Anthony Bourdain and Iggy Pop
[ed. Search and destroy - race you to the chicken wings and Cristal.]
Friday, June 1, 2018
Money for Nothing
A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on. U.S. Customs took it without charging him with a crime.
A 64-year-old Cleveland man is suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection after agents strip-searched him at an airport in October and took more than $58,000 in cash from him without charging him with any crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week in Ohio.
Customs agents seized the money through a process known as civil asset forfeiture, a law enforcement technique that allows authorities to take cash and property from people who are never convicted or even charged with a crime. The practice is widespread at the federal level. In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States. (...)
The searches turned up nothing — no drugs, no contraband, no evidence of any illegal activity, according to the lawsuit. But the agents took Kazazi's money. Even more alarming to Kazazi was that the receipt the agents handed to him did not list the dollar value of his cash.“I began to worry that they were trying to steal the money for themselves,” he said in his court declaration. (...)
The Kazazis have been caught up in a broader struggle over civil asset forfeiture. Defenders of the practice, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, say it is a valuable tool for fighting drug cartels and other criminal enterprises in cases in which a criminal conviction is difficult to obtain. But media outlets such as The Washington Post and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have found that the process is ripe for abuse.
“The government can just take everything from you,” said Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family's attorney. Hottot is with the Institute for Justice, a civil-liberties law firm working to overturn civil forfeiture. People wishing to challenge a civil forfeiture must essentially demonstrate their innocence in court, Hottot said, turning the dictum of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.
“You have to affirmatively show you're not a criminal to get your own money back,” Hottot said. “You have to effectively prove a negative.”
Federal authorities haul in billions in cash and property from forfeiture every year, a tally that does not include additional billions seized in state and local forfeiture actions.
by Christopher Ingraham, WaPo | Read more:
Image: Kazazi family/WAPO.ST/Wonkblog
[ed. Do check out: Stop and Seize. The whole concept of civil asset forfeiture is a disgrace to American democracy.]
Age Discrimination is a Real Problem
Older workers are accusing Facebook, Ikea, and hundreds of other companies for discriminating against job seekers in their 50s and 60s through targeted job ads posted on Facebook.
The Communications Workers of America, a labor union representing 700,000 media workers across the country, added the companies to a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday, which was filed in California federal court in December. In its original complaint, the labor union accused Amazon, T-Mobile, and Cox Media Group of doing the same thing.
The case, Bradley v. T-Mobile, has major implications for US employers, who routinely buy job ads on Facebook to reach users. The plaintiffs argue that Amazon, T-Mobile, Ikea, Facebook, and hundreds of other companies target the ads so they are only seen by younger Facebook users.
The lawsuit revolves around Facebook’s unique business model, which lets advertisers micro-target the network’s users based on their interests, city, age, and other demographic information. In the past, equal rights advocates have sued Facebook for accepting ads that discriminate against consumers based on their religion, race, and gender.
Facebook has argued that the company is not legally responsible when other companies buy ads that violate the law. But in a new filing, the CWA has now added Facebook to its complaint as one of the companies accused of violating civil rights laws by targeting its own job ads to younger users.
Facebook has denied that these kinds of ads are a form of age discrimination. Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP of ads, compared it to posting job ads in magazines geared for young audiences, which the courts have said isn’t inherently a form of age discrimination as long as the company is also posting job ads in media outlets with older audiences or making other recruitment efforts.
“What matters is that marketing is broadly based and inclusive, not simply focused on a particular age group. In addition, certain employers want to attract retirees or recruit for jobs with specific age restrictions like the military or airline pilots,” Goldman wrote in December in response to the original lawsuit and to the ProPublica and New York Times investigation that described the widespread practice.
Facebook came under fire in 2016 when a separate ProPublica investigation showed that companies could buy ads that screened out users based on their race, which is potentially illegal in the context of housing and employment advertising. Facebook announced in February 2017 that it had developed a new system to flag and reject certain ads that screened users based on “ethnic affinity,” but the network still lets advertisers filter out characteristics linked to other protected groups: women, people with disabilities, and religious minorities.
In the age discrimination case, plaintiffs want the court to order these companies, including Facebook itself, to stop posting job ads that filter out older workers. They argue that it’s a violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which makes it illegal to discriminate against workers over the age of 40 in employment advertising, recruiting, hiring, and other employment opportunities. (...)
Job discrimination against older workers is a big problem that is often overlooked in civil rights discussions. The number of age discrimination complaints submitted to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has been rising steadily in the past 10 years, with about 18,000 complaints filed in fiscal year 2017 — about 20 percent of all complaints filed with the federal agency.
One 2017 study from economists at Tulane University and the University of California Irvine found that job applicants near retirement age, especially women, were far less likely to hear back from recruiters than younger workers. The study compared response rates to more than 40,000 fake résumés sent in applications to 135 jobs.
by Alexia Fernández Campbell, Vox | Read more:
The Communications Workers of America, a labor union representing 700,000 media workers across the country, added the companies to a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday, which was filed in California federal court in December. In its original complaint, the labor union accused Amazon, T-Mobile, and Cox Media Group of doing the same thing.
The case, Bradley v. T-Mobile, has major implications for US employers, who routinely buy job ads on Facebook to reach users. The plaintiffs argue that Amazon, T-Mobile, Ikea, Facebook, and hundreds of other companies target the ads so they are only seen by younger Facebook users.
The lawsuit revolves around Facebook’s unique business model, which lets advertisers micro-target the network’s users based on their interests, city, age, and other demographic information. In the past, equal rights advocates have sued Facebook for accepting ads that discriminate against consumers based on their religion, race, and gender.Facebook has argued that the company is not legally responsible when other companies buy ads that violate the law. But in a new filing, the CWA has now added Facebook to its complaint as one of the companies accused of violating civil rights laws by targeting its own job ads to younger users.
Facebook has denied that these kinds of ads are a form of age discrimination. Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP of ads, compared it to posting job ads in magazines geared for young audiences, which the courts have said isn’t inherently a form of age discrimination as long as the company is also posting job ads in media outlets with older audiences or making other recruitment efforts.
“What matters is that marketing is broadly based and inclusive, not simply focused on a particular age group. In addition, certain employers want to attract retirees or recruit for jobs with specific age restrictions like the military or airline pilots,” Goldman wrote in December in response to the original lawsuit and to the ProPublica and New York Times investigation that described the widespread practice.
Facebook came under fire in 2016 when a separate ProPublica investigation showed that companies could buy ads that screened out users based on their race, which is potentially illegal in the context of housing and employment advertising. Facebook announced in February 2017 that it had developed a new system to flag and reject certain ads that screened users based on “ethnic affinity,” but the network still lets advertisers filter out characteristics linked to other protected groups: women, people with disabilities, and religious minorities.
In the age discrimination case, plaintiffs want the court to order these companies, including Facebook itself, to stop posting job ads that filter out older workers. They argue that it’s a violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which makes it illegal to discriminate against workers over the age of 40 in employment advertising, recruiting, hiring, and other employment opportunities. (...)
Job discrimination against older workers is a big problem that is often overlooked in civil rights discussions. The number of age discrimination complaints submitted to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has been rising steadily in the past 10 years, with about 18,000 complaints filed in fiscal year 2017 — about 20 percent of all complaints filed with the federal agency.
One 2017 study from economists at Tulane University and the University of California Irvine found that job applicants near retirement age, especially women, were far less likely to hear back from recruiters than younger workers. The study compared response rates to more than 40,000 fake résumés sent in applications to 135 jobs.
by Alexia Fernández Campbell, Vox | Read more:
Image:Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Biodegradable Six-Pack Rings
Florida brewery unveils six-pack rings that feed sea turtles rather than kill them
A Florida brewery has a solution: six-pack rings that that can either biodegrade or serve as a snack for wildlife. After years of research and development, the rings - made of wheat and barley - are now popping up in south Florida stores.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Memes Are Becoming Harder to Monetize
When a new meme explodes, the race to transform it into merchandise is fierce. Within hours of the laurel vs. yanny controversy, for instance, Instagram meme pages were attempting to cash in by selling yanny-and-laurel-themed T-shirts, aprons, and more.
But there was a time, from around 2008 to 2012, when seeing memes out in the world, plastered on books, merchandise, and T-shirts, was still novel. Social media was just catching hold, and memes began to seep out of forums and corners of the internet like Reddit into broader culture.
The literary agent Kate McKean, who has sold several meme-based books, refers to this time in history as the “OH! The Internet Is a Thing!” stage. It was a time when almost anyone could slap a meme onto a T-shirt, mug, plate, book, or poster and cash in. Meme-focused Tumblrs began to get book deals, FunnyJunk.com started carrying “rage face” merchandise, and Urban Outfitters ordered boatloads of T-shirts emblazoned with an image of “Scumbag Steve.”
Just five years later, the landscape has transformed dramatically. Competition is intense, and according to those who make a living selling meme-based products online, it’s harder than ever to make money on a meme.
The biggest threat to meme-focused e-commerce businesses, according to those in the field, is the rate at which people today consume memes.
“One of the biggest factors in a meme dying is if a meme gets overused,” says Jason Wong, the founder and CEO of a meme-focused e-commerce business called Dank Tank that sells merchandise like Tide Pod socks. “People today are consuming more memes than ever. The expiration date for them has shortened more since even last year. Memes used to last for two to three weeks, but recently we’ve noticed they die after just a few days.”
