...
So, anyway, yesterday afternoon the Supreme Court ordered Davis to immediately start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This morning Davis refused to comply.
In a raucous scene in this little town, two same-sex couples walked into the Rowan County Courthouse, trailed by television cameras and chanting protesters on both sides of the issue, only to be turned away by the county clerk, Kim Davis. As one couple, David Ermold and David Moore, tried to engage her in an argument, Ms. Davis said several times that her office would not issue any marriage licenses. “Under whose authority?” Mr. Ermold asked. “Under God’s authority,” she replied.
Ms. Davis at first remained in her office with the blinds drawn, while a deputy clerk told Mr. Ermold and Mr. Moore and the other couple, April Miller and Karen Roberts, that no licenses would be issued Tuesday. But the two men began shouting for her to come out and confront them face to face. “Tell her to come out and face the people she’s discriminating against,” Mr. Ermold said. Ms. Davis emerged briefly, and asked them to leave.Under God's authority.
Davis and her supporters would like to see the "rule of law" replaced with "the rule of your imaginary friends." The trouble with that, of course, is that people have very different ideas about who their imaginary friends are and what their imaginary friends think is sick, sinful, or icky. (Their imaginary friends, in fact, might not think much of your imaginary friends.) So empowering people—particularly public servants—to violate the rights of their fellow citizens based on the opinions of their various imaginary friends is an invitation to civic chaos.
I would say I can't wait for a Muslim county clerk in, say, Dearborn, Michigan (which has a huge Muslim community), to refuse to issue a marriage license to a Christian couple on the grounds that the this kafir couple hasn't been paying jizya... but that's not going to happen. Religious minorities in this country intuitively understand that to empower religious bigots like Davis is to paint bullseyes on their own backs. So the Jesus-freak goons at the Liberty Counsel work to frame discrimination as a "religious freedom" because they're confident that American Christians will be the ones doing the discriminating, not suffering from it.
Anyway, I haven't written much about Kim Davis because I knew how this was going to play out after Davis first made the news: Davis would continue to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, she would disobey multiple court orders, she would take it all the way to the Supreme Court, she would disobey the Supreme Court's order, she would be charged with contempt (her contempt hearing is scheduled for Thursday), she would possibly wind up in prison and definitely wind up losing her job. Then she would "write" a book about her traumatic experiences—that book is doubtless being ghostwritten for her already—and finally she'll spend the rest of her life on the rightwing speaking circuit playing the persecuted Christian martyr lady. I saw it coming and I didn't want to help build Davis up—I didn't want to help cash in—but my efforts to ignore Davis didn't slow her rise to fame. The events this morning in Rowan County have led the news summary on NPR all day and are currently the top story on the homepage of New York Times.
But no one is stating the obvious: this isn't about Kim Davis standing up for her supposed principles—proof of that in a moment—it's about Kim Davis cashing in. There's a big pile of sweet, sweet bigot money out there waiting for her. If the owners of a pizza parlor could rake in a million dollars just by threatening not to cater the gay wedding no one asked them to cater... just imagine how much of that sweet, sweet bigot money Kim Davis is going to rake in. I'm sure Kim Davis is already imagining it.
And speaking of Kim Davis' principles...
by Dan Savage, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Backpack Makers Rethink a Student Staple
The inside of Alejandro Sarete’s backpack is jammed with the objects of a busy student life: smartphone, USB thumb drive, playing cards, lip balm. Cho Young-Uk’s shoulder bag is more minimalist in content: Lenovo laptop and adapter.
Mr. Sarete and Mr. Cho, both students at New York University, have something missing from their stashes: piles of textbooks.
“I don’t really have to carry around textbooks anymore, like I used to in high school,” said Mr. Cho, a sophomore. All but two of his classes — Spanish history and financial accounting — had moved the coursework online.
“I think fewer people have them, for sure,” Mr. Sarete said. “I actually still like physical paper, but I’m an exception.”
