Understanding American Authoritarianism

As part of his PhD research for UMass Amherst, Matthew MacWilliams surveyed the psychological characteristics of authoritarians -- not the people who lead authoritarian movements, but the followers, those who defer to them.

His work echoed the independent research of Vanderbilt's Marc Hetherington and UNC's Jonathan Weiler, whose 2009 book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics concluded that a sizable fraction of the US voting public were authoritarian: people who wanted to be controlled, and wanted their neighbors to be controlled, because they were afraid the status quo was slipping away and they didn't believe that anything better would replace it.

They all posit that there are really three American parties, not two: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the authoritarian Republicans, who aren't conservatives in the sense of wanting tax cuts for the rich or caring about specific religious or moral questions. Rather, they want strong leaders who'll fight change, preserve hierarchies, and talk tough.

Vox's Amanda Taub recounts the long struggle to understand authoritarianism, something social scientists have struggled with since the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth. She describes many authoritarians as latent, waiting to be "activated" by threats -- demographic and economic shifts, messages of fear and terror.

Vox did its own polling and research to complement the earlier experiments on authoritarianism, concluding that Trump is merely the "symptom": "The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election."

Back in 2009, I wrote about Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians", a free/open text that summarizes 30 years of research into the authoritarian mindset. I recommend reading it now.

But both schools of thought agree on the basic causality of authoritarianism. People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats. 

The third insight came from Hetherington and American University professor Elizabeth Suhay, who found that when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians. 

But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly. 

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies
necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: Vox

The rise of American authoritarianism [Amanda Taub/Vox]

Fashion Week’s popularity on Instagram

The apparel world is just winding down from New York Fashion Week, the semi-annual designer clothing parade that this year brought us wide-leg pants, cocoon coats and whatever it was that you’d call Kanye West’s collection.

The event has been gradually transforming into a digital attraction for everyday shoppers rather than just a cloistered spectacle for industry insiders, with legions of people now getting a peek at the shows, clothes and models via livestream or social media. In other words, Fashion Week increasingly serves as a snapshot of how digital-savvy customers get their shopping ideas and interact with their favorite brands.

That’s why a new research report on Fashion Week social media engagement is especially revealing about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for retailers as they try to use social media to sell you clothes and other types of goods.

L2, a research firm that studies brands’ digital impact, analyzed the social media posts of 192 fashion houses from Feb. 1 through 18. That time period covered the shows and the immediate lead-up to them, when retailers would likely be in overdrive working to drum up anticipatory buzz. In particular, L2 studied “engagement,” a measure of how many users were enticed enough by the social media post to take an action such as “liking” a post, commenting on it or re-sharing it from their own account.

There is a striking, even extraordinary, difference between customer engagement on Instagram versus on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram, the women’s brands posted an average of 20 times and generated an average of 92,000 interactions. The engagement numbers seen on the other social platforms are paltry by comparison: On Twitter, where women’s brands posted an average of 26 times, tweets averaged 490 likes and 1,117 retweets. On Facebook, brands posted an average of eight posts each that generated 8,000 interactions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, men’s fashion brands generated significantly less social engagement overall than did women’s brands. But the pattern remains the same: Instagram accounted for the vast majority — some 89 percent — of social engagement for men’s fashion.

“Instagram really is dominating the field,” said Liz Elder, the L2 research associate who produced the Fashion Week study.

Also notable is how much the social engagement mix has changed over the last three years of fashion shows. As the chart below shows, Facebook has lost quite a bit of ground, not only in its share relative to Instagram, but in overall engagement volume. And that sends a clear message: Fashion conversation and inspiration-seeking is moving at an astonishing speed from Facebook to Instagram.

by Sarah Halzack, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Ze Takahashi/MCV Photo

Swarm

[ed. Tranquil and slightly hypnotic simulation of swarming behavior in animal populations.]
Swarm Simulator
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The Open Refrigerator

A few decades ago I was sitting in a college seminar room listening to the professor discourse quite penetratingly on Thomas Mann’s monumental and once ubiquitous novel The Magic Mountain when my mind wandered to the question of just how this novel came to be published. Presumably, that callow and ignorant undergraduate in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall thought someone — some editor — must have read the thing and recognized it for the great book that it was. And how hard could that have been anyway? Hell, even I knew it was a great book, if a bit long and occasionally opaque in meaning. I was a senior and the unpleasant prospect of graduation and the necessity to find some paying work was weighing on my mind. Why couldn’t I become that guy? I loved books, loved them even more than my other obsession, basketball. That might be a satisfying line of work. (...)

At the simplest, most basic level, I’ve been reading for a living for 37 years. I arrived at New American Library with a literary and intellectual sensibility formed by the unruly rebellions of the ’60s and the spiritual deflations of the ’70s, with a taste for the novelists and thinkers who had either helped to cause or best reflected and interpreted those rebellions and deflations. I’ve read thousands of books and proposals since then, and I believe I am a better reader than I was at age 27 — I know more because I’ve read more and my judgments are (I sure hope) better informed and more mature. But at the primal level where reader meets text and experiences emotions ranging from boredom and impatience to I-love-this-and-have-to-have-to-publish-it excitement, I think I am still that young man in the hunt and on the make, always searching for the big wow. This process takes place in the private arena of the mind and is entirely unrelated to the corporate arrangements of my employer. It is, quite literally, where I live, where I feel I am most myself.

As for the editing of those books that wow me when happy circumstances dictate that I get to acquire them, that process too takes place in a private arena. When I encounter a sentence that is inelegant or ungrammatical or inefficient or ambiguous in meaning, or a scene in a novel that is implausible or overdone or superfluous, or a plot that drags or goes off course or beggars credulity, or a line of exposition that falls short of the necessary clarity, or feel that some subject is missing and requires coverage, I point those things out to the author and with a carefully calculated mixture of firmness and solicitude suggest ways they might be remedied. I do this usually at nights and on weekends, sometimes on my bus ride to and from work, very occasionally in my office on slow days with my door closed (yes, I have an office with a door that closes), with a complete absence of business calculation beyond the largest context — that a book that is bad or just not good enough is a book that will embarrass me and my employer and be poorly received and will not sell.

