'Oumuamua

Ever since its discovery in mid-October as it passed by Earth already outbound from our solar system, the mysterious object dubbed ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “first messenger”) has left scientists utterly perplexed. Zooming down almost perpendicularly inside Mercury’s orbit at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour—too fast for our star’s gravity to catch—‘Oumuamua appeared to have been dropped in on our solar system from some great interstellar height, picking up even more speed on a slingshot-like loop around the sun before soaring away for parts unknown. It is now already halfway to Jupiter, too far for a rendezvous mission and rapidly fading from the view of Earth’s most powerful telescopes.

Astronomers scrambling to glimpse the fading object have revealed additional oddities. ‘Oumuamua was never seen to sprout a comet-like tail after getting close to the sun, hinting it is not a relatively fresh bit of icy flotsam from the outskirts of a nearby star system. This plus its deep red coloration—which mirrors that of some cosmic-ray-bombarded objects in our solar system—suggested that ‘Oumuamua could be an asteroid from another star. Yet those same observations also indicate ‘Oumuamua might be shaped rather like a needle, up to 800 meters long and only 80 wide, spinning every seven hours and 20 minutes. That would mean it is like no asteroid ever seen before, instead resembling the collision-minimizing form favored in many designs for notional interstellar probes. What’s more, it is twirling at a rate that could tear a loosely-bound rubble pile apart. Whatever ‘Oumuamua is, it appears to be quite solid—likely composed of rock, or even metal—seemingly tailor-made to weather long journeys between stars. So far there are few if any wholly satisfactory explanations as to how such an extremely elongated solid object could naturally form, let alone endure the forces of a natural high-speed ejection from a star system—a process thought to involve a wrenching encounter with a giant planet.

These bizarre characteristics have raised eyebrows among professional practitioners of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, who use large radio telescopes to listen for interstellar radio transmissions from other cosmic civilizations. If ‘Oumuamua is in fact artificial, the reasoning goes, it might be transmitting or at least leaking radio waves.

So far limited observations of ‘Oumuamua, using facilities such as the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, have turned up nothing. But this Wednesday at 3 p.m. Eastern time, the Breakthrough Listen project will aim the West Virgina-based 100-meter Green Bank Telescope at ‘Oumuamua for 10 hours of observations in a wide range of radio frequencies, scanning the object across its entire rotation in search of any signals. Breakthrough Listen is part of billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives program, a collection of lavishly-funded efforts aiming to uncover evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. Other projects include Breakthrough Starshot, which intends to develop and launch interstellar probes, as well as Breakthrough Watch, which would use large telescopes to study exoplanets for signs of life. (...)

Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and Breakthrough advisor at Harvard University who helped persuade Milner to pursue the observations, is similarly pessimistic about prospects for uncovering aliens. There are, he says, arguments against its artificial origins. For one thing, its estimated spin rate seems too low to create useful amounts of “artificial gravity” for anything onboard. Furthermore, ‘Oumuamua shows no sign of moving due to rocketry or other technology, instead following an orbit shaped by the gravitational force of the sun. Its speed relative to the solar system (about 20 kilometers per second) also seems rather slow for any interstellar probe, which presumably would cruise at higher speeds for faster trips between stars. But that pace aligns perfectly with those of typical nearby stars—suggesting ‘Oumuamua might be merely a piece of galactic “driftwood” washed up by celestial currents.

Then again, Loeb says, “perhaps the aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary system on a reconnaissance mission. In such a case, we might be able to intercept a communication signal between the different spacecraft.”

by Lee Billings, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser

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Code Injection: A New Low for ISPs

Imagine you’re on the phone with your doctor, discussing a very sensitive and private matter that requires your full attention. Suddenly in the middle of a sentence, your mobile phone provider injects a recording saying you’ve used 90 percent of your minutes for the month and to press 1 to contact customer service, and repeats the message until you either hit 1 or hit 2 to cancel.

Or you’re on a call with a buddy, talking about your favorite sports team. Suddenly you get several text messages with “special offers” from companies that sell jerseys and other sporting goods.

Unconscionable, right? Yet both scenarios play out on the Internet, in various degrees of insidiousness.

The first example above happens to an unfortunately large number of U.S. Internet users on a daily basis. Comcast and other ISPs “experimenting” with data caps inject JavaScript code into their customers’ data streams in order to display overlays on Web pages that inform them of data cap thresholds. They’ll even display notices that your cable modem may be eligible for replacement. And you can't opt out.

Think about it for a second: Your cable provider is monitoring your traffic and injecting its own code wherever it likes. This is not only obtrusive, but can cause significant problems with normal Web application function. It’s abhorrent on its face, but that hasn’t stopped companies from developing and deploying code to do it.

The second example is essentially how Google makes its money. You search for something (say, “Red Sox”) and you’ll see search results accompanied by ads for Red Sox tickets and merchandise. Web trackers do the same, which is why, if you searched for widgets on Amazon, you’ll see ads for widgets on completely unrelated websites. Of course, the difference in these examples is that you were purposefully seeking out these items, not merely discussing them with another person. This is an important distinction. (Remember: Gmail notes what you’re talking about in your email and produces ads based on that content; then again, you’re using the Gmail service for free.)

Either example is bad enough, but if we combine the two, we have a monster. We have an ISP that can and does inject its own code into data streams from third-party websites to deliver messages to its users. These could be the aforementioned data cap notifications or ads that hover above the website or even interstitial ads that cover half the page and frustrate the user, but appear to be served by the website that was visited, not the service provider. Of course, the ISP actively snoops on its users’ browsing to display those ads.

by Paul Venezia, InfoWorld | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock

[ed. This article was written in 2015 and Comcast is still at it today (see: Are you aware? Comcast is injecting 400+ lines of JavaScript into web pages.]