“It feels like the internet is all moving a lot quicker,” says Samantha Fishbein, the co-founder and COO of Betches media.
Brad Kim, the editor in chief of Know Your Meme, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the early days of meme culture, so, late 2008 to early 2012, memes used to go on for months on end,” he says. Memes like the advice dog, for instance, first broke out in 2008 but remained in steady use until mid-2012. More recently, memes like Doge and Harambe stayed popular for nearly a year. “These are memes that would have way shorter shelf life now because they would get mutated into something different or cycled out by the community entirely,” Kim says.
The 24-7 nature of today’s meme cycle has posed problems for businesses that design custom merchandise based on memes. Time is needed to pull together a design, coordinate supply chains, and work with retailers. By the time things all come together, the moment has passed.
“A few years ago, we’d see a phrase and that phrase had a longer shelf life because memes came and went at a lower pace,” Fishbein says.
Today, memes come and go sometimes faster than T-shirts can be printed, and there’s nothing more mortifying than donning a T-shirt with a dated phrase. The Instagram star Tank Sinatra says this is the reason he’s shied away from selling meme-focused merch like other Instagrammers.
“By the time the merch is ready to go, by the time the design is even approved by a shop, it’s not even worth the effort because it’s old,” he says. “You’re going to look out of touch.” The few times he has produced meme-focused items, such as pillows featuring the crying Jordan face and “Hide the Pain Harold,” they have underperformed.
Because timeliness is key, most big meme accounts and websites now use third-party services like Shopify to handle the back end of their stores. This allows them to get products up quickly. Consumers can also create their own custom meme merchandise (often for cheaper) by using sites like Redbubble, Spreadshirt, or Zazzle, which allow you to upload any image and have it printed on a variety of products.
“Those sites are really good at what they do,” says Sinatra. “But even as quickly as they work, you’re still not getting your stuff for three days or five days. By then, the boat has sailed.”
“The shorter lifespan has ... been a big challenge in our company,” says Wong.
It’s also almost impossible for sellers to monetize entire swaths of memes featuring trademarked characters like SpongeBob or Kermit the Frog.
On top of everything, the nature of what constitutes a meme itself is shifting. While early memes followed standardized formats, like white block font plastered on top of a funny photo, today’s memes are more esoteric.
Edward Stockwell who has managed meme-based social-media accounts for sites like theCHIVE and Rooster Teeth says that memes today relative to a few years ago are wildly different, and that makes them more difficult to commoditize.
“A lot of memes today are much more niche and rely on specific reference points to understand, so they’re less marketable to a wider audience,” he says. “Not that long ago there were maybe a handful of memes that everyone knew: Grumpy Cat, Scumbag Steve, etc. They were characters that stuck around.” Today’s memes, he explains, are more nebulous.
by Taylor Lorenze, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
But there was a time, from around 2008 to 2012, when seeing memes out in the world, plastered on books, merchandise, and T-shirts, was still novel. Social media was just catching hold, and memes began to seep out of forums and corners of the internet like Reddit into broader culture.
The literary agent Kate McKean, who has sold several meme-based books, refers to this time in history as the “OH! The Internet Is a Thing!” stage. It was a time when almost anyone could slap a meme onto a T-shirt, mug, plate, book, or poster and cash in. Meme-focused Tumblrs began to get book deals, FunnyJunk.com started carrying “rage face” merchandise, and Urban Outfitters ordered boatloads of T-shirts emblazoned with an image of “Scumbag Steve.”Just five years later, the landscape has transformed dramatically. Competition is intense, and according to those who make a living selling meme-based products online, it’s harder than ever to make money on a meme.
The biggest threat to meme-focused e-commerce businesses, according to those in the field, is the rate at which people today consume memes.
“One of the biggest factors in a meme dying is if a meme gets overused,” says Jason Wong, the founder and CEO of a meme-focused e-commerce business called Dank Tank that sells merchandise like Tide Pod socks. “People today are consuming more memes than ever. The expiration date for them has shortened more since even last year. Memes used to last for two to three weeks, but recently we’ve noticed they die after just a few days.”
“It feels like the internet is all moving a lot quicker,” says Samantha Fishbein, the co-founder and COO of Betches media.
Brad Kim, the editor in chief of Know Your Meme, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the early days of meme culture, so, late 2008 to early 2012, memes used to go on for months on end,” he says. Memes like the advice dog, for instance, first broke out in 2008 but remained in steady use until mid-2012. More recently, memes like Doge and Harambe stayed popular for nearly a year. “These are memes that would have way shorter shelf life now because they would get mutated into something different or cycled out by the community entirely,” Kim says.
The 24-7 nature of today’s meme cycle has posed problems for businesses that design custom merchandise based on memes. Time is needed to pull together a design, coordinate supply chains, and work with retailers. By the time things all come together, the moment has passed.
“A few years ago, we’d see a phrase and that phrase had a longer shelf life because memes came and went at a lower pace,” Fishbein says.
Today, memes come and go sometimes faster than T-shirts can be printed, and there’s nothing more mortifying than donning a T-shirt with a dated phrase. The Instagram star Tank Sinatra says this is the reason he’s shied away from selling meme-focused merch like other Instagrammers.
“By the time the merch is ready to go, by the time the design is even approved by a shop, it’s not even worth the effort because it’s old,” he says. “You’re going to look out of touch.” The few times he has produced meme-focused items, such as pillows featuring the crying Jordan face and “Hide the Pain Harold,” they have underperformed.
Because timeliness is key, most big meme accounts and websites now use third-party services like Shopify to handle the back end of their stores. This allows them to get products up quickly. Consumers can also create their own custom meme merchandise (often for cheaper) by using sites like Redbubble, Spreadshirt, or Zazzle, which allow you to upload any image and have it printed on a variety of products.
“Those sites are really good at what they do,” says Sinatra. “But even as quickly as they work, you’re still not getting your stuff for three days or five days. By then, the boat has sailed.”
“The shorter lifespan has ... been a big challenge in our company,” says Wong.
It’s also almost impossible for sellers to monetize entire swaths of memes featuring trademarked characters like SpongeBob or Kermit the Frog.
On top of everything, the nature of what constitutes a meme itself is shifting. While early memes followed standardized formats, like white block font plastered on top of a funny photo, today’s memes are more esoteric.
Edward Stockwell who has managed meme-based social-media accounts for sites like theCHIVE and Rooster Teeth says that memes today relative to a few years ago are wildly different, and that makes them more difficult to commoditize.
“A lot of memes today are much more niche and rely on specific reference points to understand, so they’re less marketable to a wider audience,” he says. “Not that long ago there were maybe a handful of memes that everyone knew: Grumpy Cat, Scumbag Steve, etc. They were characters that stuck around.” Today’s memes, he explains, are more nebulous.
by Taylor Lorenze, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
'Roseanne'
It was an incredibly exciting time to be a writer on “Roseanne.”
The revived ABC sitcom was the No. 1 new show in the country, delivering an audience that network television had not seen in years. The show was quickly renewed for another season, giving everyone a sense of accomplishment, not to mention job security.
But for all the success, there was also a vague sense of foreboding. The writers’ social media accounts were flooded with negative comments. Articles posted online criticized jokes and plots. Their friends in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles would occasionally tsk-tsk that they worked on the show. And, of course, there was Roseanne Barr, the show’s star and co-creator, and her history of volatile public comments.
“It was hard for us once we started airing and we started to see some of the stuff that came out,” said Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer of the series. “It was just brutal: ‘How dare they give her a show? How dare they write for her?’
“It was a certain amount of pressure,” he continued. “You’re the No. 1 show, and people are coming after you on the web and you’re getting attacked by 50 percent of the press.”
In the wake of ABC’s cancellation of “Roseanne” on Tuesday, only hours after Ms. Barr posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, those who worked for the network and the show were still trying to come to grips with how everything had collapsed so suddenly. (...)
By late Tuesday, Ms. Barr had returned to Twitter and, over several hours, sent or retweeted more than 100 messages.
The revived ABC sitcom was the No. 1 new show in the country, delivering an audience that network television had not seen in years. The show was quickly renewed for another season, giving everyone a sense of accomplishment, not to mention job security.
But for all the success, there was also a vague sense of foreboding. The writers’ social media accounts were flooded with negative comments. Articles posted online criticized jokes and plots. Their friends in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles would occasionally tsk-tsk that they worked on the show. And, of course, there was Roseanne Barr, the show’s star and co-creator, and her history of volatile public comments.“It was hard for us once we started airing and we started to see some of the stuff that came out,” said Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer of the series. “It was just brutal: ‘How dare they give her a show? How dare they write for her?’
“It was a certain amount of pressure,” he continued. “You’re the No. 1 show, and people are coming after you on the web and you’re getting attacked by 50 percent of the press.”
In the wake of ABC’s cancellation of “Roseanne” on Tuesday, only hours after Ms. Barr posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, those who worked for the network and the show were still trying to come to grips with how everything had collapsed so suddenly. (...)
By late Tuesday, Ms. Barr had returned to Twitter and, over several hours, sent or retweeted more than 100 messages.
In one, she apologized to her crew for costing its members their jobs, and in another she apologized to Ms. Jarrett, blaming the drug Ambien for her racist tweet. But she also responded to a message falsely claiming that the ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey consulted with Michelle Obama about the show’s cancellation. “Is this true?” Ms. Barr asked. She also retweeted a message from President Trump that said the Disney chief executive Robert A. Iger had never apologized to him “for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”
And on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Barr hinted that she might not leave ABC quietly. “You guys make me feel like fighting back,” she wrote. “I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U.”
