Forget About It

In the uneasy months following 9/11, the Bush Administration provoked a minor controversy when it announced the name of a new office dedicated to protecting the United States from terrorism and other threats. “Homeland security” had unsavory associations: the Nazis often spoke of Heimat, which was also used in the 1920s and 1930s by an Austrian right-wing paramilitary group, the Heimwehr or Heimatschutz. Even Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s secretary of defense, who had been in discussions about the term months before its introduction, had been discomfited. “The word ‘homeland’ is a strange word,” he wrote in a memo on February 27, 2001. “ ‘Homeland’ Defense sounds more German than American.” Barbara J. Fields, a historian at Columbia University, predicted in 2002 that the term would “remain a resident alien rather than a naturalized citizen in American usage.”

Seventeen years and a television series later, “homeland” no longer unsettles. The Department of Homeland Security has a $40 billion budget, 240,000 employees, and a Cabinet seat. Last summer, as journalists, academics, and intellectuals debated whether a fascist had invaded the White House, a bill reauthorizing DHS sailed through the House of Representatives by a bipartisan vote of 386 to 41. The phrase has found a home in the United States. It is a naturalized citizen.

One of the benefits of turning fifty, which I did in November, is that your memories become useful in unexpected ways. Throughout most of the Bush years, I was in my thirties — old enough to remember a time when there wasn’t a Department of Homeland Security, young enough to feel the novelties of the era. Middle age provides you a different perch. You get to watch, in real time, the shock of the new get absorbed by the soft cushions of the American tradition.

When Bush left office in 2009, he was widely loathed, with an approval rating of 33 percent. Today, 61 percent of the population approves of him, with much of that increase coming from Democrats and independents. A majority of voters under thirty-five view him favorably, which they didn’t while he was president. So jarring is the switch that Will Ferrell was inspired to reprise his impersonation of Bush on Saturday Night Live. “I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight,” he said, “and remind you guys that I was really bad. Like, historically not good.”

This is how a member of the younger generation viewed Bush in 2003, after the United States had invaded Iraq on the basis of false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction:

The damage to this country and our body politic is staggering. . . . For our Government to be lying to us as they invoke our ideals in their rhetoric sickens me to the core of my being. It means something has gone so rotten. . . . It’s the bile you swallow in the back of your throat but keeps rising back up. It is a pattern, a pattern of cruelty, trickery, deceit, crass politics, and manipulative actions. It’s something that I can no longer ignore and it is absolutely shattering my optimism. . . . And that is a terrible thing, when our Government destroys the idealism of our young.

Strong stuff, suggesting the kind of experience you don’t easily recover from. If such feelings of betrayal don’t overwhelm you with a corrosive cynicism, inducing you to withdraw from politics, they provoke an incipient realism or an irrepressible radicalism. The Gulf War, which happened when I was twenty-three, set me on the latter path, guided, I’d like to think, by some sense of the former. But whether one opts for realism or radicalism or both, such great disillusionment would seem to preclude making statements like this, fifteen years later:

I’ve never seen anything as cynical in politics as Republicans spending four months refusing to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, then attaching reauthorization to another controversial bill, then blaming Democrats for not supporting CHIP. It’s breathtaking.

You get to lose your innocence only once. But Ezra Klein, the author of both these statements, loses his every night as he scans the day’s report of the latest Republican Party outrage. American liberalism is also a party of the born-again.

The United States of Amnesia: true to form, we don’t remember who coined the phrase. It’s been attributed to Gore Vidal and to Philip Rahv, though it also appears in a syndicated column from 1948. But more than forgetfulness is at work in our ceremonies of innocence repeatedly drowned. And while it’s tempting to chalk up these rituals to a native simplicity or a preternatural naïveté — a parody of a Henry James novel, in which you get soiled by crossing the Potomac rather than the Atlantic — even our most knowing observers perform them.

The distance of a decade, for example, was all it took for Philip Roth to completely rewrite his experience of the Nixon Administration. There was a “sense,” Roth said of those years,

of living in a country with a government morally out of control and wholly in business for itself. Reading the morning New York Times and the afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then again the eleven o’clock TV news — all of which I did ritualistically — became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky. . . . One even began to use the word “America” as though it was the name not of the place where one had been raised and to which one had a patriotic attachment, but of a foreign invader that had conquered the country and with whom one refused, to the best of one’s strength and ability, to collaborate. Suddenly America had turned into “them.”

That was in 1974, when Watergate and the Vietnam War were not yet a memory. In 1984, with Reagan straddling the horizon, Roth recalled the era differently: “Watergate made life interesting when I wasn’t writing, but from nine to five every day I didn’t think too much about Nixon or about Vietnam.” And while Roth had been unsparing about Nixon in 1974 — “Of course there have been others as venal and lawless in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is” — in 2017 Nixon had become, for Roth, a benign counter to Trump. Neither Nixon nor Bush

was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.

Donald Trump is making America great again — not by his own hand but through the labor of his critics, who posit a more perfect union less as an aspiration for the future than as the accomplished fact of a reimagined past. (...)

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.

We all have a golden age in our pockets, ready as a wallet. Some people invent the memory of more tenderhearted days to dramatize and criticize present evil. Others reinvent the past less purposefully. Convinced the present is a monster, a stranger from nowhere, or an alien from abroad, they look to history for parent-protectors, the dragon slayers of generations past. Still others take strange comfort from the notion that theirs is an unprecedented age, with novel enemies and singular challenges. Whether strategic or sincere, revisionism encourages a refusal of the now.

Or so we believe.

The truth is that we’re captives, not captains, of this strategy. We think the contrast of a burnished past allows us to see the burning present, but all it does is keep the fire going, and growing. Confronting the indecent Nixon, Roth imagines a better McCarthy. Confronting the indecent Trump, he imagines a better Nixon. At no point does he recognize that he’s been fighting the same monster all along — and losing. Overwhelmed by the monster he’s currently facing, sure that it is different from the monster no longer in view, Roth loses sight of the surrounding terrain. He doesn’t see how the rehabilitation of the last monster allows the front line to move rightward, the new monster to get closer to the territory being defended.

by Corey Robin, Harper's |  Read more:
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[ed. See also: The People Are the Problem]

Erika Stone. Amish children, Pennsylvania 1981
via:

Truth and a Good Life

'Count no man happy until he is dead.' So says Aristotle, quoting Solon, one of the wise men of ancient Athens, and agreeing with him.

Even death may be too soon if Aristotle is right - and I think he is - that happiness is not a short or even a long term state of mind, not something that belongs in a list with a burst of elation, a pang of sorrow, a twinge of pain, a bout of giddiness, and the like. It also is not a longer term feeling of well-being such as alcohol, marijuana, and other substances can induce.

Nor is a happy life one where pleasant states of mind overbalance unpleasant ones. There are pleasant states of mind to be had through anticipating things you are going to do or undergo later on. Think of how enjoyable it can be to plan a holiday. Such states of mind are sometimes illusory in that upon engaging in the activity or the passivity, frustration, disappointment and boredom overtake you. An unhappy life could be one in which less time was spent feeling frustrated, disappointed and bored than was spent in pleasant anticipation. Or a life could be full of pleasant remembrances, nostalgic delight occupying most of one's time in the otherwise dismal atmosphere of a prison cell, the new tyrant having ended your pleasing days of ruling and living luxuriously.

Aristotle's word that we translate as 'happy' was 'eudaimon', and Greek thinkers had a lot to say about eudaimonia. Some recent writers prefer to translate the Greek word as 'flourishing' or 'well-being'. Others stick with 'happiness' and ask us to notice the meaning of 'happy' in 'happy outcome' or 'happy ending' or in a phrase such as 'these happy isles' to speak of Britain in its glory days. That meaning is the thing to keep in mind when you think about what living a good life is supposed to be.

The infelicity of 'happy' as the word we want is also indicated by this: When we imagine a human life entirely free of fear, of sorrow, of grief, utterly devoid of distress or suffering, are we not imagining a shallow life? I am not suggesting that it is a good thing to let suffering thrive, to see to it that poverty, sickness and hunger enhance the lives of the lower orders. In that connection, Simone Weil's words are apt: 'In the social realm it is our duty to eliminate as much suffering as we can; there will always be enough left over for the elect'.

