Happy All the Time

As biometric tracking takes over the modern workplace, the old game of labor surveillance is finding new forms.

Housed in a triumph of architectural transparency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Media Lab complex at MIT, a global hub of human-machine research. From the outside of its newest construction, you can see clear through the building. Inside are open workspaces, glittering glass walls, and screens, all encouragement for researchers to peek in on one another. Everybody always gets to observe everybody else.

Here, computational social scientist Alex Pentland, known in the tech world as the godfather of wearables, directs a team that has created technology applied in Google Glass, smart watches, and other electronic or computerized devices you can wear or strap to your person. In Pentland’s quest to reshape society by tracking human behavior with software algorithms, he has discovered you don’t need to look through a glass window to find out what a person is up to. A wearable device can trace subliminal signals in a person’s tone of voice, body language, and interactions. From a distance, you can monitor not only movements and habits; you can begin to surmise thoughts and motivations.

In the mid-2000s Pentland invented the sociometric badge, which looks like an ID card and tracks and analyzes the wearer’s interactions, behavior patterns, and productivity. It became immediately clear that the technology would appeal to those interested in a more hierarchical kind of oversight than that enjoyed by the gurus of MIT’s high-tech playgrounds. In 2010 Pentland cofounded Humanyze, a company that offers employers the chance to find out how employee behavior affects their business. It works like this: A badge hanging from your neck embedded with microphones, accelerometers, infrared sensors, and a Bluetooth connection collects data every sixteen milliseconds, tracking such matters as how far you lean back in your chair, how often you participate in meetings, and what kind of conversationalist you are. Each day, four gigabytes’ worth of information about your office behavior is compiled and analyzed by Humanyze. This data, which then is delivered to your supervisor, reveals patterns that supposedly correlate with employee productivity.

Humanyze CEO Ben Waber, a former student of Pentland’s, has claimed to take his cues from the world of sports, where “smart clothes” are used to measure the mechanics of a pitcher’s throw or the launch of a skater’s leap. He is determined to usher in a new era of “Moneyball for business,” a nod to baseball executive Billy Beane, whose data-driven approach gave his team, the Oakland Athletics, a competitive edge. With fine-grained biological data points, Waber promises to show how top office performers behave—what happy, productive workers do.

Bank of America hired Humanyze to use sociometric badges to study activity at the bank’s call centers, which employ more than ten thousand souls in the United States alone. By scrutinizing how workers communicated with one another during breaks, analysts came to the conclusion that allowing people to break together, rather than in shifts, reduced stress. This was indicated by voice patterns picked up by the badge, processed by the technology, and reported on an analyst’s screen. Employees grew happier. Turnover decreased.

The executives at Humanyze emphasize that minute behavior monitoring keeps people content. So far, the company has focused on loaning the badges to clients for limited study periods, but as Humanyze scales up, corporate customers may soon be able to use their own in-house analysts and deploy the badges around the clock.

Workers of the world can be happy all the time.

The optimists’ claim: technologies that monitor every possible dimension of biological activity can create faster, safer, and more efficient workplaces, full of employees whose behavior can be altered in accordance with company goals.

Widespread implementation is already underway. Tesco employees stock shelves with greater speed when they wear armbands that register their rate of activity. Military squad leaders are able to drill soldiers toward peak performance with the use of skin patches that measure vital signs. On Wall Street, experiments are ongoing to monitor the hormones of stock traders, the better to encourage profitable trades. According to cloud-computing company Rackspace, which conducted a survey in 2013 of four thousand people in the United States and United Kingdom, 6 percent of businesses provide wearable devices for workers. A third of the respondents expressed readiness to wear such devices, which are most commonly wrist- or head-mounted, if requested to do so.

Biological scrutiny is destined to expand far beyond on-the-job performance. Workers of the future may look forward to pre-employment genetic testing, allowing a business to sort potential employees based on disposition toward anything from post-traumatic stress disorder to altitude sickness. Wellness programs will give employers reams of information on exercise habits, tobacco use, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and body mass index. Even the monitoring of brain signals may become an office commonplace: at IBM, researchers bankrolled by the military are working on functional magnetic-resonance imaging, or fMRI, a technology that can render certain brain activities into composite images, turning thoughts into fuzzy external pictures. Such technology is already being used in business to divine customer preferences and detect lies. In 2006 a San Diego start-up called No Lie MRI expressed plans to begin marketing the brain-scanning technology to employers, highlighting its usefulness for employee screening. And in Japan, researchers at ATR Computational Neuro­science Laboratories have a dream-reading device in the pipeline that they claim can predict what a person visualizes during sleep. Ryan Hurd, who serves on the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, says such conditioning could be used to enhance performance. While unconscious, athletes could continue to practice; creative types could boost their imaginations.

