The George Plimpton Story

[ed. My life-long love of reading started with Paper Lion.]

Six books and several dozen Sports Illustrated articles into his journalistic career, George Plimpton still couldn’t type the words “participatory journalism” with a straight face. “‘Participatory journalism’—that ugly descriptive,” he writes in the first pages of Shadow Box (1977), sighing over his Underwood. Though he became nationally known as the subgenre’s paragon and the term pursued him into his obituaries, Plimpton was only a journalist in the sense that James Thurber was an illustrator and Robert Benchley a newspaper columnist. He went places, spoke to people, and wrote down his observations, but the reporting wasn’t the point. What was the point? The storytelling, the humanity, the comedy.

It was an odd match to begin with: for a writer of Plimpton’s background, journalism ranked on the literary hierarchy somewhere below light verse and pulp westerns. In George, Being George, Charles Michener, Plimpton’s editor at The New Yorker, explained:

Journalists were from a rougher background. They tended not to be Ivy League, white-shoe boys, which George was certainly the epitome of. When I came into that world, I was at Yale and people would say, “Why do you want to be a journalist? It’s sleazy. That isn’t for people like you.”

Journalism was not to be taken seriously, but comedy writing was even more of a joke. What was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, class of 1948, to do?

After two years at Cambridge, where Plimpton earned a master’s in English, he moved to Paris to run a fledgling literary quarterly, while working in secret on various novels he would later abandon; one began with a long set piece in which a fire breaks out at a society party. As contemporaries and friends—Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gay Talese—began to revitalize the journalistic form, placing themselves in the middle of the story and writing with the depth, nuance, and narrative richness of novelists, Plimpton saw an opening.

In 1956 he began writing for Sports Illustrated, which Henry Luce had founded two years earlier with the hope of targeting men of leisure. The editors had as much interest in hunting, boating, and polo as in the major spectator sports; the main athlete profiled in the debut issue was the Duke of Edinburgh, an enthusiastic amateur archer, cricketer, and high jumper. The first significant paid writing assignment of Plimpton’s career was a 30,000-word cover story, published over four consecutive issues, about Harold Vanderbilt’s passions for yachting and bridge.

The refined approach required refined authors. Sports Illustrated’s founding editor, Sid James, who had previously edited Ernest Hemingway at Life, sought novelists to serve as contributors: William Faulkner covered hockey and the Kentucky Derby, John Steinbeck wrote about fishing, Budd Schulberg about boxing, James T. Farrell was the roving baseball correspondent, and John P. Marquand wrote a series about country clubs. The editors also touted the return of Paul Gallico, who had been the highest-paid sportswriter in New York as a columnist for the Daily News before abandoning his post to write novels and screenplays (the best known today are The Poseidon Adventure and The Pride of the Yankees). Gallico got his start as a young journalist by sparring a round with Jack Dempsey, who knocked him out cold in about ten seconds. Gallico repeated the gag with many of the professional athletes he covered in order, he wrote, to understand more intimately “the feel” of the game. In the opening pages of Out of My League (1961), Plimpton writes of his admiration for Gallico:

He described, among other things, catching Herb Pennock’s curveball, playing tennis against Vinnie Richards, golf with Bobby Jones, and what it was like coming down the Olympic ski run six thousand feet above Garmisch—quite a feat considering he had been on skis only once before in his life…. I wondered if it would be possible to emulate Gallico, yet go further by writing at length and in depth about each sport and what it was like to participate.

Thus marks the first appearance of “participate” in Plimpton’s writing.

Little, Brown has published in attractive Skittles-colored editions a slightly eccentric selection of Plimpton’s works of sports journalism. The one for which he is best known, “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” which was the cover of Sports Illustrated’s April 1, 1985, issue and was later expanded into a novel, is omitted, perhaps because it is a work of fiction (though his other books, it should be noted, contain plenty of fiction). Also missing is One More July (1977), a conversation with the offensive lineman Bill Curry, and The X-Factor (1990), an inquiry into what distinguishes superstar athletes from mortals, a quality he discussed as early as the opening paragraph of his Vanderbilt piece. The new set includes the five books that Plimpton counted as works of “participatory journalism”—Out of My League, Paper Lion (1965), The Bogey Man (1968), Shadow Box, and Open Net (1985)—as well as Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), a weightless postscript to Paper Lion that mainly concerns the off-field hijinks of two Lions linemen, and One For the Record (1974), which follows Henry Aaron’s quest to beat Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. But all of Plimpton’s books were participatory in the sense that he is always tangibly present, his sensibility—beguiling, lyrical, charming, deeply funny—singing from every paragraph. The joy of these books comes less from sharing the company of Muhammad Ali or Alex Karras than—a point lost on his many imitators—from sharing the company of George Plimpton.

by Nathaniel Rich, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Larry Fink

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Aging and My Beauty Dilemma

When I was 21, I underwent breast reduction surgery, reducing my embarrassingly large chest to something that could at least fit inside a cardigan. Although there was some medical rationale for the procedure, the overwhelming reason was that I was sick and tired of every man on the planet being unable to look above my neck. Their fault, I know, not mine, and symptomatic of the baggage, both physical and psychological, women are forced to carry around with them. But once my own baggage was surgically removed, I felt amazing — lighter, prettier, healthier. Was this an indulgent move on my part? Maybe. Have I regretted it over the last 30 years? Not for a single moment. I had a problem, or at least what felt an awful lot like a problem, and I made it go away.

When it comes to aging, though, I’m torn. Because technically, growing older isn’t a problem; Mother Nature has it in for us all, reducing us to shriveled frames and crepey arms en route, eventually, to dust. And like most women in my liberal, feminist-leaning, highly educated peer group (I’m president of Barnard College in New York City), I am ideologically opposed to intervening in such a natural and inevitable process as simply getting on in years.

