Saturday, November 12, 2016
“Dear Diary: So I texted Julie and I told her that just because I’m hanging out with Linda a lot it doesn’t mean I’m not her friend anymore and she said she knows that but she just feels weird because she thinks that Linda doesn’t like her and because she thinks Linda and I have more in common, so I told her to stop worrying about what Linda thinks and she said fine but I could tell she was upset so I talked to Linda about it and she said she does like Julie and was trying really hard to be nice to her and when I told Julie what Linda had said she said she felt bad because she had been saying a lot of mean things about Linda. Anyway, I had a day off so I decided to go to the aquarium . . .”
What Might Happen to Obamacare?
Assuming that a reconciliation bill did pass, however, piecemeal changes would likely cause a lot of instability. The law is built on interlocking provisions; removing one puts pressure on others. That’s what happened when the Supreme Court made the Medicaid expansion optional for states, leaving 2.5 million people in states that chose not to expand in what has been called the Medicaid gap: too poor to be eligible for the marketplace subsidies but ineligible for Medicaid. Leaving in place the mandate for insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, as Trump said he’s considering, while getting rid of either the individual mandate — the requirement that people get insured — or the subsidies that motivate low-income healthy people to join the insurance rolls could also create instability in the insurance market. Without the necessary mix of healthy people in a plan to offset the costs of insuring people with pre-existing conditions, premiums rise, becoming unaffordable for everyone.
An estimated 22 million people would lose their insurance if Congress and Trump implemented the changes outlined in the most recent reconciliation bill. Even if Trump tries to hang onto the provisions he mentioned after meeting with Obama, it’s unclear what he might do to keep all those Americans insured. Looking at his campaign stump speeches, and proposed legislation from other Republicans, we can make some educated guesses about what might happen. (...)
Trump has said he wants to dismantle several key elements of the law, chief among them the individual mandate. He’s also said he’d like to use “block grants” that would provide a fixed sum, with fewer federal regulations, to states to fund Medicaid. It’s an idea that also features in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s health care proposal. That’s different from Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which requires that states cover everyone below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. It’s not clear how many of the millions of people who currently have Medicaid coverage under the ACA expansion would remain eligible for government assistance.
The individual mandate is a little more complicated. At one point, it was seen along most of the political spectrum as a promising way to reduce the number of uninsured people in the United States; requiring healthy people to sign up for coverage was supposed to ensure that premiums were affordable. The idea was originally floated by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and was first brought to Congress by Republicans in the 1990s. The mandate has since become one of the most despised aspects of the law.
But there isn’t a clear policy proposal with bipartisan support for how to get more healthy people into the insurance market in the absence of an individual mandate and insurance subsidies. Trump has proposed creating high-risk pool insurance programs, essentially plans that people with pre-existing conditions can buy into. These types of plans existed in many states before the passage of the ACA and by design are not self-sustaining because members use significantly more health care than they can afford. That means they require significant federal dollars ($25 billion in the case of a plan from Ryan), which is one of the many reasons high-risk pools are divisive among Republican lawmakers.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Leonard Cohen
[ed. Another tribute (I guess?) to Leonard Cohen, using a clip my nephew Tony did for Armani glasses.]
Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.Beyond the Brexit analysis, there are three new points from last night’s results that I want to emphasize, as they are unique to the 2016 U.S. election and, more importantly, illustrate the elite pathologies that led to all of this:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.
When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.
But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.
It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: via:
Book Review: House of God
[ed. I had never heard of The House of God until this review, but it has its own Wikipedia page and anything Scott Alexander at SSC recommends is worth investigating. Despite its age, much of it still sounds relevant.]
I’m not a big fan of war movies. I liked the first few I watched. It was all downhill from there. They all seem so similar. The Part Where You Bond With Your Squadmates. The Part Where Your Gruff Sergeant Turns Out To Have A Heart After All. The Part Where Your Friend Dies But You Have To Keep Going Anyway. The Part That Consists Of A Stirring Speech.
The problem is that war is very different from everything else, but very much like itself.
When I lived in Japan, I had a black neighbor who would always get told that she looked like Condoleezza Rice. She looked nothing like Condoleezza Rice. But if you’re Japanese, and the set of people you recognize includes ten million other Japanese people plus Condoleezza, then maybe all black women blur together into a vague Condoleezza-shaped blob. That’s how I am with war movies. War is so far from my usual experience that the differences among war movies don’t even register.
Medical internship is also very different from everything else but very much like itself. I already had two examples of it: Scrubs and my own experience as a medical intern (I preferred Scrubs). So when every single personin the medical field told me to read Samuel Shem’s House of God, I deferred. I deferred throughout my own internship, I deferred for another two years of residency afterwards. And then for some reason I finally picked it up a couple of days ago.
This was a heck of a book.
On some level it was as predictable as I expected. It hit all of the Important Internship Tropes, like The Part Where Your Attendings Are Cruel, The Part Where Your Patient Dies Because Of Something You Did, The Part Where You Get Camaraderie With Other Interns, The Part Where You First Realize You Are Actually Slightly Competent At Like One Thing And It Is The Best Feeling In The Universe, The Part Where You Realize How Pointless 99% Of The Medical System Is, The Part Where You Have Sex With Hot Nurses, et cetera.
All I can say is that it was really well done. The whole thing had a touch of magical realism, which turns out to be exactly the right genre for a story about medicine. Real medicine is absolutely magical realist. It’s a series of bizarre occurrences just on the edge of plausibility happening to incredibly strange people for life-and-death stakes, day after day after day, all within the context of the weirdest and most byzantine bureaucracy known to humankind. (...)
The story revolves around an obvious author-insert character, Roy Basch MD, who starts his internship year at a hospital called the House of God (apparently a fictionalized version of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston). He goes in with expectations to provide useful medical care to people with serious diseases. Instead, he finds gomers:
In the world of The House of God, medical intervention can only make patients worse:
I’m not a big fan of war movies. I liked the first few I watched. It was all downhill from there. They all seem so similar. The Part Where You Bond With Your Squadmates. The Part Where Your Gruff Sergeant Turns Out To Have A Heart After All. The Part Where Your Friend Dies But You Have To Keep Going Anyway. The Part That Consists Of A Stirring Speech.
The problem is that war is very different from everything else, but very much like itself.When I lived in Japan, I had a black neighbor who would always get told that she looked like Condoleezza Rice. She looked nothing like Condoleezza Rice. But if you’re Japanese, and the set of people you recognize includes ten million other Japanese people plus Condoleezza, then maybe all black women blur together into a vague Condoleezza-shaped blob. That’s how I am with war movies. War is so far from my usual experience that the differences among war movies don’t even register.
Medical internship is also very different from everything else but very much like itself. I already had two examples of it: Scrubs and my own experience as a medical intern (I preferred Scrubs). So when every single personin the medical field told me to read Samuel Shem’s House of God, I deferred. I deferred throughout my own internship, I deferred for another two years of residency afterwards. And then for some reason I finally picked it up a couple of days ago.
This was a heck of a book.
On some level it was as predictable as I expected. It hit all of the Important Internship Tropes, like The Part Where Your Attendings Are Cruel, The Part Where Your Patient Dies Because Of Something You Did, The Part Where You Get Camaraderie With Other Interns, The Part Where You First Realize You Are Actually Slightly Competent At Like One Thing And It Is The Best Feeling In The Universe, The Part Where You Realize How Pointless 99% Of The Medical System Is, The Part Where You Have Sex With Hot Nurses, et cetera.
All I can say is that it was really well done. The whole thing had a touch of magical realism, which turns out to be exactly the right genre for a story about medicine. Real medicine is absolutely magical realist. It’s a series of bizarre occurrences just on the edge of plausibility happening to incredibly strange people for life-and-death stakes, day after day after day, all within the context of the weirdest and most byzantine bureaucracy known to humankind. (...)
The story revolves around an obvious author-insert character, Roy Basch MD, who starts his internship year at a hospital called the House of God (apparently a fictionalized version of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston). He goes in with expectations to provide useful medical care to people with serious diseases. Instead, he finds gomers:
“Gomer is an acronym: Get Out of My Emergency Room. It’s what you want to say when one’s sent in from the nursing home at three A.M.”
“I think that’s kind of crass,” said Potts. “Some of us don’t feel that way about old people.”
“You think I don’t have a grandmother?” asked Fats indignantly. “I do, and she’s the cutest dearest, most wonderful old lady. Her matzoh balls float – you have to pin them down to eat them up. Under their force the soup levitates. We eat on ladders, scraping the food off the ceiling. I love…” The Fat Man had to stop, and dabbed the tears from his eyes, and then went on in a soft voice, “I love her very much.”
I thought of my grandfather. I loved him too.
“But gomers are not just dear old people,” said Fats. “Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them. We’re cruel to the gomers, by saving them, and they’re cruel to us, by fighting tooth and nail against our trying to save them. They hurt us, we hurt them.” (...)In the world of The House of God, the primary form of medical treatment is the TURF – the excuse to get a patient out of your care and on to somebody else’s. If the psychiatrist can’t stand a certain patient any longer, she finds some trivial abnormality in their bloodwork and TURFs to the medical floor. But she knows that if the medical doctor doesn’t want one of his patients, then he can interpret a trivial patient comment like “Being sick is so depressing” as suicidal ideation and TURF to psychiatry. At 3 AM on a Friday night, every patient is terrible, the urge to TURF is overwhelming, and a hospital starts to seem like a giant wheel uncoupled from the rest of the world, Psychiatry TURFING to Medicine TURFING to Surgery TURFING to Neurosurgery TURFING to Neurology TURFING back to Psychiatry again. Surely some treatment must get done somewhere? But where? It becomes a legend, The Place Where Treatment Happens, hidden in some far-off hospital wing accessible only to the pure-hearted. This sort of Kafkaesque picture is how medical care feels, and the genius of The House of God is that it accentuates the reality just a little bit until its fictional world is almost as magical-realist as the real one. (...)
