Can Prairie Dogs Talk?

Con Slobodchikoff and I approached the mountain meadow slowly, obliquely, softening our footfalls and conversing in whispers. It didn’t make much difference. Once we were within 50 feet of the clearing’s edge, the alarm sounded: short, shrill notes in rapid sequence, like rounds of sonic bullets.

We had just trespassed on a prairie-dog colony. A North American analogue to Africa’s meerkat, the prairie dog is trepidation incarnate. It lives in subterranean societies of neighboring burrows, surfacing to forage during the day and rarely venturing more than a few hundred feet from the center of town. The moment it detects a hawk, coyote, human or any other threat, it cries out to alert the cohort and takes appropriate evasive action. A prairie dog’s voice has about as much acoustic appeal as a chew toy. French explorers called the rodents petits chiens because they thought they sounded like incessantly yippy versions of their pets back home.

On this searing summer morning, Slobodchikoff had taken us to a tract of well-trodden wilderness on the grounds of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Distressed squeaks flew from the grass, but the vegetation itself remained still; most of the prairie dogs had retreated underground. We continued along a dirt path bisecting the meadow, startling a prairie dog that was peering out of a burrow to our immediate right. It chirped at us a few times, then stared silently.

“Hello,” Slobodchikoff said, stooping a bit. A stout bald man with a scraggly white beard and wine-dark lips, Slobodchikoff speaks with a gentler and more lilting voice than you might expect. “Hi, guy. What do you think? Are we worth calling about? Hmm?”

Slobodchikoff, an emeritus professor of biology at Northern Arizona University, has been analyzing the sounds of prairie dogs for more than 30 years. Not long after he started, he learned that prairie dogs had distinct alarm calls for different predators. Around the same time, separate researchers found that a few other species had similar vocabularies of danger. What Slobodchikoff claimed to discover in the following decades, however, was extraordinary: Beyond identifying the type of predator, prairie-dog calls also specified its size, shape, color and speed; the animals could even combine the structural elements of their calls in novel ways to describe something they had never seen before. No scientist had ever put forward such a thorough guide to the native tongue of a wild species or discovered one so intricate. Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language.

That would be an audacious claim to make about even the most overtly intelligent species — say, a chimpanzee or a dolphin — let alone some kind of dirt hamster with a brain that barely weighs more than a grape. The majority of linguists and animal-communication experts maintain that language is restricted to a single species: ourselves. Perhaps because it is so ostensibly entwined with thought, with consciousness and our sense of self, language is the last bastion encircling human exceptionalism. To concede that we share language with other species is to finally and fully admit that we are different from other animals only in degrees not in kind. In many people’s minds, language is the “cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff,” as Tom Wolfe argues in his book “The Kingdom of Speech,” published last year.

Slobodchikoff thinks that dividing line is an illusion. To him, the idea that a human might have a two-way conversation with another species, even a humble prairie dog, is not a pretense; it’s an inevitability. And the notion that animals of all kinds routinely engage in sophisticated discourse with one another — that the world’s ecosystems reverberate with elaborate animal idioms just waiting to be translated — is not Doctor Dolittle-inspired nonsense; it is fact. (...)

It did not take long for Slobodchikoff to master the basic vocabulary of Flagstaff’s native prairie dogs. Prairie-dog alarm calls are the vocal equivalent of wartime telegrams: concise, abrupt, stripped to essentials. On a typical research day, Slobodchikoff and three or four graduate students or local volunteers visited one of six prairie-dog colonies they had selected for observation in and around Flagstaff. They usually arrived in the predawn hours, before the creatures emerged from their slumber, and climbed into one of the observation towers they had constructed on the colonies: stilted plywood platforms 10 feet high, covered by tarps or burlap sacks with small openings for microphones and cameras. By waiting, watching and recording, Slobodchikoff soon learned to discriminate between “Hawk!” “Human!” and so on — a talent that he says anyone can develop with practice. And when he mapped out his recordings as sonograms, he could see clear distinctions in wavelength and amplitude among the different calls.

He also discovered consistent variations in how prairie dogs use their alarm calls to evade predators. When a human appeared, the first prairie dog to spot the intruder gave a sequence of barks, which sent a majority of clan members scurrying underground. When a hawk swooped into view, one or a few prairies dogs each gave a single bark and any animal in the flight path raced back to the burrow. (Slobodchikoff suspects that, because of a hawk’s speed, there’s little time for a more complex call.) The presence of a coyote inspired a chorus of alarm calls throughout the colony as prairie dogs ran to the lips of their burrows and waited to see what the canine would do next. When confronted with a domestic dog, however, prairie dogs stood upright wherever they were, squeaking and watching, presumably because tame, leashed dogs were generally, though not always, harmless.

Something in Slobodchikoff’s data troubled him, however. There was too much variation in the acoustic structure of alarm calls, much more than would be expected if their only purpose was to distinguish between types of predator. Slobodchikoff arranged for various dogs — a husky, a golden retriever, a Dalmatian and a cocker spaniel — to wander through a prairie-dog colony one at a time. The recorded alarm calls were still highly variable, even though the intruders all belonged to the same predator class. “That led me to think, What if they are actually describing physical features?” Slobodchikoff remembers. What if, instead of barking out nouns, prairie dogs were forming something closer to descriptive phrases?

by Ferris Jabr, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ronan Donovan

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Down With Chef Worship

Last month, celebrated Danish chef René Redzepi opened up a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico. This restaurant will only be open for seven weeks. Dinner costs $600 and lasts well past midnight. You will not eat at this restaurant. You will not even come close to ever being able to eat at this restaurant. And yet, critics went anyway, and—SHOCKEROO—they really enjoyed themselves. Redzepi’s fellow chefs also made the pilgrimage, because the high-end food industry now is just apparently a roving club of people waxing poetic over their ability to shamelessly indulge one another.

The amazing thing is how successful these chefs and critics have been in creating a cottage industry wherein consumers like me actively choose to live vicariously through them. I’m not immune to their charms. I love food, which means I also love me some food porn. I watch Parts Unknown. I eyebang the pretty photos in Bon Appétit. I read Pete Wells reviews of four-star joints with jaw-dropping prix fixe tabs. Hell, I was IN a goddamn food show. And I started watching Chef’s Table, the ultra-serious Netflix docu-series that chronicles a selected chef’s life as if they’re a sitting fucking President, and lovingly photographs every dish of theirs as if each one will be made into a permanent installation at the Museum of Modern Art.

Everything on Chef’s Table is filmed in geological slow motion. Certain cooking techniques, like the grinding of corn, are fetishized like nude bodies. It’s a beautifully made show, and I think I made it halfway through my second episode before realizing that I hated it.Take this profile of ramen master Ivan Orkin, for example:

“I’m a ‘go fuck yourself’ kinda guy.” That’s Orkin’s opening salvo. Which, okay. Fine. I’m glad you’re a cartoonishly irascible New Yorker. Can I just have my fucking bowl of soup, please? Not everything I eat needs a story, man.

And yet, that’s exactly what the high-end food scene does now. Food can’t just be food. There has to be a mythology behind it (one new restaurant in Seattle has its own goddamn encyclopedia). More important, there has to be a person behind it—an ICON—preferably some completely obsessive loon who simply won’t rest until he’s foraged for the exact right sized ramp for your chilled soup course. These chefs end up revered like tech bros and getting filmed and profiled well past the point of absurdity. (...)