The Downloadable Brain

We're Closer Than We Think to Immortality

Two millennia ago, a young carpenter appeared in what is now Israel and, in addition to suggesting some guidelines on personal behavior, offered the gift of eternal life to those who believed in him. This went over well, since the prevailing religion of his people was noticeably weak in that department, lacking clear rewards for the virtuous. His apostle presented the deal in no uncertain terms: “He that heareth my word,” said John, “and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life.” So far nobody has come back to testify to the veracity of this offer on the next plane of existence, but no one has disproved it, either. So that works for some people. It still doesn’t get to the nub of the matter, though. You still have to die in that scenario.

Some have searched for magic poultices, creams and liquids. In the 16th century, it was Ponce de Leon who reportedly searched Florida for waters that would stave off his rapidly approaching old age. Today, people follow in his footsteps, settling down in Boca, Hollywood and Jupiter Beach to achieve the same objective, with much the same lack of results, and in Beverly Hills, gorgons with crimped, distorted mouths and desiccated eyesacks roam Rodeo Drive, tweaking and slicing into themselves as they worship at the shrine of perpetual youth. Some even look okay at a very great distance.

It’s discouraging. Even if one buys into the notion of reincarnation, you are still only preserving the spirit; consciousness doesn’t make the trip from one life to the next. Plus, there is also the possibility that one will return in the next life as a stoat, or a guy whose karma involves the weekly cleaning of portable toilets at construction sites. Not the true vision of eternal life most of us would like, which involves sticking around without ever shuffling off this mortal coil at all, seeing the world change and evolve over generations.

No, for true advancement towards humanity’s most elusive goal, we must turn to the religion that we tend to like now: Technology. And the good news is that in this area we may actually be on the brink of success. For today, enormous gains are being made in the branch of computer science that is working to deliver eternal life to those who can afford it. Those in the hunt are far from snake-oil salesmen or alt-right marketers of nutty fluids. These are distinguished scientists making the prognostications. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University described the concept: “If emulation of particular brains is possible and affordable,” he wrote in a 2008 paper, “and if concerns about individual identity can be met, such emulation would enable back-up copies and ‘digital immortality.’”

Let’s take a moment to consider why this whole idea is not just futurist bushwah. The human brain, while based on an organic platform, is essentially a vast electronic switching station. If such is the case—or even fundamentally the case, with some, as it were, gray matter on the edges—why not work toward a method of emulating the brain-based persona of the individual in its entirety the way you would make a disc image on your laptop and then, when the operations and digital activities are mirrored in this manner, simply backing it up? Once it’s backed up, it can then be stored in a suitable, safe digital warehouse and then, when that receptacle has been created, downloaded into a young, vital living entity and voila. Old mind. Young body. Just what you always wanted. A hundred years later, you can do it again.

There is already significant scientific literature on the issue of personality transfer. Nobody writing about it doubts it can be done. Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, who holds a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science at the University of Wisconsin, offered this view on the circular of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, “Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe, only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of physics, chemistry and biology; it does not arise from some magical or otherworldly quality.” Once one assumes this sort of materialist view of the mind, it’s not difficult to imagine moving the contents of this mechanical entity from one housing to another.

Now, it is true that the task of performing a digital upload of an entire individual consciousness—its knowledge, earned experience, memories going back to the womb—the tech on that part of the process is in its infancy. But gains are being made. Thoughts and simple commands are now being transmitted over short distances by individuals with gizmos attached to their heads, moving little objects around at a distance by the power of their thoughts. It’s not much. But it shows that brain activity can be digitized and transmitted.

But let’s face it. We’re not going to go around with wires sticking out of our heads. The good news is that this really shouldn’t be necessary, not the way things appear to be going. Within just a very few years, the transporting of the electronic entity that is the human brain and all its contents will be vastly advanced—indeed, made possible—by a tremendous development in digital communications: that is, the widespread implantation of the cell phone and all its many wonderful functions right into your cranium.

Do you doubt it? I don’t. Go to any Starbucks, any airport, hotel lobby, public space, and you will see the entire strolling pageant of humanity with their noses firmly attached to a screen. Couples in restaurants. Kids hanging out at home. Staring into the little device. It’s not sustainable. It’s only a matter of time until a new way of inputting that data will be made available to those who want it and can afford it—driven by that ultimate arbiter of product development—consumer demand.

Tell the truth. Isn’t it a pain to be constantly carrying that thing around all the time? How many times a week do you lose it? Wouldn’t you like to be able to employ its many functions simply by touching your head, or maybe even just thinking about something? How would it be to be in touch with the Cloud 24/7? I propose the mastoid bone behind the ear. It’s unoccupied at the moment, totally unmonetized. It’s near the ocular and auditory systems, not to mention the wetware of the brain. It won’t be messing with your spine, which is complicated enough. The mastoid bone is perfect. And won’t it be nice to have your hands free?

by Stanley Bing, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien]

Nick Knight, Altered States
via:

What If Everything You Know About the Suburbs is Wrong?

With 52 essays from 74 authors, Infinite Suburbia’s 732 pages comprehensively analyze the suburbs from the perspectives of architecture, design, landscape, planning, history, demographics, social justice, familial trends, policy, energy, mobility, health, environment, economics, and applied and future technologies. Organized by theme in an index that best resembles a spider’s web, the book is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion, reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The editors of The Architect’s Newspaper (AN) spoke with the book’s editors, Alan M. Berger and Joel Kotkin, about the future of the suburbs. (...)

The Architect’s Newspaper: What is suburbia and how do you define it for this book?