As students increasingly go back to school with gadgets instead of textbooks, and no longer need huge backpacks to haul them around, backpack makers in the $2.7 billion industry are rethinking not only the perennial style of back-to-school packs but also the mission of the ubiquitous carrying gear that for decades has been an annual must-buy for students of all ages.
For clues, Eric Rothenhaus and his team at VF Corporation, the apparel giant that owns a leading maker of backpacks, JanSport, sought the advice of some extreme backpack users. They studied mountaineers whose lives can depend on their gear. They talked to the homeless in San Francisco, who live out of shopping carts.
And they visited campuses to observe the habits and habitats of college students, who buy many of the eight million backpacks JanSport sells each year. “We realized we needed to forget everything we knew about the category,” said Mr. Rothenhaus, director of research and design at JanSport.
“We went out to the streets of New York, to San Francisco, to college campuses, and we started to ask: What are the things we carry with us? How do we carry them? And how is that changing?”
Americans bought more backpacks than ever last year— 174 million of them, according to the Travel Goods Association. The bulk of these were purchased during back-to-school shopping season, typically the second-largest sales season for retailers and an important bellwether for year-end holiday sales.
But there is ample hand-wringing within the industry that it is not keeping up with the times. After growing at a fast clip over the last decade, as offices grew more casual and men increasingly switched from briefcases to backpacks, the market for backpack sales in the United States is expected to grow just 3.9 percent this year, according to data from Euromonitor International. That is down from 9 percent five years ago.
“The market for backpacks is becoming saturated and is nearing its peak," Ayako Homma, a Euromonitor research analyst, wrote in an email. Consumers, she said, are “looking for something new and different.”
Those concerns add to pessimism over the entire late-summer shopping season. Consumers will spend about 6 percent less on back-to-school purchases compared with a year ago, the National Retail Federation predicts, in part because there are few new “must have” electronics so far this year.
In backpacks, too, experts say there is a dearth of hits. They say innovation has stalled in a market dominated by VF, which also owns the Eastpak, Timberland and North Face brands and controls 55 percent of backpack sales in the United States. Many packs on students’ backs as they go back to school this week are largely indistinguishable from those their parents carried.
“I think there’s room in the market for something new,” said Lindsey Shirley, a clothing and textiles expert at Utah State University who is developing a new degree in outdoor product design to address a perceived shortfall of fresh talent in the field. “There’s definitely room for innovation.”
Mr. Sarete and Mr. Cho, both students at New York University, have something missing from their stashes: piles of textbooks.“I don’t really have to carry around textbooks anymore, like I used to in high school,” said Mr. Cho, a sophomore. All but two of his classes — Spanish history and financial accounting — had moved the coursework online.
“I think fewer people have them, for sure,” Mr. Sarete said. “I actually still like physical paper, but I’m an exception.”
As students increasingly go back to school with gadgets instead of textbooks, and no longer need huge backpacks to haul them around, backpack makers in the $2.7 billion industry are rethinking not only the perennial style of back-to-school packs but also the mission of the ubiquitous carrying gear that for decades has been an annual must-buy for students of all ages.
For clues, Eric Rothenhaus and his team at VF Corporation, the apparel giant that owns a leading maker of backpacks, JanSport, sought the advice of some extreme backpack users. They studied mountaineers whose lives can depend on their gear. They talked to the homeless in San Francisco, who live out of shopping carts.
And they visited campuses to observe the habits and habitats of college students, who buy many of the eight million backpacks JanSport sells each year. “We realized we needed to forget everything we knew about the category,” said Mr. Rothenhaus, director of research and design at JanSport.
“We went out to the streets of New York, to San Francisco, to college campuses, and we started to ask: What are the things we carry with us? How do we carry them? And how is that changing?”
Americans bought more backpacks than ever last year— 174 million of them, according to the Travel Goods Association. The bulk of these were purchased during back-to-school shopping season, typically the second-largest sales season for retailers and an important bellwether for year-end holiday sales.