Aristotle and Plato both held that a necessary condition of living a flourishing life, of eudaimonia, was that it had to be a just life, an ethical life. Plato had a striking notion of being just as achieving harmony of the soul. We can get the word 'soul' out of the idea by speaking, in post-Christian terms, of being decent, getting your act together and having your priorities right. I don't myself mind talk of the soul so long as it does not mean a substantial item, a thing which can exist without a body. Simone Weil is helpful here too. She speaks of the soul in terms of harm that can be done to the life of a human being without injury to the body.

Plato and Aristotle, despite their agreement about the necessity of decency for a good life, disagreed about the sufficiency of it. Roughly speaking, Aristotle thought that happiness, eudaimonia, was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of fortune. No matter how good a person you might be, the world could still crap on you. Plato knew perfectly well that the world could crap on the just man, but he thought that could do no harm. The crap could not blight or diminish the excellence of the life of a just man. The harmony of the soul persists no matter how discordant the surroundings happen to be. Plato also argued, perhaps because he so much hoped that, in the long run, the unjust would get their come-uppance. The 20th Century was blessed with a man who held Plato's view. A leading principle of Groucho Marxism is a pithy expression of Plato's ethics: 'Time wounds all heels'. I am sure many of you have heard of the fallacy of deducing what ought to be the case from what is the case. Groucho here indulges in the converse fallacy, deducing from what ought to be the case that, eventually at least, it will be. He derives 'is' from 'ought'.

So far I have wanted to bring out how reflection on living well, being happy, flourishing, leads to some idea of judging or evaluating the life of a person. And the opening remark 'Count no man happy until he is dead' suggests that such an evaluative conception is not a subjective matter; the person whose life is evaluated is not the only one to make such an evaluation. It is possible for the person whose life is under consideration to get it wrong, to suffer from error. A good deal needs to be said about the source of such errors, how much it is a matter of illusion or delusion, of self-deception, of willful avoidance of knowledge, victimization by deceit, etc

The main thing Aristotle and Solon had in mind was the possibility of events occurring after someone's death that bear on any judgment to be made about his or her life. Central concerns and ambitions in someone's life may be well be on track at death, but suffer derailment afterward. It may be as clear cut as an earthquake killing a man's entire family at his graveside. Surely, in such a case, we can pity the person, perhaps with the words: 'The poor sonofabitch'. Of course someone may react differently, saying 'Well, he doesn't know and won't find out, no need for pity.' If we think differently on this we are having a more or less serious evaluative, even I would say, ethical disagreement. Maybe it is more like an aesthetic disagreement. I don't really care exactly what sort of disagreement it is. It is not, no matter how you think of it, that one of us is making sense, the other failing to.

I want to focus on is one strand in the conceptual fabric we find here. I want to focus on beliefs of great importance to a person, beliefs central to his or her grip on who he or she is and what his or her life amounts to. How much does it matter if such beliefs are false? A way to filter out the relevant beliefs from others, many of which are sure to be false, is to ask whether and to what extent, a person would be devastated by finding out the truth. By devastation I mean what can lead people to think of their lives no longer making sense, no longer seeming worthwhile, drained of meaning. I shall also consider the question of the extent to which, if at all, we should disabuse others of such false beliefs if we are placed to do so. What it is to be so placed is itself of interest. Whose business is it? Surely not just that of anybody who knows the relevant truth. That will also involve the issue of how important truth, in the aspect of truthfulness to others, is. That is a nice topic in its own right, though I don't think anybody anymore holds the medieval Christian view, and the view of Immanuel Kant, that lying is never justified.

So there are two questions. First, can not knowing insulate a person from harm, exempt his or her life from being a proper object of pity? Is it right to say that what you don't know doesn't hurt you even if it is something that had you known it, would have devastated you? Second, what is appropriate if you are placed in a position to inform someone of what will devastate him and refraining from doing so will itself be a refusal of truthfulness on your part? Reflection here not about the nature of truth or about the ludicrous idea that there is no such thing as truth I am taking truth for granted and asking about how much and why it matters.

In his drama The Wild Duck, Henrik Ibsen, provides an instance where we readily judge that it would have been better to leave others with false beliefs, in particular beliefs about the relations a man's wife had to a powerful benefactor of hers and his, before and perhaps during the marriage. A child's paternity is rendered uncertain by revelations a friend of the husband is determined to make. The friend is zealous about openness and honesty in marriage. It is all a disaster; the daughter, 14 years old, an attractive and loving child, kills herself out of an induced need to prove she loves her father via a sacrifice of something precious to her The zealous has urged the girl to kill a cherished wild duck that is kept in the attic. The girl applies the advice, but not to the duck, shooting herself in the way she is told to shoot the duck, one bullet in just the right spot on her breast.

In this play, one cannot say that the man and his family are flourishing; they are not doing very well and he is as asinine in his way as his zealous friend is in his. There is no doubt that, as one of the likeable characters in the play, a Dr. Relling, says, it would have been better to leave them as they were. Relling thinks that it is generally better to leave people with their lies; he speaks of helping people to construct or hold on to lies that enable them carry on.

Still we do have here a case of truth being devastating, or received as devastating by the self-dramatizing father. A feature of the play is that the main victim of the destructive force of truth is the child, who is not mired in false belief. She is devoted to her father, or the man who may not be, but may be, her father. But he cruelly rejects her when he learns he is probably not her father. The mother is uncertain and, 15 years having passed with her as a caring and dutiful wife and mother, she cannot see why it matters. Few are those who not stand on her side.

I do not think that we can say of Hjalmer, the father, anything like 'poor fellow', something more like 'silly clod' comes to mind. He is not really a victim of deceit, though it is true that his wife was not completely open with him. The only character to be pitied is the child. With Hjalmer, we are, or I am, disposed to deplore his agonies over not being a biological father when he has been quite a good father to the child and she a devoted and charming child. Anyway, we do not have here a case of a life's worth or happiness blighted by illusion or delusion. Hjalmer's discovery of the truth about his benefactor and his wife and his doubt about his paternity do not blight a good life; at most a somewhat shabby life has removed from its brightest patch, the attractive, lively and devoted daughter, Hedvig.

We certainly get a case here for saying 'What they don't know is not hurting them'. And for saying that Hjalmer with his false belief, which was somewhat the product of avoidance of evidence, would have been better off, lived a happier life, without the intrusion of his friend's zealousness Dr. Relling's therapy of letting people live with their falsehoods, with their lies as he puts is, is vindicated.

I now have to resort to my own, perhaps perverse, aptitude for fiction for further cases. There are two.

Here is one scenario: George, a very successful salesman, is on his deathbed at the relatively early age of 60. His wife Mabel and best friend, Fred are at his side, each holding one of George's hands. George is dying in a glow of warm conviction and remembrance of the loyalty of these two, the most important people in his life. Tender farewells are exchanged and George expires. Fred and Mabel look across to each lustfully, shovel George out of the bed, and proceed to vigorous humping in the deathbed, a corpse sprawled in the centre of the room. We learn from their talk that, whenever possible - and George was, after all, a traveling salesman - they have indulged in these orgiastic delights, for 30 years.

The words that come to mind as I envisage the scene and attend to the crumpled body on the floor those I have used earlier: 'The poor sonofabitch'. If George is not an appropriate object of pity, I do not understand what pity is. But as I said earlier, if you are inclined to withhold pity in the light of the thought that George never knew of the duplicity of Mabel and Fred and was generally pleased his work and life, then you and I are having some kind of ethical disagreement. I agree with Thomas Nagel who says that it is hard to see how it can be that knowing something could be harmful, as devastating as some things can be, and yet be harmless if unknown.

Maybe our disagreement belongs to ethics somewhat indirectly. If you think no harm has been done because Fred and Mabel succeeded in hiding their disloyalty, mustn't you think that they were not acting wrongly or badly. A strict utilitarian must, I think, hold that since their disloyalty did not, in fact, cause George to suffer, Fred and Mabel did no wrong. Maybe their haste in having at it in the deathbed is a kind of disrespect for the dead, but their pleasure might easily outweigh that, if such things can be weighed against each other. Strict utilitarianism has anyway to stretch to deplore disrespect for the dead.