All this chef idolization opens the door for any number of frauds and charlatans to take advantage. It’s an act of faith when you go into a nice restaurant. You have to trust that the chef cares, and that he hired good people under him, and that he didn’t wipe his ass with raw chicken before plating your carnitas. And there are too many fancy restaurants and too many chefs out there now for all of them to be trustworthy. The hard logic dictates that some of them, perhaps many of them, are probably conning you. Some of them have the LOOK down well enough to get away with serving you thoroughly average food. (Take it from someone who’s been lured in by a chalkboard menu plenty of times).

You shouldn’t just buy that every one of these chefs is a genius. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that chefs are no longer looked down upon. I’m glad the reputation of the profession has been elevated. But this is a GROSS overcorrection. I don’t need a six-volume biography of some surly noodle guy. (...)

I’m happy for the food revolution. I’m happy that food has become such a vital part of the greater culture. I’m glad everyone has a chance to eat sushi, and bulgogi, and delicious breakfast tacos. So it’s strange to me that so much of the food scene now is centered less on what you can eat than what you cannot, and it prizes many chefs who are bizarrely determined to NOT give everyone a chance to try their best food, whether it’s opening some pop-up restaurant a thousand miles away, or changing the menu every hour because they wanna “push the envelope,” or opening an affordable restaurant that can only seat five and a half people at a time and demands testing the limits of both your patience and comfort. We live in a time of plenty and yet these guys are cranking out FOMO at an almost inhuman pace.

by Drew Magary, Deadspin |  Read more:

Image: You Tube

Have You Ever Had an Intense Experience of Mystical Communion with the Universe, Life, God, etc?

Here are two things to know about architects. First, they are fastidious and inventive with their names. Frank Lincoln Wright was never, unlike Sinatra, a Francis. He swapped in the Lloyd when he was 18—ostensibly in tribute to his mother’s surname on the occasion of her divorce, but also to avoid carrying around the name of a still more famous man, and for that nice three-beat meter, in full anticipation of seeing his full name in print. In 1917, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris—who is to modern architecture what Freud is to psychoanalysis—was given the byline Le Corbusier (after corbeau, crow) by his editor at a small journal, so that he could anonymously review his own buildings. The success of the sock puppet critic meant that after the critiques were collected into a book-length manifesto, the nom-de-plume eventually took over Jeanneret-Gris’ architect persona, as well. Ludwig Mies—the inventor of the glass-walled skyscraper—inherited an unfortunate surname that doubled as a German epithet for anything lousy or similarly defiled. He restyled himself Miës van der Rohe—vowel-bending heavy-metal umlaut and all—with the Dutch geographical tussenvoegsel “van” from his mother’s maiden name to add a simulation of the German nobiliary particle, von. Ephraim Owen Goldberg became Frank Gehry.

Second, all architects are older than you think. Or than they want you to think. Unlike the closely adjacent fields of music and mathematics, architecture has no prodigies. Design and construction take time. At 40, an architect is just starting out. Dying at 72 in architecture is like dying at 27 in rock and roll. The body of knowledge required is broad and intricate, philosophical and practical, and the training is long. The American Institute of Architects, a self-appointed enforcer of the title, requires five to seven years of school, then years more of closely monitored internships, and a further year of exams to confer the word architect on its dues-payers. This has formalized a longstanding tradition in which, architecture schools being rare (for a long time the Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were your choices), it wasn’t unusual for would-be architects to lose a decade in a kind of autodidactical twilight among artists and builders, before commencing their practice. Even now, architects start late. And they never stop, working well into their eighties and nineties, or famously in the case of Brazilian midcentury master Oscar Niemeyer, their hundreds. This is why the life story of a very different midcentury master, the Philadelphian Louis Kahn, who got started only around age 50 and died at around 70—is, among other things, a tragedy. A student once asked Kahn why it took so long to become an architect. “Why not,” he answered, “you want to die earlier?”

These matters of name and age reflect the social uncertainty and financial precarity of the profession. Prominent architects, from Palladio to Mies, were sons of stonemasons who jumped up socially thanks to gentleman patrons. The class ambiguity persists to this day; the architecture studios I teach are full of people who are the first in their families to enter any of the professions. Or are the opposite: would-be bohemian artiste children of first-generation professionals who have compromised with their elders. These exchanges of capital and class, style and status, are complicated: ever since the upstart Medici family employed Giorgio Vasari to put up pageants and palaces to substitute for pedigree, the ornamental company of architects—though themselves only tradesmen and servants—has conferred a touch of the very class to which architects also aspire. The slow and resource-rich making of buildings is impossible without the patronage of invested clients. Architecture, like certain kinds of filmmaking, is an art of spending a lot of other people’s money: a successful architect, said the teacher of the single business class my design school obliged me to take, should be the poorest person in any room. Architects, relieved just to build, work for a tiny fractional fee of projects’ construction costs. And, pleased to imagine themselves worldly, they work without managers and agents. The hours are long. The pay is bad. When Kahn died, his firm—slow-rolling chaos held together by a long-suffering Quaker deputy named David Wisdom—owed its creditors $464,423.83. In 1974 dollars.

Wendy Lesser, in her monumental new biography of Kahn, You Say to Brick, chooses to call her subject, for the most part, Lou. As in Reed, Gehrig, and Costello—a name that connotes a kind of nostalgic American working-class heroism. Lesser recounts how Kahn disarmed a colleague, who was inclined to forever call him Professor, by saying, “In the office, everyone calls me Lou.” Wendy understandably follows that lead, but for me, her Lou, Lou, Lou rings like a cowbell: like a life of the prophet Isaiah that calls its subject Izzy. Within the small world of architecture, a self-regarding world that guards its heroes to a fault—a world where Kahn is almost alone in being almost universally revered (even by those who think of his work as a terminally perfected dead end)—the only people who say “Lou” are the dwindling ranks of his former students. But even they all seem to say Lou-Kahn, one word, like lupin or Lacan. To the rest of us he has become that second single syllable, whose long open vowel—sound of submission and satisfaction—echoes in its evocation of preeminence the exotic imperial honorific, Khan.

by Thomas De Monchaux, N+1 |  Read more:

Image:Gunnar Klack

Where Have All the Insects Gone?
Image: Paul Van Hoof/Minden Pictures

Politics 101

‘He Doesn’t Give a Crap Who He Fires’

Totally unprecedented. Totally unsurprising.

When President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired FBI Director James Comey, people steeped in presidential and legal history sounded alarms. “No president has ever dismissed an FBI director under such circumstances,” bestselling author Jon Meacham said on Twitter. “It’s a constitutional crisis,” David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center wrote. “This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies,” Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN.

People who know Trump didn’t disagree, but they also responded with a combination of relative resignation and seen-it-all-before shoulder shrugs.

“Outrageous,” former Trump Organization vice president Barbara Res said when I reached her at her home shortly after the news of the firing broke.

But was she shocked? “No,” she said.

“This is an act of insanity,” a former Trump inner-circle associate told me, “but it’s how he functions.”

“Completely consistent, yes,” with his pattern of behavior, a onetime Trump political aide added.

The Trump signature here is far more than the familiar seismic John Hancock he jammed into the White House stationery with his customary dark, thick-tipped, heavy-handed pen. Trump as president has been the man and manager he’s always been. He’s practically never worked for anybody but himself, he’s always cultivated a workspace marked by competition and chaos, and the only difference between how he operated on the 26th floor of Trump Tower and how he’s steering the West Wing of the White House are the stakes.