Joel Kotkin and Alan Berger: Suburbia is generally a lower-density area outside the city core. In our approach, we look for such things as predominance of single-family housing, dependence on automobiles (particularly for non-work trips), age of housing stock, and distance from central core. This is about 80 percent of U.S. metro areas; some cities, like Phoenix and San Antonio, are predominately suburban even within their city boundaries. Within the book we have no fewer than five leading authors who define suburbia using different quantitative methods that are arguably more accurate than the U.S. Census at capturing the activities defining suburbia.

What are some of the myths that surround the architecture and design community’s perception of the suburbs?

Berger: Globally, the vast majority of people are moving to cities not to inhabit their centers, but to suburbanize their peripheries. I’m sure we can all agree that there are many suburban (and urban) models that are wasteful, unsustainable, and inequitable. However, despite having deep historical roots in conceiving suburban environments, the planning and design professions overwhelmingly vilify suburbia and seem disinterested in significantly improving it. Robert Bruegmann’s essay in the book reminds us that those who consider themselves the intellectual elite have a long history of anti-suburban crusades, and they have always been proven wrong. Our book, Infinite Suburbia, is built for an alternative discourse that can open paths to improvement and design agency, rather than condemning suburbia altogether. Our goal? To construct a balanced, alternative discourse to architecture and urban planning orthodoxy of “density fixes all,” and in doing so ask: “Can suburbia become a more sustainable model for rethinking the entire urban enterprise, as a vital fabric of “complete urbanization?”

What were some of the most surprising or counterintuitive things you found about the suburbs when compiling these essays?

Berger: One of the consistent themes in the book, and what gets me most excited as a landscape scholar, is the virtue of low density and the ecological potential of the suburban landscape. Environmentally, suburbs will save cities from themselves. Sarah Jack Hinners’s research in the book really surprised me. It suggests that suburban ecosystems, in general, are more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems. Suburbs, she says, are the loci of novelty and innovation from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they are a relatively new type of landscape and their ecology is not fixed or static.

Kotkin: Two trends that may seem counterintuitive to urbanists have been the rapid pattern of diversification in suburbs, which now hold most of the nation’s immigrants and minorities, as well as the fact that suburbs are more egalitarian and less divided by class than core cities. (...)

How do you see suburbia changing in the next few decades?

Kotkin: Suburbs will change in many ways. First, they will continue to spread in those regions that have not employed strict growth controls. Denser development seems inevitable—such as The Domain [development] in north Austin—although [the suburbs] will remain largely surrounded by the single family and townhouses most people prefer. Although they already are, they will become more attractive to Millennials, who will demand fewer golf courses and conventional malls, and more hiking/biking trials and open, common landscapes. Suburbs will become more independent from the traditional city centers except for some amenities and central government services.

Berger: Autonomous driving will dramatically change how we live, particularly in suburbia, where the dominant form of mobility is cars. Once there is widespread adoption of electrified autonomous cars, dramatic sustainability dividends will flourish in the suburbs of the future. This may also take the economic strain off metro mass transit systems, which can focus on service improvements within the core areas rather than stretching outward. Shared autonomous vehicles will become the preferred form of mass transit in areas not serviced by traditional buses or rail.

by The Editors, The Architect's Newspaper |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald

LL Cool J

[ed. Hmm... I don't think so. Cali is burning.]
Lyrics

So You Married Your Flirty Boss

“My career, at the time, was in his hands,” Allison Benedikt wrote at Slate this week, about the beginning of her relationship with John Cook, her husband of 14 years. They were colleagues at a magazine when they first kissed, and he was her senior. That kiss took place “on the steps of the West 4th subway station,” Benedikt writes, and Cook did it “without first getting [her] consent.” The piece is an intervention into the conversation on office sexual harassment, with Benedikt fearing “the consequences of overcorrection” on this issue. She does not think that “the initial touch, the scooting closer in the booth, the drunken sloppy first kiss, the occasional bad call or failed pass” are necessarily harassment, and has the happy marriage to prove it. Her piece was titled “The Upside of Office Flirtation? I’m Living It.”

Benedikt’s essay was widely shared on social media, praised for its “nuanced” approach to the messy nature of human relationships. Only a day later, however, we were reminded that there is a stark line between office flirtation and abuse. On Wednesday Lorin Stein, who himself is married to a former employee, announced that he is resigning from the editorship of The Paris Review amid an investigation into his behavior towards women in his orbit. Stein’s predation has long been a whisper-network item in literary New York. In a letter of resignation to the board of The Paris Review, Stein apologized for the way he has “blurred the personal and the professional in ways that were ... disrespectful of my colleagues and our contributors.” He said that he has come to realize that his behavior was “hurtful, degrading, and infuriating.”

Benedikt has my sympathy. She is in the tricky position of figuring out how the long-past actions of a man she loves fit into the new political landscape. If she is absolutely sure that she is a feminist, and if she is absolutely sure that she is against the harming of vulnerable people, then she is left with difficult questions: If she was merrily compliant with behaviors that are not acceptable in the workplace today, does that make her complicit with the culture of harassment? How can she defend her husband—and by extension herself—while maintaining that they were right then as well as now?

Ultimately Benedikt suggests that a man should not be condemned for the things that her husband did. But Cook did do something wrong. You shouldn’t kiss a junior colleague without asking. You probably shouldn’t kiss anybody without asking, as a rule of thumb to remember when you’re drunk. Consent is such an easy premise, and Benedikt’s reluctance to acknowledge it seems generational. Fourteen years ago affirmative consent was not such a widespread idea, and perhaps the simple words “Can I kiss you?” didn’t come so easily to a man’s lips. But the world has changed, and affirmative consent is now the standard. All college kids know this. Just ask!