Here is my second story: Giovanni is a dying. He is a prosperous and respected Sicilian winegrower. His prosperity was much helped by his two sons who emigrated to New York many years ago. Giovanni worked hard when the boys were young to get them educated and gain admission to Harvard, where they both studied law and joined large corporations in NYC. The sons visited Sicily frequently and invested in their father's winery, which prospered. Giovanni took in his best friend and neighbour, Luigi, as a partner, absorbing Luigi's smaller, adjacent winery. The partners have been fortunate to avoid the imprecations of the Mafia, and their winery has flourished as has their friendship.

The sons and their families are expected soon for a final visit, Luigi having telephoned with the sad news of impending death some weeks ago. Giovanni is so fragile that his doctor forbids him a telephone on his sickbed. Luigi has assured him that he will take any calls and contact the sons again if they do not arrive as expected. They do not, and Luigi pursues the matter. What he learns is appalling. The sons, while indeed having studied at Harvard, were enticed into being lawyers for the Mafia, eventually into occasional assassinations of public officials and businessmen who were threats to Mafia operations. One of the inducements to getting entangled with the Mafia was assurance that their father's business in Sicily would never be touched.

Luigi uncovers all this along with the devastating news that the sons will almost certainly be sentenced to death in the electric chair, their crimes having finally caught up with them. Giovanni is sure that Luigi has looked into the tardiness of the sons and when Luigi next visits the sickbed, about to be a deathbed, Giovanni asks him what is happening, why are the sons not here to bid farewell to their father? It is, after all, their great success in America and their generosity to him and their own flourishing lives that have done so much to make his own life worthwhile, especially given how much he worked and sacrificed early in his life to set them on a hopeful path..

Luigi is aware of all this and aware that another thing in Giovanni's life, and his own, has been their friendship and trusting partnership. No joy or sorrow, no elation or frustration, no satisfaction or disappointment, no problem or plight or crisis was ever anything but shared or communicated between them. Luigi knows it will devastate Giovanni to learn about his sons, especially their impending executions. But Giovanni has asked him what is happening. Luigi has no doubt that if Giovanni realizes or finds out that he is being lied to by Luigi, that will itself have some devastating force. He has to decide whether or not to lie to his dying friend.

I have no good idea as to how to finish the story. One thing I am sure of, though, is that, whether Giovanni learns the truth or not, I could not say that he had a good or a happy or a flourishing life. The prospering of his winery was, unbeknownst to him, fostered by crime. He is surely as proper an object of pity as was George in my earlier tale. As for Luigi, well, I would not like to be in his shoes. I do not see how he can avoid doing something he will find it hard to live with.

I have given cases where it makes sense to pity a person and to evaluate a life more or less negatively, in spite of the person involved being ignorant of or deceived about the relevant facts. So it can be that a life fails to be a happy one, a flourishing life, despite the likelihood that the one who lives the life would think of it as a good life. But can I generalize? Can I maintain that for any life, the falsehood, illusoriness or even delusiveness of deeply important beliefs, despite the falsehood never being revealed, is a blight on that life, a basis for pitying the person embedded in falsehood.

by Lloyd Reinhardt, Philosopher | Read more:
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Rickie Fowler, 2016 Ryder Cup at Hazeltine National Golf Club
via:
[ed. Don't worry, Rickie's doing ok.]

Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer

A strange creature stalks Los Angeles, hunting for content. He is pale and tall, as skinny as a folded-up tripod. His right hand holds a camera on a stick, which he waves like an explorer illuminating a cave painting. His left hand clutches a smartphone close to his face. Entering a restaurant, he wraps his left wrist around the door handle, so that he can pull the door open while still looking at the phone.

Chaos follows him. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. The callers say that they are Paul Denino’s father or his mother and they urgently need to talk to their son, who is autistic. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing. Callers claim that Denino is a pedophile trying to lure children to his lair, or that the large backpack he’s wearing contains a bomb, rather than a two-thousand-dollar cellular transmitter. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. They’re full of obscure references to Denino and to the Purple Army, the name of the legion of virtual fans who follow him wherever he goes.

Denino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. He wakes up at two in the afternoon, then streams for between two and six hours at a time for the rest of the day. When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers. On average, ten thousand people watch him at any given time, though once, when he staged a boxing match between viewers in his ex-girlfriend’s back yard, sixty-five thousand tuned in. He sometimes arranges elaborate events for his stream, but more often he does things that a typical twenty-three-year-old does, such as go on dates, barhop, and smoke weed in his apartment. Even then, he is not simply recording his daily life. He is performing the role of a foulmouthed trickster called Ice Poseidon. If you watch his stream, you might see Ice Poseidon using boorish lines to pick up women on the street, or rolling around Los Angeles in a giant transparent ball, or tearfully recounting his lonely childhood. Ice Poseidon’s catchphrase is “Fuck it, dude.” When I watch him, I find myself cringing from disgust, secondhand embarrassment, and a sense of impending disaster. I also can’t help but laugh sometimes.

Denino is the most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. streamers. The I.R.L., or “in real life,” distinguishes them from people who broadcast themselves playing video games, which is what Denino did until he decided to take his act out of his bedroom. Now he treats the world as a game. The goal is to generate entertainment for his viewers. He keeps one eye on his phone, where a chat room fills with comments. If his viewers enjoy what he is doing, they post laughing emojis and cries of “content!” If they don’t, they write “ResidentSleeper,” a reference to one of the most boring streaming moments of all time, in which a gamer fell asleep at his computer. The ResidentSleeper thing really gets to Denino. His viewers love to needle him—to “trigger” him, as they say—and they know his vulnerabilities as well as anyone in his life does. (...)

The fact that people can now broadcast live video from wherever they are seems like a relatively small development in the history of technology, but for streaming fans it is as exciting as the invention of television. Live streamers laud the way the medium allows them to connect directly with their viewers. Most streams are accompanied by a chat room, where viewers can offer instant feedback, and a stream often plays out as an extended conversation between the streamer and the audience. To Denino and his fans, social media, once hailed as the gold standard of authenticity, now appears artificial. Denino told me that he hates the whitewashed, feel-good version of life portrayed in the Instagram posts of online influencers. Every moment of uncontrolled chaos that unfolds on Ice Poseidon’s stream emphasizes that he is showing his viewers how things really are.

Live streaming began in 1996, when a nineteen-year-old college student named Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting grainy images of her life in her dorm room. Nothing very interesting happened at first, but millions of people tuned in; she appeared on Letterman and in countless news stories as a herald of a new age of transparency. Professional live streaming was born in 2011, with the launch of Twitch, the video-game streaming platform. Twitch offered a number of ways to monetize a live stream and attracted a huge audience of young gamers who, to their parents’ confusion, wanted not only to watch people play video games for hours but also to give money to their favorite streamers in the form of subscriptions and tips. Today, top streamers can make millions of dollars a year. The best live streamers please their audience while maintaining the creative freedom to grow, though the fact that fickle viewers are also a live streamer’s investors makes this balance more precarious than it is in perhaps any other form of entertainment. Simply changing the type of game they play has sent many streamers’ audience numbers, and income, tumbling.

Successful streamers often rely as much on their personalities as on their skill at playing video games. Like everything else, Denino has taken this idea to the extreme. As he has moved away from games, he has turned his life into a self-produced reality show. Denino’s viewers know his home address and his blood pressure. Everyone in his life is part of the show. “If I don’t know what to do on a certain day, I’ll just call someone over and we can develop their character,” he told me. These characters are given names like Anything4Views, Hampton Brandon, Salmon Andy, Mexican Andy, Asian Andy, and Motorcycle Andy. (Andy is a nickname that his viewers like to apply to minor characters.) His fans make memes about his parents, his former employers, and his childhood photos. Denino believes that such transparency will make his viewers feel invested in the never-ending journey of his life rather than just in the content he can produce. In a little more than two years, they have watched Ice Poseidon go from a gamer who lived in his parents’ house and worked as a line cook at an Italian restaurant to a geek rock star whose life is awash in Monster Energy drink, pot smoke, and hot chicks.