But as I read those submissions and edit those manuscripts, on another cognitive plane I am reality testing what I am reading. What other books — the fabled and often tiresome “comp titles” — are like this one, and how did those books sell? (We are always fighting the last war.) Is it too similar to something we published recently or are publishing in the near future, or to a book some other house has or shortly will publish? Are there visual images in the book that might be utilized on the cover? What writers of note can I bug for prepublication blurbs? Is there something about the author, some intriguing or unusual backstory, some charisma radiating off the page (and maybe the author photo? Don’t act so shocked) that suggests that he or she will be a publicity asset? What might a reasonable advance be, given the amounts that have been paid recently for similar books, or might reason for some reason be thrown out the window? (A friend and colleague of mine refers to this feeling as “Let’s get stupid.” More on this matter shortly.) What colleagues in the company, in the editorial department, in marketing, publicity, and sales, could I ask to read the book to drum up support for it? What is my “handle” going to be — the phrases or brief sentences that briskly encapsulate a book’s subject matter and commercial appeal? These and all sorts of other questions will be popping up in my brain, and inevitably there is some crosstalk and bleed-through between the two cognitive spheres. If you want total purity in these matters, go join an Irish monastery and work on illuminated manuscripts, not a New York publishing house. Or at the very least a quiet and scholarly and well-endowed university press.

Nobody really knows how an editor works besides his or her authors and possibly his or her assistant. Yet I am quite certain that, allowing for differences in personal style — some editors go for close-in textual work, some prefer to hover somewhere above the text and make broader observations and suggestions — the process described above is close to the way that my fellow New York editors operate. And there really are not too many of us. I would say that, taking in the six major corporate houses and the handful of sizable independents, that there might be something like 250 editors at a rough count working in adult trade publishing. It’s a fairly clubby group. Most of us know each other either personally or by reputation, and we watch each other’s activities, especially acquisitions, obsessively, aided by our very own digital town crier, the website Publishers Lunch. The society of editors has, of course, its doppelgänger or shadow world in that of the literary agents with whom we deal and whose functions — chiefly the discovery and care and feeding of writers and creating the market for their wares — overlap considerably with ours. Let’s put the number of agents who count (sorry, but we think that way in this town) at 150, and you can grasp how really small-town and incestuous and ingrown the literary ecosystem of New York publishing is. In such a small and hyperconnected world, fueled by the twin forces of ego (our sense that we are at the top of the heap) and insecurity (our sense that we might vanish any year now under some technological Anschluss, that we are in economic terms pissants compared, to, say, the computer-game industry, and how many people in this country care about books anyway?), the arrival of a literary property that holds the promise of both review and publicity glory and substantial sales, can instantly engage the forces of irrational exuberance. And that brings me to the subject without which no consideration of the work of the New York trade editor can be complete: money.

Lord, we have a lot of it. And lord, we need a lot of it. I work in a 50-story mixed-use office and condominium complex in Midtown North, bordering on Hell’s Kitchen. When I approach this building arriving at work in the morning or returning from one of those storied publishing lunches, I look up at it and start doing calculations in my head as to what our offices must cost to rent, and to heat and light and air-condition, let alone the expense of paying the salaries and the benefits and the T&Es of all the people working here. Then I add on the cost of our humongous and totally up-to-the-minute warehouse and fulfillment center in semirural Maryland and all the folks who work there, and I ask myself what have I done to help my company cover the truly enormous nut that one day’s operation must entail and try to avoid the obvious answer that, whatever it is, it is not enough. So I head through the revolving door and up the elevator and tank up on the not-at-all-bad Flavia coffee in the common area that looks like it was decorated with fixtures from the set of some late-’60s Polish science fiction film and start answering the e-mails that have piled up since the day before. Welcome to my world.

by Gerald Howard, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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The Collective Insanity of the Publishing Industry

[ed. I can't attest to the veracity of this, but it sounds just dumb enough to be true.]

Unless you’re a writer, I imagine you haven’t been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that’s a shame, because it’s been really entertaining.

Actually, entertaining isn’t the right word. It’s been insane, but the kind of insane that’s unreasonably fun to watch from a safe remove. Like watching a man stop traffic to cross against a green light by shouting, “I’ll bite your car!” As long as it isn’t your car he’s threatening, it’s sort of funny.

You might imagine that as an author with published works for sale, I am not at a safe remove when it comes to the publishing industry. That’s sort of true, but only sort-of.

Here’s a superb example of the madness of which I speak, and why I’m not concerned that anyone will be biting my car.

In 2014, there was a drawn-out dispute between Amazon, and Hachette. The latter is one of the largest publishers in the world, and Amazon is a company that sells things, such as books. The essence of the dispute was that Hachette—and all the other publishers we affectionately refer to as ‘the Big 5’—wanted more control over the list price of their e-books on Amazon.

That sounds thoroughly reasonable, and it sort of is, but please let me explain because the crazy is in the details. What was happening was that Amazon was discounting the price of the ebooks, and it may seem like this is something the Big 5 would want to stop, except the markdown was coming off of Amazon’s end. In other words, if Hachette wanted to charge $15.99 for an ebook, and Amazon marked it down to $9.99, Hachette was still paid their cut of the full price of the book.

More people will buy a book at $9.99 than at $15.99, so essentially, the Big 5 was coming out ahead in this arrangement in every conceivable way. They collected royalties at an unreasonably high price point while moving the number of units that corresponded to a lower price point.

So of course that had to be stopped right away.

Hachette fought for, and won from Amazon, the return to something called the Agency Model, whereby they set their price and Amazon wasn’t allowed to reduce that price. So that $15.99 book stayed at $15.99 until Hachette decided to change it.

Soon after that contract was signed, the other Big 5 contracts came due, and they all asked for the same Agency Model arrangement. Thus, the finest minds in publishing—or one might assume—negotiated themselves out of an arrangement whereby they sold more units at a lower cost without suffering the financial impact that comes with a lower unit cost.

On purpose.

This isn’t even the crazy part.

by Gene Doucette |  Read more:

Image: Gene Doucette 

Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity

Good people make us feel uncomfortable; they remind us that practising consistent generosity and selflessness isn’t nearly as impossible as we like to think. And so it is not at all surprising that we try our best to find ways of softening the embarrassment, looking eagerly for hypocrisy, inconsistency, mixed motivation or reductive explanations. Larissa MacFarquhar’s excellent book is, among other things, a bracingly sceptical examination of our scepticism. As well as giving us a series of vivid portraits of spectacularly altruistic individuals (and families), she offers a sketchy but highly intelligent overview of the various ways in which we set out to diminish those we like to call ‘do-gooders’, and concludes that these evasions won’t do: the hard question remains. If selfless devotion to relieving the pain or need of others is possible, why don’t more of us get on with it?