But there is ample hand-wringing within the industry that it is not keeping up with the times. After growing at a fast clip over the last decade, as offices grew more casual and men increasingly switched from briefcases to backpacks, the market for backpack sales in the United States is expected to grow just 3.9 percent this year, according to data from Euromonitor International. That is down from 9 percent five years ago.
“The market for backpacks is becoming saturated and is nearing its peak," Ayako Homma, a Euromonitor research analyst, wrote in an email. Consumers, she said, are “looking for something new and different.”
Those concerns add to pessimism over the entire late-summer shopping season. Consumers will spend about 6 percent less on back-to-school purchases compared with a year ago, the National Retail Federation predicts, in part because there are few new “must have” electronics so far this year.
In backpacks, too, experts say there is a dearth of hits. They say innovation has stalled in a market dominated by VF, which also owns the Eastpak, Timberland and North Face brands and controls 55 percent of backpack sales in the United States. Many packs on students’ backs as they go back to school this week are largely indistinguishable from those their parents carried.
“I think there’s room in the market for something new,” said Lindsey Shirley, a clothing and textiles expert at Utah State University who is developing a new degree in outdoor product design to address a perceived shortfall of fresh talent in the field. “There’s definitely room for innovation.”
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Skylake
The sixth generation of Intel’s Core processors, known more approachably as Skylake, will start invading new laptops and desktops over the following weeks and months. With them, they’ll bring a few enhancements you should know about—especially if your current rig is starting to show some rust.
Before we get started, though, it’s probably healthy to manage some expectations. Better processors will always be welcome, but chips aren’t progressing in a way that results in huge performance leaps the way they did a decade ago, says 451 analyst Peter Christy. Rather than raw computing power, the focus has shifted to size and efficiency.
“What you have to do is take these better transistors, which is the right way to think about what Intel does, and purpose them in a different way,” explains Christy. “A way you can purpose them is by shrinking them, or making them cheaper, or more power efficient.”
Fortunately, cheaper, thinner, and more efficient are all traits that are still very much worth chasing. And Skylake should provide all three.
A Big Leap From Your Old Box
Intel has focused its Skylake comparisons on notebooks from five years ago, which is a bit like comparing standardized test scores between a five-year-old and his 15-year-old sister. Even still, the gaps are impressively wide.
Next to those rickety 2010 machines, Skylake delivers more than double the speed, triple the battery life, and wakes up four times faster. It also enables features like WiDi (Intel’s mirroring solution), Cortana, and touch interactions that would not have been possible five years ago.
Of course, all of these specs and facts are also mostly true of Broadwell, last year’s latest and greatest Core processor, next to which Skylake marks far less significant gains; a 10 percent speed boost, the ability to scratch out a bit more battery, and a graphical bump that will mostly be appreciated by serious gamers.
Still, Intel’s choice to point to older machines isn’t simply a marketing ploy, says Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategies. It’s legitimately the most helpful point of comparison for a huge number of people.
“There are literally over 600 million PCs out there that are over four years old,” says Moorhead. “It’s not that people aren’t using their PCs, they’re just using them less because they’re spreading their computing across phones, tablets, and watches.” In other words, the number of people to whom Intel’s gaudier comparisons apply is nearly twice the population of the United States. If you’re one of them, you may feel a bit like Rip Van Acer.
“The right comparison is to look at what those 600 million people are using,” Moorhead continues, citing the bulk and dilapidated batteries of those computational dinosaurs. “What they’re looking at now is for $499 to $699 they can get a very thin PC, with touch, more than likely seven to eight hours of battery life, weigh maybe 40 percent less. It will probably be able to rotate back, if you want to use it as a tablet.” Throw in features like Intel’s RealSense camera, which obviates the need for a system password by logging you in based only on your face, and the convenience factor of fewer cables, and you’ve got a strong case finally to upgrade.
So no, it’s not a surprise that Skylake is significantly better than the Core processors of 2010. What might catch you off-guard, though, is just how much more PCs can do overall.
