The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei

Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost experimental writers. He started his career in the eighties with “vanguard fiction”—self-reflexive works focusing on history, historical narrative, memory, and myth. Now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in English: 2012’s The Invisibility Cloak, translated by Canaan Morse. It’s the first in our monthly book club with New York Review Books. Set in cutthroat, consumer-driven Beijing, the novel follows Mr. Cui, a down-at-heel Everyman who lives with his sister in an apartment where the wind is always blowing through a crack in the wall. Cui designs and installs custom stereos for hyperrich audiophiles and intellectuals, for whom he has an unreserved contempt. Then he reels in a promising but shady client who demands the best sound system in the world: an assignment that takes Cui to an unexpectedly dark place. The Invisibility Cloak is a comic tour de force; Kirkus Reviews wrote that it “packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent English-language books.”

Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come up with the idea for the book?

FEI

What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time.

The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends.

INTERVIEWER

Much of the novel is dedicated to audiophile culture and the pursuit of the greatest possible sound system. As an audio enthusiast yourself, can you comment on the spirituality of music and its relationship with these speakers, these machines, in your writing?

FEI

The centers of construction, sales, and distribution of audiophile equipment—we might call it “specialized audio-reproduction equipment”—are in Europe and America. But those with the greatest love for this equipment are in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China. These are people who’ve carried their appreciation for sound quality to a fairly extreme degree. The nineties was really the golden age for audiophiles. I tried consciously to incorporate their specialized, material knowledge into this book. For instance, the fact that I specifically name the Autograph speakers won’t mean much to those who don’t deal in hi-fi, but music aficionados, the cognoscenti, will recognize it right away. For a long time, I was dreaming about writing a horror novel. I wondered if I could apply this desire to a novel about music. Readers might ask, How do you put together a horror story with all this talk about classical music? That was the challenge I decided to overcome. (...)

INTERVIEWER

One of the groups in The Invisibility Cloak that’s criticized most stridently is the group of intellectuals who like to blow hot air and make revisionist arguments that don’t stand up.

FEI

If there’s one group of people in China that I despise more than any other, it would be the intellectuals. As I was studying and teaching, I would go home, back to my parents’ house, and they would say, Oh, we can’t fix these problems, we’ll leave all this to you and the intellectuals. I used to have high hopes and expectations for the educated in China, because of course the scholar has always enjoyed an elevated position there. Scholars are supposed to be the people who take on the world’s problems as their own, who shoulder the world’s burdens. It wasn’t until the late nineties that I began to change my opinions, and I discovered that those who are outside of the intellectual community have ethical standards that we have a lot to learn from, and they’re the ones we rely on for the idea of the country and strong development of the country. These are people who are very misunderstood within the academic circle. I had a significant change in my personal ethics with regard to the rest of the world. Now I have two circles of friends, academics and nonacademics, and it’s from the nonacademics that I’ve learned more about who and how to be. It’s very easy for us to put labels on these people. This friend of mine who’s the model for the main character, he sold shoes, he’s worked in clothing factories, he has opinions on Chinese-Japanese relations, relations with America and Chinese politics. He has his own philosophies, completely different from my intellectual friends. When we all get together, he’ll end up in arguments with them, beating them right down. That particular transformation has changed the way I build relationships with people who are outside my immediate academic circle. It’s not just their meaningless talk. I thought, Are we giving the country to these people? That might not be a good idea. We look at officials and there may be plenty of them we don’t like, but at the very least they seem to have some experience of the actual world. Meanwhile, your scholars, so many go from book to book, and they analyze systems of value, of benefit, and of resources based on what they’ve read.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the meaning behind the name The Invisibility Cloak?

FEI

The Invisibility Cloak was not the book’s first title—it was something like Leftover Fragments of Emotion in the Floating Life. I used it, but it gave me a really unlucky, inauspicious feeling. I wanted to add aspects of the horror-movie concept into the title. One of the main characters in the book is invisibility—he carries an invisibility cloak, he disappears yet he reappears, he is the sudden face in the mirror, the flicker in the one frame that then disappears. The model for Cui, the protagonist, this guy has stubbornly built his own quotidian life. I think the destruction of the quotidian life is one of the most unfortunate consequences of modernity. This guy doesn’t wear T-shirts, it doesn’t matter how hot it is, he will never wear short sleeves. He always eats fish, he never eats meat, he never gets up before ten, he will do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t not get out of bed before ten in the morning, and he obviously calls me up at midnight. He keeps to his own life. He’s built this individual ideological structure, which is something I consider admirable and wish more people would do.

by Ge Fei, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Cover, Invisibility Cloak

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Waking Up to the Gift of ‘Aliveness’

A few weeks ago, I found a surprising line in my lecture notes. I don’t know how long it had been there or how it got in. I don’t remember having written it or even having seen it before. It said, “The goal of life, for Pascal, is not happiness, peace, or fulfillment, but aliveness.” I believe the line may have been written by my teacher and friend, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Bert died in April at the age of 87.

It is strange, on the face of it at least, to think that Bert may be speaking to me from the grave. It is stranger still, perhaps, that from that less-than-ideal vantage point he could be telling me about a possible goal of life. But if you knew how my lecture notes work, it might not seem so peculiar.