One of the show’s executive producers, Tom Werner, said in a statement that he hoped “Roseanne seeks the help she so clearly needs.”
by John Koblin, NY Times | Read more:And on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Barr hinted that she might not leave ABC quietly. “You guys make me feel like fighting back,” she wrote. “I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U.”
One of the show’s executive producers, Tom Werner, said in a statement that he hoped “Roseanne seeks the help she so clearly needs.”
Image: Adam Rose, via Getty Images
[ed. Great career move. Now she can transition into full Sarah Palin mode and become the mega-superstar she was always meant to be.]
Growing Up With Steve Miller
One night in the spring of 2007, when I was thirteen, my little brother and I cupped our hands to our upstairs hallway window, looked through the cigar smoke in our backyard, and tried to find Steve Miller. There was a grown-up party swirling around outside, but we couldn’t figure out which adult was the celebrity guest. We’d learned every Steve Miller Band classic rock hit from 93.3 The Bone, but we had no idea what the guy looked like. The albums we owned either had a painting of Pegasus or a man in a Joker mask on the cover, and every male standing in our backyard looked like he worked in real estate development.
Steve Miller had attended the Dallas all-boys school St. Mark’s fifty years before we did, and he was back to play its hundredth birthday concert. Our house was near campus, and St. Mark’s borrowed our yard for his welcome dinner. We were bummed we couldn’t spot the famous guy mingling with everyone else, but after a few hours of gawking, my brother and I were allowed to come down and say good-night. We walked outside, and our parents tilted their heads toward the blazered man who could sign our CD copy of Greatest Hits 1974–78.
He was the one who looked the most at home with a cigar. Even though he was sixty-something years old, his hair was longer, featherier, more swooped and tangled than the dad cuts at the party. We walked up, and he blew out smoke and grinned. “When I was your age,” he told us, “I was already a working musician! I wrote out professional contracts, and I paid my brother to drive us to gigs at frat parties.” Not to be one-upped, I told him my band had recorded four songs and was a fixture on the bar mitzvah circuit. His grin widened, and he asked if I had two guitars I could bring outside.
I did, and my brother brought his bass. Mr. Steve—he said he wasn’t comfortable with “Mr. Miller”—left the donors’ table to play music on the porch with two middle schoolers. My brother sat down and thumped out a rhythm. Mr. Steve laid down some chords, and I tried to show off. I played some blues licks, the only kind of guitar licks I sort of knew how to play. I ran up the pentatonic scale like my uncle had taught me, hammered a Freddie King riff, and watched Mr. Steve’s eyes light up a bit.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was crudely speaking the same vocabulary that he’d used to build his career. Before he rejoined the adults, he showed me a chord progression the great Texas blues musician T-Bone Walker had taught him when Mr. Steve was my age, and then my parents made me go to bed.
But before I left, he extended an invitation: He was headlining the school centennial concert, which was being held on our football field the next day, and he asked if I wanted to watch the sound check. Yes, I said, I did.Thirteen-year-old Max Marshall (background) and his eleven-year-old brother, Charlie, playing with Miller on their back porch the night they first met him, in 2007.
The following afternoon, from the side of the stage, I watched Mr. Steve twist knobs on his amp for twelve minutes. He said he was chasing a perfect high-end tone. He walked up to the mic and kicked off “Fly Like an Eagle.” Halfway through the song, he spoke into the P.A., “Mr. Max, come up and play a solo.” He handed me his guitar. Between the band members, my family, the sound technicians, the groundskeeping crew, and assorted onlookers, there were maybe a few dozen people there—my third or fourth biggest crowd ever. I tried to imagine I was still on the porch, and I played the same licks as I had the night before. The song ended, and Mr. Steve asked if I wanted to sit in with his band that night at the concert.
I was bummed, because I had to decline. I was going to be a groomsman at my childhood nanny’s wedding that night, and it started at six. I told Mr. Steve thank you and asked if maybe we could play together at St. Mark’s 125th birthday. He said sure—but if I arranged things right, maybe I’d be able to make the 100th, too.
Thanks to my mom’s willingness to drive her Toyota Highlander at illegal speeds, I did. That evening, after the wedding ceremony, I walked a bridesmaid out of the chapel, changed out of my tuxedo in the car, and made it onstage while Steve and a band of St. Mark’s high schoolers began “Fly Like an Eagle.” I didn’t have a guitar, so I stood behind them and looked out at the hundreds of people gathered in the audience. After the second verse, Mr. Steve unstrapped his Fender Stratocaster and handed it to me. Take a solo! Biting the left side of my tongue, I stared at my tennis shoes and played the same licks I’d played the previous night in my backyard, and at sound check earlier that day. I gave him back the guitar about two minutes after he had lent it to me. The song ended, and I walked offstage and made it back to the wedding reception in time for cake.
Driving around Dallas–Fort Worth in the early aughts, it was hard to miss hearing the Steve Miller Band’s seventies hits. Stuck on the LBJ Freeway or gunning down the tollway, my parents would flip between 92.5 KZPS and 93.3 The Bone, DFW’s nearly identical classic rock stations. Each station played a narrow rotation of songs that rarely reached past the early eighties, soon after people started burning disco records. Before I was out of a car seat, I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t bothered by Watergate, what portion of the night AC/DC got shook, and what Steve Miller had to say about the “pompatus of love.”
I remember multiple childhood car rides during which we’d toggle stations and discover that 92.5 and 93.3 were playing the same Steve Miller track at the same time. Songs like “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Rock’n Me,” and four or five others felt like they were always there, riding some permanent radio wave. I didn’t mind. I grew to dig the sweet pastoral harmonies, the laid-back grooves, the trillion-dollar hooks. With militant ambition and a light touch, Miller wove psych rock, Texas blues, country music, and other threads into escapist, inescapable pop.
But though I’d heard so much of Steve Miller’s music, I didn’t know anything about Miller himself. His songs dance around any sense of biography: “The Joker,” after all, is a fictional list of alter egos—and “Steve Miller” the man is as elusive as his singles are ubiquitous. I don’t think I ever saw his face on TV or in magazines. (I wasn’t alone: one time, I was told, a security guard in Las Vegas wouldn’t let Steve onto his own stage without seeing a pass.) His name doesn’t come up in too many conversations either; many people never realize that all these songs belong to one guy.
Growing up, I didn’t know any of the music Steve Miller made before or after his hit parade. He released his first album fifty years ago and his most recent one in 2011, but KZPS and The Bone mostly played songs from 1974 to 1978. As a result, I didn’t know that Mr. Steve had recorded a 1967 live LP with Chuck Berry. I hadn’t learned that Les Paul—the jazz-and-standards legend and co-inventor of the solid-body electric guitar—was his godfather and mentor. (Steve’s father, a doctor and recording equipment enthusiast, was the best man at Paul’s wedding—which was held in the Miller home—and Paul and his bride, Mary Ford, spent their honeymoon in Steve’s parents’ bedroom.) I had no idea that when Steve was about nine years old, T-Bone Walker—a guest at his parents’ house—taught him to play guitar behind his back. Or that he had been a major figure in the sixties San Francisco psych rock boom. Or that he had opened a few of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s last shows. I didn’t know that he had the foresight to control his own publishing when that was an unusual thing to do; I didn’t know what publishing was. I didn’t understand what it took to do all of that stuff, and I didn’t know why he wanted to show me how to do any of it, either. (...)
The Steve Miller Band visits forty to fifty cities each tour, and they play roughly twenty songs a show. (Their 2018 tour, which will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Steve’s first album, hits San Antonio, Allen, Sugar Land, and Austin in late July.) Since at least the nineties, the band hasn’t been able to leave town without playing “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Swingtown,” “Rock’n Me,” “Abracadabra,” “Jungle Love,” and a few other greatest hits. In the remaining slots, they squeeze in obscurities from new albums, or jazz standards featuring Steve’s cigar-smoke legato voice, or Texas blues songs that let him wail on the guitar. The problem is, when Steve announces a song that’s not chocolate cake, hundreds of people get up for a hot dog. So, halfway through that set in Houston, he didn’t say, “We’re going to take a break from radio hits and play four blues covers”; he just asked the crowd to help welcome to the stage a fourteen-year-old kid from the great state of Texas.
I walked out, plugged into a Dr. Z amp, and helped kick off “Mercury Blues,” a song first recorded by the K. C. Douglas Trio in 1948. Things immediately felt different than they had at sound check. A few hours earlier, I had been standing under daylight, with my guitar echoing off empty seats. Now the stage was a fish tank. The spotlights beat down on me, and I couldn’t see beyond the first couple of rows. I turned to the band for some signals, but on a stage that can fit a symphony orchestra, the seven guys dressed in black disappeared behind a row of towering purple stage columns. Any sound roaring from the main speakers got absorbed by thousands of bodies, and the stage was so quiet I could hear my pick clacking the strings. (...)
A decade or so after that night, people ask me, “Are you still doing music?” I say yes, and in a way, it’s the truth; I still play guitar and write songs. But in the way that they mean—performing onstage and trying to make it—the honest answer has faded to no.
