Complex Systems, Feedback Loops, and the Bubble-Crash Cycle

Our expectations for a global economic downturn, including a U.S. recession, have hardened considerably in the past few weeks, with a continued expectation of a retreat in equity prices on the order of 40-55% over the completion of the current cycle as a base case. The immediacy of both concerns would be significantly reduced if we were to observe a shift to uniformly favorable market internals. Last week, market conditions moved further away from that supportive possibility. As I’ve regularly emphasized since mid-2014, market internals are the hinge between an overvalued market that tends to continue higher from an overvalued market that collapses; the hinge between Fed easing that supports the market and Fed easing that does nothing to stem a market plunge; and the hinge between weak leading economic data that subsequently recovers and weak leading economic data that devolves into a recession.

We continue to observe deterioration in what I call the “order surplus” (new orders + order backlogs - inventories) that typically leads economic activity. Indeed, across a variety of national and regional economic surveys, as well as international data, order backlogs have dried up while inventories have expanded. Understand that recessions are not primarily driven by weakness in consumer spending. Year-over-year real personal consumption has only declined in the worst recessions, and year-over-year nominal consumption only declined in 2009, 1938 and 1932. Rather, what collapses in a recession is the inventory component of gross private investment, and as a result of scale-backs in production, real GDP falls relative to real final sales.

Emphatically, recessions are primarily points where the mix of goods and services demanded by the economy becomes misaligned with the mix of goods and services being produced. As consumer preferences shift, technology introduces new products that dominate old ones, or market signals are distorted by policy, the effects always take time to be observed and fully appreciated by all economic participants. Mismatches between demand and production build in the interim, and at the extreme, new industries can entirely replace the need for old ones. Recessions represent the adjustment to those mismatches. Push reasonable adjustments off with policy distortions (like easy credit) for too long, and the underlying mismatches become larger and ultimately more damaging. (...)

While a weak equity market, in and of itself, is not tightly correlated with subsequent economic weakness, equity market weakness combined with weak leading economic data is associated with an enormous jump in the probability of an economic recession. See in particular From Risk to Guarded Expectation of Recession, and When Market Trends Break, Even Borderline Data is Recessionary.

The chart below presents the same data as the one above, except that it shows only values corresponding to periods where the S&P 500 was below its level of 6-months prior (as it is at present). Other values are set to zero. Again, while a uniform improvement in market internals would relieve the immediacy of our present economic and market concerns, we already observe deterioration in leading economic measures that - coupled with financial market behavior - has always been associated with U.S. recessions.

The immediate conclusion that one might draw is that the Federal Reserve made a “policy mistake” by raising interest rates in December. But that would far understate the actual damage contributed by the Fed. No, the real policy mistake was to provoke years of yield-seeking speculation through Ben Bernanke’s deranged policy of quantitative easing, which propagated like a virus to central banks across the globe. The extreme and extended nature of the recent speculative episode means that we do not simply have to worry about a run-of-the-mill recession or an ordinary bear market. We instead have to be concerned about the potential for another global financial crisis, born of years of capital misallocation and expansion of low-quality debt both here in the U.S. and in the emerging economies. For a review of these concerns, see The Next Big Short: The Third Crest of a Rolling Tsunami.

by John P. Hussman, Ph D. Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Funds

Why Americans Dress So Casually

As you look at that hoodie you got as a Christmas or Hanukkah present, you may wonder why you didn't get something a little more fancy as a gift. Don't take it personally. It turns out that Americans are a decidedly casual society when it comes to fashion. In this piece, originally published in September, we examined how that came to be. In this conversation, we explore what happened in America that made us dress so casually.

Look around you, and you'll likely notice a sea of different outfits. You might see similar articles of clothing — even the same ones — worn by different people, but rarely do you find two pairings of tops, bottoms, shoes, and accessories that are exactly alike.

That wasn't always the case, said Deirdre Clemente, a historian of 20th century American culture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose research focuses on fashion and clothing. Americans were far more formal, and formulaic dressers, not all that long ago. Men wore suits, almost without fail — not just to work, but also at school. And women, for the most part, wore long dresses.

Clemente has written extensively about the evolution of American dress in the 1900s, a period that, she said, was marked, maybe more than anything else, by a single but powerful trend: As everyday fashion broke from tradition, it shed much of its socioeconomic implications — people no longer dress to feign wealth like they once did — and took on a new meaning.

The shift has, above all, led toward casualness in the way we dress. It can be seen on college campuses, in classrooms, where students attend in sweatpants, and in the workplace, where Silicon Valley busy bodies are outfitted with hoodies and T-shirts. That change, the change in how we dress here in America, has been brewing since the 1920s, and owes itself to the rise of specific articles of clothing. What's more, it underscores important shifts in the way we use and understand the shirts and pants we wear.

