Breaking Faith

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. As Wilcox explains, “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community. The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.”

The worse Americans fare in their own lives, the darker their view of the country. According to PRRI, white Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream “still holds true.”

But non-churchgoing conservatives didn’t flock to Trump only because he articulated their despair. He also articulated their resentments. For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. In 2008, the University of Iowa’s Benjamin Knoll noted that among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and born-again Protestants, the less you attended church, the more anti-immigration you were. (This may be true in Europe as well. A recent thesis at Sweden’s Uppsala University, by an undergraduate named Ludvig Bromé, compared supporters of the far-right Swedish Democrats with people who voted for mainstream candidates. The former were less likely to attend church, or belong to any other community organization.)

How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

by Peter Beinart, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Edmon De Haro

Roy Orbison and Friends

[ed. 2:30 to 5:20. James Burton and Bruce Springsteen. Some pretty awesome guitar playing.]

President Trump's Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, 2008 annual Easter Egg Roll.
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How Gonzaga Became the Central Hope for the Struggling City of Spokane

[ed. I like Spokane. Clean, wide city streets, friendly people, reasonable traffic, active city center, nice restaurants, tidy neighborhoods. Certainly didn't appear as down-trodden as this article suggests. I've spent some time on the Gonzaga campus too, and it's beautiful.]

I doubt he remembers, but the first time I met Mark Few was when he was with his wife and children, looking for a seat inside a mega-church on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I was home from university for the winter holiday and had tagged along with my father on that Sunday morning. Upon traversing a thousand-car parking lot, we were greeted by six video screens, a handful of professional cameramen, a 12-person band, and hundreds of Protestants, gathered together to sing contemporary Christian rock.

Few, walking quickly and in lockstep with his wife, hustled past me, no doubt looking to find a seat before a crazed fan could accost him. “Great work,” I said, as he zipped past. Few, whose face is compressed and tanned like a Florida retiree, was wearing a yellow, wool sweater. He nodded towards me. “Thanks,” he said, before disappearing into a mass of singing white people.

As the men’s basketball head coach at Gonzaga University, Few is an extremely tough man to pin down. I bumped into the world-famous art dealer Larry Gagosian at the Hemingway Bar in Paris not long after that, and even he had time for a couple of words. But in the deeply conservative, largely rural, college-basketball-obsessed town of Spokane, Coach Few is the famous equivalent of about nine Larry Gagosians. He is always getting approached in Spokane’s restaurants, stores, parking lots, even churches. As the coach of the Gonzaga men’s basketball team, he is the central – perhaps the only – source of hope for a struggling city.

In 1881, Spokane was incorporated as a lumber and mining town, with thousands of men coming by way of the newly established Northern Pacific Railway through Montana and Idaho in search of gold, silver, and mill jobs. Jesuits founded Gonzaga shortly thereafter, in 1887, offering classes in theology and Latin. Surrounded by open country and pine trees, Spokane sits on a tiny lump of a hill. The air smells of Ponderosa bark, and the city experiences all four seasons: temperatures soar over a hundred degrees in May and drop below zero in December.

Spokane (pronounced spoh-kan) has changed a good deal since its founding, and as is typical with cities whose central industry is no longer demanded, its quality of life began to slide once the demand for milling and mining fell in the early-20th century. In the 1930s, with the second world war spurring the economy, aluminum plants became Spokane’s central industry; but in the postwar period, Spokane experienced few newcomers. All of its job industries had dried up.

In 1974, there was a world expo that brought a trolley system, a gondola ride, and a more expanded downtown, replete with carousel and Ferris wheel, but the carousel is now closed most of the year, the Ferris wheel now rusted. As far as economics and quality of life goes, Spokane has stayed essentially the same since its postwar slump: still poor, still dangerous.

Last year, Spokane ranked as the 22nd most dangerous city in the United States, up from 26th the year before. Last year alone there were 10 murders, 1,100 violent crimes, and 12,000 property crimes. President Trump’s message of gloom and doom resonated acutely with Spokane and the deeply conservative US congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers has represented Spokane County since 2005. Spokane’s unemployment rate is stalled at about 7%, the highest for a medium- or large-sized city in Washington and double the rate of Seattle. Over 17% of Spokane’s population lives below the poverty line. Spokane, in short, is a town in desperate need of success, vicarious or otherwise. (...)

When Mark Few was named head coach of the Gonzaga men’s basketball team in 1999, he put Spokane on the map. Every year that Few has been head coach, the Gonzaga Bulldogs have gained entrance to the NCAA tournament, making it to the Sweet 16 five times and once to the Elite Eight. Yet, they have never been to the Final Four, and a championship has always seemed unlikely, no matter their ranking or early hype. (...)

For most Spokanites, the Zags have become like a close friend. For my father and me, they are a team that we look towards during times of success, but also – perhaps especially – during times of difficulty. My father listens to every Zags game on the radio, while eating his dinner alone. My mother passed a few years ago, so whether they’re running up the score against Santa Clara or losing to BYU, my father listens in, extending his invisible support for the team just as they return their type of invisible support to him.

In the same way that a hometown team provides emotional support to its residents, it provides a common social currency as well. Personally, I could not be living a more different type of life than my father – or than many of my childhood friends who stayed back in Spokane – but a quick mention of Karnoswki’s high-scoring season or Williams-Goss’s rebounding prowess immediately levels the conversational playing field. Perhaps this common currency and invisible mutual support helps reconcile the lack of logic inherent in turning over your feelings of self-worth and happiness to strangers dribbling and shooting an orange ball.

Zooming out even more, the reason a struggling town ascribes emotional significance to a constantly rotating group of 18- to 21-year-old boys is a slippery phenomenon. What is it, exactly, that my father is hoping for when he’s eating his pasta and listening to the game on the radio? What about the yelling fans who paid five dollars for upper-level seats? The bus driver with his “Go Zags” sticker on his ticket machine? The residents of the crumbling house who post a “Gonzaga Bulldogs” pennant in their window?