At one point, it looked like things might turn out differently. In 2008, when I was in New York City for summer vacation before my freshman year of high school, Steve invited me to play with him and Les Paul. It was a minor show, a Monday gig at a Times Square jazz club, but I got stage fright knocking on Paul’s greenroom door. Inside was my mentor’s own mentor, the guy who taught Steve his first chords. I walked in, and 93-year-old Les Paul looked up from the sofa. “What kind of music do you play, kid?” I wobbled out an answer, and his eyes got small. “The blues? Kid, anybody can play the fucking blues!” When we got on stage, Les grinned, Steve grinned, and I coated my Gibson Les Paul with sweat. They played thirteenth chords and weird textures and led me away from the blues. After the show, some guy from the crowd asked me to sign his guitar. As I told the Dallas Morning News two years later, when they wrote an article about my friendship with Steve, “In some ways, I’m getting the same treatment from Steve that he got from Les. It’s a cool opportunity.”
But I eventually botched my cool opportunity. I spent a good chunk of high school flying to Sun Valley to record my songs, but by the time I showed up in New York for college orientation, in 2012, I barely mentioned to people that I played guitar. Fear and laziness had killed my music routine, and I hadn’t talked to Steve in a year. He was grieving the deaths of some close friends (including Les, who died a year after I’d met him), and I was trying to be a normal freshman. Being Steve’s mentee had put me under the spotlight and in his shadow, two places where I wasn’t confident enough to stand.
No longer a naive fourteen-year-old, I couldn’t black out and play under stage lights without thinking. Becoming aware of how I looked and sounded robbed me of my blind confidence. By the time Wikipedia listed me as a member of the Steve Miller Band (an error that was eventually corrected), I knew I was being defined in terms I’d fail by. I wasn’t a member of his band, and I was never going to make itlike he did. On some level, I wouldn’t make it like he did because musicians my age had come along too late to surf classic rock’s never-ending radio wave. Mostly, though, I wouldn’t make it like he did because I didn’t have it like he did.
When I started playing music, I thought the it in having it was some glowing X factor that famous musicians receive at birth. And when talent and undeserved privilege dropped me onto a big stage at a young age, I thought I had it. Then I looked under the hood of a successful music career. Five decades after Steve Miller released his first LP, he still practices singing on his bus, extends sound checks to the point of exhaustion, and pulls all-nighters to overdub thirty-second guitar parts. Steve’s mentorship taught me something that I didn’t want to learn: it isn’t a quality that you’re given but a question of how much you’re willing to give. Whether you want to make high art or big-money chocolate cake, you have to be monomaniacally committed to getting there. You won’t create music that’s effortless or individual without giving your effort or yourself completely to it. And by that definition, Steve has it, and I clearly never did.
Steve Miller had attended the Dallas all-boys school St. Mark’s fifty years before we did, and he was back to play its hundredth birthday concert. Our house was near campus, and St. Mark’s borrowed our yard for his welcome dinner. We were bummed we couldn’t spot the famous guy mingling with everyone else, but after a few hours of gawking, my brother and I were allowed to come down and say good-night. We walked outside, and our parents tilted their heads toward the blazered man who could sign our CD copy of Greatest Hits 1974–78.
He was the one who looked the most at home with a cigar. Even though he was sixty-something years old, his hair was longer, featherier, more swooped and tangled than the dad cuts at the party. We walked up, and he blew out smoke and grinned. “When I was your age,” he told us, “I was already a working musician! I wrote out professional contracts, and I paid my brother to drive us to gigs at frat parties.” Not to be one-upped, I told him my band had recorded four songs and was a fixture on the bar mitzvah circuit. His grin widened, and he asked if I had two guitars I could bring outside.I did, and my brother brought his bass. Mr. Steve—he said he wasn’t comfortable with “Mr. Miller”—left the donors’ table to play music on the porch with two middle schoolers. My brother sat down and thumped out a rhythm. Mr. Steve laid down some chords, and I tried to show off. I played some blues licks, the only kind of guitar licks I sort of knew how to play. I ran up the pentatonic scale like my uncle had taught me, hammered a Freddie King riff, and watched Mr. Steve’s eyes light up a bit.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was crudely speaking the same vocabulary that he’d used to build his career. Before he rejoined the adults, he showed me a chord progression the great Texas blues musician T-Bone Walker had taught him when Mr. Steve was my age, and then my parents made me go to bed.
But before I left, he extended an invitation: He was headlining the school centennial concert, which was being held on our football field the next day, and he asked if I wanted to watch the sound check. Yes, I said, I did.Thirteen-year-old Max Marshall (background) and his eleven-year-old brother, Charlie, playing with Miller on their back porch the night they first met him, in 2007.
The following afternoon, from the side of the stage, I watched Mr. Steve twist knobs on his amp for twelve minutes. He said he was chasing a perfect high-end tone. He walked up to the mic and kicked off “Fly Like an Eagle.” Halfway through the song, he spoke into the P.A., “Mr. Max, come up and play a solo.” He handed me his guitar. Between the band members, my family, the sound technicians, the groundskeeping crew, and assorted onlookers, there were maybe a few dozen people there—my third or fourth biggest crowd ever. I tried to imagine I was still on the porch, and I played the same licks as I had the night before. The song ended, and Mr. Steve asked if I wanted to sit in with his band that night at the concert.
I was bummed, because I had to decline. I was going to be a groomsman at my childhood nanny’s wedding that night, and it started at six. I told Mr. Steve thank you and asked if maybe we could play together at St. Mark’s 125th birthday. He said sure—but if I arranged things right, maybe I’d be able to make the 100th, too.
Thanks to my mom’s willingness to drive her Toyota Highlander at illegal speeds, I did. That evening, after the wedding ceremony, I walked a bridesmaid out of the chapel, changed out of my tuxedo in the car, and made it onstage while Steve and a band of St. Mark’s high schoolers began “Fly Like an Eagle.” I didn’t have a guitar, so I stood behind them and looked out at the hundreds of people gathered in the audience. After the second verse, Mr. Steve unstrapped his Fender Stratocaster and handed it to me. Take a solo! Biting the left side of my tongue, I stared at my tennis shoes and played the same licks I’d played the previous night in my backyard, and at sound check earlier that day. I gave him back the guitar about two minutes after he had lent it to me. The song ended, and I walked offstage and made it back to the wedding reception in time for cake.
Driving around Dallas–Fort Worth in the early aughts, it was hard to miss hearing the Steve Miller Band’s seventies hits. Stuck on the LBJ Freeway or gunning down the tollway, my parents would flip between 92.5 KZPS and 93.3 The Bone, DFW’s nearly identical classic rock stations. Each station played a narrow rotation of songs that rarely reached past the early eighties, soon after people started burning disco records. Before I was out of a car seat, I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t bothered by Watergate, what portion of the night AC/DC got shook, and what Steve Miller had to say about the “pompatus of love.”
I remember multiple childhood car rides during which we’d toggle stations and discover that 92.5 and 93.3 were playing the same Steve Miller track at the same time. Songs like “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Rock’n Me,” and four or five others felt like they were always there, riding some permanent radio wave. I didn’t mind. I grew to dig the sweet pastoral harmonies, the laid-back grooves, the trillion-dollar hooks. With militant ambition and a light touch, Miller wove psych rock, Texas blues, country music, and other threads into escapist, inescapable pop.
But though I’d heard so much of Steve Miller’s music, I didn’t know anything about Miller himself. His songs dance around any sense of biography: “The Joker,” after all, is a fictional list of alter egos—and “Steve Miller” the man is as elusive as his singles are ubiquitous. I don’t think I ever saw his face on TV or in magazines. (I wasn’t alone: one time, I was told, a security guard in Las Vegas wouldn’t let Steve onto his own stage without seeing a pass.) His name doesn’t come up in too many conversations either; many people never realize that all these songs belong to one guy.
Growing up, I didn’t know any of the music Steve Miller made before or after his hit parade. He released his first album fifty years ago and his most recent one in 2011, but KZPS and The Bone mostly played songs from 1974 to 1978. As a result, I didn’t know that Mr. Steve had recorded a 1967 live LP with Chuck Berry. I hadn’t learned that Les Paul—the jazz-and-standards legend and co-inventor of the solid-body electric guitar—was his godfather and mentor. (Steve’s father, a doctor and recording equipment enthusiast, was the best man at Paul’s wedding—which was held in the Miller home—and Paul and his bride, Mary Ford, spent their honeymoon in Steve’s parents’ bedroom.) I had no idea that when Steve was about nine years old, T-Bone Walker—a guest at his parents’ house—taught him to play guitar behind his back. Or that he had been a major figure in the sixties San Francisco psych rock boom. Or that he had opened a few of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s last shows. I didn’t know that he had the foresight to control his own publishing when that was an unusual thing to do; I didn’t know what publishing was. I didn’t understand what it took to do all of that stuff, and I didn’t know why he wanted to show me how to do any of it, either. (...)
The Steve Miller Band visits forty to fifty cities each tour, and they play roughly twenty songs a show. (Their 2018 tour, which will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Steve’s first album, hits San Antonio, Allen, Sugar Land, and Austin in late July.) Since at least the nineties, the band hasn’t been able to leave town without playing “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Swingtown,” “Rock’n Me,” “Abracadabra,” “Jungle Love,” and a few other greatest hits. In the remaining slots, they squeeze in obscurities from new albums, or jazz standards featuring Steve’s cigar-smoke legato voice, or Texas blues songs that let him wail on the guitar. The problem is, when Steve announces a song that’s not chocolate cake, hundreds of people get up for a hot dog. So, halfway through that set in Houston, he didn’t say, “We’re going to take a break from radio hits and play four blues covers”; he just asked the crowd to help welcome to the stage a fourteen-year-old kid from the great state of Texas.