The masterminds at Humanyze have grasped a fundamental truth about surveillance: a person watched is a person transformed. The man who invented the panopticon—a circular building with a central inspection tower that has a view of everything around it—gleaned this, too. But contrary to most discussions of the “all-seeing place,” the idea was conceived not for the prison, but for the factory.

by Lynn Stuart Parramore, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Edgar Degas

Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon.
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Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2016
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The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People

I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.
—John Wayne (b. 1907) on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960

I hope he fails.
—Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) on the election of Barack Obama in 2008

In recent decades, we Americans have become highly practiced in the skills and mental habits of demonizing our political opponents. All our instruments agree that we currently do political polarization very well, and researchers tell us that we’re getting better at it all the time.

For example, Stanford Professor Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues recently found that, when it comes both to trusting other people with your money and evaluating the scholarship applications of high school seniors, Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that “Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.” As a result, today “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.”1 That’s saying something!

But if polarization is all around us, familiar as an old coat, what about its opposite? What would depolarization look and sound like? Would we know it if we saw it, in others or in ourselves? Perhaps most importantly, what are the mental habits that encourage it?

We’re confronted with an irony here. We Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out. A number of big structural and social trends—including the end of the Cold War, the rising importance of cultural issues in our politics, growing secularization, greater racial and ethnic diversity, the shift from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers as the nation’s dominant elites, the break-up of the old media system, the increasing ideological coherence of both of our two main political parties, among others—appear to have helped produce our current predicament.

Yet over time, the intellectual habits encouraged by these underlying shifts developed a life and autonomy of their own. They became “baked in,” ultimately forming a new popular wisdom regarding how we judge what is true and decide what is right in public life. The intellectual habits of polarization include binary (Manichaean) thinking, absolutizing one’s preferred values, viewing uncertainty as a weakness, privileging deductive thinking, assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith, and hesitating to agree on basic facts and the meaning of evidence.

What are the antidotes to these familiar habits? We can recognize the mindset of the polarizer, but how does the depolarizer understand conflict and try to make sense of the world? Here is an attempt to answer these questions, by way of proposing the seven habits of highly depolarizing people.

by David Blankenhorn, American Interest |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Busting cactus smugglers in the American west
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A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D.

[ed. This hardly seems like news these days what with HFT (high frequency trading) and other technological distortions in the market, but whatever. As always, buyer beware. See also: Good times for Exchange-Traded Funds.]

The mood in the markets may be getting grimmer, but in the booming world of exchange-traded funds, people just want to party.

And so it was last month at the $2.8 trillion industry’s annual jamboree in South Florida, where 2,200 investment advisers and fund salesmen came together for three days of hard drinking and product pitching. Against a backdrop of New Orleans jazz bands and poolside schmooze-fests — some call it spring break for the E.T.F. crowd — one event stood out, though.

It was an invitation-only party (crabs, cocktails and a D.J. on a moonlit dock) thrown by Jane Street, a secretive E.T.F. trading firm that, after years of minting money in the shadows of Wall Street, is now pitching itself to some of the largest institutional investors in the world.

And the message was clear: Jane Street, which barely existed 15 years ago and now trades more than $1 trillion a year, was ready to take on the big boys.

Much of what Jane Street, which occupies two floors of an office building at the southern tip of Manhattan, does is not known. That is by design, as the firm deploys specialized trading strategies to capture arbitrage profits by buying and selling (using its own capital) large amounts of E.T.F. shares.

It’s a risky business.

As the popularity of E.T.F.s has soared — exchange-traded funds now account for a third of all publicly traded equities — the spreads, or margins, have narrowed substantially, making it harder to profit from the difference.

And in many cases, some of the most popular E.T.F.s track hard-to-trade securities like junk bonds, emerging-market stocks and a variety of derivative products, adding an extra layer of risk.

These dangers were brought home last August, when markets were rattled by China’s decision to devalue its currency; some of the largest E.T.F.s sank by 50 percent or more.

While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls.

“It’s remarkable what they can do,” said Blair Hull, a founder of an electronic trading firm who relies on Jane Street to make a market for his recently started E.T.F. “If you look at who provides this kind of liquidity these days, it’s fewer and fewer firms.”

It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion. And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital.