The aforementioned psychology of connection explains much of it, but not all of it. As someone who growing up was generally more interested in reading a book than watching the Zags play, the answer has long eluded me. But I believe those activities have more in common than I’d previously given them credit for. The janitor who makes up the 17% of people living below the poverty line, returning to home in north Spokane late at night to catch the Zags isn’t thinking about the “mirror neurons” that are firing or the common social currency he is establishing. He isn’t thinking about the economic possibilities of a strong sports team, Few’s $1.37m per year salary, or the soaring number of applications to Gonzaga after they made it to the Elite Eight. He’s excited that his team is ranked to be national champions this year, that his team is in its best form in the school’s history.

by Cody Delistraty, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: markk

Why Porn Has Gotten So Rough

“It’s become more rough. It’s become generally more… humiliating,” offers Julianna, a top porn agent. “Anyone can open the internet and find anything they want, and when you watch this, you go, ok, what’s the next step? You’re always curious about going deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Julianna is the co-founder of Julmodels, an agency for porn performers based in Hungary. She is also one of the subjects of Pornocracy, an eye-opening documentary about the state of porn playing at SXSW. The crux of the film, directed by the French porn veteran turned director Ovidie, is that free XXX tube sites have not only left the adult industry in tatters, but are a pox on society: a danger to sex workers, forcing them into extreme acts of degradation due to dwindling demand, and to our youth, allowing them unfettered access to hardcore pornography.

The latter issue looms large in Ovidie’s harrowing film, a stygian exploration into porn’s white collar underbelly that likens its hoodied, pierced creator to a Lisbeth Salander-esque hacktivist truth-bombing the system. In one particularly cringe-inducing scene, Pierre Woodman, a renowned DIY porn filmmaker, captures the corrupting influence of tube sites.

“The root of it all is that internet piracy is killing adult movies, streaming content that should only be for adults but that is now unfortunately available to young people as well,” he says. “And I’m fed up with hearing every day during casting sessions a girl who says, ‘Oh I’ve known you since I was eight years old.’ That’s just too much.”

After navigating her way past performers, handlers, and producers, Ovidie’s quest leads her to the kingpin: MindGeek, a multinational corporation with a near-monopoly on free streaming porn. The conglomerate owns all the sites in the Pornhub network, including YouPorn, RedTube, GayTube, Tube8, and Pornhub; as well as the porno studios Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Twistys, and the bulk of Playboy’s digital and TV operations. But the sprawling company, which previously operated under the names Mansef and Manwin, has run afoul of the law on numerous occasions. In 2009, the Secret Service seized $6.4 million in funds from two fidelity bank accounts controlled by Mansef, with Feds accusing the syndicate of money laundering; and in 2012, its then-owner Fabian Thylmann, a young German programmer once hailed as the Mark Zuckerberg of porn, was arrested on charges of tax evasion.

What Pornocracy does is raises plenty of questions concerning MindGeek’s operations. Why is it headquartered in Luxembourg, a notorious tax haven, when most of its operations appear to be run out of Canada? Do Wall Street hedge funds have a controlling interest in the company? Who is actually pulling the strings? How are these sites not violating copyright laws? And why is the money allegedly being routed through various countries to performers?

“They’re a fishy, weird company,” says Stoya, a Digital Playground contract girl from 2007-2013, in the film. “My Fleshlight royalties, when the wire transfers come in, go through banks in places like South Africa. They have offices in Ireland. It’s a bunch of men with Greek last names and thick Greek accents claiming to be Quebecois.”

by Marlow Stern, BuzzFeed |  Read more:

Image: Magneto Presse

You Can Now Send and Request Money in Gmail on Android

Google Wallet has been integrated into Gmail on the web since 2013, but today Google is rolling out a new integration on mobile. Starting today, users of the Gmail app on Android will be able to send or request money with anyone, including those who don’t have a Gmail address, with just a tap.

The user experience has been designed to make exchanging money as easy as attaching a file, Google explains in its announcement. To access the new feature, you tap the attachment icon (the paperclip), then choose either send or request money, depending on your needs. A pop-up window appears where you can input the amount and add a note, and send.

The entire process takes place in the Gmail app – you don’t have to have Google Wallet installed. In addition, recipients can configure it so the money they receive through Gmail goes directly into their bank account. There are no fees involved, notes Google.

The goal, seemingly, is to take on quick payment apps like PayPal, Venmo or Square Cash, by offering a feature to move money right within Gmail’s app. This could be useful for those times where the money is already a topic of an email conversation – like when you’re planning a trip with friends, or getting the family to go in together on a gift for your parents, for example.

But whether or not people would think to turn to Gmail for other uses, like splitting the dinner bill or paying friends back for drinks, is another matter.

by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Daylight Saving Hell

I shouldn’t be obsessed with daylight saving time, but I am. Like a pregnancy due date, a college graduation, or an income-tax payment, I have DST circled in red on my calendar and amplified with exclamation marks.

A few years ago, it meant nothing to me. I work at home—I can sleep or rise anytime I want, and I don’t get melancholy when the days get shorter. But here’s what I’ve come to anticipate with dread: changing the time on the clock in my car.

It’s nothing fancy: a 2015 Subaru Forester that I bought used. Although I don’t consider myself a dimwit, I absolutely cannot figure out how to set the clock. Twice a year, when the time changes, I find myself sitting in the car reading the Forester manual or at my desk watching YouTube videos on this subject and still, setting the clock is unfathomable.

My Forester has a large central display and, to the left of the wheel, three imposing black levers. To set the time, you have to do an intricate dance with these levers, along with corresponding icons that look like amoebas or the rings of Saturn. Even to get to the “clock function screen,” you must first navigate past the main information screen, which provides access to a dozen other functions. If you’re persistent enough, you’ll eventually land on one that says DATE, which means, in classical Subaru, TIME. From there, you go back to the three levers and start playing with them, looking for a way to enter the correct hour of day. If you mess up—by taking one hand off the lever too quickly or depressing the wrong one out of sequence—the entire screen goes dark and you’re back to square one.

There was a time when the clock in my car was correct. After the battery died (because I forgetfully left the headlights on), it was five hours off. I tried every way I could to adjust it, and then, in desperation, I duct-taped a small travel clock to the dashboard and used that.

When the guy from AAA came to charge the battery, I asked him if he could set the time. This is a man who spends every day under the hood of a car. He took one look at the three levers and snorted, “Sorry, can’t help you.”

