Death and the Drug War

In 2017, two countries hit a milestone. In Mexico, there were 29,168 murders, the highest number on record. Across the border in the United States, nearly 70,000 people died from drug overdoses, over three times as many as were dying annually less than two decades ago. More Americans now die every year from overdoses than died in the entire Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars.

There is, of course, a link between Mexico’s murders and America’s overdoses. The murders are rising because of wars between ever-more-brutal drug cartels, who are competing to ship the products on which Americans will overdose. Mexico’s murder rate is slightly deceptive, because it varies significantly across the country, and some areas experience far less crime than many other Latin American countries. But in states like Baja California, the homicide rates match those of the world’s most violent countries. Unsurprisingly, the areas with the highest rates of violent crime tend to be those near major ports or U.S. border crossings, or areas which have some other strategic value for the drug trade. The state of Guerrero, where more than half of Mexico’s opium-poppies are grown, has seen its murder rate escalate over the same period that heroin overdoses have skyrocketed in the U.S. It is strange to think that the deaths of people so far apart geographically—a taxi driver in Acapulco, a struggling addict in Kentucky—could be so intimately connected.

Everyone has heard the gruesome stories about cartel violence in Mexico, which is not just shocking quantitatively but also qualitatively. People beheaded, boiled alive, fed to wild animals: the Mexican notas rojas graphically document the depravity and extremity of cartel killings, which terrify rivals and civilians alike. But the lurid spectacle of border state violence is not something Americans should feel comfortably distant from. One big reason for the ferocity of inter-cartel competition is because Mexico, a highly unequal country where nearly half the population lives in poverty, happens to be situated next to a very rich country willing to pay high prices for an illegal product. There is a certain “logic” to drug violence: if there are fortunes to be made from a commodity that can only be provided through criminal enterprise, people will desperately seek those fortunes through whatever means are necessary. There are political, economic, and cultural forces that contribute to a growth in violence, but while the causes are complex, they are not random or inexplicable.

Before trying to analyze those causes, though, we should make sure we truly appreciate the human toll. As always, behind the statistics are lives, and we can take a moment to think about the level of human suffering that stems from the entire process of manufacturing, distributing, and ingesting illegal drugs. Mexican border cities like Reynosa and Juarez have turned from lively border towns into sad, despondent ganglands where fear rules many people’s lives. Of course, it’s important not to excessively caricature the situation: even cities with high murder rates aren’t continuous gun battles 24 hours a day. The residents of these places still go out in public, throw parties, attend school, and so on; a bold tourist may still visit on the right day and have a more or less normal experience. Nevertheless, in the areas they control, the power of cartels is one of the dominant facts of everyday life. Cartels are the final arbiters of most of what appears in print: a journalist who writes the wrong thing can expect to receive a threatening phone call, or even a summary execution. Many Mexican journals have shuttered, or have been reduced to simply putting out carefully-worded catalogs of daily murders. Bodies are left in public places, clearly as a message to someone, though it is often unclear whom. If you fall afoul of the cartel—and you may well do so without even realizing it, or because they’ve mistaken you for someone else—not only you, but your entire family may be at risk, down to your little children. This past summer—to give just one example—a family of five, including four children aged between 5 and 10, were murdered in Coatzacoalcos because the cartel suspected that the father, an out-of-work taxi driver, had acted as a lookout in an attack by one of their rivals.

All of this is just the suffering that occurs from living alongside criminal trafficking syndicates. Then we have the human consequences of drug use itself, which is felt on both sides of the border. The 70,000 who die annually in the U.S. are people’s parents, children, friends. Many are people who struggled hard to free themselves, to avoid a fate they could see coming, but who were unable to escape addiction. It’s hard to conceive of what the attempt to free oneself is like, the near impossibility of using sheer willpower to overcome a dependency that is chemical in nature. Journalist Ioan Grillo quotes an addict friend: “Imagine the worst flu and multiply it by ten. Then, know you can make it go away with one more hit.” Who could resist a medicine that instantly relieves the most extreme torment? And for many addicts, it’s not simply the physical torment of withdrawal that drugs alleviate: it’s the deep psychological trauma of past abuse, of profound depression, of a consuming, self-annihilating sense of failure. Whole American communities have turned into places of death and dependency.