It is not unreasonable to demand that men in workplaces act as if the year were 2017 and not 2003. At the same time, nobody is retrospectively prosecuting a man for acting as if it were 2003 in 2003. Nobody is hauling John Cook into the sex-crimes dock or putting Benedikt on trial for crimes against feminism. Nobody is suggesting that she thinks Stein’s behavior is okay, or that that the beginning of a loving marriage is the same thing as sexual harassment. But in writing her essay, in attempting to draw some universal principles from her specific experiences, Benedikt makes bad arguments with real-world consequences—of the kind that have kept the long-swirling rumors from Stein’s door until now.

I went to university late. I was 20 years old, and jaded from a bad relationship and a bad year at art school. Soon after starting my undergraduate degree at Oxford, I also started a relationship with a man in his thirties whose job it was to teach me. He did not coerce me; we pursued each other. I was very sad at the time and I could tell that he was too. He had moved there from another country and was isolated in the old boys’ club of Oxford. We were lonely and troubled people, and we made each other very happy. Our relationship continued for three years, until I moved to New York to work on my Ph.D. We went to weddings together. I ran up wooden staircases in buildings constructed hundreds of years ago to reach him. I slunk through shadows and took elusive cobbled paths through town to find him.

There was a lot of opportunity for coercion, but that didn’t happen: Once we started sleeping together, I made sure that my boyfriend never graded another paper by me again. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, to sleep with a professor and keep my intellectual principles intact. I kept the relationship secret from almost all my friends. The whole thing was extremely fun, we traveled together, I loved him a lot. We didn’t get married or have kids, but I don’t regret it at all.

And I still think he did something wrong.

Professors should not have sex with their undergraduate students, even those who are older and more hardheaded and determined than the others. Academics abuse those junior to them all the time, and rely on a combination of tenure and shame to keep them out of trouble. This has also happened to me. I know that those two experiences—of a relationship and of an assault—are totally different. But they were both facilitated by the same permissive culture at universities. The first experience was good, the second was mindbendingly awful. I would have forgone the first to avoid the second.

The flaw in Benedikt’s argument is that it is so narrowly focused. It’s as if she thinks that the #MeToo campaign wants to take her marriage away. If Cook hadn’t kissed her on the steps of West 4th Street station in the light of the Duane Reade, she implies, she wouldn’t be married with those beautiful children. And then what would her life have been like? This is who I am, she seems to say.

When I say that professors shouldn’t sleep with their students, but that I don’t regret the time that my professor and I slept together, I am not contradicting myself. None of us can go back in time to change the past, nor do I have sufficient insight to know what life would have been like if I had never had that relationship. But I do know what I believe is right, right now. Justifying my own past is less important than protecting the vulnerable.

by Josephine Livingstone, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

[ed. A little too nuanced for me (it wouldn't be the first time I've failed to comprehend a woman's perspective). Do read the Benedikt article referenced at the top. See also: Sometimes a Stupid Joke is Just a Stupid Joke]

How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com

When Amazon.com burst onto the nascent online retail scene in 1995, the future seemed bleak for brick-and-mortar independent bookstores—which already faced competition from superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Indeed, between 1995 and 2000, the number of independent bookstores in the United States plummeted 43 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a nonprofit trade association dedicated to the promotion of independent bookstores.

But then a funny thing happened. While pressure from Amazon forced Borders out of business in 2011, indie bookstores staged an unexpected comeback. Between 2009 and 2015, the ABA reported a 35 percent growth in the number of independent booksellers, from 1,651 stores to 2,227.

This surprising resurgence piqued the interest of Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School, who studies how mature organizations and industries faced with technological change reinvent themselves. Raffaelli has termed this line of research “technology reemergence.” It began with his study of the Swiss watch industry, which collectively reinvented itself (and thus survived) in the wake of digital watches. Five years ago, he set out to discover how independent bookstores managed to survive and even thrive in spite of Amazon and other online retailers.

Raffaelli is a field researcher by training. His study on independent bookselling includes more than 200 interviews and focus groups with bookstore owners, publishers, and prominent authors; field visits to dozens of bookstores in 13 states; 91 hours of observing bookstore activity and industry conferences; and an analysis of 915 newspaper and trade publication articles that mentioned independent bookselling in some fashion. He even attended a training course on how to open an independent bookstore.

Here are some of Raffaelli’s key findings so far, based on what he has found to be the “3 C’s” of independent bookselling’s resurgence: community, curation, and convening.

• Community: Independent booksellers were some of the first to champion the idea of localism; bookstore owners across the nation promoted the idea of consumers supporting their local communities by shopping at neighborhood businesses. Indie bookstores won customers back from Amazon, Borders, and other big players by stressing a strong connection to local community values.
• Curation: Independent booksellers began to focus on curating inventory that allowed them to provide a more personal and specialized customer experience. Rather than only recommending bestsellers, they developed personal relationships with customers by helping them discover up-and-coming authors and unexpected titles.
• Convening: Independent booksellers also started to promote their stores as intellectual centers for convening customers with likeminded interests—offering lectures, book signings, game nights, children’s story times, young adult reading groups, even birthday parties. “In fact, some bookstores now host over 500 events a year that bring people together,” Raffaelli says.

While all this was happening on a local level, there was important top-down work going on at the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a nonprofit trade association dedicated to the promotion of independent bookstores. The ABA served as a glue to bind likeminded players together—facilitating partnerships between bookstores and other local businesses, for example. The ABA also strengthened the collective identity of indie bookstores by helping its members share best practices, such as how to use social media to promote special events.

Raffaelli plans to release an initial version of the study in 2018; in the meantime, he has published a multi-page abstract with an overview of the initial findings. Its working title: “Reframing Collective Identity in Response to Multiple Technological Discontinuities: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores.”

by Carmen Nobel, Harvard Business School |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Having an active trade-in/credit system for used books and other media is also a big plus.]