But like many of my peers, I am also a two-faced hypocrite, at least when it comes to parts of myself that may well benefit from a twinge of not-quite-so-natural intervention. Almost every woman I know colors her hair in some way, whether from a box or at a pricey salon. And these days, at least in Manhattan — and Los Angeles, London and even Paris, I suspect — many women will quietly confess to a shot of Botox from time to time, or a dose of filler to soften their smiles. It’s after that point that things become dodgy. Brow lifts. Estrogen. Tummy tucks. Cellfina cellulite treatment. Is it all a slippery slope to some kind of Kardashian hell? Or, like Propecia and Viagra — age-fighting interventions that men use and rarely take much criticism for — are they simply elements in a modern medicine chest, there for the picking? Does a little face-lift along the way constitute treason, or just a reasonable accommodation? I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that for women in certain professional or social circles, the bar of normal keeps going up. There are virtually no wrinkles on Hollywood stars or on Broadway actors; ditto for female entrepreneurs or women in the news media. There are few wrinkles on the women in Congress and even fewer on Wall Street. Chief executives, bankers, hospital administrators, heads of public relations firms and publishing houses, lawyers, marketers, caterers: Certain standards of appearance have long been de rigueur for women in these positions, from being reasonably fit and appropriately dressed to displaying attractive coifs and manicured nails. But more and more, these standards also now include being blond, dark- or red-haired and nearly wrinkle-free. Just saying no — to chemicals, peels, lasers and liposuction — becomes harder under these circumstances, even if no one wants to admit that’s the case.

What is more, as with so many issues that surround women and beauty and aging and sex, there is a paradox today that seems to strike women of the postfeminist generation with a particular force. In the bad old days — before women worked outside the home; before they lived much past their reproductive years; before there were Restylane and Juvéderm, Radiesse and Sculptra — the idea of halting aging or fading in its tracks was only a fantasy, the stuff of Ponce de Léon and the fountain of youth. No one did anything about it, much less worried about the moral implications of doing so. But today, women facing the onslaught of middle age are armed with an arsenal of age-fighting implements and, for many, a feminist-inspired philosophy that disdains using them.

It is a trivial dilemma, perhaps, but a painful one nevertheless. If a woman with some degree of professional success brags about or even comments upon her fabulous new filler or face-lift, she risks being derided as a traitor to the cause, someone silly enough to have spent the time and money to subject herself to an unnecessary, possibly dangerous, procedure. (When is the last time you heard a movie star tout her plastic surgeon? Or a leading executive thank her dermatologist?) By the same token, if that woman ignores the process of aging and eases more honestly into her inevitable wrinkles, belly fat and gray hair, she is liable to stand out as an anomaly within her personal and professional circles. In political science, we would refer to this as a collective action dilemma: Everyone is better off if nobody tummy-tucks and uses Botox, but once anyone starts, it gets harder to pull back from the practice.

So instead, an entire generation of feminist and postfeminist women who stormed the barricades of the American work force, planned their reproductive destinies, and even got their partners to fold the laundry occasionally are now engaged in an odd sort of collective self-delusion. Everyone (at least in certain high-profile or professional circles) is doing it, and very few are confessing, a fact that in some ways is more disturbing than the surge in the surgeries themselves. Because not only are we nipping, suctioning and using hormones, but we’re also feeling embarrassed about it, and lying. Neither of which was really the point of women’s liberation.

by Debora L. Spar, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Monica Ramos

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Everything You Need to Know About the Brangelina Divorce

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Venkatesh Rao: How the World Works

[ed. Tech analyst and author Venkatesh Rao recommends five books for a good understanding of how the world works, and why.]

What do you see as the commonality with these books and why do they explain ‘how the world works’?

I have a particular idea in mind when I say ‘how the world works.’ I mean forming what’s known as an ‘appreciative’ model of reality. The distinction I want to make here is between appreciative models and manipulative models — which is a distinction due to urbanist John Friedmann.

The idea is that a manipulative model of reality is something that allows you to do things. It’s based on skills or agency. An appreciative model is simply a satisfying understanding of the world. It may not necessarily allow you to do things—it may not allow you to build big companies or solve important problems like climate change—but it will give you an understanding of the world that satisfies you. That satisfaction, to people who seek knowledge, is very similar to the satisfaction that religious people get from having a religious idea in their head.

So all these books that we’re talking about offer you very rich and interesting and, in each case, somewhat counterintuitive appreciative models of significant chunks of experienced reality.

Obviously there’s no such thing as a single grand unified book that will give you a really satisfying model of every aspect of human experience that you might live through. But each of these books does a good job with a very big chunk of life as we experience it.

What do people do if they live their lives without this type of model?

There are two schools of thought here. One is the famous line that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ There are a lot of people—especially people who are prone to intellectualize things—who sincerely believe that the unexamined life is not worth living. The contrasting sentiment is that the unlived life is not worth examining. I don’t think any particular person has ever said that, but a lot of people like to flip it around and come up with that.

I tend not to be doctrinaire about it. I’m open to the idea that there are different personalities when it comes to this sort of thing. Some people have a great need for having an appreciative understanding of their own lived experience. Other people seem to get along just fine learning how to work the world and get along in it and succeed and make millions of dollars or whatever it is that they set out to do. They don’t seem to feel any particular lack or spiritual angst from not having an appreciative model of the world. I don’t necessarily think people miss out, just that there are certain types of people who are predisposed to feeling a certain angst if they don’t have this.

Let’s start off with the most concrete book on your list — Francis Fukuyama’s two book series on the way institutions and governments work. That’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) followed by Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014).

Most of us, when we are first exposed to history in high school, learn an extremely dull, non-analytical version of history which is just one damned fact after another. It’s very unsatisfying. The way we are taught history also typically serves certain regional political purposes. In countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it might be much more deliberately political. In liberal democracies, it’s a bit more open. History is taught with a genuine intent to foster some sort of critical appreciation and developing a sense of history. But it’s still pretty banal: this king then that king and so forth.

Once you re-engage with history as an adult—and by this I mean intellectually aware, curious people not professional historians—there are very few treatments of all of history that truly satisfy your urge to understand just how human society functions and how it came to function the way it does. What are the variety of ways in which it functions around the world? How is the system in China different from the system in the United States. How did they each get to be where they are? All of these are questions that you could call analytical history.

Francis Fukuyama is best known for his 1989 article declaring the end of history. He approaches the end of history from the perspective of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a precipitating event, but he’s coming from an intellectual tradition that goes back to Hegel. It’s a metaphysical thesis about history that holds together very coherently. His basic argument was that liberal democratic forms, as they exist in the West and certain other parts of the world like Japan and India, represent the end state of political evolution, in a certain sense. It’s not that history itself ends as in stops happening, but that a certain aspect of evolution ends. I like the biological analogy, that in the primordial soup there were a huge number of replicator molecules that could self-produce but at some point DNA became the dominant monopolistic molecule that became the basis of all life. In that sense, history ended when liberal democracy emerged as the global standard for governance.