I made an appointment at the Subaru dealership. A jumpsuited technician got into the driver’s seat and started to manipulate the three levers. He kept a blank face, but I could tell he was having problems. After about fifteen minutes, the screen said it was January 4035 and the time was 00.15 A.M.

He walked into the garage and another technician came out. I did not like this at all; it felt like when you’re suffering from a condition so anomalous that your doctor needs an immediate consultation with a superior. The new guy settled into the driver’s seat, where he, too, became frustrated. I felt like I had to say something, to excuse myself for bringing a car into the dealership to have the clock set and to make them more at ease with the problem.

“This is so unusual,” I said. “I mean, I’m not that stupid.” I blabbered on: “I actually went to Yale, where I did my graduate work, and I still can’t figure out how to set this damn clock!” My bona fides did nothing to help them set the clock, relax, or commiserate with me, so I shut up. After half an hour, the clock was set. I asked the guys to show me how to do it and they said, “Too complicated.” I left it at that.

Following this professional intervention, I took the travel clock off the dashboard and glanced happily at the official car clock to check the time. It felt so luxurious. But then it hit me: soon it would be daylight saving time and the clock would again be wrong.

by Jane Stern, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elles
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Lisa Breslow, Spring and Green, 2016
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Tom Gauld
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Meet the Companies Literally Dropping ‘Irish’ Pubs in Cities Across the World

[ed. I used to dream of going to Ireland or Scotland and experiencing the historic pub culture (along the lines of Balleykissangel or Local Hero), but not much anymore. I get the impression everything's been too westernized and Disneyfied (like many other cities and countries of the world).]

The walls of the bar are covered in old art, photographs of Ireland, and yellowing posters in frames. A pair of hurleys, the flat ash stick of the Gaelic game, are tacked above the door frame. The bar’s otherwise full of dust-coated bottles of bygone whiskeys and stouts, musical instruments, and familiar ridged glass partitions that gracefully generate several spaces where there might have been just one.

Christy Moore, beloved grandfather of contemporary Irish folk music, hums over the speakers. The manager — who, pleasingly, shares a first name with Moore — flits warmly and easily from bar to table, genially, and in a Donegal accent, asking about the general well-being of diners and drinkers. Notably, there are few shamrocks, in any form or medium — they, along with leprechauns, are generally derided as emblematic of a very loose grip on Ireland and “Irishness.”

The Auld Dubliner — small, dark, and convincing, with a flat, matte, unassuming facade (red and yellow lettering over black paint, on wood) — rests between a heavily illuminated branch of T-Mobile and a “dueling piano café” on a street approximately 5,000 miles from the place invoked in its name. Almost every part of the bar the eye falls on — from the stocky tables and the upholstered chairs to the floor tiling and the mock oil lamps dangling from the ceiling — were railed into the unit in Long Beach, California, from a 40-foot container that spent between three and five weeks at sea.

The bar’s trappings belie its location — a retail complex — and the year of its opening: 2003. Like thousands elsewhere, it was designed and prefabricated in Ireland: an export not cultural or theoretical, but actual. The assiduous export and installation of these pre-made Irish bars has been going on for more than 30 years, resulting in a global network of establishments that are interrelated but unrelated. A loose confederation. A franchise without a name.

In the late 1970s, Dublin architecture student Mel McNally and some classmates were tasked with analyzing a piece of local architecture. They decided to make their subject the city’s pubs. A dim view was taken of their proposal, but in the end, the project was such a success that it became a months-long public exhibition. Much of the work went missing in the final days, as McNally tells it, so emotive and sought-after were the drawings and renderings.

McNally went on to research the whole of Ireland to establish a definitive playbook of pub varieties, which led to the foundation of a design and manufacturing specialist, the Irish Pub Company [IPC], in 1990. The ambition was to design and build complete interiors of pubs, first domestically, but then for foreign markets, assembling huge shipments of flooring, decorative glass, mirrors, ceiling tiles, light fixtures, furniture, signage, and bric-a-brac, as well as the obvious centerpiece: the bar itself.

The group now sells bars in six “styles” that can be selected from a company catalog: Shop, Gastro, Victorian, Brewery, Country, and Celtic. At a glance, the variations may seem slight. Upon closer inspection, though, the Victorian option makes distinctively liberal use of brass accents and plummy tones. “Country” is a simpler affair: woody, closer to a kitchen, and liable to feature wall-mounted crockery and/or an open fire. “Modern” would appear to be the hipster iteration, the furniture sleek and the setting more contemporary, one conducive to nu-Irish pursuits like craft beer and artisanal gin tasting.

The Celtic style, on the other hand, plays up ancient folklore and mythology. “Brewery” uses related paraphernalia, cobblestone, and slate to get at the historical version of its name. “Shop” riffs on the rural pubs that doubled as general stores — or the general stores that doubled as pubs — a special configuration still found in Ireland.

Asked about essential components of an Irish bar, McNally offers, “I think everybody recognizes that good stained glass makes a difference,” delivering the line with total solemnity. Also important: spaces. “When I talk about spaces in pubs, very few clients know what I’m talking about,” he says, naming Dublin’s the Long Hall — a revered, beguiling Dublin pub, popular and relied upon for generations — as emblematic. Part of a protected structure, the pub has a jaunty red exterior and is a deep red within, like a heart, warm and compact, with chambers that inform the natural flow of patrons. “You know when you walk in how you wind up gathering up with people.”

The brewery behind Guinness, faced with flagging sales internationally, partnered with IPC shortly after its 1990 launch. McNally’s model was a highly effective conduit for sales of stout, and financial backing offered by Guinness enabled McNally’s expansion into continental Europe by subsidizing new operators and investing heavily in marketing.

The companies worked together to promote the flatpack Irish bar, made to order, as a marketable commodity. Introductory workshops were hosted. Country managers were appointed to handle particularly interested markets. Later on, assistance reportedly took the shape of a five-day class on all operational aspects and extended to the recruitment of Irish people to staff new openings.

by Siobhán Brett, Eater | Read more:
Image: Irish Pub Company

The New Party of No

[ed. I'd vote for Elizabeth in a New York minute. She's spent her whole career supporting working families, eviserating Wall Street, and fighting inequality. Expect her to be demonized in Clinton style as soon as mid-term elections roll around.]