You see, I’ve been teaching the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, and the Existentialist tradition he prefigured, since Bert introduced me to them almost 30 years ago. The lecture notes I use started out as notes I took as a student in his courses. Over the years they grew and matured, not only in response to what I learned from my students but also, and especially, in response to many continuing conversations with Bert. The strands of influence in those notes are so many and so various that they have long grown obscure. It is sometimes a surprise, even to me, to discover what they contain.

Surprises like these are wonderful, but sometimes perplexing too. What could it mean, after all, that the goal of life is aliveness? It sounds almost banal, or even tautological. But perhaps, after a bit of thought, it resonates.

Think of the way that life really can become lifeless. You know what it’s like: rise, commute, work, lunch, work some more, maybe have a beer or go to the gym, watch TV. For a while the routine is nurturing and stabilizing; it is comfortable in its predictability. But soon the days seem to stretch out in an infinite line behind and before you. And eventually you are withering away inside them. They are not just devoid of meaning but ruthless in their insistence that they are that way. The life you are living announces it is no longer alive.

There are at least two natural, but equally flawed, responses to this announcement: constantly seek out newness or look for a stable, deeper meaning to your existing routine. In the 18th century, these responses were centered in Italy and Germany, respectively. Their descendants persevere today.

The Italian — Casanova was the paradigm — decides that what is missing from his life is spontaneity: He has died within his routine because it kills all his natural desires. To become alive again, he commits himself passionately to following his desires, take him where they may. He takes on many lovers — thrilling, consuming affairs! — but eventually he leaves each one for the next; he lives in the moment without a care for his past commitments or his future possibilities. His life moves from one raw excitement to another. Eventually, however, he becomes isolated, inconstant and unmoored. He hurts those around him. He becomes incapable of genuine connection with anyone and unsure of who he really is. He despairs.

The German takes a different approach. Shall we call him Kant? He decides that what is missing is a reason for his routine. He seeks it out. He tells himself a story, one that delivers a meaningful justification of his daily life. And then he enters into the routine once again, determined this time to live in the knowledge that no matter how deadening it becomes, it is justified and therefore must be pursued. It is his duty to do so. But even though he knows the why of what he is doing, he cannot escape the feeling that he is not living by doing it. The monotony re-establishes itself. He cannot escape the ruthless assertion of its insignificance. He despairs.

We see what these responses are aiming for — the aliveness they hope to achieve — by seeing how they ultimately fall short of their goal. To be alive is to have the passion of Casanova without its isolation, inconstancy and despair, or the resolute certainty of Kant, without its monotony and insignificance. Indeed, perhaps the best we can hope for is to point to the phenomenon in its absence: Aliveness is whatever is lacking when the monotony of the routine forces itself to the fore. But can we say something positive about what aliveness is?

A complete definition of the phenomenon is no doubt beyond our grasp. But there are two distinctive features of its elusiveness that I believe we can identify. The first is that every apparent source of aliveness disappears upon the inspection of it — the ground of aliveness recedes from view. Consider a simple example: the love you feel gazing at your lover’s face. When you are in love, you are alive; the whole world vibrates with significance. It is natural to want to hold onto that aliveness, to make it last forever, to find its source. And where else could it be but in your lover’s face? So you look. But beware! Look too closely and something falls apart.

For the greater the love that face evokes, the more transcendent your experience of that person, the less it seems possible that a face, a physicalface, could actually be its ground. The phenomenon is filled with the deepest mystery, like the man who is God or the brain that is mind. After all, how could this fleshy, corporeal thing, of skin and veins and muscles and fat, how could this mere physical stuff and substance give rise to the ecstasy and transport of love? Of course it does! But the more you look at what a human face is, the less it seems capable of doing what it does. The object of love, as an object of love, dissolves in looking at it. The ground of aliveness withdraws from view.

The second feature is equally enigmatic. When you really feel alive, your past, your present and your future somehow make sense together as the unity they have always promised to be. I sometimes feel truly alive, for instance, when I am teaching my students. When it is going well, when we are connected and engaged and the classroom is buzzing, it is not just that we are sharing a special moment together. For me, that moment has the special character that it does because it fulfills the promise implicit in moments like that from my own childhood and youth. It is the validation of what came before just as it is the preparation for what comes after. When you see in your students the sense that what is happening now will stay with them, will remain alive as a future memory that can sustain them in some other moment, far away and very different from the one we are now sharing, then the moment vibrates with an energy it wouldn’t otherwise have.

by Sean D. Kelly, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ibai Acevedo/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Aliveness]

Peter Nidzgorski
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Advice on New Year’s Resolutions from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

It will soon be that time of year where many of us set ourselves up for failure. Make a resolution or don’t make a resolution; you will regret either. Or so the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard might quip. One estimate suggests that almost half of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, and yet less than 10 percent successfully follow through. Maybe we forget about them long before our snow boots dry out. Maybe life takes us on a different path. Maybe we stop caring. Maybe we simply fail. It might be tempting to do away with this farce altogether, but before we commit to being noncommittal about the New Year, it’s worth thinking through some of the options.