If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience. Denino often lands at the top of a message board called LivestreamFails, which functions as a micro-TMZ for the personal lives of live-streaming celebrities. Last year, the biggest story on LivestreamFails was the revelation by a popular video-game streamer called Dr. DisRespect that he was cheating on his wife. Dr. DisRespect posted a tearful apology and disappeared for months. Streamers claim to hate drama, but they also understand that a popular post on LivestreamFails can be great for their numbers. “Drama equals views equals money,” Denino told me. In February, when Dr. DisRespect made a triumphant return, it was one of the most watched live streams in history, with about three hundred and eighty thousand viewers. (...)

Denino has lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half, and during that time he has been kicked out of six apartments. The moves have been exhausting for him, but for viewers they offer an easy way to delineate eras in the Ice Poseidon show—“seasons,” as one put it to me. Denino’s first apartment was a two-bed-two-bath in a brand-new building in the heart of Hollywood. “I just Googled apartments in L.A., and it was literally the first one that popped up,” he told me. The prominent placement on search engines is probably related to the fact that the building was reportedly once the home of Logan Paul, the popular YouTuber. It is now a mecca for online-content creators, and it seemed like the perfect environment for Denino. “Most of the people who lived there were loud as fuck, did YouTube stuff,” Denino said. “We would throw balls of bread off the balcony to see how far we could throw it.” His viewers recall the era fondly. But Denino was kicked out after six months. “The building’s office was getting mass-called by my viewers every day, just non-stop, like ‘Hey, we know Paul Denino lives there. He’s burning down his apartment.’ ”

The biggest problem was the swattings. People would call 911 with false reports of hostage situations or bomb threats, in order to get a swat team sent to Denino’s apartment. Swatting has its origins in the subculture of Internet trolls, where it is a favorite tactic for harassing and bullying people. Swatting has exploded in popularity in recent years, owing in part to the rise of live streaming. Previously, the hoaxer would have to imagine his target’s distress when a team of heavily armed police officers broke down his door. But, if the target is broadcasting himself live, the hoaxer can see his handiwork play out in real time.

by Adrian Chen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Siggi Eggertsson

[ed. Ever wonder what everyone's looking at, noses glued to their smartphones all the time? Artificial life.]

How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What’s On Tonight

The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people’s data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge.

In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users.

Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner , the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban.

Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands — including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips — to place its software on certain sets. When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides special offers “by cleverly recognizing onscreen content.” But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.

Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in.

Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched.

The big draw for advertisers — which have included Citi and JetBlue in the past, and now Expedia — is that Samba TV can also identify other devices in the home that share the TV’s internet connection.

Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. Instead, advertisers can pay the company to direct ads to other gadgets in a home after their TV commercials play, or one from a rival airs. Advertisers can also add to their websites a tag from Samba TV that allows them to determine if people visit after watching one of their commercials.

If it sounds a lot like the internet — a company with little name recognition tracking your behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads — that’s the point. But consumers do not typically expect the so-called idiot box to be a savant.

“It’s still not intuitive that the box maker or the software embedded by the box maker is going to be doing this,” said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union and a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission. “I’d like to see companies do a better job of making that clear and explaining the value proposition to consumers.” (...)

Samba TV’s language is clear, said Bill Daddi, a spokesman. “Each version has clearly identified that we use technology to recognize what’s onscreen, to create benefit for the consumer as well as Samba, its partners and advertisers,” he added.

Still, David Kitchen, a software engineer in London, said he was startled to learn how Samba TV worked after encountering its opt-in screen during a software update on his Sony Bravia set.

The opt-in read: “Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way.”

The language prompted Mr. Kitchen to research Samba TV’s data collection and raise concerns online about its practices.

Enabling the service meant that consumers agreed to Samba TV’s terms of service and privacy policy, the opt-in screen said. But consumers couldn’t read those unless they went online or clicked through to another screen on the TV. The privacy policy, which provided more details about the information collected through the software, was more than 4,000 words, and the terms exceeded 6,500 words.

“The thing that really struck me was this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial feature,” Mr. Kitchen said. “You appear to opt into a discovery-recommendation service, but what you’re really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV.”

by Sapna Maheshwari, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Plugspreading

Plugspreading is an abomination and it must end today

via: CNET

via:

John Atkinson
via:

Everything You Love Will Be Eaten Alive

The Efficient City’s war on the Romantic City…

Here are two different visions for what a city ought to be. Vision 1: the city ought to be a hub of growth and innovation, clean, well-run, high-tech, and business-friendly. It ought to attract the creative class, the more the better, and be a dynamic contributor to the global economy. It should be a home to major tech companies, world-class restaurants, and bold contemporary architecture. It should embrace change, and be “progressive.” Vision 2: the city ought to be a mess. It ought to be a refuge for outcasts, an eclectic jumble of immigrants, bohemians, and eccentrics. It should be a place of mystery and confusion, a bewildering kaleidoscope of cultures and classes. It should be a home to cheap diners, fruit stands, grumpy cabbies, and crumbling brownstones. It should guard its traditions, and be “timeless.”

It should be immediately obvious that not only are these views in tension, but that the tension cannot ever be resolved without one philosophy succeeding in triumphing over the other. That’s because the very things Vision 2 thinks make a city worthwhile are the things Vision 1 sees as problems to be eliminated. If I believe the city should be run like a business, then my mission will be to clear up the mess: to streamline everything, to eliminate the weeds. If I’m a Vision 2 person, the weeds are what I live for. I love the city because it’s idiosyncratic, precisely because things don’t make sense, because they are inefficient and dysfunctional. To the proponent of the progressive city, a grumpy cabbie is a bad cabbie; we want friendly cabbies, because we want our city to attract new waves of innovators. (Hence a meritocratic star-rating system for ride-share app drivers is unquestionably a good thing.) To the lover of the City of Mystery, brash personalities are part of what adds color to life. In the battle of the entrepreneurs and the romantics, the entrepreneurs hate what the romantics love, and the romantics hate what the entrepreneurs love. In the absence of a Berlin-like split, there can be no peace accord, it must necessarily be a fight to the death. What’s more, neither side is even capable of understanding the other: a romantic can’t see why anyone would want to clean up the dirt that gives the city its poetry, whereas an entrepreneur can’t see why anyone would prefer more dirt to less dirt.

Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul, based on the blog of the same name, is a manifesto for the Romantic Vision of the city, with Michael Bloomberg cast as the chief exponent of the Entrepreneurial Vision. “Nostalgic” will probably be the word most commonly used to capture Jeremiah Moss’s general attitude toward New York City, and Moss himself embraces the term and argues vigorously for the virtues of nostalgia. But I think in admitting to being “nostalgic,” he has already ceded too much. It’s like admitting to being a “preservationist”: they accuse you of being stuck in the past, and you reply “Damn right, I’m stuck in the past. The past was better.” But this isn’t simply about whether to preserve a city’s storied past or charge forward into its gleaming future. If that were the case, the preservationists would be making an impossible argument, since we’re heading for the future whether they like it or not. It’s also about different conceptions of what matters in life. The entrepreneurs want economic growth, the romantics want jazz and sex and poems and jokes. To frame things as a “past versus future” divide is to grant the entrepreneurs their belief that the future is theirs.

Moss’s book is about a city losing its “soul” rather than its “past,” and he spends a lot of time trying to figure out what a soul is and how a city can have one or lack one. He is convinced that New York City once had one, and increasingly does not. And while it is impossible to identify precisely what the difference is, since the quality is of the “you know it when you see it” variety, Moss does describe what the change he sees actually means. Essentially, New York City used to be a gruff, teeming haven for weirdos and ethnic minorities. Now, it is increasingly full of hedge fund managers, rich hipsters, and tourists. Tenements and run-down hotels have been replaced with glass skyscrapers full of luxury condos. Old bookshops are shuttered, designer clothes stores in their place. Artisanal bullshit is everywhere, meals served on rectangular plates. You used to be able to get a pastrami and a cup of coffee for 50 cents! What the hell happened to this place?