In the world of The House of God, medical intervention can only make patients worse:
Anna O. had started out on Jo’s service in perfect electrolyte balance, with each organ system working as perfectly as an 1878 model could. This, to my mind, included the brain, for wasn’t dementia a fail-safe and soothing oblivion of the machine to its own decay?
From being on the verge of a TURF back to the Hebrew House for the Incurables, as Anna knocked around the House of God in the steaming weeks of August, getting a skull film here and an LP there, she got worse, much worse. Given the stress of the dementia work-up, every organ system crumpled: in a domino progression the injection of radioactive dye for her brain scan shut down her kidneys, and the dye study of her kidneys overloaded her heart, and the medication for her heart made her vomit, which altered her electrolyte balance in a life-threatening way, which increased her dementia and shut down her bowel, which made her eligible for the bowel run, the cleanout for which dehydrated her and really shut down her tormented kidneys, which led to infection, the need for dialysis, and big-time complications of these big-time diseases. She and I both became exhausted, and she became very sick. Like the Yellow Man, she went through a phase of convulsing like a hooked tuna, and then went through a phase that was even more awesome, lying in bed deathly still, perhaps dying. I felt sad, for by this time, I liked her. I didn’t know what to do. I began to spend a good deal of time sitting with Anna, thinking.
The Fat Man was on call with me every third night as backup resident, and one night, searching for me to go to the ten o’clock meal, he found me with Anna, watching her trying to die.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
I told him.
“Anna was on her way back to the Hebrew House, what happened – wait, don’t tell me. Jo decided to go all-out on her dementia, right?”
“Right. She looks like she’s going to die.”
“The only way she’ll die is if you murder her by doing what Jo says.”
“Yeah, but how can I do otherwise, with Jo breathing down my neck?”
“Easy. Do nothing with Anna, and hide it from Jo.”
“Hide it from Jo?”
“Sure. Continue the work-up in purely imaginary terms, buff the chart with the imaginary results of the imaginary tests, Anna will recover to her demented state, the work-up will show no treatable cause for it, and everybody’s happy. Nothing to it.”
“I’m not sure it’s ethical.”
“Is it ethical to murder this sweet gomere with your work-up?”
There was nothing I could say.” (...)House of God does a weird form of figure-ground inversion.
An example of what I mean, taken from politics: some people think of government as another name for the things we do together, like providing food to the hungry, or ensuring that old people have the health care they need. These people know that some politicians are corrupt, and sometimes the money actually goes to whoever’s best at demanding pork, and the regulations sometimes favor whichever giant corporation has the best lobbyists. But this is viewed as a weird disease of the body politic, something that can be abstracted away as noise in the system.
And then there are other people who think of government as a giant pork-distribution system, where obviously representatives and bureaucrats, incentivized in every way to support the forces that provide them with campaign funding and personal prestige, will take those incentives. Obviously they’ll use the government to crush their enemies. Sometimes this system also involves the hungry getting food and the elderly getting medical care, as an epiphenomenon of its pork-distribution role, but this isn’t particularly important and can be abstracted away as noise.
I think I can go back and forth between these two models when I need to, but it’s a weird switch of perspective, where the parts you view as noise in one model resolve into the essence of the other and vice versa.
And House of God does this to medicine.
Doctors use certain assumptions, like:
1. The patient wants to get better, but there are scientific limits that usually make this impossible
2. Medical treatment makes people healthier
3. Treatment is determined by medical need and expertise
But in House of God, the assumptions get inverted:
1. The patient wants to just die peacefully, but there are bureaucratic limits that usually make this impossible
2. Medical treatment makes people sicker
3. Treatment is determined by what will make doctors look good without having to do much work
Everybody knows that those first three assumptions aren’t always true. Yes, sometimes we prolong life in contravention of patients’ wishes. Sometimes people mistakenly receive unnecessary treatment that causes complications. And sometimes care suffers because of doctors’ scheduling issues. But it’s easy to abstract away to an ideal medicine based on benevolence and reason, and then view everything else as rare and unfortunate deviations from the norm.
House of God goes the whole way and does a full figure-ground inversion. The outliers become the norm; good care becomes the rare deviation. What’s horrifying is how convincing it is. Real medicine looks at least as much like the bizarro-world of House of God as it does the world of the popular imagination where doctors are always wise, diagnoses always correct, and patients always grateful.
And then there are other people who think of government as a giant pork-distribution system, where obviously representatives and bureaucrats, incentivized in every way to support the forces that provide them with campaign funding and personal prestige, will take those incentives. Obviously they’ll use the government to crush their enemies. Sometimes this system also involves the hungry getting food and the elderly getting medical care, as an epiphenomenon of its pork-distribution role, but this isn’t particularly important and can be abstracted away as noise.
I think I can go back and forth between these two models when I need to, but it’s a weird switch of perspective, where the parts you view as noise in one model resolve into the essence of the other and vice versa.
And House of God does this to medicine.
Doctors use certain assumptions, like:
1. The patient wants to get better, but there are scientific limits that usually make this impossible
2. Medical treatment makes people healthier
3. Treatment is determined by medical need and expertise
But in House of God, the assumptions get inverted:
1. The patient wants to just die peacefully, but there are bureaucratic limits that usually make this impossible
2. Medical treatment makes people sicker
3. Treatment is determined by what will make doctors look good without having to do much work
Everybody knows that those first three assumptions aren’t always true. Yes, sometimes we prolong life in contravention of patients’ wishes. Sometimes people mistakenly receive unnecessary treatment that causes complications. And sometimes care suffers because of doctors’ scheduling issues. But it’s easy to abstract away to an ideal medicine based on benevolence and reason, and then view everything else as rare and unfortunate deviations from the norm.
House of God goes the whole way and does a full figure-ground inversion. The outliers become the norm; good care becomes the rare deviation. What’s horrifying is how convincing it is. Real medicine looks at least as much like the bizarro-world of House of God as it does the world of the popular imagination where doctors are always wise, diagnoses always correct, and patients always grateful.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Workout Gear for When You’re Not Breaking a Sweat
[ed. No, not from the Onion.]
The athleisure spectrum now runs from workout clothes to off-duty weekend uniforms to “elevated” high fashion clothes — think Rihanna’s Fenty x Puma collection, characterized as Marie Antoinette-inspired streetwear — that is perfect for after dark. In a roundup of the recent Paris shows, Vogue.com decreed that the trend is now influencing all levels of fashion: “The athleisure effect can’t be denied.”
The mecca for athleisure is on lower Fifth Avenue from 17th Street to 23rd Street, in the Flatiron neighborhood. Stores there stock everything from basic black leggings to this season’s oversize bomber jackets. Bonus: Some of the stores have studios, a few offering free classes, and salespeople who are plugged in to the latest neighborhood fitness craze. It’s like finding out where the best powder is on the mountain from the cool ski locals while they are setting your bindings.Start at the southern end of the strip with Lululemon, which helped set off the athleisure tsunami, at the brand’s flagship store at 114 Fifth Avenue at 17th Street. It’s the company’s largest store in the United States, offering an overwhelming selection of its infamous leggings, mocked by some as overhyped and overpriced ($68 to $148) yet beloved by Luluhead stalwarts as flattering essentials.
The Lululemon salespeople are like legging sommeliers, patiently explaining the various fabric types, and suggesting associated activities for each — wicking materials for hot yoga, for example, or compression fabric for cycling, and lattice sides for barre class. Be warned that Lululemon sizes are not ego-boosting: If you are usually a size 6, you may need an 8. Still, the salespeople will work with you until they can honestly say that yes, it looks good.
And although it may sound like a “Saturday Night Live” parody, the store has a concierge who will point customers to nearby workout options, like Swerve, the hot new team-inspired cycling studio, or the latest array of workouts at Flex Studios (Pilates, barre and TRX), and then help book the classes. Downstairs, there is a studio called Hub Seventeen, which has classes, some free and some that cost $10 to $20, art shows and film screenings that can be booked online.
(While it will take you away from the area, a 20-minute walk to the Lululemon Lab at 50 Bond Street is worth the detour. The design team, working in full view in the back of the store, creates clothes with New Yorkers in mind — functional and mostly in dark and neutral palettes. This is class, not mass. Prices range from $60 for tops, to up to $450 for coats. The strap leggings have a horizontal slit at the knee, a fashion-statement riff on torn jeans that also allows for freedom of movement. It is one of only two Lab stores; the other is in Vancouver, British Columbia. The clothes are available only at the store, not online.)
Gap-owned Athleta, at 126 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street, does not push the envelope, and that can be a good thing. Mannequins are dressed in laid-back and doable options, such as leggings ($65 to $98) layered with a chunky long sweater and topped with down vests. A rotating roster of A-list teachers — like Dana Trixie Flynn from Laughing Lotus yoga — teaches classes in the beautiful studio downstairs. Classes are free. It is best to book online in advance because they fill up.
To flesh out the basic look, cross the street for hoodies, graphic tees and sunglasses at Zara, 101 Fifth Avenue at 17th Street, or H&M, 111 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street.
Tory Sport, 129 Fifth Avenue at 20th Street, is the athleisure line started by the designer Tory Burch in 2015. The ’70s-infused style is right in the modern groove: color-blocked, chevron-patterned and with track stripes in cutting-edge, sports-friendly fabrics. Framed vintage Sports Illustrated covers of greats like John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova set the vibe for the collection and the store, which has the feel of a sleek, retro Scandinavian ski chalet.
On a recent visit, a Tory Sport saleswoman inquired, “What sport are you into?” before pointing to the separate golf, tennis, running and studio lines. Her own current favorite, she said, was the killer workouts at Tone House in the neighboring Murray Hill area: “The hardest workout I’ve ever had.”
However, sport distinctions quickly seem irrelevant, as even a dedicated yogi on her way to check out the seamless leggings will stop short at the golf clothes, like the cunning short-sleeve crew neck sweater ($225) that has a contrasting ring collar and is made of “performance cashmere.” That’s right: cashmere that wicks. The “Coming and Going” category is a catchall for wardrobe staples officially intended for going to and from the studio. But these pieces, made from performance fabrics, are appropriate for work or for social gatherings. A convertible blazer with zip-in nylon dickey and hoodie is a nice twist on a classic ($365).
