Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive

Late last year, graduate students watched as legislators in the House debated giving them a hefty new tax bill: A version of the GOP tax plan proposed to treat tuition waivers as taxable income. Although that plan was later dropped, Congress is once again considering legislation that could affect graduate students’ bottom lines. And the federal government is considering ending some of its student loan forgiveness programs, which could raise the economic barrier to entering certain public service professions and leave social workers, teachers and other people in public-service fields that require graduate degrees paying thousands of dollars more for their education. (...)

The costs of the suite of plans currently offered by the government to lessen the burden of grad school debt has ballooned faster than anticipated, and the federal government stands to lose bundles of money. A new audit from the Department of Education’s inspector general found that between fiscal years 2011 and 2015, the cost of programs that allow student borrowers to repay their federal loans at a rate proportional to their income shot up from $1.4 billion to $11.5 billion. Back in 2007, when many such programs launched, the Congressional Budget Office projected they would cost just $4 billion over the 10 years ending in 2017.

The cost of the loan forgiveness programs exploded, in part, because policymakers did not correctly estimate the number of students who would take advantage of such programs, according to higher education scholar Jason Delisle. Now there’s an emerging consensus that some programs should be reined in, but ideas on how much and in what ways vary by party affiliation. Senate Democrats just introduced a college affordability bill that focuses on creating “debt-free” college plans by giving federal matching funds to states that, in turn, would figure out ways to help students pay for school. In the past, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to require borrowers to repay more of their debts and made some proposals for modifying the programs’ rules. The GOP goes much further in its suggestions: A new proposal from House Republicans would eliminate some loan-forgiveness programs entirely.

The federal government currently offers several types of loans, with varying repayment terms, one of which can cover up to the full cost of a student’s graduate program. If, after they leave school, a borrower signs up for an income-driven repayment plan, they will pay back their loan at the rate of 10 percent of their discretionary income each year, and the remaining balance will be forgiven after 20 years.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, however, a student’s debt can be forgiven after just 10 years. The program was created to ease economic barriers to entering public service, which is defined as work for any federal, state, local or tribal agency, or any tax-exempt nonprofit.

Right now, a Georgetown Law grad who’s gunning for a job at a U.S. attorney’s office and enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program would expect that the federal student loans she took out to help pay her $180,000 tuition will be forgiven after 10 years. If, like the typical lawyer, she graduates with $140,000 in federal student loan debt and her salary rises from $59,000 to $121,000 a year over her first 10 years on the job, she could have the government wipe out $147,000 in debt — the full remaining principal of her debt plus interest — according to a 2014 studyfrom the think tank New America, which Delisle co-authored.

Or let’s say a second-grade teacher with a master’s degree and $42,000 in federal student loan debt (a typical amount for a first-year teacher after undergraduate and graduate school) earns in the 75th percentile for his age for 10 years. If he dutifully fulfills all the requirements for a federal debt forgiveness program — including completing all of the onerous paperwork — he, for now, stands to have about $33,000 of that debt forgiven, according to the New America report.

But this year the House is poised to consider the PROSPER Act, which would, among other things, reinstate a cap on how much graduate students could borrow (up to $28,500 per year, or $150,000 total) and shrink the number of income-based repayment programs currently available for both grad and undergrad students from five to just one, though a traditional, non-income-based repayment plan will also be available. (...)

“Everyone in legal education is scared to death that some of these federal programs could go down the drain,” Cornblatt says. “Everybody wants to make sure that the ability to attract these kids is not compromised” because of proposals like the PROSPER Act.

So, let’s return to our hypothetical Georgetown Law grad, the would-be attorney who wants to go into public-sector law and is enrolled in the loan forgiveness program. If the PROSPER Act passes, rather than paying 10 percent of her discretionary income for 10 years and having $147,000 in federal student loan debt forgiven, she would have to choose from one of the two repayment plans it allows. That means she’d either pay 15 percent of her discretionary income until she’s paid off as much as she would have under a 10-year plan, with some of the interest potentially forgiven, or she would have to use a standard 10-year repayment plan, also with no loan forgiveness involved.

It’s a bleaker picture for a social worker — who likely needs a master’s in social work to practice and typically starts with an annual income of $24,000, earning $57,000 annually by year 10, according to the New America report. If that social worker is enrolled in one of the currently available income-based repayment programs, all of his remaining federal loan debt (typically $49,000 upon graduation) can be forgiven. Including interest, that would be around $51,000 — more than the original loan — even though he would have repaid about $15,000 over the years. Without loan forgiveness, he’d be looking at many more years of loan payments.

Though Kelchen predicts that if the PROSPER Act passes, some colleges will try to either increase how much financial aid they offer or reduce tuition, he cautions, “I don’t think it will be enough to make up for loss of loan access, particularly in low-paying fields.”

by Amanda Palleschi, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:

Image: Jaap Arriens/Getty

The Massive Prize Luring Miners to the Stars

Sending a spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system to mine asteroids might seem like an improbable ambition best left to science fiction. But it’s inching closer to reality. A NASA mission is underway to test the feasibility on a nearby asteroid, and a niche group of companies is ramping up to claim a piece of the pie.

Industry barons see a future in finding and harnessing water on asteroids for rocket fuel, which will allow astronauts and spacecrafts to stay in orbit for longer periods. Investors, including Richard Branson, China’s Tencent Holdings and the nation of Luxembourg, see a longer-term solution to replenishing materials such as iron and nickel as Earth’s natural resources are depleted.

Millions of asteroids roam our solar system. Most are thought unsuitable for mining, either because they’re too small, too inaccessible to Earth or because the materials that make up the asteroid have little value. But we know of almost 1,000 asteroids that show potential. Timing is everything, though. The varied orbits of these asteroids mean that many are nearby only once every several years.

The estimated potential value of some of these asteroids–assuming you could completely mine them, and assuming current market valuations–is so substantial as to be barely comprehensible. The most valuable known asteroid is estimated to be worth $15 quintillion, according to Asterank, a database owned by Planetary Resources, a company that aims to mine asteroids. That represents the world’s total gross domestic product (about $80 trillion) 192,283 times over. (...)

