Sunday, January 28, 2018
$21 Trillion in Unauthorized Government Spending; Defense Department to Conduct First-Ever Audit
Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.
The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)
Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).
The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.
“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.
Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending.
Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion,” he said. “So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.”
Skidmore and Fitts agreed to work together to investigate the issue further. Over the summer, two MSU graduate students searched government websites, especially the website of the Office of Inspector General, looking for similar documents dating to 1998. They found documents indicating a total $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments over the 1998-2015 period. (The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)
In a Dec. 8 Forbes column he co-authored with Laurence Kotlikoff, Skidmore said the “gargantuan nature” of the undocumented federal spending “should be a great concern to all taxpayers.”
“Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure,” the column concludes. “We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment.”
by Mark Skidmore and Andy Henion, MSU Today | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. That's trillion, with a capital "T". See also: Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?]
The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)
Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.
“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.
Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending.
Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion,” he said. “So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.”
Skidmore and Fitts agreed to work together to investigate the issue further. Over the summer, two MSU graduate students searched government websites, especially the website of the Office of Inspector General, looking for similar documents dating to 1998. They found documents indicating a total $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments over the 1998-2015 period. (The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)
In a Dec. 8 Forbes column he co-authored with Laurence Kotlikoff, Skidmore said the “gargantuan nature” of the undocumented federal spending “should be a great concern to all taxpayers.”
“Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure,” the column concludes. “We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment.”
by Mark Skidmore and Andy Henion, MSU Today | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. That's trillion, with a capital "T". See also: Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?]
Joni Mitchell
In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn't see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all...
Lyrics
[ed. At the height of her super powers.]
How St. Augustine Invented Sex
He rescued Adam and Eve from obscurity, devised the doctrine of original sin—and the rest is sexual history.
One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-year-old boy and his father went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. At some point during their visit, the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his recently sprouted pubic hair. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and he went on to shape Christian theology for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, to explore the hidden recesses of the inner life, and to bequeath to all of us the conviction that there is something fundamentally damaged about the entire human species. There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past fifteen hundred years.
In the “Confessions,” written around 397, Augustine described what happened in the bathhouse many years earlier. That day, Patricius, his father, saw in him the signs of inquieta adulescentia, restless young manhood, and was—in Sarah Ruden’s new, strikingly colloquial translation—“over the moon” at the thought of someday soon having grandchildren. It is easy, even across a vast distance in time, to conjure up a teen-ager’s exquisite embarrassment. But what fixed itself in Augustine’s memory, instead, is something that happened when they got home: “In his glee he told my mother—it was the sort of tipsy glee in which this sorry world has forgotten you, its creator, and fallen in love instead with something you’ve created.” (Augustine’s “Confessions” are addressed to his God.) His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian and responded very differently. Since God had already started to build his temple in her breast, she “endured a violent spasm of reverent, tremulous trepidation.” The unbaptized adolescent’s sexual maturity had become the occasion—not the first and certainly not the last—for a serious rift between his parents.
Patricius did not concern himself with his son’s spiritual development in the light of Jesus, nor did he regard the evidence of his son’s virility with anything but delight. In response, Monica set out to drive a wedge between son and father. “She made a considerable bustle,” Augustine writes, admiringly, “to ensure that you, my God, were my father, rather than him.”
About one thing the father and mother agreed: their brilliant son should obtain the education his gifts deserved. The young Augustine had been sent to study in the pleasant town of Madauros and had shown remarkable facility in literary interpretation and performance. The university at Carthage seemed within reach—followed, possibly, by a lucrative career in law or public speaking. Patricius, a man of modest means, scrimped and networked for a year to collect the needed funds. When Augustine left Thagaste, he must have seen his father for the last time, for in the “Confessions” he mentions that when he was seventeen Patricius died. The mention is a conspicuously cool one.
If the grieving widow also felt some relief at his death—given that he was a dangerous influence on her beloved son—any hopes she might have had that Augustine would embark at once on the path of chastity were quickly dashed. “I came to Carthage,” he writes, “to the center of a skillet where outrageous love affairs hissed all around me.” His confession that he polluted “the shared channel of friendship with putrid rutting” sounds like an overheated account of masturbation or homosexuality; other, equally intense and equally cryptic phrases evoke a succession of unhappy affairs with women. The feverish promiscuity, if that is what it was, resolved fairly quickly into something quite stable. Within a year or two, Augustine had settled down with a woman with whom he lived and to whom, in his account, he was faithful for the next fourteen years.
The arrangement was probably the best that Monica could have envisaged at this stage for her son, given his restless sexual energies. What she most feared was a hasty marriage that might hinder his career. Merely living with a woman posed much less of a threat, even when the woman gave birth to a son, Adeodatus. By the standards of the time, the relationship was a respectable one. At least from Augustine’s perspective—and that is the only perspective we have—there was no thought of his marrying the woman, whose name he does not even bother to provide. He expects his readers to understand the difference “between the sanctioned scope of marriage, a bond contracted for the purpose of producing children, and a deal arising from lustful infatuation.”
Priding himself on his intelligence and his literary sensitivity, he studied law; he honed his rhetorical skills; he entered dramatic competitions; he consulted astrologers; he mastered the complex, sinuous system of thought associated with the Persian cult known as Manichaeanism. Augustine carried his Manichaeanism, along with his mistress and his son, from Carthage to Thagaste, where he taught literature, and then back to Carthage, where he gave courses on public speaking, and then to Milan, where he took up an illustrious professorship of rhetoric.
In Augustine’s decade-long ascent, there was one major problem, and her name was Monica. When he arrived at Thagaste for his first teaching position, Augustine’s mother was loath to share a house with him, not because of his mistress and child but, rather, because of his Manichaean beliefs. Those beliefs—the conviction that there were two forces, one good and the other evil, at war in the universe—were repugnant to her, and she made a conspicuous show of weeping bitterly, as if her son had died.
Her tears were redoubled when, back at Carthage, he prepared to leave for Rome: “She was hanging onto me coercively, trying to either stop my journey or come along with me on it.” Lying, he told her that he was only seeing off a friend, and persuaded her to spend the night at a shrine near the harbor. “I got away, and got away with it.”