It’s very easy, as you can see, for this line of thought to rapidly slip from critiquing to kvetching, and Moss does frequently sound like a cranky old man. But that’s half the point, he wants to show us that the cranky old men are not crazy, that we should actually listen to them. It’s not a problem with them for complaining that the neighborhoods of their childhood are being destroyed, it’s a problem with us for not caring about that destruction. (See Leonard Nimoy talking about the tragic redevelopment of his vibrant multiethnic childhood neighborhood in Boston.) Moss is a psychoanalyst, and he does not see “nostalgia” as irrational, but as a healthy and important part of being a person. We are attached to places, to the memories we make in them, and if you bulldoze those places, if you tear away what people love, you’re causing them a very real form of pain.

Moss loves a lot of places, and because New York City is transitioning from being a city for working-class people to a city for the rich, he is constantly being wounded by the disappearance of beloved institutions. CBGB, the dingy punk rock music club where the Ramones and Patti Smith got their start, is forced out after its rent is raised to $35,000 a month. Instead, we get a commemorative CBGB exhibit at the Met, with a gift shop selling Sid Vicious pencil sets and thousand-dollar handbags covered in safety pins. The club itself becomes a designer clothing store selling $300 briefs. The ornate building that once housed the socialist Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, the exterior of which featured bas-relief sculptures of Marx and Engels, is converted to luxury condos. Its ethnic residents largely squeezed out, bits of Little Italy are carved off and rebranded as “Nolita” for the purpose of real estate brochures, since—as one developer confesses—the name “Little Italy” still connotes “cannoli.” A five-story public library in Manhattan, home to the largest collection of foreign-language books in the New York library system, is flattened and replaced with a high-end hotel (a new library is opened in the hotel’s basement, with hardly any books). Harlem’s storied Lenox Lounge is demolished, its stunning art-deco facade gone forever. Rudy Giuliani demolishes the Coney Island roller coaster featured in Annie Hall. Cafe Edison, a Polish tea house (see photo p. 32-33), is evicted and replaced with a chain restaurant called “Friedman’s Lunch,” named after right-wing economist Milton Friedman. (I can’t believe that’s true, but it is.) Judaica stores, accordion repairmen, auto body shops: all see their rent suddenly hiked from $3,000 to $30,000, and are forced to leave. All the newsstands in the city are shuttered and replaced; they go from being owner-operated to being controlled by a Spanish advertising corporation called Cemusa. Times Square gets Disneyfied, scrubbed of its adult bookstores, strip joints, and peep shows. New York University buys Edgar Allen Poe’s house and demolishes it. (“We do not accept the views of preservationists who say nothing can ever change,” says the college’s president.) (...)

This complaint against the demise of the mom-n-pops and the takeover of chain retailers is now decades old. And it has its flaws: sometimes labor practices can be better at large corporations than at the celebrated “small business,” because there is actually recourse for complaints against abusive managers. If the only person above you is the owner, and the owner is a tyrant, there’s not much you can do. Still, the core critique is completely valid. Chain retail exists to make the world more efficient, but ends up turning the world uninteresting. I have actually noticed that I am less inclined to travel because of this. Why would I go to New York, when I can see a Starbucks right here? Monoculture is such a bleak future; local variation is part of what makes the world so wonderful. You can measure whether a place is succeeding by whether it’s possible to write a good song or poem about it. It’s almost literally impossible to write a good non-ironic poem about an Applebee’s. Compare that with nearly any greasy spoon or dive bar. (...)

The effort to replace poor people with rich people is often couched in what Moss calls “propaganda and doublespeak.” One real estate investment firm claims to “turn under-achieving real estate into exceptional high-yielding investments,” without admitting that this “under-achieving real estate” often consists of people’s family homes. (Likewise, people often say things like “Oh, nobody lives there” about places where… many people live.) One real estate broker said they aspired to “a well-cultivated and curated group of tenants, and we really want to help change the neighborhood.” “Well-cultivated” almost always means “not black,” but the assumption that neighborhoods actually need to be “changed” is bad enough on its own.

In fact, one of the primary arguments used against preservationists is the excruciating two-word mantra: cities change. Since change is inevitable and desirable, those who oppose it are irrational. Why do you hate change? You don’t believe that change is good? Because it’s literally impossible to stop change, the preservationist is accused of being unrealistic. Note, however, just how flimsy this reasoning is: “Well, cities change” is as if a murderer were to defend himself by saying “Well, people die.” The question is not: is change inevitable? Of course change is inevitable. The question is what kinds of changes are desirable, and which should be encouraged or inhibited by policy. What’s being debated is not the concept of change, but some particular set of changes.

Even “gentrification” doesn’t describe just one thing. It’s a word I hate, because it captures a lot of different changes, some of which are insidious and some of which seem fine. There are contentious debates over whether gentrification produces significant displacement of original residents, and what its economic benefits might be for those residents. The New York Times chided Moss, calling him “impeded by myopia,” for failing to recognize that those people who owned property in soon-to-be-gentrified areas could soon be “making many millions of dollars.” But that exactly shows the point: Moss is concerned with the way that the pursuit of many millions of dollars erodes the very things that make a city special, that give it life and make it worth spending time in. A pro-gentrification commentator, in a debate with Moss, said that he didn’t really see any difference, because “people come for the same reason they always have: to make as much money as possible.” That’s exactly the conception that Moss is fighting. People came to New York, he says, because it was a place worth living in, not because they wanted to make piles of money.

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

Image: Jeremiah Moss
[ed. Companion piece to the post following this one re: Seattle. See also: Is Housing Inequality the Main Driver of Economic Inequality?]

Is Bezos Holding Seattle Hostage? The Cost of Being Amazon's Home

However they see Amazon, for good or ill, residents of the fastest-growing city in the US largely agree on the price Seattle has paid to be the home of the megacorporation: surging rents, homelessness, traffic-clogged streets, overburdened public transport, an influx of young men in polo shirts and a creeping uniformity rubbing against the city’s counterculture.

But the issue of Jeff Bezos’s balls is far from settled. “Have you seen the Bezos balls?” asked Dave Christie, a jewellery maker at a waterfront market who makes no secret of his personal dislike for the man who founded and still runs Amazon. “No one wanted them. They’ve disfigured downtown. Giant balls say everything about the man. Bezos is holding Seattle hostage.”

It’s not strictly true to say everyone is against the three huge plant-forested glass spheres at what Amazon calls its “campus” in the heart of the city. The Bezos balls, as the conservatories are popularly known, are modelled on the greenhouses at London’s Kew Gardens, feature walkways above fig trees, ferns and rhododendrons, and provide hot-desking for Amazon workers looking for a break from the neighbouring office tower.

“They are absolutely gorgeous. There was nothing in that area 10 years ago,” said Jen Reed, selling jerky from another market stall. “I don’t hate Amazon the way that a lot of people hate them. Seattle has changed a lot. My rent’s gone from $500 to $1,000, but outside of that Amazon have been beneficial. It’s give and take, and anyway we invited them here.”

But even those sympathetic to the biggest retailer in the US are questioning whether there has been more take than give. Amazon has long been accused of stretching the city’s transit and education systems, and its highly paid workers have driven up prices of goods and housing.

The resentful murmur recently became a roar after Amazon reacted to the city’s latest tax proposal, which would have charged large businesses an annual $275 per employee, by resorting to what critics call blackmail. In mid-June, less than a month after unanimously passing the tax, Seattle’s council abandoned it in the face of threats from the corporation. The tension has sharpened the debate about whether the city can retain its identity as one of the most progressive in the country, or is destined to be just another tech hub.

Ironically, given Amazon’s much-publicised “city sweepstakes”, in which municipalities in North America are competing to land the company’s second headquarters, Seattle did not reach a Faustian pact with Amazon to lure it in the first place. The city gave no tax breaks and passed no anti-union laws, although the fact that Washington state law bars income tax was certainly appealing. The council did encourage the firm’s massive growth, however, with accommodations on building regulations that helped drive $4bn in construction.