I spoke with Clemente to learn more about the origins of casual dress, and the staying power of the trend. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start by talking a bit about what you study. You’re a historian, and you focus on American culture as it pertains to fashion. Is that right?

I'm a cultural historian. I’m a 20th century expert, so don’t ask me anything about the Civil War. And my focus is clothing in fashion. So I’m a little bit of a business historian, a little bit of a historian of marketing, and a little bit of a historian of gender. When you kind of mix all of those things together, all those subsections of history, you get what I study.

So that scene from "The Devil Wears Prada," when Meryl Streep criticizes Anne Hathaway for believing she isn’t affected by fashion, it must resonate with you.

Well you know, it’s just so true. People say, "Oh well, you know, I don’t care about fashion." They go to the Gap, they go to Old Navy, and they all dress alike, they wear these uniforms. The thing that I really harp on is that, that in and of itself is a choice, it’s a personal choice, because there are many people who don’t do that. In buying those uniforms, you’re saying something about yourself, and about how you feel about clothing and culture. There is no such thing as an unaffected fashion choice. Anti-fashion is fashion, because it’s a reaction to the current visual culture, a negation of it.

by Roberto A. Ferdman, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Barry Wetcher

When Philosophy Lost Its Way

[ed. I can think of one exception - Eric Hoffer.]

The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods — ancient, medieval and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism, analytic versus Continental), or into various core areas (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics). It can also, of course, be viewed through the critical lens of gender or racial exclusion, as a discipline almost entirely fashioned for and by white European men.

Yet despite the richness and variety of these accounts, all of them pass over a momentous turning point: the locating of philosophy within a modern institution (the research university) in the late 19th century. This institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.

Take this simple detail: Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central home. Philosophers could be found anywhere — serving as diplomats, living off pensions, grinding lenses, as well as within a university. Afterward, if they were “serious” thinkers, the expectation was that philosophers would inhabit the research university. Against the inclinations of Socrates, philosophers became experts like other disciplinary specialists. This occurred even as they taught their students the virtues of Socratic wisdom, which highlights the role of the philosopher as the non-expert, the questioner, the gadfly.

Philosophy, then, as the French thinker Bruno Latour would have it, was “purified” — separated from society in the process of modernization. This purification occurred in response to at least two events. The first was the development of the natural sciences, as a field of study clearly distinct from philosophy, circa 1870, and the appearance of the social sciences in the decade thereafter. Before then, scientists were comfortable thinking of themselves as “natural philosophers” — philosophers who studied nature; and the predecessors of social scientists had thought of themselves as “moral philosophers.”

The second event was the placing of philosophy as one more discipline alongside these sciences within the modern research university. A result was that philosophy, previously the queen of the disciplines, was displaced, as the natural and social sciences divided the world between them.

This is not to claim that philosophy had reigned unchallenged before the 19th century. The role of philosophy had shifted across the centuries and in different countries. But philosophy in the sense of a concern about who we are and how we should live had formed the core of the university since the church schools of the 11th century. Before the development of a scientific research culture, conflicts among philosophy, medicine, theology and law consisted of internecine battles rather than clashes across yawning cultural divides. Indeed, these older fields were widely believed to hang together in a grand unity of knowledge — a unity directed toward the goal of the good life. But this unity shattered under the weight of increasing specialization by the turn of the 20th century.

by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, NY Times |  Read more:
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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A Simple Blood Test For Every Form of Cancer

Catching cancer early is an incredible challenge, but a new way to detect it in the blood would have the potential to totally revolutionize cancer treatment in just a few years.

Illumina, the $25 billion maker of gene sequencing technology, has created a new company that's trying to invent a blood test to identify all cancers in their early stages, something that would be a tremendous help in diagnosing the illness before it is too difficult to treat effectively.

The team behind the announcement is not the first to attempt something of this nature, and previous efforts by other companies have been criticized for having too little research behind them or focusing too much on detection rather than treatment. Crucially, this blood test does not exist yet, and while scientists will be working furiously to try to make it happen, it doesn't mean they will succeed.

But this latest bet is one of the best-funded, with a number of illustrious scientists already involved — and Illumina's backing may give it a critical boost.

The new company, called Grail (as in, it's trying to achieve something considered the Holy Grail for cancer researchers) hopes to have a pan-cancer blood test by 2019, an extremely ambitious goal.

That would mean that anyone could add such a test onto their annual physical — no need for separate tests for different types of lung cancer, prostate cancer, or any other form of the illness.

Grail is launching with $100 million in Series A financing, backed by Illumina, Bill Gates, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions. Illumina and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center are partnering to help launch a study to see if Grail's test can actually do what they hope it will do.