The son must have felt some guilt. And yet, in remembering this moment, he allowed himself for once to express some anger toward his mother: “Her longing, which was physical, was taking a beating from the justified whip of sorrow.” The phrase Augustine uses for this longing—carnale desiderium—might seem more appropriate for a lover than for a mother. Monica had taken whatever was blocked or unsatisfied in her relationship with her husband and transferred it to her son. Augustine, suffocating, had to flee. And the suffering that his escape visited upon her was, he reflects, her due as a woman: “these tortures revealed the vestiges of Eve she had within her, as with groans she searched for what she had given birth to with groans.”
In Genesis, the consequence of Eve’s disobedience is twofold: women are condemned to bring forth children in pain and to yearn for the husbands who dominate them. As Augustine looks back at his relation to his mother, child and husband are merged in him: she brought him with sorrow into the world and she sought him with sorrow through the world. For his grieving mother’s search for her son did not end at the harbor in Carthage. A few years later, when Augustine took up his post in Milan, Monica sailed from North Africa to join him.
This time, he did not flee. Though he was not ready to be baptized a Catholic, he told his mother that he had been deeply impressed by Ambrose, the Catholic bishop of Milan. Ambrose’s powerful sermons helped to undermine Augustine’s contempt for the apparent crudeness of the Bible’s stories. What had originally struck him as absurdities began to seem like profound mysteries. His long-held intellectual and aesthetic certainties were crumbling.
All the while, Augustine’s career continued on its course. He met his students in the morning, and spent his afternoons with his close friends, discussing philosophy. His mother, now settled in his household, sought to change her son’s life. She busied herself with arranging a favorable marriage, and found a suitable Catholic heiress whose parents agreed to the match. The girl was almost two years shy of marriageable age, though, and so the wedding had to wait.
In the meantime, Monica engineered another change in her son’s life. The woman with whom he had been living “was torn from my side, because she was supposed to be an obstacle to my marriage,” Augustine writes. “My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood.” Of his mistress’s feelings, he gives us no glimpse, noting simply, “She went back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man.” Then she is gone from his account, leaving him with the gnawing sexual appetite that she had served to appease. He quickly took another mistress.
Yet, as he soon came to testify, God’s grace works in strange ways. In little more than a year’s time, Augustine had converted to the Catholic faith. Shortly thereafter, now baptized, he broke off his engagement to marry, resigned his professorship, vowed himself to perpetual chastity, and determined to return to Africa and found a monastic community. By running away from his mother, he had, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual journey that would surpass her utmost dreams.
Characteristically, he was able to embrace Lady Continence, as he put it, only in the context of a much larger rethinking of the nature of sexuality. He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by projecting himself back into the remotest human past.
In the Roman port of Ostia, a few days before setting sail for Africa, Augustine and his mother were standing by a window that looked out onto an enclosed garden, and talking intimately. Their conversation, serene and joyful, led them to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure, no matter how great, could ever match the happiness of the saints. And then, “stretching upward with a more fiery emotion,” Augustine and Monica experienced something remarkable: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. And “while we were speaking and panting for it, with a thrust that required all the heart’s strength, we brushed against it slightly.”
It is difficult to convey in translation the power of the account, and of what it meant for the thirty-two-year-old son and the fifty-five-year-old mother to reach this climax together. Then it was over: suspiravimus. “We sighed,” Augustine writes, and returned to the sound of their speech.
The moment of ecstasy that Augustine and his mother shared was the most intense experience in his life—perhaps, as Rebecca West remarked, “the most intense experience ever commemorated.” A few days later, Monica fell ill, and died soon after. The “Confessions” does not take the story of Augustine’s life further. Instead, it turns to a philosophical meditation on memory and an interpretation of the opening of Genesis, as if that were where his whole autobiography had been heading. Why Genesis? And why, in the years that followed, did his attention come to focus particularly on the story of Adam and Eve?
Pagans ridiculed that story as primitive and ethically incoherent. How could a god worthy of respect try to keep humans from the knowledge of good and evil? Jews and Christians of any sophistication preferred not to dwell upon it or distanced themselves by treating it as an allegory. For Philo, a Greek-speaking Jew in first-century Alexandria, the first human—the human of the first chapter of Genesis—was not a creature of flesh and blood but a Platonic idea. For Origen, a third-century Christian, Paradise was not a place but a condition of the soul.
The archaic story of the naked man and woman, the talking snake, and the magical trees was something of an embarrassment. It was Augustine who rescued it from the decorous oblivion to which it seemed to be heading. He bears principal responsibility for its prominence, including the fact that four in ten Americans today profess to believe in its literal truth. During the more than forty years that succeeded his momentous conversion—years of endless controversy and the wielding of power and feverish writing—he persuaded himself that it was no mere fable or myth. It was the key to everything.
In the “Confessions,” written around 397, Augustine described what happened in the bathhouse many years earlier. That day, Patricius, his father, saw in him the signs of inquieta adulescentia, restless young manhood, and was—in Sarah Ruden’s new, strikingly colloquial translation—“over the moon” at the thought of someday soon having grandchildren. It is easy, even across a vast distance in time, to conjure up a teen-ager’s exquisite embarrassment. But what fixed itself in Augustine’s memory, instead, is something that happened when they got home: “In his glee he told my mother—it was the sort of tipsy glee in which this sorry world has forgotten you, its creator, and fallen in love instead with something you’ve created.” (Augustine’s “Confessions” are addressed to his God.) His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian and responded very differently. Since God had already started to build his temple in her breast, she “endured a violent spasm of reverent, tremulous trepidation.” The unbaptized adolescent’s sexual maturity had become the occasion—not the first and certainly not the last—for a serious rift between his parents.Patricius did not concern himself with his son’s spiritual development in the light of Jesus, nor did he regard the evidence of his son’s virility with anything but delight. In response, Monica set out to drive a wedge between son and father. “She made a considerable bustle,” Augustine writes, admiringly, “to ensure that you, my God, were my father, rather than him.”
About one thing the father and mother agreed: their brilliant son should obtain the education his gifts deserved. The young Augustine had been sent to study in the pleasant town of Madauros and had shown remarkable facility in literary interpretation and performance. The university at Carthage seemed within reach—followed, possibly, by a lucrative career in law or public speaking. Patricius, a man of modest means, scrimped and networked for a year to collect the needed funds. When Augustine left Thagaste, he must have seen his father for the last time, for in the “Confessions” he mentions that when he was seventeen Patricius died. The mention is a conspicuously cool one.