A strategically incoherent, predictably unpredictable, private-sector lord who ran his family business by doing what he wanted when he wanted and with limited consideration for consequences stretching beyond his own immediate interests and gratification, Trump has spent the first not quite four months of his presidency running headlong into the constitutional checks and balances of American democracy. The system of safeguards against dictatorial intemperance has flummoxed him. Where there has been objective failure, Trump as usual has proclaimed historic success.

In instances, though, in which executive power is sufficient for actual action, he has been nobody but his imperious, impetuous, spiteful self. And here, according to the reporting of POLITICO and other news organizations, Trump made a fraught, monumental, republic-rattling decision the way he’s always made decisions—quickly—and for the same central reasons—vengeance and self-interest. Comey wasn’t the first person he fired—he canned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and interim Attorney General Sally Yates—but this sacking in many ways was Trump’s quintessential act as the country’s chief executive.

Enraged by the FBI’s ongoing investigation into his and his campaign’s Russian ties, Trump had pliant Justice Department deputies outline Hillary Clinton-related reasons to fire Comey—reasons that seemed contrived given Trump’s praise for Comey on the campaign trail, the kiss he blew in Comey’s direction this past January and his statement of support just last month. On Tuesday, however, Trump wrote a short letter of his own in which the second paragraph in particular pulsed with telltale Trump, down to the self-serving and factually unsupported statement replete with clumsily inserted commas. “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation …”

And then he didn’t do the actual firing himself, which has been a feature of his management style through the years. He didn’t call Comey. He had Keith Schiller, his longtime bodyguard who now has the title of Director of Oval Office Operations, take his letter to Comey’s office. Famous for saying “You’re fired” on TV, Trump never has relished firing people in real life.

“I think the shamelessness of it is stunning, and stunningly consistent,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair said. “He’s thinking 24-7 how to move the chess pieces around to benefit himself.”

“Listen,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former high-ranking Trump casino executive in Atlantic City, “he’s always been very protective of himself, first and foremost. In that regard, this, I believe, is consistent—because he’s certainly trying to protect himself.”

“This is who he is,” said Artie Nusbaum, one of the top bosses at the construction firm that built Trump Tower. “No morals, no nothing. He does what he does.”

People who work or have worked with Trump have been saying this forever.

by Michael Kruse, Politico | Read more:
[ed. Sorry for the lack of posts lately. The dysfunction, lying, and finger-pointing coming out Washington is sucking the air out of everything interesting. See also: The Real Obama]

NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer Project to the Entire Internet

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the project, a joint supercomputing initiative administered by NYU, the Department of Defense, and IBM. And they were available for the entire world to download.

The supercomputer described in the trove, “WindsorGreen,” was a system designed to excel at the sort of complex mathematics that underlies encryption, the technology that keeps data private, and almost certainly intended for use by the Defense Department’s signals intelligence wing, the National Security Agency. WindsorGreen was the successor to another password-cracking machine used by the NSA, “WindsorBlue,” which was also documented in the material leaked from NYU and which had been previously described in the Norwegian press thanks to a document provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Both systems were intended for use by the Pentagon and a select few other Western governments, including Canada and Norway.

Adam, an American digital security researcher, requested that his real name not be published out of fear of losing his day job. Although he deals constantly with digital carelessness, Adam was nonetheless stunned by what NYU had made available to the world. “The fact that this software, these spec sheets, and all the manuals to go with it were sitting out in the open for anyone to copy is just simply mind blowing,” he said.

He described to The Intercept how easy it would have been for someone to obtain the material, which was marked with warnings like “DISTRIBUTION LIMITED TO U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ONLY,” “REQUESTS FOR THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE REFERRED TO AND APPROVED BY THE DOD,” and “IBM Confidential.” At the time of his discovery, Adam wrote to me in an email:

All of this leaky data is courtesy of what I can only assume are misconfigurations in the IMAS (Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing) department at NYU. Not even a single username or password separates these files from the public internet right now. It’s absolute insanity.

The files were taken down after Adam notified NYU.

Intelligence agencies like the NSA hide code-breaking advances like WindsorGreen because their disclosure might accelerate what has become a cryptographic arms race. Encrypting information on a computer used to be a dark art shared between militaries and mathematicians. But advances in cryptography, and rapidly swelling interest in privacy in the wake of Snowden, have helped make encryption tech an effortless, everyday commodity for consumers. Web connections are increasingly shielded using the HTTPS protocol, end-to-end encryption has come to popular chat platforms like WhatsApp, and secure phone calls can now be enabled simply by downloading some software to your device. The average person viewing their checking account online or chatting on iMessage might not realize the mathematical complexity that’s gone into making eavesdropping impractical.

The spread of encryption is a good thing — unless you’re the one trying to eavesdrop. Spy shops like the NSA can sometimes thwart encryption by going around it, finding flaws in the way programmers build their apps or taking advantage of improperly configured devices. When that fails, they may try and deduce encryption keys through extraordinarily complex math or repeated guessing. This is where specialized systems like WindsorGreen can give the NSA an edge, particularly when the agency’s targets aren’t aware of just how much code-breaking computing power they’re up against.

Adam declined to comment on the specifics of any conversations he might have had with the Department of Defense or IBM. He added that NYU, at the very least, expressed its gratitude to him for notifying it of the leak by mailing him a poster. (...)

The documents, replete with intricate processor diagrams, lengthy mathematical proofs, and other exhaustive technical schematics, are dated from 2005 to 2012, when WindsorGreen appears to have been in development. Some documents are clearly marked as drafts, with notes that they were to be reviewed again in 2013. Project progress estimates suggest the computer wouldn’t have been ready for use until 2014 at the earliest. All of the documents appear to be proprietary to IBM and not classified by any government agency, although some are stamped with the aforementioned warnings restricting distribution to within the U.S. government. According to one WindsorGreen document, work on the project was restricted to American citizens, with some positions requiring a top-secret security clearance — which as Adam explains, makes the NYU hard drive an even greater blunder:

Let’s, just for hypotheticals, say that China found the same exposed NYU lab server that I did and downloaded all the stuff I downloaded. That simple act alone, to a large degree, negates a humongous competitive advantage we thought the U.S. had over other countries when it comes to supercomputing.

The only tool Adam used to find the NYU trove was Shodan.io, a website that’s roughly equivalent to Google for internet-connected, and typically unsecured, computers and appliances around the world, famous for turning up everything from baby monitors to farming equipment. Shodan has plenty of constructive technical uses but also serves as a constant reminder that we really ought to stop plugging things into the internet that have no business being there. (...)

Çetin Kaya Koç is the director of the Koç Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which conducts cryptographic research. Koç reviewed the Windsor documents and told The Intercept that he has “not seen anything like [WindsorGreen],” and that “it is beyond what is commercially or academically available.” He added that outside of computational biology applications like complex gene sequencing (which it’s probably safe to say the NSA is not involved in), the only other purpose for such a machine would be code-breaking: “Probably no other problem deserves this much attention to design an expensive computer like this.”

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Thinkstock via NSF

The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Influencers

I never really expected to write these words, but: It was Kendall Jenner who did it for me.

Or, to be fair, not Kendall Jenner herself — or not entirely Kendall Jenner — but rather the 10th-anniversary Indian Vogue cover that featured Kendall Jenner, as conceived and photographed by Mario Testino. When released last week on the magazine’s social media accounts, it almost immediately became the center of a storm of social media ire, most of it along the lines of this : “Disgustingly inappropriate. Were ALL the Indian women unavailable??”

