Pushing and Pulling Goals

This is a distinction I’ve always found helpful.

A pulling goal is when you want to achieve something, so you come up with a plan and a structure. For example, you want to cure cancer, so you become a biologist and set up a lab and do cancer research. Or you want to get rich, so you go to business school and send out your resume.

A pushing goal is when you have a plan and a structure, and you’re trying to figure out what to do with it. For example, you’re studying biology in college, your professor says you need to do a research project to graduate, and so you start looking for research to do. You already know the plan – you’re going to get books, maybe use a lab, do biology-ish things, and end up with a finished report which is twenty pages double-spaced. All you need to figure out is what you’re going to select as the nominal point of the activity. There’s something perversely backwards about this – most people would expect that the point of a research project is to research some topic in particular. But from your perspective the actual subject you’re researching is almost beside the point. The point is to have a twenty page double-spaced report on something.

School and business are obvious ways to end up with pushing goals, but not every pushing goal is about satisfying somebody else’s requirements. I remember in college some friends set up an Atheist Club. There was a Christian Club, and a Buddhist Club, so why shouldn’t the atheists get a club too? So they wrote the charter, they set a meeting time, and then we realized none of us knew what exactly the Atheist Club was supposed to do. The Christian Club prayed and did Bible study; the Buddhist club meditated, the atheist club…sat around and tried to brainstorm Atheist Club activities. Occasionally we came up with some, like watching movies relevant to atheism, or having speakers come in and talk about how creationism was really bad. But we weren’t doing this because we really wanted to watch movies relevant to atheism, or because we were interested in what speakers had to say about creationism. We were doing this because we’d started an Atheist Club and now we had to come up with a purpose for it.

Sometimes on Reddit’s /r/writing I see people asking “How do you come up with ideas for things to write about?” and I feel a sort of horror. So you want to write a novel, but…you don’t have anything to write about? And you just sit there thinking “Maybe it should be about romance…no, war…no, the ennui of the working classes…or maybe hobbits.” I can understand this in theory – you want to be A Writer – but it still weirds me out.

You may have noticed I don’t really like pushing goals. Part of it is an irrational intuition that they’re dishonest in some way that’s hard to explain. It usually ends up with me trying to figure out what to do my biology research project on, and I think “well, I can’t think of anything I really want to research, so maybe I should just do whatever is easiest”. But if I do whatever is easiest, I feel really bad, and worry maybe I have some kind of obligation to research something important that I care about. So I get my brain tangled up trying to figure out how much easiness I can get away with, then feeling bad for asking the question, then trying to come up with something important I honestly want to do, which doesn’t exist since I wasn’t doing a biology research project the month before my professor assigned it to me and so clearly I am only doing it to satisfy the requirement.

Another part of it is that it’s often a sign something has gone wrong somewhere. In the example of the Atheist Club, that thing might have been starting the club in the first place. But assuming that we genuinely want to start the club, then the presence of a pushing goal means we don’t understand why we wanted to start the club. If we wanted to start it because we wanted to hang out with other atheists, then that offers a blueprint for a solution to the problem – instead of planning all these movies and speakers, we should just hang out. If we did it because we thought it was important for atheism to be more visible on campus, then again, that offers a blueprint for a solution – spend our sessions trying to improve atheism’s campus visibility. If we just sit there saying “I guess we have an Atheist Club now, better think of something to do at meetings”, then it seems like something important hasn’t been fully examined.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: none

Beth Hart

The Substitute

An email blast goes out from the director of composition to all the adjuncts, graduate students, and temporary-contract full-time instructors who teach writing at a large state university. The director of composition is chipper about a professional development opportunity at a neighboring institution and he’ll reserve space for any of the teacher-persons who want to go, the fee paid by the English Department. The invitation is for a workshop with a nationally recognized composition scholar, and the teachers can carpool. For teachers, professional development means a day without teaching, but a day spent talking about teaching, and this is a welcome and often productive change. Almost as an afterthought, the director of composition ends the email by saying anyone who would like to attend the workshop who teaches on that day should arrange for a substitute to teach their classes.

If you’ve never heard of substitute teachers for college classes, that’s because they don’t exist. A substitute is a teacher-person who goes from school to school, and from class to class, to sit in when the regular teacher has taken a day off. Since the students who attend high school, middle school, or elementary school are required by law to sit in those classrooms, the job of the substitute is to watch the kids, end of story. The teacher calls their principal and says they won’t be coming in that day and the principal goes down the list until someone agrees to substitute. It’s never been the teacher’s responsibility.

Professional development is important for teachers: professors go to conferences to stay relevant and to make contacts. It used to be that the university would pay for this, and that’s still mostly true, though it’s almost never the case for the kinds of teacher-persons who received the director of composition’s email. The director of composition recognized that these were teacher-persons who needed professional development for different reasons. The adjuncts, the graduate students, and the temporary-contract full-time instructors were all in the same boat, valued for their semi-pro status, and the director of composition would escort them to the nationally recognized scholar like Scouts on their first camping trip. No one believes that the workshop attendees will ever achieve the heights of the national scholar, no matter what their potential, and in the meantime, they’re still expected to adhere to university policy and to be sure the classes are being taught.