I walked out, plugged into a Dr. Z amp, and helped kick off “Mercury Blues,” a song first recorded by the K. C. Douglas Trio in 1948. Things immediately felt different than they had at sound check. A few hours earlier, I had been standing under daylight, with my guitar echoing off empty seats. Now the stage was a fish tank. The spotlights beat down on me, and I couldn’t see beyond the first couple of rows. I turned to the band for some signals, but on a stage that can fit a symphony orchestra, the seven guys dressed in black disappeared behind a row of towering purple stage columns. Any sound roaring from the main speakers got absorbed by thousands of bodies, and the stage was so quiet I could hear my pick clacking the strings. (...)
A decade or so after that night, people ask me, “Are you still doing music?” I say yes, and in a way, it’s the truth; I still play guitar and write songs. But in the way that they mean—performing onstage and trying to make it—the honest answer has faded to no.
At one point, it looked like things might turn out differently. In 2008, when I was in New York City for summer vacation before my freshman year of high school, Steve invited me to play with him and Les Paul. It was a minor show, a Monday gig at a Times Square jazz club, but I got stage fright knocking on Paul’s greenroom door. Inside was my mentor’s own mentor, the guy who taught Steve his first chords. I walked in, and 93-year-old Les Paul looked up from the sofa. “What kind of music do you play, kid?” I wobbled out an answer, and his eyes got small. “The blues? Kid, anybody can play the fucking blues!” When we got on stage, Les grinned, Steve grinned, and I coated my Gibson Les Paul with sweat. They played thirteenth chords and weird textures and led me away from the blues. After the show, some guy from the crowd asked me to sign his guitar. As I told the Dallas Morning News two years later, when they wrote an article about my friendship with Steve, “In some ways, I’m getting the same treatment from Steve that he got from Les. It’s a cool opportunity.”
But I eventually botched my cool opportunity. I spent a good chunk of high school flying to Sun Valley to record my songs, but by the time I showed up in New York for college orientation, in 2012, I barely mentioned to people that I played guitar. Fear and laziness had killed my music routine, and I hadn’t talked to Steve in a year. He was grieving the deaths of some close friends (including Les, who died a year after I’d met him), and I was trying to be a normal freshman. Being Steve’s mentee had put me under the spotlight and in his shadow, two places where I wasn’t confident enough to stand.
No longer a naive fourteen-year-old, I couldn’t black out and play under stage lights without thinking. Becoming aware of how I looked and sounded robbed me of my blind confidence. By the time Wikipedia listed me as a member of the Steve Miller Band (an error that was eventually corrected), I knew I was being defined in terms I’d fail by. I wasn’t a member of his band, and I was never going to make itlike he did. On some level, I wouldn’t make it like he did because musicians my age had come along too late to surf classic rock’s never-ending radio wave. Mostly, though, I wouldn’t make it like he did because I didn’t have it like he did.
When I started playing music, I thought the it in having it was some glowing X factor that famous musicians receive at birth. And when talent and undeserved privilege dropped me onto a big stage at a young age, I thought I had it. Then I looked under the hood of a successful music career. Five decades after Steve Miller released his first LP, he still practices singing on his bus, extends sound checks to the point of exhaustion, and pulls all-nighters to overdub thirty-second guitar parts. Steve’s mentorship taught me something that I didn’t want to learn: it isn’t a quality that you’re given but a question of how much you’re willing to give. Whether you want to make high art or big-money chocolate cake, you have to be monomaniacally committed to getting there. You won’t create music that’s effortless or individual without giving your effort or yourself completely to it. And by that definition, Steve has it, and I clearly never did.
by Max Marshall, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Max Marshall
Familiar Things: Left Behind by Korea’s Success
In South Korea these days, a popular dish at trendy restaurants is budae jjigae—an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stew full of noodles, red pepper paste, Spam, sausages, kimchi, American cheese, baked beans, tofu, and whatever else the chef might want to throw into the mix.
Budae means “battalion” in Korean, which points to the stew’s origins in the Korean War. The conflict took a heavy toll on agriculture and livestock—not to mention able-bodied farmers—and pushed many Koreans to the brink of starvation. Those living close enough to U.S. military outposts often scavenged from the nearby garbage dumps, secreting away items that U.S. soldiers prized least, such as Spam and baked beans. The addition of fermented cabbage and chili paste to these foreign tastes created something new and distinctly Korean.
South Korea has since become a wealthy country, but signs of past underdevelopment often still lurk just beneath the surface of everyday staples. Indeed, in novelist Hwang Sok-yong’s Familiar Things, budae jjigae features prominently, its inglorious origins a stand-in for all the other horrors that Koreans would prefer to forget. Familiar Things was initially published in South Korea in 2011; its English translation, which will finally be distributed in the United States starting this month, serves as a powerful and potentially contentious reminder of the difficult backstory to South Korean success. (...)
With Familiar Things, Hwang turns his attention to the underside of South Korea’s remarkable economic development, namely, the vast underclass it has created. Hwang’s riveting tale of second-class citizenship, in which the main characters are forced to pick through garbage to survive, gestures not just at the country’s past and what was lost during rapid modernization. It also serves as an implicit warning about the future of the Korean peninsula.
Familiar Things resonates with today’s political moment even though it is set in the early 1980s. At that time, South Korea was in a deep dictatorial funk and just beginning to enjoy some of the fruits of economic modernization. In the space of a single generation, the country rocketed from having one of the lowest per-capita GDPs to being one of the top industrialized nations in the world. But that economic miracle depended on the sacrifice of millions of farmers and industrial workers who tightened their belts—or had their belts tightened for them.
The protagonists of Familiar Things—a boy, nicknamed Bugeye, and his mother—are two members of this pivotal generation. Thirty years have passed since the Korean War, but they too must pick through trash to survive. The novel takes place almost entirely on “Flower Island,” a garbage dump on the outskirts of an unnamed South Korean city.
The dirty, dangerous, demeaning work at the dump is in fact a step up for Bugeye and his mother, who were on the verge of going hungry after the authorities marched off his father to one of the dictatorship’s “reeducation camps.” To celebrate their arrival, Bugeye and his mother’s new neighbors at the dump welcome them with “Flower Island stew,” which Bugeye’s mother immediately recognizes as budae jjigae. It is a signal that their survival will depend on cast-offs—this time not from U.S. soldiers but from their Korean brethren.
By the 1980s, South Koreans had become prosperous enough to throw out perfectly edible food as well as usable clothes, fixable appliances, and even the building materials that Flower Islanders use to create shacks for themselves. The garbage pickers extract everything that can be recycled—paper, metal, plastic, glass—in order to earn their modest wages. The smell of garbage on Flower Island is pervasive, and the odor marks the scavengers as an underclass. In order to venture into the city without attracting scorn, the Flower Islanders must keep a separate set of clothes at a nearby drycleaners.
Bugeye, who is thirteen but looks older, quickly acclimates to his new life. He befriends the younger boy next door, Baldspot, and joins a local gang of kids. But it is far from an idyllic life:
Unlike the trash-pickers, the dokkaebi need the children. These hungry ghosts ask the two children to get them a prized food item: memilmuk. This traditional dish, a buckwheat jelly, is both a favorite of dokkaebi and also part of the ceremonial offerings made to ancestors. It is a taste of the past, of the countryside, and of a way of life that Korea’s modernization is gradually eroding.
When the children offer the dokkaebi their memilmuk, one of the spirits who steps forward to thank them is wearing a baseball cap that says “New Village Movement.” It is a telling detail that all Korean readers would instantly recognize. The New Village Movement was both an effort in the 1970s to modernize villages—replacing thatch roofs, for instance, with tile—and to eliminate any lingering forms of resistance in the countryside. The government program also sought to suppress older belief systems such as Confucian-style ancestor worship. Through the New Village Movement, the authorities would have displaced the original inhabitants of Flower Island to make room for the garbage dump. And so for the dokkaebi to wear such a hat is the equivalent of a recently laid-off coal miner continuing to sport his “Make America Great Again” cap.
Budae means “battalion” in Korean, which points to the stew’s origins in the Korean War. The conflict took a heavy toll on agriculture and livestock—not to mention able-bodied farmers—and pushed many Koreans to the brink of starvation. Those living close enough to U.S. military outposts often scavenged from the nearby garbage dumps, secreting away items that U.S. soldiers prized least, such as Spam and baked beans. The addition of fermented cabbage and chili paste to these foreign tastes created something new and distinctly Korean.
South Korea has since become a wealthy country, but signs of past underdevelopment often still lurk just beneath the surface of everyday staples. Indeed, in novelist Hwang Sok-yong’s Familiar Things, budae jjigae features prominently, its inglorious origins a stand-in for all the other horrors that Koreans would prefer to forget. Familiar Things was initially published in South Korea in 2011; its English translation, which will finally be distributed in the United States starting this month, serves as a powerful and potentially contentious reminder of the difficult backstory to South Korean success. (...)With Familiar Things, Hwang turns his attention to the underside of South Korea’s remarkable economic development, namely, the vast underclass it has created. Hwang’s riveting tale of second-class citizenship, in which the main characters are forced to pick through garbage to survive, gestures not just at the country’s past and what was lost during rapid modernization. It also serves as an implicit warning about the future of the Korean peninsula.