If the grieving widow also felt some relief at his death—given that he was a dangerous influence on her beloved son—any hopes she might have had that Augustine would embark at once on the path of chastity were quickly dashed. “I came to Carthage,” he writes, “to the center of a skillet where outrageous love affairs hissed all around me.” His confession that he polluted “the shared channel of friendship with putrid rutting” sounds like an overheated account of masturbation or homosexuality; other, equally intense and equally cryptic phrases evoke a succession of unhappy affairs with women. The feverish promiscuity, if that is what it was, resolved fairly quickly into something quite stable. Within a year or two, Augustine had settled down with a woman with whom he lived and to whom, in his account, he was faithful for the next fourteen years.
The arrangement was probably the best that Monica could have envisaged at this stage for her son, given his restless sexual energies. What she most feared was a hasty marriage that might hinder his career. Merely living with a woman posed much less of a threat, even when the woman gave birth to a son, Adeodatus. By the standards of the time, the relationship was a respectable one. At least from Augustine’s perspective—and that is the only perspective we have—there was no thought of his marrying the woman, whose name he does not even bother to provide. He expects his readers to understand the difference “between the sanctioned scope of marriage, a bond contracted for the purpose of producing children, and a deal arising from lustful infatuation.”
Priding himself on his intelligence and his literary sensitivity, he studied law; he honed his rhetorical skills; he entered dramatic competitions; he consulted astrologers; he mastered the complex, sinuous system of thought associated with the Persian cult known as Manichaeanism. Augustine carried his Manichaeanism, along with his mistress and his son, from Carthage to Thagaste, where he taught literature, and then back to Carthage, where he gave courses on public speaking, and then to Milan, where he took up an illustrious professorship of rhetoric.
In Augustine’s decade-long ascent, there was one major problem, and her name was Monica. When he arrived at Thagaste for his first teaching position, Augustine’s mother was loath to share a house with him, not because of his mistress and child but, rather, because of his Manichaean beliefs. Those beliefs—the conviction that there were two forces, one good and the other evil, at war in the universe—were repugnant to her, and she made a conspicuous show of weeping bitterly, as if her son had died.
Her tears were redoubled when, back at Carthage, he prepared to leave for Rome: “She was hanging onto me coercively, trying to either stop my journey or come along with me on it.” Lying, he told her that he was only seeing off a friend, and persuaded her to spend the night at a shrine near the harbor. “I got away, and got away with it.”
The son must have felt some guilt. And yet, in remembering this moment, he allowed himself for once to express some anger toward his mother: “Her longing, which was physical, was taking a beating from the justified whip of sorrow.” The phrase Augustine uses for this longing—carnale desiderium—might seem more appropriate for a lover than for a mother. Monica had taken whatever was blocked or unsatisfied in her relationship with her husband and transferred it to her son. Augustine, suffocating, had to flee. And the suffering that his escape visited upon her was, he reflects, her due as a woman: “these tortures revealed the vestiges of Eve she had within her, as with groans she searched for what she had given birth to with groans.”
In Genesis, the consequence of Eve’s disobedience is twofold: women are condemned to bring forth children in pain and to yearn for the husbands who dominate them. As Augustine looks back at his relation to his mother, child and husband are merged in him: she brought him with sorrow into the world and she sought him with sorrow through the world. For his grieving mother’s search for her son did not end at the harbor in Carthage. A few years later, when Augustine took up his post in Milan, Monica sailed from North Africa to join him.
This time, he did not flee. Though he was not ready to be baptized a Catholic, he told his mother that he had been deeply impressed by Ambrose, the Catholic bishop of Milan. Ambrose’s powerful sermons helped to undermine Augustine’s contempt for the apparent crudeness of the Bible’s stories. What had originally struck him as absurdities began to seem like profound mysteries. His long-held intellectual and aesthetic certainties were crumbling.
All the while, Augustine’s career continued on its course. He met his students in the morning, and spent his afternoons with his close friends, discussing philosophy. His mother, now settled in his household, sought to change her son’s life. She busied herself with arranging a favorable marriage, and found a suitable Catholic heiress whose parents agreed to the match. The girl was almost two years shy of marriageable age, though, and so the wedding had to wait.
In the meantime, Monica engineered another change in her son’s life. The woman with whom he had been living “was torn from my side, because she was supposed to be an obstacle to my marriage,” Augustine writes. “My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood.” Of his mistress’s feelings, he gives us no glimpse, noting simply, “She went back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man.” Then she is gone from his account, leaving him with the gnawing sexual appetite that she had served to appease. He quickly took another mistress.
Yet, as he soon came to testify, God’s grace works in strange ways. In little more than a year’s time, Augustine had converted to the Catholic faith. Shortly thereafter, now baptized, he broke off his engagement to marry, resigned his professorship, vowed himself to perpetual chastity, and determined to return to Africa and found a monastic community. By running away from his mother, he had, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual journey that would surpass her utmost dreams.
Characteristically, he was able to embrace Lady Continence, as he put it, only in the context of a much larger rethinking of the nature of sexuality. He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by projecting himself back into the remotest human past.
In the Roman port of Ostia, a few days before setting sail for Africa, Augustine and his mother were standing by a window that looked out onto an enclosed garden, and talking intimately. Their conversation, serene and joyful, led them to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure, no matter how great, could ever match the happiness of the saints. And then, “stretching upward with a more fiery emotion,” Augustine and Monica experienced something remarkable: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. And “while we were speaking and panting for it, with a thrust that required all the heart’s strength, we brushed against it slightly.”
It is difficult to convey in translation the power of the account, and of what it meant for the thirty-two-year-old son and the fifty-five-year-old mother to reach this climax together. Then it was over: suspiravimus. “We sighed,” Augustine writes, and returned to the sound of their speech.
The moment of ecstasy that Augustine and his mother shared was the most intense experience in his life—perhaps, as Rebecca West remarked, “the most intense experience ever commemorated.” A few days later, Monica fell ill, and died soon after. The “Confessions” does not take the story of Augustine’s life further. Instead, it turns to a philosophical meditation on memory and an interpretation of the opening of Genesis, as if that were where his whole autobiography had been heading. Why Genesis? And why, in the years that followed, did his attention come to focus particularly on the story of Adam and Eve?