The director of composition should have known more than anyone that it would be next to impossible for composition teachers to get substitutes for their classes, due to the number of them attending the workshop and the number of classes those teachers regularly taught. You see, there’s no substitute pool for them to draw from, so they have to ask unpaid favors of each other, because they certainly can’t ask the tenured professors, who have minimal contact with contingent faculty as they come and go from year to year. Despite the good intentions of the director of composition, the contingent teachers have been reminded that they can’t pretend to claim the perks taken for granted by tenured professors and also do their jobs effectively. (...)

When a student tells me they want to be a teacher I suggest they try substitute teaching. It doesn’t cost anything, one doesn’t need a license, and there’s no prep. They only work the days they want to work and if they are even semi-competent, the schools will keep calling them back. For my own part, I had good experiences as a substitute teacher. It let me know that I was able to go into a classroom where I was greeted with extremely low expectations, yet I could trick the students into learning despite themselves. Anyone who thinks they want to teach will get a pretty quick sense of whether they still want to teach after they’ve tried substituting.

As sensible as this sounds, this suggestion, that a student should try substituting is almost always greeted by the student with disdain. We tend to think of ourselves as better than substitutes, even those with no teaching experience. And so asking someone to be a substitute for a college class only works if that teacher is already in a position that comes with a degree of disrespect. By comparison, instead of asking “Will you be the substitute for my classes?” a contingent teacher might try out some of these equivalent phrases on their colleagues: “Will you babysit my child? Will you be a server at my wedding? Will you pick up my mom from the airport?” The only reason I need a substitute for my classes is because the director of composition told me I did, and the only reason the director of composition told me I did was because the university administration, a.k.a. the numbers people, told the director that I did.

I’m in a position that comes with disrespect, though my students don’t really know it, because whether I go to a workshop for faculty development or not, I’m a professional. Sometimes, the students who turn their noses up at the suggestion that they try substitute teaching will say, “I don’t want to teach high school. I want to do what you do. I want to teach college.”

I tell them that if they teach in the public secondary or elementary schools they’ll have better job security and will likely be paid more. They might have to deal with student discipline or with standardized tests, but maybe that’s not such a big deal. Maybe it just is. It’s teaching after all. It’s a calling.

Blind faith in the capitalist meritocracy makes it surprising for a student to hear that a professor with a Ph.D. can make less than a teacher with a bachelor’s degree, someone they might think of as more like a smart mom than a scholar. But at the end of the school year that teacher won’t be let go simply because her contract has run out. She’ll almost automatically be kept on the payroll, and she’ll be given a raise. At public secondary or elementary schools it’s easier to keep someone around than to do a new job search, so even without tenure there’s almost always job security. At institutions of higher education, however, they pretty much always run job searches, even when they have someone they want to keep around. A professor on a temporary contract might be asked to reapply for the job they already have, or their renewable contract could be replaced with one that is nonrenewable, because the rules can change without warning.

by John Minichillo, McSweeny's |  Read more:

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The Unified Theory of Deliciousness

My first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, had an open kitchen. This wasn’t by choice—I didn’t have enough money or space to put it farther away from the diners. But cooking in front of my customers changed the way I look at food. In the early years, around 2004, we were improvising new recipes every day, and I could instantly tell what was working and what wasn’t by watching people eat. A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their toe.

The Momofuku Pork Bun was our first dish that consistently got this kind of reaction. It was an 11th-hour addition, a slapped-together thing. I took some pork belly, topped it with hoisin sauce, scallions, and cucumbers, and put it inside some steamed bread. I was just making a version of my favorite Peking duck buns, with pork belly where the duck used to be. But people went crazy for them. Their faces melted. Word spread, and soon people were lining up for these buns.

That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.” A chef can go years before getting another dish like that. We’ve been lucky: Hits have come at the least expected time and place. I’ve spent weeks on one dish that ultimately very few people would care about. And then I’ve spent 15 minutes on something that ends up flooring people like the pork bun.

Believe me, nobody is more surprised about this than I am. Cooking, as a physical activity, doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has. To compensate for my lack of dexterity, speed, and technique, I think about food constantly. In fact, I’m much stronger at thinking about food than I am at cooking it. And recently I started seeing patterns in our most successful dishes that suggested our hits weren’t entirely random; there’s a set of underlying laws that links them together. I’ve struggled to put this into words, and I haven’t talked to my fellow chefs about it, because I worry they’ll think I’m crazy. But I think there’s something to it, and so I’m sharing it now for the first time. I call it the Unified Theory of Deliciousness.