On the morning after Election Day, Chuck Schumer’s phone rang. It was Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly described Schumer as his friend — which, the New York senator was at pains to clarify when we first spoke in mid-February, “isn’t quite true.” There had been the occasional favor; at Schumer’s request, Trump hosted a fund-raiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee at Mar-a-Lago in 2008, and Schumer made a cameo on “The Apprentice” in 2006. Beyond that, Schumer told me: “I bump into him at meetings here and there. We never went out to dinner once. We never played golf together. I sort of knew him.”

On election night, Schumer was with Hillary Clinton at the Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan when, around 8 p.m., he saw some troubling exit polls coming out of Florida and North Carolina. They showed that college-educated women in both states — a demographic that everyone assumed would be a lock — were underperforming for Clinton. Schumer called one of her top campaign advisers, who tried to reassure him. “He says, ‘Don’t worry, our firewalls in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan are strong,’ ” Schumer recalls. “ ‘There’s no way Trump can win.’ ”

Schumer kept up appearances. He tweeted a photo of himself in front of a catering table with Kate McKinnon, who plays Clinton on “Saturday Night Live” (“I got to congratulate Hillary Clinton — oops, wrong Hillary!”), and then took the stage, leading the crowd in a chant of “I believe that she will win!” But by shortly after 11 p.m., Trump had taken Ohio and North Carolina. The probability dashboards on the data-journalism websites had lurched Trumpward, and an unthinkable future was lumbering into view.

Schumer, who was in line to succeed Harry Reid as the top-ranking Democrat in the Senate after Reid’s retirement in December, had spent roughly $8 million of his own campaign funds on Democratic senatorial campaigns in other states in hopes of retaking control of the upper chamber, which the Democrats lost in 2014, and of making himself the majority leader. On his bookshelf he kept a copy of “Master of the Senate,” the historian Robert Caro’s exhaustive chronicle of Lyndon Johnson’s years as the Democratic majority leader, which Caro had inscribed to Schumer: “Whose career I have been following for years with real admiration, so that I have no doubt that he will be a great leader of senators.” But by the early hours of Wednesday it was clear that the Democrats would not take the Senate and that Schumer would not be Lyndon Johnson.

“We’ll work together,” Trump said on the phone call. He said he wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act — “that A.C.A. is terrible,” he told Schumer — which was an obvious nonstarter for the incoming minority leader. He also said he wanted a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. “I said, ‘Well, a trillion dollars sounds good to me,’ ” Schumer told me. But to get Democrats on board, he warned, three conditions had to be met. “You can’t do it with these tax breaks,” he said. Second, he could not “cut the programs we care about — Medicare, education, scientific research — to pay for this. It’s got to be new spending.” Finally, the bill had to preserve existing environmental and labor protections. “I said, ‘To do that, you’re going to have to get half your party really mad at you.’ ”

Schumer, as he saw it, was calling Trump’s bluff. “Donald Trump ran as an anti-establishment populist — against both the Democratic and Republican establishments,” he told me. Whether or not he had meant it, the Democrats could try to hold him to it. On the several occasions that Trump called Schumer in the weeks after the election, Schumer argued that he could try to govern as a hard-right conservative, but “America is not a hard-right country,” and there would be electoral consequences.

It might not have been the strongest card to play, but Schumer did not have a strong hand. The election in November left the Democrats stripped of power at every level of federal authority. Schumer would now possess the only means they had of exerting even limited influence over Trump’s agenda: a Senate Democratic caucus that, while several seats shy of a majority, was large enough to make life complicated for Senate Republicans. But that could happen only if the Democrats formed a united front — and it was unclear whether they could, or even wanted to.

The 2016 election was not just an electoral crisis for the party but also an existential one, more severe than any that the Democrats had experienced in decades. The party had glided through the campaign with a sense of destiny: In July, Schumer breezily remarked that “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Then Hillary Clinton lost to a candidate who revived a strain of nativist, nationalist politics that had been dormant in the Republican Party for at least a generation, and who won in part on the ballots of Barack Obama voters in traditionally Democratic strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin. “I sleep like a baby,” Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me. “And I can sleep anywhere — on the road, on the floor, in my kid’s bed jammed up against the wall.” But on election night, he says: “It’s so cliché, but I stayed up all night. I was, mentally, totally unprepared. At some level, you do have this — ” he trailed off and was silent for a moment. “You do start to question whether you know the country as well as you thought.”

The Democratic primaries and caucuses, meanwhile, had left the party sharply divided. Clinton lost 22 states to Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s independent and self-identified socialist senator, whose out-of-nowhere challenge had stirred a grass-roots excitement that Clinton’s campaign conspicuously lacked and acrimoniously split the Democratic Party’s centrist and left-leaning contingents — the latter of which viewed the Obama years as a missed opportunity to fight economic inequality, reorient trade policy and rein in Wall Street. Clinton might have won the popular vote, but in a way, this only amplified the confusion: about whether the party needed to transform or simply tinker; whether it needed to move to the right or to the left; whether the voters who were willing to vote for a candidate who said the things Trump said could be won back at all.

These were problems for anyone trying to chart a course for the Democrats, but in a particularly acute way they were problems for Schumer, a politician who was better known as a dealmaker, a student of consensus, than as a pathfinder. As majority leader, the next two years might have been the pinnacle of his career: bill signings, valedictory news conferences (and few politicians visibly delight in news conferences the way Schumer does), the sorts of late-night negotiations that historians like Caro write books about. Instead, Schumer found himself with a job that The Times Union, in Albany, observed two days after the election was “something of a booby prize.” The Democrats, who spent Obama’s presidency railing against Republican obstructionism, would soon be facing a president who, in his stated ambitions to unmake much of Obama’s legacy, was all but inviting them to try the same. Whether this was in Schumer’s​ ​DNA was one question. Whether it was in t​he party’s​ ​was another.