Bandier, a few blocks north at 164 Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street, is a multibrand shop, the place to check out this season’s mesh or perforated fabrics, graphic leggings, camouflage motorcycle (camo moto) jackets, cropped tops and oversize bomber jackets. These are club-worthy, the elevated end of the spectrum. The store is the real deal, so worth braving the brisk (or overwhelmed?) salespeople, including one who handed a customer a size small bomber jacket to try on, while waving off the idea of taking a medium for comparison purposes, with a definitive, “It’s supposed to be fitted.”
Bandier has attitude. Painted on the wall in a cheeky script is the message: “Take Care of Your Girls.” Upstairs at Studio B — “Where Fashion Fitness and Music Go to Play” — you can take classes like Stoked Shred, ModelFIT sculpt and Yoga for Bad People. Sign up online; prices range from $15 to $35. (...)
It is worth the cardio schlep up four flights of stairs at 25 West 23rd Street, just around the corner toward Sixth Avenue, to Y7 Studio, the self-proclaimed home of “Original Hip-Hop Yoga,” to check out the small retail space. Score a black graphic crop top or muscle shirt (“I’m Like / Hey / What’s Up / Let’s Flow,” or “Namastizzle,” $50) and a New York Yogis snapback hat ($40) for instant street cred.
by Mary Billard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stefania Curto for The New York Times
Makeover Mania
1. The Problem
In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. And so on. The world is, after all, full of problems.
The human desire to solve problems fuels brand-new inventions too: The wheel, for example, eased conveyance significantly. But the redesign tends to address problems with, or caused by, dimensions of the human-designed world, and identifying such problems may be the designer’s most crucial skill. Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem — or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.
As an example in miniature of how the redesign is supposed to work, consider New York’s bike-share program. In 2014, Dani Simons, then the director of marketing for Citi Bike, visited a School of Visual Arts interaction-design class and presented it with a problem to solve. Citi Bike was selling plenty of annual memberships, but it was failing to attract enough “casual” riders, the sorts of one-off users who might rent a bike for just a day or a week. The class went into the field, observing and interviewing people at Citi Bike stations, and at their final meeting, the students presented Simons with their findings — and potential solutions.
Simons was so impressed that she signed two students, Amy Wu and Luke Stern, to a three-month contract that summer. The two of them soon zeroed in on a particularly thorny design problem: the big, instructional decal on Citi Bike’s kiosks. Annual members used a key fob and had no reason to interact with the decal, but it was the gateway for casual users. Consisting mostly of text, the decals were dense and off-putting, especially to tourists uncomfortable with English. Some failed to understand that they were supposed to type in a code from a printed receipt to unlock a bike; instead, they tried to figure out how to insert the receipt itself into a slot on the docking station.
There was another, more prosaic reason that Stern and Wu focused on the decal: It was something they could actually change. Citi Bike is operated by a private firm, but New York’s Transportation Department oversees it, too, and the technology involves an external vendor. The decal, however, was produced in-house. So Stern and Wu proposed refashioning it, using a set of instructional pictograms loosely inspired by Ikea booklets. They tested several prototypes and endured baffled responses from Citi Bike users until eventually landing on a gridlike arrangement of visuals that people found intuitive. Simons and the Transportation Department signed off on a final version, and it was installed on the city’s 300-plus Citi Bike stations. Wu checked the service’s publicly available user data a month later and discovered that casual ridership had increased about 14 percent. “It was a little bit surreal,” Stern recalls. “We can actually make a difference.”
Indeed, this is the platonic ideal of the redesign: A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard — all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.
This hunger for change has been a boon for firms like IDEO. Tim Brown, the company’s president and chief executive, has overseen IDEO’s steady expansion from product design to interactive and service design for businesses like Bank of America and Microsoft, and in more recent years even for municipalities and governments. He has been a vocal proponent of the idea that “design thinking” can be applied to just about any problem. “There are two takes on the redesign,” Brown says. “The glass-half-empty take on redesign is, ‘Oh, we’re unnecessarily redesigning a chair,’ or a lamp, or whatever.”
The glass-half-full take requires a broader perspective: “The need to redesign is really dependent on how fit for purpose the thing in question is,” Brown says. In his thinking, much of our world is built around systems designed to respond to the social structures and technologies of the industrial age. Everything from systems of education and health care to the design of cities and modes of transportation, he says, all trace their roots to a drastically different era and ought to be fundamentally rethought for the one we live in now. “I think we’ve potentially never been in a period of history where there are so many things that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says. “And therefore the idea of redesign is entirely appropriate, I think — even though it’s extremely difficult.”
2. What to Change
You don’t have to listen to Karim Rashid for very long to get a sense that he thinks pretty much every single manifestation of the built environment needs to be redesigned. Known for his colorful personal and professional style, he has had a long run as one of the most famous industrial designers in America. He believes design is a fundamentally social act that makes the world a better place. But it is also, he points out, a business. So in practice, most redesigns begin with a client; without one, not much happens. He has worked with many of them — on furniture, packaging, gadgets, housewares, luxury goods, even condos and hotels. But he has learned that even having a client does not guarantee that any given redesign will ever make it out of renderings and prototypes and into the real world. “People say I’m prolific,” he says. “Can you imagine if all the other stuff got to go to market?”
As Rashid sees it, so many of the things that surround us bear cumbersome vestiges of the past. “The world is full of this kind of kitsch history — history that has nothing to do with the world we live in now,” he says. He points to a redesign project of his that fizzled, a complete rethinking of the business-class tableware for Delta Air Lines. His proposal was bold: His bowls had sharp angles that echoed Delta’s triangular logo, his trays had subtle recesses that anchored dishes in place and his wineglasses skipped the stem in favor of a tapered shape with a wide base.
“The stem on a wineglass is meaningless,” Rashid says. He dismisses the conventional argument that it prevents the drinker’s hand from interfering with wine’s ideal temperature; to have the slightest such effect, he claims, you’d have to wrap your palm around the bowl for 20 straight minutes. The stem is actually a leftover artifact, he says, from centuries ago, when goblets made of metal had high stems to signal status and wealth. This design quirk remained after we switched to glass, Rashid says. Making wineglasses look a certain way because that’s how they have always looked is a classic example of privileging form over function. “I’m sitting in first class or business class on an airplane with turbulence,” Rashid says, “with a wineglass with a stem on it — do you understand? It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
His proposed redesigns were striking, but they had to pass muster with the service-item maker, the flight attendants’ union and Delta itself — which ultimately declined to move forward with the concepts Rashid proposed. “It was all rejected,” he tells me, with a sigh. “Because it doesn’t look like domestic tableware.”
Rashid loves to “break archetypes,” in effect redesigning a whole object category. But the hurdles to doing so involve practicality as well as taste. More recently, he designed the Solarin mobile phone for Sirin Labs. It is equipped with extreme encryption capabilities and made with wealthy, privacy-obsessed customers in mind. It costs an eye-popping $12,000 and up. The client had a sky’s-the-limit attitude about imbuing the phone with a truly distinct form.
Rashid proposed an oval shape. “It would fit perfectly in your hand,” he says. His concept made it to prototype, and “everybody loved the oval phone.” But it turned out that only a handful of factories do smartphone glass assembly, and none were willing to retool an entire production line to accommodate a relatively small client. Moreover, existing operating systems are all designed to work in a grid format. The phone ended up with pronounced beveling at the edges, but was still fundamentally a rectangle. “I was so, so disappointed,” Rashid says. “I tried every trick.” Sounding almost wistful, he recalls a similar misadventure: an oval-shaped television set he designed for Samsung. “They showed it in some focus group, and it bombed,” he says, laughing. “People didn’t like the idea of an oval television. I have no idea why.”
3. What to Keep
I know why. And really, so does Rashid. As much as we are attracted to the new, we simultaneously cling to the familiar. This tension means that some redesigns — particularly in the realm of graphic design — can inspire surprisingly visceral public backlash. Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram updated its logo and app icon, simplifying the design and making it more colorful. The chorus of online moaning and mockery that followed grew so loud that it was actually reported on by The Times, which called it a “freak out.” Instagram didn’t budge, but a similar backlash in 2010 caused the Gap to retract plans for a new logo it had floated online. The University of California pulled back key elements of a redesign that met with a similarly furious response.
Probably the most notorious and consequential example involved Tropicana. In 2009, the brand rolled out a new look that included a full redesign of its familiar packaging and visual identity, dropping its orange-with-a-straw-in it logo — corny, perhaps, but very familiar — for a more stylish icon and a sans-serif type treatment. Fans howled online, but that probably mattered less than the reported 20 percent drop in retail sales. The redesign was withdrawn, and the brand went back to its old look.
Situations like this can unnerve clients, and this knowledge was certainly relevant to Mastercard when it decided this year to update its logo for the first time in more than 20 years. Raja Rajamannar, the global chief marketing and communications officer, says that the first parameter he gave his designer, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, “was not to mess things up.” The online crowd can get “pretty nasty,” he explains. “We don’t want to get mired in unnecessary controversy and negativity.”
This conservatism among clients can frustrate designers. “I was kind of brought up in this tradition that, you know, there’s nothing more inspiring than the blank slate, the open brief,” Bierut says. But over the years he has come to appreciate the challenge of “starting with a given,” particularly now.
“The last big period of redesign was the postwar era,” Bierut says. “There was this mania to make older companies look new and modern.” As a more corporate world emerged, the visual vernacular of mom-and-pop businesses looked quaint, and so design shifted from an emphasis on manufacturing things to selling more abstract forms of value. A railroad doesn’t run trains, the thinking went; it provides transportation — so instead of a representation of a locomotive, its more modern logo might rely on arrows and italic typography. More broadly, idiosyncratic or hand-drawn lettering gave way to stylized and minimal iconography and type treatments that projected far-flung and trustworthy power. “Corporate design was done as a command-and-control exercise,” he says, resulting in a master solution laid out in “a thick binder” prescribing how every branding element would appear.