This probably sounds absolutely ridiculous, but the theory is rooted in a class I took in college called Advanced Logic. A philosopher named Howard DeLong taught it; he wrote one of the books that directly inspired Douglas Hofstadter to write Gödel, Escher, Bach. The first day, he said, “This class will change your life,” and I was like, “What kind of asshole is this?” But he was right. I would never pretend to be an expert in logic, and I never made it all the way through Gödel, Escher, Bach. But the ideas and concepts I took away from that class have haunted me ever since.

DeLong and Hofstadter both found great beauty in what the latter called strange loops—occasions when mathematical systems or works of art or pieces of music fold back upon themselves. M. C. Escher’s drawings are a great, overt example of this. Take his famous picture of two hands drawing each other; it’s impossible to say where it starts or ends. When you hit a strange loop like this, it shifts your point of view: Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it.

It was only recently that I had a realization: Maybe it’s possible to express some of these ideas in food as well. I may never be able to hear them or draw them or turn them into math. But I’ll bet I can taste them. In fact, looking back over the years, I think a version of those concepts has helped guide me to some of our most popular dishes.

My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.

It’s a little bit like the famous liar’s paradox, which we studied in DeLong’s class. Here’s one version of it: “The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.” As soon as you accept the first sentence, you validate the second sentence, which invalidates the first sentence, which invalidates the second, which validates the first, and on and on.

Most people won’t ever notice this sensation; they’ll just appreciate that the food tastes good. But under the surface, the saltiness paradox has a very powerful effect, because it makes you very aware of what you’re eating and your own reaction to it. It nags at you, and it keeps you in the moment, thinking about what you’re tasting. And that’s what makes it delicious.

This was an important realization for me, because it seemed like I’d discovered an unequivocal law. And I figured if I could find one, there had to be more—a set of base patterns that people inherently respond to. So then the challenge became discovering those patterns and replicating them in dish after dish. If you could do that, you’d be like the Berry Gordy of cooking; you’d be able to crank out the hits.

by David Chang, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kiernan Monaghan & Theo Vamvounakis

via: here and here

Move Managers

In her long career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Phyllis Harrison-Ross has been described by friends and colleagues as practical and calm. But two other traits, humor and patience, went right out the window when she decided to downsize.

“You ask yourself what you want to keep, and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” said Dr. Harrison-Ross, who turns 80 next month. “It’s an emotional roller coaster that takes a toll on you. It’s very tiring.

“I thought I could get down to the bare essence of things myself,” she said. “But that proved to be very difficult, much more than I had expected.”

Her solution: Dr. Harrison-Ross hired a senior move manager.

Moving is stressful at any age, but for those who have lived in one place for many years, getting rid of things that have accumulated over decades is a large barrier to overcome.

As people get older, said David J. Ekerdt, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of Kansas, cognitive and physical issues hamper divestment. “It’s also a very emotional task. It’s hard to quantify the attachment one has to certain possessions,” he said, adding that the probability of people divesting themselves of their belongings decreases each decade after age 50.

Senior move managers specialize in the issues that comes with downsizing, including donating and selling items and hiring movers. In New York, these managers maneuver through the often stringent moving and trash-disposal rules adopted by co-ops and condominium buildings. They also deal with out-of-town family members who may want items sent to them. They pack and unpack; they call the cable company. Most also help with decluttering and organizing the homes of seniors who wish to stay put.

The specialty is new, so no one can estimate just how many senior move managers there might be in the United States. But Mary Kay Buysse, the executive director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, said: “Our membership has grown from 22 members in 2002 to nearly 1,000 members today. Though most of our current data is anecdotal, we know members managed over 100,000 senior moves last year.” She added that total revenue among the members was about $150 million last year.

Dr. Harrison-Ross, a commissioner of the New York State Commission of Correction and chairwoman of the commission’s medical review board, said she first thought about moving from her four-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side about five years ago, but didn’t start looking for a smaller place until health issues took a toll about two years ago.

“There were rooms I didn’t go into for days,” said Dr. Harrison-Ross, who has lived in the apartment for 48 years.

She found a spot in an apartment building for seniors on the Upper West Side, but knew she was in trouble when her first impulse was to “stick everything I had into storage and forget about it unless I needed something.”

She asked a friend to help her get organized. But the two puzzled over how to get rid of large items or whom to call to sell furniture and artwork.

Then Dr. Harrison-Ross’s real estate agent referred her to Katie Hustead, who with her husband, Joseph Weston, runs Paper Moon Moves, a Brooklyn company specializing in seniors. She talked to Ms. Hustead on the phone and met with her in person before she signed on.

“It’s very important to hire someone that you can trust, because the decisions you’re making are very emotional,” Dr. Harrison-Ross said. “Once I knew I could trust Katie, things started to move forward, because any suggestion she would make, I knew she had thought about what was important to me.”

Most senior move managers in New York charge about $100 per hour, higher than the national average. In a 2014 survey conducted by the National Association of Senior Move Managers, 50 percent of the respondents said they charged between $41 and $60 per hour. (...)