"We look forward to a day in the not too distant future where there would be a simple blood test for every form of cancer," Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute and a board member of Grail, said on a press call on Sunday.

The key to this effort is the ability to detect what's known as circulating tumor DNA, or CTDNA. In recent years, doctors have discovered that the genetic material from cancerous tumors starts circulating in our bodies.

"It's abundantly clear that these molecules are in the blood," Illumina CEO Jay Flatley said on the call. (...)

Flatley is well aware of the minefield Grail is entering. "If you look at this business, it’s littered with failures. With a few exceptions, screening tests have been invariably horrible," he told the MIT Technology Review. "It’s a big challenge."

by Kevin Loria, Tech Insider |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Biological 'Clock' Discovered in Sea Turtle Shells

Radiocarbon dating of atomic bomb fallout found in sea turtle shells can be used to reliably estimate the ages, growth rates and reproductive maturity of sea turtle populations in the wild, a new study led by Duke University and NOAA researchers finds.

The technique provides more accurate estimates than other methods scientists currently use and may help shed new light on factors influencing the decline and lack of recovery of some endangered sea turtles populations.

“The most basic questions of sea turtle life history are also the most elusive,” said Kyle Van Houtan, fisheries research ecologist at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and adjunct associate professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Van Houtan and his colleagues analyzed hard tissue from the shells of 36 deceased hawksbill sea turtles collected since the 1950s. The turtles either died naturally or were harvested for their decorative shells as part of the global tortoiseshell trade. The researchers worked with federal agencies, law enforcement and museum archives to obtain the specimens.

The scientists were able to estimate each turtle’s approximate age by comparing the bomb-testing radiocarbon accumulated in its shell to background rates of bomb-testing radiocarbon deposited in Hawaii’s corals. Levels of carbon-14 increased rapidly in the biosphere from the mid-1950s to about 1970 as a result of Cold War-era nuclear tests but have dropped at predictable rates since then, allowing scientists to determine the age of an organism based on its carbon-14 content.

Van Houtan and his team were able to estimate median growth rates and ages of sexual maturity in the collected specimens by comparing their radiocarbon measurements to those of other wild and captive hawksbill populations whose growth rates were known.

This is the first time carbon-14 dating of shell tissue has been used to estimate age, growth and maturity in sea turtles. Previously, scientists employed other, less precise methods such as using turtle length as a proxy for age, or analyzing the incomplete growth layers in hollow bone tissue.

The researchers published their peer-reviewed research January 6 in the Proceedings of Royal Society B.

Aside from giving scientists a more reliable tool for estimating turtle growth and maturity, Van Houtan believes the new technique sheds light on why some populations -- including Hawaiian hawksbills, the smallest sea turtle population on Earth -- aren’t rebounding as quickly as expected despite years of concerted conservation.

“Our analysis finds that hawksbills in the Hawaii population deposit eight growth lines annually, which suggests that females begin breeding at 29 years -- significantly later than any other hawksbill population in the world. This may explain why they haven’t yet rebounded,” Van Houtan said.

The bomb radiocarbon tests also indicate another red flag, he said.

“They appear to have been omnivores as recently as the 1980s. Now, they appear to be primarily herbivores. Such a dramatic decline in their food supply could delay growth and maturity, and may reflect ecosystem changes that are quite ominous in the long term for hawksbill populations in Hawaii,” he said.

by Kyle S. Van Houtan, Duke University |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

My Right to Die

Assisted suicide, my family, and me.

Every story has a beginning. This one starts in late 2001, when my father-in-law fractured three of his ribs. Harry was a retired physician, and after a thorough workup that he insisted on, it turned out that his bone density was severely compromised for no immediately apparent reason. Further tests eventually revealed the cause: He had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.

Harry's cancer was caught early, and it progressed slowly. By 2007, however, it had taken over his body. When my wife saw him in early 2008, she remarked that he looked like someone in a lot of pain but trying not to show it—despite the fact that he was taking oxycodone, a powerful opiate.

During a career that lasted more than three decades, he had watched all too many of his patients struggle with their final months, and this experience had persuaded him that he would take his own life if he found himself dying of an agonizing and clearly terminal illness. Now he was. Finally, on the evening of January 29, he stumbled and fell during the night, and decided his time had come: He was afraid if he delayed any longer he'd become physically unable to remain in control of his own destiny.

This was important. Since Harry lived in California, where assisted suicide was illegal, he had to be able to take his life without help. Because of this, he initially intended not to tell either of his daughters about his decision. He wanted to run absolutely no risk that merely by being with him in his final moments, or even knowing of his plans, they'd be held responsible for his death.