By the ’80s and ’90s, that approach started to feel dated, suspicious and at odds with a vogue for more agile management theories. So in the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of redesigns as companies have repositioned themselves in a more globalized, technologized marketplace. Mastercard is one of many examples of a company looking to update visual strategies designed with billboards and brick-and-mortar stores in mind for the age of social media and a transnational customer base.
Nevertheless, the specific dimensions of Mastercard’s “don’t mess it up” parameter included keeping the interlocking circles — one red, one yellow — that the brand has used for more than half a century. Bierut believes that this was wise: Unlike a book cover or a poster, a brand mark is “more like a building,” he says. “You don’t unveil it thinking it’s going to work once and then be on its way. It’s supposed to accrue value the longer it’s invested in.” The raw familiarity that builds up over years, which marketers refer to as “equity,” probably plays a bigger factor in our assessment of a supposedly great logo design than we realize. Bierut is tickled, for instance, by how many people seem to admire Target’s logo. “I can’t imagine if you went to your client whose name was Target and said, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ then you went away for a few weeks and came back with a circle with a dot in the middle, and an invoice,” he says. “The client would be skeptical — and the world at large would destroy you.”
For Mastercard, Pentagram got as creative as the brief allowed, offering dozens of yellow-and-red-circle variations — adding additional colors to suggest inclusivity, or a superminimal take presenting only the outlines of the interlocked rings. Rajamannar (and others at Mastercard, crosschecked by multiple rounds of market research) passed on those, opting for a treatment that amounted to a kind of reiteration of the existing mark. The colors became a little brighter, a set of stripes in their overlap was eliminated in favor of a single orange-y color and the name moved below the circles. Ultimately, in fact, the new symbol is designed to be able to stand alone, with no name at all; Rajamannar says testing conducted across 11 countries found 81 percent of respondents recognized the wordless version of the logo as Mastercard’s.
In short, the not-messing-it-up mission was deemed a success — and there was no notable backlash. “This kind of brand mark has become more ubiquitous than the designers of the ’60s and ’70s ever would have dreamed,” Bierut says, and that may explain a public interest in design that would have been a shock in that era. It should not be so surprising today; the design profession has been on a decades-long mission to have its work taken seriously across the culture. But now, having achieved what they wanted, many designers seem to wish the public would be more deferential — something Bierut finds amusing. “If designers claim to want people to be interested and invested in and care about design,” he says, “they sort of have to accept that interest on the terms of, you know, the audience.”
4. Where to Compromise
In 2011, Jamie Siminoff had just sold a start-up and was spending most of his days in his garage in Pacific Palisades, Calif., determined to come up with a new business concept. Tinkering with ideas including a gardening business and new conference-call technology, he soon became annoyed, because he could never hear his doorbell, and he kept missing visitors. So he “hacked together” a system that linked the bell to his phone. His wife told him that it was far more useful than the notions he was chasing in the garage. The idea evolved to include a camera and a motion detector — and thus the ability to monitor your front door from anywhere, with a smartphone, making the object as much about security as convenience.
The product he ended up with, Ring, is a good example of a broader phenomenon in the world of industrial design. The technology shifts that Brown and Rashid cite have quickened the pace of redesigns in more mundane, less grandiose ways. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors, circuit boards, cameras and other components, practically every consumer good now seems susceptible to reinvention as a “smart object.” Even the path Siminoff traveled from concept to design was made easier by technology and start-up mania, first with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign, then with an unsuccessful but profile-raising appearance on “Shark Tank.”
Sometimes such a path results in a version of what the tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — starting with a supposed breakthrough and then seeking out a supposed problem that it can hypothetically solve. And at times the presumed innovations in these tech-centric redesigns seem to run well ahead of their potential privacy and security pitfalls. (“Yes,” the tech site Motherboard reported last year, “your smart dildo can be hacked.”) But sometimes it results in a hit, like the widely celebrated update of the thermostat in internet-connected, app-controlled form created by the start-up Nest, which was ultimately bought by Google for $3.2 billion.
By his own account, Siminoff’s first stab at the product was a bit off. He called it Doorbot, and its look matched the geeky name: a vaguely sci-fi, curved object with a camera concealed by a spooky, bulbous protrusion. “That was the pride of the design,” Siminoff says now, laughing. He prototyped it in his garage with a couple of recent college graduates; none of them had a design background. The marketplace set him straight, he says: “No one wanted this big HAL 9000 thing on the front door.” He still believed in the object’s utility, but he realized he would need to redesign his redesign.
Siminoff found his way to Chris Loew, an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, with a long record in technology hardware; he worked on early versions of tablet products and spent 16 years at IDEO helping clients including Samsung and Oral-B. In more recent years he has been hired by a number of start-ups. Impressed by Siminoff, Loew also recognized the issues with Doorbot. “It was very gadgety,” he says, wryly. “You didn’t know if you were being shot with radiation or — you know, it’s not offensive, but you didn’t know what it was.” In short, it didn’t look like a doorbell, and even the most impressive technical capabilities have to be presented in a form that makes sense to the consumer.
In this case, that meant a design that resonated with basic home architecture. There were already serious technologized constraints: It had to accommodate a fairly large battery, a camera, a circuit board and a motion detector that required an opening of a specific size. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, the architectural setting imposed limits that might not apply to a free-standing product: Nobody really wants to tack a wild experiment in product design to a front door. Loew settled on a rectangular shape that would visually echo molding. “Everybody’s house is really just extruded shapes and planar shapes,” says Loew, who is now Ring’s lead product designer. The product comes in various finishes informed by classic door hardware, and is meant to be notable but not flashy.
The company has grown to 500 employees, with hundreds of thousands of installations already done. The only holdover from Doorbot is a circle around the button that glows blue when pressed.
In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. And so on. The world is, after all, full of problems.
The human desire to solve problems fuels brand-new inventions too: The wheel, for example, eased conveyance significantly. But the redesign tends to address problems with, or caused by, dimensions of the human-designed world, and identifying such problems may be the designer’s most crucial skill. Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem — or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.
As an example in miniature of how the redesign is supposed to work, consider New York’s bike-share program. In 2014, Dani Simons, then the director of marketing for Citi Bike, visited a School of Visual Arts interaction-design class and presented it with a problem to solve. Citi Bike was selling plenty of annual memberships, but it was failing to attract enough “casual” riders, the sorts of one-off users who might rent a bike for just a day or a week. The class went into the field, observing and interviewing people at Citi Bike stations, and at their final meeting, the students presented Simons with their findings — and potential solutions.Simons was so impressed that she signed two students, Amy Wu and Luke Stern, to a three-month contract that summer. The two of them soon zeroed in on a particularly thorny design problem: the big, instructional decal on Citi Bike’s kiosks. Annual members used a key fob and had no reason to interact with the decal, but it was the gateway for casual users. Consisting mostly of text, the decals were dense and off-putting, especially to tourists uncomfortable with English. Some failed to understand that they were supposed to type in a code from a printed receipt to unlock a bike; instead, they tried to figure out how to insert the receipt itself into a slot on the docking station.
There was another, more prosaic reason that Stern and Wu focused on the decal: It was something they could actually change. Citi Bike is operated by a private firm, but New York’s Transportation Department oversees it, too, and the technology involves an external vendor. The decal, however, was produced in-house. So Stern and Wu proposed refashioning it, using a set of instructional pictograms loosely inspired by Ikea booklets. They tested several prototypes and endured baffled responses from Citi Bike users until eventually landing on a gridlike arrangement of visuals that people found intuitive. Simons and the Transportation Department signed off on a final version, and it was installed on the city’s 300-plus Citi Bike stations. Wu checked the service’s publicly available user data a month later and discovered that casual ridership had increased about 14 percent. “It was a little bit surreal,” Stern recalls. “We can actually make a difference.”
Indeed, this is the platonic ideal of the redesign: A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard — all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.
This hunger for change has been a boon for firms like IDEO. Tim Brown, the company’s president and chief executive, has overseen IDEO’s steady expansion from product design to interactive and service design for businesses like Bank of America and Microsoft, and in more recent years even for municipalities and governments. He has been a vocal proponent of the idea that “design thinking” can be applied to just about any problem. “There are two takes on the redesign,” Brown says. “The glass-half-empty take on redesign is, ‘Oh, we’re unnecessarily redesigning a chair,’ or a lamp, or whatever.”
The glass-half-full take requires a broader perspective: “The need to redesign is really dependent on how fit for purpose the thing in question is,” Brown says. In his thinking, much of our world is built around systems designed to respond to the social structures and technologies of the industrial age. Everything from systems of education and health care to the design of cities and modes of transportation, he says, all trace their roots to a drastically different era and ought to be fundamentally rethought for the one we live in now. “I think we’ve potentially never been in a period of history where there are so many things that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says. “And therefore the idea of redesign is entirely appropriate, I think — even though it’s extremely difficult.”
2. What to Change
You don’t have to listen to Karim Rashid for very long to get a sense that he thinks pretty much every single manifestation of the built environment needs to be redesigned. Known for his colorful personal and professional style, he has had a long run as one of the most famous industrial designers in America. He believes design is a fundamentally social act that makes the world a better place. But it is also, he points out, a business. So in practice, most redesigns begin with a client; without one, not much happens. He has worked with many of them — on furniture, packaging, gadgets, housewares, luxury goods, even condos and hotels. But he has learned that even having a client does not guarantee that any given redesign will ever make it out of renderings and prototypes and into the real world. “People say I’m prolific,” he says. “Can you imagine if all the other stuff got to go to market?”