Move managers also have a long list of contacts for specific tasks, Ms. Buysse said. For example, a good move manager will know not to call a top-tier auctioneer for something worth a few thousand dollars, and know which estate liquidators or junk haulers work well with seniors.

Move managers can also step in when adult children don’t live near their parents or don’t have time to help sort through belongings. Judith Kahn, who owns Judith Moves You, a Manhattan company that specializes in senior moves, said most seniors can handle an organizational task for only about three hours a day, which can frustrate adult children who have flown in for the weekend and want to get things done quickly.

“Kids often have a different idea of how their parents should move, so it’s better if a move manager can be that understanding, neutral person,” Ms. Kahn said.

by Kaya Laterman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Emon Hassan

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeoise wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and] one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives.

How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (public library) — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as “a populated place: a city in itself.”

After the sudden collapse of a romance marked by extreme elation, Laing left her native England and took her shattered heart to New York, “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass.” The daily, bone-deep loneliness she experienced there was both paralyzing in its all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to aliveness. Indeed, her choice to leave home and wander a foreign city is itself a rich metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a voluntary vagabond and a catatonic recluse all at once, yet somehow a vitalizing laboratory for self-discovery. The pit of loneliness, she found, could “drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.”

She writes:

There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens? (...)

There is, of course, a universe of difference between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to signal an existential failing — a social stigma the nuances of which Laing addresses beautifully:

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social circles. 

Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologisation, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that loneliness serves no purpose… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind.

It was in the lacuna between self-forgetfulness and self-discovery that Laing found herself drawn to the artists who became her companions in a journey both toward and away from loneliness. There is Edward Hopper with his iconic Nighthawks aglow in eerie jade, of which Laing writes:

There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.   […] 

The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.   […] 

Green on green, glass on glass, a mood that expanded the longer I lingered, breeding disquiet.

Hopper himself had a conflicted relationship with the common interpretation that loneliness was a central theme of his work. Although he often denied that it was a deliberate creative choice, he once conceded in an interview: “I probably am a lonely one.” Laing, whose attention and sensitivity to even the subtlest texture of experience are what make the book so wonderful, considers how Hopper’s choice of language captures the essence of loneliness:

It’s an unusual formulation, a lonely one; not at all the same thing as admitting one is lonely. Instead, it suggests with that a, that unassuming indefinite article, a fact that loneliness by its nature resists. Though it feels entirely isolating, a private burden no one else could possibly experience or share, it is in reality a communal state, inhabited by many people. In fact, current studies suggest that more than a quarter of American adults suffers from loneliness, independent of race, education and ethnicity, while 45 per cent of British adults report feeling lonely either often or sometimes. Marriage and high income serve as mild deterrents, but the truth is that few of us are absolutely immune to feeling a greater longing for connection than we find ourselves able to satisfy. The lonely ones, a hundred million strong. Hardly any wonder Hopper’s paintings remain so popular, and so endlessly reproduced. 

Reading his halting confession, one begins to see why his work is not just compelling but also consoling, especially when viewed en masse. It’s true that he painted, not once but many times, the loneliness of a large city, where the possibilities of connection are repeatedly defeated by the dehumanising apparatus of urban life. But didn’t he also paint loneliness as a large city, revealing it as a shared, democratic place, inhabited, whether willingly or not, by many souls?  […]

What Hopper captures is beautiful as well as frightening. They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them… As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’s strange, estranging spell. 

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings | Read more:
Image:Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (1942)

Mikael Jansson
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Being Honest About Trump

[ed. Whatever you think of Donald Trump's chances in November it says a lot about our country that he's achieved what he has so far. In the end, it's not enough to say... oh, I made a mistake, or, I thought we just needed a change (Brexit, anyone?). Even if you're not fully aware, you're still fully culpable. See also: The Beginning of the End.]

...We walk out of the beautiful museum and find ourselves back in a uniquely frightening moment in American life. A candidate for President who is the announced enemy of the openness that America has traditionally stood for and that drew persecuted émigrés like Moholy-Nagy to America as to a golden land, a candidate who embraces the mottos and rhetoric of the pro-fascist groups of that same wretched time, has taken over one of our most venerable political parties, and he seems still in the ascendancy. His language remains not merely sloppy or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency that have governed American politics. Most recently, just this week, he has repeated the lie that there has been a call for “a moment of silence” in honor of the murderer of five policemen in Dallas.

This ought to be, as people said quaintly just four or five months ago, “disqualifying.” Nonetheless, his takeover of the Republican Party is complete, and, in various postures of spinelessness, its authorities accede to his authority, or else opportunistically posture for a place in the wake of it. Many of them doubtless assume that he will lose and are hoping for a better position afterward—still, the very small show of backbone that would be required to resist his takeover seems unavailable. Even those who clearly fear and despise him, like the Bush family, seem able to register their opposition only in veiled language and cautiously equivocal formulations; Jeb Bush knows what Trump is, but still feels obliged to say that he would “feel sad” if Trump lost.