Amazon has remade Seattle in many ways beyond new buildings. The city’s population has surged by about 40% since the company was founded, and nearly 20,000 people a year are moving there, often drawn by the company and its orbit. The tech industry has brought higher-paying jobs, with its average salary about $100,000. But that is twice as much as half the workers in the city earn, and the latter’s spending power is dropping sharply, creating a clear economic divide between some of the city’s population and the new arrivals.

The better-paid have driven up house prices by 70% in five years, and rents with them, as they suck up the limited housing stock. The lower-paid are being forced out of the city, into smaller accommodation or on to the streets. The Seattle area now has the highest homeless population in the country after New York and Los Angeles, with more than 11,000 people without a permanent home, many living in tent camps under bridges, in parks and in cemeteries.

“It’s incredibly difficult to find housing in Seattle now,” said Nicole Keenan-Lai, executive director of Puget Sound Sage, a Seattle thinktank focused on low-income and minority communities. “Two years ago a study came out that said 35% of Seattle’s homeless population has some college or a college degree.”

John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute said there is a a direct link between the surge in highly paid jobs and the numbers of people forced on to the street.

“There’s an incredible correlation between the increase in homelessness and the increase in the number of people who have incomes in excess of $250,000,” he said. “That has grown by almost 50% between 2011 and 2017. The population of homeless kids in the Seattle public schools has grown from 1,300 kids to 4,200.” (...)

This is not how large numbers of people in Seattle think things should work. They argue that Amazon should contribute to upgrading a transport system that’s struggling under the influx it created, and improving schools that provide the educated workforce the company benefits from.

“It is sort of a bipolar relationship because we do have a progressive city in some respects, we have a progressive city council in some respects, and then we have an environment that embraces individual wealth,” said Burbank.

“I think Amazon’s attitude has to do with the difference between social liberties and economic equality. Bezos was helpful in the campaign for same-sex marriage, but he also put $100,000 in opposition to the [initiative on introducing an] income tax that we ran in our state in 2010.

“So if it has to do with personal freedom, that’s OK. But if it has to do with actually trying to create a shared quality of life which entails taxation of the affluent or higher taxation, that’s not OK. And so this is a really good city for him because we have a lot of personal freedom and we have no taxation. Of course chickens are going to come home to roost at some point.”

Bezos’s company has arguably done much to erode the liberal and progressive culture of the city that first attracted him. Unlike other locally based giant corporations such as Microsoft, Starbucks and Boeing, Amazon planted itself in the heart of the city, and the influx of well-paid tech workers has changed the feel of Seattle. Keenan-Lai sees it in the erosion of the identity of her old neighbourhood on the city’s Capitol Hill and the disappearance of older, quirky restaurants, driven out by newer, more polished places.

“I can’t begrudge people moving to try to find opportunity,” she said. “But I do hear a lot of people say ‘I don’t want those programmers coming to Seattle’. It does create a lot of tension. Amazon represents both innovation and progress, and also dystopian fears for a lot of folks.”

Reed, at the market stall, added: “It’s definitely weird when you go into a dive bar that used to have bike gangs and now everyone’s in a polo shirt.”

by Chris McGreal, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:Ted S. Warren/AP

[ed. I don't like to drive near Seattle, let alone through it anymore.]

via:

Remains

My great-grandfather (born 1826) called our place Eagle Pond Farm because a great bald eagle lived on a hill called Eagle’s Nest and fished the pond every day for its dinner. Yet his youngest child, my grandmother Kate (born 1878), never saw the bird. The land and its creatures have altered. Thirty-five years after my grandmother’s death, I saw a bald eagle fly over the water.

When the 19th century filled New Hampshire with farms, 70 percent of the state was open land. Dairy farms of 40 or 60 acres lined the dirt roads, pastures for cattle behind them. When I am driven in the backcountry now, past dense forests of hardwood or soft, I see remnant stone walls that kept sheep and cattle to their allotted pastures. I see no horses, whose manure used to surface the roads. The farmers’ sons and daughters deserted granite and sandy soil to work in the mills or go west, where the earth was better for farming. New England has become the most forested part of the United States, 80 percent covered by trees.

In summers when I hayed with my grandfather, 1938–1945, fewer than half a million people lived in New Hampshire. Every quarter mile or so on Route 4 (paved 1928), a small farm—a few Holsteins with hayfields, sheep, chickens, one horse to pull or carry—struggled to survive through the labor of a farmer like my grandfather. Much land and no cash. Old backcountry farms had already begun their return to forest. When my grandfather and I walked in the hills, to call the cows or pick blueberries, we were wary to avoid cellar holes and abandoned wells. Sometimes we knew that a cellar hole was near because the dead farmwife’s hollyhocks gave us warning. At 12 I hayed for the first time on two acres of widow hay down the road. (The farmer had died; his widow wanted grass in her fields, not brush.) When my late wife, Jane Kenyon, and I returned to live in central New Hampshire in 1975, the widow’s hayfield looked like virgin forest to city sorts, softwood rising high and dense. In the southern part of the state, tract houses cover the earth of old farms, and New Hampshire has more than a million people now—mainly suburbanites who live an hour or less from Boston, refugees from Taxachusetts to a state without income tax.

Dylan Thomas wrote a villanelle addressed to his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The rhyming line was “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” When I met Dylan, I was 23. I told him I loved that poem, and he told me he didn’t; he said he stole it from Yeats. (Yeats in old age liked to use the word “rage.”) Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about the poem. It showed affection and care for his father, but it asked him to do what he could not do. In real life, a student of mine at Michigan cherished her ferocious father. He was difficult, but she had always adored his explosiveness. When he softened in age, she couldn’t bear it. She spoke in something like anger, as if his weakness were willful.

When Jane and I moved here, we loved a great-aunt of mine—82, younger than I am now—whose temperament was cheerful and affectionate. She and Jane spent mornings together digging bitter dandelions to boil for dinner. My aunt tottered when she walked, and with difficulty climbed six concrete steps, without a railing, to reach her front door. She asked her grandson, a 30-year-old carpenter, to put up something she could hold onto. I heard him grumble, “She could climb them stairs if she was a mind to.”

Everyone who practices an art should love and live with another art. One learns about one’s own work by exposing oneself to a different passion. Mentioning a second art does not imply competence in practicing it. In eighth grade I flunked Art, which was lamentable because I sat beside Mary Beth Burgess in class, and I was sweet on her. Music is totally beyond me. My most notable musical moment took place on Ken Burns’s Baseball. He interviewed me about the game, about loving baseball, not about playing it. I had hung around Major League players, writing books and essays about them, and for Ken I came up with 20 anecdotes. Then he asked me to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” telling me that all his interviewees would sing it. Ken Burns’s charm could persuade a monkey to breed with a daffodil. At his urging I tried singing “Take me out …” and heard my pitch waver capriciously up and down. Tuneless, ashamed, I forgot the lyrics in my disgrace. The highlight of Ken’s Baseball series, I swear, is the image of my mouth hanging open wide and silent. It looked like brain damage. In editing, Ken paid special attention to this image by holding it for two or three beats. (...)

Old houses are full of holes. Creatures sneak into the living room. A summer ago, a garter snake entered and slithered across my living room. I stepped on its head and threw it outside. The same year, I discovered a visitor who became my favorite for persistence. A chipmunk took up residence and remained on the first floor for two or three months. Every day I would hear chirping, at first sounding like an electronic signal. Then the chipmunk came into sight, pausing with its paws tucked or folded before it, I suppose sustained by my cat’s kibble and water. As for my cat, she stared at it intently, fascinated. My housekeeper, Carole, bought a tiny Havahart trap and baited it with whatever we imagined was a chipmunk treat. Every morning the bait was gone, but so was the chipmunk. One morning the creature skittered from the kitchen into the toolshed, where the door showed a wide space at its bottom, and never appeared again. I felt abandoned. When autumn descended into winter, I walked into the cluttered dining room, never used in old age, and smelled something rotten in a box of unsorted snapshots. Under a layer of pictures I found the small body of our chipmunk. It had not escaped after all. With a paper towel I picked it up, rigid and almost weightless, and threw it from the door as far as I could. Next morning when I opened the door to pick up the newspaper, half of his small mummified corpse lay beside the door.