As Rashid sees it, so many of the things that surround us bear cumbersome vestiges of the past. “The world is full of this kind of kitsch history — history that has nothing to do with the world we live in now,” he says. He points to a redesign project of his that fizzled, a complete rethinking of the business-class tableware for Delta Air Lines. His proposal was bold: His bowls had sharp angles that echoed Delta’s triangular logo, his trays had subtle recesses that anchored dishes in place and his wineglasses skipped the stem in favor of a tapered shape with a wide base.
“The stem on a wineglass is meaningless,” Rashid says. He dismisses the conventional argument that it prevents the drinker’s hand from interfering with wine’s ideal temperature; to have the slightest such effect, he claims, you’d have to wrap your palm around the bowl for 20 straight minutes. The stem is actually a leftover artifact, he says, from centuries ago, when goblets made of metal had high stems to signal status and wealth. This design quirk remained after we switched to glass, Rashid says. Making wineglasses look a certain way because that’s how they have always looked is a classic example of privileging form over function. “I’m sitting in first class or business class on an airplane with turbulence,” Rashid says, “with a wineglass with a stem on it — do you understand? It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
His proposed redesigns were striking, but they had to pass muster with the service-item maker, the flight attendants’ union and Delta itself — which ultimately declined to move forward with the concepts Rashid proposed. “It was all rejected,” he tells me, with a sigh. “Because it doesn’t look like domestic tableware.”
Rashid loves to “break archetypes,” in effect redesigning a whole object category. But the hurdles to doing so involve practicality as well as taste. More recently, he designed the Solarin mobile phone for Sirin Labs. It is equipped with extreme encryption capabilities and made with wealthy, privacy-obsessed customers in mind. It costs an eye-popping $12,000 and up. The client had a sky’s-the-limit attitude about imbuing the phone with a truly distinct form.
Rashid proposed an oval shape. “It would fit perfectly in your hand,” he says. His concept made it to prototype, and “everybody loved the oval phone.” But it turned out that only a handful of factories do smartphone glass assembly, and none were willing to retool an entire production line to accommodate a relatively small client. Moreover, existing operating systems are all designed to work in a grid format. The phone ended up with pronounced beveling at the edges, but was still fundamentally a rectangle. “I was so, so disappointed,” Rashid says. “I tried every trick.” Sounding almost wistful, he recalls a similar misadventure: an oval-shaped television set he designed for Samsung. “They showed it in some focus group, and it bombed,” he says, laughing. “People didn’t like the idea of an oval television. I have no idea why.”
3. What to Keep
I know why. And really, so does Rashid. As much as we are attracted to the new, we simultaneously cling to the familiar. This tension means that some redesigns — particularly in the realm of graphic design — can inspire surprisingly visceral public backlash. Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram updated its logo and app icon, simplifying the design and making it more colorful. The chorus of online moaning and mockery that followed grew so loud that it was actually reported on by The Times, which called it a “freak out.” Instagram didn’t budge, but a similar backlash in 2010 caused the Gap to retract plans for a new logo it had floated online. The University of California pulled back key elements of a redesign that met with a similarly furious response.
Probably the most notorious and consequential example involved Tropicana. In 2009, the brand rolled out a new look that included a full redesign of its familiar packaging and visual identity, dropping its orange-with-a-straw-in it logo — corny, perhaps, but very familiar — for a more stylish icon and a sans-serif type treatment. Fans howled online, but that probably mattered less than the reported 20 percent drop in retail sales. The redesign was withdrawn, and the brand went back to its old look.
Situations like this can unnerve clients, and this knowledge was certainly relevant to Mastercard when it decided this year to update its logo for the first time in more than 20 years. Raja Rajamannar, the global chief marketing and communications officer, says that the first parameter he gave his designer, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, “was not to mess things up.” The online crowd can get “pretty nasty,” he explains. “We don’t want to get mired in unnecessary controversy and negativity.”
This conservatism among clients can frustrate designers. “I was kind of brought up in this tradition that, you know, there’s nothing more inspiring than the blank slate, the open brief,” Bierut says. But over the years he has come to appreciate the challenge of “starting with a given,” particularly now.
“The last big period of redesign was the postwar era,” Bierut says. “There was this mania to make older companies look new and modern.” As a more corporate world emerged, the visual vernacular of mom-and-pop businesses looked quaint, and so design shifted from an emphasis on manufacturing things to selling more abstract forms of value. A railroad doesn’t run trains, the thinking went; it provides transportation — so instead of a representation of a locomotive, its more modern logo might rely on arrows and italic typography. More broadly, idiosyncratic or hand-drawn lettering gave way to stylized and minimal iconography and type treatments that projected far-flung and trustworthy power. “Corporate design was done as a command-and-control exercise,” he says, resulting in a master solution laid out in “a thick binder” prescribing how every branding element would appear.By the ’80s and ’90s, that approach started to feel dated, suspicious and at odds with a vogue for more agile management theories. So in the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of redesigns as companies have repositioned themselves in a more globalized, technologized marketplace. Mastercard is one of many examples of a company looking to update visual strategies designed with billboards and brick-and-mortar stores in mind for the age of social media and a transnational customer base.
Nevertheless, the specific dimensions of Mastercard’s “don’t mess it up” parameter included keeping the interlocking circles — one red, one yellow — that the brand has used for more than half a century. Bierut believes that this was wise: Unlike a book cover or a poster, a brand mark is “more like a building,” he says. “You don’t unveil it thinking it’s going to work once and then be on its way. It’s supposed to accrue value the longer it’s invested in.” The raw familiarity that builds up over years, which marketers refer to as “equity,” probably plays a bigger factor in our assessment of a supposedly great logo design than we realize. Bierut is tickled, for instance, by how many people seem to admire Target’s logo. “I can’t imagine if you went to your client whose name was Target and said, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ then you went away for a few weeks and came back with a circle with a dot in the middle, and an invoice,” he says. “The client would be skeptical — and the world at large would destroy you.”
For Mastercard, Pentagram got as creative as the brief allowed, offering dozens of yellow-and-red-circle variations — adding additional colors to suggest inclusivity, or a superminimal take presenting only the outlines of the interlocked rings. Rajamannar (and others at Mastercard, crosschecked by multiple rounds of market research) passed on those, opting for a treatment that amounted to a kind of reiteration of the existing mark. The colors became a little brighter, a set of stripes in their overlap was eliminated in favor of a single orange-y color and the name moved below the circles. Ultimately, in fact, the new symbol is designed to be able to stand alone, with no name at all; Rajamannar says testing conducted across 11 countries found 81 percent of respondents recognized the wordless version of the logo as Mastercard’s.
In short, the not-messing-it-up mission was deemed a success — and there was no notable backlash. “This kind of brand mark has become more ubiquitous than the designers of the ’60s and ’70s ever would have dreamed,” Bierut says, and that may explain a public interest in design that would have been a shock in that era. It should not be so surprising today; the design profession has been on a decades-long mission to have its work taken seriously across the culture. But now, having achieved what they wanted, many designers seem to wish the public would be more deferential — something Bierut finds amusing. “If designers claim to want people to be interested and invested in and care about design,” he says, “they sort of have to accept that interest on the terms of, you know, the audience.”
4. Where to Compromise
In 2011, Jamie Siminoff had just sold a start-up and was spending most of his days in his garage in Pacific Palisades, Calif., determined to come up with a new business concept. Tinkering with ideas including a gardening business and new conference-call technology, he soon became annoyed, because he could never hear his doorbell, and he kept missing visitors. So he “hacked together” a system that linked the bell to his phone. His wife told him that it was far more useful than the notions he was chasing in the garage. The idea evolved to include a camera and a motion detector — and thus the ability to monitor your front door from anywhere, with a smartphone, making the object as much about security as convenience.
The product he ended up with, Ring, is a good example of a broader phenomenon in the world of industrial design. The technology shifts that Brown and Rashid cite have quickened the pace of redesigns in more mundane, less grandiose ways. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors, circuit boards, cameras and other components, practically every consumer good now seems susceptible to reinvention as a “smart object.” Even the path Siminoff traveled from concept to design was made easier by technology and start-up mania, first with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign, then with an unsuccessful but profile-raising appearance on “Shark Tank.”
Sometimes such a path results in a version of what the tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — starting with a supposed breakthrough and then seeking out a supposed problem that it can hypothetically solve. And at times the presumed innovations in these tech-centric redesigns seem to run well ahead of their potential privacy and security pitfalls. (“Yes,” the tech site Motherboard reported last year, “your smart dildo can be hacked.”) But sometimes it results in a hit, like the widely celebrated update of the thermostat in internet-connected, app-controlled form created by the start-up Nest, which was ultimately bought by Google for $3.2 billion.
By his own account, Siminoff’s first stab at the product was a bit off. He called it Doorbot, and its look matched the geeky name: a vaguely sci-fi, curved object with a camera concealed by a spooky, bulbous protrusion. “That was the pride of the design,” Siminoff says now, laughing. He prototyped it in his garage with a couple of recent college graduates; none of them had a design background. The marketplace set him straight, he says: “No one wanted this big HAL 9000 thing on the front door.” He still believed in the object’s utility, but he realized he would need to redesign his redesign.
Siminoff found his way to Chris Loew, an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, with a long record in technology hardware; he worked on early versions of tablet products and spent 16 years at IDEO helping clients including Samsung and Oral-B. In more recent years he has been hired by a number of start-ups. Impressed by Siminoff, Loew also recognized the issues with Doorbot. “It was very gadgety,” he says, wryly. “You didn’t know if you were being shot with radiation or — you know, it’s not offensive, but you didn’t know what it was.” In short, it didn’t look like a doorbell, and even the most impressive technical capabilities have to be presented in a form that makes sense to the consumer.
In this case, that meant a design that resonated with basic home architecture. There were already serious technologized constraints: It had to accommodate a fairly large battery, a camera, a circuit board and a motion detector that required an opening of a specific size. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, the architectural setting imposed limits that might not apply to a free-standing product: Nobody really wants to tack a wild experiment in product design to a front door. Loew settled on a rectangular shape that would visually echo molding. “Everybody’s house is really just extruded shapes and planar shapes,” says Loew, who is now Ring’s lead product designer. The product comes in various finishes informed by classic door hardware, and is meant to be notable but not flashy.