Which was then followed, as these things so often are, by a host of headlines like CNN.com’s “Vogue India Cover Lands Kendall Jenner in More Trouble.”

But here’s the thing: Was it really Ms. Jenner’s fault? Was she in any way culpable for this bad choice? After all, she was being used as work for hire: a body and a face to sell a magazine.

Or was she?

Therein lies the problem. Because the obvious assumption — the one made by all the worked-up folks in the Twittersphere — was that she had been employed not just as a clothes hanger (as models used to be known), but, at least in part, as herself: a public figure with an immediately recognizable name and face and family back story, along with approximately 80.3 million Instagram followers. An — and I cringe at the word, but it is in the Cambridge English Dictionary — Influencer. And that influence was part of what Indian Vogue was paying for by paying her to be on its cover.

It’s the same thing that the Fyre Festival, the famously failed music festival in the Bahamas, was paying for when it paid Ms. Jenner, along with Bella Hadid (12.7 million Instagram followers), Hailey Baldwin (10 million) and Emily Ratajkowski (12.8 million), to drum up excitement via promotional posts with said women cavorting in bikinis on a beach. It’s what, to a certain extent, Pepsi was paying for when it hired Ms. Jenner (sense a theme here?) and put her in an ill-conceived ad in which she uses a soda to soften up a police officer at a riot. It’s what Vogue Arabia was paying for when it put an only-semi-veiled Gigi Hadid on the cover of its first issue.

Whether it is obviously an ad, whether a Federal Trade Commission-required hashtag admission goes with it or not (and the F.T.C. is increasingly cracking down on influencer posts, recently writing to 45 celebrities to warn them about necessary disclosures), there is, as Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at J. Walter Thompson, said, “an implied individual choice.”

And that means that those involved are perceived as having a personal — not merely professional — relationship with the thing they are selling. Which in turn means they bear some responsibility for it. There is a downside to the upside of being an influencer.

Sometimes it’s literal: The Fyre Festival is now facing a class-action lawsuit in which the defendants include not only the organizers, but also a number of “Jane Does” who helped promote the festival.

Sometimes it’s reputational: After Selena Gomez, the proud possessor of the most Instagram followers badge (she had 120 million as of Wednesday), signed on to represent Coach — after having been an ambassador for Louis Vuitton, a brand with a very different aesthetic, one nonfan : “Selena Gomez, the previous face of Coca Cola, Louis Vuitton, Verizon, and the current face of Pantene and Coach … a joke to the industry???”

Either way, it’s real. As with all slippery slopes, it’s easy to hop on but also easy to end up in a heap at the bottom. Which raises the possibility that we are on the verge of a new (hopefully more considered) age in the evolution of Influencer culture.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Vogue, Mario Testino

An Attack on American Democracy

At a time like this, it is important to express things plainly. On Tuesday evening, Donald Trump acted like a despot. Without warning or provocation, he summarily fired the independent-minded director of the F.B.I., James Comey. Comey had been overseeing an investigation into whether there was any collusion between Trump’s Presidential campaign and the government of Russia. With Comey out of the way, Trump can now pick his own man (or woman) to run the Bureau, and this person will have the authority to close down that investigation.

That is what has happened. It amounts to a premeditated and terrifying attack on the American system of government. Quite possibly, it will usher in a constitutional crisis. Even if it doesn’t, it represents the most unnerving turn yet in what is a uniquely unnerving Presidency.

Things like this are not supposed to happen in a liberal democracy, especially in one that takes pride, as the United States does, in safeguards put in place against the arbitrary exercise of power. The F.B.I. is meant to be an independent agency, above and beyond partisan politics and personal grudges. (That is why its directors are appointed for ten-year terms.) The President is supposed to respect this independence, especially when it comes to matters in which he has, or could have, a personal interest.

There is little in American history that compares to, or justifies, what Trump has now done. In recent times, the only possible precedent is the Saturday Night Massacre, of October 20, 1973, when Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, Archibald Cox. Arguably, Trump’s Tuesday Afternoon Massacre was even more disturbing. In 1973, the two top law-enforcement officials in the land—the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to carry out Nixon’s dictatorial order to terminate Cox. It was left to the wretched Robert Bork, who was then the Solicitor General, to do the deed.

In contrast, Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was a central figure in the ouster of Comey. In March, Sessions—a close political ally of Trump’s—was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after it emerged that he had failed to disclose meetings with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to Washington. But this recusal didn’t prevent Sessions from pushing for Comey’s dismissal. In its public statement announcing the firing, the White House said, “President Trump acted on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”

Of course, the ultimate responsibility lies with Trump. In a brief letter to Comey, which the White House also released, he said, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau. It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.”

As Trump has amply demonstrated in the past, hardly anything he says can be taken at face value, and everything in his letter should be treated skeptically, especially his claims about what Comey told him. What we know for sure is that Comey, in his March 20th testimony on Capitol Hill, confirmed that the F.B.I. was conducting a criminal investigation into “any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coördination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.” Although Comey refused to go into much detail about the investigation, he confirmed that it had been going on since last July, and he gave the distinct impression that, wherever it led, it would be pursued with vigor.

We also know that Comey issued a blunt public dismissal of Trump’s claims on Twitter that Barack Obama ordered U.S. spy agencies to wiretap Trump Tower during the Presidential campaign. “I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the F.B.I.,” Comey said, during his testimony.

This, surely, is the relevant context of Comey’s dismissal. By contrast, the two other documents that the White House released on Tuesday to justify Trump’s action—a letter from Sessions to the President, and a three-page memorandum from Rosenstein to Sessions—smacked of a desperate and unconvincing effort to cook up a pretext.

In his letter, Rosenstein, who hitherto had a reputation as an independent official, took issue with Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. He focussed in particular on the July 5, 2016, press conference at which Comey announced that the Bureau had closed its investigation without recommending any charges, while at the same time criticizing how Clinton and her aides had handled classified information. This, Rosenstein said, was “a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.” He also brought up Comey’s subsequent announcement, on October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton case because of the discovery of thousands of e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Rosenstein called the announcement a departure from the agency’s tradition of avoiding public comment during an election season.

Many observers would agree with at least some of Rosenstein’s points about the Clinton investigation—but so what? Are we seriously being asked to countenance the idea that Trump fired Comey because he didn’t treat Hillary Clinton fairly? The same Trump who seized upon Comey’s press conference last July and used it to buttress his claims that Clinton should be jailed? The same Trump who, on October 31st, said, “It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made in light of the kind of opposition he had”?

Until the White House comes up with a less ludicrous rationalization for its actions, we can only assume that Trump fired Comey because the Russia investigation is closing in on him and his associates, and he knew that he didn’t have much sway over the F.B.I. director. That is the simplest theory that fits the facts. And it is a cause for great alarm.

Ever since Trump took office, many people have worried about his commitment to democratic norms, the Constitution, and the rule of law. From the hasty promulgation of his anti-Muslim travel ban onward, he has done little to salve these concerns. Now he has acted like one of the authoritarian leaders he so admires—a Putin, an Erdoğan, or an El-Sisi.

by John Cassidy, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Peterson/Redux
[ed. The question is, what will our Republican-led Congress do? Care to guess?]