Luckily, neither my wife nor her sister had to learn of their father's death via a call from the morgue. A friend persuaded him to call both of them, and on January 30 we all drove out to Palm Springs to say our last goodbyes. After that, Harry wrote a note explaining that he was about to take his own life and that no one else had provided any assistance. It was time. He categorically forbade any of us from so much as taking his arm. He walked into his bedroom, put a plastic bag over his head, and opened up a tank of helium. A few minutes later he was dead.

Why Helium? Why the note?

Harry was a methodical man, and when he decided he would eventually take his own life, he naturally looked for advice. The place he turned to was the Hemlock Society, founded in 1980 with a mission of fighting to legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill adults.

When we went through Harry's files after his death, we found a slim manila folder with several pages copied from various Hemlock publications, nestled between a bunch of fat folders containing financial information, his will, and his medical records. One of the pages recommended that you write a note making it clear that you had taken your own life, unassisted by anyone else. This was meant for the sheriff or the coroner, and was designed to protect anyone who might be suspected of illegally aiding you.

There were also several pages with instructions on how to take your life using an "inert gas hood kit." This is a fairly simple and painless way to die, since your body reflexively wants to breathe, but doesn't really care what it breathes. If you breathe pure helium, or any other inert gas, you won't feel any sensation of suffocation at all. You simply fall unconscious after a minute or so, and within a few more minutes, you die.

by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Kendrick Brinson

Tiziana Loiacono, Aspettando

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An Interview With Karl Ove Knausgaard

[ed. I've been trying to read My Struggle for a while now and have to admit, I'm about to give up the struggle. I thought Bolaño’s 2666 was a tough read, but for some reason this one seems even tougher (mostly because the narrative feels digressive and somewhat banal. I guess I just don't get it. Postscript: 200 pages in it's getting better.)]

Last September in Oslo, the New Yorker critic James Wood conducted a public interview with the ­novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard as part of the third annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival. Their audience filled the main auditorium of Litteraturhuset—the writers’ center across the street from the royal ­palace—beyond capacity, with disappointed latecomers crowding the café next door.

An estimated one in ten Norwegians owns a copy of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Extreme in its candor, by turns earnest and satiric, attentive to the minutiae of postmodern family life, My Struggle marks a revolution in Scandinavian fiction and, in the United States, has sparked more critical discussion than any translated work since Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. To date, only the first three volumes of My Struggle have been published in English; an excerpt from Book Four follows on page 87. We are grateful to Wood and Knausgaard, and to the organizer of the festival, Frode Saugestad, for allowing us to publish this exchange.

WOOD

Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?

KNAUSGAARD

That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true.

WOOD

But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?

KNAUSGAARD

Yes, it is.

WOOD

It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?

KNAUSGAARD

No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by ­doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on.

The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I ­remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, 
and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing.

WOOD

And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention 
to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in 
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the ­object, not on its ­category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?

KNAUSGAARD

Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend 
to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway.

by James Wood and Karl Knausgaard, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Last Outlaw Poet

[ed. I was browsing an old copy of Rolling Stone the other day and rediscovered a wonderful article I'd forgotten about, written by Ethan Hawke (the actor) in 2009. Unfortunately, it's no longer available on Rolling Stone's web site and seems to have been scrubbed completely from all internet searches. Isn't that weird? Apparently there was some dispute concerning the veracity of the incident described below (you can look it up yourself), but after googling it awhile it sounds like it happened just the way it's described. So, anyway. If you're in your local library, check out the April, 2009 issue. It's a great read.]

Standing backstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York, leaning against a crumbling brick wall in the dark, I could barely see Kris Kristofferson standing to my left. Willie Nelson was in the shadows to my right. Ray Charles was standing beside Willie, idly shifting his weight back and forth. A bit farther along the wall were Elvis Costello, Wyclef Jean, Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne, Paul Simon and respective managers, friends and family. Everybody was nervous and tight. We were there for Willie Nelson's 70th birthday concert in 2003.

Up from the basement came one of country music's brightest stars (who shall remain nameless). At that moment in time, the Star had a monster radio hit about bombing America's enemies back into the Stone Age.

"Happy birthday," the Star said to Willie, breezing by us. As he passed Kristofferson in one long, confident stride, out of the corner of his mouth came "None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris."

"What the fuck did you just say to me?" Kris growled, stepping forward.

"Oh, no," groaned Willie under his breath. "Don't get Kris all riled up."

"You heard me," the Star said, walking away in the darkness.

"Don't turn your back to me, boy," Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

The Star turned around: "I don't want any problems, Kris — I just want you to tone it down."

"You ever worn your country's uniform?" Kris asked rhetorically.

"What?"

"Don't 'What?' me, boy! You heard the question. You just don't like the answer." He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air. "I asked, 'Have you ever served your country?' The answer is, no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man's life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!" I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me. "You don't know what the hell you are talking about!"

"Whatever," the young Star muttered.