The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions is at least four thousand years old. The ancient Babylonians celebrated their new year—the rebirth of the sun god Marduk—in spring, to coincide with barley-sowing season. Akitu was a twelve-day festival in which the king would promise to fulfill an extensive list of duties. To seal the king’s commitment, the high priest would slap him hard across the face. The slap had to be firm enough to draw tears: proof of the king’s dedication and a reminder to him to be humble. As part of the festival, other people also pledged their allegiance to the king and the gods and promised to repay their debts.

It may be tempting to overthrow this ancient tradition, to make no resolutions, and to go along with the flow of life like a carefree leaf on the surface of a happily bubbling stream. But Kierkegaard would argue that such a metaphor is deceptive: we would be akin to a stone hurled across the surface of the water, which “skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths.” Without commitments, we risk disappearing into the existential abyss. A life that lacks purpose creates anxiety. A meaningful life, Kierkegaard suggests, is one in which we actively assert ourselves in order to live more fully.

It’s all well and good to make promises, but there’s still the challenge of keeping them. Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that what differentiates humans from other creatures is that we have “the right to make promises.” Making promises addresses a fundamental aspect of our humanity: that each of us is and is not the person we will become in the future. This is confusing, so let’s get concrete: Are you the same person you will be next year? Well, not exactly. Gray hair may sprout, wrinkles may emerge, your voice may deepen and thicken, your joints begin to ache. Your physical characteristics will objectively change, even if minutely. Your emotional and psychological identity may also shift; you might get a new job or a new partner, a new hobby or a new therapist. A promise is a way of laying claim to an uncertain future. It is a way of projecting oneself into the coming months, protecting a commitment that may be impossible to keep. It is also a means of guarding or binding one’s identity—the I in I promise. Why does a nonhuman animal not make promises? Most don’t have a conception of themselves as individuals or a vested sense of identity. Yes, some animals may experience guilt, but guilt is not the same as the shame of breaking a longstanding promise. Nietzsche’s suggestion is that we ought to keep making resolutions—heartfelt, honest-to-God promises—lest we devolve into an animal-like state.

Nietzsche does not say, however, that we must keep our resolutions. Sometimes, many times, the cost is simply too high. To fulfill all promises unconditionally may be unwise, if not pig-headed and arrogant. For example, perhaps you committed to shedding a few pounds, but it turns out that your blood sugar plummets every time you go for more than two hours without a snack and you’re constantly on the verge of passing out. So that wasn’t a great resolution after all. Or you resolved not to go on any new dates and to focus on your career, but every morning you bump into the same lovely person at your favorite café. With new information, you just might need to leave some commitments behind. There’s no reason to feel guilty about that. The Romantic view of the self is that there’s no need to feel enslaved to an idea of ourselves that we wanted in the past. The self is forever in flux, changing, growing. The Romantic self is one that is ready to annihilate itself over and over again. As Nietzsche’s most famous protagonist Zarathustra says, “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”

For an existentialist an unwillingness to “burn yourself in your own flame,” to overcome or break a promise, can be a sign of “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a situation in which you disavow the immediate free will that is always at your disposal. Bad faith is “bad” because it denies the hard, metaphysical core of being human—radical freedom. Radical freedom means we are radically responsible both for keeping and for transgressing promises. The fragility of our promises is what makes them meaningful.

by John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Social Media Threat: People Learned to Survive Disease, We Can Handle Twitter

Society seems to be growing steadily crazier. And maybe it doesn’t just seem to be. Maybe it actually, is growing crazier.

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.

As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”

Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: “The Internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?” And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we’re in the same boat as the neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: Toxic ideas that spread like wildfire. (...)

... in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition. In early cities, after all, people had no idea how diseases spread, something we didn’t fully understand until the late 19th century. But rule-of-thumb sanitation made things a lot better over time. Also, populations eventually adapted: Diseases became endemic, not epidemic, and usually less severe as people developed immunity. And finally, as Scott notes, surviving disease was always a function of nutrition, with better-nourished populations doing much better than malnourished ones.

Maybe there are some lessons for us here. We don’t know much about the spread of ideas, or what would constitute the equivalent of intellectual indoor plumbing. (Censorship isn’t enough, as it often just promotes the spread of bad ideas that people in power like). Over time we’ll learn more. Maybe we’ll come up with something like the germ theory of disease for ideas.

And perhaps people will acclimate. Twitter is still new, and amplifies crazy opinions. People may learn to spend less time on social media or to avoid them altogether. (In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, the elites of the future consume their news on paper, and send each other handwritten notes; electronic communication is for the plebes.) But that will take time.

Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.

Better nourished minds are likely more resistant to social-media contagion. We’d better do something about it, before the real epidemic strikes.

by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. The author mentions Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age but perhaps a better example might be Snow Crash which imagines the spread of a mental virus via algorithmically designed bitmapped image. In terms of what can be done, 1) indoor plumbing: provide better access to mental health treatments and facilities at less expense, and remove research restrictions on so-called psychedelic pharmaceuticals (ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, etc); 2) immunity: establish regulations, guidelines, best practices - whatever - for social media that mitigate psychologically addictive programming (like you would for any drug, and require full disclosure and uses of all acquired data); 3) nourishment: agree with the author, more emphasis should be placed on humanities and civics instruction in schools (and not just old dead white guys and wars).] 