Before we get started, though, it’s probably healthy to manage some expectations. Better processors will always be welcome, but chips aren’t progressing in a way that results in huge performance leaps the way they did a decade ago, says 451 analyst Peter Christy. Rather than raw computing power, the focus has shifted to size and efficiency.“What you have to do is take these better transistors, which is the right way to think about what Intel does, and purpose them in a different way,” explains Christy. “A way you can purpose them is by shrinking them, or making them cheaper, or more power efficient.”
Fortunately, cheaper, thinner, and more efficient are all traits that are still very much worth chasing. And Skylake should provide all three.
A Big Leap From Your Old Box
Intel has focused its Skylake comparisons on notebooks from five years ago, which is a bit like comparing standardized test scores between a five-year-old and his 15-year-old sister. Even still, the gaps are impressively wide.
Next to those rickety 2010 machines, Skylake delivers more than double the speed, triple the battery life, and wakes up four times faster. It also enables features like WiDi (Intel’s mirroring solution), Cortana, and touch interactions that would not have been possible five years ago.
Of course, all of these specs and facts are also mostly true of Broadwell, last year’s latest and greatest Core processor, next to which Skylake marks far less significant gains; a 10 percent speed boost, the ability to scratch out a bit more battery, and a graphical bump that will mostly be appreciated by serious gamers.
Still, Intel’s choice to point to older machines isn’t simply a marketing ploy, says Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategies. It’s legitimately the most helpful point of comparison for a huge number of people.
“There are literally over 600 million PCs out there that are over four years old,” says Moorhead. “It’s not that people aren’t using their PCs, they’re just using them less because they’re spreading their computing across phones, tablets, and watches.” In other words, the number of people to whom Intel’s gaudier comparisons apply is nearly twice the population of the United States. If you’re one of them, you may feel a bit like Rip Van Acer.
“The right comparison is to look at what those 600 million people are using,” Moorhead continues, citing the bulk and dilapidated batteries of those computational dinosaurs. “What they’re looking at now is for $499 to $699 they can get a very thin PC, with touch, more than likely seven to eight hours of battery life, weigh maybe 40 percent less. It will probably be able to rotate back, if you want to use it as a tablet.” Throw in features like Intel’s RealSense camera, which obviates the need for a system password by logging you in based only on your face, and the convenience factor of fewer cables, and you’ve got a strong case finally to upgrade.
So no, it’s not a surprise that Skylake is significantly better than the Core processors of 2010. What might catch you off-guard, though, is just how much more PCs can do overall.
by Brian Barrett, Wired | Read more:
Image: Intel
Surprise Military Reunions At NFL Games Reach Peak Bullshit
[ed. See also: The NFL's Salute To Service Is Horseshit]
During last weekend’s preseason St. Louis Rams game, a familiar ritual played out: With a stadium full of fans and a television audience watching, Rams cheerleader Candace Ruocco Valentine was surprised by the arrival of her husband August Valentine, a Marine Corps first lieutenant, who had just returned home from service abroad.
As a series of visuals, shown in the video below, it was a sterling example of the genre. The All-American cheerleader literally drops her pom-poms to run toward her husband, relief written across her face as she does; the happy young couple embraces; and Rampage, an anthropomorphic ram, looks on approvingly at their release from anxiety and fear.
As a set of facts, though, the heartwarming moment was basically bullshit, despite which the viral glurge machine went ahead and ran with the story of a joint triumph for the Valentines, the St. Louis Rams, the NFL, and the Pentagon.
by Tom Ley, Deadspin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality
At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments. This meager figure is often explained as the consequence of a regrettable reality: qualified students from disadvantaged backgrounds simply do not exist in significant numbers. But it’s not so. A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do. Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.
Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams
A few years ago, the writer Joy Williams’s favorite church needed to dispose of a few extra pews after a renovation. Williams attends the church only in April and October, when her frequent cross-country drives take her to Laramie, Wyo., but she wanted a pew anyway. She borrowed a trailer, got a friend to help her load the pew and drove a thousand miles, pulling it behind her enormous Bronco, her two German shepherds in the cab with her. Now the long, dark pew lives in her house in Tucson.