At this New Hampshire house, woodchucks are annoying and commonplace. Sixty years ago, my cousin Freeman grew vegetables by his shack up on New Canada Road, and his shotgun took care of many such thieves. Each summer he ate one. “If they eat my peas, I’ll eat them! ” Freeman would dress the woodchuck and carry it downhill to my grandmother’s wood stove. Kate held her nose as she baked it, and Freeman in his hut ate woodchuck.

Across the road from the house, my grandparents raised their year’s bounty of beans, peas, onions, potatoes, and corn. The farthest part of the garden was sweet corn, which phantom raccoons ate every night. Nearer the house were the peas and beans, and it was maddening to find pole beans devoured by woodchucks. When I was a boy, I’d sit on a concrete watering trough with my .22 Mossberg and wait for an hour to assassinate a predator. When Jane and I returned, we grew another garden. I was too impatient, nearly 50, to sit so long with my gun. I bought a Havahart trap. From the porch I could see when the trap was sprung. I walked across Route 4 with the same Mossberg and killed the woodchuck trembling in my Havahart. Once every summer I thought of what Freeman did. In the kitchen I picked up the Joy of Cooking, where Irma Rombauer gives a recipe for woodchuck. When I got to the part about looking for mites when you skinned it, I closed the book and buried the corpse.

My Havahart came from an Agway, which sold farm equipment after most farmers had left. Traps were not the only solution for woodchucks. If you found a likely hole you could try poison, but nothing worked for me except a long rifle slug from my .22. An Agway clerk told me of a customer who was especially enraged. He bought sticks of dynamite, fed them down a woodchuck hole, and blew up his whole garden. (...)

Gray squirrels dig in the driveway. Red squirrels are sneaky and rip into insulation on the second floor, poking pink fuzzy fragments through the cracks in the toolshed’s ceiling. Always there have been multitudes of mice, though not so many as when my grandfather kept a shed full of grain. Back then, a mother cat had three litters a year, and the kittens who ate mice followed my grandfather as he milked. In the tie-up he swirled a teat and sprayed Holstein milk into gaping mouths. Eventually each kitten strayed away to take a look at Route 4, and it was my chore to bury them deep enough so that something would not dig up a snack. Meanwhile the old mother dragged her teats on the barn floor and never approached the road. If mice in the house became a nuisance, my grandmother invited a cat inside for a predatory visit. Otherwise no mouse-catching cats or beloved cow-herding dogs were allowed inside. People lived in houses.

In 1975 Jane and I brought three cats with us from Michigan. In Ann Arbor, a town of a hundred thousand, Catto and Mia and Arabella roamed outside. New Hampshire’s Route 4 turned them into housecats. They didn’t seem to mind, maybe because the mouse supply was exemplary. Jane went barefoot most of the year as she walked around the house and wrote poems. She screamed a special small scream whenever her bare foot squished the ripped body of a mouse, placed in her way by a cat showing off.

by Donald Hall, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Ronald Wittek Picture Press Getty Images via
[ed. See also: Donald Hall’s Life Work]

Doom and Gloom: The Role of the Media in Public Disengagement on Climate Change

In July of 2008, as a national broadcast correspondent, I reported on environmental conditions in Newtok, a remote community of roughly 400 Yup’ik people in Northwest Alaska. Newtok was losing forty to a hundred feet of coastline a year to erosion, and sinking because of “permafrost” that is no longer permanent, the direct result of a warming climate. Flooding threatened homes, the school, and the only supply of clean water. I chose to report on Newtok because the community was actively working on a relocation plan after voting to move to higher, more stable ground. My story compared the actions of Newtok with Kivalina, an Inupiaq community of the same size situated on a barrier island further north. Kivalina faced similar conditions and had filed suit that same year against ExxonMobil Corp. for damages caused by climate change.

In the decade since my report aired on National Public Radio, news outlets from all over the world visited Newtok, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik and a dozen other Alaska Native communities forced to consider relocation because of the effects of climate change. The national stories all fit the same narrative pattern. With images of houses tipping precariously off cliffs, and phrases such as “impending doom,” and “cultural extinction,” the reporting paints a picture of tragedy and hopelessness, framing community members as victims to sell the urgency of mitigation to the public. As a CNN correspondent unabashedly reported, “a trip here is like a trip into a disturbing future.”

The repetition of this narrow narrative in national and international media for more than ten years has not resulted in a groundswell of support for mitigation or adaptation. Nor has it resulted in public policy at the state or federal level. It may have even undermined the ability of these coastal communities to help themselves. According to a 2017 study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council, “Because government action on supporting community in general has been limited, and given the high and rising costs of relocation, it may very well be the case that people leave these communities individually and that some communities collapse before any concerted effort to relocate them en masse ever materializes. Unfortunately, governments have yet to act in many of these cases, thus delaying and increasing the magnitude of the costs and impacts. As these impacts accrue, people become less able to respond and adapt effectively.” As Enoch Adams of Kivalina sarcastically put it to me, “Well, how ‘bout I move into your house?

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet. NOAA’s 2017 Arctic Report Card states: “The unprecedented rate and global reach of change disproportionally affect the people of northern communities, further pressing the need to prepare for and adapt to the new Arctic.

For Americans, the “Arctic” is Alaska, a state that is among the first to experience the severe effects of a warming climate, where snow and sea ice have been declining so rapidly that coastal villages have no buffer from fall and winter storms. This is compounded by melting permafrost that has accelerated erosion and foundation problems for structures and entire communities. While it’s important for the public to see and understand this threat, it is also important for the public to see and understand how people are responding.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, conducts research on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental attitudes and behavior. He is best known for his research indicating “Six Americas,” categories of public opinion about climate change, on a scale from “dismissive” to “alarmed.” Leiserowitz says the media focuses disproportionately on impact, and Americans are tuning out. “I think most journalists come in, they’ve already got the story written, they say I want to do a story about climate victims, climate refugees, and so I’m going to go to a place like Kivalina which is a poster child for vulnerability to climate change and I’m coming to tell that story. I’m just going to get some actualities and some nice footage of houses falling into the ocean and then I’ll go home and file my story. I don’t think they spend the time with the people in those communities to understand the stresses they are facing and moreover, they’re not really interested in thinking about ‘how do we actually address these issues?’ That’s a different kind of a story, an increasingly important and more complex story that’s not just limited to people in Kivalina. You’ve got cities like Boston and Norfolk and Miami and New Orleans all having to directly confront these fundamental challenges because it’s at their front door now too."

The underlying premise of this paper is that repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness. The paper focuses on five years of national media coverage of climate change in the U.S. Arctic, specifically stories about communities facing coastal erosion and relocation, to argue for journalism that provides a more representative view of the challenges posed by a warming climate. Such reporting would also include responses and innovations, and increase pressure on policymakers to act, rather than offering excuses for inaction. (...)

While it might seem contradictory to provide information about mitigation or adaptation in a story about climate change impacts, it is standard procedure in the coverage of public health. What reporter covering a flu epidemic wouldn’t think to provide information in the same story about the availability of a vaccine or how the disease was being transmitted? Lauren Feldman, of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, says unlike public health, stories about climate change seldom discuss both threat and efficacy information, or impact and action. “I think there is a model in public health. You tell a story about a crisis or a disease and you tell people what they can do to avert that crisis. A very similar approach can and should be taken with climate change. Here is a threat and here are some steps that you as an individual can take, and here is what the government is doing or and here is what industry is doing.”

In a study of climate change coverage by U.S. network television news between 2005 and 2011, Feldman found that impact and efficacy were rarely discussed together in the same broadcast, and to the extent that efficacy was discussed at all, it was framed in terms of conflict—a fight between political parties, or the impossibility or downside of a potential remedy. Feldman says, “Our most consistent finding is that including the efficacy or solution information increases people’s sense of hope, and of all the emotions that we study, fear, anger, hope—hope is the most consistent driver of intentions to engage politically, support for climate mitigation policies, energy conservation behavior; so hope is really important.”