The book’s title relates this to the conundrum in moral philosophy that focuses on the limits of ‘disinterested’ care for others. Given the choice between rescuing a drowning relative or a total stranger in a situation of disaster, which do we go for? Does a thirty-year-old mother of four have more claim on me than my own ageing parent or unmarried sibling? It seems at first sight that a truly disinterested, truly generous love would make no fundamental differentiation between those who happen to be close to us and anyone else, so any decision about which one to give priority to would have to be made on grounds that had nothing to do with accidents of connection or instinct. MacFarquhar, by setting her narratives of ‘moral extremity’ in the context of this dilemma, highlights the way in which her heroes and heroines of moral consistency have to find some kind of calculus by which to make decisions about their ethical priorities. And this, of course, is where the problems begin. (...)

MacFarquhar frequently discusses the ideas of Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist whose passionate insistence on a fully rational morality based on detailed calculations of the effectiveness of specific acts and policies has had a huge influence on popular movements such as the Oxford-based Giving What We Can network. Many of the people we meet in the book have been deeply marked by Singer and his followers, who offer a lucid and practical programme for maximising the effectiveness of charitable generosity through painstaking research and unsentimental assessment of results. There is a lot to be said for this as a basis for action. But two uncertainties remain, one fairly specific, the other larger and more elusive. Singer and others are clear that the most effective way you might help in – say – relieving global poverty or disease may not be to work as a grassroots development economist or a medical volunteer in South Sudan, but to take a highly paid job in your own country and donate a correspondingly large sum. There is much common sense in this and it usefully deflates the dramatic impulse that tempts us to think that we help best when we suffer most, even if this means we are largely ineffectual. But it leaves hanging the question of how there might ever be a world in which the coexistence of vastly (irrationally) paid jobs in the developed world – in the financial services sector, for example – and lethally fragile economies elsewhere is not just taken for granted. The model still seems to be bound up with the practice of the rich showing benevolence towards the poor, rather than any longer-term structural adjustment in the direction of greater equality or mutuality.

This connects with the broader point. There is often an assumption in all this that ‘goodness’ is about finding and enacting the most uncomplicatedly virtuous course of action, and that such a course of action is defined quite strictly in terms of the quantifiable relief of suffering. Once again, this is a helpful corrective to vagueness and self-serving fantasy. But what if ‘goodness’ also had something to do with a quality of relation with those who receive help, not just with the long-distance solving of their problems for them? What if morality had more to do with habit and character, with the grace of receiving as well as of giving, rather than being just the sum total of right actions? Singer and many (but not all) of the figures whose stories feature in Strangers Drowning are committed Kantians in their ethics: they believe that morality is about the quest for the unequivocally good action. But, as the dilemmas flagged in the title should tell us, there are choices in which there is no unequivocally good outcome. Talking as though there were one can imperceptibly encourage us to ignore certain kinds of suffering or pain in the way touched on earlier. As many moral philosophers have insisted over the last few decades, focusing on how to make infallibly right choices (and also on hard cases where this looks practically impossible) isn’t a very useful way of thinking about a good life as opposed to an ensemble of right answers. Part of the discomfort generated by some of MacFarquhar’s case studies is to do with a sense that some people are looking almost obsessively for a scheme of ideas that will assure them beyond doubt that they are doing what is right. The more sympathetic figures in this book are those who ruefully acknowledge that their moral maximalism cannot ever quite deliver this and that the human cost along the way may be disturbingly high; or those whose generosity has about it some dimension of warmth or joy as well as effectiveness.

by Rowan Williams, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image: Strangers Drowning

[ed. See also: The Politics of the Hoodie]

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

One week ago we showed a clip by Google-owned Boston Dynamics in which a 5'9", 180lbs humanoid robot called Atlas engaged in various human activities, such as walking, picking itself up, opening doors, and carrying heavy loads. The robot in question, clearly an old prototype (which prompted many to wonder just how far advanced is the underlying technology now if Google has no industrial espionage concerns with this particular specimen) was not only this close from putting millions of workers in menial, repetitive occupations out of a job, but could easily serve as a solider in any army that has a "lower" standard of acceptance.

It was the latter which led to visceral reactions among viewers, some of whom complained that the clip was "disturbing", "frightening" and outright "terrifying", and if there is anything Google does not want, it is to scare the general public with its arsenal of "disturbing" robots.

Which may explain the resulting attempt at damage control, because one week after GOOG shocked the public with the eerie-looking "Atlas", it has now gone the cuteness route and released another clip, this time of Spot, Google's electronic dog, which is seen in the following clip in "the wild", engaged in a close encounter with an actual terrier belonging to Android cofounder Andy Rubin.

The terrier's less than enthusiastic reaction is about what one would expect. (...)

We can't wait to see the "uncute" military version out in the wild next.

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[ed. Title: Richard Brautigan]

Versace
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Thanks Bank of America

[ed. I just got another VISA card in the mail today so thought I'd repost something I'd written less than two years ago. I know they're changing over to the new embedded EMV chip technology, but the notice with my card didn't mention any of that. It's the same old form letter.]

We have learned that your Bank of America® credit card information may have been compromised at an undisclosed merchant or service provider. This does not mean fraud has or will occur on your account, but we are taking precautionary steps to help protect your account.

We're mailing you a new credit card with a new number and deactivating your old card on 05/14/2014. Your new card should arrive within 5-7 business days in an unmarked envelope. Upon receiving it, please:

Activate your new card immediately so you may continue making transactions without interruption 

Destroy your old card and start using your new card

If you've set up recurring payments with a store or service provider, provide those companies with your new credit card number and expiration date 

Keep in mind that if you have a Personal Identification Number (PIN) it is secure and remains unchanged 

Remember, your account has the Total Security Protection® package which provides you with greater defense against theft, loss and fraudulent use of your card.

-----

Dear Bank of America,

Thanks for the heads up. I'd like to ask a few questions, though:

How is it that an "undisclosed merchant or service provider" could compromise my credit card account? What does "undisclosed" mean, and undisclosed to whom? Don't you have standardized security measures in place for all merchants and service providers that use your services? Was it just me, or is this a systemic BoA problem that affects millions of other customers? What was the nature of the compromised activity, and how are you dealing with the issue (other than making me jump through these hoops?)