The Democrats have never been a natural opposition party, or a particularly effective one. Republicans from Reagan to the Tea Party broadly believed in reducing government, as the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Cutting budgets and eliminating programs might require a Republican president and a congressional majority, but lacking this, a disciplined minority party could gum up the works, starving existing initiatives and blocking attempts to expand them.

Democrats, by contrast, have generally been united by a belief in government that tries to do big things, in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society or, later, Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — a belief that, practically speaking, requires either landslide majorities or a willingness to compromise. Several public-opinion polls in recent years have found that this difference is reflected in the party’s electorates, which have increasingly come to view the political process in starkly different ways. In a 2014 Pew survey, 82 percent of people who identified as “consistently liberal” said they liked politicians who were willing to make compromises; just 32 percent of “consistently conservative” respondents agreed.

The week of Trump’s inauguration, David Brock — the onetime conservative journalist turned liberal gadfly — hosted a private gathering of Democratic luminaries at Turnberry Isle, a golf resort outside Miami. One speaker Brock invited was Ronald Klain, the former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, who previously worked for Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, in the aftermath of the 1994 midterms, when the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Addressing Brock’s crowd, Klain called for Democrats to embrace what he dubbed the Hundred-Day Fight Club. As Klain learned from working with Daschle, “You have to take on a lot of fights to win any fights,” he told me recently. “When you’re in the minority, you can’t be too choosy. I advocated a strategy of more comprehensive opposition.” But plenty of the Democrats present — among them the Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who was sharing the stage with Klain — disagreed. “At the time, there was more of a divide,” Klain told me. “The ‘we gotta pick our spots’ philosophy: ‘He’s a new president — we don’t want to look like McConnell looked in 2009.’ ” Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky who was then the minority leader and is now majority leader, reportedly mapped out a program of near-total resistance shortly before Obama took office — a strategy that Democrats spent subsequent years attacking as cynical and irresponsible. “We’re Democrats,” Klain said. “We like to govern.”

Among the Democrats who appeared to share Klain’s postelection view was Harry Reid, Schumer’s predecessor as minority leader, who would be retiring in December. Reid and Schumer, then Reid’s deputy, were an effective team for years in the Senate, partners in a long-running good-cop-bad-cop act. Schumer was known as a sharp-elbowed partisan during his 18 years in the House of Representatives, but in the Senate he had become an avatar of the gabby aisle-crossing bonhomie that had historically characterized the upper chamber. “You know, I get along,” Schumer told me. “I’m in the gym in the morning, I’m talking with Thune, and Lamar, and Cornyn all the time,” he said, referring to the Republican Senators John Thune, Lamar Alexander and John Cornyn. “I’m friends with them. They attack me, I attack them. We understand that.”

This was the old way of the Senate — one that began to fade in the late 1970s as the ideological consolidation of the parties accelerated, reducing their need and taste for compromise. By the time Schumer arrived in 1999, four years after the Newt Gingrich-helmed Republican revolution, it was fast becoming an anachronism, with meals in the senators’ bipartisan dining room giving way to one-party caucus lunches. By the time Reid became minority leader, amid the scorched-earth polarization of George W. Bush’s second term, it was all but gone.

Reid, like his Republican counterpart, McConnell, was one of the rare politicians who seemed to genuinely not care if people liked him or not. He was known for his blunt-instrument floor speeches, sandbags of verbiage delivered with minimal theatrics and less ambiguity of purpose. It was in this mode that he took to the Senate floor, a week after the election, and drew a line.

Senate Democrats had tried for years to pass the kind of infrastructure bill Trump had suggested, Reid reminded his colleagues, only to run up against Republican opposition. “If Trump wants to pursue policies that will help working people, Democrats will take a pragmatic approach,” he said. “But we also have other responsibilities.” He made clear that the price of Democratic cooperation should be Trump’s dropping of Stephen K. Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive chairman who ran his campaign and whom Trump named as his chief White House strategist two days earlier.

“In his first official act, Trump appointed a man who is seen as a champion of white supremacy as the No. 1 strategist in his White House,” Reid said. “As long as a champion of racial division is a step away from the Oval Office,” he added, “it will be impossible to take Trump’s efforts to heal the nation seriously.”

Reid and Schumer might have differed temperamentally, but they were both thinking about the 2018 midterm elections, in which 25 Democratic senators would be defending their seats. Lose eight seats, and the Republicans would have 60, enough to override a Democratic filibuster — at which point the Democrats’ debates about what they stood for or against would be academic. Five of the those senators —“the Big Five,” Schumer called them — were moderate Democrats in states in the Midwest, the Mountain West and Appalachia that Trump had just won handily. The abiding question was what, exactly, the voters who cast ballots for both Trump and, say, North Dakota’s Democratic senator, Heidi Heitkamp, were voting for in 2016; the party was still far from a clear answer.

Schumer, who began holding weekly dinners with the Big Five after the election, believed it was best to allow these senators to cooperate with Trump as necessary. But according to members of Reid’s staff at the time, Reid (who declined to comment) worried that, given Trump’s lack of interest in policy detail and disregard for ethical conflicts, even well-intentioned legislative compromises could prove to be politically costly — that an eventual backlash against the president would also fall upon Democrats who gestured toward working with him. “Reid didn’t want to validate the assumption that this incompetent blowhard could get a bill to the floor in the first place, which has proved to be a struggle for Trump so far,” Adam Jentleson, at the time Reid’s deputy chief of staff, told me.

Democrats were also still deeply divided over whether it was even possible to navigate 2017 without resolving the ideological and policy differences that fractured the party in 2016. At a closed-door meeting of the Democracy Alliance — a network of high-rolling Democratic campaign donors — at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington the week after the election, Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered an emotional address, excoriating the party for losing its way. One attendee paraphrased her speech to me: “People want someone to fight for them — that’s why they voted for Donald Trump. He might not actually do it, but he said he would fight for them. On trade, in American politics, we’ve gotten where we either look like we’re all about free trade without any empathy for people who have lost their jobs, or we’re rabid nationalist-protectionists. We need to build a policy in between. In 2016, we did not come out clear. When we are clear about what we believe, when we fight for people, we’ll win.” To beat pugilistic right-wing populism, maybe you needed pugilistic left-wing populism.