Feldman speculates journalists fail to tell the solution part of the story because it’s not as dramatic and it smacks of advocacy. “There isn’t convergence yet around solutions. Journalists see consensus around the science now, but if you pair the science with what an individual can do about it, it looks like you are making an argument for a specific action, so it’s left out. But our empirical research indicates that people will disengage if it’s left out, if all they get is the doom and gloom message.” (...)

Alaska in the Climate Change Narrative

Over the last few decades, national and international media outlets have spent considerable time and money sending correspondents to remote communities in Alaska to witness and report on the human impacts of climate change. These are places that are not connected by road, populated primarily by indigenous people who live, in large part, a subsistence lifestyle. As anthropologists Elizabeth Marino and Peter Shweitzer noted in 2016, “with the rise in public discourse about climate change, the overwhelming desire to document the phenomenon, and the identification of Arctic residents as some of the first “victims” of climate change, rural Alaska has been besieged with unprecedented numbers of journalists, photographers, scientists, and politicians over the last 25 years. All seem eager to engage in a discussion or, even better, to get a photo of people who have first-hand experience with climate change.”

Marino and Schweitzer, who themselves were documenting the impacts of climate change in the Alaskan community of Shishmaref, reported that “while we were making dinner with a Shishmaref resident, who had already been featured in a Canadian documentary about climate change and been quoted and photographed for People and Time magazines, two television crews, one from Japan and one from Colorado, simultaneously filmed a story on climate change in his kitchen.”

The shape of the narrative begins in the early stages of the reporting process, in the very questions that are posed: How does it feel to be a climate victim? What is it like to know that you may lose your home in the middle of the night? Are you afraid of losing your culture? Just how bad are the storms? How does it feel to know there is nothing you can do to stop it?

Marino and Schweitzer document that in Shishmaref, as is the case in other Inupiaq and Yup’ik communities, residents “are hesitant to hyperbolize conditions of flooding and environmental shift. Journalists, however, are quick to use catastrophic language.”

Stripped to his shirtsleeves on a desolate polar beach, the Inupiat Eskimo hunter gazes over his Arctic world. Thousands of years ago, hungry nomads chased caribou here across a now-lost land bridge from Siberia, just 100 miles away. Many scientists believe those nomads became the first Americans. Now their descendants are about to become global-warming refugees. Their village is about to be swallowed up by the sea. 

“We have no room left here,” Tony Weyiouanna, 43, said. “I have to think about my grandchildren.”

Sally Russell Cox, the sole community planner for the state of Alaska, has been working with the village of Newtok since 2006. She says she rolls her eyes when she gets yet another email from a media organization asking for contact information. “I just had two different reporters today who I haven’t gotten back to yet, wanting to go out to Newtok, but it’s like, ‘have you even looked and seen how many times this story has been told?’ And it’s always, always the same story. Look, the people of Newtok are not victims. They are not refugees. We know what the problem is and we have been moving forward. That’s the story.”

Romy Cadiente is the relocation coordinator for Newtok. After a lengthy webinar discussion in Washington D.C., during which he detailed the problems and progress made toward relocation, the host of Wilson Center NOW asked him how he felt about climate deniers, those who are uncertain about the science. Cadiente sidestepped the loaded question and replied patiently, “There’s just a lot of information that’s already published about us, there’s no room for talk anymore. There are thirty-one villages right now in Alaska experiencing the same problem. Let’s do, guys."

Voiceless Victims

To determine the dominant narrative of national media coverage of climate change in the Arctic, we conducted an analysis of stories containing the key terms “climate change” and “arctic” in prominent print, radio, and television news outlets over a five-year period, from March 2013 to March 2018. This analysis includes the years before, during, and after President Obama’s high-profile visit to Alaska in 2015 as the U.S. assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council.

The analysis establishes that most news stories during this time period focused on the science of climate change with no human subject. When these news stories did include people’s voices, they were overwhelmingly “experts,” including scientists, policymakers and advocates. Few included the voice of actual residents.

Of the minority subset of stories that had a human subject at the center of the narrative, it was that of an indigenous person or community. Of that subset, the individual or community was overwhelmingly framed as a victim facing environmental threat or loss. The dominant Arctic climate change story involving people focuses on coastal erosion and the prospect of relocation, a story that has been told repeatedly for more than a decade with little discussion of mitigation or adaptive responses.

The search revealed that the majority of stories are not about people at all, but rather about other aspects of the ecosystem, with sea ice, polar bears, walruses, and ocean temperatures chief among them. Of the 1,450 stories analyzed in our survey, ice is mentioned 4,559 times—an average of more than three times per story. Derivatives of “melting” are mentioned 1,178 times. Polar bears and walruses are mentioned nearly as often as Alaskans: Polar bears are mentioned 260 times and walruses are mentioned 206 times, while the word “Alaskans” comes up 289 times. Strikingly, the term “polar bears” is twice as frequent as the term “indigenous,” which only appears 118 times in the stories analyzed. Furthermore, when these indigenous communities are invoked, they rarely speak.

A selection of articles from The Washington Post illustrates the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the Post published an article about 35,000 walruses crowding the shores of Alaska, another science story about starving polar bears, a travel section article about going “nose-to-nose” with a polar bear, and a piece that appeared on page A10 with the headline, “Arctic melt has animals migrating to strange places.” While this article quotes academics and scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian, it does not mention or quote any Arctic residents. The travel section story about polar bears had no quotes from the local people in the Inupiaq village of Kaktovik, who were described as “reticent.”

A second trend is that, of the stories that do involve people, the majority are scientists, policymakers, and advocates. “Geologist(s),” “expert(s),” “scientist(s),” or “doctor(s)” are mentioned 3,681 times in the data set, an average of nearly twice per story. Whereas, “indigenous” and related terms such as “native” are mentioned 472 times in the data set, an average of 0.25 times per story. For every twelve stories The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ABC, or NBC produced on climate change in the Arctic in the last five years, only three mentioned the people who actually live there.

Of the stories that do involve local people or a community, most are about indigenous people facing difficulty, such as coastal erosion or inadequate funding for relocation associated with that erosion. Most of these stories frame local communities as endangered, threatened, facing losses, and incapable of responding. None of them use words such as “strong,” “capable,” or “empowered” to describe people. In fact, “strong” often describes the forces of climate change, as in “strong storms” or “strong resistance in Congress.”

Visually, a majority of the television and print stories use wide aerial shots, along with eroding beaches and cracks in the tundra, to convey the vulnerability of these communities, raising the unanswered question of why people would ever choose to live in such a place.

It is important to note that residents of Newtok and the other communities in Alaska that are most at risk live in their current locations because they were required to settle there. Yup’ik and Inupiaq people lived semi-nomadic lifestyles in the region for thousands of years. In the 1950s the government mandated that all native children receive formal education, even if it meant attending boarding schools hundreds of miles away from family. In the region, schools were built where barges could offload construction materials, on sand spits and barrier islands in river deltas prone to flooding and erosion. Because of the mandate, communities grew around the new schools. Elder Lucy Adams explains her family’s decision to paddle 70 miles to where she lives now: “In July, we take off in skin boats from Point Hope to Kivalina, because we were not in school, us children, and so the nearest one was going to be here, and that’s why we are here.” (...)

The substance of most of these stories is an emotional description of the problem. How the community is responding is an afterthought. If the story does include a discussion of responses, they are framed as obstacles—the inability of residents to get federal or state funding for relocation, the inadequacy of retaining walls that have been funded thus far, what might be lost if the community moves, the difficulty of responding locally to climate impacts. Most repeat the impossibly high relocation price tag calculated by government agencies:

“The Corps of Engineers estimates that moving would cost as much as $130 million, or more than $412,000 per resident.”

In the few more comprehensive reports about Newtok, the community that is the closest toward relocation, its new housing site, Mertarvik, is mentioned in the context of how little progress has been made, the few buildings that have been erected, and the difficulty of getting construction materials.

Finally, and notably, most reports end with a further message of impending doom, leaving the audience deep in the hole with little hope of climbing out...

by Elizabeth Arnold, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy | Read more:
Image:Diane Haeker and Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC)
[ed. See also (for example): Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map']

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