Repairing the lives of addicts, and ending the carnage caused by the drug trade, is a morally urgent issue that requires a humane, careful, and immediate political response. Sometimes, when we think about U.S. drug policy, it’s easy to get caught up in abstract arguments about whether the government should have the “right” to regulate individual drug use, or cultural debates about whether the use of certain drugs has net positive or negative impacts for society. It’s not that these questions are entirely worthless, but they are, at best, secondary concerns. The overwhelmingly more important question is, what can we do to stop all these deaths from happening? What will actually work?

by Briana Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Ale de la Torre

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[ed. Yes, we actually used to be excited about having a "tv dinner".]

Undertanding NBA Strategies

[ed. I've been watching the NBA playoffs lately and while I admire the obvious skills, I'm pretty much clueless about the actual strategies involved. It just looks like a bunch of guys running around trying to get open or block shots, even though I know there's so much more to it than that. So I spent some time on a few strategy web sites (like here, here and here), but it seems this is one topic that just can't be conveyed in written form (at least to me). Check out the above video if you're similarly befuddled. It seems to explain a lot about what's going on (although, given the speed and fluidity of the game you may have to pause it now and then to really see the finer details).]

How to Solve the Puzzle

It was in the mid-1980s that the short seller James Chanos first realised he was being investigated. People were ‘going through my garbage’, he says. They didn’t find anything incriminating: Chanos lives a ‘nice quiet yuppie existence’, said one of the private investigators, whose report ended up in the hands of the Wall Street Journal. That didn’t stop Chanos losing his job at an investment house owned by a German bank. The WSJ story fingered him as a central figure in what it called ‘an ad hoc network of short sellers’ in the US, who ‘pick a stock, then sow doubt in an effort to depress it’. Chanos told me he was ‘shown the door by my German masters’.

‘Short selling’ is selling shares or other financial instruments that you don’t own, or own only temporarily – shares, for example, that have been borrowed from another investor. Chanos was – and still is – short selling shares that seem demonstrably overvalued. Perhaps a corporation’s way of doing business has run out of steam, or its managers have surreptitiously been overstating its revenues. Once other investors come to realise this, the price of the shares will fall and the short seller will be able to buy them at the lower price before returning them, pocketing the difference. (The short seller doesn’t have to give back the same shares that were borrowed: except in a few special cases, a corporation’s shares are identical and interchangeable.)

It seems to have been the managers of corporations that Chanos was short selling who paid for the investigation into him. But they aren’t the only ones who don’t like short sellers. In September 2008, Alex Salmond, then Scotland’s first minister, lashed out at the ‘bunch of short-selling spivs’ he blamed for the falling price of shares in Halifax Bank of Scotland. (Alas, the spivs were right: were it not for the takeover by Lloyds and then the taxpayer bail-out, HBOS would probably have collapsed.) As in 2008, when financial crises hit, short selling is often banned, in the hope – usually forlorn – of stemming price falls. Beyond its actual economic effects, there’s also a general feeling that there is something inherently fishy about selling things you don’t actually own, or that it’s morally dubious to profit from misfortune. Both Christianity and Islam have traditionally disapproved of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out its holdings of shares to short sellers.) (...)

Even in the relative safety of the US, short sellers seem security-conscious (it’s sometimes hard to find the street addresses of their offices), but their more pressing concerns are economic. A perennial issue is whether they will be lent shares to short sell, and if so at what cost. Although a firm called Equilend has developed a new electronic marketplace for stock borrowing, much lending still goes on by direct negotiation between institutions – ‘over the counter’, as market participants put it. The deals are often made between people who know each other well, but no one lends out shares on a simple promise they will be returned:the borrower has to leave cash (or government bonds, or sometimes other assets) with the lender as surety. Cash is the most common form of collateral, and the norm in the US is to hand over 102 per cent of the market value of the shares. Until the short seller returns them, the lender can earn interest on that cash. In the past, all the interest was kept by the lender, but in recent decades borrowers have usually been able to negotiate what’s called a ‘rebate’: a share of the interest payments.