What is genuinely alarming is the urge, however human it may be, to normalize the abnormal by turning toward emotions and attitudes that are familiar. To their great credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it, insisting on her “criminality” at the very moment when it’s officially rejected, and attempting to equate this normal politician with an abnormal threat to political life itself. They do this, in part, to placate their readership. In the so-called mainstream (call it liberal) media, meanwhile, the election is treated with blithe inconsequence, as another occasion for strategy-weighing. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this! While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.

A certain number of the disengaged insist that Trump isn’t really as bad as all that. And there may indeed be another universe in which Donald Trump is one more blowhard billionaire with mixed-up politics but a basically benevolent heart, a Ross Perot type, or perhaps more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, preaching some confused combination of populism and self-help and doomed to flounder when he comes to power. This would not be the worst thing imaginable. Unfortunately, that universe is not this one. Trump is unstable, a liar, narcissistic, contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a pathos to his followers’ dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But he did not come to political attention as a “populist”; he came to politics as a racist, a proponent of birtherism.

As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences invariably are. Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against it fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

Hillary Clinton is an ordinary liberal politician. She has her faults, easily described, often documented—though, for the most part, the worst accusations against her have turned out to be fiction. No reasonable person, no matter how opposed to her politics, can believe for a second that Clinton’s accession to power would be a threat to the Constitution or the continuation of American democracy. No reasonable person can believe that Trump’s accession to power would not be.

By Adam Gopnik , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Spencer Platt/Getty

Val Archer (b. 1946), Pearl
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How to Avoid the Most Common Fake Foods on Restaurant Menus

Traditionally, food fraud scandals have involved supermarket staples like domestic Parmesan cut with high levels of cellulose, extra-virgin olive oil that failed to meet the extra-virgin standard, honey diluted with corn syrup, or dried spices "extended" with chopped weeds.

But lately the media focus has turned to restaurant menus. Inside Edition reported that Red Lobster’s namesake bisque and Nathan’s Famous’ lobster salad both missed a crucial ingredient — lobster. A scathing Tampa Bay Times report bashed self-proclaimed "farm-to-table" restaurants for lying about almost everything down to the names of local farmer purveyors, and serving farmed Asian pollock as Alaskan wild-caught, drug-addled feedlot cattle as grass-fed, and, worst of all for those following Jewish or Muslim dietary customs, swapping cheaper pork for veal.

Food fraud is a sophisticated $50 billion annual industry, according to Michigan State University's Food Fraud Initiative, and while many of the nation's scams occur in grocery store aisles and retail shops, what has surprised many readers of my new book Real Food/Fake Food the most is the Wild West of restaurant menus. There’s a perception that spending more or visiting "name" chefs is an insurance policy against counterfeits, but that’s not really true. Food deceptions are institutionalized in the food-service industry: Some occur further up the supply chain, and many are in fact perfectly legal, even if morally outrageous.

Reading the menu and the waiter is as much art as science, so here are the top three fake food flags — keep an eye out especially for red snapper, Kobe, or the use of truffle oil — that should impact your evaluation of all claims on a restaurant’s menu.

1. Where’s the beef? USDA Prime, Kobe, and "Dry-Aged"

It is important to understand that menus and restaurant food claims are largely unregulated, exempt from Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture rules for retail. Label a "Choice" steak "USDA Prime" in the supermarket and you’ll likely get fined; label it "USDA Prime" on a menu and you just significantly enhanced your margin. Diners take it for granted that 28-day dry-aged beef was actually aged, that heirloom breed pork is not the standard Sysco version, and that organic produce is organic. They should not. If investigations like the Tampa Bay Times' have shown one thing, it’s that the more "value added" tasty-sounding adjectives adorn a menu, the more likely there are lies. This is especially true in the highest-priced sections of most restaurant menus, meat and seafood.

The single biggest menu red flag, regardless of the price level of the establishment, is the use of the words "Kobe beef." When Inside Edition confronted New York’s Old Homestead steakhouse about serving $350 Kobe steak that was not from Kobe, the spokesman basically dismissed their finding as semantics. The supply of the real thing is so scarce that individual restaurants are licensed by Kobe’s marketing council to buy it, and you can literally count the restaurants in this country serving the real thing on your fingers. The nine such places in the country proudly display golden steer plaques, usually at the front counter. The other 99+ percent of Kobe claims are lies, including all for burgers, sliders, hot dogs, and anything cheap — the real thing sells for well over$20 an ounce.

Other beef claims are much harder to evaluate. But as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of beef produced in this country is not of high quality — it is industrial feedlot beef, reared on drugs and silage, a fermented corn stew, as well as animal by-products. Yet there are a lot of restaurants serving steak, many of them upscale. Less than two percent of the beef produced in the country grades USDA Prime (the USDA’s numbers report they declare four percent of American beef "Prime," but that only reflects the percentage of beef that’s actually submitted to be graded; lower-quality beef often isn’t graded at all). Only a small percentage of our beef is truly grass fed and even less is also raised drug- and animal-byproduct free. There are just a handful of established steakhouses like Keens in New York and Bern’s in Tampa that dry-age their own meat in house. And only a tiny handful of wholesalers like New York’s DeBragga distribute Japanese beef.