Cat Person

Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.

“That’s an . . . unusual choice,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.”

Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class—though she was pretty sure that he was out of college, in his mid-twenties at least. He was tall, which she liked, and she could see the edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. But he was on the heavy side, his beard was a little too long, and his shoulders slumped forward slightly, as though he were protecting something.

Robert did not pick up on her flirtation. Or, if he did, he showed it only by stepping back, as though to make her lean toward him, try a little harder. “Well,” he said. “O.K., then.” He pocketed his change.

But the next week he came into the movie theatre again, and bought another box of Red Vines. “You’re getting better at your job,” he told her. “You managed not to insult me this time.”

She shrugged. “I’m up for a promotion, so,” she said.

After the movie, he came back to her. “Concession-stand girl, give me your phone number,” he said, and, surprising herself, she did.

From that small exchange about Red Vines, over the next several weeks they built up an elaborate scaffolding of jokes via text, riffs that unfolded and shifted so quickly that she sometimes had a hard time keeping up. He was very clever, and she found that she had to work to impress him. Soon she noticed that when she texted him he usually texted her back right away, but if she took more than a few hours to respond his next message would always be short and wouldn’t include a question, so it was up to her to re-initiate the conversation, which she always did. A few times, she got distracted for a day or so and wondered if the exchange would die out altogether, but then she’d think of something funny to tell him or she’d see a picture on the Internet that was relevant to their conversation, and they’d start up again. She still didn’t know much about him, because they never talked about anything personal, but when they landed two or three good jokes in a row there was a kind of exhilaration to it, as if they were dancing.

Then, one night during reading period, she was complaining about how all the dining halls were closed and there was no food in her room because her roommate had raided her care package, and he offered to buy her some Red Vines to sustain her. At first, she deflected this with another joke, because she really did have to study, but he said, “No, I’m serious, stop fooling around and come now,” so she put a jacket over her pajamas and met him at the 7-Eleven.

It was about eleven o’clock. He greeted her without ceremony, as though he saw her every day, and took her inside to choose some snacks. The store didn’t have Red Vines, so he bought her a Cherry Coke Slurpee and a bag of Doritos and a novelty lighter shaped like a frog with a cigarette in its mouth.

“Thank you for my presents,” she said, when they were back outside. Robert was wearing a rabbit-fur hat that came down over his ears and a thick, old-fashioned down jacket. She thought it was a good look for him, if a little dorky; the hat heightened his lumberjack aura, and the heavy coat hid his belly and the slightly sad slump of his shoulders.

“You’re welcome, concession-stand girl,” he said, though of course he knew her name by then. She thought he was going to go in for a kiss and prepared to duck and offer him her cheek, but instead of kissing her on the mouth he took her by the arm and kissed her gently on the forehead, as though she were something precious. “Study hard, sweetheart,” he said. “I will see you soon.”

On the walk back to her dorm, she was filled with a sparkly lightness that she recognized as the sign of an incipient crush.

While she was home over break, they texted nearly non-stop, not only jokes but little updates about their days. They started saying good morning and good night, and when she asked him a question and he didn’t respond right away she felt a jab of anxious yearning. She learned that Robert had two cats, named Mu and Yan, and together they invented a complicated scenario in which her childhood cat, Pita, would send flirtatious texts to Yan, but whenever Pita talked to Mu she was formal and cold, because she was jealous of Mu’s relationship with Yan.

“Why are you texting all the time?” Margot’s stepdad asked her at dinner. “Are you having an affair with someone?”

“Yes,” Margot said. “His name is Robert, and I met him at the movie theatre. We’re in love, and we’re probably going to get married.”

“Hmm,” her stepdad said. “Tell him we have some questions for him.”

“My parents are asking about u,” Margot texted, and Robert sent her back a smiley-face emoji whose eyes were hearts.

by Kristen Roupenian, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Elinor Carruci

photo: markk

photo: markk

Ruby Silvious
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The Problem with Muzak - Spotify’s Bid to Remodel an Industry

“Anything you want.
Anyone you want.
Anywhere you want.
Anyway! Anyway!”
—Priests, “Pink White House” (2017)

Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table, a machine that allows you to order without talking to other humans—a circumstance provided by capitalism’s boundless quest to cash in on convenience. Of course, this doesn’t make your experience any easier: within minutes, an employee scrambles over to assist you with the device, which keeps freezing when you choose the “bowls” tab. “Can I just tell you my order?” you ask, half-laughing, thoroughly hoping for a moment of commiserating solidarity over this disruptor™ fail. Instead she grabs the thing and helps you finalize your purchase. This person hates her job, but she’s lucky that, for the moment, she still has it.

This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry.

The music world continues to be exceedingly vulnerable, and there are looming questions that desperately need to be addressed. Most important: How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?

Enter Spotify, a platform that is definitely not the answer. In fact, it only exacerbates such conundrums. Yet for now it has manipulated the vast majority of music industry “players” into regarding it as a saving grace. As the world’s largest streaming music company, its network of paying subscribers has risen sharply in recent years, from five million paid subscribers in 2012 to more than sixty million in 2017. Indeed, the platform has now convinced a critical mass that paying $9.99 per month for access to thirty million songs is a solid, even virtuous idea. Every song in the world for less than your shitty airport meal. What could go wrong?

Billionaires have thrown a lot of money at Spotify. As of September 2017, the platform has been valued at $16 billion by venture capitalists who see it as the next Netflix, and who have perhaps fooled themselves into trusting that this exploitative model will “save the music industry.” Spotify’s endgame, for now, is to go public. The company could be worth $20 billion by next year, when it will likely be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. According to Reuters, Spotify plans to file its intention of a public offering with U.S. regulators before the end of this calendar year and to go public in the first or second quarter of 2018. Bloomberg reports that it recently hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co. to “assess its options.”