Over the next 25 years, Fukuyama’s ideas were tested by the unfolding of history. Some people think that the events of the 1990s and 2000s proved him definitively wrong. Others think they proved him absolutely right. I happen to be in the second category. I think that events since he wrote that famous paper and book in 1989 have fundamentally proved him right.

This two-volume book is basically a very extended study of history from that starting point of ‘What happens if you look at history as a convergent evolutionary path that seems to end in liberal democracy? How did we get there?’

There are three basic pillars of liberal democracy that we are familiar with, the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. He generalizes these into a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms for consent by individuals, so accountability mechanisms. He traces the evolution of these mechanisms around the world from as far back in recorded history as we can go and what he offers is a really nuanced story of how different pieces of the puzzle emerge in different parts of the world. For example, the idea of a strong central state with an impersonal bureaucracy and civil service examinations first emerged in China. The idea of a rule of law, as in a body of legal thinking that applies to rulers, just as it does to the ruled, did not emerge in China—a lack that still shows today—but it did emerge in India. And Europe was the first place where all three mechanisms came together for the first time: a rule of law, accountability, and a strong state.

So that is his basic framework. In between, there are very interesting chapters, about what happened in the Ottoman Empire, say. He traces how these three building blocks slowly develop, and how somewhere around the 18th century, in pre-modern Germany, the elements first began coming together in a way that we would recognize today as a modern, liberal democratic state. The first volume deals with that whole story until about 1800. The second volume deals with the story from 1800 to today and it covers all the things you would expect. (...)

What’s the role of the United States in all this?

The contribution of the United States to the evolution of governance is what Fukuyama calls ‘clientelism.’ His sense of the word clientelism is technically different from the way it is normally used, but it’s what we are seeing, for example, in the Trump campaign right now. That form of clientelism was pioneered by Andrew Jackson in the middle of the 19th century, and it has very peculiar characteristics. Unlike previous models of patronage, where elected, otherwise powerful, leaders used to guarantee their own support by handing out favors almost at an individual level, clientelism is the mechanism by which you hand out favors to large segments of the population that work for you in a democracy.

by Venkatesh Rao, Five Books |  Read more:

Image: Five Books 

Plan Bee

Seven types of bees once found in abundance in Hawaii have become the first bees to be added to the US federal list of endangered and threatened species.

The listing decision, published on Friday in the Federal Register, classifies seven varieties of yellow-faced or masked bees as endangered, due to such factors as habitat loss, wildfires and the invasion of non-native plants and insects.

The bees, so named for yellow-to-white facial markings, once crowded Hawaii and Maui but recent surveys found their populations have plunged in the same fashion as other types of wild bees – and some commercial ones – elsewhere in the United States, federal wildlife managers said.

Pollinators like bees are crucial for the production of fruits, nuts and vegetables and they represent billions of dollars in value each year to the nation’s agricultural economy, officials said.

Placing yellow-faced bees under federal safeguards comes just over a week since the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the imperilled rusty patched bumble bee, a prized but vanishing pollinator once found in the upper midwest and north-eastern United States, to the endangered and threatened species list.

One of several wild bee species seen declining over the past two decades, the rusty patched bumble bee is the first in the continental United States formally proposed for protections.

The listing of the Hawaii species followed years of study by the conservation group Xerces Society, state government officials and independent researchers. The Xerces Society said its goal was to protect nature’s pollinators and invertebrates, which play a vital role in the health of the overall ecosystem.

The non-profit organization was involved in the initial petitions to protect the bee species, said Sarina Jepson, director of endangered species and aquatic programs for the Portland, Oregon-based group.

Jepson said yellow-faced bees could be found elsewhere in the world, but these particular species were native only to Hawaii and pollinate plant species indigenous to the islands.

The bees faced a variety of threats including “feral pigs, invasive ants, loss of native habitat due to invasive plants, fire, as well as development, especially in some for the coastal areas”, Jepson told Associated Press.

The bees could be found in a wide variety of habitats in Hawaii, from coastal environments to high-elevation shrub lands, she said. The yellow-faced bees pollinated some of Hawaii’s endangered native plant species. While other bees could potentially pollinate those species, many could become extinct if these bees were to die off entirely.

Hawaii-based entomologist Karl Magnacca said the bees “tend to favor the more dominant trees and shrubs we have here”, he said. “People tend to focus on the rare plants, and those are important, that’s a big part of the diversity. But the other side is maintaining the common ones as common. (The bees) help maintain the structure of the whole forest.”

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: John Kaia/AP

The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain

I am writing to share a story with you, specifically for you. My hope is that it will help you understand your patients along with their spouses and caregivers a little more. And as for the research you do, perhaps this will add a few more faces behind the why you do what you do. I am sure there are already so many.

This is a personal story, sadly tragic and heartbreaking, but by sharing this information with you I know that you can help make a difference in the lives of others.

As you may know, my husband Robin Williams had the little-known but deadly Lewy body disease (LBD). He died from suicide in 2014 at the end of an intense, confusing, and relatively swift persecution at the hand of this disease's symptoms and pathology. He was not alone in his traumatic experience with this neurologic disease. As you may know, almost 1.5 million nationwide are suffering similarly right now.

Although not alone, his case was extreme. Not until the coroner's report, 3 months after his death, would I learn that it was diffuse LBD that took him. All 4 of the doctors I met with afterwards and who had reviewed his records indicated his was one of the worst pathologies they had seen. He had about 40% loss of dopamine neurons and almost no neurons were free of Lewy bodies throughout the entire brain and brainstem.

Robin is and will always be a larger-than-life spirit who was inside the body of a normal man with a human brain. He just happened to be that 1 in 6 who is affected by brain disease.

Not only did I lose my husband to LBD, I lost my best friend. Robin and I had in each other a safe harbor of unconditional love that we had both always longed for. For 7 years together, we got to tell each other our greatest hopes and fears without any judgment, just safety. As we said often to one another, we were each other's anchor and mojo: that magical elixir of feeling grounded and inspired at the same time by each other's presence.

One of my favorite bedrock things we would do together was review how our days went. Often, this was more than just at the end of the day. It did not matter if we were both working at home, traveling together, or if he was on the road. We would discuss our joys and triumphs, our fears and insecurities, and our concerns. Any obstacles life threw at us individually or as a couple were somehow surmountable because we had each other.

When LBD began sending a firestorm of symptoms our way, this foundation of friendship and love was our armor.