In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop.

by Landon Thomas, Jr. |  Read more:

Image: Cole Wilson

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[ed. Decisions decisions...]
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The Triumph of the Hard Right

Everybody told everybody early in this year’s presidential campaign (during what was called Trump Summer) that we had never seen anything so sinisterly or hilariously (take your choice) new. But Trump Summer was supposed to mellow into Sane Autumn, and it failed to—and early winter was no saner. People paid to worry in public tumbled over one another in asking what had gone wrong with our politics. Even the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, joined the worriers. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, he set up what he called the Growth and Opportunity Project, to reach those who had not voted Republican—young people, women, Latinos, and African-Americans. But its report, once filed, had no effect on the crowded Republican field of candidates in the 2016 race, who followed Donald Trump’s early lead as he treated women and immigrants as equal-opportunity objects of scorn. Now the public worriers were yearning for the “good old days” when there were such things as moderate Republicans. What happened to them?

The current Republican extremism has been attributed to the rise of Tea Party members or sympathizers. Deadlock in Congress is blamed on Republicans’ fear of being “primaryed” unless they move ever more rightward. Endless and feckless votes to repeal Obamacare were motivated less by any hope of ending the program than by a desire to be on record as opposing it, again and again, to avoid the dreaded label RINO (Republican in Name Only).

E.J. Dionne knows that Republican intransigence was not born yesterday, and he has the credentials for saying it because this dependably intelligent liberal tells us, in his new book, that he began as a young Goldwaterite—like Hillary Clinton (or like me). He knows that his abandoned faith sounded themes that have perdured right down to our day. In the 1950s there were many outlets for right-wing discontent—including H.L. Hunt’s Lifeline, Human Events, The Dan Smoot Report, the Fulton Lewis radio show, Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby, the Manion Forum. In 1955, William F. Buckley founded National Review to give some order and literary polish to this cacophonous jumble. But his magazine had a small audience at the outset. Its basic message would reach a far wider audience through a widely popular book, The Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten for Barry Goldwater by Buckley’s brother-in-law (and his coauthor for McCarthy and His Enemies), L. Brent Bozell.

The idea for the book came from Clarence Manion, the former dean of Notre Dame Law School. He persuaded Goldwater to have Bozell, who had been his speechwriter, put his thoughts together in book form. Then Manion organized his own and other right-wing media to promote and give away thousands of copies of the book. Bozell did his part too—he went to a board meeting of the John Birch Society and persuaded Fred Koch (father of Charles and David Koch) to buy 2,500 copies of Conscience for distribution. The book put Goldwater on the cover of Time three years before he ran for president. A Draft Goldwater Committee was already in existence then (led by William Rusher of National Review, F. Clifton White, and John Ashbrook). Patrick Buchanan spoke for many conservatives when he called The Conscience of a Conservative their “New Testament.”

The Goldwater book, Dionne says, had all the basic elements of the Tea Party movement, fully articulated fifty years before the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party through their organizations Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. The book painted government as the enemy of liberty. Goldwater called for the elimination of Social Security, federal aid to schools, federal welfare and farm programs, and the union shop. He claimed that the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision was unconstitutional, so not the “law of the land.” He said we must bypass and defund the UN and improve tactical nuclear weapons for frequent use.

It was widely thought, when the book appeared, that its extreme positions would disqualify Goldwater for the presidency, or even for nomination to that office. Yet in 1964 he became the Republican nominee, and though he lost badly, he wrenched from the Democrats their reliably Solid South, giving Nixon a basis for the Southern Strategy that he rode into the White House in the very next election. The Southern Strategy had been elaborated during Nixon’s campaign by Kevin Phillips, a lawyer in John Mitchell’s firm. The plan did not rely merely on Southern racism, but on a deep conviction that, as Phillips put it in a 1968 interview, all politics comes down to “who hates who.” In that interview, Phillips laid out an elaborate taxonomy of hostilities to be orchestrated by Republicans—another predictor of the Tea Party. Dionne argues, with ample illustration decade by decade, that this right-wing populism would remain a Republican orthodoxy, latent or salient, throughout the time he covers.

Joe Scarborough, in a recent book, The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics—and Can Again, claims that moderate conservatism is the real Republican orthodoxy, interrupted at times by “extremists” like Goldwater or the Tea Party. He suggests Dwight Eisenhower as the best model for Republicans to imitate. Yet Scarborough is also an admirer of Buckley, and his thesis does not explain—as Dionne’s thesis does—why Buckley despised Eisenhower. Eisenhower, as the first Republican elected president after the New Deal era of Roosevelt and Truman, was obliged in Buckley’s eyes to dismantle the New Deal programs, or at least to begin the dismantling. Buckley resembled the people today who think the first task of a Republican president succeeding Obama will be to repeal or take apart the Affordable Care Act.

Eisenhower, instead, adhered to the “Modern Republicanism” expounded by the law professor Arthur Larson, which accepted the New Deal as a part of American life. Eisenhower said, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” It was to oppose that form of Republicanism that Buckley founded National Review in 1955, with a program statement that declared: “Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle-of-the-Road is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant.” (...)