Eddie Vedder

repost

Smartphones Have an Unexpected New Rival

Last week, an Indian government official announced that iPhones will start rolling off an assembly line in Bangalore by the end of April, targeted at local customers. It's a big moment for Apple Inc., which is counting on India's emerging middle class to make up for slowing sales in other markets. But don't bet on the iPhone conquering India, or any other emerging market, just yet.

That's because smartphones of all kinds are facing stiff competition from an unlikely new challenger: feature phones. With simple handsets and small screens intended mostly for calls and text messages -- similar to the Nokia or Motorola you probably owned years ago -- a new generation of feature phones is suddenly looking like a threat to Apple and its rivals.

For a technology long ago left for dead, feature phones have lately made some impressive gains. After years of almost continuous decline, global shipments have grown for two consecutive quarters. Growth in emerging markets has been especially impressive: In Africa, feature-phone shipments surged 32 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2016, compared to a decline of 5.2 percent for smartphones. Expect that trend to continue, for a few reasons.

One obvious advantage is price. At the end of 2016, the average global price of a smartphone was $256, compared to $19.30 for a feature phone. In emerging markets, where even educated urbanites typically earn less than $10,000 a year (in India, they average $5,385), that doesn't leave much in the way of consumer choice. But even if a buyer has $256 to spare, the booming secondhand market offers far better options than a smartphone. In Ghana, where I recently spent a few weeks, $256 will buy a used Pentium III desktop computer, a flat-screen monitor, a satellite dish and a decoder box to pirate satellite television broadcasts.

Another factor is battery life. In many emerging markets, where electricity service can be intermittent, smartphones that have to be recharged each day can't compete against feature phones that can now go for weeks on a single charge. In West Africa, it's the rare smartphone owner who doesn't also carry a feature phone as a hedge against missing calls and messages due to battery depletion. Equally important, most emerging-market customers prepay for voice and data, making smartphones that passively eat up bandwidth a major inconvenience.

by Adam Minter, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Can These Seabirds Adapt Fast Enough to Survive a Melting Arctic?

On Cooper Island, there aren’t many rules. But one rule that is wordlessly respected is you never look directly at South Beach, because South Beach is the designated bathroom, sited on a gravel sandbar so flat you can take a headcount of all inhabitants from a mile away, no lenses required.

Another rule is you shouldn’t go out alone, but if you do, you should take a walkie-talkie and a shotgun, because you never know when a polar bear might show up, and if one does, you don’t want the polar bear between you and the cabin, the only structure on the island that might sustain a clawed assault.

Not that I know how to fire a shotgun, much less how to disable a starving bear keen on making me its meal. But rules are rules, so I carry one anyway.

When camping on an island a short boat ride from the northernmost point of Alaska, it’s difficult not to fixate on the bears, one of the few remaining animals that make humans prey. When bears do visit, though, they’re still not the most charismatic megafauna on Cooper Island. That distinction goes to George Divoky, a septuagenarian who’s spent nearly 11 cumulative years here. By the time I reach Cooper Island on August 7, Divoky has been here for two months. Between his mop of gray hair and unkempt beard—there are no mirrors in the South Beach bathroom—shine bright darting eyes that don’t miss much. He wears what you might expect of an Arctic field ornithologist: rain pants and a parka flecked with splatters of bird poop and undergirded with wool-sweater strata.

But few remember Divoky for his appearance; it’s the words that pour from his mouth like water from a burst dam that define him. Any object in his periphery can inspire a story, told in fractal spurts and with oppressive detail, and if he’s interrupted—by a question, a task, another thought—he’ll return to his story minutes later, as if the world paused in wait of his next word.

His lingual floodwaters can be disorienting and, to some, off-putting. A lifelong outsider in self-imposed exile, Divoky commands a conversation and is prone to unwittingly drowning out its more subdued participants with his contrarian convictions. But it’s hard to blame him, for you, the conversant, are the odd one here on Cooper Island, a mere visitor in his world. For the past 43 years, he’s spent every summer here, usually in a tent, and usually by himself.

Even so, the island’s other seasonal inhabitants—the colony of Black Guillemots that nest here every summer—hold a greater claim to Cooper than Divoky. They are the reason he’s here, and their progenitors were here first. It was July 6, 1972, when a Coast Guard icebreaker dropped him off for a seabird survey, that he discovered 10 pairs of the handsome seabirds nesting under scattered debris—ammo boxes, floorboards, and innumerable wood planks—abandoned by the U.S. Navy after the Korean War. His find was a northern range expansion for the species in Alaska.

Like a kid flipping rocks to find salamanders, a 26-year-old Divoky flipped boards and boxes to search for eggs and create new nesting crevices. By the end of the summer, his nest count for the island was up to 18. When he returned to Washington, D.C., for a fellowship at the Smithsonian, he couldn’t stop thinking about Cooper Island. He was struck by the scientific potential of its accessible nest sites and seduced by the opportunity to indulge himself in solitary nature. He soon relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, and by 1975 got his hands on enough funding to return to Cooper Island for an entire summer. He hasn’t missed one since, serially sacrificing employers and girlfriends who demanded he choose between them and the guillemots.