Osiris-Rex, a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft, is on its way to a near-Earth asteroid to check out whether it will be viable for extracting water and minerals.

It’s expected to reach the asteroid, Bennu, in December, becoming the first U.S. mission to retrieve a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth to be studied, said Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona professor, who is working in conjunction with NASA as he oversees the mission.

“We’re interested in finding sources of water for furthering exploration,” Lauretta said in an interview. “Anytime you’re involved in space flight, it’s a risky business. We have a lot of technologies to overcome the challenges of navigating a spacecraft around the asteroid.”

Bennu comes very close to Earth every six years and scientists estimate that asteroids of its type are made of about 10 percent iron and nickel. Asterank values Bennu at $670 million, though Lauretta says too little is known about Bennu’s composition to understand its potential value.

During its time at Bennu, the spacecraft will analyze the asteroid’s shape and chemistry, sample its surface materials and collect data on its orbit so scientists can determine the likelihood of it crashing into Earth in the future. The spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth in 2023, he said.

“The next iron age is going to be in space as people use technology to build communities,” said Chris Lewicki, president of Planetary Resources, one of the first movers on asteroid mining. The company aims to launch a mission by 2020 to identify water resources in asteroids.

Mining will take longer, but he says that shouldn't surprise anyone. It’s “not unusual” for mining projects on Earth to take upwards of 15 years before they're productive, he said.

Lewicki expects the space economy could morph into at least a $1 trillion market as mining picks up. “It’s unchartered territory.”

The U.S. isn’t the only country eyeing intergalactic mining. Tiny Luxembourg wants to become the space hub of the European Union. It passed a law in 2017 that gives companies the rights to whatever they extract from asteroids. The U.S. has similar rules in its 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. Setting early ground rules was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, administered by the UN’s Vienna-based Office for Outer Space Affairs. It keeps space free of all national sovereignty or ownership claims–plus nuclear weapons–and restricts the use of the moon and other space bodies to peaceful purposes. It was signed by about 60 countries, including the U.S.

by Susanne Barton and Hannah Recht, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Drinking Straw Shrimp Lure

[ed. Strangely mesmerizing.]

Charles Bartlett, c. 1920-1921, Surf Riders, Honolulu

[ed. See also: Seeing Honolulu Through a Surfing Life and Joan Didion's Honolulu (The Metropole)]

Peter Tosh

The Class System

Until this week, I had never flown first class before. But on my way back from North Carolina, I was given an unexpected upgrade to Seat 1F, and treated to the full premium air travel experience. Given that first class seats seem to cost about three times as much as economy seats, I suppose I expected a fair bit of luxury. As it turns out, these are—as far as I could observe—the perks you are granted:

• The seats are slightly less uncomfortable, and you are able to move your legs.
• You are offered drinks when you get on board the plane, instead of only when you reach cruising altitude. 
• These drinks are served in glasses rather than plastic cups.
• When they come around with snacks, instead of just handing you a packet of biscuits, they allow you to choose which packet of biscuits you would like out of a basket containing multiple different types of biscuits.
• You have exclusive access to the forward lavatory, though it is the same as the rear lavatory.
• You board early, so that you can spend time sitting on the plane that would otherwise have been spent sitting at the gate.
• The flight attendants address you by name, and make a somewhat greater effort to pretend to like you.

If there were other differences, I did not notice them. I have been told that you are also given “free alcohol.” The alcohol itself isn’t special, since you can purchase it in coach, so the perk is more accurately characterized as “the illusion of free alcohol” or “alcohol priced into your ticket rather than bought on the plane.”

On the whole, an underwhelming list. It is not immediately clear why you would pay $500 or more for this assemblage of tiny extras. But there is one more thing you get when you fly first class, a feature they don’t list on the airline’s website: you get to know that you are in first class. A distinction is made between you, the first-class passenger, and the steerage passengers, who file past you one by one seeing exactly who you are and where you are sitting. (This is not always the case, but even when everyone else doesn’t parade past you, the fundamental aspect remains, namely the knowledge of having separated yourself from the majority of your fellow travelers.)

First class tickets are obviously not “worth it” in the sense of providing anything that can reasonably be called value for money. The seats aren’t actually much more conducive to rest or spinal health, having a glass instead of a cup isn’t exactly decadent luxury, and even the expanded range of available biscuits doesn’t alter the fact that airline snacks are airline snacks. There are two reasons, then, why one might purchase a first-class ticket. First, one is so stupendously wealthy that no price is too high to pay for even small improvements, meaning that if an airline charged $500 to passengers who wanted tea instead of coffee, you wouldn’t think twice about paying it if tea was what you wanted. The second explanation is that the improvements aren’t what’s being bought. What is being bought is status.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?

I watched in dismay as most of my educated, middle-class friends began, at the onset of middle age, to obsess about their health and likely longevity. Even those who were at one point determined to change the world refocused on changing their bodies. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure.

Mostly they understood the task of ageing to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mindset that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious”, while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free”. Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures such as hours-long cardio sessions, fasts, purges or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.

Of course I want to be healthy, too; I just don’t want to make the pursuit of health into a major life project. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and will stave off hunger for as long as possible, such as protein, fibre and fats. But I refuse to overthink the potential hazards of blue cheese on my salad or pepperoni on my pizza. I also exercise – not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care, I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in undergoing tests to uncover problems that remain undetectable to me. When friends berate me for my laxity, my heavy use of butter or habit of puffing (but not inhaling) on cigarettes, I gently remind them that I am, in most cases, older than they are.

So it was with a measure of schadenfreude that I began to record the cases of individuals whose healthy lifestyles failed to produce lasting health. It turns out that many of the people who got caught up in the health “craze” of the last few decades – people who exercised, watched what they ate, abstained from smoking and heavy drinking – have nevertheless died. Lucille Roberts, owner of a chain of women’s gyms, died incongruously from lung cancer at the age of 59, although she was a “self-described exercise nut” who, the New York Times reported, “wouldn’t touch a French fry, much less smoke a cigarette”. Jerry Rubin, who devoted his later years to trying every supposedly health-promoting diet fad, therapy and meditation system he could find, jaywalked into Wilshire Boulevard at the age of 56 and died of his injuries two weeks later.