The colors were changing and the air was crisp; it was already late October of 2013 and our second wedding anniversary. Robin had been under his doctors' care. He had been struggling with symptoms that seemed unrelated: constipation, urinary difficulty, heartburn, sleeplessness and insomnia, and a poor sense of smell—and lots of stress. He also had a slight tremor in his left hand that would come and go. For the time being, that was attributed to a previous shoulder injury.

On this particular weekend, he started having gut discomfort. Having been by my husband's side for many years already, I knew his normal reactions when it came to fear and anxiety. What would follow was markedly out of character for him. His fear and anxiety skyrocketed to a point that was alarming. I wondered privately, Is my husband a hypochondriac? Not until after Robin left us would I discover that a sudden and prolonged spike in fear and anxiety can be an early indication of LBD.

He was tested for diverticulitis and the results were negative. Like the rest of the symptoms that followed, they seemed to come and go at random times. Some symptoms were more prevalent than others, but these increased in frequency and severity over the next 10 months.

By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels—just to name a few—were settling in hard. Psychotherapy and other medical help was becoming a constant in trying to manage and solve these seemingly disparate conditions.

I was getting accustomed to the two of us spending more time in reviewing our days. The subjects though were starting to fall predominantly in the category of fear and anxiety. These concerns that used to have a normal range of tenor were beginning to lodge at a high frequency for him. Once the coroner's report was reviewed, a doctor was able to point out to me that there was a high concentration of Lewy bodies within the amygdala. This likely caused the acute paranoia and out-of-character emotional responses he was having. How I wish he could have known why he was struggling, that it was not a weakness in his heart, spirit, or character.

In early April, Robin had a panic attack. He was in Vancouver, filming Night at the Museum 3. His doctor recommended an antipsychotic medication to help with the anxiety. It seemed to make things better in some ways, but far worse in others. Quickly we searched for something else. Not until after he left us would I discover that antipsychotic medications often make things worse for people with LBD. Also, Robin had a high sensitivity to medications and sometimes his reactions were unpredictable. This is apparently a common theme in people with LBD.

During the filming of the movie, Robin was having trouble remembering even one line for his scenes, while just 3 years prior he had played in a full 5-month season of the Broadway production Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, often doing two shows a day with hundreds of lines—and not one mistake. This loss of memory and inability to control his anxiety was devastating to him.

While I was on a photo shoot at Phoenix Lake, capturing scenes to paint, he called several times. He was very concerned with insecurities he was having about himself and interactions with others. We went over every detail. The fears were unfounded and I could not convince him otherwise. I was powerless in helping him see his own brilliance.

For the first time, my own reasoning had no effect in helping my husband find the light through the tunnels of his fear. I felt his disbelief in the truths I was saying. My heart and my hope were shattered temporarily. We had reached a place we had never been before. My husband was trapped in the twisted architecture of his neurons and no matter what I did I could not pull him out.

In early May, the movie wrapped and he came home from Vancouver—like a 747 airplane coming in with no landing gear. I have since learned that people with LBD who are highly intelligent may appear to be okay for longer initially, but then, it is as though the dam suddenly breaks and they cannot hold it back anymore. In Robin's case, on top of being a genius, he was a Julliard-trained actor. I will never know the true depth of his suffering, nor just how hard he was fighting. But from where I stood, I saw the bravest man in the world playing the hardest role of his life.

Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it. Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating? And not from something he would ever know the name of, or understand? Neither he, nor anyone could stop it—no amount of intelligence or love could hold it back.

Powerless and frozen, I stood in the darkness of not knowing what was happening to my husband. Was it a single source, a single terrorist, or was this a combo pack of disease raining down on him?

He kept saying, “I just want to reboot my brain.” Doctor appointments, testing, and psychiatry kept us in perpetual motion. Countless blood tests, urine tests, plus rechecks of cortisol levels and lymph nodes. A brain scan was done, looking for a possible tumor on his pituitary gland, and his cardiologist rechecked his heart. Everything came back negative, except for high cortisol levels. We wanted to be happy about all the negative test results, but Robin and I both had a deep sense that something was terribly wrong.

by Susan Schneider Williams, Neurology | Read more:
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Beck

Bruna Massadas, Telephone series, 2015
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Blink Wireless Security Cameras Run for Two Years on a Pair of AA Batteries

Over the last year or so we’ve seen an uptick in availability of small and relatively cheap wireless security cameras. I mean truly wireless, using Wi-Fi to transmit data and batteries to provide power. That magical combination of features allows this new breed of cameras to be placed almost anywhere in, or around, a home. So I jumped at the chance when Immedia’s Blink offered to send me a couple of the tiny cameras we first previewed at CES in January.

Blink cameras are sold as one ($99), two ($169), three ($229), or five ($349) camera systems, with each additional camera costing $75. The camera itself shoots 720p video and features a microphone, temperature sensor, and an adjustable LED lamp that can easily illuminate an entire room when the camera’s motion sensor is tripped. Every camera system ships with a small sync module that joins your local Wi-Fi and then acts as a communication hub for the Blink cameras. The camera itself is small, about two-thirds the size of a deck of cards and weighing barely more than the two AA batteries you slot into the back. And after a Wednesday firmware update, Blink cameras can now function for more than two years before requiring a battery change based upon typical usage.

I’ve been living for a few weeks with two Blink systems. A three-camera system installed in my home and a one-camera system in a little one-room surf shack I make use of when conditions allow. Both were dead simple to set up from my iPhone (there’s also an Android app), taking less than five minutes to go from unboxing to seeing live video. In daily usage, the cameras do exactly what they’re supposed to do. My home system is set up to automatically arm itself every night and to disarm itself in the morning before the house begins to stir. Conversely, I manually arm the beach house whenever I’m not there. While the systems haven’t caught any criminals, the home Blink did alert me when my son came home after I had been unable to reach him for several hours (dead phone) one night; and the beach Blink confirmed my suspicions that the guy who sold me the shack was showing it off to perspective buyers without my permission.

by Thomas Ricker, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Thomas Ricker

SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, or Stein

Many conservatives make the argument against utopianism. The millenarian longing for a world where all systems are destroyed, all problems are solved, and everything is permissible – that’s dangerous whether it comes from Puritans or Communists. These same conservatives have traced this longing through leftist history from Lenin through social justice.

Which of the candidates in this election are millennarian? If Sanders were still in, I’d say fine, he qualifies. If Stein were in, same, no contest. But Hillary? The left and right both critique Hillary the same way. She’s too in bed with the system. Corporations love her. Politicians love her. All she wants to do is make little tweaks – a better tax policy here, a new foreign policy doctrine there. The critiques are right. Hillary represents complete safety from millennialism.