In all these cases, the question you should be asking your waiter is "where does your meat come from?" If they can unflinchingly name a specialty distributor, a growers’ cooperative like Niman Ranch, or a particular farm such as Colorado’s 7X ranch, it’s a good sign. If they can’t answer this question specifically and without hesitation, it’s a terrible sign — all these meats are highly specialized and need to be carefully sourced.

2. Red snapper = red flags

Seafood is even worse. In the largest nationwide study conducted by Oceana in 2013, 38 percent of all restaurants — and a staggering 74 percent of all sushi eateries — mislabeled the species of fish served. While businesses inevitably blamed distributors and wholesalers, it was no accident — the substitute was always less expensive than the one claimed on the menu.

How to avoid that upcharge? Rockefeller University's Dr. Mark Stoeckle, involved in DNA species testing for the Barcode of Life project, gave me this tip: "Just don’t ever order red snapper." The poster child for fraud, the real thing is served up less than six percent of the time. At New York sushi temple Sushi Nakazawa, often rated the Big Apple’s best, the fraud risk is so high they simply they won’t serve red snapper — ever. Eat this fish out every night for a week and odds are you still won’t have tasted it, and just seeing it on a menu at anything less than one of the country’s top seafood restaurants makes me immediately suspect of everything else.

But it’s not just red snapper: cod, halibut, flounder, and grouper are commonly faked, often by Cambodian ponga, a catfish mass-produced in Asian fish farms under suspect conditions that have included banned drugs. In sushi restaurants, white tuna, widely used in rolls, did almost as poorly as red snapper, and the primary substitute is escolar, known in the trade as the "Ex-Lax fish" due to the digestive distress it can cause — it used to be banned on our shores. The reason seafood is so widely and easily faked is because most diners are so disconnected from it: If you don’t fish, you have no idea what most fish look like. In any case, in restaurants it is almost always entirely prepared, already cut into filets — which with white fishes, are largely indistinguishable, especially under a mound of sauce or in cioppino.

by Larry Olmsted, Eater | Read more:
Image: Alena Haurylik/Shutterstock

Sanyu (1901-1966), Three Nudes, 1950s
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Gineke Zikken
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Group Therapy: Was It Really a Game?

Before A Question of Scruples, Loaded Questions, or Curses; decades before Cards Against Humanity, Drunk Stoned or Stupid, or Never Have I Ever; before Nasty Things, What’s Yours Like?, or Disturbed Friends, there was Group Therapy, the original psychological adult board game. Released in 1969, Group Therapy straddled the free-love ’60s and the ’70s Me Decade, groovy and real, a plain black box with white text, just the name and question: “Is it really a game"? Yes, reads the instruction booklet, Group Therapy is a game. “But Group Therapy is for people who want to do more than just play games. For people who want to open up. Get in touch. Let go. Be free.”

The rules are simple. Players move their tokens along a game board from the beginning space marked “Hung Up” to the final space marked “Free.” To reach “Free,” players must draw from three decks of cards and perform the cards’ instructions. These tasks grow more difficult as you move along the board, from yellow to blue to red.

From the yellow deck: “Ask someone to hold you and rock you. Give yourself to the experience.”

From the blue deck: “Stand facing the group member who threatens you most. Pushing your hands against his, tell him why he frightens you.”

And from the red deck, my absolute favorite card: “You have been accused of over-intellectualizing your hang-ups. Respond — without falling victim to that criticism.”

Within a minute after performing each card’s instruction, players must issue a judgment by displaying a card. One side reads “With It,” the other “Cop Out.” With each “With It” judgment, players advance a space, and go back for each “Cop Out.” A player may also read, pass, and move their token one space back.

A better tagline for Group Therapy might be one I read online: “It’s like Candyland except with more awkwardness and crying.” (...)

Saturday, November 3, 1973. All in the Family, the number one show in the country with an average weekly audience of 20 million viewers, airs an episode entitled “The Games Bunkers Play.” Mike, better known as “Meathead,” breaks out a board game after dinner and invites his friend, Lionel Jefferson, and the Lorenzos, the Bunkers’ neighbors, along with Archie, Edith, and Gloria to play.

“It’s a psychological game — if you play this game right, you could really learn a lot about yourself,” Meathead explains enthusiastically. “You pick a card when it comes your turn, you read it and do what it’s says.”

“Sounds left-wing to me,” Archie quips.

Archie picks the first card: “Do an interpretive dance that shows how you feel when you think nobody likes you.” The audience erupts in laughter. Archie makes a face, picks another: “Discuss the part of your body which you are most proud of.”