“You have to be careful what you fall in love with in your twenties,” he says, unprompted, one evening. “I fell in love with this island.”

Divoky returned each summer to watch the colony mature, collecting meticulous data—growth, breeding, feeding, kinship—on every nesting pair and chick, and banding every adult and fledgling. The colony thrived, and grew to 200 breeding pairs by 1989. Since then, it’s taken a turn for the worse, slowly at first and then into free-fall, and Divoky now cares for an island and its birds in decline. “I used to see chicks hatch, and I’d see them grow, and they had an 85 to 90 percent chance of flying away,” he says. This year 85 pairs bred on the island, fledging just 45 chicks out of 120 hatched—not enough to maintain the colony’s population.

Nearly all the causes for this decline—changes in food, competitors, and predators—track the warmer air, warmer ocean water, and retreat of sea ice near Cooper Island, all symptoms of global climate change caused by carbon dioxide. These molecules build up in the atmosphere and trap heat, like the layers of blankets required to sleep through the night on a sandbar on the Beaufort Sea. Somewhat ironically, if it weren’t for climate change, guillemots may never have nested on Cooper in the first place: Until the late 1960s, snow blanketed the ground for too much of the summer.

“During my research lifetime, Cooper Island will no longer be able to support this species,” Divoky says. “It went from too cold to too warm. It should have taken centuries, not decades.”

And yet he keeps coming back to watch his beloved island decline, collecting as much data as he can along the way. Through his ruthless devotion, Divoky has created one of the few ecological studies with enough long-term, rigorously collected data to illuminate how climate change will force populations through an evolutionary bottleneck unlike any seen since the last ice age. And the only reason we have even this glimpse is because of Divoky, a rare bird indeed. (...)

His study also has particular power because of dumb luck: It happens to cover a period of rapid atmospheric warming. Most scientists studying the biological impacts of climate change can’t define “normal” for a given species or ecosystem, and now it’s too late; the effects are manifest. But Divoky spent his first 28 years following individual birds, individual chicks, their partners, their offspring, through their entire lives—surely enough data to describe a normal, functioning Mandt’s Black Guillemot colony. “At one point, he had the whole story told in his mind,” says Stan Senner, vice president of bird conservation for Audubon’s Pacific Flyway and Divoky’s long-time friend. “The birds are there, the ice is near shore, the cod are associated with the ice, the birds don’t have to go very far, they get the cod. Life is good.”

Then everything changed. For the first 28 years of Divoky’s study, chicks ate cod almost exclusively. But in 2003 parents began serving fourhorn sculpin, an ugly fish with a lumpy head and spiny fins. Divoky would find chicks choked dead with enormous sculpin lodged in their throats. Parents eventually learned to catch smaller sculpin, but chicks still suffered. “It takes a long time to break down all that cartilaginous mass” in sculpin fins, Divoky says. Just one fish is enough to fill a chick’s stomach. “It’s like, ‘I can’t get anything else down, I’ve still got the last sculpin head in my stomach.’"

The ensuing hunger makes siblings turn aggressive: In many nests the larger chick bullies the smaller one, sometimes to starvation. As we examine one nest, Divoky points to matted, thin feathers on the back of one beta’s neck—physical evidence of aggression. Under the sculpin regime, chicks grow more slowly and fledge at less than 300 grams. Nearly one quarter starve in their nests.

It’s an ugly scene, but the parents are doing their best as they face a novel Arctic landscape. The sea ice that previously drifted and persisted near the island through the summer is now melted and effectively gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away—by August or even July. Arctic cod can’t survive in warm water south of the ice, and guillemot parents can’t fly fast enough to make additional trips to the edge every day. So they’ve decided that more sculpin, for all its faults, is a better bet than fewer cod. “This is a pivotal time,” Divoky says. “You can see the size of the chicks now. They need all the energy they can get. And the primary prey is gone.” (...)

If seabirds are barometers of ocean health, then Arctic birds are screaming that there’s a major shift in the system, a shift so extreme the barometers themselves are now changing. Make no mistake: These seabirds, and other species across the Arctic, are entering a period of rapid natural selection that will lead to either their extinction or evolution.

by Hannah Waters, Audubon |  Read more:

Image: Peter Mather

[ed. I met George back in the early 80s when we were both involved with OCSEAP, a massive multi-disciplinary research effort designed to provide baseline environmental information for making informed oil and gas decisions in Alaska (studies which no one seems to remember nowadays, even currrent scientists working in Alaska). He contributed the research, I took the data and developed state policy on federal lease sales, which came to encompass the entire Alaskan coastline and all offshore federal waters (an accelerated process under President Reagan and his then Secretary of the Interior, James Watt). Stan Senner was a good friend and colleague as well. Nice to see those guys still at it. I wish I were still there sometimes.]