Trump’s policy ideas are mostly silly, but no one cares, because he’s not really running on policy. He’s running on making America great again, fighting the special interests, and defying the mainstream media. Nobody cares what policies he’ll implement after he does this, because his campaign is more an expression of rage at these things than anything else.

In my review of Singer on Marx, I wrote that:

I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap. I figured…he’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences. 

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

And since then, one of the central principles behind my philosophy has been “Don’t destroy all existing systems and hope a planet-sized ghost makes everything work out”. Systems are hard. Institutions are hard. If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it. Throughout history, dozens of movements have doomed entire civilizations by focusing on the “destroying the current system” step and expecting the “build a better one” step to happen on its own. That never works. The best parts of conservativism are the ones that guard this insight and shout it at a world too prone to taking shortcuts.

Donald Trump does not represent those best parts of conservativism. To transform his movement into Marxism, just replace “the bourgeoisie” with “the coastal elites” and “false consciousness” with “PC speech”. Just replace the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of the workers, with the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of “real Americans”. Just replace the hand-waving lack of plans with what to do after the Revolution with a hand-waving lack of plans what to do after the election. In both cases, the sheer virtue of the movement, and the apocalyptic purification of the rich people keeping everyone else down, is supposed to mean everything will just turn out okay on its own. That never works. 

A commenter on here the other day quoted an Atlantic article complaining that “The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”. Well, count me in that second group. I don’t think he’s literal. I think when he talks about building a wall and keeping out Muslims, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. When he talks about tariffs and trade deals, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. Fine. But neither of those two things are a plan. The problem with getting every American a job isn’t that nobody has been fighting for them, the problem with getting every American a job is that getting 100% employment in a modern economy is a really hard problem.

Donald Trump not only has no solution to that problem, he doesn’t even understand the question. He lives in a world where there is no such thing as intelligence, only loyalty. If we haven’t solved all of our problems yet, it’s because the Department of Problem-Solving was insufficiently loyal, and didn’t try hard enough. His only promise is to fill that department with loyal people who really want the problem solved.

I’ve never been fully comfortable with the Left because I feel like they often make the same error – the only reason there’s still poverty is because the corporate-run government is full of traitors who refuse to make the completely great, no-downsides policy of raising the minimum wage. One of the right’s great redeeming features has been an awareness of these kinds of tradeoffs. But this election, it’s Hillary who sounds restrained and realistic, and Trump who wants the moon on a silver platter (“It will be the best moon you’ve ever seen. And the silver platter is going to be yuuuuuge!”) (...)

Okay, but what about the real reason Trump is so popular?

When I talk to Trump supporters, it’s not usually about doubting climate change, or thinking Trump will take the conservative movement in the right direction, or even immigration. It’s about the feeling that a group of arrogant, intolerant, sanctimonious elites have seized control of a lot of national culture and are using it mostly to spread falsehood and belittle anybody different than them. And Trump is both uniquely separate from these elites and uniquely repugnant to them – which makes him look pretty good to everyone else.

This is definitely true. Please vote Hillary anyway.

Aside from the fact that getting back at annoying people isn’t worth eroding the foundations of civil society – do you really think a Trump election is going to hurt these people at all? Make them question anything? “Oh, 51% of the American people disagree with me, I guess that means I’ve got a lot of self-reflecting to do.” Of course not. A Trump election would just confirm for them exactly what they already believe – that the average American is a stupid racist who needs to be kept as far away from public life as possible. If Trump gets elected, sure, the editorial pages will be full of howls of despair the next day, but underneath the howls will be quiet satisfaction that the world is exactly the way they believed it to be.

The right sometimes argues that modern leftism is analogous to early millenarian Christianity. They argue this, and then they say “You know what would stop these people in their tracks? A strong imperial figure who persecutes them. That’s definitely going to make them fade away quietly. There is no way this can possibly go wrong.”

Leftism has never been about controlling the government, and really the government is one of the areas it controls least effectively – even now both houses of Congress, most state legislatures, most governors, etc, are Republican. When people say that the Left is in control, they’re talking about academia, the media, the arts, and national culture writ large. But all of these things have a tendency to define themselves in opposition to the government. When the left controls the government, this is awkward and tends to involve a lot of infighting. When the right controls the government, it gets easy. If Trump controls the government, it gets ridiculously easy.

This has real-world effects. Millennials are more conservative than previous generations. Andrew Gelman, who is usually right about everything, says:

If you look at the cohort of young voters who came of age during George W. Bush’s presidency, they’re mostly Democrats, which makes sense as Bush was a highly unpopular Republican. The young voters who came of age during Obama’s presidency are more split, which makes sense because Obama is neither popular nor unpopular; he has an approval of about 50%

I would prefer the next generation end up leaning more to the right, because that will cancel out younger people’s natural tendency to lean left and make them pretty moderate and so low-variance. I definitely don’t want an unpopular far-right presidency, because then they’re going to lean left, which will combined with the natural leftiness of the young and make them super left. And this is the sort of thing that affects the culture!

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Mercury News Daily via:

Pentagon’s 5,000-Strong Cyber Force Passes Key Operational Step

[ed. See also: Security Experts Agree: The NSA Was Hacked]

A 5,000-person Pentagon force created to bolster military computer networks and initiate cyber attacks against terror groups should be ready to carry out its mission by the end of the week, a key step in improving the U.S.’s ability to respond to hacks by overseas adversaries.

The Cyber Mission Force will reach "initial operational capability” by Friday, said Colonel Daniel J.W. King, a Cyber Command spokesman, in an e-mail. The group’s 133 teams have met basic criteria on personnel, training, resources and equipment, but all of them aren’t necessarily ready to launch attacks, he said.

The force, which falls under the U.S. Cyber Command created in 2009, likely will focus on the highest priorities, such as risks from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist groups including Islamic State, according to Bob Stasio, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and former chief of operations at the National Security Agency’s Cyber Operations Center.

Until the force becomes fully operational, which is planned in 2018, the question officials directing it will ask first will be, “What’s the minimum operation I need against the biggest threats that I have today -- the closest alligators to the boat," Stasio said.

Previously, cyber operations were scattered in silos across Cyber Command, the NSA and other military branches, according to Stasio. The new centralized force will help cut through the bureaucracy, he added. Officials plan to expand the force by another 1,200 people as part of the process of becoming fully combat ready.