Ray Charles stood motionless. Willie Nelson looked at me and shrugged mischievously like a kid in the back of the classroom.

Kristofferson took a deep inhale and leaned against the wall, still vibrating with adrenaline. He looked over at Willie as if to say, "Don't say a word." Then his eyes found me.

"You know what Waylon Jennings said about guys like him?" he whispered.

I shook my head.

"They're doin' to country music what pantyhose did to finger-fuckin'." (...)

Kris Kristofferson is cut from a thicker, more intricate cloth than most celebrities today: Imagine if Brad Pitt had also written a Number One single for someone like Amy Winehouse, was considered among the finest songwriters of his generation, had been a Rhodes scholar, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, a boxer, a professional helicopter pilot — and was as politically outspoken as Sean Penn. That's what a motherfuckin' badass Kris Kristofferson was in 1979. And now if you go online and watch the video for his 2006 song "In the News," it's obvious he is still very much that man.

by Ethan Hawke, Rolling Stone | Read more:

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Obama as Literary Critic

[ed. See also: Barack Obama and the intellectual as President]

Recently, while writing an essay on T.S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, “Eliot and the Shudder,” a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliot’s unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper on The Waste Land for a college course.

Obama’s letter appeared in a biography by David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story, published in 2012, and prompted dozens of comments, some praising, some condescending. What struck me on rereading it was that, hasty and elliptical as it was, it exemplified literary criticism—like Frank Kermode’s—at its best, and showed why it might be worth doing. It also pointed toward something unsettling about its author’s later career.

This is what the young Obama wrote to his friend, divided into paragraphs for easier reading on screen:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. 

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. 

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) 

And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Obama begins with a strikingly suggestive insight into Eliot’s literary and religious tradition and his special relation to it: Eliot is one of a line of Protestant visionary and apocalyptic writers from Thomas Münzer (or Müntzer) in the sixteenth century to Yeats in the twentieth, but distinguishes himself by finding his apocalypse in the actual world, not in a visionary one. Obama then describes Eliot’s double impulse toward, on one hand, a visionary realm of “ecstatic chaos” together with “asexual purity,” and, on the other, the “lifeless mechanistic order” and “brutal sexual reality” of everyday existence. And he recognizes that Eliot accepts this double impulse as a tragic fate that he can never transcend or escape.

Obama sees that Eliot’s conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot’s conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends.

by Edward Mendelson, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Thomas Grauman/Corbis

How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans Into Suckers

Full disclosure: I am a 36-year-old dude who bores easily, drinks I.P.A.s and wears sports-themed T-shirts, especially ones with faded, nostalgic logos that suggest better times. In my early 20s, I developed a gambling problem that I’ve since learned to spread out over a variety of low-stakes games — Scrabble, pitch-and-putt golf, my stock profile on ETrade. I watch somewhere between six and 20 hours of basketball per week. I try to keep up with the usual cultural things — documentaries about conflict in South Sudan, Netflix binge shows, memes — but whenever I find myself awake in the early morning and there is no email to answer and no news to track, I watch SportsCenter, or I scan the previous night’s N.B.A. box scores to check up on Porzingis, or I read some dissertation on Johnny Cueto’s unusual ability to hold runners on first base. It’s not the most glamorous way to spend my time, but what can I do? My mind, at its most aimless, obsessively seeks out sports information. I am, in other words, the target demographic for the daily fantasy sports industry.

Since the start of this N.F.L. season, I have lost roughly $1,900 on DraftKings and FanDuel, the two main proprietors of daily fantasy sports (D.F.S.). I play pretty much every night. This requires me to pick a team of players — whether baseball, basketball, football, hockey or soccer — each of whom have been assigned a dollar amount, and fit them all under a salary cap. I base these lineups on reasonably educated hunches, something to the effect of: I’ll play the Indiana Pacers point guard George Hill tonight, because he’s going up against the New Orleans Pelicans, who have been a defensive train wreck this season, especially on the perimeter. Also, Monta Ellis, Hill’s back-court partner, is sitting out, which means more of the usage load should fall to Hill. Sometimes, usually while walking the dog, I’ll even sit down on a park bench and check to make sure that at least some of those facts are real. My bets range anywhere from $3 to $100. My losses in D.F.S. are not financially crippling, nor are they happening at a rate that should be cause for concern. But every gambler, whatever the size of the problem, wants to know that he or she has some chance of winning.