How can I properly evaluate this risk and possibly avoid similar situations in the future when the only statement provided is "this does not mean fraud has or will occur"? Don't you have algorithms and monitoring systems designed to red flag purchases that are inconsistent with my history? (You certainly did when I drove through Canada and suddenly found my card inactivated so I couldn't buy gas, or call you with my cell phone. That was a good one, thanks!). What does it mean if other "compromised" activites occur again? Are you going to just keep replacing my cards? And what does this say about the rigor of your monitoring systems?

Lastly, and most importantly, do you have any idea what it takes to change all the autopay accounts most cards are currently registered under? (rhetorical question, I'm sure you do and don't really care). It's not insignificant. Utilities, banks, brokerages, Netflix, Amazon, PayPal, cable tv... on and on and on (I'm sure other customers have more accounts than I do, things like smartphone and computer apps, music services, etc. Maybe even country club memberships like your executives enjoy). The time and aggravation involved in calling, emailing, and simply trying to remember all these accounts is, well, let's just say it again, not insignificant, and doesn't enhance anyone's productivity. In fact, it occurs to me to ask: why don't YOU call and update all my accounts? You have all the information.

So Bank of America, I'm asking you, please explain your Total Security Protection package and how this makes my life better? I was under the impression that you had tighter controls on your services than you actually do? What about your claims that unwarranted purchases can be identified quickly and won't be credited to my account? If all that can be undermined by one "compromised merchant or service provider" what does that say about your service?

Since it looks like I'll have to change the information on all my accounts anyway, maybe it's a good time to start looking at other card options.

by markk
Image via:

[ed. Tried responding to this, but here's the reply: "Because email is not a secure form of communication, please do not reply to this email. If you have any questions about your account or need assistance, please visit http://www.bankofamerica.com and select the Contact Us link."

[Thanks again, BoA!]

How to Sell a $1,000 Pill for $10 Without Losing Money

Gregg Alton has what seems like a disorienting job at Gilead Sciences Inc. He’s paid to figure out how to sell the drug Sovaldi, which infamously retails in the U.S. at $1,000 a pill, for relatively next to nothing.

The instructions for pricing the cure, which wipes out hepatitis C in just 12 weeks, basically go like this: “Get to as many patients as possible in low-income nations --and not lose money,” Alton says. “It’s very simple.”

Actually, it’s not so simple, but it is controversial. Decisions about what to charge around the world for life-saving remedies have spurred debate ever since Big Pharma began offering some discounts after a backlash in the ’90s, when groundbreaking HIV treatments reduced deaths in wealthy countries and not poor ones. Criticism has been harsh with Sovaldi, one of the most expensive and best-selling drugs in history.

“We make a good target,” says Alton, Gilead’s executive vice president of corporate and medical affairs.

He offers a rare look at how a pharmaceutical giant walks the line between shareholder expectations on the one hand and global public health needs on the other. It starts with his team looking at the map through the lens of per-capita income. Countries that are well-off go into one bucket. The rest are sorted by wealth and rate of hepatitis C infection.

Then come negotiations with governments. Whatever the price settled on in lower-income nations, Alton says, it usually brings complaints about why the therapy isn’t cheaper -- or why it’s so much cheaper than in the U.S.

Sovaldi Versus IPhone

“People say, ‘Why does Egypt pay 2 percent of the price?’ But it’s something we should do,” he says. He contrasts Sovaldi with the iPhone: “It costs the same everywhere, but it’s not a human need.”

At the moment there are 101 countries in Gilead’s most-needy category, including Egypt, Cuba, Pakistan and the Philippines, and they’re all on the company’s generic-approved list. Gilead has given 11 manufacturers in India licenses to make knockoffs, with sales strictly limited to the list; Gilead gets a 7 percent cut of sales. A generic pill is going for as little as $4.29 in India.

But it could take years for generics to reach all 101, and in the meantime Gilead is cutting deals with some for branded Sovaldi, and also for Harvoni, a formulation that combines Sovaldi with another drug and can reduce treatment times. Typically it’s $900 for a 12-week regimen, or $10 a pill, Alton says, with governments footing all or part of the bill. Gilead has received or applied for the OK to sell Sovaldi in 29 countries, including 16 on the most-needy list. (...)

‘Sophisticated Strategy’

“We can’t price to the poorest person,” Alton says. For one thing, there’s the don’t-lose-money mandate. What’s more, he says, Gilead doesn’t want “to create an artificially low price for the generic companies coming in after us.”

There’s another set of calculations for middle-income nations. In Brazil, for instance, Gilead charges $6,875 for 12 weeks -- 8.2 percent of the U.S. retail price but, according to critics, too much for a nation where per-capita income is about $15,838.

Gilead has a “very sophisticated strategy,” says Tahir Amin, co-founder of the nonprofit group Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge. The company has excluded Chinese generic-makers that could have hastened delivery but would have cost Gilead profits, Amin says. And Gilead “could certainly do more” for middle-income countries not among the 101, he says, singling out China, Brazil and Ukraine, where the disease-burden is high.

Hepatitis C related liver diseases kill about 500,000 annually, most of them in middle- and low-income countries. Until Sovaldi, treatments were marginally effective and often had brutal side effects. When the drug hit the U.S. market in 2013 it was a stunner, for its efficacy and list price: $84,000 for 12 weeks.

That kicked off a new round in the argument over how to reward the innovation that produces cures while not throwing up hurdles for those who need them.

Some public and private U.S. insurers have limited prescriptions to only the sickest. A bipartisan U.S. Senate Finance Committee report chastised Gilead, saying it was focused more on profits than patients. Gilead responded that it priced Sovaldi thoughtfully, based on existing treatments on the market.

Most in Big Pharma make the lion’s share of their money in the U.S., where prices aren’t regulated and insurers negotiate discounts, so hardly anyone pays full freight. Still, Sovaldi’s U.S. sales have made the company and some shareholders rich, but Alton says that’s fair. Gilead is “incentivizing investors -- otherwise they would invest in social media or something else.”

by Caroline Chen, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Forbes

That Was How He Was

For Ethan Canin, the author of A Doubter’s Almanac, Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish” is a masterwork. The protagonist is a businessman named Woody Selbst who’s unsure of how to mourn his con artist father. Pop didn’t just abandon the family when Woody was a teenager. He tricked his son into becoming an accomplice in his escape—a cruel ruse that permanently thwarted Woody’s ambitions in the process.