"We continue to generate the mission force," Admiral Michael Rogers, who heads Cyber Command and the NSA, said in a Sept. 13 speech in Washington. "At the same time, we got to tell ourselves we are not where we need to be in this mission."

The operational capability designation means the Pentagon has better streamlined cyber activities across its bureaucracy, but analysts say it doesn’t necessarily reflect greater security chops as defense officials try to keep up with fast-evolving technology and threats.

"What it means is we have the people, the tools, we’ve practiced and we’re ready," said Mark Young, chief security officer and senior vice president at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc. and a former senior executive at Cyber Command. (...)

Setting up the force is also a sign that cyber is more "baked into" the military’s overall strategy, while providing defense officials a grasp of how much it needs to spend on cybersecurity, said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity Inc. and a former NSA computer scientist. In its 2017 information technology budget, the Defense Department requested $6.8 billion for cyber operations. (...)

"You have to kind of look at it as if you’re building a whole new Navy, that’s a very expensive operation," Aitel said. "It gives them better buckets to throw money into and know where that money is going."

by Nafeesa Syeed, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

Kiwako Suzuki
via:
[ed. For my new pal, Tako.]

Party paella
photo: markk

What It's Like to Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome

I wake up one morning certain that I’ve become three months pregnant overnight. The farting starts immediately. I skip breakfast, spend a half hour searching for pants I can zip over my bloated stomach, and then hurry to work and sit at my desk by the door of a tiny office crammed with four editors. My belly doesn’t rumble, but buzzes and shrieks. I shift in my chair to hide the cacophony.

Four hours pass. I take trips to the bathroom to stand in the stall and let it all out. My boss calls me into her office and I rise, suck it in, and waddle to her. Yes, of course I’ll look at the brochure. Lunch time arrives. I cautiously eat some bread and peanut butter, then smell something rankish and panic. Did I just leak gas without knowing? No, someone is heating a cheesy burrito in the microwave.

Exhausted at the end of the day, I flatulate my way back home. I eat my first real meal of the day and continue to pass wind every 10 minutes, like clockwork, until bedtime. The funk makes it hard to sleep. The next morning, I rush to the bathroom, decide to risk breakfast, then stop at the door on my way out to run back for round two. I arrive 10 minutes late to work, tired already, and endure the same routine for two weeks before my bowels settle down and declare defeat.

The cause of my plight is irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—a disorder where the brain and the gut don’t communicate as they should. It’s a functional disorder, which means that it comes from a problem with the way a normal body function is carried out, instead of something foreign, like a virus. And unlike other illnesses that don’t involve foreign assassins—cancer, for example—IBS will not show up on any tests or examinations.

IBS’s issue is abnormal colon motility—the contraction of muscles in the intestines and the way food moves through them—where the colon is extra sensitive and tends to spasm when stimulated by things like food or stress. These spasms can cause food to move too quickly through the digestive tract (diarrhea) or get stuck (constipation). People with IBS can also be extra-sensitive to the goings-on in their gut, and feel pain from small pockets of gas, for instance, when others would feel nothing.

The disorder is common, affecting 10 to 15 percent of adults, and twice as many women as men. Since the cause of the disorder is unknown, treatments are often aimed at the symptoms: laxatives, stool hardeners, changes in diet, supplements, and even psychotherapy. Psychotherapy often addresses stress management, but also deals with the emotional side effects of having a persistent, incurable, mostly invisible, and dinner-conversation-taboo disorder.

I learned that I had IBS as a sophomore in college, a few weeks before winter finals. The first step in treating it, I was told, was to keep a food log: For a few months, I had to write down everything I ate, every day, and how I felt afterward. I also had to reduce stress. I lasted about three days before giving up the log—who has time for that?—and reducing stress as a college student with looming finals was not an option. Besides, I wasn’t convinced that IBS was what I really had; maybe the doctor had missed something, maybe it was a passing bug.

I finished college with on-off symptoms, making visits to doctors whenever I felt particularly bad, certain that this time we’d catch something terrible lurking in my bowels. I even scooped my poop into vials and sent them to a laboratory to look for bugs. At one point, I had a bout of panic attacks as I cycled through all the things I could have: endometriosis, colon cancer, a gut-bursting alien.

As a student I’d had enough breaks in the day to hide in my room and recuperate, but after graduating it became much more difficult. In addition to struggling at work, I made excuses not to meet friends; often, I was just too tired to spend a night ballooning with gas or fretting over the geometry and mechanics of airflow between a bathroom and living room. I dreaded dates with a new significant other. What if I fart on him while he’s the big spoon? I’d reject being physical with excuses like headaches or fatigue.

Some researchers believe that the issue in IBS lies in the brain-gut connection, a mysterious link whereby the goings-on in a person’s gut are believed to influence not only mood, but some of the core facets of personality. The connection is why people feel nauseated, for example, before giving an important speech. The brain sends signals to the gut, such as, what if I mess up, and all my great auntie’s prophecies of failure and depravity come true? To which the gut responds with butterflies or violent, vomitous stage fright. Or instead, the gut might signal food poisoning! to the brain, to which the brain responds with, that hurts, and, quick find a bathroom!  (...)

One emerging theory for IBS is that there is, in fact, an imbalance of serotonin in the gut: Those with diarrhea have too much, those with constipation have too little, and both run the risk of serotonin-induced mood swings.

At a particularly low point, I Googled “IBS symptoms” and discovered some forums dedicated to IBS sufferers and others with gastrointestinal disorders. On one, an anonymous person wrote: “It seems that my whole life is dominated by my bowel to the extent that some days I am afraid to leave the house.” Another person lamented the disorder’s invisibility: “This disease does not 'show' on the outside, so even good friends are not always understanding. I am aware of this so I keep it to myself.” IBS is not a life-threatening disorder, but some people become incapacitated by it. They quit work, stop traveling, and withdraw completely. Some fall into a deep depression that exacerbates the brain-gut feedback loop and intensifies their symptoms.

Like me, many people with IBS are too embarrassed to talk openly about it, or think that because it’s invisible or not serious that somehow their symptoms don’t matter. They also try to shove their lives into a neat little box in hopes of keeping their disorder from bothering anybody else.

by Anne McGovern, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: David Leahy/Getty

The Company That Wants to Fight Your Medical Bills

But there's a catch.