***
As North and South Korea make tentative moves toward reconciliation, it is worth remembering that the economic gap between the two is staggering. Reunification remains a daunting challenge, not least because it is difficult to imagine a scenario that would not instantly turn North Koreans into second-class citizens and semi-permanent dependents.Familiar Things resonates with today’s political moment even though it is set in the early 1980s. At that time, South Korea was in a deep dictatorial funk and just beginning to enjoy some of the fruits of economic modernization. In the space of a single generation, the country rocketed from having one of the lowest per-capita GDPs to being one of the top industrialized nations in the world. But that economic miracle depended on the sacrifice of millions of farmers and industrial workers who tightened their belts—or had their belts tightened for them.
The protagonists of Familiar Things—a boy, nicknamed Bugeye, and his mother—are two members of this pivotal generation. Thirty years have passed since the Korean War, but they too must pick through trash to survive. The novel takes place almost entirely on “Flower Island,” a garbage dump on the outskirts of an unnamed South Korean city.
The dirty, dangerous, demeaning work at the dump is in fact a step up for Bugeye and his mother, who were on the verge of going hungry after the authorities marched off his father to one of the dictatorship’s “reeducation camps.” To celebrate their arrival, Bugeye and his mother’s new neighbors at the dump welcome them with “Flower Island stew,” which Bugeye’s mother immediately recognizes as budae jjigae. It is a signal that their survival will depend on cast-offs—this time not from U.S. soldiers but from their Korean brethren.
By the 1980s, South Koreans had become prosperous enough to throw out perfectly edible food as well as usable clothes, fixable appliances, and even the building materials that Flower Islanders use to create shacks for themselves. The garbage pickers extract everything that can be recycled—paper, metal, plastic, glass—in order to earn their modest wages. The smell of garbage on Flower Island is pervasive, and the odor marks the scavengers as an underclass. In order to venture into the city without attracting scorn, the Flower Islanders must keep a separate set of clothes at a nearby drycleaners.
Bugeye, who is thirteen but looks older, quickly acclimates to his new life. He befriends the younger boy next door, Baldspot, and joins a local gang of kids. But it is far from an idyllic life:
In the shantytown where they lived, children were useless, worth less than scrap metal. To make matters worse, no one wanted to deal with a kid like Baldspot, who was slow and stammered when he spoke. For the grown-ups, who had to work nonstop from dawn to dusk, children were nothing more than an obstacle that slowed them down.Baldspot initiates Bugeye into the otherworldly realm of the dokkaebi, a variety of spirit that alternately plays tricks on humans or assists them, depending on the dokkaebi’s disposition. The dokkaebi of Flower Island are the area’s former inhabitants from before South Korea’s great economic leap forward and the subsequent arrival of the garbage. With this excursion into magical realism, Hwang strives to capture the often-surreal experience of South Korea’s mad dash to modernity.
Unlike the trash-pickers, the dokkaebi need the children. These hungry ghosts ask the two children to get them a prized food item: memilmuk. This traditional dish, a buckwheat jelly, is both a favorite of dokkaebi and also part of the ceremonial offerings made to ancestors. It is a taste of the past, of the countryside, and of a way of life that Korea’s modernization is gradually eroding.
When the children offer the dokkaebi their memilmuk, one of the spirits who steps forward to thank them is wearing a baseball cap that says “New Village Movement.” It is a telling detail that all Korean readers would instantly recognize. The New Village Movement was both an effort in the 1970s to modernize villages—replacing thatch roofs, for instance, with tile—and to eliminate any lingering forms of resistance in the countryside. The government program also sought to suppress older belief systems such as Confucian-style ancestor worship. Through the New Village Movement, the authorities would have displaced the original inhabitants of Flower Island to make room for the garbage dump. And so for the dokkaebi to wear such a hat is the equivalent of a recently laid-off coal miner continuing to sport his “Make America Great Again” cap.
by John Feffer, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Philippe Teuwen
N.B.A. Finals: Warriors and Cavs Star in Basketball’s Version of Groundhog Day
Image: Daniel Zakroczemski
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
How Portugal is Kicking Its Heroin Habit
via:
[ed. See also: The Science of the Psychedelic Renaissance (New Yorker)]
Scooter Startups Have Launched a Revolution. Can They Control It?
Just after 7 a.m. on a recent weekday morning, Alexander Berg pulled his van — bright green, with the word “LimeBike” emblazoned on the side — over on a corner on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berg, a thin, cheerful 31-year old in a hoodie, pulled on a pair of black gloves and threw open the back of the van, which was filled with electric scooters. “We’ll do three here,” he said.
Berg’s employer, a startup named Lime based just south of the city in San Mateo, is one of a handful of companies that have spent the last few months sprinkling hundreds of bikes and electric scooters around American cities. They allow people to unlock the vehicles with smartphone apps and ride them for as little as $1, leaving them sitting on the sidewalk when they’ve reached their destination. The companies — and the investors who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into them over the last year and a half — see this as the next step in the massive recalibration of transportation that Uber and Lyft kicked off about a decade ago. In an open letter to his competitors, Travis VanderZanden, chief executive officer of Bird, another scooter-sharing company, described it as the “biggest revolution in the transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age.”
Scooter sharing was an immediate hit. Lime said that each vehicle in its major markets gets used nine times on an average day. In San Francisco, that adds up to about 2,200 daily rides. But this popularity has also been polarizing. The scooters are broadly seen as an annoying fad among tourists and clueless tech workers, who zip around the city’s sidewalks, breaking the law — scooters are supposed to be ridden in the street — and imperiling everyone around them. Scooters have been thrown in waterways and trees, broken in half, and smeared with poop. (...)
It’s not unusual for startups to set their internal treadmills to speeds they struggle to maintain, especially when venture capitalists are pushing them to dominate. Lime, which has already raised $132 million, is working on closing another fundraising round, which it expects to close within weeks. It’s in 60 markets, and plans to be in 100 markets by the end of the year. To keep this pace, the company has sacrificed peace with local governments, something it has consistently said it would prioritize. Last month, San Francisco’s city attorney sent cease-and-desist orders to the scooter-sharing companies, while local lawmakers wrote new rules. The city is accepting applications from companies looking to operate scooter-sharing services, but the number of scooters they can deploy will be limited. Honolulu; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee have also taken action to slow the spread of scooters. (...)
Bike-sharing is a deceptively complicated business. Lime had to acquire a fleet of vehicles strong enough to withstand a beating, build software to deploy them, and establish individual operations in each city. Adding scooters was just another layer of complexity. Even transportation experts who support the sharing platforms expected them to spend years in obscurity. “Nobody took it seriously — at least I didn’t,” said Sharon Feigon, the executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, an advocacy group pushing for alternative transportation. “Then all of a sudden it took off.”
Besides pedal bikes, electric-assist bikes and scooters, Lime is also developing “transit pods,” one- or two-person vehicles smaller than cars but more powerful than golf-carts, that drive in city streets. Bao and Sun are vague about when the pods might hit the streets. Eventually, Lime envisions a kind of transportation subscription service, where people would choose the type of vehicle based on their needs. While skeptics see an odd fad, Lime thinks its business will become an alternative model for transportation, at least in urban areas. Uber and Lyft have been hinting that they see things in a similar way. In April, Uber paid over $100 million to buy Jump, another bike-sharing company, and Lyft has approached San Francisco about launching its own scooter-sharing service, according to technology news website the Information.
by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Berg’s employer, a startup named Lime based just south of the city in San Mateo, is one of a handful of companies that have spent the last few months sprinkling hundreds of bikes and electric scooters around American cities. They allow people to unlock the vehicles with smartphone apps and ride them for as little as $1, leaving them sitting on the sidewalk when they’ve reached their destination. The companies — and the investors who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into them over the last year and a half — see this as the next step in the massive recalibration of transportation that Uber and Lyft kicked off about a decade ago. In an open letter to his competitors, Travis VanderZanden, chief executive officer of Bird, another scooter-sharing company, described it as the “biggest revolution in the transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age.” Scooter sharing was an immediate hit. Lime said that each vehicle in its major markets gets used nine times on an average day. In San Francisco, that adds up to about 2,200 daily rides. But this popularity has also been polarizing. The scooters are broadly seen as an annoying fad among tourists and clueless tech workers, who zip around the city’s sidewalks, breaking the law — scooters are supposed to be ridden in the street — and imperiling everyone around them. Scooters have been thrown in waterways and trees, broken in half, and smeared with poop. (...)
It’s not unusual for startups to set their internal treadmills to speeds they struggle to maintain, especially when venture capitalists are pushing them to dominate. Lime, which has already raised $132 million, is working on closing another fundraising round, which it expects to close within weeks. It’s in 60 markets, and plans to be in 100 markets by the end of the year. To keep this pace, the company has sacrificed peace with local governments, something it has consistently said it would prioritize. Last month, San Francisco’s city attorney sent cease-and-desist orders to the scooter-sharing companies, while local lawmakers wrote new rules. The city is accepting applications from companies looking to operate scooter-sharing services, but the number of scooters they can deploy will be limited. Honolulu; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee have also taken action to slow the spread of scooters. (...)