In our conversation for this series, Canin explained that his favorite part comes at the very end. As Pop pulls off one last con on his deathbed, Woody’s coming-to-terms is expressed in a simple final sentence: “That was how he was.” We discussed how Bellow infuses five ordinary words with such uncanny power; why endings should make us feel, not think; and what “A Silver Dish” teaches about dialogue, plot, and character.

A Doubter’s Almanac is a family saga about the destructive power of genius, and like “A Silver Dish” it concerns a complex father/son legacy. It’s the story of a groundbreaking mathematician from northern Michigan, whose brilliance is only equaled by his capacity for betrayal and violence. A cast of long-suffering characters support the celebrated work, including the son who fears he’s inherited his father’s gifts and penchant for self-destruction.

In 1998, Ethan Canin left medicine to teach fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he was my professor). The best-selling author of the story collections Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief, and novels including America America and For Kings and Planets, his fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. We spoke at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan.

Ethan Canin: When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of Henderson the Rain King in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had, a pair of cords and a sport coat—but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits. As they stood there talking about whether they preferred intravenous versus oral chemotherapy, I thought, “Oh my god, I’m about to get myself into the wrong line of work.” But when I went in for the interview, the guy noticed I had a book in my jacket pocket. He asked what I was reading, and when I took it out, he said, “Oh, that’s my favorite book.” All we did was talk about Henderson the Rain King. I think that’s how I got into medical school.

I think Bellow’s the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I’m in awe.

One of my favorite works is the great short story “A Silver Dish,” a story not too many people seem to know. It ends with, for me, one of the most memorable lines in fiction:

That was how he was.

There are five words in that sentence, each one essentially meaningless: That was how he was. Two of them are the same word: “was” and “was.” Hardly any sounds even, in those words, there’s no tilt, no break, no angle to the rhythm—just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Of all those words, only “he” and perhaps “was” have any sort of meaning. “How” is technically an adverb the way it’s used here but feels more nounish to me, in the sense that I get a little visual spark when I read it, entirely from what has come before in the story. The whole sentence uses only seven distinct letters, and contains only 15 letters total: three a’s, three h’s, three w’s, two s’s, two t’s, an o, and an e.

It’s an amazingly restrained line from Bellow, who was a poet of the first order. I think he was intentionally restricting his palette. Compare it to some of his other great sentences, like the famous first line of The Adventures of Augie March:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

You can open that book up to page 400 and find the best sentence you’ve ever seen. It’s an astonishing, volcanic eruption of ideas and language. (...)

But the last line of “A Silver Dish,” is nothing like that. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep. I’ve read the story three times in the past few weeks, and each time I arrived at that sentence, tears came to my eyes.

How does Bellow pack so much emotion into those five ordinary words?

I think it’s their very blankness that allows them to channel so much emotion. Because they don’t bring anything specific to mind, they allow us to feel without thinking. At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel. You’ll often see this in the final moments of a film: The camera tilts up, and the movie ends with a non-distinct image of the sky, or the sea, or the coast. Something the eye can’t quite focus on, which allows you to focus on everything that’s come before. That’s how “that was how he was” works, too. It brings nothing else to mind. This sentence would be a non-sentence if it began the story—but, placed at the end, it’s packed with the charge of everything that precedes it. Each of those non-words is nitroglycerin, and the story that precedes it is the fuse.

To me, this line also shows that content trumps style. I have a theory about writing, which is that you cannot simultaneously write something true about character and, at the same time, write something linguistically beautiful. There are too few words to express both truth and beauty, so most empathetic—or another way to say this might be character-driven writers—tend to naturally reserve their beautiful constructions for when the content is less urgent. You’ll see Bellow get poetic when he’s writing about the scenery, like when Woody and his dad take that streetcar ride. But when he’s trying to write something that really gets to the narrator’s deep emotional experience, the prose is mostly very simple: That was how he was. Five plain words. At the crux of the story it pays to write what’s true, rather than try to write what’s true and then dilute that by making the prose beautiful. It’s a continuum, of course, but I don’t think you can be at both ends of the continuum.

For me, I should also say, this story answers almost every question a young writer could have about fiction writing. (...)

When “A Silver Dish” begins, it’s remarkably static: Woody, pierced by the sound of church bells all over Chicago, is mourning his father, a lifetime of old memories and impressions washing over him. But the story snaps into sudden focus when he recalls one of his father’s transgressions, a betrayal that’s haunted the younger man all his life. It’s that individual transgression—that memorable instance of bad behavior—that gets the story rolling.

I think of that moment as the story standing up. The moment when the black lines on the page suddenly become a story.

I’ve heard [the Deadwood creator] David Milch say (though I might be butchering it slightly) that it’s easier to plot your way into an idea than it is to idea your way into a plot. And I think a lot of writers start out making the mistake of trying to write a novel about something. Novels are discussed as though they are intentionally about something, but they’re not. They’re stories. We’re taught to think about them that way by literary critics, or by English teachers, who are, in their defense, generally trying to teach you to write a paragraph rather than a novel. But to be a writer, I think, you have to abandon the idea that fiction is “about” something. This concept is bad enough in your reading life. But it’s fatal in your writing life.

I’ve seen plenty of students come in and say, I want to write a novel about blah blah blah. But you just can’t do it. You can only write a novel about a character who does something wrong, and see what happens from there. Novels are compendiums of bad behavior, and literature is the gossip about it.

In other words, if you’re writing a piece of fiction, I’d urge you not to try to show anything—instead, try to discover something. There’s no way to write anything powerful unless your unconscious takes charge.

by Joe Fassler and Ethan Canin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Doug McLean

What Restaurants Should Know About Food Critics (& How to Spot One)

As a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Ruth Reichl knows what can make or break a great dining experience. She’s famous for her creative and serious approach to the job, which earned her two James Beard Awards for restaurant criticism and led to her dressing up in elaborate disguises to avoid being recognized on the New York dining scene, as she describes in her memoir Garlic and Sapphires.

Here, we ask Ruth what restaurants should know about criticism, how to deal with a negative review — and yes, how to spot a critic.

If you could tell restaurateurs one thing about food critics or criticism, what would it be?

This isn’t necessarily about critics or criticism, it’s about running a restaurant. It amazes me how few restaurants understand how important the initial contact is. However you are accessing the restaurant — on the phone or website — you take that impression into the restaurant with you.

The same holds true for when you sit down at the table. The first things that happen there are very hard to recover from. Everyone pays attention to the welcome, but the smell of a restaurant when you walk in was always really important to me. The quality of the bread, the quality of the butter. If you give me soft butter that smells like the refrigerator, I’m done.