Some of these deaths were genuinely shocking. Jim Fixx, author of the bestselling The Complete Book Of Running, believed he could outwit the cardiac problems that had carried his father off to an early death by running at least 10 miles a day and restricting himself to a diet of pasta, salads and fruit. But he was found dead on the side of a Vermont road in 1984, aged only 52.

Even more disturbing was the untimely demise of John H Knowles, director of the Rockefeller Foundation and promulgator of the “doctrine of personal responsibility” for one’s health. Most illnesses are self-inflicted, he argued – the result of “gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, smoking” and other bad choices. The “idea of a ‘right’ to health,” he wrote, “should be replaced by the idea of an individual moral obligation to preserve one’s own health.” But he died of pancreatic cancer at 52, prompting one physician commentator to observe, “Clearly we can’t all be held responsible for our health.”

Still, we persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fibre? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death? When David Bowie and Alan Rickman both died in early 2016 of what major US newspapers described only as “cancer”, some readers complained that it is the responsibility of obituaries to reveal what kind of cancer. Ostensibly, this information would help promote “awareness” of the particular cancers involved, as Betty Ford’s openness about her breast cancer diagnosis helped to destigmatise that disease. It would also, of course, prompt judgments about the victim’s “lifestyle”. Would Bowie have died – at the quite respectable age of 69 – if he hadn’t been a smoker? (...)

Similarly, with sufficient ingenuity – or malicious intent – almost any death can be blamed on some mistake of the deceased. Surely Fixx had failed to “listen to his body” when he first felt chest pains and tightness while running, and maybe, if he had been less self-absorbed, Rubin would have looked both ways before crossing the street. Maybe it’s just the way the human mind works, but when bad things happen or someone dies, we seek an explanation, preferably one that features a conscious agent – a deity or spirit, an evil-doer or envious acquaintance, even the victim. We don’t read detective novels to find out that the universe is meaningless, but that, with sufficient information, it all makes sense. We can, or think we can, understand the causes of disease in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science: avoiding tobacco, exercising, undergoing routine medical screening and eating only foods currently considered healthy. Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death. Or, to put it another way, every death can now be understood as suicide. (...)

While the affluent struggled dutifully to conform to the latest prescriptions for healthy living – adding whole grains and gym time to their daily plans – the less affluent remained mired in the old comfortable, unhealthy ways of the past – smoking cigarettes and eating foods they found tasty and affordable. There are some obvious reasons why the poor and the working class resisted the health craze: gym memberships can be expensive; “health foods” usually cost more than “junk food”. But as the classes diverged, the new stereotype of the lower classes as wilfully unhealthy quickly fused with their old stereotype as semi-literate louts. I confront this in my work as an advocate for a higher minimum wage. Affluent audiences may cluck sympathetically over the miserably low wages offered to blue-collar workers, but they often want to know “why these people don’t take better care of themselves”. Why do they smoke or eat fast food? Concern for the poor usually comes tinged with pity. And contempt.

by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:Stephen Voss for the Guardian

China's Tiangong-1 Space Station Will Crash to Earth This Weekend

It will all be over in a flash. At some point this weekend, a dazzling fireball will tear across the sky as China’s out-of-control space station tumbles back to Earth at 16,500mph and burns up in the atmosphere.

The Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace”, has been hopelessly adrift since the Chinese space agency lost control of the prototype space lab in 2016, five years after it launched as a bold symbol of the nation’s ambitions in orbit.

From the moment it was lost, scientists around the world began plugging information on the stricken craft into computer models to predict how its final act would play out. On Friday, the European Space Agency said that the unoccupied wreckage would crash back to Earth between Saturday night and Sunday evening UK time.

“If you’re in the right place at the right time, and the sky is clear, it will be quite spectacular,” said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s space debris office in Darmstadt. “It will be visible to the naked eye, even in daylight, and look like a slow-moving shooting star that splits into a few more shooting stars. You might even see a smoke trail.”

Compared with the International Space Station (ISS), Tiangong-1 is a minnow. The 400-tonne ISS would barely fit inside a football field, while the 8.5 tonne Chinese station is no bigger than a bus. Visitors to Tiangong-1, including China’s first two female taikonauts, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, had two sleeping berths at their disposal, but the toilet and cooking facilities were on the Shenzhou module that ferried them to the orbiting outpost.

Though Tiangong-1 will be the largest lump of space junk to fall back to Earth so far this year, it is nowhere near a record-breaker. In 2001, the Russian space agency steered their 120 tonne Mir space station safely into the Pacific Ocean. The far less controlled re-entry of Nasa’s 74 tonne Skylab in 1979 scattered pieces of space hardware over hundreds of miles of Western Australia. The re-entry of Tiangong-1 will be uncontrolled too.

About 100 tonnes of spent rocket stages, defunct satellites, and other space debris come down each year. Most of the material burns up in the atmosphere as aerodynamic friction turns terrific speed into ferocious heat. As a rule of thumb, only about 20 to 40% of a spacecraft survives the inferno of re-entry. The components that hit the ground tend to be heat-resistant fuel tanks, thrusters and other parts, such as metal docking rings, which can be the size of a rear tractor wheel.

On Friday, the Chinese space station was still hurtling around the planet more than 180km above the surface. The atmosphere is tenuous at that altitude, but thick enough to drag on the solar panels and body of Tiangong-1. Gradually this slows the spacecraft down until gravity can pull it from orbit. When the spaceship falls below 100km, it will begin its re-entry in earnest.

by Ian Sample, Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Courtesy of CMSE

Julie Paterson
via:

A Chat Room of Their Own

In the fall of 2015, Nina Lorez Collins, a former literary agent, writer and mother of four young adults, including a pair of twins, was experiencing a fairly typical middle-aged malaise. She had a complicated second marriage, and her body was betraying her — textbook perimenopausal stuff, awaking most nights at 3 a.m., heart pounding, soaked in sweat. When she Googled “perimenopause,” it amused her to read that one of the symptoms was “impending sense of doom,” and she noted her discovery in an uncomplicated (until recently) manner: a Facebook post.