The fee that the lender earns (the ‘borrow fee’) is the interest on the collateral, minus the rebate. If the borrowed shares are in a big, heavily traded US or UK corporation, and not too many people are trying to short sell its shares, borrowing is easy and cheap: currently, the borrow fee is unlikely to exceed around 0.25-0.3 per cent per year. A fee larger than that often indicates that, as market participants put it, a borrow is becoming ‘warm’, usually because demand from short sellers is growing. Warm can rapidly become very hot indeed, as borrow fees soar to 50 per cent per year or more. In those cases, borrowers are having to make large, explicit payments to lenders, and the shares are said to be ‘hard to borrow’ or ‘on special’. Short sellers also have to be wary of ‘recall’. The lender of the shares has the right to demand them back at any point (with very limited notice). If their price has risen in the interim, even temporarily, a recall can inflict a nasty loss on the short seller. Lenders’ right of recall gives them a further advantage as a borrow becomes warmer: the short seller may get a phone call gently suggesting a higher borrow fee.

To be a successful short seller you need therefore to understand what Chanos calls ‘the plumbing’ of lending. One of the partners in his firm, Kynikos Associates, has ‘been on [Wall] Street for almost fifty years, and he has taught me all that I know about borrow, rebates, sourcing [finding shares, to borrow] … He has a good sixth sense, even if something looks to be quite available and very liquid, that there’s trouble down the pike. He’s kept us out of a lot of situations where that’s happened.’ Short sellers also need to be wary of ‘squeezes’, in which a targeted corporation’s managers, or other investors, deliberately push share prices upwards in the hope of forcing short sellers to liquidate their positions at a loss. One good way for a corporation to engineer a squeeze is to announce a programme of buying back its own shares.

A short seller must be able to identify shares that aren’t simply overvalued but that can credibly be shown to be overvalued: you won’t succeed merely by having a hunch that the high prices of the shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet ($1095 at the time of writing), or of Amazon ($1590) can’t possibly be justified. Chanos teaches his analysts to think of the information about a corporation as an onion: ‘The outer layer is Wall Street stories and rumours. The next layer in is Wall Street research. The next … is company presentations … [then] company press releases. Then the final core of the onion [is] the mandated financial statements. Most investors work from the outside of the onion in; they never get to the core. I always stress to my people: start from the core, then work your way out.’

The numbers in firms’ financial statements, though, aren’t considered hard facts by short sellers. They know only too well that there are many ways a corporation can tweak its accounting in order to present a flattering view of its finances. Short sellers must have a ‘nose’ for situations in which these tweaks add up to something worse than everyday embellishment. Chanos’s most famous ‘short’ was the energy company Enron, which eventually went bankrupt in spectacular fashion in December 2001.​ The crucial moment was in September 2000, when a contact in Dallas phoned Chanos to ask if he had read an article in the Wall Street Journal by a journalist called Jonathan Weil, who specialised in accounting. Much of the profit being recorded by energy companies such as Enron, Weil reported, came from their estimates of the current market value of contracts to supply oil, gas or electricity that could stretch many years into the future. The companies, however, were supplying few details of how they were making these estimates. Chanos hadn’t read Weil’s article (it appeared only in the Texas edition of the WSJ since the companies in question were based mainly in Houston) so his contact faxed it to him. Chanos’s nose twitched. As he later told the Yale Alumni Magazine, he spent much of that weekend poring over the details of Enron’s financial statements, becoming increasingly convinced that an apparently highly profitable company with an enviable reputation for innovation was actually steadily losing money.

But there’s a limit to how much you can learn while sitting at your desk reading the footnotes to balance sheets. Sometimes, a short seller has to become a field worker, ‘talking to people at the loading dock’, as Chanos puts it. Photographs, videos, sometimes even recordings of telephone calls can form part of the case that short sellers seek to build. Look at the website of Carson Block’s firm, Muddy Waters Research, for example, and notice the attention it pays to the physical world: precipitous, hairpin mountain roads down which huge volumes of timber would have to be hauled; satellite images of the possibly crumbling walls of a giant opencast mine; a solitary lorry idling outside what one might have expected to be a busy factory.

by Donald MacKenzie , London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Why you should never short-sell stocks]

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Anthony Bourdain and Iggy Pop
[ed. Search and destroy - race you to the chicken wings and Cristal.]

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:

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.

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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

Reddit surpasses Facebook to become the 3rd most visited site in the US

Reddit surpasses Facebook to become the 3rd most visited site in the US

Image: uncredited

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'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.

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:

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.

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.

***

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

via:

How Portugal is Kicking Its Heroin Habit

In less than two decades, Portugal went from suffering an epidemic of heroin use, drug-related crimes and deaths to enjoying one of the lowest rates of drug-related deaths in the world.
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:

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]

Little Willie John

via: YouTube