The company has grown to 500 employees, with hundreds of thousands of installations already done. The only holdover from Doorbot is a circle around the button that glows blue when pressed.
The Wisdom of Spock
[ed. "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."]
A Little Talk in Downing St.
[ed. And the media spent so much time and attention on it — always with the assertion that although there might not be anything nefarious or criminal there, it “raises questions” and so therefore had to get extended front-page treatment every time they could find an excuse to bring up — that this absurdly trivial matter became without question the single most important issue of the campaign. So Donald Trump, the most unqualified, ignorant, authoritarian, impulsive, reckless candidate in history is going to be president of the United States in part because, and let me repeat this, Hillary Clinton used the wrong email address. - Paul Waldman, WP via:]
How do you sign off an email? How, when writing to someone who is more than an acquaintance and less than an intimate, do you show that you mean well without being intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note. I started borrowing it, then ramped it up to ‘all best wishes’, fearing that ‘good’ might be interpreted as lukewarm, but now I am mildly regretting the inflation. I rattle out yet another round of doubly superlative ‘all best wishes’ and feel like Tchaikovsky giving the direction pppppp in his Symphony No. 6 when ppp would have done just as well. But it’s also possible to dial things down too far until a sign-off becomes an insult. The Twitter account ‘Very British Problems’ cites the problem of ‘receiving an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause so much anger’.
In the age of letter-writing, deciding how to start and finish was so much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter:
My Darling Mr Asquith is a deeply sympathetic and scrupulously researched biography of the socialite Venetia Stanley (1887-1948). One of its main themes is the complex gradation of affection that could be expressed by different salutations at the start of letters between very posh associates in Edwardian and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used as to be ‘fairly meaningless’ and so if you wanted to show that you truly had feelings for the person you were addressing the ante had to be upped. Adding a possessive was one way of making ‘darling’ more meaningful: ‘My darling’ carried ‘a slightly different connotation, and ‘My own darling’ a different one again. Another way was to go for the superlative: ‘“darlingest”, or “my darlingest”, were particularly affectionate, if ungrammatical,’ Buczacki notes.
When Asquith wrote to his second wife, Margot (his first wife died of typhoid in 1891), she was ‘my own darling’. But when, as a man in his sixties, he wrote to the Hon. Venetia Stanley, the twentysomething woman with whom he was besotted from 1912 to 1915, he employed fifty shades of ‘darlings’ and ‘beloveds’, ranging from ‘my very own darling’ to ‘most loved’ to ‘my darling of darlings’. These darlings multiplied across nearly six hundred love letters written by Asquith to Venetia, totalling nearly 300,000 words.
Venetia was the youngest daughter of the 4th Lord Stanley of Alderley, who, like most of the men in Venetia’s life, had been a Liberal MP, in his case between 1880 and 1885. She was the cousin of Clementine Churchill; before Clementine married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping strange animals, including a Syrian brown bear called Lancelot – her greatest talent seems to have been as a confidante. According to Buczacki, she addressed ‘almost everyone’ as ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’, regardless of her feelings for them, which stood her in good stead on the social scene. But Asquith took her ‘darlings’ to heart.
Even by the standards of philandering old politicians, the outpouring of letters from Asquith to Venetia was extraordinary. When the letters started in spring 1912, there was nothing particularly political about them. Buczacki summarises the typical structure as ‘comments on the weather, where he was, where he was due to visit, snippets about his family, where and with whom he had dined, what he thought Venetia should be reading, a few literary or classical brainteasers for her to resolve, a wish for him to see her at the earliest opportunity and an affectionate valediction’. Often he wrote, in fairly conventional terms, about her physical charms or plans to take her out in his Laundalette car, which was one of his favourite fumbling grounds, since he couldn’t drive and therefore had to sit in the back, hands free. ‘Shall we go for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talk?’ he inquired in one letter. Other letters recalled snatched moments together. ‘It comes back to me – like a wave – that supreme half hour we spent in the gloaming on the wooden bench in the little garden.’
Increasingly, however, he interspersed his sweet nothings to Venetia with things that were ‘secret’, ‘very secret’ or ‘most secret’, to do with state business. A letter in which he lamented a new yellow dress that Venetia had bought – he jested that it was a ‘yellow peril’ – also contained his thoughts on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Finance Bill and Sylvia Pankhurst. Venetia, he was glad to find, shared his opposition to votes for women. He confided to her his anxiety about Irish Home Rule (it was Asquith who introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912, 1913 and 1914 and then postponed it when war started). In July 1914, he warned Venetia that the situation in Europe was ‘as bad as it can possibly be’ and not helped by the Austrians being ‘quite the stupidest people in Europe (as the Italians are the most perfidious)’.
In the third month of the war, Asquith warned Venetia – ‘strictly between you and me’ – that Britain was weak in arms and ammunition in the event of a German invasion. Venetia was kept fully briefed on secret discussions that Asquith had with the Committee of Imperial Defence. Sometimes he even sent bundles of papers to accompany the letters, the better for her to understand them. He occasionally wrote to her during cabinet meetings and once during a War Council meeting. During most of the time Asquith was besotted with her, she was also being courted by Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP whom she would go on to marry. It’s quite possible that Asquith and Montagu sat in the same cabinet meetings, both writing letters to Venetia. When war started, and she took on work as a nurse at the London Hospital, Asquith wrote to her all the more often. ‘During Venetia’s three months as a probationer nurse,’ Buczacki notes, ‘Prime Minister Asquith, while leading the largest empire in the history of the world in a global war, wrote to her 147 times, occasionally sending four letters in a single day.’ During one seven-day period, Asquith wrote Venetia 14 letters amounting to ten thousand words in all; page after page was filled with secret details about the conflict.
The question is why Asquith – a relatively cautious politician whose flaws, at least during the war, had more to do with a lack of decisiveness than excessive daring – would have risked national security and his own reputation so recklessly. Then again, he wasn’t the first or last politician with an urge to expose himself in ways that might ruin him. When I watched the recent documentary about Anthony Weiner, the American politician who scuppered first his congressional career and then his bid to become mayor of New York City with a series of ‘sexting’ scandals in which he was found to have sent explicit photos of himself to several women, I kept wondering why he had to involve another human being in his predilections. Wouldn’t a mirror have done just as well? But maybe the risk of self-sabotage is part of what drove him on. Asquith, too, was aware that he might be ruined if his letters to Venetia fell into the wrong hands. He told Venetia he was ‘certain’ that she wouldn’t help any scurrilous biographers by passing on his letters, which shows that he knew it was a possibility.
More straightforwardly, people do crazy things out of sexual frustration and it may be that Asquith was ejaculating words in the direction of Venetia Stanley because he couldn’t offload anything else.
How do you sign off an email? How, when writing to someone who is more than an acquaintance and less than an intimate, do you show that you mean well without being intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note. I started borrowing it, then ramped it up to ‘all best wishes’, fearing that ‘good’ might be interpreted as lukewarm, but now I am mildly regretting the inflation. I rattle out yet another round of doubly superlative ‘all best wishes’ and feel like Tchaikovsky giving the direction pppppp in his Symphony No. 6 when ppp would have done just as well. But it’s also possible to dial things down too far until a sign-off becomes an insult. The Twitter account ‘Very British Problems’ cites the problem of ‘receiving an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause so much anger’.
In the age of letter-writing, deciding how to start and finish was so much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter:Yours faithfully: To unknown person on business.
Yours truly: To slight acquaintance.
Yours very truly: Ceremonious but cordial.
Yours sincerely: In invitations & friendly but not intimate letters.But that didn’t solve every dilemma. In an age of ritualised courtship and repressed emotions the difficulty was more likely to have to do with intimate letters than those written to business acquaintances.
My Darling Mr Asquith is a deeply sympathetic and scrupulously researched biography of the socialite Venetia Stanley (1887-1948). One of its main themes is the complex gradation of affection that could be expressed by different salutations at the start of letters between very posh associates in Edwardian and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used as to be ‘fairly meaningless’ and so if you wanted to show that you truly had feelings for the person you were addressing the ante had to be upped. Adding a possessive was one way of making ‘darling’ more meaningful: ‘My darling’ carried ‘a slightly different connotation, and ‘My own darling’ a different one again. Another way was to go for the superlative: ‘“darlingest”, or “my darlingest”, were particularly affectionate, if ungrammatical,’ Buczacki notes.
When Asquith wrote to his second wife, Margot (his first wife died of typhoid in 1891), she was ‘my own darling’. But when, as a man in his sixties, he wrote to the Hon. Venetia Stanley, the twentysomething woman with whom he was besotted from 1912 to 1915, he employed fifty shades of ‘darlings’ and ‘beloveds’, ranging from ‘my very own darling’ to ‘most loved’ to ‘my darling of darlings’. These darlings multiplied across nearly six hundred love letters written by Asquith to Venetia, totalling nearly 300,000 words.
Venetia was the youngest daughter of the 4th Lord Stanley of Alderley, who, like most of the men in Venetia’s life, had been a Liberal MP, in his case between 1880 and 1885. She was the cousin of Clementine Churchill; before Clementine married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping strange animals, including a Syrian brown bear called Lancelot – her greatest talent seems to have been as a confidante. According to Buczacki, she addressed ‘almost everyone’ as ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’, regardless of her feelings for them, which stood her in good stead on the social scene. But Asquith took her ‘darlings’ to heart.
Even by the standards of philandering old politicians, the outpouring of letters from Asquith to Venetia was extraordinary. When the letters started in spring 1912, there was nothing particularly political about them. Buczacki summarises the typical structure as ‘comments on the weather, where he was, where he was due to visit, snippets about his family, where and with whom he had dined, what he thought Venetia should be reading, a few literary or classical brainteasers for her to resolve, a wish for him to see her at the earliest opportunity and an affectionate valediction’. Often he wrote, in fairly conventional terms, about her physical charms or plans to take her out in his Laundalette car, which was one of his favourite fumbling grounds, since he couldn’t drive and therefore had to sit in the back, hands free. ‘Shall we go for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talk?’ he inquired in one letter. Other letters recalled snatched moments together. ‘It comes back to me – like a wave – that supreme half hour we spent in the gloaming on the wooden bench in the little garden.’