Pagans ridiculed that story as primitive and ethically incoherent. How could a god worthy of respect try to keep humans from the knowledge of good and evil? Jews and Christians of any sophistication preferred not to dwell upon it or distanced themselves by treating it as an allegory. For Philo, a Greek-speaking Jew in first-century Alexandria, the first human—the human of the first chapter of Genesis—was not a creature of flesh and blood but a Platonic idea. For Origen, a third-century Christian, Paradise was not a place but a condition of the soul.
The archaic story of the naked man and woman, the talking snake, and the magical trees was something of an embarrassment. It was Augustine who rescued it from the decorous oblivion to which it seemed to be heading. He bears principal responsibility for its prominence, including the fact that four in ten Americans today profess to believe in its literal truth. During the more than forty years that succeeded his momentous conversion—years of endless controversy and the wielding of power and feverish writing—he persuaded himself that it was no mere fable or myth. It was the key to everything.
by Stephen Greenblatt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Malika Favre
[ed. Weird. See also: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve - a Review]
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Florida’s 1.5 Million Missing Voters
Everyone remembers that the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes in Florida. Far fewer remember another important number from the state that year — 620,000, the Floridians who were barred from voting because state records showed, correctly or not, they had been convicted of a felony.
It didn’t matter whether their crime was murder or driving with a suspended license, nor whether they had fully served their sentence. In Florida, the voting ban is entrenched in the Constitution, and it’s for life.
Today, Florida disenfranchises almost 1.5 million of its citizens, more than 11 states’ populations and roughly a quarter of the more than six million Americans who are unable to vote because of a criminal record.
Felon disenfranchisement is a destructive, pointless policy that hurts not only individuals barred from the ballot box, but American democracy at large. Its post-Civil War versions are explicitly racist, and its modern-day rationales are thin to nonexistent. It can make all the difference in places like Florida, which didn’t stop being competitive in 2000; the state remains a major presidential battleground, and victories for both parties in state and local elections are often narrow.
That could all change if a proposed constitutional amendment gets enough signatures to be placed on the ballot in November and wins enough support. The initiative would automatically restore voting rights to the vast majority of Floridians who have completed their sentence for a felony conviction, including any term of parole or probation.
This is a long overdue and urgently needed reform. The only way around Florida’s lifetime ban — as in the other three states with such a ban, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia — is a direct, personal appeal to the governor. In the last few years, Terry McAuliffe, as Virginia’s governor, restored voting rights to more than 168,000 people, and the governors in Kentucky and Iowa granted roughly 9 in 10 of the restoration requests they received in the first half of the decade.
In contrast, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida grants only 8 percent of the requests that come before the state’s clemency board, which he leads — for a total of only a few hundred people each year, even though there is a backlog of more than 10,000 petitions awaiting review.
Mr. Scott’s predecessor, Charlie Crist, took a far better approach, using his executive power to streamline the restoration process for certain classes of offenders, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies. Once people “have paid their debt, society should honor its part of the bargain and allow citizens to re-enter society,” he wrote in 2007. “To not do so is more than reckless or irresponsible, it is unjust.”
It’s hard to argue with that logic, but Mr. Scott found a way. Soon after taking office in 2011, he not only reversed Mr. Crist’s policies, but imposed a waiting period of at least five years after people had completed their sentences before they could plead with him to restore their voting rights. The message wasn’t meant to be welcoming, and Floridians have responded accordingly — the number of restoration requests has cratered during Mr. Scott’s tenure.
Anyone lucky enough to get a hearing before the governor has a few minutes to make his or her case for being a reformed citizen. These people, who have served their time and should not have to answer to anyone, must then endure condescending moral lectures from Mr. Scott and his cabinet members, who don’t have to provide any explanation for their decisions. In one case involving a man who had been convicted of manslaughter after drunken driving, Mr. Scott, whose microphone remained on, turned and whispered to a board member, “That’s how my uncle died.”
With condolences to Mr. Scott, this is absurd. The right to vote is the most meaningful mark of citizenship in a democracy. It should be withheld only in extreme circumstances, and its restoration shouldn’t depend on the whims of a governor. What’s worse, many of these laws, especially in the South, are inextricable from their racist origins. Florida’s was enacted in 1868 — two years after the state thumbed its nose at the 14th Amendment — with the intent to prevent newly freed black people from voting. Those effects linger today, as one in five black adults in Florida remain disenfranchised because of a criminal record.
The new initiative, which excludes people convicted of murder or sexual offenses, will be placed on the ballot if it receives 766,200 signatures and will take effect if it earns at least 60 percent of the vote. Its advocates have submitted more than one million signatures to date, although many still need to be verified before the Feb. 1 deadline.
It didn’t matter whether their crime was murder or driving with a suspended license, nor whether they had fully served their sentence. In Florida, the voting ban is entrenched in the Constitution, and it’s for life.
Today, Florida disenfranchises almost 1.5 million of its citizens, more than 11 states’ populations and roughly a quarter of the more than six million Americans who are unable to vote because of a criminal record.Felon disenfranchisement is a destructive, pointless policy that hurts not only individuals barred from the ballot box, but American democracy at large. Its post-Civil War versions are explicitly racist, and its modern-day rationales are thin to nonexistent. It can make all the difference in places like Florida, which didn’t stop being competitive in 2000; the state remains a major presidential battleground, and victories for both parties in state and local elections are often narrow.
That could all change if a proposed constitutional amendment gets enough signatures to be placed on the ballot in November and wins enough support. The initiative would automatically restore voting rights to the vast majority of Floridians who have completed their sentence for a felony conviction, including any term of parole or probation.
This is a long overdue and urgently needed reform. The only way around Florida’s lifetime ban — as in the other three states with such a ban, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia — is a direct, personal appeal to the governor. In the last few years, Terry McAuliffe, as Virginia’s governor, restored voting rights to more than 168,000 people, and the governors in Kentucky and Iowa granted roughly 9 in 10 of the restoration requests they received in the first half of the decade.