Johnny Depp: A Star in Crisis and the Insane Story of His "Missing" Millions

Early one afternoon in October 2012, Jake Bloom and Joel Mandel left their respective Beverly Hills offices, slipped into their luxury cars and embarked on the roughly 30-minute journey to the Hollywood Hills compound of their client, Johnny Depp. Bloom was a rumpled and graying lawyer whose disheveled style camouflaged an intellect exercised on behalf of such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone. Mandel, then in his early 50s, was a tall, rather amiable accountant who favored loose-fitting jeans and looser-fitting shirts, sartorial code designed to assure his clients he was just another boy in their band as well as a top-flight business manager steeped in the arcana of arbitrage and amortization.

Both men had been close to Depp for years. Bloom, indeed, was such a confidant to the actor that he had even joined him for an induction ceremony into the Comanche nation when he played Tonto in The Lone Ranger; as for Mandel, he had accompanied Depp to his three-island property in the Bahamas, atolls Mandel had helped his client buy for a total of $5.35 million.

These men were part of Depp's inner circle, at least as far as any lawyer or accountant could belong to the inner circle of an artist this mercurial, one with a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his leg and "Death is certain" scrawled beneath it, whose soul mates were such creative titans as Marlon Brando, Keith Richards and Hunter S. Thompson — the journalist whose ashes Depp fired from a cannon hauled to the top of a 153-foot tower, a tribute for which the actor says he paid $5 million.

Leaving their cars that day, the advisers approached one of Depp's five houses on a dead-end stretch of North Sweetzer Avenue. A modernist affair that was simply referred to as 1480, the building had been converted into a recording studio and was an appendage to an eight-bedroom, castle-like mansion once owned by music producer Berry Gordy. One of the star's two omnipresent assistants led the men in, past a painting that British artist Banksy had created for Depp, and into a den, where the actor was leaning back in a slightly battered chair, surrounded by dozens upon dozens of classic guitars.

After the obligatory small talk, the visitors got to the point: Depp's cash flow had reached a crisis point, they declared. Even though the star had become wildly wealthy (later, Mandel would claim Depp earned more than $650 million in the 13-plus years he had been represented by The Management Group, the company Mandel had started in 1987 with his brother Robert), there just wasn't enough liquid money to cover Depp's $2 million in monthly bills.

Without a fire sale, Depp — then arguably the biggest star in Hollywood and certainly one of the best paid, thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — would never be able to meet his obligations. Not the payments on his portfolio of real estate around the world. Not the impulse purchases such as the three Leonor Fini paintings he had bought from a Manhattan gallery (the first two for $320,000, the third as a $245,000 gift for then-girlfriend Amber Heard). Not the $3.6 million he paid annually for his 40-person staff. Not the $350,000 he laid out each month to maintain his 156-foot yacht. And not the hundreds of thousands of dollars he paid to sustain his ex-partner, Vanessa Paradis, and their children, Lily-Rose and Jack.

by Stephen Galloway, Ashley Cullins, Hollywood Reporter | Read more:
Image: uncredited via:

Ogata Kenzan, Tea bowl with pines (ca. 1700)
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Bird calls
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How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality

The son of a minister, Ohene Asare grew up poor. His family immigrated from Ghana when he was 8 and settled down in West Bridgewater, Mass., a town 30 miles south of Boston, where he was one of the few black students at the local public school. “It was us and this Jewish family,” Asare remembered. “It was a field day.” His white classmates bullied him, sometimes using racial slurs. His father transferred Asare when he was 14 to Milton Academy, which awarded Asare a scholarship that covered tuition and board. His parents still had to take out loans worth about $20,000 for his living expenses. But the academy set Asare up for future success. He and his wife, Régine Jean-Charles, whom he got to know at Milton, are in their late 30s. She is a tenured professor of romance languages and literature at Boston College, and Asare is a founder of Aesara, a consulting and technology company.

Two years ago, the couple bought a new home. Set on a half-acre lot that backs up to conservation land in Milton, Mass., the 2,350-square-foot split-level has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, an open-concept kitchen and dining area, a finished basement, hardwood floors and beautiful touches throughout, like the Tennessee marble fireplace and hearth. It cost $665,000. “This is the nicest house I’ve ever lived in,” Asare told me.

Asare and Jean-Charles have four children and earn roughly $290,000 a year, which puts them in the top 5 percent of household incomes in the country. After renting for the first years of their marriage, they participated in a home buyers’ program administered by the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. The program allowed Asare and Jean-Charles to purchase their first home in 2009 for $360,000 with a 10 percent down payment, half of what is typically required. In 2015, they sold it for $430,000. There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller. The average homeowner boasts a net worth ($195,400) that is 36 times that of the average renter ($5,400).

Asare serves on the advisory board for HomeStart, a nonprofit focused on ending and preventing homelessness. Like most organizations, HomeStart is made up of people at various rungs on the economic ladder. Asare sits near the top; his salary exceeds that of anyone on staff at the nonprofit he helps advise. When Crisaliz Diaz was a staff member at HomeStart, she was at the other end of the ladder. She earned $38,000 a year, putting her near the bottom third of American household incomes. A 26-year-old Latina with thick-rimmed glasses, Diaz rents a small two-bedroom apartment in Braintree, Mass., an outer suburb of Boston. Her two sons, Xzayvior and Mayson — Zay and May, she calls them — share a room plastered with Lego posters and Mickey Mouse stickers. Her apartment is spare and clean, with ceiling tiles you can push up and views of the parking lot and busy street.

When Diaz moved in four years ago, the rent was $1,195 a month, heat included, but her landlord has since raised the rent to $1,385 a month, which takes 44 percent of her paycheck. Even with child-support payments and side jobs, she still doesn’t bring in enough to pay her regular bills. She goes without a savings account and regularly relies on credit cards to buy toilet paper and soap. “There’s no stop to it,” she told me. “It’s just a consistent thing.”

Diaz receives no housing assistance. She has applied to several programs, but nothing has come through. The last time Boston accepted new applications for rental-assistance Section 8 vouchers was nine years ago, when for a few precious weeks you were allowed to place your name on a very long waiting list. Boston is not atypical in that way. In Los Angeles, the estimated wait time for a Section 8 voucher is 11 years. In Washington, the waiting list for housing vouchers is closed indefinitely, and over 40,000 people have applied for public housing alone. While many Americans assume that most poor families live in subsidized housing, the opposite is true; nationwide, only one in four households that qualifies for rental assistance receives it. Most are like Diaz, struggling without government help in the private rental market, where housing costs claim larger and larger chunks of their income.

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. The standard of “affordable” housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family’s income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. Yet America’s national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing. It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America’s inequality in such a sweeping fashion.

Consider Asare and Diaz. As a homeowner, Asare benefits from tax breaks that Diaz does not, the biggest being the mortgage-interest deduction — or MID, in wonk-speak. All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes. In 2015, Asare and Jean-Charles claimed $21,686 in home interest and other real estate deductions, which saved them $470 a month. That’s roughly 15 percent of Diaz’s monthly income. That same year, the federal government dedicated nearly $134 billion to homeowner subsidies. The MID accounted for the biggest chunk of the total, $71 billion, with real estate tax deductions, capital gains exclusions and other expenditures accounting for the rest. That number, $134 billion, was larger than the entire budgets of the Departments of Education, Justice and Energy combined for that year. It is a figure that exceeds half the entire gross domestic product of countries like Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.