Yet, despite its conventional market viability, there are key differences between Spotify and its rivals, Apple Music and Amazon Music, which both have the luxury of capitalizing on overpriced, fun-sized plastic and metal surveillance machines. For Apple Music, the bottom line is selling iPhones, laptops, iPads, and other hardware. Streaming music makes those products more valuable. For Amazon Music, the motive is similar; they aim to sell Alexa devices and Amazon Prime subscriptions.

But Spotify’s worth is more ephemeral. Its value—what makes it addictive for listeners, a necessity for artists, and a worthwhile investment for venture capitalists—lies in its algorithmic music discovery “products” and its ability to make the entire music industry conform to the new standards it sets. This means one thing: playlists are king, and particularly the ones curated by Spotify itself. An unprecedented amount of data (“skip rates” and “completion rates” determine whether a song survives) and “human-machine technology” are deployed to quantify your tastes. This is what lies behind the “magic” of Spotify.

Spotify and Chill

To understand the danger Spotify poses to the music industry—and to music itself—you first have to dig beneath the “user experience” and examine its algorithmic schemes. Spotify’s front page “Browse” screen presents a classic illusion of choice, a stream of genre and mood playlists, charts, new releases, and now podcasts and video. It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system. On Monday, you’ll find “Discover Weekly,” an algorithmically created playlist of recommendations based on your listening habits. On Friday, there’s “New Music Friday,” a highly coveted and well trafficked playlist of mostly Top-40 content, thoroughly inaccessible to anyone but major labels. The rest of the front page arrangement depends on the date and time, but you’ll likely see one of its most prized brands—like the popular and also major label-saturated “RapCaviar”—or else music that somehow opportunistically rides the news cycle: Which celebrity musician died today? Otherwise, you’ll find songs tied to moods or activities, like “Good Vibes” or “Wild + Free.” And you will most certainly see something along the lines of “Chilled Folk,” “Chill Hits,” “Evening Chill,” “Chilled R&B,” “Indie Chillout,” or “Chill Tracks.”

Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.

As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.

These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

Indeed, Spotify’s obsession with mood and activity-based playlists has contributed to all music becoming more like Muzak, a brand that created, programmed, and licensed songs for retail stores throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the company prioritized workplace soundtracks that were meant to heighten productivity, using research to evaluate what listeners responded to most. In many ways, this is not unlike the playlist category called “Focus” that we see now on Spotify. In March 2011, Muzak was purchased by Mood Media, a company that provides in-store music, signs, scents, and video content. The similarity between the objectives of companies like Muzak and Mood Media, and the proliferation of mood-based playlists on Spotify, is more than just a linguistic coincidence; Spotify playlists work to attract brands and advertisers of all types to the platform.

The Automation of Selling Out

Advertising and branding products are used all over Spotify: videos, audio, commercial breaks, clickable image pop-ups, overlays, the sponsoring of (extremely popular) Spotify-owned playlists, the sponsoring of live session videos, home page takeovers, and standalone advertisements. Some are banner advertisements, others are advertorial, and still others blur the line. And this is part of a grander confusion: the very idea of what it means to be an “independent artist” in 2017 has been eroded as more and more artists find themselves beholden to corporate platforms of all types.

Spotify also presents a new and complicated extension of hyper-commercial webspace, and it’s a development that could prove to be particularly harmful for musicians: the corporate-branded playlists. This “feature” could be explained as the platform’s interpretation of corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform’s regular users. This has led to a proliferation of playlists made by brands. For example: the “Coffeehouse Pop” made by the official Starbucks page, or the “Running Tempo Mix” created by Nike Women. So long as corporations have at least twenty songs on their playlists and don’t include an artist more than once, they’re good. In the past, such an arrangement would require a given artist to sign a licensing or advertising deal, and it often appeared transactional, hence the traditional notion of “selling out.” Today on Spotify, artists often have no idea they’ve been added to these playlists. I only managed to discover this phenomenon upon plugging a friend’s band name into a tool called “Spot On Track,” which uses Spotify’s public API to present the different playlists where specific artists and their tracks appear. My friend’s band was completely unaware of its inclusion on the Nike and Starbucks playlists, and the band receives no additional compensation beyond the usual streaming royalties sent to labels and rights-holders.

We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid.

by Liz Pelly, The Baffler |  Read more:
Image: via

Politics 101

The Uneven Playing Field

A Weekend with Bernie

The G.O.P. Is Rotting

The Next Step in the Radical Trump-G.O.P. Agenda: Gut the Welfare State

The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken (links galore)

Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle For Self-Preservation (must read)

Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right

How Republicans Are Immunizing Their Voters Against Whatever Mueller Uncovers

[ed. Check back for updates]

Don’t Blame the Election on Fake News. Blame It on the Media.

As troubling as the spread of fake news on social media may be, it was unlikely to have had much impact either on the election outcome or on the more general state of politics in 2016. A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” Unlike the fake news numbers highlighted in much of the post-election coverage, engagement with sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller are substantial—especially in the realm of social media.

Nevertheless, a longer and more detailed report by the same researchers shows that by any reasonable metric—including Facebook or Twitter shares, but also referrals from other media sites, number of published stories, etc.—the media ecosystem remains dominated by conventional (and mostly left-of-center) sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, and Politico.

Given the attention these very same news outlets have lavished, post-election, on fake news shared via social media, it may come as a surprise that they themselves dominated social media traffic. While it may have been the case that the 20 most-shared fake news stories narrowly outperformed the 20 most-shared “real news” stories, the overall volume of stories produced by major newsrooms vastly outnumbers fake news. According to the same report, “The Washington Post produced more than 50,000 stories over the 18-month period, while The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post each published more than 30,000 stories.” Presumably not all of these stories were about the election, but each such story was also likely reported by many news outlets simultaneously. A rough estimate of thousands of election-related stories published by the mainstream media is therefore not unreasonable.