When Williams was a child, her father was a minister at a Congregational church in Portland, Me. ‘‘He gave a beautiful sermon,’’ she said as we hiked through Arizona’s Santa Catalina foothills on trails she walks every morning. I asked if she had ever considered being a preacher like her father: Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy. ‘‘Oh, no, I’m too shy,’’ she said, before lapsing into a companionable silence, the only sound her Chuck Taylors’ crunch on the trailbed. ‘‘Maybe that’s what I need,’’ she cawed suddenly. ‘‘A pulpit that I take from reading to reading with me.’’
Williams is wiry and tanned, her hands and face biblically wrinkled. She is 71. Years ago, she lost her eyeglasses before a university appearance and had to wear prescription sunglasses at the lectern; appreciating, perhaps, the remoteness they facilitate, she has worn them ever since at all hours of the day and night. Not unlike that church pew in her living room, the sunglasses seem like an act of disregard for everyday comfort, an eccentricity that makes everyone else uneasy but Williams more secure.
It was just after dawn, but already the air was stifling. We reached a summit, and Williams drank from her dogs’ scratched and dented water bottle. Fat black ants swarmed into a crevice near our feet. Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us.
To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’
The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal. In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you. Other writers I spoke to about Williams’s work expressed a sense of awe at the grandeur underlying her stories of weirdos and misfits. ‘‘She’s a visionary,’’ Karen Russell told me, ‘‘and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’
This month, Knopf will publish ‘‘The Visiting Privilege,’’ a collection of 46 stories that cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance. The collection’s epigraph is a verse from 1 Corinthians: ‘‘We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’’ When Don DeLillo called to talk about Williams, he quoted that verse back to me. Then he said: ‘‘This is the definition of the classic American short story. And this is what Joy writes so beautifully.’’
When Williams was a child, her father was a minister at a Congregational church in Portland, Me. ‘‘He gave a beautiful sermon,’’ she said as we hiked through Arizona’s Santa Catalina foothills on trails she walks every morning. I asked if she had ever considered being a preacher like her father: Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy. ‘‘Oh, no, I’m too shy,’’ she said, before lapsing into a companionable silence, the only sound her Chuck Taylors’ crunch on the trailbed. ‘‘Maybe that’s what I need,’’ she cawed suddenly. ‘‘A pulpit that I take from reading to reading with me.’’Williams is wiry and tanned, her hands and face biblically wrinkled. She is 71. Years ago, she lost her eyeglasses before a university appearance and had to wear prescription sunglasses at the lectern; appreciating, perhaps, the remoteness they facilitate, she has worn them ever since at all hours of the day and night. Not unlike that church pew in her living room, the sunglasses seem like an act of disregard for everyday comfort, an eccentricity that makes everyone else uneasy but Williams more secure.
It was just after dawn, but already the air was stifling. We reached a summit, and Williams drank from her dogs’ scratched and dented water bottle. Fat black ants swarmed into a crevice near our feet. Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us.
To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’
The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal. In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you. Other writers I spoke to about Williams’s work expressed a sense of awe at the grandeur underlying her stories of weirdos and misfits. ‘‘She’s a visionary,’’ Karen Russell told me, ‘‘and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’
This month, Knopf will publish ‘‘The Visiting Privilege,’’ a collection of 46 stories that cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance. The collection’s epigraph is a verse from 1 Corinthians: ‘‘We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’’ When Don DeLillo called to talk about Williams, he quoted that verse back to me. Then he said: ‘‘This is the definition of the classic American short story. And this is what Joy writes so beautifully.’’
by Dan Kois, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: Raymond Meeks
Google’s Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers
Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.
It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.
“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”
Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down on the highway.
For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded its tests in July to Austin, Tex.
Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.
“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was at fault.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.
“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”
Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down on the highway.
For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded its tests in July to Austin, Tex.
Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.
“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was at fault.
by Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Gordon De Los Santos/Google
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
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