Reid brought Warren onto the Democratic Senate leadership team in 2014, and she was one of the people he most trusted to keep the Senate caucus on its bearings through the difficult weather ahead. Shortly before Thanksgiving, he summoned Warren to the minority leader’s office. When she arrived, the room was littered with art supplies; on an easel was a half-finished portrait of Reid that would be unveiled at his retirement party the following month. Its subject was preoccupied with the future of the party to which he had dedicated decades of his life. Reid told Warren she needed to think seriously about running for president in 2020. “He was worried in November,” Warren told me recently. “For me, it was so important to make clear: We will fight back — we will fight back. We’re not here to make this normal.”

by Charles Homans, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by James Victore. Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images

What Our Cells Teach Us About a ‘Natural’ Death

[ed. Yes. Imagine if there were more research devoted to promoting a good, natural death (free of invasive technologies) that makes succumbing to the inevitable a more gentle, pain-free process. I don't fear death as much as I fear dying (... insert Woody Allen joke here).]

Every Thursday morning on the heart transplant service, our medical team would get a front-row seat to witness an epic battle raging under a microscope. Tiny pieces of heart tissue taken from patients with newly transplanted hearts would be broadcast onto a gigantic screen, showing static images of pink heart cells being attacked by varying amounts of blue immune cells. The more blue cells there were, the more voraciously they were chomping away the pink cells, the more evidence that the patient’s inherently xenophobic immune system was rejecting the foreign, transplanted heart.

There was so much beauty to be found in the infinitesimal push and pull between life and death those slides depicted that I would fantasize about having them framed and put up in my house. Yet the more I studied those cells, the more I realized that they might have the answers to one of the most difficult subjects of our time.

Throughout our history, particularly recently, the human race has looked far and wide to answer a complex question — what is a good death? With so many life-sustaining technologies now able to keep us alive almost indefinitely, many believe that a “natural” death is a good one. With technology now invading almost every aspect of our lives, the desire for a natural death experience mirrors trends noted in how we wish to experience birth, travel and food these days.

When we picture a natural death, we conjure a man or woman lying in bed at home surrounded by loved ones. Taking one’s last breath in one’s own bed, a sight ubiquitous in literature, was the modus operandi for death in ancient times. In the book “Western Attitudes Toward Death,” Philippe Ariès wrote that the deathbed scene was “organized by the dying person himself, who presided over it and knew its protocol” and that it was a public ceremony at which “it was essential that parents, friends and neighbors be present.” While such resplendent representations of death continue to be pervasive in both modern literature and pop culture, they are mostly fiction at best.

This vision of a natural death, however, is limited since it represents how we used to die before the development of modern resuscitative technologies and is merely a reflection of the social and scientific context of the time that death took place in. The desire for “natural” in almost every aspect of modern life represents a revolt against technology — when people say they want a natural death, they are alluding to the end’s being as technology-free as possible. Physicians too use this vocabulary, and frequently when they want to intimate to a family that more medical treatment may be futile, they encourage families to “let nature take its course.”

Yet, defining death by how medically involved it is might be shortsighted. The reason there are no life-sustaining devices in our romantic musings of death is that there just weren’t any available. Furthermore, our narratives of medical technology are derived largely from the outcomes they achieve. When death is unexpectedly averted through the use of drugs, devices or procedures, technology is considered miraculous; when death occurs regardless, its application is considered undignified. Therefore, defining a natural death is important because it forms the basis of what most people will thus consider a good death.

Perhaps we need to observe something even more elemental to understand what death is like when it is stripped bare of social context. Perhaps the answer to what can be considered a truly natural death can be found in the very cells that form the building blocks of all living things, humans included.

by Haider Javed Warraich, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Corbis, via Getty Images

Millennials Are Giving the Finger to Diamond Rings

[ed. 'Silent rings'?! : )]

It may not be as glittery or romantic, but saving for a house together or putting money aside to cover future parental-leave shortfall does signify a deeper level of commitment than the traditional diamond ring. That’s a possible explanation as to why among millennials – the generation in full marital swing – cheaper gemstones seem to be an increasingly attractive choice.

They’re also more fashionable, particularly in art-deco-style jewellery. “About five years ago, there was a massive reappraisal of coloured stones; a recognition they could be just as beautiful,” says John Benjamin, an expert in antique jewellery. For years, coloured stones were under-appreciated and undervalued. “The prices have absolutely skyrocketed in recent years. In auction, we’re seeing prices that we never saw before, it is a very different sort of marketplace from the old days when coloured stones could be bought, frankly, very cheaply in auction.”

That isn’t to say diamonds, particularly among younger people, are over – a 2016 report into the market by De Beers found that millennials spent $26bn on new diamond jewellery in its four key markets – more than any other generation. But jewellers are reporting that younger customers are starting to look for something less traditional than the white sparkler. An article in style journal the Gentlewoman this month even suggested that some women are opting for “silent” rings – fingers left naked as a mark of independence.

The internet – and specifically Pinterest and Instagram – has opened up options, says Nikolay Piriankov, founder of Taylor & Hart, which specialises in custom-made rings. “Before, it was very much driven by what jewellers could stock, and, if it wasn’t in your local shop, you wouldn’t know it was possible.

by Emine Saner, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:ProArtWork/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Ng Han Guan
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How We Finally Know We're Old: Grunge Tours Are a Thing in Seattle

It's 10 a.m. on a Thursday, and I'm standing in front of the (recently rebranded) MoPOP Museum waiting for my ride. I'm here to go on Stalking Seattle, a driving tour billed as "A Rock & Roll Sightseeing Tour."

And it's certainly not hard to feel stalker-esque when climbing into an unmarked black Dodge minivan with tinted windows. Two couples, visiting from the Netherlands and the Dominican Republic, sit in the back. It's not what I had pictured—which, to be fair, was some kind of double-decker bus, or maybe a Ride the Ducks "I'm embarrassed for everybody here" type of situation.

"Oh, it's not a real tour," owner and operator Charity Drewery insists, "just a van full of fans." Drewery, who grew up in Seattle, spent her musically formative years "going to shows and chasing boys" in the early 1990s grunge and rock scene.

She starts the tour in a parking lot in front of the Queen Anne apartment where Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone overdosed in 1990, just before the band's debut album was released.