The ads, I admit, are what got me. For the first 10 months of 2015, DraftKings and FanDuel spent more than a combined $200 million on advertising, a surge that peaked at the start of the football season, when a DraftKings ad ran seemingly every couple of minutes on television. In addition to the ads, many of which showed regular guys like me who had won, in the DraftKings parlance, “a shipload of money,” there were DraftKings lounges in N.F.L. stadiums, FanDuel sidelines in N.B.A. arenas and daily fantasy advice segments in the sports sections of newspapers and all over ESPN, which, during the first weeks of the N.F.L. season, felt as if it had been converted into a nonstop publicity machine for DraftKings. As of August, both companies had billion-dollar valuations and promised weekly competitions with huge payouts and fast and easy withdrawals.

Initially, D.F.S. seemed harmless enough — on Sunday mornings, I would challenge a couple of my friends in California to head-to-head match-ups for $50 and put a few $20 entries into the million-dollar fantasy-football contest. Then, on Sunday, Sept. 27, Ethan Haskell, an employee at DraftKings, inadvertently published information that could have given him an edge over his competitors. That day, Haskell won $350,000 in prizes on FanDuel. (DraftKings later concluded, in an internal review conducted by a former United States attorney, that Haskell obtained the information after the deadline for submitting his lineup in the contest and couldn’t use it for profit.) Haskell’s accidental disclosure and subsequent bonanza caught the attention of several media outlets, including The Times, leading to a volley of articles and columns that placed the operations of daily fantasy sports under close scrutiny.Continue reading the main story

In the three months that have passed since Haskell’s post, DraftKings and FanDuel have been reeling. In October, Nevada joined Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Washington on the list of states where DraftKings and FanDuel cannot be played. On Nov. 10, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York issued cease-and-desist letters to the two companies, and later filed lawsuits against the two companies. In response, a judge ordered them to stop accepting bets in the state. (The judge’s order has now been stayed, and both companies continue to do business in New York. Last week, Schneiderman asked a judge to order DraftKings and FanDuel to reimburse the money New York State residents have lost on the site.) On Dec. 23, Lisa Madigan, attorney general for the state of Illinois, released an opinion stating that daily fantasy games “clearly constitutes gambling.” (The two companies have argued that D.F.S. is a game of skill.) A chill has hit the D.F.S. industry. Prize pools have been steadily declining, and in the eyes of the public and much of the media, D.F.S. has become synonymous with online poker or offshore sports gambling — an industry, in other words, that deserves neither protection nor sympathy.

Since the scandal broke, I have traveled to D.F.S. events, spent dozens of hours playing on DraftKings and FanDuel and talked to players and industry media figures. I initially intended to write an article about the bro culture that had sprouted up around D.F.S., which, from a distance, reminded me of the sweaty, sardonic camaraderie you typically see at high-stakes poker events. At the time, the crusade against D.F.S. felt a few degrees too hot — DraftKings and FanDuel struck me as obviously gambling sites, but the game itself felt sort of like homework. You research players. You build a spreadsheet. You project data and enter a team. You watch the team either fulfill or fall short of your projections. The next day, you start over again. The ruinous thrill of other forms of gambling — sports betting, blackjack, poker — just wasn’t there.

Instead, I came across a different sort of problem: a rapacious ecosystem in which high-volume gamblers, often aided by computer scripts and optimization software that allow players to submit hundreds or even thousands of lineups at a time, repeatedly take advantage of new players, who, after watching an ad, deposit some money on DraftKings and FanDuel and start betting. Both companies mostly looked the other way. And, when evidence of the competitive advantages enjoyed by these high-volume players became too overwhelming for the companies to ignore, DraftKings and FanDuel enacted rules that in the end are likely to protect the high-volume players rather than regulate them. In any case, a stricter ban on computer scripting would have been functionally impossible — because, as a representative of FanDuel told me, D.F.S. companies cannot reliably detect it on their sites.

Each company took advantage of language in a federal law that allowed them to plug directly into two huge, overlapping populations — fantasy sports players and gamblers. Each company was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding and sponsorships, all of which created pressure to increase user bases, which, in turn, led to an advertising deluge this past fall. It takes years of testing, regulation and outside oversight to create a reliable betting market. But DraftKings and FanDuel rose to prominence — and now, seemingly, have become derailed — in the course of a single N.F.L. regular season.

The betting economy that has been created is highly unstable and corrupt. One critic I spoke to was Gabriel Harber, a well-known D.F.S. podcaster and writer who has worked in the D.F.S. industry since its inception and goes by the handle CrazyGabey. He has come forward to discuss the rampant exploitation in D.F.S.’s betting economy.

“The idea that these sites exist so that regular guys can make a lot of money playing daily fantasy sports is a lie,” Harber told me. “FanDuel and DraftKings are optimized for power players to rape and pillage regular players over and over again.”

by Jay Caspian Kang, NY Times |  Read more:

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The Comfort Food Diaries: All I Want Are Some Potato Skins

We are at a bar somewhere near our office north of Times Square, and all I want are some potato skins, but all they have on the menu are mozzarella sticks and chicken wings and nachos, which are terrible if you ask me, at least compared to potato skins. Potato skins have everything you could ever hope for in a bar food—the crunch of the skin, the pull of the cheddar, the stink of the green onion, the chew of the bacon bits. A plate of potato skins and a pint of cold lager is the best pairing American cuisine has to offer. I mean that. I really do.