In contrast, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida grants only 8 percent of the requests that come before the state’s clemency board, which he leads — for a total of only a few hundred people each year, even though there is a backlog of more than 10,000 petitions awaiting review.
Mr. Scott’s predecessor, Charlie Crist, took a far better approach, using his executive power to streamline the restoration process for certain classes of offenders, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies. Once people “have paid their debt, society should honor its part of the bargain and allow citizens to re-enter society,” he wrote in 2007. “To not do so is more than reckless or irresponsible, it is unjust.”
It’s hard to argue with that logic, but Mr. Scott found a way. Soon after taking office in 2011, he not only reversed Mr. Crist’s policies, but imposed a waiting period of at least five years after people had completed their sentences before they could plead with him to restore their voting rights. The message wasn’t meant to be welcoming, and Floridians have responded accordingly — the number of restoration requests has cratered during Mr. Scott’s tenure.
Anyone lucky enough to get a hearing before the governor has a few minutes to make his or her case for being a reformed citizen. These people, who have served their time and should not have to answer to anyone, must then endure condescending moral lectures from Mr. Scott and his cabinet members, who don’t have to provide any explanation for their decisions. In one case involving a man who had been convicted of manslaughter after drunken driving, Mr. Scott, whose microphone remained on, turned and whispered to a board member, “That’s how my uncle died.”
With condolences to Mr. Scott, this is absurd. The right to vote is the most meaningful mark of citizenship in a democracy. It should be withheld only in extreme circumstances, and its restoration shouldn’t depend on the whims of a governor. What’s worse, many of these laws, especially in the South, are inextricable from their racist origins. Florida’s was enacted in 1868 — two years after the state thumbed its nose at the 14th Amendment — with the intent to prevent newly freed black people from voting. Those effects linger today, as one in five black adults in Florida remain disenfranchised because of a criminal record.
The new initiative, which excludes people convicted of murder or sexual offenses, will be placed on the ballot if it receives 766,200 signatures and will take effect if it earns at least 60 percent of the vote. Its advocates have submitted more than one million signatures to date, although many still need to be verified before the Feb. 1 deadline.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Yarek Waszul
“This is Serious": Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral
Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.
Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.
Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin. Twitter, Snap, and Foursquare have all been marooned, at various points, because of Facebook’s implacable desire to grow. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and dozens of others are breathing life because they assented to Facebook’s acquisition desires. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg moved quickly to circumnavigate regulations before governments realized the problems that Facebook created—and certainly before they understood exactly how dangerous a social network can be to their citizens’ privacy, and to a democracy as a whole.
From a business standpoint, Facebook’s barbarism seemed to work out well for the company. The social network is worth over half-a-trillion dollars, and Zuckerberg himself is worth some $76 billion. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers and executives in the entire industry. But the fallout from that success has also become increasingly obvious, especially since the 2016 election, which prompted a year of public relations battles over the company’s most fundamental problems. And now, as we enter 2018, Zuckerberg is finally owning up to it: Facebook is in real trouble.
During the past six months alone, countless executives who once workedfor the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives. Unable to hide from the reality of what social media has wrought, Facebook has been left with no choice but to engage with people and the media to explore if it is possible to fix these problems. Zuckerberg determined that his 2018 annual challenge would be fixing his own Web site, noting that “the world feels anxious and divided,” and that Facebook might—just maybe—be contributing to that. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” he wrote. Now, the company has said it’s going to change the focus of the site to be less about news and more about human connections.
The question, of course, revolves around this underlying motivation. Is Zuckerberg saying this because he really does worry what the world might look like tomorrow if we continue headed in the direction we’re going? Is Facebook eliminating news from its site because it realizes that spotting “fake news” is too difficult to solve—even for Facebook? Or, as some people have posited to me, is Facebook rethinking the divide it has created in order to keep growing? After all, much of Zuckerberg’s remaining growth opportunity centers upon China, and the People’s Republic won’t let any product (digital or otherwise) enter its borders if there’s a chance it could disrupt the government’s control. Why would the Chinese Politburo open its doors to a force that could conspire in its own Trumpification or Brexit or similar populist unrest?
There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.
There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”
Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.
Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin. Twitter, Snap, and Foursquare have all been marooned, at various points, because of Facebook’s implacable desire to grow. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and dozens of others are breathing life because they assented to Facebook’s acquisition desires. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg moved quickly to circumnavigate regulations before governments realized the problems that Facebook created—and certainly before they understood exactly how dangerous a social network can be to their citizens’ privacy, and to a democracy as a whole.From a business standpoint, Facebook’s barbarism seemed to work out well for the company. The social network is worth over half-a-trillion dollars, and Zuckerberg himself is worth some $76 billion. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers and executives in the entire industry. But the fallout from that success has also become increasingly obvious, especially since the 2016 election, which prompted a year of public relations battles over the company’s most fundamental problems. And now, as we enter 2018, Zuckerberg is finally owning up to it: Facebook is in real trouble.
During the past six months alone, countless executives who once workedfor the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives. Unable to hide from the reality of what social media has wrought, Facebook has been left with no choice but to engage with people and the media to explore if it is possible to fix these problems. Zuckerberg determined that his 2018 annual challenge would be fixing his own Web site, noting that “the world feels anxious and divided,” and that Facebook might—just maybe—be contributing to that. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” he wrote. Now, the company has said it’s going to change the focus of the site to be less about news and more about human connections.
The question, of course, revolves around this underlying motivation. Is Zuckerberg saying this because he really does worry what the world might look like tomorrow if we continue headed in the direction we’re going? Is Facebook eliminating news from its site because it realizes that spotting “fake news” is too difficult to solve—even for Facebook? Or, as some people have posited to me, is Facebook rethinking the divide it has created in order to keep growing? After all, much of Zuckerberg’s remaining growth opportunity centers upon China, and the People’s Republic won’t let any product (digital or otherwise) enter its borders if there’s a chance it could disrupt the government’s control. Why would the Chinese Politburo open its doors to a force that could conspire in its own Trumpification or Brexit or similar populist unrest?
There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.
There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”
by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Pau Barrena/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”?