The sense of betrayal by one’s own is a continuing theme in the Republican Party (a Fox News poll in September 2015 found that 62 percent of Republicans feel “betrayed” by their own party’s officeholders). (...)

Both Bush presidents were denounced by the Republican right, the first for raising taxes, the second for expanding Medicare’s pharmaceutical support and expanding the government’s role in education—and the two of them for increasing the size and cost of government. Even the sainted Reagan disappointed the hard right with his arms control efforts, his raising (after cutting) taxes, his failure to shrink the government, and his selling of arms to Iran (though that bitterness has been obscured by the clouds of myth and glory surrounding Reagan).

To be on the right is to feel perpetually betrayed. At a time when the right has commanding control of radio and television talk shows, it still feels persecuted by the “mainstream media.” With all the power of the one percent in control of the nation’s wealth, the right feels its influence is being undermined by the academy, where liberals lurk to brainwash conservative parents’ children (the lament of Buckley’s very first book, God and Man at Yale). Dionne shows how the right punishes its own for “selling out” to any moderate departures from its agenda once a person gets into office.

by Garry Wills, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

How Economists Would Wage the War on Drugs

In April, the world’s governments will meet in New York for a special assembly at the United Nations to discuss how to solve the drug problem. Don’t hold your breath: Since the previous such gathering nearly two decades ago, the narcotics industry has done better than ever. The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren’t any closer to finding a way to stamp them out.

This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms—and have the same weaknesses.

In El Salvador, the leader of one of the country’s two big gangs complained to me about the human-resources problems he faced given the high turnover of his employees. (Ironically, his main sources of recruitment were the very prisons that were supposed to reform young offenders.) In Mexican villages, drug cartels provide basic public services and even build churches—a cynical version of the “corporate social responsibility” that ordinary companies use to clean up their images. Mexico’s Zetas cartel expanded rapidly by co-opting local gangsters and taking a cut of their earnings; it now franchises its brand rather like McDonald’s and faces similar squabbles from franchisees over territorial encroachment. Meanwhile, in richer countries, street-corner dealers are being beaten on price and quality by “dark web” sites, much as ordinary shops are being undercut by Amazon.

Soldiers and police officers have done rather poorly at regulating this complex global business. So what would happen if the war on drugs were waged instead by economists?

Take cocaine, which presents one of the great economic puzzles of narcotics. The war against cocaine rests on a simple idea: If you restrict its supply, you force up its price, and fewer people will buy it. Andean governments have thus deployed their armies to uproot the coca bushes that provide cocaine’s raw ingredient. Each year, they eradicate coca plants covering an area 14 times the size of Manhattan, depriving the cartels of about half their harvest. But despite the slashing and burning, the price of cocaine in the U.S. has hardly budged, bobbing between $150 and $200 per pure gram for most of the past 20 years. How have the cartels done it?

In part, with a tactic that resembles Wal-Mart’s. The world’s biggest retailer has sometimes seemed similarly immune to the laws of supply and demand, keeping prices low regardless of shortages and surpluses. Wal-Mart’s critics say that it can do this in some markets because its vast size makes it a “monopsony,” or a monopoly buyer. Just as a monopolist can dictate prices to its consumers, who have no one else to buy from, a monopsonist can dictate prices to its suppliers, who have no one else to sell to. If a harvest fails, the argument goes, the cost is borne by the farmers, not Wal-Mart or its customers.

In the Andes, where coca farmers tend to sell to a single dominant militia, the same thing seems to be happening. Cross-referencing data on coca-bush eradication with local price information shows that, in regions where eradication has created a coca shortage, farmers don’t increase their prices as one might expect. It isn’t that crop eradication is having no effect; the problem is that its cost is forced onto Andean peasants, not drug cartels or their customers.

Even if the price of coca could be raised, it wouldn’t have much effect on cocaine’s street price. The raw leaf needed to make one kilogram of cocaine powder costs about $400 in Colombia; in the U.S., that kilogram retails for around $150,000, once divided into one-gram portions. So even if governments doubled the price of coca leaf, from $400 to $800, cocaine’s retail price would at most rise from $150,000 to $150,400 per kilogram. The price of a $150 gram would go up by 40 cents—not much of a return on the billions invested in destroying crops. Consider trying to raise the price of art by driving up the cost of paint: It would be futile since the cost of the raw material has so little to do with the final price.

by Tom Wainwright, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Pedro Pardo

The Shame of Wisconsin

Wisconsin is probably the most beautiful of the midwestern farm states. Its often dramatic terrain, replete with unglaciated driftless areas, borders not just the Mississippi River but two great inland seas whose opposite shores are so far away they cannot be glimpsed standing at water’s edge. The world across the waves looks distant to nonexistent, and the oceanic lakes stretch and disappear into haze and sky, though one can take a ferry out of a town called Manitowoc and in four hours get to Michigan. Amid this somewhat lonely serenity, there are the mythic shipwrecks, blizzards, tornadoes, vagaries of agricultural life, industrial boom and bust, and a burgeoning prison economy; all have contributed to a local temperament of cheerful stoicism.