[ed. There's certainly a pressing need for a service like Remedy but it doesn't sound like this is it. Between the first salvo of a doctor or hospital's billing statement, followed by insurance company weaseling, then various back and forth negotiations and some final resolution (while different billing statements and coverage notices are being sent to the patient) who knows what the final bill will be, if one can even tell it is a final bill? Not to mention the details of what actually was performed and correctly billed in the first place. No wonder it's confusing. Remedy seems to take care of the last issue, ie., looking at billing codes and checking for errors, but that's about all. This seems like such a massive untapped market (concierge services for medical billing) that it's frankly astounding to me that no one has made a better effort at capturing it.]

If you’re the special kind of person who’s interested in medical billing, I’ve had an exciting past few months. One day this spring, I was frantically chopping carrots after work when I noticed that my left hand was covered in lukewarm blood. When I washed it off, I saw my skin splaying open to reveal my pale-blue thumb joint. That necessitated not one, but two trips to an urgent-care center, a strange hybrid of an emergency room and doctor’s office where payment can be similarly muddled.

I also got a new mouthguard, something my doctor says I must wear, or else I will grind my teeth away to tiny nubs while I sleep. I tried to pretend the little session where they make a mold of your mouth using what looks and tastes like melted-down Crocs was a 15-minute spa retreat from my work emails. My bubble was burst when, on my way out, the front-desk woman told me the mouthguard would cost more than $400, which I let her charge to my credit card because the alternative was to press my sawed-off hand to my nub-toothed mouth and run screaming out the door.

Another doctor I see regularly told me “I don’t deal with insurance,” with the same nonchalance that 20-somethings with rich parents say they “didn’t feel like having roommates” to explain their one-bedroom condos. She has no in-network equivalent.

These experiences softened me up for a pitch from Remedy, a new start-up that aims to help people fight their medical bills. Though estimates of billing errors vary widely, at least 10 to 30 percent of medical bills contain a mistake. I figured my recent medical misadventures might make Remedy worth my while.

Remedy was founded in 2015 by John Schulte, a software engineer, Marija Ringwelski, a public-health worker, and Victor Echevarria, a former executive at the errand startup TaskRabbit. Echevarria sought to apply TaskRabbit’s duty-delegating model to disputing medical bills, another chore many can’t wait to offload. By the end of November, Remedy had raised $1.9 million from investors, and it’s expected to formally launch this week.

At first, Remedy relied on individuals texting the company photos of bills they found dubious. Before long, though, the team realized people “felt they were being taken advantage of and wanted a constant protector,” Echevarria told me. Now users connect their insurance to the platform and have Remedy scrutinize every one of their claims. To the layman, disputing medical errors can prove so tedious and complicated, Echevarria said, that “it makes cancelling Comcast look like the simplest thing in the world.”

Remedy’s bill-sleuthing is performed in part by a network of medical-billing contractors who work on each patient’s “cases” on their own schedule. For any errors uncovered, providers are supposed to refund the money directly to the Remedy user. Remedy is free to use, but it takes a 20 percent cut of the savings they find, up to $99 for a single bill. (Though the company said that $99 cap could change.)

Remedy said that based on “research from CMS [The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services], statistics from academia, and independent investigations,” medical errors are responsible for $120 to $150 billion in overcharges each year. It uses that figure, divided by the population of insured Americans, to bolster its claim that it would save the average family $1,000 per year.

It’s not clear yet how much money Remedy would save for the average healthy-ish person, however. Echevarria told me Remedy focuses on the mistakes made by doctors’ offices, rather than on bargaining with insurers. In the U.S., all diagnoses are assigned a code, and an improper code might lead to a denied claim, as might a clerical error like a misspelled name. It’s easy and common for doctors or billing clearinghouses to make these mistakes, Echevarria said. Insurers, meanwhile, are so strict in what they cover that negotiating with them can be like “banging your head against a wall of futility, even for us,” he said. Still, the company said it would appeal some denied claims, like those for services that should have been covered by the plan.

Since its founding, the company says it has discovered errors in half of its users’ bills. For patients who can’t afford their bills, Remedy said they will help set up monthly payment plans for free. Eventually, Echevarria said, “our hope is to negotiate for discounts in every single case” where a patient desires one. In my case, though, steep, correct bills weren’t reduced; I got an email from Remedy saying “everything checks out” with my three-figure mouthguard.

The service can make things a bit awkward with your medical providers. My no-insurance doctor sent me a worried email when Remedy asked her about my tab. Without thinking, I sheepishly apologized for the inconvenience. Several billing experts told me I should have argued with the dentist about my mouthguard bill rather than paying it, but the reason I turned to Remedy was because I find haggling with doctors to be more painful than, well, pulling teeth. Remedy says its service is actually good for doctors, since sometimes patients simply dodge bills they feel are unfair. (...)

Bell said that while services like Remedy might make financial sense for some, we shouldn’t lose sight of the underlying problem: Medical bills are too high and too wrong, too often.

“Do we really want to encourage the growth of a new industry to scrutinize inaccurate bills?” he said in an email. “The dead elephant in the room is that if the consumer had been billed correctly, they would not need this service.”

by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Karin Schermbrucker / AP

Fly-Along Companions Offer a Way for Older People to Travel

Janet Robertson, a documentary filmmaker in New York, helps look after her uncle, Vincent Fahey. He is nearly 87 and loves to travel.

But she can’t always accompany Uncle Vin, who needs some day-to-day assistance. So when he wanted to visit London this past spring, Ms. Robertson did what others have started doing: She hired a skilled traveling companion for her older loved one.

For the London trip, Ms. Robertson found Doug Iannelli, owner of Flying Companions in Atlanta, to accompany her uncle.

Mr. Iannelli managed the travel reservations and logistics, slept in an adjoining hotel room and otherwise accompanied Mr. Fahey full time as they took in the museums, restaurants and tourist sites. When needed, Mr. Iannelli provided a wheelchair and made sure they took frequent rest breaks.

In all, the seven-day trip cost about $10,000. And Ms. Robertson stayed in touch with the pair via text messages and photos.

“I felt more comfortable because I could follow along,” Ms. Robertson said.

The business of providing traveling companions for older adults is still new enough that there are no good statistics on who or how many provide such services. But they are cropping up — not only in the United States but in Europe and Asia — to cater to aging populations who have leisure time and money but diminished capacity for the rigors of travel.

Whether it is older people on vacation or grandparents wanting to join their far-flung families for weddings and graduations, there is a growing number of seniors willing to travel but needing help moving through airport security lines, managing luggage and navigating busy terminals and bustling hotel lobbies.