Increasingly, however, he interspersed his sweet nothings to Venetia with things that were ‘secret’, ‘very secret’ or ‘most secret’, to do with state business. A letter in which he lamented a new yellow dress that Venetia had bought – he jested that it was a ‘yellow peril’ – also contained his thoughts on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Finance Bill and Sylvia Pankhurst. Venetia, he was glad to find, shared his opposition to votes for women. He confided to her his anxiety about Irish Home Rule (it was Asquith who introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912, 1913 and 1914 and then postponed it when war started). In July 1914, he warned Venetia that the situation in Europe was ‘as bad as it can possibly be’ and not helped by the Austrians being ‘quite the stupidest people in Europe (as the Italians are the most perfidious)’.
In the third month of the war, Asquith warned Venetia – ‘strictly between you and me’ – that Britain was weak in arms and ammunition in the event of a German invasion. Venetia was kept fully briefed on secret discussions that Asquith had with the Committee of Imperial Defence. Sometimes he even sent bundles of papers to accompany the letters, the better for her to understand them. He occasionally wrote to her during cabinet meetings and once during a War Council meeting. During most of the time Asquith was besotted with her, she was also being courted by Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP whom she would go on to marry. It’s quite possible that Asquith and Montagu sat in the same cabinet meetings, both writing letters to Venetia. When war started, and she took on work as a nurse at the London Hospital, Asquith wrote to her all the more often. ‘During Venetia’s three months as a probationer nurse,’ Buczacki notes, ‘Prime Minister Asquith, while leading the largest empire in the history of the world in a global war, wrote to her 147 times, occasionally sending four letters in a single day.’ During one seven-day period, Asquith wrote Venetia 14 letters amounting to ten thousand words in all; page after page was filled with secret details about the conflict.
The question is why Asquith – a relatively cautious politician whose flaws, at least during the war, had more to do with a lack of decisiveness than excessive daring – would have risked national security and his own reputation so recklessly. Then again, he wasn’t the first or last politician with an urge to expose himself in ways that might ruin him. When I watched the recent documentary about Anthony Weiner, the American politician who scuppered first his congressional career and then his bid to become mayor of New York City with a series of ‘sexting’ scandals in which he was found to have sent explicit photos of himself to several women, I kept wondering why he had to involve another human being in his predilections. Wouldn’t a mirror have done just as well? But maybe the risk of self-sabotage is part of what drove him on. Asquith, too, was aware that he might be ruined if his letters to Venetia fell into the wrong hands. He told Venetia he was ‘certain’ that she wouldn’t help any scurrilous biographers by passing on his letters, which shows that he knew it was a possibility.
More straightforwardly, people do crazy things out of sexual frustration and it may be that Asquith was ejaculating words in the direction of Venetia Stanley because he couldn’t offload anything else.
by Bee Wilson, LRB | Read more:
Image: Margot Asquith and Venetia Stanley at the Scott-Sackville trial (1913)
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court
Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a lawsuit to conclusion. A third factor is increased unwillingness of lawyers to take a case on a contingent-fee basis when the anticipated monetary award is modest. A fourth factor is the decline of unions and other institutions that provide their members with free legal representation. A fifth factor is the imposition of mandatory arbitration. A sixth factor is judicial hostility to class action suits. A seventh factor is the increasing diversion of legal disputes to regulatory agencies. An eighth factor, in criminal cases, is the vastly increased risk of a heavy penalty in going to trial.
For these and other reasons, many Americans with ordinary legal disputes never get the day in court that they imagined they were guaranteed by the law. A further result is that most legal disputes are rarely decided by judges, and almost never by juries. And still another result is that the function of the judiciary as a check on the power of the executive and legislative branches and as an independent forum for the resolution of legal disputes has substantially diminished—with the all-too-willing acquiescence of the judiciary itself.
Some of this may seem surprising to people accustomed to hearing about overburdened courts with overcrowded dockets. These very real burdens partly reflect the decades-old refusal of many legislatures to provide funds for new courts and new judges at a rate remotely comparable to the increase in population and the corresponding increase in cases. But aside from these facts, a closer look at changes in the courts’ dockets reveals some disturbing trends.
Until 1970, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts, the great majority of individuals who brought or defended lawsuits in state courts were represented by lawyers. But today as many as two thirds of all individual civil litigants in state trial courts are representing themselves, without a lawyer. Indeed, in some states, an astonishing 90 percent of all family law and housing law cases—which are the most common legal disputes for most Americans—involve at least one party who is not represented by a lawyer.
Individuals not represented by lawyers lose cases at a considerably higher rate than similar individuals who are represented by counsel. In mortgage foreclosure cases, for example, you are twice as likely to lose your home if you are unrepresented by counsel. Or to give a different kind of example, if you are a survivor of domestic violence, your odds of obtaining a protective order fall by over 50 percent if you are without a lawyer. While hard statistics are not available for every kind of case, surveys of state and federal judges repeatedly show that they are quite certain that parties unrepresented by counsel fare far worse than those who are represented by counsel, even when the judge tries to compensate for counsel’s absence.
This is hardly surprising. Unlike most European legal systems, the American legal system is an “adversary system,” where, in Chief Justice John Roberts’s words, the judge simply serves as an “umpire” determining which of the contestants has won the match. While the analogy may be overstated, the fact remains that very few laypersons, lacking a lawyer’s legal education or familiarity with the intricacies of modern law, can hope to compete with a party represented by a lawyer. As a practical matter, such unrepresented litigants are effectively denied a fair day in court.
This is bad enough when the unrepresented litigant is a plaintiff who has chosen to go to court without a lawyer because she cannot afford one. But increasingly, the unrepresented parties are defendants who were hauled into court by institutions well supplied with lawyers. For example, the most immediate impact of the Great Recession on the courts was a huge increase in foreclosure proceedings brought by banks and other mortgage lenders against those who had defaulted on their mortgages. These hapless homeowners, who in many cases had been inveigled by mortgage brokers into taking out excessive mortgages on which they inevitably defaulted, were now facing foreclosure without remotely having the money to retain a lawyer to defend them.
Despite the recent improvement in the economy, this peril persists. In New York State, for example, almost one third of all state court civil cases brought in 2015 were foreclosure actions; and in these, despite increased efforts by public interest groups to provide legal representation, nearly 40 percent of the defendants still were unrepresented. The same trend can also be seen in eviction proceedings brought against tenants. In New York City’s Housing Court, for example, 70 percent of tenant defendants who were sued in 2015 were unrepresented by counsel.
More generally, most observers agree that the primary reason so many Americans are unrepresented in court is that even people of moderate means simply cannot afford a lawyer. The provision of legal services has never operated according to free-market principles. Lawyers comprise a guild to which there are significant barriers to entry, not least the huge expense of a legal education. But in the past few decades, the price of hiring a lawyer to handle an everyday dispute has risen at a rate much greater than the average increase in income or wages. Thus, between 1985 and 2012 the average billing rate for law firm partners in the US increased from $112 per hour to $536 per hour, and for associate lawyers from $79 per hour to $370 per hour. These billing rates increased at more than three times the rate of inflation during the same period.
Economists differ about the reasons for this large increase in the price of legal help. But among the causes is a great increase in legal specialization. A corollary is that the “family lawyer” has become even more rare than the “family doctor.” But whereas the ordinary American can usually get decent health care under insurance provided through his employer or, more recently, the state, affordable legal insurance remains a rarity. The result is not only that a very large number of Americans who go to court, or are hauled into court, are unrepresented by counsel, but also that an unknown but probably even larger number of Americans who might otherwise seek legal redress for wrongs done to them simply cannot afford a lawyer and choose instead to forgo justice altogether.
Further still, even those individuals who can afford counsel rarely get their day in court. Rather, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they settle with their adversaries before the merits of their cases ever get heard. This is true even in federal courts, where, because of lighter dockets, there is much less institutional pressure to settle. Nevertheless, whereas in 1938 about 19 percent of all federal civil cases went to trial, by 1962 that rate had declined to 11.5 percent and by 2015 it had declined to an abysmal 1.1 percent. Although the data for state civil cases are less ample, it appears that in state courts the situation is even worse, with fewer than 1 percent of them now going to trial. And while it is true that some of the remaining 99 percent of cases are resolved by motions made in court and accepted by a judge, in the majority of cases the parties simply settle without any judge or jury reaching a decision on the merits.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier, 1846
For these and other reasons, many Americans with ordinary legal disputes never get the day in court that they imagined they were guaranteed by the law. A further result is that most legal disputes are rarely decided by judges, and almost never by juries. And still another result is that the function of the judiciary as a check on the power of the executive and legislative branches and as an independent forum for the resolution of legal disputes has substantially diminished—with the all-too-willing acquiescence of the judiciary itself.Some of this may seem surprising to people accustomed to hearing about overburdened courts with overcrowded dockets. These very real burdens partly reflect the decades-old refusal of many legislatures to provide funds for new courts and new judges at a rate remotely comparable to the increase in population and the corresponding increase in cases. But aside from these facts, a closer look at changes in the courts’ dockets reveals some disturbing trends.
Until 1970, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts, the great majority of individuals who brought or defended lawsuits in state courts were represented by lawyers. But today as many as two thirds of all individual civil litigants in state trial courts are representing themselves, without a lawyer. Indeed, in some states, an astonishing 90 percent of all family law and housing law cases—which are the most common legal disputes for most Americans—involve at least one party who is not represented by a lawyer.