Nonetheless, a feeling of overlookedness and isolation can be said to persist in America’s dairyland, and the idea that no one is watching can create a sense of invisibility that leads to the secrets and labors that the unseen are prone to: deviance and corruption as well as utopian projects, untested idealism, daydreaming, provincial grandiosity, meekness, flight, far-fetched yard decor, and sexting. Al Capone famously hid out in Wisconsin, even as Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party was getting underway. Arguably, Wisconsin can boast the three greatest American creative geniuses of the twentieth century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Orson Welles, and Georgia O’Keeffe, though all three quickly left, first for Chicago, then for warmer climes. (The state tourism board’s campaign “Escape to Wisconsin” has often been tampered with by bumper sticker vandals who eliminate the preposition.)

More recently, Wisconsin is starting to become known less for its ever-struggling left-wing politics or artistic figures—Thornton Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder—than for its ever-wilder murderers. The famous late-nineteenth-century “Wisconsin Death Trip,” by which madness and mayhem established the legend that the place was a frigid frontier where inexplicably gruesome things occurred—perhaps due to mind-wrecking weather—has in recent decades seemingly spawned a cast of killers that includes Ed Gein (the inspiration for Psycho), the serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and the two Waukesha girls who in 2014 stabbed a friend of theirs to honor their idol, the Internet animation Slender Man.

The new documentary Making a Murderer, directed and written by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, former film students from New York, is about the case of a Wisconsin man who served eighteen years in prison for sexual assault, after which he was exonerated with DNA evidence. He then became a poster boy for the Innocence Project, had his picture taken with the governor, had a justice commission begun in his name—only to be booked again, this time for murder.

Ricciardi and Demos’s rendition of his story will not help rehabilitate Wisconsin’s reputation for the weird. But it will make heroes of two impressive defense attorneys as well as the filmmakers themselves. A long-form documentary in ten parts, aired on Netflix, the ambitious series looks at social class, community consensus and conformity, the limits of trials by jury, and the agonizing stupidities of a legal system descending on more or less undefended individuals (the poor). The film is immersive and vérité—that is, it appears to unspool somewhat in real and spontaneous time, taking the viewer with the camera in unplanned fashion, discovering things as the filmmakers discover them (an illusion, of course, that editing did not muck up). It is riveting and dogged work.

The film centers on the Avery family of Manitowoc County, home to the aforementioned ferry to Michigan. Even though the lake current has eroded some of the beach, causing the sand to migrate clockwise to the Michigan dunes, and the eastern Wisconsin lakeshore has begun to fill forlornly with weeds, it is still a picturesque section of the state. The local denizens, whether lawyers or farmers, speak with the flata’s, throatily hooted o’s, and incorrect past participles (“had went”) of the region. There is a bit of Norway and Canada in the accent, which is especially strong in Wisconsin’s rural areas and only sometimes changes with education.

The Avery family are the proprietors of Avery’s Auto Salvage, and their property—a junkyard—on the eponymous Avery Road is vast and filled with over a thousand wrecked automobiles. It is a business not unlike farming in that in winter everything is buried in snow and unharvestable. The grandparents, two children, and some grandchildren live—or used to—on an abutting compound that consists of a small house, a trailer, a garage, a car crusher, a barn, a vegetable garden, and a fire pit.

In 1985 Steven Avery, the twenty-three-year-old son of Dolores and Allan Avery, was arrested and convicted of a sexual assault he did not commit. There was no forensic technology for DNA testing in 1985, and he had the misfortune to look much like the actual rapist—blond and young—and the traumatized victim, influenced by the county investigators who had the whole Avery family on their radar, identified him in a line-up as her attacker. Despite having sixteen alibi witnesses, he was found guilty. The actual rapist was allowed to roam free.

After the Wisconsin Innocence Project took on his case, Avery was finally exonerated in 2003. DNA tests showed he was not guilty and that the real attacker was now serving time for another rape. Avery then hired lawyers and sued Manitowoc County and the state of Wisconsin for wrongful imprisonment and for denying his 1995 appeal (a time during which DNA evidence might have set him free), which the state had mishandled, causing him to serve eight more years.