With that Archie exits (“I’m doing my interpretative of a guy going down to Kelsey’s for a couple of beers.”) The group plays on. Meathead loses his cool when they judge him as a “Cop Out.” He accuses everyone of criticizing him just as harshly as Archie. Edith follows him into the kitchen. Archie doesn’t hate you, Edith explains. He criticizes you because he sees in you all the things that he can never be.

When Archie comes home, oblivious to what had gone one, Mike says he understands and hugs him.

4.
Inside our home in Maple Shade, N.J., a working class suburb of Philadelphia, the Summer of Love arrived around 1975. Mom, who worked part-time as a secretary at our Catholic school, read Leo Buscaglia pop psychology books and prayer booklets she kept in her bedside table. Dad, a local delivery truck driver, played whale call cassettes and ordered home wine-making kits. We traced biorhythm charts with a Spirograph-looking instrument that determined if our energies were compatible, if we were having “up” or “down” days. Mom and Dad may have taken part in a few hippie things, but were far from hippies. They had more in common with All in the Family than Jefferson Airplane.

Dad bought Group Therapy at a toy store in 1974. Mom’s high school friends, ex-cheerleaders all, came by to play, and brought their husbands along. Marlboro smoke filled the kitchen on these adult get-togethers. I am reminded of one night when I was eight years old, sitting down next to empty bottles of Boone’s Farm wine, and insisting on playing the game as well.

I drew the card that read “You are advertising yourself as a lover. What does the ad say?”

Mom told me to pick another one, then sent me back to bed, without the group giving their judgment.

by Daniel Nester, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Nester

‘BoJack Horseman’: Hilarious and Hallucinatory

[ed. See also: The World According to ‘BoJack Horseman’]

The first time I watched “BoJack Horseman,” I thought I’d seen this sort of thing too many times before. This may sound like an odd thing to say about an animated comedy featuring a washed-up sitcom actor who happens to be a horse, but bear with me.

The premise felt like one more cynical take on showbiz shallowness and debauchery — “Entourage” and “Episodes” crammed into two ends of a horse costume. The players were familiar types: an entitled, has-been title character (Will Arnett); his tightly wound agent and ex-lover, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), a cat; his shiftless houseguest, Todd (Aaron Paul), a 20-something human; his amiable frenemy, a Labrador retriever named Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins).

But by the middle of the first season and throughout its spectacular second one, “BoJack Horseman,” created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, revealed itself as another, much more thoughtful creature.

Tired of living on the residual money and fame from his corny hit ’90s sitcom (“Horsin’ Around,” about a horse who adopts three human children), BoJack decides to pursue his dream of starring in the biopic “Secretariat.” (Tagline: “He’s tired of running in circles.”) The process forces him to get serious about his work, to confront the number of people he’s hurt over the course of his career and, ultimately, to grapple with his own self-destructiveness and depression.

BoJack, an ass of a horse, is right in the wheelhouse of Mr. Arnett, who has played self-centered oafs like Gob Bluth in “Arrested Development.” But he’s also deeply, well, human: self-absorbed, self-destructive, but self-aware enough to know that he wants to be better than he is, even as he fails.

In the third season, which arrives on Friday on Netflix, BoJack has realized his goal — kind of. After he flaked out on the set of “Secretariat,” the director completed his scenes by using a C.G.I. horse — which, it turned out, played the role better than BoJack himself.

Now he’s doing an awards-season press tour under the eye of his “Oscar whisperer” publicist, Ana Spanikopita (Angela Bassett), taking credit for the work of an improved electronic simulacrum of himself.

For the BoJack we thought we knew in the beginning of the series, this might be enough: praise, validation and love, without having to work for them. Now, he realizes, he wants to be good enough to have done it.

But actually doing the work is hard, and in the amniotic infinity pool of celebrity that BoJack floats in, there are too many incentives just to do the easy thing. BoJack is, among other things, an addict — booze, drugs, sex — and the endorphin rush of public adulation is one of the toughest buzzes for him to kick.

The Oscar campaign provides the arc of the new season, as BoJack endures press interviews (including one with a reporter from “Manatee Fair”) and schmoozes with industry types at parties including a “bat bat mitzvah,” where the young celebrant becoming an adult is, in fact, a bat. (“BoJack” is not above a broad animal joke; when Ana orders soup in a restaurant, the waiter who brings it is, naturally, a fly.)

The absurdist comedy and hallucinatory visuals match the series’s take on Hollywood as a reality-distortion field. But the series never takes an attitude of easy superiority to its showbiz characters. At heart, “BoJack Horseman” is a comedy about lonely people (and animals) who are never by themselves.

by James Poniewozik, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

Ron Lawson
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Too Cool

The news was enough to have French smokers choking on their morning cigarette: France is considering banning some tobacco brands because they are just too cool.

Among those threatened are Gitanes and Gauloises, beloved of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to puff through five packets of filterless Gitanes a day.