They are suddenly everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain: Walking at night with the right-of-way but with their heads down; occupying the intersection for just a couple seconds too long while answering a stray text message; wandering midblock into a suburban thoroughfare where the crosswalks are a mile apart and the cars zoom by at 40 mph. They are the recurring nightmare of every driver going a little too fast when it’s a little too dark out; their specter haunts local-news websites when there’s a fatal crash in the neighborhood and self-proclaimed “car guys” rush to the comments section to exonerate their own. They are, in short, the newest menace on American streets: the distracted pedestrian.
In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)
It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.
“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)
If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”
So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)
Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.
In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”
What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?
A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”
The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.
In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.
“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)
***
The phantom menace of the “distracted pedestrian” is just an updated version of the same tactic. In bringing it to pass, local and state lawmakers are once again getting an assist from one of the world’s most storied car companies. The 2017 Ford Fusion included a new feature called Pre-Collision Assist, which uses a combination of radar and cameras to scan the roadway and identify objects blocking it. Fair enough—except that Ford is advertising Pre-Collision Assist as a way to defend the driver against “petextrians.” The company website states, “By identifying the problem that petextrians pose to drivers and creating a new technology to combat and prevent this issue, we have reaffirmed our commitment to making the roads safer for everyone.” A company engineer helpfully added, “We were startled to see how oblivious people could be of a 4,000-pound car coming toward them.” In a battle between one person wearing clothing and shoe-leather and another wearing a speeding, combustible two-ton metal machine, Ford wants us to believe that the former is the real threat.If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”
So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)
Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.
In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”
What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?
A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”
The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Try a Little Nuance Instead
When Donald Trump was elected president, I tried to console myself with the idea that at least we were living in interesting times. Things might be discombobulating and, for some, downright terrifying, but they would hardly be boring, right?
The last year has proved me wrong. We've never lived in less interesting times. In order for something to be interesting it has to be at least marginally graspable. Even if you can't see the big picture, you have to be able to back up and see past your nose. And trying to grasp the full scope of the political climate right now is a bit like trying to view a Hieronymus Bosch triptych that's been hung inside a small, dark closet. We have no idea what we're really looking at. All we know is that it's overwhelming and often grotesque.
That's part of the reason I mostly kept my opinions to myself in 2017. My taste for counterintuitive rumination and occasional devil's advocacy felt inappropriate to the occasion. I could have spent the year clucking about unhelpful hyperbole and tiresome performative wokeness, about the perils of labeling every political opponent a fascist, and all the ways in which the "nasty woman" trope was becoming, well, a little trop. But given the magnitude of the political earthquake and the justifiability of people's outrage, it seemed better to step back and let more visceral responses set the tone.
Still, as we come up on the anniversary of Trump's inauguration, the awe-inspiring Women's March and the beginning of the mass nervous breakdown among liberals, I can't help but think we've also reached the end of a certain grace period, one in which we pretended that wokeness was an acceptable substitute for an actual personality, not to mention for actual activism.
During this period, virtue signaling has become blue states' own sort of opioid addiction. Post something about toxic masculinity, white privilege or, of course, President Trump (whose name is shorthand for both) and the likes and affirmations will mete out just enough dopamine to keep you going until the next fix.
Better yet, if you want to promote your movie, your book, your economic theory or your crowdfunded business venture, wrap it in the cloak of Trump-resistance and you are suddenly part of a mighty and magically unassailable franchise. Approval will be freely bestowed and favors exchanged. Important people are likely to endorse you and important media to cover you. In fact, this might be the only way to get important media coverage because "life in the age of Trump" is pretty much the only story in the news cycle.
But if you start to feel less than sincere every time you join a #MeToo chorus, you do what humans have done for thousands of years: Get together and admit privately to feeling conflicted.
Such gatherings are now referred to as "back channeling." And they don't just happen after a few too many drinks at media industry cocktail parties. They happen when college professors feel they have to whisper their support to colleagues embroiled in campus identity politics scandals. They take the form of direct messages on social media that start with "I didn't want to say this in the comment thread, but ..." They're what we professional opinionators sometimes do after holding forth with righteous certainty: turn to our closest confidants and confess to a level of cognitive dissonance and confusion we fear would alienate our followers and possibly kill our careers if we tried to put it into words.
All this messiness makes back-channel conversations the most interesting ones going on right now. It's time they came out of the shadows.
Bit by bit, it's starting to happen. The #MeToo movement is infused with obtuse rhetoric like "zero tolerance," but it has also led to a handful of more nuanced analyses about the slippery nature of sexual consent and the dangers of failing (or refusing) to distinguish male clumsiness from dangerous aggression. Sure, some of the woke-iscenti dismissed these articles out of hand. I even saw someone refer to "nuance" as though it were a form of conservative trolling or rape apology. But I also noted rumblings of relief.
[ed. See also: We're Not Done Here.]
The last year has proved me wrong. We've never lived in less interesting times. In order for something to be interesting it has to be at least marginally graspable. Even if you can't see the big picture, you have to be able to back up and see past your nose. And trying to grasp the full scope of the political climate right now is a bit like trying to view a Hieronymus Bosch triptych that's been hung inside a small, dark closet. We have no idea what we're really looking at. All we know is that it's overwhelming and often grotesque.
That's part of the reason I mostly kept my opinions to myself in 2017. My taste for counterintuitive rumination and occasional devil's advocacy felt inappropriate to the occasion. I could have spent the year clucking about unhelpful hyperbole and tiresome performative wokeness, about the perils of labeling every political opponent a fascist, and all the ways in which the "nasty woman" trope was becoming, well, a little trop. But given the magnitude of the political earthquake and the justifiability of people's outrage, it seemed better to step back and let more visceral responses set the tone.Still, as we come up on the anniversary of Trump's inauguration, the awe-inspiring Women's March and the beginning of the mass nervous breakdown among liberals, I can't help but think we've also reached the end of a certain grace period, one in which we pretended that wokeness was an acceptable substitute for an actual personality, not to mention for actual activism.
During this period, virtue signaling has become blue states' own sort of opioid addiction. Post something about toxic masculinity, white privilege or, of course, President Trump (whose name is shorthand for both) and the likes and affirmations will mete out just enough dopamine to keep you going until the next fix.