The bar is one of those fake Irish pubs that are ubiquitous in Midtown Manhattan. Let's call it Magnus O'Malley O'Sullivan's. It's the kind of place that smells of stale beer, cleaning products, and lacquer. It has no history. It has no lore. There are no regulars. The bartender can't pour a Guinness to save his life. In one of the basement bathrooms, a tourist from Indiana is likely throwing up after one too many Long Island Iced Teas. As a Korn song plays from an iPod, we get two orders of wings and two orders of mozzarella sticks. I can't keep my eyes off the plasma TVs.

We gather here once or twice a week to complain about our jobs. We work at a home improvement magazine, where I serve as an associate editor. I dislike my boss immensely, and he dislikes me just the same. It's the middle of the recession, and we keep having layoffs, but for some reason he never fires me. After each purge, we gather at this bar with our fallen ex-colleagues, and at some point one of them inevitably looks at me and says something like, "I can't believe you made it through." As I said, I dislike my boss immensely, and he dislikes me. Everyone knows he does.

I am in my late thirties, and I am anxious all the time. I take pills for it, but they don't work. I'm convinced I am dying of several diseases, because I have been a hypochondriac ever since I was a freshman in college and mistook two salivary glands under my tongue for cancerous tumors, and I didn't go to the doctor because I was terrified he would tell me I wasn't mistaken at all. I stand outside my office each day, chain-smoking cigarettes and worrying about my health. Creditors keep calling me because I'm tens of thousands of dollars in debt; I can't pay the rent on my Brooklyn apartment anymore. My girlfriend moved out. After work, all I want is a cold lager and some potato skins, because I am convinced they will fix everything. No, they won't pay the rent, but they have their own special powers. (...)

When I was a teenager, my father and I made a point of watching St. Elsewhere together each Wednesday night. It was after my parents' divorce, and we were living in a rented two-story town house. After years of tumult, things had finally started to settle down, and I was happy just to spend time with him. We had two floral-patterned love seats that used to be part of a formal living room set, but since Mom got full custody of the family room sofa, they now served as our primary seating. There were rips in the arms, and one of the legs had snapped off. We had each claimed one of our own, mine on the right side of the living room, his on the left. Before the show came on at 10 p.m., I would go into the cupboard to fetch a bag of Tato Skins, a concave chip that looked sort of like a tongue and was supposed to taste just like potato skins, and did. Then I would go into the refrigerator to retrieve a tin of Frito-Lay cheddar cheese dip and bring it into the living room, where Dad and I would split the entire bag, watching a medical drama that, in the series finale, was revealed to be little more than a young boy's dream.

I leave the fake Irish pub and walk by a T.G.I Friday's on 46th Street. It's about 10 p.m., and the place is filled with tourists. I stand outside watching throngs of people from Ohio and Michigan and everywhere else but New York pass me by. I admire the fact that sometime, in the next day or two, they'll all pack their bags in their Marriott hotel rooms and fly back to places that are so much more familiar to me than this one is.

There's a woman I have a crush on, and I fumble with my cellphone, scrolling for her number. I want to see if she'll meet me here. I want to call her and say: "Hey, wanna meet me at Fridays for some potato skins?" But then I realize how affected this will sound. She'll think I'm asking her to eat potato skins at Friday's because it's ironic, but it's not ironic at all. It's sacred.

I put my phone back into my pocket and totter toward the subway. This isn't the time for potato skins, I think to myself. But will there ever be a time again? Maybe potato skins are best left alone as a childhood memory. Yes, they are my favorite comfort food, but if I eat them, they'll just remind me how uncomfortable I am. In my city. In my middle age. In my life.

by Keith Pandolfi, Serious Eats |  Read more:

Image: Zac Overman

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Therapy Wars: the Revenge of Freud

Dr David Pollens is a psychoanalyst who sees his patients in a modest ground-floor office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a neighbourhood probably only rivalled by the Upper West Side for the highest concentration of therapists anywhere on the planet. Pollens, who is in his early 60s, with thinning silver hair, sits in a wooden armchair at the head of a couch; his patients lie on the couch, facing away from him, the better to explore their most embarrassing fears or fantasies. Many of them come several times a week, sometimes for years, in keeping with analytic tradition. He has an impressive track record treating anxiety, depression and other disorders in adults and children, through the medium of uncensored and largely unstructured talk.