Overall, what was your approach to criticism?

If you judge a restaurant on what they’re trying to do as opposed to what you want them to do, you can review anything from a hot dog stand to a four-star restaurant. I would do my homework ahead of time and figure out what they’re trying to do, and how well do they do that. I would study up on chefs, figure out what their previous places were, and really read whatever statements they put out about what they’re trying to do. Then you can judge them on their own pretensions. One of the biggest faults of criticism is that critics have a tendency to judge a restaurant on what they wish it would be. That’s a real mistake.

What are some other little things you’d notice as a critic that people might not think about?

One of the things that always baffles me is when cocktails are too expensive. You’re sitting at a bar, someone asks if you want something while you’re waiting, you order a cocktail — and you realize it’s the most expensive cocktail you’ve ever bought in your life. I am immediately put out by that. I know it’s a profit center for restaurants, but it’s also that first contact people have with you, and it leaves an impression.

I’m also stunned by how unaware restaurateurs are of the sophistication of wine buyers. If you’re marking bottles up three times what you paid for them, it’s very likely that half of your customers know it. Thirty years ago you could get away with that, but today you’re dealing with a more sophisticated diner and drinker. If you’re charging $10 a glass for a bottle you bought for $8, half of your customers will know it and they’re going to be pissed about it. It’s not a smart place to make money.

What you really want as a restaurateur is to get the customer on your side as quickly as possible. You want them to want you to succeed. When I was a critic and giving out stars I really took that into consideration. I would often give restaurants a glowing review and give them two stars instead of three, because if you give three stars, people go in with a huge chip on their shoulder. But if you give a glowing review and two stars, they’ll go in saying, why is she such a bitch?

Every one of your customers can be on your side or not on your side, and that’s something you really want to think about. A lot of it is not how good the food or service is but how much they like you. Restaurateurs don’t think much about the likeability factor. As a critic, you think about it a lot because it’s what you always hear from readers. That’s why Danny Meyer is so smart — he makes is customers feel like they’re loved. (...)

What were some things you looked for from the service staff?

I still think that we as Americans have a very difficult time with service. There used to be rules, and now there aren’t any rules, so we’re still trying to figure out what is American service.

I’m still stunned by how many restaurants you walk into where the waiter will say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so.” You really want to say, “I don’t care what your name is.” We still have yet to figure out how to have service that is friendly and yet a little bit distant. It should be caring and anticipatory. The best service is the service that you don’t notice, where you never have to ask for your wine glass to be refilled, for more water or bread, or for a plate to be taken away. It just happens. It’s still really rare to get that in restaurants.

One of my real pet peeves is that I really hate it when somebody’s plate is cleared when someone else isn’t finished. It still happens way too often.

Another thing that drives me crazy: overfilling the wine glass. Every time they come by they fill it, because they’re trying to get you to order another bottle. That really aggressive upselling drives me insane. I think it’s counter-productive. Nobody wants a full glass at every minute! When you feel that, you start to notice how aggressive they are about other things, and it unbalances the trust you have in the restaurant. Trust is the most valuable thing you can have with your customer, and you don’t want to do anything to upset that trust.

And this is everybody’s pet peeve: there is nothing more annoying than having a waitperson say “good choice” after you order. I did not need your approval.

by Olivia Terenzio, Open for Business | Read more:
Image: Fiona Abound

B-17 Flying Fortress
via:

Esperanza Spalding and Gretchen Parlato

MFA vs. CIA

[ed. This is very much the theme of Mortals, a great novel by Norman Rush]

When I was twenty-three, I was hired by the CIA. I was working at a Catholic school at the time, coaching squash and teaching seventh-grade social studies—which was funny, since I had never before seen a squash game before and was not even so much as a lapsed Catholic. I lived behind the school in a former convent where the only consistently functioning lights were a pair of glowing red exit signs. My prevailing feeling that year was one of intense personal absurdity, and it was in this spirit that I applied to the CIA (I liked international relations, and who knew they had an online application?) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I liked writing stories, and what the hell?). These things certainly didn’t make any less sense than coaching squash and living in a convent—though they weren’t really ambitions as much as gestures: reflections of my general hope that I would, someday, do something else. Each was something in between a dice roll and a delusion, a promissory note and a private joke to no one but myself.

Later, it turned out that this was a lot like what writing a novel would feel like.

In some ways, it is hard to imagine two paths more different than being a writer and being a spy. It is certainly hard to imagine two careers with more wildly disparate stakes. And yet there are parallels in the underlying qualities of their practitioners: an interest in psychology, a facility with narrative, a tendency to position oneself as an observer, and a willingness to lie and call it something else.

In The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage, Frederick P. Hitz notes that one of the requirements of a good intelligence officer is “a profound understanding of human nature”—the ability to get into “the heads and the guts of a recruited spy.” Spy running often involves a carefully choreographed pulling of psychic marionette-strings: threads of desire and ambition, paranoia and greed, ideology and pragmatism—all unique to the individual in question and to the broader cultural and geopolitical context. Vanities and resentments are especially important, and CIA officers must play to these without ever acknowledging them outright (Hitz’s book offers a catalog of spies who were motivated, at least in part, by the most minor of grievances—and won over by the most minor of flatteries). Intelligence failures, like literary ones, tend to stem from failures of empathetic imagination.

We do not generally think of spying as an exercise in empathy, since its results are rarely benign. But insight into another person is a tool like any other (everything depends on what you do with it), and empathy forms the only springboard from which we can hope to access it. Spies must be empathetic in gaining understanding and ruthless in using it. In some ways, this is the real-world counterpart of the kind of empathy writers extend toward their characters. Novelists spend years conjuring fictional people—intricately constructing backstories, lovingly sketching minds—so that they can be made to react plausibly to whatever horrors have been planned for them all along. The stakes of this process are, in the scheme of things, nonexistent. Yet to be good at it does demand a non-squeamish imagination, as well as an aptitude for what Keats called negative capability: the ability to accept uncertainties, to sustain incompatible possibilities. This is an uncommon quality, I think—and like insight itself, much depends on how it is used. It lets us consider ideas we don’t completely believe in, inhabit perspectives we don’t totally endorse. It lets us linger too long in liminal spaces where we don’t necessarily want to stay.

A few weeks after I submitted my online application, the CIA contacted me for a phone interview. I was surprised by this—less by the fact that my résumé had passed some initial scrutiny than that somebody had read it in the first place. This, combined with the quick turnaround, left me in the very weird (and possibly unprecedented) position of being impressed with the honesty of the Central Intelligence Agency and the efficiency of the federal government.(...)