Collings Guitars

[ed. Sad I am today. I just learned that Bill Collings died last July and somehow I missed it. I've owned several Collings guitars over the years and have played probably a couple hundred others. Every one was fantastic. A few were other-worldly.  Rest in peace, Bill... ya did good. Bill Collings: 1948–2017]

Bussed Out

Quinn Raber arrived at a San Francisco bus station lugging a canvas bag containing all of his belongings: jeans, socks, underwear, pajamas. It was 1pm on a typically overcast day in August.

An unassuming 27-year-old, Raber seemed worn down: his skin was sun-reddened, he was unshaven, and a hat was pulled over his ruffled blond hair. After showing the driver a one-way ticket purchased for him by the city of San Francisco, he climbed the steps of the Greyhound bus.

He traveled 2,275 miles over three days to reach his destination: Indianapolis.

Cities have been offering homeless people free bus tickets to relocate elsewhere for at least three decades. In recent years, homeless relocation programs have become more common, sprouting up in new cities across the country and costing the public millions of dollars.

But until now there has never been a systematic, nationwide assessment of the consequences. Where are these people being moved to? What impact are these programs having on the cities that send and the cities that receive them? And what happens to these homeless people after they reach their destination?

In an 18-month investigation, the Guardian has conducted the first detailed analysis of America’s homeless relocation programs, compiling a database of around 34,240 journeys and analyzing their effect on cities and people.

A count earlier this year found half a million homeless people on one night in America. The problem is most severe in the west, where rates of homelessness are skyrocketing in a number of major cities, and where states like California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have some of the highest rates of per capita homelessness.

These are also the states where homeless relocation programs are concentrated. Using public record laws, the Guardian obtained data from 16 cities and counties that give homeless people free bus tickets to live elsewhere.

The data from these cities has been compiled to build the first comprehensive picture of America’s homeless relocation programs. Over the past six years, the period for which our data is most complete, we are able to track where more than 20,000 homeless people have been sent to and from within the mainland US. (...)

Some of these journeys provide a route out of homelessness, and many recipients of free tickets said they are grateful for the opportunity for a fresh start. Returning to places they previously lived, many rediscover old support networks, finding a safe place to sleep, caring friends or family, and the stepping stones that lead, eventually, to their own home.

Nan Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said bus programs can be a “positive”, although not a panacea, in part because most people are homeless in places they are from.

That is far from the whole story, however.

While the stated goal of San Francisco’s Homeward Bound and similar programs is helping people, the schemes also serve the interests of cities, which view free bus tickets as a cheap and effective way of cutting their homeless populations.

People are routinely sent thousands of miles away after only a cursory check by authorities to establish they have a suitable place to stay once they get there. Some said they feel pressured into taking tickets, and others described ending up on the streets within weeks of their arrival.

Jeff Weinberger, co-founder of the Florida Homelessness Action Coalition, a not-for-profit that operates in a state with four bus programs, said the schemes are a “smoke-and-mirrors ruse tantamount to shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than reducing homelessness”.

“Once they get you out of their city, they really don’t care what happens to you.”

by Outside in America Team, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Guardian

Arteluce, Wall Applique (Attributed), Circa 1965.
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Why Bitcoin’s $10,000 Price Doesn’t Reflect Its True Value

Bitcoin finally hits $10,000! — The Economist, Nov. 28th, 2017

Bitcoin surpasses the $10,000 milestone! — CNBC, Nov. 28th, 2017

BITCOIN SOARS ABOVE $11,000! — The Guardian, Nov. 29th, 2017

News outlets haven’t even had 24 hours to let the “10K” news simmer and it already climbed to $11,500. By the time they published the “11K” piece, it already dropped back to $9,000. Then, as soon as they entered the last word on their “Bitcoin is crashing!” article, it’s back at $11,000 per BTC.

Amazing! But this is not unprecedented.

We’ve seen this before, back in 2013, a media frenzy when Bitcoin was approaching $1,000 that fueled that year’s bubble. In January of that year, one bitcoin was trading at around $15.00, rocketed to $266 by April, and then crashed back to $50 really quick. By November, it had already broken $1,000, peaking at $1,242 on Mt.Gox. That’s an almost 100-fold increase in 11 months, an order of magnitude larger than this year’s (2017) 10-fold run up.

Funny thing is, the charts then are almost identical to the ones today, and news articles look exactly the same. Just add one zero.

The media gobbles this up because people are fascinated by this stuff. Stories of people finding 5000 BTC in an old hard drive that they bought for $25 in 2009, a man throwing away 7500 BTC by accident and scouring a landfill to try and find it, a man buying pizzas for 10,000 BTC — It’s the sizzle to the steak and it sells.

The Other Side

People love it when things go up, but what goes up must come down, and Bitcoin is not immune to this. History shows three major “Bitcoin Bubbles”, and a LOT of volatility in between. Swings of 20–30% in one day are not uncommon in the Bitcoin world, but to most people this can be quite terrifying. For example, in the same day when Bitcoin broke $11,500 a couple of days ago, Bitcoin crashed back to $9,600, and lost 20% of its value overnight.

It isn’t just that, there are more. There’s that time it crashed from $260 to $50. Bitcoin was declared dead. (...)