Friends wrote back, half-seriously, suggesting she start a group for their cohort, but what to call it? Black Cohosh (for the herbal remedy)? How about What Would Virginia Woolf Do? one friend joked darkly, because of course what Woolf did, at 59, was kill herself.

Within a week or so, Ms. Collins, now 48, had created a secret Facebook group with just that title, inviting her friends into the internet era’s version of a consciousness-raising group, where women of a certain age could talk about things they didn’t want to share with husbands, partners or children.

That would be everything from the peevishly quotidian (complaints about dry skin or men not shutting cabinets) to the truly harrowing (suicide ideation; job loss at middle age; bad marriages; domestic abuse; and children suffering from drug addiction).

And sex. There would be lots of chatter around sex: requests for tips on technique; concern about “the handful of limp” of an older boyfriend; vaginal atrophy; dry vaginas; sex toys; bad sex; no sex; anal sex; the viability of hiring a male prostitute; who has an orgasm first during sex: weird places to have sex; obligatory sex; sex with an ex; tantric sex; group sex; and many, many posts about coconut oil (see “dry vaginas,” above).

Now It’s a Book

Ms. Collins, who lives in Brooklyn Heights in a modish duplex apartment overlooking the East River, is emblematic of a certain demographic: mostly white — though Ms. Collins is half-black — expensively educated and housed liberals. You would assume that group would mirror itself online and stay small and homogeneous. But within a year of its founding, WWVWD, to use its colloquial abbreviation, had more than 1,300 members; the week after the presidential election there was an increase of another 1,000, Ms. Collins said, with many seeking a way to marshal themselves for political action.

The original group, which Ms. Collins changed from “secret” to “closed” (meaning it can be seen by the public), begot subgroups, for those who wanted to focus on philanthropy, activism, business networking and writing. Woolfers in New York City began meeting in person, as Ms. Collins led field trips to Toys in Babeland, the sex accessories emporium on the Lower East Side, and hosted Scrabble tournaments and clothing swaps.

Woolfers have also swapped houses and apartments, rented each other rooms and raised money for groups including the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Trust for Public Land. Recently, four Woolfers spent a day at the Wallkill Correctional Facility, joining a mentorship program for inmates there.

There are now more than 7,600 Woolfers across the country, from New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, as you might expect, but also from Arkansas, Chicago and Maine. And Ms. Collins, who spent a few weeks last month on a cross-country road trip with a new boyfriend meeting Woolfers in Memphis and Telluride, Colo., among other spots, has a new book, out in April, called “What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology.” It is a sometimes wince-inducing primer on fashion, sex, marriage, divorce, money and health gleaned from her experience as Woolfer in chief, and with contributions from her Woolfer sisters.

It also has memoirish elements: Ms. Collins details her adventures in the orgy tent at Burning Man (she and her ex brought their own sheets, and kept to themselves), her struggles with depression and her adherence to an expensive beauty routine that involves fake eyelashes and Botox. She also cops to divorce envy, and notes the benefits of prenups, long-term-care insurance and pharmaceuticals like Xanax. In its breezy candor, the book is as appealing and appalling as the conversations of the Woolfers online, though it lacks the tartness and invective that occasionally erupts there, turning a you-go-girl group of self-affirmers into an unruly scrum.

Because when thousands of women get together on social media, what could possibly go wrong?

‘Assume Goodness, Please’

“We do fight sometimes,” Ms. Collins said. “We’re talking about super-candid things, and people have strong opinions. If you’re talking about whether or not to let your 16-year-old have sex or whether to have an affair or how to tell your colleague at work that she’s a jerk, people will have strong responses.”

When one long-married woman wrote about the heartache she was feeling because her lover of five years had broken up with her, many Woolfers were upset by her adultery, Ms. Collins said, and she had to step in to remove comments that were aggressive, moralistic and vitriolic. When a white Woolfer reported that a black man in a park had exposed himself to her, many in the group were inflamed that she had noted his race.

At first, Ms. Collins read every post herself, to steer the conversation and defuse tension. But when the group swelled to 3,000, she asked some of the early Woolfers to help her moderate; now, about 20 women have oversight of what’s posted. Politics, race and infidelity are topics that reliably lead to problems. “I’ll be out somewhere and I’ll get a text from someone saying basically there’s a huge fight in Aisle 6 and what do we do?” Ms. Collins said.

Early last year, Ms. Collins chastised the group for what she saw as occasional reflexive pettiness. “This is not a liberal arts college, circa 2016,” she wrote in part. “We don’t have to give trigger warnings. Bring on the posts about money concerns and racism concerns and class struggle, but don’t blame fellow members without real cause. Assume goodness, please.”

Jenny Douglas, an early Woolfer and moderator, said, “If there’s a post you don’t like, we say, ‘Scroll on by.’ You don’t need to pick a fight with everything or anyone you disagree with. When we are meeting online and tackling subjects that are so nuanced, you can lose that nuance. Those tender subjects are tricky to tackle in any form.”

Just a few weeks ago, a moderator quit the group after a discussion of moderator practices — how they vetted posts, for example — left her feeling bullied, she said.

There are over-posters, and drunk posters; there are angry, cursing posters — whose words are promptly removed, Ms. Collins said — and posters who are a tad self-righteous. And there are the lurkers and the hate readers, along with those who are repelled or bored or disappointed by the particular window into women’s lives that the group affords them.

“I always think that Virginia Woolf would be mortified at having her name associated with this group,” said Daphne Merkin, the memoirist and cultural critic, who is a member of the group but does not post anything. “At first I thought it was going to be some kind of literary meeting of the minds. That there would be some interesting comments about Jean Rhys. Instead it’s, “What do you do with your dildos?” Or this sort of subclinical despair about no longer having a flat stomach.

“It’s not like that stuff is beneath me,” Ms. Merkin went on. “I mean, I once wrote a story on buffing up the vagina, but these revelations are very cosmeticized. There’s little wit, but maybe wit takes more time than social media allows. This is more like the stuff you tell your girlfriend at the end of the day, the eye-glazing end of intimacy. There’s intimacy that’s thrilling, but this isn’t.”