Bike-sharing is a deceptively complicated business. Lime had to acquire a fleet of vehicles strong enough to withstand a beating, build software to deploy them, and establish individual operations in each city. Adding scooters was just another layer of complexity. Even transportation experts who support the sharing platforms expected them to spend years in obscurity. “Nobody took it seriously — at least I didn’t,” said Sharon Feigon, the executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, an advocacy group pushing for alternative transportation. “Then all of a sudden it took off.”
Besides pedal bikes, electric-assist bikes and scooters, Lime is also developing “transit pods,” one- or two-person vehicles smaller than cars but more powerful than golf-carts, that drive in city streets. Bao and Sun are vague about when the pods might hit the streets. Eventually, Lime envisions a kind of transportation subscription service, where people would choose the type of vehicle based on their needs. While skeptics see an odd fad, Lime thinks its business will become an alternative model for transportation, at least in urban areas. Uber and Lyft have been hinting that they see things in a similar way. In April, Uber paid over $100 million to buy Jump, another bike-sharing company, and Lyft has approached San Francisco about launching its own scooter-sharing service, according to technology news website the Information.
by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
[ed. Seems to be the Uber model: ignore regulations, saturate cities, negotiate later (after cornering the market). See also: Unfortunately, the Electric Scooters Are Fantastic]
[ed. Seems to be the Uber model: ignore regulations, saturate cities, negotiate later (after cornering the market). See also: Unfortunately, the Electric Scooters Are Fantastic]
Monday, May 28, 2018
FaceTune is Conquering Instagram
The Oxford English Dictionary chose “selfie” as its word of the year at the end of 2013. At around the same time, four Israeli computer science PhD students and a supreme court clerk had an idea for an app that that would allow regular people to do Photoshop-style retouching of their smartphones photos.
That app was FaceTune.
The team behind it hoped they’d be able to sell enough copies of the app to raise a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead, the selfie-editing app was a runaway hit whose digital fingerprints can be seen all over the internet: pores, lines and zits are airbrushed to oblivion, teeth whitened and waists nipped. It has been endorsed by a swarm of Instagram influencers and celebrities including Khloe Kardashian – the social media equivalent of a royal warrant.
The first version has sold more than 10m copies (at between $3.99 and $5.99 each) and was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017.
“We were really surprised. We didn’t think any single app would be significant enough to finance the entire growth of the company. It felt like we had won the lottery,” said Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, the Jerusalem-based startup that makes FaceTune as well as a handful of other photo and video-editing apps.
At the end of 2016, Lightricks launched an upgraded version of their flagship app, FaceTune 2. It’s free to download but $5.99 per month to unlock all of the features, which include a live-editing tool for users to tweak their selfies even before snapping the photo. It has already been downloaded more than 20m times, with almost 500,000 subscribers paying an average of $40 per year.
FaceTune’s success comes down to the way it makes it child’s play to alter images with far more precision than Snapchat filters but less complexity than professional editing tools like Photoshop.
“I mainly use it for beauty product and lifestyle shots to brighten them up,” said beauty blogger Amelia Perrin. “I’m quite a technophobe and can’t use anything like Photoshop, so it’s nice to have a relatively simple tool to sharpen things up.”
“If done properly, it should be hard to tell you’ve used it,” said Natasha Church, a makeup and beauty blogger who has made YouTube tutorials explaining how she edits her photos.
“If I’m taking a selfie I might use the ‘heal’ tool to get rid of a spot. Or if you’ve got enlarged pores you can use the ‘smooth’ tool. If I’m wearing sparkly eyeshadow I might use the ‘detail’ tool to make it pop a bit more,” she said.
All too often, however, FaceTune users go overboard, smoothing their selfies into amorphous avatars or slimming their bodies to the point of anatomical impossibility.
Overzealous FaceTuning is so widespread that recently celebrity model Chrissy Tiegen weighed in: “I don’t know what real skin looks like any more.”
by Olivia Solon, The Guardian | Read more:
That app was FaceTune.
The team behind it hoped they’d be able to sell enough copies of the app to raise a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead, the selfie-editing app was a runaway hit whose digital fingerprints can be seen all over the internet: pores, lines and zits are airbrushed to oblivion, teeth whitened and waists nipped. It has been endorsed by a swarm of Instagram influencers and celebrities including Khloe Kardashian – the social media equivalent of a royal warrant.The first version has sold more than 10m copies (at between $3.99 and $5.99 each) and was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017.
“We were really surprised. We didn’t think any single app would be significant enough to finance the entire growth of the company. It felt like we had won the lottery,” said Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, the Jerusalem-based startup that makes FaceTune as well as a handful of other photo and video-editing apps.
At the end of 2016, Lightricks launched an upgraded version of their flagship app, FaceTune 2. It’s free to download but $5.99 per month to unlock all of the features, which include a live-editing tool for users to tweak their selfies even before snapping the photo. It has already been downloaded more than 20m times, with almost 500,000 subscribers paying an average of $40 per year.
FaceTune’s success comes down to the way it makes it child’s play to alter images with far more precision than Snapchat filters but less complexity than professional editing tools like Photoshop.
“I mainly use it for beauty product and lifestyle shots to brighten them up,” said beauty blogger Amelia Perrin. “I’m quite a technophobe and can’t use anything like Photoshop, so it’s nice to have a relatively simple tool to sharpen things up.”
“If done properly, it should be hard to tell you’ve used it,” said Natasha Church, a makeup and beauty blogger who has made YouTube tutorials explaining how she edits her photos.
“If I’m taking a selfie I might use the ‘heal’ tool to get rid of a spot. Or if you’ve got enlarged pores you can use the ‘smooth’ tool. If I’m wearing sparkly eyeshadow I might use the ‘detail’ tool to make it pop a bit more,” she said.
All too often, however, FaceTune users go overboard, smoothing their selfies into amorphous avatars or slimming their bodies to the point of anatomical impossibility.
Overzealous FaceTuning is so widespread that recently celebrity model Chrissy Tiegen weighed in: “I don’t know what real skin looks like any more.”
by Olivia Solon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Nicole Hale via
[ed. The things you learn every day, huh.]
Tailspin: How Baby Boomers Broke America
Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?
As I tried to find the answer over the past two years, I discovered a recurring irony. About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.These distinctly American ideas became the often unintended instruments for splitting the country into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected overmatched, overran and paralyzed the government. The unprotected were left even further behind. And in many cases, the work was done by a generation of smart, hungry strivers who benefited from one of the most American values of all: meritocracy. (...)
I was one of those elite winners. In 1964, I was a bookworm growing up in Far Rockaway, a working-class section of Queens. One day, I read in a biography of John F. Kennedy that he had gone to something called a prep school. None of my teachers at Junior High School 198 had a clue what that meant, but I soon figured out that prep school was like college. You got to go to classes and live on a campus, only you got to go four years earlier, which seemed like a fine idea. It seemed even better when I discovered that some prep schools offered financial aid. I ended up at Deerfield Academy, in Western Massachusetts, where the headmaster, Frank Boyden, told my worried parents, who ran a perpetually struggling liquor store, that his financial-aid policy was that they should send him a check every year for whatever they could afford.
Three years later, in 1967, I found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office one day in the fall of my senior year with a man named R. Inslee Clark Jr., the dean of admissions at Yale. Clark looked over my record and asked me a bunch of questions, most of which were about where I had grown up and how I had ended up at Deerfield. Then he paused, looked me in the eye and asked if I really wanted to go to Yale – if it was my first choice. When I said yes, Clark’s reply was instant: “Then I can promise you that you are in. I will tell Mr. Boyden that you don’t have to apply anywhere else. Just kind of keep it to yourself.”
What I didn’t know then was that I was part of a revolution being led by Clark, whose nickname was Inky. I was about to become one of what would come to be known as Inky’s boys and, later, girls. We were part of a meritocracy infusion that flourished at Yale and other elite education institutions, law firms and investment banks in the mid-1960s and ’70s. It produced great progress in equalizing opportunity. But it had the unintended consequence of entrenching a new aristocracy of rich knowledge workers who were much smarter and more driven than the old-boy network of heirs born on third base–and much more able to enrich and protect the clients who could afford them. (...)
The Meritocracy’s ascent was about more than personal profit. As my generation of achievers graduated from elite universities and moved into the professional world, their personal successes often had serious societal consequences. They upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones. They created exotic, and risky, financial instruments, including derivatives and credit default swaps, that produced sugar highs of immediate profits but separated those taking the risk from those who would bear the consequences. They organized hedge funds that turned owning stock into a minute-by-minute bet rather than a long-term investment. They invented proxy fights, leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks that gave lawyers and bankers a bonanza of new fees and maximized short-term profits for increasingly unsentimental shareholders, but deadened incentives for the long-term growth of the rest of the economy.
Regulatory agencies were overwhelmed by battalions of lawyers who brilliantly weaponized the bedrock American value of due process so that, for example, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long. Lawyers then contested the meaning of every clause while racking up fees of hundreds of dollars per hour from clients who were saving millions of dollars on every clause they could water down. (...)
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable–government agencies, Congress, the courts.
There may be no more flagrant example of the achievers’ triumph than how they were able to avoid accountability when the banks they ran crashed the economy. The CEOs had been able to get the courts to treat their corporations like people when it came to protecting the corporation’s right to free speech. Yet after the crash, CEOs got prosecutors and judges to treat them like corporations when it came to personal responsibility. The corporate structures they had built were so massive and so complex that, the prosecutors decided, no senior executive could be proved to have known what was going on. (...)