What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news. (...)

The problem is this: As has become clear since the election, there were profound differences between the two candidates’ policies, and these differences are already proving enormously consequential to the American people. Under President Trump, the Affordable Care Act is being actively dismantled, environmental and consumer protections are being rolled back, international alliances and treaties are being threatened, and immigration policy has been thrown into turmoil, among other dramatic changes. In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.

In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election. (...)

Consistent with other studies of media coverage of the election, our analysis finds that The New York Times focused much more on “dramatic” issues like the horserace or personal scandals than on substantive policy issues. Moreover, when the paper did write about policy issues, it failed to mention important details, in some cases giving readers a misleading impression of the true state of affairs. If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues such as healthcare, immigration, taxes, and economic policy—or how these issues would likely be affected by the election of either candidate as president—they would not have learned much from reading the Times. What they would have learned was that both candidates were plagued by scandal: Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for government business while secretary of state, as well as allegations of possible conflicts of interest in the Clinton Foundation; and Trump over his failure to release his tax returns; his past business dealings; Trump University; the Trump Foundation; accusations of sexual harassment and assault; and numerous misogynistic, racist, and otherwise offensive remarks. What they would also have learned about was the ever-fluctuating state of the horse race: who was up and who was down; who might turn out and who might not; and who was happy or unhappy with whom about what.

To be clear, we do not believe the the Times’s coverage was worse than other mainstream news organizations, so much as it was typical of a broader failure of mainstream journalism to inform audiences of the very real and consequential issues at stake. In retrospect, it seems clear that the press in general made the mistake of assuming a Clinton victory was inevitable, and were setting themselves as credible critics of the next administration. Possibly this mistake arose from the failure of journalists to get out of their “hermetic bubble.” Possibly it was their misinterpretation of available polling data, which showed all along that a Trump victory, albeit unlikely, was far from inconceivable. These were understandable mistakes, but they were still mistakes. Yet, rather than acknowledging the possible impact their collective failure of imagination could have had on the election outcome, the mainstream news community has instead focused its critical attention everywhere but on themselves: fake news, Russian hackers, technology companies, algorithmic ranking, the alt-right, even on the American public.

To be fair, journalists were not the only community to be surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election—a great many informed observers, possibly including the candidate himself, failed to take the prospect of a Trump victory seriously. Also to be fair, the difficulty of adequately covering a campaign in which the “rules of the game” were repeatedly upended must surely have been formidable. But one could equally argue that Facebook could not have been expected to anticipate the misuse of its advertising platform to seed fake news stories. And one could just as easily argue that the difficulties facing tech companies in trading off between complicity in spreading intentional misinformation on the one hand, and censorship on the other hand, are every bit as formidable as those facing journalists trying to cover Trump. For journalists to excoriate the tech companies for their missteps while barely acknowledging their own reveals an important blind spot in the journalistic profession’s conception of itself.

by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: CJR

Tom Gauld
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Emergency Rooms Are Monopolies

Around 1 am on August 20, Ismael Saifan woke up with a terrible pain in his lower back, likely the result of moving furniture earlier that day.

“It was a very sharp muscle pain,” Saifan, a 39-year-old engineer, remembers. “I couldn’t move or sleep in any position. I was trying laying down, sitting down, nothing worked.”

Saifan went online to figure out where he could see a doctor. The only place open at that hour was Overland Park Regional Medical Center in his hometown of Overland Park, Kansas.

The doctor checked his blood pressure, asked about the pain, and gave him a muscle relaxant. The visit was quick and easy, lasting about 20 minutes.

But Saifan was shocked when he received bills totaling $2,429.84.

The bill included a $3.50 charge for the muscle relaxant. The rest — $2,426.34 — was from “facility fees” charged by the hospital and doctor for walking into the emergency room and seeking care.

Because Saifan’s health spending is still within his plan’s deductible, he is responsible for the entire amount.

“I called the insurance company to make sure the bill was real,” he says. “They said it was a reasonable price, and gave me a breakdown.”

There are 141 million visits to the emergency room each year, and nearly all of them (including Saifan’s) have a charge for something called a facility fee. This is the price of walking through the door and seeking service. It does not include any care provided.

Emergency rooms argue that these fees are necessary to keep their doors open, so they can be ready 24/7 to treat anything from a sore back to a gunshot wound. But there is also wide variation in how much hospitals charge for these fees, raising questions about how they are set and how closely they are tethered to overhead costs.

Most hospitals do not make these fees public. Patients typically learn what their emergency room facility fee is when they receive a bill weeks later. The fees can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s why Vox has launched a year-long investigation into emergency room facility fees, to better understand how much they cost and how they affect patients.

Saifan’s bill was so expensive, it turns out, because the hospital used the facility fee typically reserved for complex, intensive emergency room visits.

Emergency room facility fees are usually coded on a 1 to 5 scale, to reflect the complexity of care delivered to the patient. Saifan’s visit where he received a muscle relaxant was coded by the doctor as a level 4 visit — the second highest — and came with hefty fees as a result.

The hospital billed a separate facility fee and chose level 3, typically reserved for moderately complex visits.

Saifan’s experience isn’t an anomaly: A new Vox analysis reveals that emergency rooms all across the country are increasingly using these higher-intensity codes, and that the price of these codes has increased sharply since 2009.

Vox worked with the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) to analyze 70 million insurance bills for emergency room visits from between 2009 and 2015. We focused on the prices that health plans paid hospitals for facility fees, not the hospital charges (which can often be inflated well above what patients actually pay).