The Bitcoin Hype-Cycle

The peculiar thing about Bitcoin’s price is that it has these cycles. First, a slow and steady accumulation by people who understand the tech and buy it when it is ignored as worthless. This is usually after the price had just “crashed”. Then it starts to reach a point where the media picks up its growth. And then, a parabolic buying frenzy where even your grandma starts buying Bitcoins. Finally, after reaching a dramatic peak, it finally pops and drops, leaving only those who believe in the tech and support it even after a crash. Back to square one,with a bigger base price and a larger user base. Rinse, repeat.

The Obsession with the Price While Overlooking the Value

Price is not equal to value. The price of water is cheap, but it is pretty valuable. We will die without it! If water suddenly became scarce, its market price would skyrocket. In a zombie/nuclear holocaust apocalypse scenario, your gold would bet worth much less than water, guaranteed. Today, simple bottled water is, in a lot of places, more expensive than gasoline per liter, when two decades ago the idea of buying water at all was considered crazy. The market decides on the price, but the value of something lies outside its price.

In the same way, the value of Bitcoin has nothing to do with its exchange rate.

When Bitcoin was worth exactly zero dollars, it already essentially solved the previously unsolvable 30-year old computer science problem called the Byzantine General’s problem — how to reach agreement with other agents over an untrusted network of communication. That value proposition was there from day zero, even if the price of one Bitcoin was zero.

“A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.” Satoshi Nakamoto, 2009

Because of Bitcoin, we don’t need middlemen to transact — hell, we eliminated the need for trust. We can transfer value over the internet without asking permission from a gatekeeper. The internet did this for the transfer of information, whereas before, we had to go to the post office to send mail, through a telephone operator to call someone overseas, or a publisher to let the world read about our stories and ideas. Bitcoin is doing this today, letting us store value like never before and transfer value from one owner to another without permission, globally, and instantly.

Just like how the value of your paper money is not in the paper itself but in the government or authority that issues this paper, the value of Bitcoin is not in the tokens used to exchange with each other, but in the network that allows this exchange to happen.

The price of Bitcoin is the least interesting thing about it. The value of Bitcoin is in its ability to do what it set out to do, and do it best. When you truly understand the technology, you’ll realize it’s true value.

by Miguel Cuneta, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Iced tea company rebrands as “Long Blockchain” and stock price triples. Insanity.]

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Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra

[ed. For some inscrutable reason (money, probably) you have to click over to YouTube's site to view this video (or use this link). You won't be disappointed.]

A Dissent from Judis’ Dissent

Let me gently dissent from John Judis’s argument that we’re missing the impact the GOP tax bill will have over public opinion over the next year.

First, points of agreement.

Deficits, debt and inequality in the abstract have seldom been major political drivers of opinion about big legislation. The 2001 Bush tax cut is a good example. It was wildly weighted toward benefits to the wealthiest Americans. That was bad policy, set the country up for fiscal problems later in the decade and deepened the trend to greater income and wealth inequality. But it also did give small but still meaningful tax relief to ordinary families. It wasn’t terribly popular but it almost wasn’t terribly unpopular. That made it hard to mount any significant or effective opposition to it. By and large voters, not surprisingly, are much more focused on what they are getting than whether someone else is getting something more. The fact that some super wealthy person was getting a lot more than you were was a distant and not terribly compelling reality or lever of opposition.

It is also true that wealth and wage inequality, articulated in the ways progressives usually discuss it, doesn’t have a huge or immediate political traction, even though it is a hugely influential subtext and driver to our entire politics.

John argues that just because the bill is terrible big picture doesn’t mean its near and medium term politics will be bad for Republicans. Democrats are ignoring the fact that it does provide significant, if short-term tax relief for many middle income earners, specifically through expanding the child tax credit and nearly doubling the standard deduction. Yes, those are temporary and they disappear in 2025 or whenever. But you’ve got to be pretty deep into politics to think in those terms. If you are, you likely have settled partisan opinions already.

But if these are all the case, why is the bill at present so deeply unpopular?

Remember, it’s one thing for a big tax increase to be unpopular. Even when it’s good policy very few people want to pay higher taxes. The same applies when you’re doing something like Obamacare which upsets lots of apple carts, even if many people are helped. Big tax cuts should be popular, even if they’re bad policy. But this bill is far more unpopular than any major tax cut bill in the last half century. Indeed, it is more unpopular than the last generation’s two major tax hike bills. That’s kind of amazing. It’s substantially less popular than Obamacare was just after it was passed. Perhaps that’s a funny analogy for Democrats to make. But remember, the passage of Obamacare preceded a massive wave election in 2010.

So again, why is this bill so deeply unpopular?

I think there are essentially three reasons.

One is partisan affiliation and identification. Donald Trump and the GOP are behind it. And they’re both deeply unpopular. So voters, not unreasonably, apply that negativity to a bill they favor.

The second factor, somewhat more substantively, is that Democrats have been successful at painting the bill as essentially a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. This isn’t just a paint job. That’s what it is. They have been helped by an endless stream of news about the details of what the plan does.

We also need to take account of the last 10 months in which the Trump GOP tried repeatedly to take health care coverage from 10s of millions of Americans. They went at it so hard they pretty much gave up arguing that this would not be the consequence of what they were doing. They just wanted to do it. In doing so, they actually made Obamacare a lot more popular. Trump and Republicans have spent almost a year trying to take benefits from ordinary people to give money back to people who are either very wealthy or extremely wealthy. This reality (combined with other confirming events over the last year) has become deeply embedded in the public psyche. And it is the prism through which voters are viewing this bill. That is key.