Days after Avery’s release, Manitowoc law enforcement was feeling vulnerable about the 1995 appeal and writing memos, redocumenting the case from eight years earlier. The civil suit was making headway, and only the settlement amount remained to be determined; it was going to be large and would come out of Manitowoc County’s own budget, since the insurance company had denied the county coverage on the claim.

Then, in November 2005, just as crucial depositions were both scheduled and proceeding and Avery stood to receive his money, he was suddenly and sensationally arrested for the murder of a freelance photographer named Teresa Halbach, who had come to Avery’s Auto Salvage on Halloween to photograph a truck for an auto magazine, and whose SUV had been found on the Avery property, as eventually were her scattered and charred remains. Avery had two quasi alibis—his fiancée, to whom he’d spoken at length on the phone the afternoon of Halbach’s disappearance, and his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, who had just come home from school.

No one but Steven Avery ever came under suspicion, and county investigators circled in strategically. After getting nowhere with the fiancée, they focused on the nephew, who was gentle, learning-disabled, and in the tenth grade; they illegally interrogated him and suggested he was an accomplice. They took a defense witness and turned him into one for the prosecution.

Brendan was then charged with the same crimes as Avery: kidnapping, homicide, mutilation of a corpse. Prodded and bewildered, Brendan had made up a gruesome story about stabbing Halbach and slitting her throat in Avery’s trailer (the victim’s blood andDNA were never found on the premises), a fictional scenario that came, he later said, from the James Patterson novel Kiss the Girls. When asked why he’d said the things he said, he told his mother it was how he always got through school, by guessing what adults wanted him to say, then saying it. In an especially heartbreaking moment during the videotaped interrogation included in the documentary, and after he has given his questioners the brutal murder tale they themselves have prompted and helped tell, Brendan asks them how much longer this is going to take, since he has “a project due sixth hour.”

It is a crazy story. And the film’s double-edged title pays tribute to its ambiguity. Either Steven Avery was framed in a vendetta by Manitowoc County or the years of angry prison time turned him into the killer he had not been before. But the title aside, the documentary is pretty unambiguous in its siding with Avery and his appealing defense team, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, who are hired with his settlement money as well as money his parents, Dolores and Allan, put up from the family business.

One cannot watch this film without thinking of the adage that law is to justice what medicine is to immortality. The path of each is a little crooked and always winds up wide of the mark.

by Lorrie Moore, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

Sarah Moon
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Guilhem Desq

Guilhem Desq on the hurdy-gurdy

Luna

Luna on the gayageum

Powerful Ripples of Crazy

Forget about Oscar-nominated movies and peak TV—the best entertainment of this, or any, year is the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It’s got drama, comedy, tragedy and yelling (mostly yelling). Also, did I mention everyone is nuts? Think of it as a phenomenon similar to those newly discovered gravitational waves: Long after we’re gone, powerful ripples of crazy will still be spreading across the universe.

Let’s get you up to date. Remember Ted Cruz? He’s the one with the voice of Marvin the Martian and the world view of Yosemite Sam. During a recent debate, Marco Rubio called Cruz a liar. Then Donald Trump called Cruz “the single biggest liar”—because to Trump, everything is always the single biggest anything. Cruz later called Rubio and Trump whiners. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush called his mom and asked if he could stop trying to be president now.

Things have been tough for Rubio since Iowa, where he gave a memorable victory speech (it was memorable primarily because he finished third). A political algorithm in a suit, Rubio has been assailed for repeating his talking points, word for word, time after time, without care as to whether the message fits the context. Here’s a typical exchange:

Marco: “Let’s dispel this notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Speaker box: “Um, I just asked if you want fries with that.”

To his credit, Mr. Robot got through the last debate without falling into a programming loop, which is good news for his campaign and terrible news for humanity. This means it’s learning. Soon it will become self-aware and then there’s no stopping the Rubio-Skynet ticket.

Anyway, all that stuff about who’s the lyingest liar? Turns out that was the classy part of the debate. Later on, Trump defended having referred to Cruz as a “pussy”—saying it wasn’t so bad because, FYI, Bush had publicly threatened to “take off his pants and moon everybody.” It was around this time that the moderator interjected: “We’re in danger of driving this into the dirt.” In danger? The Republican race is a tire fire wrapped in a train wreck inside The Adventures of Pluto Nash. We’re watching as one of the world’s most successful political parties goes Dumpster diving for a leader.

The news networks are struggling to adapt. They still cover the race as though it’s a normal campaign. It’s not. We’ve passed into some next-level Narnia-talking-animal strangeness. Still, every night you can find on CNN a pundit confidently predicting Donald Trump’s demise. But Trump never demises! Everything that should kill him politically only makes him stronger. And, weirdly, oranger.

by Scott Feschuk, Macleans | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Kanye West Is Fixing His Album in Public. You’ll Want to Read the Edits

When Kanye West first tweeted a handwritten 10-song track list for his seventh album, “The Life of Pablo,” late last month, the photo was captioned, “So happy to be finished with the best album of all time.”