Writers and spies share an ability—and a willingness—to hide in plain sight, to deflect attention not only from the nature of their role but from the fact that they have any role at all. A spy obscures his relationship to events in order to affect them, just as a writer hovers anonymously beyond the page in order to exert her tyrannical, obsessive control. What is authorial distance, anyway, but a form of plausible deniability? This willingness to disappear is another difficult quality to gauge in normal terms—it seems to be simultaneously a form of delusional arrogance and its exact opposite. But writers and spies both understand its uses; in both cases, it is the vanishing act that enables the sorcery.

In the fall, I began my teaching job. I wasn’t the only one to notice I wasn’t great at it. Maybe jobs aren’t for me, I thought, and applied to MFA programs. And then the CIA invited me to Washington, D.C., for a three-day interview.

As one does with unforeseen outcomes, I began to make a retroactive case for inevitability—not of my future position as a CIA officer, but of my present position as an apparently viable CIA candidate. For this, according to the CIA itself, was what I was—a fact too bizarre to be meaningless. I still felt almost totally sure I would not get the job—beyond the candidate evaluation lay a vast labyrinth of security-clearance assessments from which, it seemed, almost nobody emerged—but it was time to seriously entertain the possibility.

It was also time to reconsider the question of whether I actually wanted this job. In a way I had wanted it all along, of course, but more like someone who wants to go to space someday and less like someone who wants to leave for a mission to Mars in six months; it was an issue that needed revisiting in light of this new, apparently literal reality. Another question was the ethical one—heretofore academic or, at most, civic. I believed in the necessity of the CIA; I respected many of the things it did or tried to do and was, like all sane people, horrified by other things. I’d raised some of these issues in my initial interviews, but more as a citizen in a unique position to learn how she should regard actions undertaken on her behalf than as a person contemplating undertaking any particular action herself. Should morally alert people shun the CIA, or are they the very people we most need working for it? I’d thought about this question in the way I’d thought about a lot of questions—as a philosophy major. I was going to have to think about whether there was another way to think.

It is fair to say that I had doubts. But doubts, I reasoned reasonably, were not a reason not to go to Washington. Doubts were a reason to go and get more information. And maybe they were. But the bigger thing was this: I was curious.

by Jennifer duBois, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: “The Crow Spy Talks to the King of Owls and His Ministers,” Kalila wa Dimna

Nobel Prize Economists Say Free Market Competition Rewards Deception and Manipulation

The late nineteenth century was a busy time for inventors: the automobile, the telephone, the bicycle, the electric light. But another invention of the time has received much less attention: the “slot machine.” Slot machine in the beginning did not have its present-day connotation. The term referred to any sort of “vending machine”: you deposited your coin in a slot; you got to open a box. By the 1890s slot machines were selling chewing gum, cigars and cigarettes, opera glasses, chocolate rolls in individual paper wrappers, even quick looks at the precursor-to-the-phone-book city directories— all manner of things. The basic innovation was a lock activated by the deposit of a coin.

But then a new use was discovered. It wasn’t long before slot machines began to include gambling machines. A newspaper of the time dates the appearance of slot machines in this modern sense to 1893. One of those early machines rewarded winners with fruit candy rather than money; it was not long before everybody ascribed special meaning to that rare coincidence: the appearance of three cherries.

Before the 1890s were over, a new kind of addiction, to gambling slot machines, had been born. In 1899 the Los Angeles Times reported, “In almost every saloon may be found from one to half a dozen of these machines, which are surrounded by a crowd of players from morning to night…. Once the habit is acquired it becomes almost a mania. Young men may be seen working these machines for hours at a time. They are sure to be the losers in the end.” (...)

What Markets Do for Us

The history of the slot-machine-good/ slot-machine-bad from the 1890s to the present illustrates our dual view of our market economy. Most fundamentally, we applaud markets. Free markets are products of peace and freedom, flourishing in stable times when people do not live in fear. But the same profit motive that produced those boxes that opened and gave us something we wanted has also produced slot machines with an addictive turn of the wheel that takes your money for the privilege. Almost all of this book will be figuratively about slot-machines-bad, rather than about slot-machines-good: because as reformers both of economic thought and of the economy we seek to change not what is right with the world, but rather what is wrong. But before we begin, we should reflect on what markets do for us.

To do so, it is useful to take a long perspective and return to that era of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century. In December 1900, in The Ladies Home Journal civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. participated in the sport of predicting what life would be like one hundred years hence. He predicted we would have “hot and cold air [coming] from spigots.” We would have fast ships that would get us “to England in two days.” “There will be airships,” mainly used by the military, but sometimes for passengers and freight. “Grand opera will be telephoned to private homes and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box.” The predictions go on.

Watkins described his predictions as seeming “strange, almost impossible”; but, remarkably, free markets, with their incentives to produce what people want, as long as a profit can be made, have made his predictions come true, and more.

However, free markets do not just deliver this cornucopia that people want. They also create an economic equilibrium that is highly suitable for economic enterprises that manipulate or distort our judgment, using business practices that are analogous to biological cancers that make their home in the normal equilibrium of the human body. The slot machine is a blunt example. It is no coincidence that before they were regulated and outlawed slot machines were so common that they were unavoidable. Insofar as we have any weakness in knowing what we really want, and also insofar as such a weakness can be profitably generated and primed, markets will seize the opportunity to take us in on those weaknesses. They will zoom in and take advantage of us. They will phish us for phools.

Of Phish and Phool

The word phish, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined in 1996 as the Web was getting established. That dictionary defines phish as “To perpetrate a fraud on the Internet in order to glean personal information from individuals, esp. by impersonating a reputable company; to engage in online fraud by deceptively ‘angling’ for personal information.” 11 We are creating a new, broader meaning for the word phish here. We take the computer definition as a metaphor. Rather than viewing phishing as illegal, we present a definition for something that is much more general and goes much further back in history. It is about getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman, but not in the interest of the target. It is about angling, about dropping an artificial lure into the water and sitting and waiting as wary fish swim by, make an error, and get caught. There are so many phishers and they are so ingenious in the variety of their lures that, by the laws of probability, we all get caught sooner or later, however wary we may try to be. No one is exempt. (...)