Recently, Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser to President Trump, heralded his boss’s first tax plan as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big.” And indeed, Trump’s plan represents a radical transformation in how we will fund the government, with its biggest winners being corporations and wealthy families. But no one in his administration, and only a small (albeit growing) group of people in either party, is pushing to reform what may very well be the most regressive piece of social policy in America. Perhaps that’s because the mortgage-interest deduction overwhelmingly benefits the sorts of upper-middle-class voters who make up the donor base of both parties and who generally fail to acknowledge themselves to be beneficiaries of federal largess. “Today, as in the past,” writes the historian Molly Michelmore in her book “Tax and Spend,” “most of the recipients of federal aid are not the suspect ‘welfare queens’ of the popular imagination but rather middle-class homeowners, salaried professionals and retirees.” A 15-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government-subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. It is only by recognizing this fact that we can begin to understand why there is so much poverty in the United States today.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction — an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

The MID came into being in 1913, not to spur homeownership but simply as part of a general policy allowing businesses to deduct interest payments from loans. At that time, most Americans didn’t own their homes and only the rich paid income tax, so the effects of the mortgage deduction on the nation’s tax proceeds were fairly trivial. That began to change in the second half of the 20th century, though, because of two huge transformations in American life. First, income tax was converted from an elite tax to a mass tax: In 1932, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (precursor to the I.R.S.) processed fewer than two million individual tax returns, but 11 years later, it processed over 40 million. At the same time, the federal government began subsidizing homeownership through large-scale initiatives like the G.I. Bill and mortgage insurance. Homeownership grew rapidly in the postwar period, and so did the MID.

By the time policy makers realized how extravagant the MID had become, it was too late to do much about it without facing significant backlash. Millions of voters had begun to count on getting that money back. Even President Ronald Reagan, who oversaw drastic cuts to housing programs benefiting low-income Americans, let the MID be. Subsequent politicians followed suit, often eager to discuss reforms to Social Security and Medicare but reluctant to touch the MID, even as the program continued to grow more costly: By 2019, MID expenditures are expected to exceed $96 billion.

by Matthew Desmond, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Casarez

“Well, there’s your problem right there—you need to sauté the onions in white wine before adding the ginger.”

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Is the Gig Economy Working?

Not long ago, I moved apartments, and beneath the weight of work and lethargy a number of small, nagging tasks remained undone. Some art work had to be hung from wall moldings, using wire. In the bedroom, a round mirror needed mounting beside the door. Just about anything that called for careful measuring or stud-hammering I had failed to get around to—which was why my office walls were bare, no pots yet dangled from the dangly-pot thing in the kitchen, and my bedside shelf was still a doorstop. There are surely reasons that some of us resist being wholly settled, but when the ballast of incompletion grew too much for me I logged on to TaskRabbit to finish what I had failed to start.

On its Web site, I described the tasks I needed done, and clicked ahead. A list of fourteen TaskRabbits appeared, each with a description of skills and a photograph. Many of them wore ties. I examined one called Seth F., who had done almost a thousand tasks. He wore no tie, but he had a ninety-nine-per-cent approval rating. “I’m a smart guy with tools. What more can you want?” he’d written in his profile. He was listed as an Elite Tasker, and charged fifty-five dollars an hour. I booked him for a Wednesday afternoon.

TaskRabbit, which was founded in 2008, is one of several companies that, in the past few years, have collectively helped create a novel form of business. The model goes by many names—the sharing economy; the gig economy; the on-demand, peer, or platform economy—but the companies share certain premises. They typically have ratings-based marketplaces and in-app payment systems. They give workers the chance to earn money on their own schedules, rather than through professional accession. And they find toeholds in sclerotic industries. Beyond TaskRabbit, service platforms include Thumbtack, for professional projects; Postmates, for delivery; Handy, for housework; Dogvacay, for pets; and countless others. Home-sharing services, such as Airbnb and its upmarket cousin onefinestay, supplant hotels and agencies. Ride-hailing apps—Uber, Lyft, Juno—replace taxis. Some on-demand workers are part-timers seeking survival work, akin to the comedian who waits tables on the side. For growing numbers, though, gigging is not only a living but a life. Many observers see it as something more: the future of American work.

Seth F.—the “F” stood for Flicker— showed up at my apartment that Wednesday bearing a big backpack full of tools. He was in his mid-forties, with a broad mouth, brown hair, and ears that stuck out like a terrier’s beneath a charcoal stocking cap. I poured him coffee and showed him around.

“I have molding hooks and wire,” I said, gesturing with unfelt confidence at some coils of translucent cord. “I was thinking they could maybe hang . . .” It struck me that I lacked a vocabulary to address even the basics of the job; I swirled my hands around the middle of the wall, as if blindfolded and turned loose in a strange room.

Seth F. seemed to gather that he was dealing with a fool. He offered a decision tree pruned to its stump. “Do you want them at eye level?” he asked.

“Eye level sounds great,” I said.

Seth F. had worked for TaskRabbit for three years, he told me as he climbed onto my kitchen stool—“like twenty-one years in normal job time.” In college, he had sold a screenplay to Columbia Pictures, and the film, though never made, launched his career. He wrote movies for nine years, and was well paid and sought after, but none of his credited work made it to the big screen, so he took a job as a senior editor at Genre, a now defunct gay magazine, where he covered the entertainment industry. He liked magazine work, but was not a true believer. “I’m one of those people, I think, who has to change jobs frequently,” he told me. He got a master’s degree in education, and taught fourth grade at Spence and at Brooklyn Friends. Fourteen years in, a health condition flared up, leaving his calendar checkered with days when it was hard to work. He’d aways found peculiar joy in putting together ikea furniture, so he hired himself out as an assembly wiz: easy labor that paid the bills while he got better. He landed on TaskRabbit.

“There are so many clients, I rarely get bored,” he told me. He was feeding cord through the molding hooks to level my pictures. At first, he said, hourly rates at TaskRabbit were set through bidding, but taskers now set their own rates, with the company claiming thirty per cent. A constellation of data points—how quickly he answers messages, how many jobs he declines—affect his ranking when users search the site. He took as many jobs as he could, generating about eighty paid hours each month. “The hardest part is not knowing what your next paycheck is from,” he told me.

Seth F. worked quickly. Within an hour, he had hung six frames from the molding over my couches. Sometimes, he confessed, his jobs seem silly: he was once booked to screw in a light bulb. Other work is harder, and strange. Seth F. has been hired to assemble five jigsaw puzzles for a movie set, to write articles for a newspaper in Alaska, and to compose a best-man speech to be delivered by the brother of the groom, whom he had never met. (“The whole thing was about, ‘In the future, we’re going to get to know each other better,’ ” he explained.) Casper, the mattress company, booked him to put sheets on beds; Oscar, the health-insurance startup, had him decorate its offices for Christmas.

As we talked, his tone warmed. I realized that he probably visited strangers several times a day, meting out bits of himself, then moving on, often forever, and I considered what an odd path through professional experience that must be. He told me that he approached the work with gratitude but little hope.

“These are jobs that don’t lead to anything,” he said, without looking up from his work. “It doesn’t feel”—he weighed the word—“sustainable to me.”

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Janine Ilvonen

My So-Called (Instagram) Life

“You’re like a cartoon character,” he said. “Always wearing the same thing every day.”

He meant it as an intimate observation, the kind you can make only after spending a lot of time getting to know each other. You flip your hair to the right. You only eat ice cream out of mugs. You always wear a black leather jacket. I know you.