Best? Could happen. Finished? Not even close.

Instead, the rollout of “Pablo” has been an unprecedented public marathon, with Mr. West adding songs, revising lyrics on quick notice, adding and dropping contributors, changing the album’s title and release date several times, and gabbing about it all on Twitter. The process has also included televised live performances, public squabbles, unauthorized leaks of demo recordings — the sort of stuff Dylan archivists typically wait decades to hear — and a fashion show with 1,000 models.

The result is an exemplar of modern celebrity musicmaking: a dramatic, rococo, continuous (and possibly still continuing) narrative that spans music, fashion, theater and politics. Mr. West has turned the album release process — historically a predictably structured event, and lately rewritten by stars like Beyoncé as precise, sudden assault — into a public conversation, one taking place on Twitter, YouTube, Periscope and in Madison Square Garden as much as in the studio. With flux embedded in its DNA, “Pablo” is crisply alive, like water that’s still boiling even though the flame is off. Pay close attention to the multiple iterations and you hear an artist at work, as well as a celebrity tending his image. It’s everything bared — process as art.

What is “The Life of Pablo” then? Is it one of the notepad-scrawled track listings Mr. West released on Twitter? Is it the nine-track version of the album that played at Mr. West’s Madison Square Garden extravaganza, illegally ripped and made available for unauthorized download soon after the show (which some critics chose to review)? Is it the 18-track album that was very, very briefly made available for sale early Sunday morning, for $20, via Tidal (which included an incorrect file, a duplicate of one song)? Is it that same (now corrected) version, now not for sale anywhere, that remains available for streaming on Tidal (though even Tidal has referred to this version as “partial”)?

Is there even a finished version of “Pablo” that will stand still long enough to comment on?

That’s especially relevant given that Mr. West seems to already be building outside feedback into the process of making this album. Take, for example, the saga of the song “Famous.”

Two days before Mr. West played “Pablo” for the world at a Feb. 11 fashion show at Madison Square Garden, he held a listening session for friends, family and representatives of his record label. The next day, a Reddit user began a thread titled, “Rumor: Kanye West is going to diss Taylor Swift on his new album.” The post went on to detail the opening lines from “Famous”: “I feel like Taylor Swift still owe me sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” He also made an insulting reference to Amber Rose, an ex-girlfriend.

But the “Famous” Mr. West played at Madison Square Garden two days later was different. The reference to Ms. Rose was gone, and the line about Ms. Swift was clunkier: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” (The “owe me sex” conceit was a callback to Mr. West’s verse on Young Jeezy’s 2008 hit “Put On.”)

So had Mr. West toned down the lyrics? The answers weren’t clear until Thursday, when a demo version of the first verse of “Famous” leaked online, with the lyrics as the Reddit user had reported them. That means that at some point, quite possibly between the night of Feb. 9 and the afternoon of Feb. 11, Mr. West decided to soften the blow. (...)

All this instability makes for a fascinating close-reading experience, but it also calls into question the ostensible finished version of “Pablo” as it has been promoted so far. A couple of the leaked songs, “The Mind Is Powerful” and “Fall Out of Heaven” — which may or may not be from the “Pablo” sessions — are half-song, half-sketch, with Mr. West mumbling his way through the melody, moving from scribbled outline to completed thought and back again.

These are incomplete, right? Sure. But then, there are at least three songs on “Pablo” on which Mr. West mumbles his way through a sticky portion of a song. On the album, those moments feel like conscious artistic decisions, but in the wake of these demos, they suggest that perhaps Mr. West just wasn’t quite finished, or that being slightly unfinished is the new finished.

So will “Pablo” ever be done? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Think of how we understand pop music titans like Dylan or Prince. Over time, more demos and alternate versions and live versions get released — officially or not — and our understanding of their process deepens. Given the speed and porousness of the Internet era, we may soon be able to assess and comprehend Mr. West in much the same way. Albums that seem to be complete will only get less so. Songs that sound fixed in stone will be revealed to be the product of much trial and error. The process will be laid bare, as fascinating as the end result.

So let Mr. West be messy. The music, the fashion show, the merchandise, the Twitter digressions, the “S.N.L.” performances and leaked backstage meltdown: “The Life of Pablo” will be remembered for all of it.