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amy Lombard

“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

The dawn and rise of the American chef commenced when Americans, from coast to coast, and in large numbers, began voluntarily, enthusiastically cooking in restaurants for a living — a once forbidden and unrespected professional course — screw the consequences. Many started like Marder, spontaneously, rebelliously, often in isolation, with no idea there were others like them Out There. A few stuck their toes in the water in the 1960s, a few more in the 1970s, and then hordes jumped into the pool in the 1980s and ’90s, after which there was no looking back.

These weren’t the first American chefs, or even the first prominent ones. There had always been exceptions, like the astounding Edna Lewis, who for five years ending in 1954 had been the chef and a business partner at Café Nicholson in Midtown Manhattan— that she did this as both an African American and a woman in the 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. But those stories were few and far between, not part of an overarching national phenomenon. And the lower kitchen ranks were more often than not populated with lost souls who lacked ambition or the aptitude for a traditional career, weren’t pursuing a love of food and/or craft, or acting on Marder-like epiphanies, a version of which became a rite of passage for an entire generation. Professional cooking was viewed as menial, unskilled labor performed, often in unsavory conditions, by anonymous worker bees. The United States Department of Labor categorized chefs as domestics through 1976 when — after lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, who themselves required nudging by Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian American Chicago chef, writer, and television personality — it recognized them as professionals. Domestics suggests chauffeurs and housekeepers; most Americans regarded cooks as something grittier.

“One of the comparisons I make today that illustrates the difference between then and now is back in the day you never would put your uniform on or anything that made you look like a cook on the way to work,” says San Francisco–based chef Jan Birnbaum, who started his career in New Orleans and New York. “Because it wasn’t a proud thing to be. You’re that guy behind the door who has no skill. He’s certainly not intellectual, and he probably is either a criminal or he’s amongst them. There’s just a whole lot of undesirable stuff. Today the streets of San Francisco, man, they proudly walk down the street all the time in full uniforms.” Even in France, historically the Western capital of fine dining, this stigma attached to the profession through the 1960s. Chefs were not renowned or celebrated; at best, they were regarded as craftsmen. Alain Sailhac, who grew up in the mountain village of Millau, France, and would go on to become the chef of Le Cygne and Le Cirque in New York City, remembers the moment he first became enticed by the kitchen, in the mid-twentieth century: At age fourteen, at his brother’s wedding, he struck up a conversation with the chef, which sparked an interest he couldn’t shake.

“Why do you want to be a cook?” demanded his father, who wanted his son to take up the family’s glove-manufacturing business. Sailhac persisted until his dad relented, walked him into the town’s only one-star restaurant, where the chef was a World War I buddy. “Do you want to take my son?” asked the senior Sailhac. “He wants to be like you, a stupid chef.” (Even after he became a cook, Sailhac hid his profession from women; if they learned he worked in a restaurant, he told them he was a chef de rang [dining room captain], which was more prestigious.)

Consider, too, Auguste Escoffier, whose crowning achievement, Le guide culinaire, first published in 1903, was the kitchen bible of its day. The book codified basic recipes and techniques, set forth a system for organizing the kitchen brigade, and recommended a front-of-house structure. Yet Nathan Myhrvold, author of a defining tome on modernist cuisine, unsentimentally dubs Escoffier “the Henry Ford of the conventional kitchen. . . . His masterwork was fundamentally motivated by gastronomy as a manufacturing process rather than as an art. . . . He was an artisan striving to run a factory rather than be an artist.”

So what happened? To impose biblical simplicity on the narrative would be dishonest; there was no Garden of Eden, no aproned Adam and Eve from whom all future American chefs descended, no single moment that lit the fuse. The movement was scattershot but not coincidental, produced (Big Bang–style) by a confluence of events and phenomena: the Vietnam War and the resistance at home; the counterculture; easy access to travel; the music, movies, and literature of the day; drugs, including “the pill”; and a new approach to restaurant cooking, to name the factors most often cited by those who were there as the ones that propelled them into the kitchen.

“It’s a universal mind,” says Thomas Keller, chef-owner of a restaurant empire founded on Yountville, California’s The French Laundry, of the national reach of those influences. “We all talk about universal minds and how people come up with the same idea relatively around the same period of time without having had conversations about it personally. They’re just doing the same thing.”

Jonathan Waxman, a California chef who has toggled back and forth between the coasts throughout his career, puts it slightly differently: “We all had the same acid flashback at the same time,” he says. “But each of us did it differently.”

by Andrew Friedman, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: getty images + 123RF images, composite by Katie Kosma

Is a Different Kind of Paradigm Driving Jazz These Days?

Too. Many. Notes! All that noodling. Honking and screeching. Borrrrrrring.

As a jazz critic and fanatic, I frequently hear what people do not like about the music. Chief among their complaints is this: jazz is indulgent—music for other musicians that just goes on and on with all that playing, all that complicated music. I might deride folks for lack of patience or appreciation, but what's wrong with jazz being more accessible, more digestible, shorter? After all, what we admire about The Beatles or Stevie Wonder might be an ability to compress so much great music into a classic pop song length with the impact that comes with brevity.

In the early decades of jazz, of course, the music as recorded came in short form. Until the LP became common in the '50s, almost every recorded performance was less than four minutes. Duke Ellington, to use just one example, could fill three minutes with a universe of creativity. In the most recent past, jazz musicians have tried to make their art more accessible by writing tighter tunes and recording shorter, "poppier" material, and there are examples of some success. But dumbing the music down to compete with real pop—hooks and choruses and all that—meant erasing the beauty that made jazz special.

In the last few years, however, we are seeing a new brevity arrive from jazz musicians who are thinking differently about getting their art into people's ears. Specifically, we are seeing the release of EPs—"extended play" recordings that contain fewer tracks then a traditional full-length "album", which usually means about 20 minutes of music.

Most notably, in 2017 saxophonist Kamasi Washington released Harmony of Difference, an EP containing music written for an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Washington's previous recording was his three-CD debut, The Epic, a recording that utterly defied the notion that the hipper jazz audience requires something brief. It was released on Brainfeeder, an imprint associated with Flying Lotus rather than mainstream jazz. Yes, Washington's latest work was inherently shorter, but the move remains intriguing and savvy. And he's not alone.