And he did know me. Rather, he knew the caricature of me that I had created and meticulously cultivated. The me I broadcast to the world on Instagram and Facebook. The witty, creative me, always detached and never cheesy or needy.

That version of me got her start online as my social media persona, but over time (and I suppose for the sake of consistency), she bled off the screen and overtook my real-life personality, too. And once you master what is essentially an onstage performance of yourself, it can be hard to break character.

There was a time when I allowed myself to be more than what could fit onto a 2-by-4-inch screen. When I wasn’t so self-conscious about how I was seen. When I embraced my contradictions and desires with less fear of embarrassment or rejection.

There was a time when I swore in front of my friends and said grace in front of my grandmother. When I wore lipstick after seeing “Clueless,” and sneakers after seeing “Remember the Titans.” When I flipped my hair every way, ate ice cream out of anything, and wore coats of all types and colors.

Since then, I have consolidated that variety — scrubbed it away, really — to emerge as one consistently cool girl: one face, two arms, one black leather jacket.

And so it was a validation of sorts when Joe fell for her, the me in the leather jacket. He was brilliant, the funniest guy in our TV writing program, and my ideal cool counterpart. I could already see us on screen; we made sense.

Best of all, he thought he liked me more than I liked him, and that was perfect too, because it gave me the upper hand. I was above love, above emotional complication, dedicated to higher pursuits.

Periodically Joe would confront me about this imbalance. We would meet at a park on Second Avenue and 10th Street, and he would tell me that I drove him crazy, that he couldn’t be as removed as me.

And, of course, the truth was that I wasn’t removed at all. Over the many months we were together, as we went from being friends to more than friends, I had fallen for him completely. The singular syllable of his name had started to feel permanently tucked between my molars and was always on my mind.

But I was reluctant to change my character midseason and become someone who was more open and, God forbid, earnest about love. He had fallen for the cool, detached me, so that’s who I remained. And he got bored.

That’s the way it goes with half-hour TV shows. Consistency can become boring. The will-they-or-won’t-they characters have to get together, and at that point the show is closing in on its finale. It’s all in the build, and when that becomes tired, the show gets canceled.

Like an allergic reaction to becoming unloved, my Instagram account went into overdrive, all aimed at one audience member: Joe. Through hundreds of screens, I was screaming at him: “I’m here! I’m funny! I’m at that fish taco place I showed you!”

The likes I got from my followers did little to quell my crushing need for Joe’s cyberapproval. “Like me again, like me again,” became my subconscious mantra.

But he didn’t like me, and each time he didn’t, the heartache felt like a warm bullet exploding in my gut. I would lie on the couch and clutch my stomach so tightly it was as if I were trying to expel the shrapnel from my throat. I knew no one else could extract it for me because no one knew it was there.

I was embarrassed for the people I saw who pined publicly on Instagram, but I also envied them. They were showered with support, with reassurance. If they were not completely cured, at least the illness seemed to run a shorter course.

Meanwhile, every time I twisted my spine, I felt that warm bullet scraping my insides. I was scared it might fossilize there and become permanently embedded.

In an effort to self-soothe, I wrote letters to Joe — actual, physical letters, pen to notepad — that felt like some ancient ritual, using my whole hand and not just my thumbs. Staring at his cowlick in class, I would write down everything I wanted: for him to critique my writing, to stroke my hair while we watched “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on his ugly futon, to read his plays and believe I was moving ever closer to his core.

Rather than give him any of these letters, I burned them, trying and failing to cremate that side of myself.

Day by day, hour by hour, my Instagram feed became more manic, nasty and petulant. Posts that were once meant as romantic gestures became tiny, pixelated middle fingers.

Joe began to notice, but instead of magically falling back in love with me, he became hurt and angry. I was inexplicably cold to him, posting photos of parties I threw that he wasn’t invited to, pictures of me abroad where I hadn’t told him I was studying, and pieces of art I made but hadn’t shared with him.

In return, he sent me messages of unvarnished honesty: “Why didn’t you invite me?” “Why are you being like this?”

Oh, it’s just who I am. I am fun, I feel nothing and I have completely forgotten you.

And so it went, and I kept at the beautiful box I was crafting for myself. A shoe box covered in stickers and fake jewels. The kind you would make for a pet parakeet you have to bury. I would dream about Joe at night, and in the morning I would post something silvery and eye catching. It was always just tinfoil, though, not truth. And I prayed no one would notice.

I posted a photo of me standing next to a shirt that said “The World Shook at Adam’s bar mitzvah, 1995,” with a witty caption about simpler times, before global warming. A girl who follows me, with whom I’ve spoken only a handful of times, told me it was so “on brand.”

My brand, specifically: funny, carefree, unromantic, a realist.

by Clara Dollar, NY Times |  Read more:

Image :Brian Rea

[ed. I hope this is parody.]

 

 

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Forbidden Questions?

24 Key Issues That Neither the Washington Elite Nor the Media Consider Worth Their Bother

Donald Trump's election has elicited impassioned affirmations of a renewed commitment to unvarnished truth-telling from the prestige media. The common theme: you know you can’t trust him, but trust us to keep dogging him on your behalf. The New York Times has even unveiled a portentous new promotional slogan: “The truth is now more important than ever.” For its part, the Washington Post grimly warns that “democracy dies in darkness,” and is offering itself as a source of illumination now that the rotund figure of the 45th president has produced the political equivalent of a total eclipse of the sun. Meanwhile, National Public Radio fundraising campaigns are sounding an increasingly panicky note: give, listener, lest you be personally responsible for the demise of the Republic that we are bravely fighting to save from extinction.

If only it were so. How wonderful it would be if President Trump’s ascendancy had coincided with a revival of hard-hitting, deep-dive, no-holds-barred American journalism. Alas, that’s hardly the case. True, the big media outlets are demonstrating both energy and enterprise in exposing the ineptitude, inconsistency, and dubious ethical standards, as well as outright lies and fake news, that are already emerging as Trump era signatures. That said, pointing out that the president has (again) uttered a falsehood, claimed credit for a nonexistent achievement, or abandoned some position to which he had previously sworn fealty requires something less than the sleuthing talents of a Sherlock Holmes. As for beating up on poor Sean Spicer for his latest sequence of gaffes -- well, that’s more akin to sadism than reporting.

Apart from a commendable determination to discomfit Trump and members of his inner circle (select military figures excepted, at least for now), journalism remains pretty much what it was prior to November 8th of last year: personalities built up only to be torn down; fads and novelties discovered, celebrated, then mocked; “extraordinary” stories of ordinary people granted 15 seconds of fame only to once again be consigned to oblivion -- all served with a side dish of that day’s quota of suffering, devastation, and carnage. These remain journalism’s stock-in-trade. As practiced in the United States, with certain honorable (and hence unprofitable) exceptions, journalism remains superficial, voyeuristic, and governed by the attention span of a two year old.

As a result, all those editors, reporters, columnists, and talking heads who characterize their labors as “now more important than ever” ill-serve the public they profess to inform and enlighten. Rather than clearing the air, they befog it further. If anything, the media’s current obsession with Donald Trump -- his every utterance or tweet treated as “breaking news!” -- just provides one additional excuse for highlighting trivia, while slighting issues that deserve far more attention than they currently receive.

To illustrate the point, let me cite some examples of national security issues that presently receive short shrift or are ignored altogether by those parts of the Fourth Estate said to help set the nation’s political agenda. To put it another way: Hey, Big Media, here are two dozen matters to which you’re not giving faintly adequate thought and attention.