We found that the price of these fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending.

Overall spending on emergency room fees rose by more than $3 billion between 2009 and 2015, despite the fact the HCCI database shows a slight (2 percent) decline in the number of emergency room fees billed in the same time period.

“It is having a dramatic effect on what people spend in a hospital setting,” says Niall Brennan, executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute. “And as we know, that has a trickle-down effect on premiums and benefits.”

by Sarah Kliff, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Northrop/Vox

Motel Living and Slowly Dying

By trade and self-identity, I am a novelist. But to keep the groceries coming, I am also an oil pipeline worker. They call me a “pig tracker,” which means I monitor the location of cleaning and diagnostic tools traveling through pipelines, and when I’m not in the field, I’m in a hotel somewhere along the line, sleeping my way toward my next shift.

The particular rhythms of what I do — track the pig in its journey beneath the prairies, hand off the job to my counterpart on the other shift, find a hotel near where I’ll rejoin the line, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat — have made me something of an unintentional expert on hotel living and on the America nobody dreams about seeing on vacation.

I travel by secondary and tertiary roads, skulking around the pipeline on 12-hour shifts, either midnight to noon or noon to midnight. I work alone, mostly. And when the shift is done, I catch my rest in places like Harrisonville, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas. Lapeer, Michigan, and Amherst, New York. Toledo, Ohio, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota. I’ve learned that Super 8s are not always super, and Comfort Inns sometimes afflict the comfortable. I rack up IHG points and Wyndham Rewards and Choice Privileges. I may never have to pay for a personal car rental again, so fulsome are my Enterprise points.

Sometimes I lose track of what day it is, or when, exactly, I’m going home again. But the places where I set my head stand ready to reorient me with a comfortable sameness. There’s the antiseptic smell of a well-cleaned lobby, the paper coffee cups in my room wrapped in plastic, the rattle and hum of the air-conditioning unit. When I arrive in the wee hours, the lonely night auditor is often all too happy to talk. When I leave at 11 p.m. for my next night shift, I often have to talk the clerk through my reasons for arriving and departing in the same 12-hour period. Twenty-four hours a day, there’s coffee of varying age and quality.

I’ve come to value the simple things: a clean room, reliable hot water, and a staff that respects a do-not-disturb sign. And learned the sublime wisdom of a song called “My Favourite Chords” by a Canadian band called the Weakerthans.

I want to fall asleep / to the beat of you breathing / in a room near a truck stop / on a highway somewhere …

The words are a concise demonstration of language’s power to inspire cinema in our heads. They also form a picture of my life. Because the truth is, I’ve been living in motels since I was a child.

¤

My father was an exploratory well digger, and I traveled with him every summer through the American West, far off the interstates, in a nomadic way that was worlds different from my life at home with my mother in Fort Worth, Texas.

In the summer of 1981, when I was 11 years old, I lived with him and my then-stepmother in a bottom-floor room at the Park Plaza Motel in Sidney, Montana. Dad was working near Watford City, North Dakota, about 50 miles east, but he used Montana and its lack of a sales tax as a home base. I’d ride out to the fields with him during the day, peeling around on my motorcycle, then return with him and his crew to Sidney in the evening, reuniting with my stepmother. The three of us would have dinner, watch some TV — it was the summer of Fernando Valenzuela’s miracle stint with the Log Angeles Dodgers — and then start the cycle again. (...)

My life in motels doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve read or seen; it’s too ordinary, too predictable. I’m not Humbert Humbert, dragging his Lolita through the West, a step ahead of Clare Quilty. I’ve never met someone like Juan Chicoy, the impromptu innkeeper from John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, or the precocious little girl Moonee and her crazy mom from the recent movie about permanent motel existence, The Florida Project. My stays are straight credit-card transactions, reimbursed by my employer, and generally last just a few hours before I move along again. My intimacy with these places runs no deeper than: “Welcome back, Mr. Lancaster.”

There is, of course, a darker, seemingly hopeless side to these homes away from home. In left-behind precincts of cities and towns — indeed, on the main drag that connects my comfortable suburban neighborhood in Billings, Montana, with downtown — you can find bedraggled motels where single-room occupancy often means a family of five sharing a sink, a shower, and maybe a kitchenette. These are the working destitute, or the pensioned-off. These folks are able to scrape together several hundred dollars for rent, but not the first and last months and a water deposit and a credit score required for a less expensive apartment, let alone the three-percent down on an FHA mortgage.

We tend to think of homelessness in terms of cardboard boxes on street grates and cars that double as living spaces, but that’s a small aperture of the overall problem. These past-their-glory motels house people who work hard — and who face crushing odds of ever getting ahead of their circumstances. And as we run the average rents in places like Seattle and San Francisco to the stratosphere, without an attendant increase in affordable housing, we’re falling deeper into crisis.

In Billings, where I live when I’m not in a motel, we have 110,000 people, and 621 of them are homeless kids in the public school system. That’s the total from the most recent full school year. Of those 600-plus, 104 live the peculiar form of it at motels with names like the Lazy K-T. By any measure, it’s a shameful number. Teachers and administrators at the schools write grant proposals for supplemental breakfast programs. My friends who oversee classrooms have mastered the subtle art of pulling a kid aside and, without shaming him, learning whether he has a winter coat. When the answer is no, they find a way to get him one.

Elizabeth Lloyd Fladung, who has photographed American families on the margins for the past two decades, told The Nation in 2015: “The sight of these iconic structures now serving as home to scores of destitute people who don’t seem to have any chance at the American Dream really shows just how little infrastructure there is to help poor people in need, and how much damage decades of wage stagnation has done.”

by Craig Lancaster, LARB | Read more:
Image: uncredited