Better yet, if you want to promote your movie, your book, your economic theory or your crowdfunded business venture, wrap it in the cloak of Trump-resistance and you are suddenly part of a mighty and magically unassailable franchise. Approval will be freely bestowed and favors exchanged. Important people are likely to endorse you and important media to cover you. In fact, this might be the only way to get important media coverage because "life in the age of Trump" is pretty much the only story in the news cycle.
But if you start to feel less than sincere every time you join a #MeToo chorus, you do what humans have done for thousands of years: Get together and admit privately to feeling conflicted.
Such gatherings are now referred to as "back channeling." And they don't just happen after a few too many drinks at media industry cocktail parties. They happen when college professors feel they have to whisper their support to colleagues embroiled in campus identity politics scandals. They take the form of direct messages on social media that start with "I didn't want to say this in the comment thread, but ..." They're what we professional opinionators sometimes do after holding forth with righteous certainty: turn to our closest confidants and confess to a level of cognitive dissonance and confusion we fear would alienate our followers and possibly kill our careers if we tried to put it into words.
All this messiness makes back-channel conversations the most interesting ones going on right now. It's time they came out of the shadows.
Bit by bit, it's starting to happen. The #MeToo movement is infused with obtuse rhetoric like "zero tolerance," but it has also led to a handful of more nuanced analyses about the slippery nature of sexual consent and the dangers of failing (or refusing) to distinguish male clumsiness from dangerous aggression. Sure, some of the woke-iscenti dismissed these articles out of hand. I even saw someone refer to "nuance" as though it were a form of conservative trolling or rape apology. But I also noted rumblings of relief.
by Meghan Daum, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Jose Luis Magana / AP[ed. See also: We're Not Done Here.]
Police Union Privileges
Earlier I wrote about how police unions around the country give to every officer dozens of “get out of jail” cards to give to friends, family, politicians, lawyers, judges and other connected people. The cards let police on the street know that the subject is to be given “professional courtesy” and they can be used to get out of speeding tickets and other infractions. Today, drawing on the Police Union Contracting Project, I discuss how union contracts and Law Officer “Bill of Rights” give police legal privileges that regular people don’t get.
In 50 cities and 13 states, for example, union contracts “restrict interrogations by limiting how long an officer can be interrogated, who can interrogate them, the types of questions that can be asked, and when an interrogation can take place.” In Virginia police officers have a right to at least a five-day delay before being interrogated. In Louisiana police officers have up to 30 days during which no questioning is allowed and they cannot be questioned for sustained periods of time or without breaks. In some cities, police officers can only be interrogated during work hours. Regular people do not get these privileges.
The key to a good interrogation is that the suspect doesn’t know what the interrogator knows so the suspect can be caught in a lie which unravels their story. Thus, the Florida Police Bill of Rights is stunning in what it allows police officers:
Moreover, how do you think complainants feel knowing that the police officer they are complaining about “must be informed of the names of all complainants.” I respect and admire police officers but frankly I think this rule is dangerous. Would you come forward?
How effective would criminal interrogations be if the following rules held for ordinary citizens?
In the United States if you are arrested–even for a misdemeanor or minor crime, even if the charges are dropped, even if you are found not guilty–you will likely be burdened with an arrest record that can increase the difficulty of getting a job, an occupational license, or housing. But even in the unlikely event that a police officer is officially reprimanded many states and cities require that such information is automatically erased after a year or two. The automatic erasure of complaints makes it difficult to identify problem officers or a pattern of abuse.
Louisiana’s Police Officer Bill of Rights is one of the most extreme. It states that police have the right to expunge any violation of criminal battery and assault and any violation of criminal laws involving an “obvious domestic abuse.”
…beyond being an affront to the ideal of the rule of law in the abstract, it seems plausible that these “get out of jail free” cards help to reinforce the sort of us-against-them mentality that alienates so many communities from their police forces. Police departments that want to demonstrate they’re serious about the principle of equality under the law shouldn’t be debating how many of these cards an average cop gets to hand out; they should be scrapping them entirely.
Equality under the law also requires that privileges and immunities extend to all citizens equally.
In 50 cities and 13 states, for example, union contracts “restrict interrogations by limiting how long an officer can be interrogated, who can interrogate them, the types of questions that can be asked, and when an interrogation can take place.” In Virginia police officers have a right to at least a five-day delay before being interrogated. In Louisiana police officers have up to 30 days during which no questioning is allowed and they cannot be questioned for sustained periods of time or without breaks. In some cities, police officers can only be interrogated during work hours. Regular people do not get these privileges.
The key to a good interrogation is that the suspect doesn’t know what the interrogator knows so the suspect can be caught in a lie which unravels their story. Thus, the Florida Police Bill of Rights is stunning in what it allows police officers:
The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under investigation must be informed of the nature of the investigation before any interrogation begins, and he or she must be informed of the names of all complainants. All identifiable witnesses shall be interviewed, whenever possible, prior to the beginning of the investigative interview of the accused officer. The complaint, all witness statements, including all other existing subject officer statements, and all other existing evidence, including, but not limited to, incident reports, GPS locator information, and audio or video recordings relating to the incident under investigation, must be provided to each officer who is the subject of the complaint before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer.By knowing what the interrogators know, the suspect can craft a story that fits the known facts–and the time privilege gives them the opportunity to do so.
Moreover, how do you think complainants feel knowing that the police officer they are complaining about “must be informed of the names of all complainants.” I respect and admire police officers but frankly I think this rule is dangerous. Would you come forward?
How effective would criminal interrogations be if the following rules held for ordinary citizens?
The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under interrogation may not be subjected to offensive language or be threatened with transfer, dismissal, or disciplinary action. A promise or reward may not be made as an inducement to answer any questions.What does it say about our justice system that the police don’t want their own tactics used against them?
In the United States if you are arrested–even for a misdemeanor or minor crime, even if the charges are dropped, even if you are found not guilty–you will likely be burdened with an arrest record that can increase the difficulty of getting a job, an occupational license, or housing. But even in the unlikely event that a police officer is officially reprimanded many states and cities require that such information is automatically erased after a year or two. The automatic erasure of complaints makes it difficult to identify problem officers or a pattern of abuse.
Louisiana’s Police Officer Bill of Rights is one of the most extreme. It states that police have the right to expunge any violation of criminal battery and assault and any violation of criminal laws involving an “obvious domestic abuse.”