There’s a more specific factor that has taken hold in part because of the Obamacare repeal fights, in part because of Trump himself and the plutocrats he’s surrounded himself with. The point I made about the Bush tax cuts above is that people care how things affect them. If I get some tax relief that’s my focus not the fact that someone richer did too, even if maybe they got more than they really needed. But polling shows that a majority of Americans think the big payoffs to the wealthy in this bill are coming at their expense. That is a significant difference from the Bush 2001 tax cut bill and the Reagan one twenty years earlier. Whether that is because of the substance of the bill itself or the Trump prism through which voters are viewing it is uncertain. But it’s a major difference, a highly significant one and not one I expect to see change.

In other words, set aside that it is largely a major giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. The last year has cued the public up to assume that’s what it does.

The third factor has to do with specific ways this law actually hurts significant segments of the population which may not be the most needy but are politically vocal. Start with the end of the SALT deductions, the severe restriction on your ability to deduct what you pay in state and local taxes. This is a huge attack on relatively high tax blue states which will dramatically increase the already severe disparity in how much money blue states send to the federal government versus what they get back. This may not be terrible for poor and lower middle class taxpayers. But in states like California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other comparable states it will actually hit upper middle class and wealthy tax payers pretty hard. And those are people who tend to make their voices heard politically. Those changes will also affect more affluent homeowners.

Beyond this there are a number of changes down in the bill that hit various groups of tax payers because the bill writers needed to get the money for those corporate tax breaks. Those stories will start coming out in the coming months too.

Of course, socking it to blue states is a feature of the bill rather than a bug. But there’s a problem. There are a lot of Republican Reps in blue states. 14 in California. 9 in New York. 5 in New Jersey. 12 in Pennsylvania. In what looks to be a very challenging midterm election already, supporting that big a tax hike on your own constituents will be a tough vote to explain. In special elections to date, aside from differential turnout, the biggest area of Republican erosion has been in affluent and educated suburbs which lean Republican. In a lot of blue states those are just the places likely to be hit by these changes. A number of Reps voted against the bill for just that reason. But history suggests voters punish the party in power in these cases regardless of how their own Rep voted.

Now, the reply to all this is that whatever the bill’s unpopularity now, starting next year people are going to start seeing more money in their paychecks. They’ll see that it really was a tax cut for them too and their opinions will change.

Is that probable?

Not really.

We have a recent example, the legislation Obama and the Democrats passed in the midst of the financial crisis included temporary middle income tax cuts larger than the current cuts in this bill. Politically speaking it made no difference at all. Indeed, most people didn’t even realize they’d gotten a tax cut.

Some of that may have been that the Democrats did a poor job selling the bill. I do think that’s part of the equation. The bigger factor, however, is that the overriding narrative of the Democrats first two years of complete control of the federal government was that they’d raised some taxes and spent a lot of money on new programs and stimulus relief. The tax cuts the great majority of people got just didn’t change that equation, certainly not for people already inclined to see what the Democrats were doing in negative terms. What all of that comes down to is that there’s little reason to think that small but non-trivial changes in the amount of take home pay will make an unpopular bill popular. We have evidence for this. It’s recent and I think pretty on-point.

What does tend to drive election opinion is the broader economy. There’s a lot of historical support for that. But that raises another problem, or really a mystery. The US economy has actually been doing quite well this year. Yet President Trump remains historically unpopular and big majorities of voters want Democrats to take over Congress. Maybe that will change next year. But it’s not clear why. Trump appears to be so divisive and so bad a President that the normal tendency to support incumbents during periods of good economic news does not appear to be working. Again, I would suggest this is a reason to question whether small changes in take home pay will change the public verdict on this bill.

The tax cut bill is unpopular first because its authors are very unpopular. It is also unpopular because of the disorderly and chaotic process in which it was constructed in which it was quite clear that the overriding goal was tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. A lot of the maneuvering was to find ways not to raise taxes too much on ordinary people so that it became impossible to pass. The overriding goal, however, was clear. So it is both the popular mood, the unpopularity of the President and the substance of the bill itself that is driving its low numbers. Recent evidence suggests that the relatively marginal short term benefits to middle income earners are not ones that will change anyone’s opinions. They’ll mainly confirm opinions of people already committed to supporting the President. Republicans are heading into a midterm election year with a historically unpopular president, coupled with polling which suggests wave-like numbers of people want the Democrats to take over Congress. Republicans have added to this by passing an extremely unpopular bill. Maybe it will start to get more popular and that will improve the position of congressional Republicans. But contrary to John’s claims about Democratic wish-fulfillment, this strikes me as magical thinking.

We shall see.

by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo |  Read more:

[ed. See also: Trump Was Warned and What To Think About That]

photo: markk

photo: markk

Chick Corea, Steve Gadd

[ed. The best jazz pianist and drummer alive. Check out the original version of this classic. See also: Al Jarreau's amazing vocal interpretation.]