"If Andy hadn't died, Mother Love Bone would have made it. And then of course, after Andy died, Chris Cornell wrote the best album of his life, Temple of the Dog," she explains to us as we head to the next location. Drewery says she wants to bring up more Seattle grunge-era bands in her tour than "just the big four" who made it, playing bands like Gruntruck, Mudhoney, Green River, Screaming Trees, and Skin Yard on her iPod as she drives.

The highlight of the tour is easily Black Dog Forge. After almost kicking the door in because the key was stuck, Drewery leads the tour inside the blacksmith shop and down some rickety steps to the basement space where both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden used to rehearse.

It's still a practice space for the Briefs, a punk band formed in 2000 that includes Lance "Romance" Mercer, Pearl Jam's former photographer, Drewery points out. Maybe because it's still used, the rehearsal space manages to almost preserve the very smell of the—dare I say it—teen spirit that catalyzed a movement.

Guitars are stacked haphazardly in the corner, piles of PBR cans and ashtrays threaten to fall over. Like the Moore and the Paramount, both spots on her tour, it has life—it is still fulfilling its intended purpose. But, as became obvious from driving past all the new construction sites downtown, few other places still are.

Drewery, for her part, is keenly aware that the Seattle she is stalking on her tours is by now almost a ghost town: RKCNDY, Tower Records, and the Off Ramp are all long gone. As is a cheap bite at the Hurricane, all the record stores, and the bowling alleys.

"This used to be a working man's town," she laments as she pulls into the parking lot of a Madison Park Starbucks after visiting the house where Kurt Cobain killed himself. "Everybody worked at Boeing, or they were loggers and fishermen. You know, that's what your dad did. That's why people wore flannel, because their dad had flannels!"

The Crocodile—since remodeled—is still there, as is Re-bar, where Nirvana started a food fight and got kicked out of their own record-release party for Nevermind. But the parking lot she used has been replaced by construction, so she doesn't even bother stopping there anymore, just points it out from the van. Sometimes, though, tourists will ask her to take their picture in front of the legendary venue.

"If you just look at the building you're standing right in front of, and you don't look to the side at all the new construction, maybe you can feel like you were back there."

by Amber Cortes, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Amber Cortes

The Murakami Effect

For the past decade or so I’ve been working on what is essentially an ethnography of the publishing industry, primarily in Tokyo and New York, and the way the intersection—and often the collision—of aesthetic and economic considerations influences what gets translated, how it is translated, and how it is marketed and consumed in another literary context. That is, ultimately, how the traffic of translation is subject to the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry, and how these concerns shape a canon of literature in translation that may bear little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture, but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived in the national imagination of the target culture.

So, for example, reducing the argument to its simplest terms, in the 1950s and 60s, Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata were translated, marketed, and read in the US as representatives of a newly docile, aestheticized, Zen-like Japanese culture that was explicitly meant (by translators and publishers and perhaps policy experts as well) to replace the bellicose wartime image of Japan, as Edward Fowler has argued. This was one piece of a general rehabilitation strategy for the country in concert with promoting its new role as a reliable ally in the US Cold War calculus. At the same time, however, this image bore little resemblance to the positions Kawabata and Mishima often occupied in the domestic Japanese literary canon or marketplace.

In more recent years, Haruki Murakami has been similarly—though quite distinctly—marketed as the foremost literary representative of what Douglas McGray has called Japan’s emergent “Gross National Cool.” That is, at some point after the bursting of its economic bubble at the end of the 1980s, Japan began a transition from being a producer and exporter of industrial and technological products (Honda Civics and Sony Walkmen) to being a producer and exporter of cultural capital. As its hold on industrial domination receded, it succeeded, more or less, in reinventing itself as a possessor and wielder of soft power and cultural capital that could rival US global hegemony in the popular culture imagination. In effect, Hondas and Sonys were replaced by Pokémon and anime and sushi. At that point Haruki Murakami was, I would argue, more or less consciously identified as the most likely literary equivalent of this phenomenon. His slacker narrators and magical-realist plots were key to his selection for translation and export as another form of Japanese cultural “cool,” at a moment when the world was increasingly receptive to the notion that Japanese film, fashion, and food carried with them a kind of global cultural cachet. In other words, Murakami’s fiction, apart from its literary value, became a kind of cultural product representing a certain view of Japan as futuristic pop phenomenon. To cite just one example of this, when the translation of his bestselling novel 1Q84 was published in 2011, I remember walking out of the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, where a wall of the heavy volumes had been stacked in the lobby, and into the Urban Outfitters store where there were equally impressive stacks of the book, but this time they were clearly intended as fashion accessories to match the rest of the disposable books that chain tends to sell.

Murakami is no doubt known to many, even perhaps most, readers of literature in English—or he should be (a fact in itself worth noting when it comes to writers read largely in translation). Another significant writer of contemporary Japanese fiction, who is I’m sure known to far fewer readers in English, is Minae Mizumura. This writer has staked out a fascinating position, both in her fiction and in her critical work, that stands in stark contrast to Murakami’s fiction, the reputation it has engendered, and the position he occupies in the global literary market and imagination. These two authors could be said, in fact, to embody two completely opposite positions when it comes to the question of literary traffic. Furthermore, it seems to me that some fundamental contradictions inherent in the work of translators—work that serves, ostensibly, to build cultural bridges—can be inferred even more clearly from two specific texts by these authors. The two fictions in question are Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love,” first published in Japanese as part of a 2013 collection entitled Koishikute [Ten Selected Love Stories] and in English in the New Yorker magazine in 2013 in Ted Goossen’s excellent translation, and Minae Mizumura’s very long 2002 fiction, entitled Honkaku Shōsetsu in Japanese and A True Novel in English, published in 2013 in Juliet Winters Carpenter’s equally good translation.

But first it’s helpful to take a close look at the example of Murakami, in order to see some of the ways literary traffic is affected by and, in some cases, radically altered by the economic considerations that accompany the movement of literary products through global markets. Translation, in this context, is no longer the activity of a single individual—the one traditionally known as the “translator”—but is altered and inflected by numerous other actors. I think of all this as “translation discourse”—that is, the tacit conversations between and negotiations among translators and, in no particular order, literary agents, editors, publishers, copy editors, jacket designers, marketing managers, sales representatives, book reviewers, and others who, in one way or another, have a say in what gets chosen for translation, who is chosen to translate it, how it gets translated, how it gets edited, how it gets marketed, and who, ultimately, will be likely to read it—and even how they are likely to react to it.