The ban, which could also cover the Lucky Strike, Marlboro Gold, Vogue and Fortuna brands, is the logical conclusion of a new public health law – based on a European directive – which stipulates tobacco products “must not include any element that contributes to the promotion of tobacco or give an erroneous impression of certain characteristics”.

Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vague”, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociability”. (...)

In May, France ordered all cigarette manufacturers to create neutral packaging. The bill means that from November, French shops can only sell the new packets that are of a uniform size and colour and have the brand name in a small uniform font.

The new packs are part of a hotly disputed health reform bill voted through by French MPs in 2014 which also tackles eating disorders, sunbed use and binge drinking. An attempt to scrap the neutral cigarette package clause failed by just two votes in November 2015.

by Kim Willsher, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Sonny Meddle/Rex/Shutterstock

R.E.M.

Kim Kardashian vs Taylor Swift: a Battle of Two PR Styles

[ed. Nice to get caught up every seven years or so.... or, maybe not.]

"I'd very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” Taylor Swift writes in a statement released to the world via an Instagram post. She is upset that she has been “falsely painted as a liar” in a series of events that amount to “character assassination”. Someone is offering the world a story about her, a story in which she is the villain. Swift doesn’t want to accept that role.

How did we get here? If you haven’t been following the drama of Swift vs West for the past seven years, here are the basics of what we know. In 2009, Swift was awarded the MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video. Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech to insist that, with “Single Ladies”, a song nominated for the same award, Beyoncé “had one of the best videos of all time”. West’s reputation as (in Barack Obama’s words) “a jackass”, was cemented: the majority of people watching at home were resoundingly on Swift’s side. West apologised. Fast forward a few years, and the two have kissed and made up: at the 2015 VMAs, Swift presented West with an award of his own. A month later, West sends Swift flowers – she posts a picture of them to Instagram, hastags it #BFFs, and it becomes her most popular post to the site. Then, in February of this year, West debuts his new album, including the song “Famous”, which contains the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? / I made that bitch famous” – tabloids were shocked. West claims that he had Swift’s approval. Swift denied it, in her first of several statements she would make in relation to this incident.

At the Grammy Awards a few days later, Swift made a thinly veiled allusion to those who “try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame”. West claimed that despite her comments, Swift had approved the lyrics in question during a phone call. A video for the song comes out, showing a naked Swift lookalike in bed next to West – many labelled it misogynistic. At this point, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, started to defend her husband, insisting that the phone conversation had happened on film in an interview with GQ – and that she has the tapes. In a somewhat condescending statement, Swift denied that she had ever heard the song or approved the specific lyrics in question, but confirmed that Kanye West had called her to ask her something else about the song.

“Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West. However, that does not change the fact that much of what Kim is saying is incorrect. Kanye West and Taylor only spoke once on the phone while she was on vacation with her family in January of 2016 and they have never spoken since. Taylor has never denied that conversation took place. It was on that phone call that Kanye West also asked her to release the song on her Twitter account, which she declined to do. Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term ‘that bitch’ in referencing her. A song cannot be approved if it was never heard. Kanye West never played the song for Taylor Swift. Taylor heard it for the first time when everyone else did and was humiliated. Kim Kardashian’s claim that Taylor and her team were aware of being recorded is not true, and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”

Then, last night, just after an episode of her reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians aired discussing the whole affair, Kim Kardashian West posted the video footage to her Snapchat.

In the video we see Kanye reading her the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex”. We don’t see him reading the line about how he made her famous, but we can tell that something that is at least similar is read, by Swift’s response: “You honestly didn’t know who I was before that. It doesn’t matter if I sold seven million of that album before you did that, which is what happened. You didn’t know who I was.” Less than an hour later, Swift released a statement which emphasises that she was not aware that she would be referred to as “that bitch” in the song, hence her change in tone.

The charitable reading of Swift is that she was overly nice to West on the phone without knowing the specifics. The less charitable reading is that she wanted the lyric to be released to the public, but to also publically reject it as misogynistic: because, as Kim Kardashian West says on KUWTK, she wanted to “play the victim” as “it worked so well for her the first time”. Many agreed with Kardashian West. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty and #KimExposedTaylorParty started trending on Twitter – the most enthusiastic followers of to-the-minute celebrity gossip felt it was high time the sweet, girlish singer was “exposed” as something a lot less innocent. People were taking sides – and they chose Kim’s.

Kim Kardashian West and Taylor Swift have very different types of fame, and very different approaches to being famous, but both are powerful women renowned – infamous, even – for controlling their public image down to the minute details. They have both spent years crafting channels that give the illusion of intimacy with their audiences, building relationships (romantic and otherwise) with other celebrities, turning unsavoury tabloid stories to their own advantage, carefully selecting which parts of their personal lives to share with the world. As Taylor’s fear of “narrative” exemplifies, they are, in essence, storytellers. This feud represents a battle between two very different styles of storytelling.

by Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Kevin Mazur/WireImage, E!; Taylor Swift