More and more, jazz artists across the spectrum find that releasing EPs makes sense. Often, these shorter collections of tunes are being released digitally rather than in a physical format, quite often through Bandcamp. How and why this makes sense in the 2018 commercial climate for jazz is an intriguing question that I explored with saxophonist and composer Jonathan Greenstein and the president of Mack Avenue Records, Denny Stilwell.

Up-and-Coming Artists and EPs: Saxophonist Jonathan Greenstein

How does a 14-year-old who's been studying classical music in Israel have his head turned in the direction of jazz? Jonathan Greenstein had his 8th-grade after-school music teacher give him a cassette of Charlie Parker's classic Bird with Strings album. "This will really convince you," he told the young saxophone student. "It was the opening phrase of 'Just Friends'—it was so different from anything I'd heard before, anything I'd heard on the radio," Greenstein says, with wonder still in his voice. "I was listing to a lot of Pink Floyd at the time, a lot of Metallica."

Today, Greenstein is in his early 30s and living in New York, and the lessons of Bird with Strings are still paramount. What Greenstein heard in Parker's art in 8th grade was simple: he heard a story-teller at work.

Greenstein studied music in Israel out of high school and played in the IDF military band as part of his mandatory service. But the lure of coming to the birthplace of jazz was strong. "I wanted to give it a try. I figured I'd regret not trying, even if I tried and failed. I visited The New School in New York then headed up to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, someone told us to go a free concert with alumni, and there was a student who was a songwriting major, and she sang a country song."

Greenstein aspired to play jazz, but at some level, the real lure was storytelling. "I thought, if there is someone who can sing something like that, a pop hit, that's the place for me."

After music school, says Greenstein, "I thought, I am ready. I moved to New York and nobody cared." He and a few friends went out every night "trying to cut each other" but "New York is very expensive, and I ran through my money quickly." He moved back to Israel for a time but didn't feel at home, at least not musically. And so in 2011 he returned to New York and developed a new way of thinking about his music. "I'm thinking, I don't like the supper club experience. I didn't want to play at Dizzys [expensive jazz club that is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center] and have people pay a $30 cover, $50 for a meal, more for wine. That was not the experience I wanted for my music. You play differently for those audiences."

Crafting a New Way of Telling a Jazz Story

Greenstein wanted out of jazz clubs and thought about a place where the audience would be standing up. "So, I thought, what if we play at a rock club—at Rockwood Music Hall? I convinced them to let me play even though they don't usually have instrumental music. We played on a Wednesday at 1.00 AM. On our first gig there was one guy, drunk, who yelled, 'Jazz at Rockwood, I can't believe it!' We played there every week for a year and a half. It completely changed what I was trying to do. Because the audience is standing up, a certain groove has to be there. Everything has to have closure, a concise story. It has to be short or otherwise people will pull out their phones. If we started with something that sounded too 'jazzy', we would lose the audience right away."

Recording his music in the EP format, then, was simply a way of following the lead created by a new audience. "On an artistic level, making an EP is more like writing a short story. I think of it as a story rather than a bunch of tunes with solos. Form became the thing for me: how does the form of one tune tell the story? I want there to be closure at the end of the track.

You hear this in Greenstein's music. On Vol2, the second of his two EPs, with Michal King and Takeshi Ohbayashi on keys, bassist Joshua Crumbly, and drummer Jonathan Pinson. Consisting of five tunes over 20 minutes, Greenstein creates music that is approachable and tonal (that is, not edgy or avant-garde) and that makes a statement through atmosphere and groove. There-s improvising and interesting form—this is not some poppy, smooth jazz—but the tunes aren't structured as bebop melodies, strings of solos from all the players, then the melody again. The opener, "Once You're There" sets out a tenor saxophone melody in ballad form and then sets up a hip-hop-type groove ... but one with alternating bars of four beats and six beats. The original melody doesn't return as a ballad. "Retrograde" features a haunting minor melody that transitions into an unusual, somewhat military sounding drum groove just as a ghostlike electronic keyboard begins playing figures and washes behind Greenstein's improvisation. The melody does return this time, with just the tenor and Wurlitzer piano remaining.

"The idea," Greenstein said of this recent recording, "is this: if you have one subway ride, can you go through this transformative experience in that time. It's connected to this idea that you are holding someone's hand and saying, this music is okay, it won't bite. It's not a complex, through-composed thing that will exhaust you. Hopefully, you hear it, you might think you didn't need it, then you realize how much you needed it.

"I think that's what Bird with Strings did for me. I thought he's talking to me. He's bringing me into the song. I'm trying to do the same thing. So you as a listener can enter this story, a whole world of sound and texture. Hopefully, this music stays with you, and you can grow with it, through the closure, through it being a full statement. Too much jazz lacks that full statement."

by Will Layman, Pop Matters |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

A Short Description of Cultural Appropriation for Non-Believers

1. Your new friends Bob and Rita come to lunch and you serve them idlis, like your grandmother used to make.

2. They love your south Indian cooking and ask for the recipe.

3. You never hear from Rita and Bob again.

4. You read in the Style section of the Guardian about Rita and Bob’s new Idli bar in Covent Garden… called ‘Idli.’

5. You visit Idli. The food tastes nothing like your grandmother’s.

6. Your grandmother dies.

7. Rita and Bob’s children inherit the Idli chain, and open several franchises in America.

8. Your children find work as short order chefs… at Idli.

9. Your children visit you in a nursing home and cook you idlis, which taste nothing like the ones you remember from your youth.

10. You compliment their cooking and ask for the recipe.

11. You die.

by Rajeev Balasurbramanyam, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: ImagesBazaar/ Getty Images via:

Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?

Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?

A new technology—virtual embodiment—challenges our understanding of who and what we are.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Daniel Zender

America’s Gender-Fluid Future, in 100 Years of Baby Name Trends

In 1910, just 5% of American babies named “Charlie” were girls. Over 100 years later, girl Charlies took over their male counterparts for the first time in 2016—making up 51% of the share.

With little fuss or fanfare, Charlie has gone gender-neutral.