Travelers 65 and older now make up nearly 20 percent of domestic leisure passengers in the United States, according to the research firm TNS TravelsAmerica. That percentage is almost certain to grow; the federal government has forecast that the number of adults 85 and older in this country, which was six million in 2013, will reach 14.6 million in 2040. (...)

Mr. Iannelli began his business nine years ago after helping a friend with disabilities fly to Minnesota.

“I realized there must also be people with nonmedical challenges that need help traveling,” he said. Since then, Mr. Iannelli said, he has flown worldwide with hundreds of clients.

The services aren’t cheap. Clients pay for the travel companion’s tickets, the companion’s hotel room if necessary, meals, incidentals and fees for the service. Mr. Iannelli said the price to accompany a client on a plane trip within the United States — including his fees and travel costs for all parties — might range from $2,800 to $4,500 for coach airfare. Business or first class, of course, would cost more.

Some companion services provide personal care like medication reminders, dressing, bathing and feeding. And for those with specific medical needs, traveling nurse services are available.

by Julie Weed, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Dustin Chambers

Japanese sweets
via:

What’s ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ Without Garrison Keillor?

"Here they come,” said the security guard, mopping sweat from his brow. He was tall and bald but not imposing, and he worried that the searing heat would lead to too much drinking. It was 3 p.m. on June 11, and the gates to the Ravinia outdoor theater in Highland Park, Ill., had just opened. People streamed in carrying coolers and lawn chairs, checkered blankets and wineglasses, plasticware full of crackers, melons and deviled eggs. They politely competed for swatches of grass in the shade of oak trees mounted with thank you for not smoking signs.

They wore old Cubs shirts and sun hats of all colors. A stuffed bald eagle perched atop one of the coolers. Vendors sold bottles of wine for $40. The security guard’s concerns proved well founded; the Malbec went quickly, then the Moscato. Lawn space dwindled, and with it some of the crowd’s civility. An old man struggled under the weight of two folding chairs. His wife worried aloud that he’d have a heart attack. “Keep walking!” he snapped.

They had come to see Garrison Keillor one last time. The creator and host of “A Prairie Home Companion” had for four decades gently skewered their baby-boomer sensibilities with fake ads for rhubarb pie and stories about family life that descended into jokes about plagues of rats and apocalyptic climate change. “There’s something about this kind of humor people my age can appreciate,” said Tim Balster, a gray-haired magician I met in the crowd. “It’s like a quilt.” Balster had been listening to “Prairie Home” for 33 of his 52 years. He loved nothing more than to hear the aging writer breathing deeply, his nose right next to the mike. “It draws you in,” he said, “like a moth to the flame.”

Now that was ending. Only four shows remained before Keillor would depart, relinquishing hosting duties to a 35-year-old mandolin player from California named Chris Thile, who was appearing as a musical guest for this show. As we sat in the grass, Balster noted that Keillor left the show once before, when he married a Danish woman, only to return. It was true. But this hiatus occurred during the Reagan administration, when Keillor, now 74, was still a relatively young man. Nevertheless, Balster said, “I’m holding out hope.”

An hour or so before the gates opened, I watched Thile prepare for the show in a dressing room in the Ravinia’s backstage area, then head for the stage entrance, where he crossed paths unexpectedly with Keillor. Keillor is 6-foot-3, a looming and still presence; Thile is fence-post thin with a pronounced jawline and unruly dirty-blond hair. He projects a focused, constant energy, and today his boyishness was amplified by a retainer in his mouth, a corrective measure to address problems left over from a childhood without dental insurance. Thile was already dressed for the performance in a collared shirt; Keillor, who is known for rewriting scripts until the last possible minute, wore a T-shirt.

“How’s it going?” Thile asked.

“How would I know?” Keillor said, without making eye contact.

Thile retreated to his dressing room to warm up on his mandolin, a rare 1924 Gibson built by the renowned luthier Lloyd Loar. He played arpeggios, his long fingers hopping around the fretboard, and sang in a clear falsetto: “Da da da da.” Thile’s voice is a staccato tenor. A critic once memorably wrote that Keillor’s baritone sounded “precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers”; Thile would be more suited to announcing a pickup football game played by peregrine falcons. He put on a tie: “There’s that.” But he looked a little nervous.

Internally, executives at American Public Media, the nonprofit that produces and distributes “A Prairie Home Companion,” liken Thile’s ascent to Jimmy Fallon’s taking Jay Leno’s seat. The comparison sells short the jarring nature of the shift. Leno didn’t conceive of “The Tonight Show” or write most of the jokes himself, as is the case with Keillor and “Prairie Home.” More peculiar still, Thile is not a writer-raconteur in the mode of Keillor, but a musician, and one who prefers technical, challenging terrain.

The transition brings with it more than one existential question — whether “A Prairie Home Companion” can possibly go on without Garrison Keillor’s voice, and whether there’s even a place for such a show in modern America. (...)

Keillor’s creation has always been an easy mark for jokes; in the popular imagination, the show is a sort of comfort food for the overeducated. (“Be more funny!” Homer Simpson once yelled at a cartoon version of Keillor.) But those who see Keillor as the bard of the white picket fence neglect how dark his humor could be: In a 2011 Lake Wobegon monologue, Keillor rhapsodized about putting a dead aunt out back to freeze. (“She was not a great beauty, and death did nothing to improve her.”) And the show has been remarkably popular, commanding more than four million weekly listeners at its peak. Minnesota Public Radio sold the publisher of its “Prairie Home”-themed product catalog, Rivertown Trading Company, for $120 million in 1998.

It was on the strength of Keillor’s audience that Bill Kling, the former president of Minnesota Public Radio, started National Public Radio’s first big competitor, American Public Radio. The show helped public radio stretch away from its staple diet of hard news; Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig owe Keillor a debt. So do a lot of people in Nashville. Over the past four decades, there has been no greater megaphone for acoustic music than “A Prairie Home Companion.” A partial list of artists who played the show includes Emmylou Harris, Chet Atkins, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Keb’ Mo’, Wilco, Mark Knopfler and Iris Dement, not to mention lesser-known talents like Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. “He was down there away from the Top 40,” Harris told me, “which is a necessary thing.”

But the show never changed much, and in the podcast era, “Prairie Home” has come to feel anachronistic rather than subversive. Keillor’s habit of mocking millennial culture hasn’t helped; the show’s terrestrial audience has declined by 500,000 in the past five years, to 3.1 million. Its average listener age is 59.

by Abe Streep, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times