Four broad areas indicate how widespread are the NO-ONE-COULD-POSSIBLY-WANTs, regarding personal financial security; the stability of the macroeconomy (the economy as a whole); our health; and the quality of government. In each of these four areas we shall see that phishing for phools has significant impact on our lives.

Personal Financial Insecurity. A fundamental fact of economic life has never made it into the economics textbooks. Most adults, even in rich countries, go to bed at night worried about how to pay the bills. Economists think that it is easy for people to spend according to a budget. But they forget that even if we are careful 99 percent of the time, the remaining 1 percent, when we act as if “money does not matter,” can undo all that prior rectitude. And businesses are keenly aware of those 1-percent moments. They target the events in our lives when love (or other motivations) trumps our budgetary caution. For some, this is an annual Christmas potlatch. For others, it occurs at rites of passage: such as weddings (where the wedding mags assure brides that the “average wedding” costs almost one half of annual per capita GDP); funerals (where the parlor director carefully lays out the caskets to induce the choice, for example, of the Monaco “with Sea Mist polished finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred”); or births (where Babies “R” Us will give a “personal registry advisor”).

But rites of passage are not the only life punctuations where sticking to budget is presented as being mean. It is thus no coincidence that, as rich as we are in the United States, for example, relative to all previous history, most adults still go to bed worried about their bills. Producers have been just as inventive in getting us to feel we need what is produced as they have been in filling the needs that we really have. No one wants to go to bed at night worried about the bills. Yet most people do.

One source of our angst about those bills comes from rip-offs: as consumers we are especially prone to pay too much when we step outside of our comfort zone to make the rare, expensive purchase. In some 30 percent of home sales to new buyers, total— buyer plus seller— transaction costs, remarkably, are more than half of the down payment that the buyer puts into the deal. Auto salesmen, as we shall see, have developed their own elaborate techniques to sell us more car than we really want; and also to get us to pay too much. Nobody wants to be ripped off. Yet we are, even in the most carefully considered purchases of our lives.

by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Evonomics | Read more:
Image: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Seeking distraction one winter afternoon, a Milwaukee boy takes to some old-fashioned mischief and hurls snowballs at passing cars. A driver gives chase and kicks in the door of the house where the boy lives with his mother and younger brother. The landlord puts the family out. Thus begins an odyssey that in Matthew Desmond’s gripping and important book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, exposes the harrowing world of the ten million or so low-income households that pay half or more of their income for rent and utilities, a long-overlooked population whose numbers have recently soared.

The mother, Arleen, finds a house she likes, and it consumes only 84 percent of her cash income. But the city condemns it. So she moves the teen, Jori, and his brother, Jafiris, to a place she calls “Crack Head City” and then to a duplex where the rent, $550 a month, requires 88 percent of her income. She falls behind and gets evicted two days before Christmas, but the new tenant lets her stay until she finds a place. Living with a stranger causes friction, and Arleen calls ninety landlords before finding a place, from which she is again evicted. The situation worsens. She and the boys double up with a neighbor who is turning tricks. They rent a place where they are robbed at gunpoint. When Arleen’s next apartment takes 96 percent of her welfare check, she can’t keep the lights on. Her worst fear comes to pass: child welfare takes the kids.

Evicted tells this and other disturbing stories in spellbinding detail in service of two main points. One is that growing numbers of low-income households pay crushing shares of their incomes for shelter—50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, and more—leaving inadequate sums for items as basic as medicine and food. Their numbers were rising for decades but soared to record levels during the Great Recession. The book’s second point is that the evictions aren’t just a consequence of poverty but also a cause. Evictions make kids change schools and cost adults their jobs. They undermine neighborhoods, force desperate families into worse housing, and leave lasting emotional scars. Yet they have been an afterthought, if that, in discussions of poverty. (...)

Evictions are brutal. Desmond watches as an armed deputy knocks and a mother pleads vainly for time. The mover says she can pay to store her possessions or have them left on the street. She can’t afford storage. “Curbside service, baby!” the mover tells the crew. Three children watch their mother pace. “Her face had that look,” Desmond writes. “The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours.” One woman from the trailer park spent $1,000 on the storage bills but fell behind and lost her belongings anyway. About 70 percent of evicted tenants who opt for storage do. A week earlier, a man asked the deputy for a private moment, then shot himself in the head.

Evictions destabilize neighborhoods. The more people come and go, the less chance there is for cohesion. A case in point is the Hinkston family—Doreen, four kids, and three grandkids—who were neighborhood fixtures on a block where they lived for seven years. Doreen was a porch sitter who knew everyone and kept her eyes on the street. When an eviction notice forced them to move in a hurry, they quickly settled for a run-down house on a block where they knew no one and kept inside. “With Doreen’s eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence,” Desmond writes, “but Wright Street didn’t gain one.” Evictions often generate two moves—a rush that often ends in a hellhole and an effort to climb out of it.

Worse, evictions destabilize people. Jori, the snowball thrower, went to five different schools in seventh and eighth grades, “when he went at all.” He once missed seventeen consecutive days. The disruptions cause workers to get fired. Letters sent to wrong addresses cause people to miss appointments and lose public aid. Evictions mar the tenants’ records, making it harder to get housing assistance or rent private apartments. The effects are enduring, as measured by incidents like hunger or lost utilities. “The year after eviction, families experience 20 percent higher levels of material hardships than similar families who were not evicted,” Desmond writes. He continues:

Then there is the toll eviction takes on a person’s spirit…. One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rates of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers.

Eviction isn’t just another hardship, Desmond argues, but a detour onto a much harder path—“a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

The landlords in Evicted hold all the cards. Technically, they can’t retaliate against tenants who complain of stopped-up toilets or broken windows. But they can evict anyone who fails to pay the rent, regardless of the housing conditions. The result is a kind of devil’s pact. “Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted,” Desmond writes. When cases go to court, tenants rarely win. About 70 percent of them don’t even appear. They can’t miss work or find child care or stomach the humiliation. The sound of eviction court is the call of a name, “a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp.”

When one of Sherrena Tarver’s houses catches fire, a baby dies. There were supposed to be smoke detectors in the bedroom, but the firemen didn’t hear them. Sherrena fears she’s at risk. “I thought we had put some smoke detectors up there,” she says. “I can’t remember right now.” The baby’s mother, Kamala, is one of her former students. When the fire inspector calls the next day and tells Sherrena she’s off the hook, she has one question: Does she have to return Kamala’s rent?

The answer is no. And she doesn’t.

by Jason DeParle, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Magnum Photos