Quartz analyzed the Social Security Administration’s public data on baby names to find out whether what happened with “Charlie” is an exception, or part of a wider trend. Our results show that, on average, the country is slowly moving toward using more gender-neutral names. And a few popular names are leading the way.

To analyze the trend, we calculated a “genderedness score” for every American baby name—and for the country on the whole. The score goes from zero to one. A zero means a name is perfectly non-gendered. That is to say, exactly half of the babies with that name are boys, and the other half are girls. A one, meanwhile, means the name is used exclusively for one gender. So a lower score means a name is more gender-neutral, and less biased.

American parents have long had a strong preference for gendered names. The overall genderedness score was 0.97 in 1920, meaning nearly every kid had a name that was used almost exclusively for just boys or just girls. The score is falling, though. It hit 0.946 in 2016, the most recent year the SSA has name data for. The 1920 score is close to the historical average for names like “Billy,” “Selma,” and “Otis.” Names around the new—less gender-specific—number include “Jerry,” “Aden,” and “Orion.”

Several popular names, Charlie among them, are driving this trend. No girls named “Blake” show up in the data at all until 1951. But today, one-quarter of American Blakes are female. And it’s not just boys’ names being given to girls, either. “Marion,” for example, has seen a major shift from girls to boys.

Many other popular names from the 2016 dataset are also gender-neutral, including “Finley,” “Justice,” and “Armani.” Here are the least-gendered 20, only including those with more than 500 babies with that name.

At the same time, some names are becoming more gendered. “Ashton” has gone from being pretty equal to primarily a boys’ name. “Harper” used to be more common for boys, but is now over 97% girls. And the most popular names from 2016 score high on the genderedness scale—Emma and Olivia at 0.99, and Scarlett and Victoria at 1.00, without a single boy.

Given that the average is moving the other way, though, it seems these mono-gendered choices are slowly becoming less popular. Gender-neutral options like Parker, Jordan, and Riley were among the top 100 in 2016.

by Nikhil Sonnad, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Quartz

Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Congolese 2014via:

John Philipps Emslie, 1846-1860.
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For Fender Guitars, The Future Is Digital And Female

There have been numerous news stories about the impending death of U.S. guitar business. Not without some reason. The instrument long ago lost its central role in pop music. Iconic brand Gibson is in trouble. So is big-box retailer Guitar Center. Ditto many of the mom-and-pop stores that used to be the heart of the business.

According to The Music Trades magazine, though, the $7.4 billion market for all new instruments and music gear has actually been growing since the recession years of 2008 and 2009. Last year retailers sold $1.9 billion of new fretted instruments (mainly guitars) and related gear, up 8.9% from 2016.

Andy Mooney, CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Fender, says his company has been growing faster than the industry. Private equity owned Fender, which had about $500 million in revenues in 2017, is building a strategy on developing a younger audience through new instruments and on reaching customers online. Last July Fender introduced Fender Play, an online subscription guitar lesson service. This March it rolled out a line of lower priced guitars aimed at beginning players, particularly young women. The California Series guitars are acoustics with built in electronics, which can be played plugged or unplugged. While high priced acoustic guitars tend to look like fine antiques, the look and feel of the California Series (the company was famously launched in 1945 out of Leo Fender's Fullerton radio repair shop) echoes Fender’s iconic and flashy electrics.

In this interview which has been edited and condensed Mooney, a retail veteran formerly with Nike and later chief of Disney's consumer product division, talked about why the future of the guitar business is female and why he's not worried about the brick and mortar apocalypse.

The guitar is the baby boomer's instrument. What's the reason for optimism about it now?

It comes back to the environmental positives: consumption of live and recorded music is at an all-time high and continuing to grow. There are 125 million people paying for digital streaming services and that’s growing. We had LiveNation last month reporting 82 million people went to concerts last year up 21%. There is not a signal that the uptake of Spotify or Apple music subscriptions is going to decrease for the foreseeable future, not a signal that LiveNation which is the largest provider of live concerts and has been growing for 11 years, is going to slow down. In Fender's case we think we are just doing a really good job of being a contemporary provider of product and a contemporary marketer of product through predominantly social media and digital channels. We’ve really stepped up our game in terms of more marketing money and spending all the incremental money on appealing to audiences online. (...)

How much of your dealers’ sales are online?

It depends on the region. We estimate that half our sales in the North America are getting done online in some form or other. It's moved from 35 % to 50 % over the last three years.

How does that compare with your competitors?

I can't speak for those brands but I’d think that would be about par for the course for anybody that’s got a significant brand in North America. (...)

What’s the business case for going after beginners?

About two years ago we did a lot of research about new guitar buyers. We were hungry for data and there wasn’t much available. We found that 45% of all the guitars we sell every year go to first-time players. That was much higher than we imagined. Ninety percent of those first-time players abandoned the instrument in the first 12 months — if not the first 90 days — but the 10% that didn’t tended to commit to the instrument for life and own multiple guitars and multiple amps.

We also found that 50% of new guitar buyers were women and that their tendency was to buy online rather than in a brick and mortar store because the intimidation factor in a brick and mortar store was rather high.

The last thing we found was that new buyers spend four times as much on lessons as they do on equipment. So that shaped a number of things. It shaped the commitment we made to Fender Play because we felt there was an independent business opportunity available to us that we’d never considered before because the trend in learning was moving online. We also found we needed to communicate more to the female audience in terms of the artists we connect with, in terms of using women in our imagery and thinking generally about the web.

Has the additional marketing spend helped?

What we found that was a shocker to us was that Fender Play and our other marketing activity encouraged people who had never thought about buying a guitar to buy a guitar. We have good sell-through data for electric guitars in North America. In the November, December, and January we had sell- through increases of 13.5%, 15% and 15%. We’ve haven’t seen growth in the industry at that level for many years and the industry has inherently growing.