A law enforcement officer, upon written request, shall have any record of a formal complaint made against the officer for any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state criminal statute listed in Paragraph (2) of this Subsection involving domestic violence expunged from his personnel file, if the complaint was made anonymously to the police department and the charges are not substantiated within twelve months of the lodging of the complaint. (2)(a) Any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state statute defining criminal battery and assault. (b) Any violation of other municipal or parish ordinances or state statutes including criminal trespass, criminal damage to property, or disturbing the peace if the incident occurred at either the home of the victim or the officer or the violation was the result of an obvious domestic dispute.In an excellent post on get out of free jail cards, Julian Sanchez writes:
…beyond being an affront to the ideal of the rule of law in the abstract, it seems plausible that these “get out of jail free” cards help to reinforce the sort of us-against-them mentality that alienates so many communities from their police forces. Police departments that want to demonstrate they’re serious about the principle of equality under the law shouldn’t be debating how many of these cards an average cop gets to hand out; they should be scrapping them entirely.
Equality under the law also requires that privileges and immunities extend to all citizens equally.
Phantom Thread
A brilliant English couturier of the postwar age: fastidious and cantankerous, humourless and preposterous – and heterosexual, in that pre-Chatterley era when being a bachelor and fashion designer wasn’t automatically associated in the public mind with anything else. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us his cinema swansong in this new film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. He is Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, celebrated dressmaker to the debutantes of Britain, but now under pressure from the New Look and influences from across the Channel. He treats us to a fine display of temper on the subject of that unforgivably meretricious word: chic.
Just when he is at his lowest, Woodcock falls in love with a shy, maladroit German waitress at the country hotel where he happens to be staying. This is Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. With his connoisseur’s eye, Woodcock sees in her a grace and beauty that no one else had noticed, certainly not Alma herself. Dazzled, she comes to live with him as his assistant and model in the central London fashion house over which Woodcock rules with his sister and confidante Cyril, played with enigmatic reserve by Lesley Manville. But, as Woodcock becomes ever more impossible and controlling, submissive Alma must find new, more dysfunctional ways to re-establish her emotional mastery over him.
Day-Lewis gives a performance of an almost ridiculously charismatic outrageousness, the sort only he could get away with. He is Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell with a dash of Tony Armstrong-Jones – certainly Hartnell’s relationship with his sister and business partner Phyllis is evoked here. It’s a study in cult leadership to compare with Anderson’s The Master and a portrait of entrepreneurial loneliness to put alongside his appearance in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
Woodcock is a preening exquisite, theatrical, highly strung, with a borderline-bizarre speaking voice, sinuous and refined: an acquired style perhaps hinting at a humbler beginning than any he will admit to now. This Woodcock has the etiolated grace of a dancer, the misanthropy of an artist, and also the careless hauteur of the nobleman, and it’s the kind of character that Day-Lewis has played in other films, the one who nurses a politely unvoiced contempt for the lack of integrity he sees in everything and everyone around him, especially here the vulgar, moneyed women on whose patronage he is forced to rely.
He is the definition of a gentleman: someone who never gives offence accidentally. I couldn’t watch Day-Lewis without grinning all over my face at this creation. But he is not supposed to be funny or camp. Krieps matches this as best she can with an intelligent, subdued naturalism, just as she did playing Jenny Marx in Raoul Peck’s new film The Young Karl Marx. Yet there is no question of who is in the spotlight. (...)
There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance. And Woodcock’s sartorial creations have a surreal quality, decadent, like dishes at a Roman banquet. Can this really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final performance? He’s said that it is and he is not someone for speaking casually. We have to assume that this is goodbye. Maybe this is how onlookers felt at Nijinsky’s last public performance in 1917, which reputedly made Arthur Rubinstein burst into tears. It’s a wonderful high note for Day-Lewis to end on: I feel a mixture of euphoria and desperate sadness.
Just when he is at his lowest, Woodcock falls in love with a shy, maladroit German waitress at the country hotel where he happens to be staying. This is Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. With his connoisseur’s eye, Woodcock sees in her a grace and beauty that no one else had noticed, certainly not Alma herself. Dazzled, she comes to live with him as his assistant and model in the central London fashion house over which Woodcock rules with his sister and confidante Cyril, played with enigmatic reserve by Lesley Manville. But, as Woodcock becomes ever more impossible and controlling, submissive Alma must find new, more dysfunctional ways to re-establish her emotional mastery over him.Day-Lewis gives a performance of an almost ridiculously charismatic outrageousness, the sort only he could get away with. He is Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell with a dash of Tony Armstrong-Jones – certainly Hartnell’s relationship with his sister and business partner Phyllis is evoked here. It’s a study in cult leadership to compare with Anderson’s The Master and a portrait of entrepreneurial loneliness to put alongside his appearance in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
Woodcock is a preening exquisite, theatrical, highly strung, with a borderline-bizarre speaking voice, sinuous and refined: an acquired style perhaps hinting at a humbler beginning than any he will admit to now. This Woodcock has the etiolated grace of a dancer, the misanthropy of an artist, and also the careless hauteur of the nobleman, and it’s the kind of character that Day-Lewis has played in other films, the one who nurses a politely unvoiced contempt for the lack of integrity he sees in everything and everyone around him, especially here the vulgar, moneyed women on whose patronage he is forced to rely.
He is the definition of a gentleman: someone who never gives offence accidentally. I couldn’t watch Day-Lewis without grinning all over my face at this creation. But he is not supposed to be funny or camp. Krieps matches this as best she can with an intelligent, subdued naturalism, just as she did playing Jenny Marx in Raoul Peck’s new film The Young Karl Marx. Yet there is no question of who is in the spotlight. (...)
There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance. And Woodcock’s sartorial creations have a surreal quality, decadent, like dishes at a Roman banquet. Can this really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final performance? He’s said that it is and he is not someone for speaking casually. We have to assume that this is goodbye. Maybe this is how onlookers felt at Nijinsky’s last public performance in 1917, which reputedly made Arthur Rubinstein burst into tears. It’s a wonderful high note for Day-Lewis to end on: I feel a mixture of euphoria and desperate sadness.
by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Phantom Thread
[ed. Looking forward to seeing this one.]
Thursday, January 25, 2018
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