If there ever will be a truly complete take on “Pablo,” it should include all of these things: maybe a collector’s edition that includes T-shirts and handstitched tweets and a fashion lookbook and behind-the-scenes documentary video footage and cached web pages and exhaustive demos documenting the songs at their various phases of evolution. Thanks to Mr. West’s living, breathing creative process, the album is no longer just a snapshot, but an unending data stream.

by Jon Caramanica, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Keller

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Robot Art Raises Questions about Human Creativity

Image: AARON

A Son Rises in the West

Twenty years ago a Seattle boy moved to Nepal after being recognized as the reincarnation of a revered Tibetan lama. The public’s reaction to his mother’s decision to let him go says as much about our understanding of parenting as it does about Buddhism.

In the final years of his third life, Dezhung Rinpoche enjoyed short walks around the block near his home in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood. Dressed in the traditional maroon robes of a Tibetan Buddhist lama, he would shuffle along with the help of an attendant and the crutch that had been his constant companion since a botched knee surgery had hobbled him several years earlier. This was the mid-’80s, nearly a decade before Tibetan Buddhism would become a cultural phenomenon in the United States, so the sight of a robed holy man circumambulating the block would have inspired more than a few double-takes in this relatively enlightened enclave that borders the University of Washington.

Born Könchok Lhündrup in 1906, the Buddhist teacher grew up in the cold, arid foothills of east Tibet, with little in the way of scenery to distract him from his religious studies. But here in his adopted home—where he’d lived since 1960, originally as a guest of the UW—he was surrounded by greenery. And he cherished his afternoon sidewalk amblings for the opportunity they provided to soak up the flora he’d missed out on as a young man.

That bum knee made for tough sledding, though, so Dezhung Rinpoche made frequent stops, often hunkering down in a neighbor’s front yard. (A former neighbor found it so disconcerting to watch the lama regularly sully his robes in their wet grass that they began leaving out a lawn chair for his use.) It was during one of these pit stops that the aged man pulled close Adrienne Chan, his attendant and student for nearly a decade. He had decided where he would be reborn, and he wanted to share the news.

In the quarter century since fleeing his homeland, where the Chinese had set about burning Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in 1959, Dezhung Rinpoche had traveled extensively. He’d taught and studied throughout India and the United States, so according to tradition he could have honored any of those locations with his next reincarnation. But as Chan leaned in, Dezhung Rinpoche said simply, “I will be reborn in Seattle. It is nice and clean and fresh.”

Not long after, in May 1987, the lama died in Nepal. And then the wait for his return began.

Dezhung Rinpoche was four years into his fourth life when the country learned his name. You may remember him if you were a regular reader of The Seattle Times. Or The New York Times. Or USA Today. For six weeks 20 years ago, he was the most famous toddler in America.

Yet his rebirth in November 1991 went largely unheralded. There were no reporters, no cameras to document the occasion; at that point no one knew for sure who he really was. But even if they had, it’s possible he still would have been regarded as little more than a curiosity by anyone outside of the Sakya Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist center in Greenwood where his parents practiced. The Dalai Lama was only two years removed from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and the faith had yet to break through into the American mainstream.

Two years later, the boy born Sonam Wangdu was formally recognized as Dezhung Rinpoche’s reincarnation, due in large part to a series of visions and dreams shared by his mother and the Sakya Monastery’s head lama. More than 4,000 people attended Dezhung Rinpoche IV’s enthronement in Nepal—his mother would later note that he behaved himself and even sat still for most of the ceremony—but still the media didn’t pounce.

It wasn’t until December 1995, shortly after Christmas, that Seattleites and the rest of the country took notice of the boy lama. His story had become newsworthy for two reasons. For starters, he was preparing to move to Kathmandu, Nepal—almost completely cut off from his family—where he would study the dharma for 20 years to continue on the path to enlightenment he’d presumably started three lives ago.

Then there was the matter of his family. His father, who died before Sonam’s second birthday when his car ran a red light and was struck by a Gray Lines tour bus downtown, was a Tibetan man named Tenzin Lama. His mother was white and grew up Catholic in small-town Indiana. And tucked into each story about Dezhung Rinpoche’s rebirth was the suggestion—sometimes overt, sometimes not so overt—that this American woman was shirking her biological duties by shipping off her young, innocent son to live out his childhood in the windswept tundra of eastern Asia. “Sonam will stay in the monastery, home to 38 monks, and live behind its eight-foot wall for five to eight years,” wrote USA Today’s Andrea Stone. “He will see his mother just twice a year, or whenever she can scrape together the $1,200 airfare.” The media had come for the mysticism and stayed for the moral outrage.

Save for a handful of television interviews over the next few years, the little lama’s mother retreated from the limelight and back to the relative safety of the monastery after he departed for Nepal. She’d said goodbye to her son willingly, but she lost a good deal of her dignity by force.

by Matthew Halverson, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Kin Lok