We've been growing at faster pace than the industry and enjoying that growth. Gibson’s travails are all of their own making; it’s nothing to do with the state of the industry.

by Peter Carbonara, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Fender

Julia Lillard and Eric Edelman, Trolley to Folly (2017)

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Facebook’s Chaotic, Destructive Corporate Culture

TPM Reader MS has a critique of my recent comments about Facebook, both on the podcast and the Editor’s Blog. I spoke of “sleaze” and a “if we can code it, we should totally do it” ethos. On “sleaze” he’s probably right because that’s just a loaded word and too imprecise in its meaning. On the latter point, I think we were actually talking about something similar or even the same thing. In any case, here’s MS’s take …

"I heard you talking about this on the podcast, with some befuddlement, as to why Facebook has such problems playing nice etc. etc. Then you make this remark in the Editor’s Blog about Facebook’s “sleaze and ‘if we can code it, we should totally do it’ ethos,” which seems to me a very inaccurate take on what’s going on inside Facebook. I don’t think sleaze and “whoa, that’s cool I like it” are driving much of anything over there. To me it’s all fairly clear and has very deep roots in Zuckerberg specifically and the way Facebook all got started in the first place. 

This will probably be inarticulate but (I hope) it should be clear enough. I’m an adult who was much older than college-age in 2005 (therefore observed Facebook go from something I was not allowed to join to something I was allowed to join) and has spent the last 5 years writing for a website that makes its money by getting articles to become more popular via Facebook. Nobody at my website ever intended as a business plan for Facebook to have so much control over our fortunes, but it was an unavoidable outcome of working for a place that depends on clicks. In 2014 it was Facebook or nothing, which was just the way Facebook wanted it. All of which is to say I may not have your experience dealing with them as some kind of unreliable business partner but I do have a pretty valid stretch of experiences with them using a slightly different lens. 

Facebook started at Harvard, and Zuckerberg consciously used Harvard’s cachet as the most revered school in the country to drive a dynamic whereby he has the thing and you, the client, the product, are on the outside seeking entry. He did it within Harvard, he did it within the Ivy League, he did it for the collegiate world as a whole…. He set up a closed world that was by definition private and unknown to the uninitiated and traded on people’s FOMO, fear of missing out. The unclarity of Facebook’s goings-on and the indifference towards the customers’ collective voice were baked in very very early. 

You know that thing about deciding whether you are going to ask permission to do something or do it and beg forgiveness later? That little trope describes Facebook’s MO to an unusual extent. There’s zero transparency and very little accountability to outsiders at Facebook. For several years the website I work for has ridden a roller coaster of unpredictable booms and busts because Facebook twiddled some knob in or against our favor and we’re forced to live with the result. We’re often in a semi-panic as a result. Oh Facebook, can we have some idea what those changes you made are or mean so we can plan around them? Don’t make me laugh. They’re not going to tell us that. What’s that? We made a change and decided in 2011 or whatever that this subset of your data couldn’t be private anymore even though it was implied that it would stay private? Oh well sorry, you should probably just adjust to that because we like things better this way. In a month we’ll make some other change without consulting you and you won’t be able to get any information about that change either. We’re going to do these things and we don’t care even a little what you think of them or how they affect you. Is there someone at Facebook regular users (including businesses) can contact so that people can appeal or get some information about how they should proceed with interacting with Facebook? Don’t be ridiculous, there is no such person. You can’t call Facebook tech support, that is just not a thing that exists. More than most companies, Facebook conducts its affairs using the frustrating method of the unarticulated fiat, choices made from on high with no transparency. 

Greed and desire for control drive this to be sure, I’m not sure “sleaze” does. 

Look, about 3 years ago it became clear that Facebook and the publishing world at large were joined in some kind of death dance…. Facebook had every opportunity to meet with those publishers as equals and try to be a “good faith partner” with them as we all moved forward together. Instead they made 300 decisions a day that made it clear they didn’t want any give or take with publishers. They would dictate the terms and everybody would be happy with what they got, and that’s it, because they held the upper hand at that time. If you tried to game out what would happen with such a relationship, it was inevitable that that relationship would sour and a great many proud, important and not-important entities would get very steamed about being pushed around by Facebook all the time. 

What ended up happening was that Facebook made a series of decisions that were a direct result of their blitheness towards data and privacy issues and their lack of a good relationship with those publishers made it impossible for them to make any smaller adjustments to the system in a way that made any sense. As a result they ended up nuking the entire “posting on Facebook for profit” model, and the entire publishing and online advertising model is in tatters because the only possible venue for online advertisements/virality that can yield actual profits has decided that nothing can be done for gain on Facebook for a while. I’m saying all this to express the idea that playing nice with the publishers was in THEIR best interest all along, even if they spectacularly failed to recognize this. They went the other way and now the relationship might be irreparable. Facebook has made squeaky little “we’re sorry, whatevs” noises in the past and I can’t actually tell if the current contrition is in any way real or just a holding tactic to get through this scandal. If past performance is any guide, I’m forced to conclude that it’s bullshit. 

In any case, what remains is that there’s a lot of advertising cash out there waiting to be thrown at the internet and a lot of entities who would love to receive it. Facebook has temporarily absented itself from being the broker for those transactions. This is where the current “leave Facebook” movement has the potential to do real harm to Facebook, because it trades on Facebook’s being the only game in town and the primary venue for Boomers and GenXers and some millennials to interact. But Facebook rather feels like an advertising venue first and foremost these days, which is new; that was simply not true 2 years ago. The acridity of the 2016 political year left a lot of my liberal friends (most of them women) with extremely little desire to spend time on Facebook, and not all of that is Facebook’s fault. They’re all at Instagram, which is nicer, more tolerant, and more respectful. But while the shrinking of the Facebook audience can hurt the site, the likelihood of publishers building a separate set of institutions to deal with this shit would also be very harmful to Facebook. The publishers rightly feel very burned, and it’s not yet clear whether a reasonable second option is even viable. But an aging audience that is not hip and that is not being truly replenished by the hip could spell bad news for Facebook, as are the calculations of prideful publishers who detested being under the thumb of someone who is as callow as Zuckerberg often appears to be. 

I think this is entirely a mess of its own making, and I might be in a minority but I think it was entirely predictable. I was saying as far back as 2014 that Facebook had absolutely terrible BO and that it really made no sense to treat all of these publishers as slaves, in the long run. 

Anyway. Rather than sleaze and “we should totally do it” I see idealism and incredible arrogance and incredible entitlement, that’s what is driving this."

by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo |  Read more:

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