1. Accomplishing the “mission”: Since the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States has been committed to defending key allies in Europe and East Asia. Not long thereafter, U.S. security guarantees were extended to the Middle East as well. Under what circumstances can Americans expect nations in these regions to assume responsibility for managing their own affairs? To put it another way, when (if ever) might U.S. forces actually come home? And if it is incumbent upon the United States to police vast swaths of the planet in perpetuity, how should momentous changes in the international order -- the rise of China, for example, or accelerating climate change -- affect the U.S. approach to doing so?

2. American military supremacy: The United States military is undoubtedly the world’s finest. It’s also far and away the most generously funded, with policymakers offering U.S. troops no shortage of opportunities to practice their craft. So why doesn’t this great military ever win anything? Or put another way, why in recent decades have those forces been unable to accomplish Washington’s stated wartime objectives? Why has the now 15-year-old war on terror failed to result in even a single real success anywhere in the Greater Middle East? Could it be that we’ve taken the wrong approach? What should we be doing differently?

3. America’s empire of bases: The U.S. military today garrisons the planet in a fashion without historical precedent. Successive administrations, regardless of party, justify and perpetuate this policy by insisting that positioning U.S. forces in distant lands fosters peace, stability, and security. In the present century, however, perpetuating this practice has visibly had the opposite effect. In the eyes of many of those called upon to “host” American bases, the permanent presence of such forces smacks of occupation. They resist. Why should U.S. policymakers expect otherwise?

4. Supporting the troops: In present-day America, expressing reverence for those who serve in uniform is something akin to a religious obligation. Everyone professes to cherish America’s “warriors.” Yet such bountiful, if superficial, expressions of regard camouflage a growing gap between those who serve and those who applaud from the sidelines. Our present-day military system, based on the misnamed All-Volunteer Force, is neither democratic nor effective. Why has discussion and debate about its deficiencies not found a place among the nation’s political priorities?

5. Prerogatives of the commander-in-chief: Are there any military actions that the president of the United States may not order on his own authority? If so, what are they? Bit by bit, decade by decade, Congress has abdicated its assigned role in authorizing war. Today, it merely rubberstamps what presidents decide to do (or simply stays mum). Who does this deference to an imperial presidency benefit? Have U.S. policies thereby become more prudent, enlightened, and successful?

6. Assassin-in-chief: A policy of assassination, secretly implemented under the aegis of the CIA during the early Cold War, yielded few substantive successes. When the secrets were revealed, however, the U.S. government suffered considerable embarrassment, so much so that presidents foreswore politically motivated murder. After 9/11, however, Washington returned to the assassination business in a big way and on a global scale, using drones. Today, the only secret is the sequence of names on the current presidential hit list, euphemistically known as the White House “disposition matrix.” But does assassination actually advance U.S. interests (or does it merely recruit replacements for the terrorists it liquidates)? How can we measure its costs, whether direct or indirect? What dangers and vulnerabilities does this practice invite?

7. The war formerly known as the “Global War on Terrorism”: What precisely is Washington’s present strategy for defeating violent jihadism? What sequence of planned actions or steps is expected to yield success? If no such strategy exists, why is that the case? How is it that the absence of strategy -- not to mention an agreed upon definition of “success” -- doesn’t even qualify for discussion here?

by Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch | Read more:

Too Much Information

One of the few detectable lies in David Foster Wallace's books occurs in his essay on the obscure '90s-era American tennis prodigy Michael Joyce, included in Wallace's first nonfiction anthology, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Apart from some pages in his fiction, it's the best thing he wrote about tennis—better even than his justly praised but disproportionately famous piece on Roger Federer—precisely because Joyce was a journeyman, an unknown, and so offered Wallace's mind a white canvas. Wallace had almost nothing to work with on that assignment: ambiguous access to the qualifying rounds of a Canadian tournament, a handful of hours staring through chain link at a subject who was both too nice to be entertaining and not especially articulate. Faced with what for most writers would be a disastrous lack of material, Wallace looses his uncanny observational powers on the tennis complex, drawing partly on his knowledge of the game but mainly on his sheer ability to consider a situation, to revolve it in his mental fingers like a jewel whose integrity he doubts. In the mostly empty stadium he studies the players between matches. "They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies," he writes, "the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions." He hears the "authoritative pang" of tour-tight racket strings and sees ball boys "reconfigure complexly." He hits the practice courts and watches players warm up, their bodies "moving with the compact nonchalance I've since come to recognize in pros when they're working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear."

The lie comes at the start of the piece, when Wallace points out a potential irony of what he's getting ready to do, namely write about people we've never heard of, who are culturally marginal, yet are among the best in the world at a chosen pursuit. "You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something," Wallace says. "At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

What's strange is that this was written in 1996—by then, Wallace had completed his genre-impacting second novel, Infinite Jest, as well as the stories, a couple already considered classic, in the collection Girl with Curious Hair. It's hard to believe he didn't know that he was indeed among the hundred best at a particular thing, namely imaginative prose, and that there were serious people ready to put him among an even smaller number. Perhaps we should assume that, being human, he knew it sometimes and at other times feared it wasn't true. Either way, the false modesty—asking us to accept the idea that he'd never thought of himself as so good and had proposed the experiment naively—can't help reading as odd. Which may itself be deliberate. Not much happens by accident in Wallace's stuff; his profound obsessive streak precluded it. So could it be there's something multilayered going on with sport as a metaphor for writing—even more layers than we expect? It does seem curious that Wallace chose, of all the players, one named Joyce, whose "ethnic" Irishness Wallace goes out of his way to emphasize, thereby alluding to an artist whose own fixation on technical mastery made him a kind of grotesque, dazzling but isolated from healthful, human narrative concerns. Certainly Wallace played textual games on that level.

Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow. (...)

It's hard to do the traditional bio-style paragraph about Wallace for readers who, in this oversaturated mediascape, don't know who he was or why he mattered, because you keep flashing on his story "Death Is Not the End," in which he parodies the practice of writing the traditional bio-style paragraph about writers, listing all their honors and whatnot, his list becoming inexplicably ridiculous as he keeps naming the prizes, and you get that he's digging into the frequent self-congratulating silliness of the American literary world, "a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, [...] a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters...a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation." Wallace himself had many of the awards on the list, including "a 'Genius Grant' from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation." Three novels, three story collections, two books of essays, the Roy E. Disney Professorship of Creative Writing at Pomona College...

When they say that he was a generational writer, that he "spoke for a generation," there's a sense in which it's almost scientifically true. Everything we know about the way literature gets made suggests there's some connection between the individual talent and the society that produces it, the social organism. Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen when its old one dies, and it's possible now to see Wallace as one of those. I remember well enough to know it's not a trick of hindsight, hearing about and reading Infinite Jest for the first time, as a 20-year-old, and the immediate sense of: This is it. One of us is going to try it. The "it" being all of it, to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century. Someone had come along with an intellect potentially strong enough to mirror the spectacle and a moral seriousness deep enough to want to in the first place. About none of his contemporaries—even those who in terms of ability could compete with him—can one say that they risked as great a failure as Wallace did.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ |  Read more:
[ed. From the archive: Readers of this blog know I'm an unabashed DFW fan, and so, please excuse another review of his postumous book The Pale King, which I somehow managed to miss the first time around.]