To visit Pollens, as I did one dark winter’s afternoon late last year, is to plunge immediately into the arcane Freudian language of “resistance” and “neurosis”, “transference” and “counter-transference”. He exudes a sort of warm neutrality; you could easily imagine telling him your most troubling secrets. Like other members of his tribe, Pollens sees himself as an excavator of the catacombs of the unconscious: of the sexual drives that lurk beneath awareness; the hatred we feel for those we claim to love; and the other distasteful truths about ourselves we don’t know, and often don’t wish to know.

But there’s a very well-known narrative when it comes to therapy and the relief of suffering – and it leaves Pollens and his fellow psychoanalysts decisively on the wrong side of history. For a start, Freud (this story goes) has been debunked. Young boys don’t lust after their mothers, or fear their fathers will castrate them; adolescent girls don’t envy their brothers’ penises. No brain scan has ever located the ego, super-ego or id. The practice of charging clients steep fees to ponder their childhoods for years – while characterising any objections to this process as “resistance”, demanding further psychoanalysis – looks to many like a scam. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say” than Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Todd Dufresne declared a few years back, summing up the consensus and echoing the Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, who in 1975 called psychoanalysis “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”. It was, Medawar went on, “a terminal product as well – something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.”

A jumble of therapies emerged in Freud’s wake, as therapists struggled to put their endeavours on a sounder empirical footing. But from all these approaches – including humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, transactional analysis and so on – it’s generally agreed that one emerged triumphant. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is a down-to-earth technique focused not on the past but the present; not on mysterious inner drives, but on adjusting the unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions. In contrast to the meandering conversations of psychoanalysis, a typical CBT exercise might involve filling out a flowchart to identify the self-critical “automatic thoughts” that occur whenever you face a setback, like being criticised at work, or rejected after a date.

CBT has always had its critics, primarily on the left, because its cheapness – and its focus on getting people quickly back to productive work – makes it suspiciously attractive to cost-cutting politicians. But even those opposed to it on ideological grounds have rarely questioned that CBT does the job. Since it first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, so many studies have stacked up in its favour that, these days, the clinical jargon “empirically supported therapies” is usually just a synonym for CBT: it’s the one that’s based on facts. Seek a therapy referral on the NHS today, and you’re much more likely to end up, not in anything resembling psychoanalysis, but in a short series of highly structured meetings with a CBT practitioner, or perhaps learning methods to interrupt your “catastrophising” thinking via a PowerPoint presentation, or online.

Yet rumblings of dissent from the vanquished psychoanalytic old guard have never quite gone away. At their core is a fundamental disagreement about human nature – about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope to find peace of mind. CBT embodies a very specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it. CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them.

Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated. For one thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but understood. From this perspective, depression is less like a tumour and more like a stabbing pain in your abdomen: it’s telling you something, and you need to find out what. (No responsible GP would just pump you with painkillers and send you home.) And happiness – if such a thing is even achievable – is a much murkier matter. We don’t really know our own minds, and we often have powerful motives for keeping things that way. We see life through the lens of our earliest relationships, though we usually don’t realise it; we want contradictory things; and change is slow and hard. Our conscious minds are tiny iceberg-tips on the dark ocean of the unconscious – and you can’t truly explore that ocean by means of CBT’s simple, standardised, science-tested steps.

This viewpoint has much romantic appeal. But the analysts’ arguments fell on deaf ears so long as experiment after experiment seemed to confirm the superiority of CBT – which helps explain the shocked response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time.

Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977. (In the unlikely event that this trend were to persist, it could be entirely useless in a few decades.) Had CBT somehow benefited from a kind of placebo effect all along, effective only so long as people believed it was a miracle cure?

That puzzle was still being digested when researchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals.

Such findings, it turns out, aren’t isolated – and in their midst, a newly emboldened band of psychoanalytic therapists are pressing the case that CBT’s pre-eminence has been largely built on sand. Indeed, they argue that teaching people to “think themselves to wellness” might sometimes make things worse. “Every thoughtful person knows that self-understanding isn’t something you get from the drive-thru,” said Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of Colorado medical school, who is one of CBT’s most unsparing critics. His default bearing is one of wry good humour, but exasperation ruffled his demeanour whenever our conversation dwelt too long on CBT’s claims of supremacy. “Novelists and poets seemed to have understood this truth for thousands of years. It’s only in the last few decades that people have said, ‘Oh, no, in 16 sessions we can change lifelong patterns!’” If Shedler and others are right, it may be time for psychologists and therapists to re-evaluate much of what they thought they knew about therapy: about what works, what doesn’t, and whether CBT has really consigned the cliche of the chin-stroking shrink – and with it, Freud’s picture of the human mind – to history. The impact of such a re-evaluation could be profound; eventually, it might even change how millions of people around the world are treated for psychological problems.

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Peter Gamlen

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