Murakami’s international success has helped make the outlines of the translation discourse remarkably clear. I’ve analyzed elsewhere, and in more detail, the development of his global reputation in a variety of registers, all of which have contributed to the way he was translated and marketed abroad. Some of these factors include the origin of Murakami’s career in an act of auto back-translation (that is, he wrote the opening passages of his first novel, Kaze no uta o kike, in English and translated them himself back into Japanese); Murakami’s own experience as a highly prolific translator of American fiction and the knowledge that lent him of how books fare in translation and what needs to happen to make them intelligible and attractive to a wide readership in a target culture; his conscious management of his global career—switching translators, for instance, from a talented but “interventionist” freelancer to a Harvard professor, switching his representation from a small Japanese foreign rights agency to Amanda Urban at ICM, switching publishers from Kodansha International, the English-language arm of a large Japanese house that brought out his first three titles in English, to the prestige imprint Knopf, and the accompanying switch from little-known, Tokyo-based editors to Gary Fisketjon, one of the most influential literary editors of his generation; and perhaps most importantly, what I see as Murakami’s fairly self-conscious assault on the fortress of America’s most important literary reputation-maker, the New Yorker magazine, where he was acquired and edited by another literary titan of the 1990s, Robert Gottlieb. Murakami himself studied the work of New Yorker writer Raymond Carver—and ultimately translated every word Carver ever wrote into Japanese—in part with an eye to creating a version of the New Yorker house style in Japanese, which allowed him, when his work was translated back into English, to embody a naturalized Japanese New Yorker writer more New Yorker in many ways than any other and, not incidentally, made him among the writers who have appeared most often in that magazine in the past 25 years.

I worry that this account of Murakami’s career is too cynical and that it fails to take into consideration the role his literary talent played in his success. There is no doubt some truth to that criticism, but I have also felt that it is important to understand these largely economic and political mechanisms in order to see the effects they have on the aesthetic process. Of course, it’s also worth pointing out that my fascination with the mechanisms of Murakami’s literary celebrity was also fueled by the fact that his career has had a direct influence on my own work as a translator, much of which would have been unimaginable were it not for his success and his shaping of Western and particularly American expectations for what Japanese contemporary fiction looks like, and the role that success has played in encouraging American publishers to go on a decades-long hunt for what is invariably called “the next Murakami.” I have taken to calling this the “Are there any more like you at home?” factor, in reference to the almost constant questioning by agents and editors about the next Murakami and my own experience in translating half a dozen writers, such as Natsuo Kirino and Yōko Ogawa, who have been identified, often explicitly on jacket copy, as Murakami-like in one way or another—and often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I have also been able to observe and participate in an analogous (if less successful) process of commodification of these writers and of my translations that has involved, in some cases, the same players and moves I had previously noted in the Murakami narrative: Kirino, for example, after the success of her novel Out in English translation, made an identical change of representation from the same Japanese agency to Amanda Urban at ICM, and an analogous change of publishers; and just as Robert Gottlieb “discovered” Murakami when he was literary editor for the New Yorker, his successor, Deborah Treisman, I suspect, acquired Yōko Ogawa’s stories, in a sense, to develop her own global Japanese New Yorker writer.

So, again, there are many non-literary, largely extra-textual, and mainly economic factors that influence the nature and volume of literary “traffic” flowing between Japan and the English-speaking world, and these factors have an influence on the practice of translation itself.

by Stephen Snyder, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jerry Jeff Walker

Lyrics

[ed. See also: My Old Man]

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Employees Who Decline Genetic Testing Could Face Penalties Under Proposed Bill

[ed. Republican representatives, hard at work for you! This bill probably won't go very far (for now, anyway) but at least it gives a good idea of what some people (and insurance companies) are thinking. Remember when drug testing was considered an invasion of privacy because what you did on your own time was your own time, and of no consequence to your employer (as long as you showed up sober)? Now that's all been normalized. This is the next step. I wonder how many people will sign up for their company wellness programs after this?] 

Employers could impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs if a bill approved by a U.S. House committee this week becomes law.

In general, employers don't have that power under existing federal laws, which protect genetic privacy and nondiscrimination. But a bill passed Wednesday by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce would allow employers to get around those obstacles if the information is collected as part of a workplace wellness program.

Such programs — which offer workers a variety of carrots and sticks to monitor and improve their health, such as lowering cholesterol — have become increasingly popular with companies. Some offer discounts on health insurance to employees who complete health-risk assessments. Others might charge people more for smoking. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers are allowed to discount health insurance premiums by up to 30 percent — and in some cases 50 percent — for employees who voluntarily participate in a wellness program.

The bill is under review by other House committees and still must be considered by the Senate. But it has already faced strong criticism from a broad array of groups, as well as House Democrats. In a letter sent to the committee earlier this week, nearly 70 organizations — representing consumer, health and medical advocacy groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, AARP, March of Dimes and the National Women's Law Center — said the legislation, if enacted, would undermine basic privacy provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act and the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).

Congress passed GINA to prohibit discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes. There is an exception that allows for employees to provide that information as part of voluntary wellness programs. But the law states that employee participation must be entirely voluntary, with no incentives for providing the data or penalties for not providing it.

But the House legislation would allow employers to impose penalties of up to 30 percent of the total cost of the employee's health insurance on those who choose to keep such information private. (...)

The average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health coverage in 2016 was $18,142, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Under the plan proposed in the bill, a wellness program could charge employees an extra $5,443 in annual premiums if they choose not to share their genetic and health information.

The bill, Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, HR 1313, was introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx, (R-N.C.), who chairs the Committee on Education and the Workforce. A committee statement said the bill provides employers “the legal certainty they need to offer employee wellness plans, helping to promote a healthy workforce and lower health care costs.”

by Lena H. Sun, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: (luchschen/iStock)