Individuals not represented by lawyers lose cases at a considerably higher rate than similar individuals who are represented by counsel. In mortgage foreclosure cases, for example, you are twice as likely to lose your home if you are unrepresented by counsel. Or to give a different kind of example, if you are a survivor of domestic violence, your odds of obtaining a protective order fall by over 50 percent if you are without a lawyer. While hard statistics are not available for every kind of case, surveys of state and federal judges repeatedly show that they are quite certain that parties unrepresented by counsel fare far worse than those who are represented by counsel, even when the judge tries to compensate for counsel’s absence.
This is hardly surprising. Unlike most European legal systems, the American legal system is an “adversary system,” where, in Chief Justice John Roberts’s words, the judge simply serves as an “umpire” determining which of the contestants has won the match. While the analogy may be overstated, the fact remains that very few laypersons, lacking a lawyer’s legal education or familiarity with the intricacies of modern law, can hope to compete with a party represented by a lawyer. As a practical matter, such unrepresented litigants are effectively denied a fair day in court.
This is bad enough when the unrepresented litigant is a plaintiff who has chosen to go to court without a lawyer because she cannot afford one. But increasingly, the unrepresented parties are defendants who were hauled into court by institutions well supplied with lawyers. For example, the most immediate impact of the Great Recession on the courts was a huge increase in foreclosure proceedings brought by banks and other mortgage lenders against those who had defaulted on their mortgages. These hapless homeowners, who in many cases had been inveigled by mortgage brokers into taking out excessive mortgages on which they inevitably defaulted, were now facing foreclosure without remotely having the money to retain a lawyer to defend them.
Despite the recent improvement in the economy, this peril persists. In New York State, for example, almost one third of all state court civil cases brought in 2015 were foreclosure actions; and in these, despite increased efforts by public interest groups to provide legal representation, nearly 40 percent of the defendants still were unrepresented. The same trend can also be seen in eviction proceedings brought against tenants. In New York City’s Housing Court, for example, 70 percent of tenant defendants who were sued in 2015 were unrepresented by counsel.
More generally, most observers agree that the primary reason so many Americans are unrepresented in court is that even people of moderate means simply cannot afford a lawyer. The provision of legal services has never operated according to free-market principles. Lawyers comprise a guild to which there are significant barriers to entry, not least the huge expense of a legal education. But in the past few decades, the price of hiring a lawyer to handle an everyday dispute has risen at a rate much greater than the average increase in income or wages. Thus, between 1985 and 2012 the average billing rate for law firm partners in the US increased from $112 per hour to $536 per hour, and for associate lawyers from $79 per hour to $370 per hour. These billing rates increased at more than three times the rate of inflation during the same period.
Economists differ about the reasons for this large increase in the price of legal help. But among the causes is a great increase in legal specialization. A corollary is that the “family lawyer” has become even more rare than the “family doctor.” But whereas the ordinary American can usually get decent health care under insurance provided through his employer or, more recently, the state, affordable legal insurance remains a rarity. The result is not only that a very large number of Americans who go to court, or are hauled into court, are unrepresented by counsel, but also that an unknown but probably even larger number of Americans who might otherwise seek legal redress for wrongs done to them simply cannot afford a lawyer and choose instead to forgo justice altogether.
Further still, even those individuals who can afford counsel rarely get their day in court. Rather, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they settle with their adversaries before the merits of their cases ever get heard. This is true even in federal courts, where, because of lighter dockets, there is much less institutional pressure to settle. Nevertheless, whereas in 1938 about 19 percent of all federal civil cases went to trial, by 1962 that rate had declined to 11.5 percent and by 2015 it had declined to an abysmal 1.1 percent. Although the data for state civil cases are less ample, it appears that in state courts the situation is even worse, with fewer than 1 percent of them now going to trial. And while it is true that some of the remaining 99 percent of cases are resolved by motions made in court and accepted by a judge, in the majority of cases the parties simply settle without any judge or jury reaching a decision on the merits.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier, 1846
via:
[ed. We're screwed.]
President Trump is the shock heard round the world. Now that he has won, the instant explanations have already started to flood in: that the mobilisation (or not) of this or that demographic was decisive; that he tapped the angry anti-establishment mood; that he spoke for millions who felt abandoned by the prosperous and progressive; that American nativism was always far stronger than liberals wanted to think; that he was a celebrity candidate for the celebrity-obsessed age; that he rode the tiger of post-truth politics; that making America great again was a cut-through message in a militaristic and imperial nation; that white men (and many white women) had had it with political correctness; that misogyny swung it; that the mainstream media failed to call him out; that it is a verdict on the Barack Obama years; that Mrs Clinton was always the wrong candidate; that there was racist dirty work in the voting system; that it was the Russians that won it for him.
None of these explanations is irrelevant. All of them have something to say. But beware of instant certainties.
by Editorial Board, The Guardian | Read more:
On a Precipice
President Donald Trump. Three words that were unthinkable to tens of millions of Americans — and much of the rest of the world — have now become the future of the United States.
Having confounded Republican elites in the primaries, Mr. Trump did the same to the Democrats in the general election, repeating the judo move of turning the weight of a complacent establishment against it. His victory is a humbling blow to the news media, the pollsters and the Clinton-dominated Democratic leadership.
The candidates appeared neck-in-neck in the popular vote, but Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
Having confounded Republican elites in the primaries, Mr. Trump did the same to the Democrats in the general election, repeating the judo move of turning the weight of a complacent establishment against it. His victory is a humbling blow to the news media, the pollsters and the Clinton-dominated Democratic leadership.
The candidates appeared neck-in-neck in the popular vote, but Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
In Boomers’ Sunset, Election Reawakens an Old Divide
They came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, in the traumatic aftermath of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They fought and protested a war together, argued over Nixon and Kissinger together, laughed at Archie Bunker together. As children, they practiced air-raid drills; as adults, they cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the 1990s, they saw one of their own become president, watching him gain glory as one of the most gifted politicians of his time, but also infamy as one of its most self-indulgent — a poster child for the Me Generation.
They are of course the baby boomers, the collective offspring of the most fertile period in American history. At 75 million strong, they have been the most dominant force in American life for three decades, and one of its most maligned. Enlightened but self-centered, introspective but reckless, they are known among the cohorts that followed them — and even to some boomers themselves — as the generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals, but still held fast to its sense of superiority.
If Bill Clinton was their white-haired id, Hillary Clinton is their superego in a pantsuit. A second Clinton presidency could represent a last hurrah for the baby boomers. But it could also offer a shot at a kind of generational redemption.
“There is a kind of do-over quality to it,” said Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” “This is their last chance to get it right.”
A shared history binds the boomers — as do, broadly speaking, some shared traits. Their parents suffered through the Depression and World War II before rearing them in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Inevitably, perhaps, they were guided by two polestars: responsibility and entitlement.
Those dueling impulses powered the rise of both Clintons: one impulse galvanizing supporters who deeply admired their commitment to public service, the other galling critics who saw them as playing by their own rules.
“There’s this tremendous idealism with the Clintons — actually living social change, embodying social change,” said Gil Troy, the author of “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s” and a history professor at McGill University in Montreal. “But also, at the end of day, not just having this will to power, but also being so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they improvise a new set of morality and ethics.”
Like her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton’s political odyssey began in earnest when she volunteered for George McGovern’s youth-powered 1972 presidential bid, one that ended in a lopsided, welcome-to-adulthood takedown of ’60s idealism at the hands of President Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority.” It was there, in the trenches, that the Clintons — still in their mid-20s, and not yet married — began to assemble the network of trusted friends that continues to surround them.
Twenty years later, at 46, Bill Clinton became the third-youngest president ever elected. At 69, Hillary Clinton would be the second-oldest. In many respects, her journey has become her generation’s journey — from protester to parent and now grandparent, from earnest idealist to battle-hardened realist.
They would be bookends on their cohort, one seizing the national stage on behalf of their generation in its prime, the other, who now qualifies for Medicare, vying to lead it into its dotage.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times
In the 1990s, they saw one of their own become president, watching him gain glory as one of the most gifted politicians of his time, but also infamy as one of its most self-indulgent — a poster child for the Me Generation.They are of course the baby boomers, the collective offspring of the most fertile period in American history. At 75 million strong, they have been the most dominant force in American life for three decades, and one of its most maligned. Enlightened but self-centered, introspective but reckless, they are known among the cohorts that followed them — and even to some boomers themselves — as the generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals, but still held fast to its sense of superiority.
If Bill Clinton was their white-haired id, Hillary Clinton is their superego in a pantsuit. A second Clinton presidency could represent a last hurrah for the baby boomers. But it could also offer a shot at a kind of generational redemption.
“There is a kind of do-over quality to it,” said Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” “This is their last chance to get it right.”
A shared history binds the boomers — as do, broadly speaking, some shared traits. Their parents suffered through the Depression and World War II before rearing them in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Inevitably, perhaps, they were guided by two polestars: responsibility and entitlement.
Those dueling impulses powered the rise of both Clintons: one impulse galvanizing supporters who deeply admired their commitment to public service, the other galling critics who saw them as playing by their own rules.
“There’s this tremendous idealism with the Clintons — actually living social change, embodying social change,” said Gil Troy, the author of “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s” and a history professor at McGill University in Montreal. “But also, at the end of day, not just having this will to power, but also being so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they improvise a new set of morality and ethics.”
Like her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton’s political odyssey began in earnest when she volunteered for George McGovern’s youth-powered 1972 presidential bid, one that ended in a lopsided, welcome-to-adulthood takedown of ’60s idealism at the hands of President Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority.” It was there, in the trenches, that the Clintons — still in their mid-20s, and not yet married — began to assemble the network of trusted friends that continues to surround them.
Twenty years later, at 46, Bill Clinton became the third-youngest president ever elected. At 69, Hillary Clinton would be the second-oldest. In many respects, her journey has become her generation’s journey — from protester to parent and now grandparent, from earnest idealist to battle-hardened realist.
They would be bookends on their cohort, one seizing the national stage on behalf of their generation in its prime, the other, who now qualifies for Medicare, vying to lead it into its dotage.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times
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