When they created ways to package mortgages into securities that could be resold to investors, for example, it was initially celebrated as a way to get more money into the mortgage pool, thereby making more mortgages available to the middle class. But by 2007 it had become far too much of a good thing. As the financial engineers continued to push the envelope with ever-riskier versions of the original invention, they crashed the economy.
Thus, the breakdown came when their intelligence, daring, creativity and resources enabled them to push aside any effort to rein them in. They did what comes naturally – they kept winning. And they did it with the protection of an alluring, defensible narrative that shielded them from pushback, at least initially. They won not with the brazen corruption of the robber barons of old, but by drawing on the core values that have always defined American greatness.
They didn’t do it cynically, at least not at first. They simply got really, really good at taking advantage of what the American system gave them and doing the kinds of things that America treasures in the name of the values that America treasures.
And they have invested their winnings not only to preserve their bounty, but also to root themselves and their offspring in a new meritocracy-aristocracy that is more entrenched than the old-boy network. Forty-eight years after Inky Clark gave me my ticket on the meritocracy express in 1967, a professor at Yale Law School jarred the school’s graduation celebration. Daniel Markovits, who specializes in the intersection of law and behavioral economics, told the class of 2015 that their success getting accepted into, and getting a degree from, the country’s most selective law school actually marked their entry into a newly entrenched aristocracy that had been snuffing out the American Dream for almost everyone else. Elites, he explained, can spend what they need to in order to send their children to the best schools, provide tutors for standardized testing and otherwise ensure that their kids can outcompete their peers to secure the same spots at the top that their parents achieved.
“American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat,” Markovits concluded, “a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy.”
The frustrated, disillusioned Americans who voted for President Trump committed the ultimate act of rejecting the meritocrats – epitomized by the hardworking, always prepared, Yale Law – educated Hillary Clinton – in favor of an inexperienced, never-prepared, shoot-from-the-hip heir to a real estate fortune whose businesses had declared bankruptcy six times. He would “drain the swamp” in Washington, he promised. He would take the coal industry back to the greatness it had enjoyed 80 years before. He would rebuild the cities, block immigrants with a great wall, provide health care for all and make the country’s infrastructure the envy of the world, while cutting everyone’s taxes. Forty-six percent of those who voted figured that things were so bad, they might as well let him try.
by Steven Brill, Time | Read more:
Image: Ross MacDonald[ed. See also: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy. (Excerpt):
New forms of life necessarily give rise to new and distinct forms of consciousness. If you doubt this, you clearly haven’t been reading the “personal and household services” ads on Monster.com. At the time of this writing, the section for my town of Brookline, Massachusetts, featured one placed by a “busy professional couple” seeking a “Part Time Nanny.” The nanny (or manny—the ad scrupulously avoids committing to gender) is to be “bright, loving, and energetic”; “friendly, intelligent, and professional”; and “a very good communicator, both written and verbal.” She (on balance of probability) will “assist with the care and development” of two children and will be “responsible for all aspects of the children’s needs,” including bathing, dressing, feeding, and taking the young things to and from school and activities. That’s why a “college degree in early childhood education” is “a plus.”
In short, Nanny is to have every attribute one would want in a terrific, professional, college-educated parent. Except, of course, the part about being an actual professional, college-educated parent. There is no chance that Nanny will trade places with our busy 5G couple. She “must know the proper etiquette in a professionally run household” and be prepared to “accommodate changing circumstances.” She is required to have “5+ years experience as a Nanny,” which makes it unlikely that she’ll have had time to get the law degree that would put her on the other side of the bargain. All of Nanny’s skills, education, experience, and professionalism will land her a job that is “Part Time.” (...)
My 16-year-old daughter is sitting on a couch, talking with a stranger about her dreams for the future. We’re here, ominously enough, because, she says, “all my friends are doing it.” For a moment, I wonder whether we have unintentionally signed up for some kind of therapy. The professional woman in the smart-casual suit throws me a pointed glance and says, “It’s normal to be anxious at a time like this.” She really does see herself as a therapist of sorts. But she does not yet seem to know that the source of my anxiety is the idea of shelling out for a $12,000 “base package” of college-counseling services whose chief purpose is apparently to reduce my anxiety. Determined to get something out of this trial counseling session, I push for recommendations on summer activities. We leave with a tip on a 10-day “cultural tour” of France for high schoolers. In the college-application business, that’s what’s known as an “enrichment experience.” When we get home, I look it up. The price of enrichment: $11,000 for the 10 days.]
Sunday, May 27, 2018
The Joy of Voting by Mail
California’s top-two primary, which will choose candidates regardless of party for the November election, is approaching on June 5. But like a growing majority of Golden State voters, my wife and I will vote by mail well before what is technically Election Day (ballots must be postmarked by June 5 and received by county election officials three days later or less, though ballots can also be dropped off at precincts or “voting centers”). Because we are registered as permanent vote-by-mail voters, we get ballots automatically as long as we keep eschewing the increasingly less crowded Election Day polling places.
So this weekend, Dawn and I plan to sit down with our mail ballots and our handy-dandy state and county voter guides. Those reflect a wonderful California institution that provides every voter with detailed explanations of, and pro-and-con advocacy statements concerning, every state and local ballot initiative (a Golden State institution dating back to the Progressive Era, though today’s special-interest-financed initiatives are frequently everything other than progressive) along with declarations from every candidate coherent enough to complete a sentence. We will have the leisure to make our way through the incredibly extensive list of statewide candidates facilitated by California’s “jungle” nonpartisan top-two primary (in which all candidates from every party compete for a general election spot offered to the top two finishers, regardless of party or percentage of the vote). That means there are 32 U.S. Senate candidates and 27 gubernatorial candidates on the June 5 ballot. It’s really not something you want to first encounter alone, in a voting booth.
As Dave Roberts, a distinguished environmental writer who is a resident of all-voting-by-mail Oregon (a system also embraced by Colorado and Washington) notes, voting by mail ought to be strongly considered as the wave of the future nationally. It has raised voter turnout every place it’s been used. It’s cheaper than voting systems that rely on polling places and polling workers. It is attractive to all sorts of voters — particularly people who may not find it easy to take off work to stand in line during working hours on a random Tuesday — who value convenience. Indeed, there’s not much of a downside for abandoning the old system, argues Roberts:
Some critics think voting-by-mail facilitates voter fraud. As Roberts responds, that makes little sense:
by Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine | Read more:
So this weekend, Dawn and I plan to sit down with our mail ballots and our handy-dandy state and county voter guides. Those reflect a wonderful California institution that provides every voter with detailed explanations of, and pro-and-con advocacy statements concerning, every state and local ballot initiative (a Golden State institution dating back to the Progressive Era, though today’s special-interest-financed initiatives are frequently everything other than progressive) along with declarations from every candidate coherent enough to complete a sentence. We will have the leisure to make our way through the incredibly extensive list of statewide candidates facilitated by California’s “jungle” nonpartisan top-two primary (in which all candidates from every party compete for a general election spot offered to the top two finishers, regardless of party or percentage of the vote). That means there are 32 U.S. Senate candidates and 27 gubernatorial candidates on the June 5 ballot. It’s really not something you want to first encounter alone, in a voting booth.As Dave Roberts, a distinguished environmental writer who is a resident of all-voting-by-mail Oregon (a system also embraced by Colorado and Washington) notes, voting by mail ought to be strongly considered as the wave of the future nationally. It has raised voter turnout every place it’s been used. It’s cheaper than voting systems that rely on polling places and polling workers. It is attractive to all sorts of voters — particularly people who may not find it easy to take off work to stand in line during working hours on a random Tuesday — who value convenience. Indeed, there’s not much of a downside for abandoning the old system, argues Roberts:
Most of the time, for most people, voting in the U.S. is a big bunch of bullshit hassle. It’s been made a hassle on purpose — and not for all people equally, but, like so many things, disproportionately for the poor, minorities, young people, and students.
Just the idea that in 2018, people have to schlep down to a gym or something between particular hours on a particular weekday and stand in line for hours to poke at choices on a touchscreen, all while being monitored by creepy onlookers … it’s an insult to modernity, all of it. We can do better.Voting on something other than Election Day is a more familiar experience than ever in a country where early voting — in some places in-person early voting at traditional polling places — is growing as fast as hostile Republican election officials will allow. So voting-by-mail mostly violates increasingly archaic taboos, which mostly upsets political consultants who realize get-out-the-vote and persuasion strategies focused on Election Day only aren’t very efficient any more.
Some critics think voting-by-mail facilitates voter fraud. As Roberts responds, that makes little sense:
[A]bout a quarter of all votes were cast by mail in 2016. Absentee ballots have long been available in dozens of states. Since 2000, overall, about a quarter-billion votes have been cast by mail. Thus far, there have been virtually no documented incidents of coercion or abuse. As NVHC notes in a white paper on this subject, “Oregon has mailed-out more than 100 million ballots since 2000, with about a dozen cases of proven fraud.” That’s a 0.00000012 percent rate of fraud.That’s attributable to a combination of felony charges for voting-by-mail tampering, and the difficulty involved in rigging so decentralized a voting system. It’s surely a safer system than using voting machines that are inevitably vulnerable to hacking by Russians or God knows who.
by Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. It is a joy. When I was living in Washington state it was the easiest thing to do. Why would anyone not want to make voting easier?]
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