BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up

It’s hard to think of a show currently on air that could make me want to watch a single character speak in one long, despairing stream for nearly a whole episode. Prolonged expressions of angst can sink live-action drama, which thrives on eventfulness and conflict. But BoJack Horseman—a cartoon sitcom whose title character is a melancholic, middle-aged stallion—inhabits a genre of its own, somewhere between slapstick and theater of the absurd. Midway through the show’s new season, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) wears a charcoal suit and stands at a pulpit next to a coffin. His mother has died. For over 20 full minutes, with no interruption, he delivers a brilliant, pained, rambling eulogy.

Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.

If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television. (...)

BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act.

He recounts his entire family story: his dad’s failed ambitions, his mother’s seething. He remembers how, at parties, she sometimes temporarily dropped her mantle of martyrdom and began to dance. It was one of the few moments, he says, that he could see love between his parents. “This cynical, despicable woman he married took flight,” he says.

This moment of grace, it meant something. We understood each other in a way, me and my mom and my dad. . . . My mother, she knew what it was like to feel your entire life like you are drowning, with the exception of these moments, these very rare instances in which you suddenly remember you can swim.

BoJack and his circle are drowners, and always have been. But they also attempt to keep swimming, despite everything. And it makes sense that many of these characters are zoological. We are less likely to blame animals for their own pain; if they are hurt, we tend to ask what the world did to them, rather than what they did to themselves.

There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”

By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor.

by Rachel Syme, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus – which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends. Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.

Haidt and Lukianoff’s explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological. In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to ‘paranoid parenting,’ and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation. Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years – just when things started to escalate.

This cohort is experiencing a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression and suicide. When they arrived on campus, in an increasingly polarised political climate, they were unprepared to be intellectually challenged. They – or at least the ‘social justice’ activists of this generation – responded by creating a culture of censorship, intimidation and violence, and witch hunts against non-believers. Universities, led by risk adverse bureaucracies, are treating students like customers and allowing an aggressive, censorious minority set the agenda.

The dangers of safety culture

Haidt and Lukianoff focus on the unintended consequences of safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges. Safety culture has the best of intentions: protect kids from danger. It began with a focus on physical safety – removing sharp objects and choke hazards, requiring child seats, and not letting children walk home alone. Safety, however, has experienced substantial concept creep. It now includes emotional safety, that is, not being exposed ideas that could cause psychological distress. Taken together, the focus on physical and mental safety makes young people weaker.

Humans are what author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘antifragile’. We ‘benefit from shocks; [humans] thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty’. Peanuts are a case in point of needing to be exposed to danger to build resilience. From the 1990s, parents were encouraged to not feed children peanuts, and childcare centres, kindergartens and schools banned peanuts. This moratorium has backfired. The LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) found that not eating peanut-containing products during infancy increases allergies. The researchers recruited 640 infants with a high risk of developing peanut allergy. Half were given a peanut-containing product. The other half avoided peanuts. The study found that 17 per cent of those who did not consume peanuts developed an allergy by age 5, compared to just 3 per cent of those who did consume the peanut-containing snack. Our immune system grows stronger when exposed to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasites.

Antifragility applies to emotional health as well. When you guard children against every possible risk – do not let them outside to play or walk home alone – they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills. Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow. Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak. Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors. Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring. Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think certain ideas are dangerous, or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run. Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible, it setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression. (...)

Feelings over debate

There is a link between rising mental health issues, safety culture and campus trends. It is notable how often students put censorious demands in the language of feeling safe. Students demand trigger warnings because ideas are emotionally challenging, safe spaces to hide away from scary situations, and the disinvitation of controversial speakers to feel safe on campus. While it is important to show courtesy in public debate, it is patently absurd to suggest that simply hearing an idea you dislike makes you unsafe in any meaningful way. As the old saying goes, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. In fact, the opposite is true, post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon: difficult situations do make us stronger. (...)

Safety culture undermines the entire purpose of a higher education. Universities exist to challenge students, to expand their worldview and develop their critical thinking. This is done by hearing and responding to ideas that make us feel uncomfortable. Efforts to censor speakers because they make some people feel ‘unsafe’ prevents the necessary process of argument and counter-argument in the pursuit of finding the truth.

Debate on campus is already undermined by the lack of viewpoint diversity – most academics come from a similar political pedigree, meaning students have fewer opportunities to be challenged in the first place. A lack of exposure to different ideas means a much more limited and weaker education. As British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ In other words, to make an argument thoughtfully, it is necessary to understand the counterfactual of one’s own argument.

by Matthew Lesh, Quillette |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jimmie Spheeris

Archigram. AD 39. May 1969
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Shutting Down the Memory Factory

Video Renaissance finally shut down this week. It outlasted Blockbuster and nearly every other video store by about half a decade, which is impressive. But it still can’t really console me.

When I was in high school, Video Renaissance was an oasis for misfits. For the most part, Sarasota was sleepy, conservative, and suburban. The guys at Video Renaissance were none of these things. They were excitable, proudly left-wing, and cosmopolitan. They also had a particular sensibility that I’ve come to admire: They loved culture but they weren’t pretentious about it. They were omnivores. Yes, they could talk to you about German Expressionism, but they didn’t at sneer anyone who was just in the mood for something loud and violent. The only people they couldn’t stand were the inverse snobs: the people who went “Oh, I can’t watch films in black and white.” The one requirement for their friendship: You had to be curious and a little offbeat.

I’ve been trying to think of an accurate way of conveying what it was like for my high school self, in a pretty boring tourist town, to come across Video Renaissance’s archive of 50,000 classics, cult movies, foreign movies, popular hits, and weird experimental what-have-you. The first comparison I thought of was the cave that Roald Dahl’s “BFG” lives in, where the BFG has endless shelves containing the children’s dreams he has collected, all in labeled jars. Going to Video Renaissance was like getting to prowl through the BFG’s dream collection.

The revelation that Video Renaissance gave me as a teenager was that the world is weird. Sarasota was—not entirely, but in large part—comprised of big box stores, chain restaurants, strip malls. I don’t mind these things much, but they were formulaic, predictable. Most of the blockbuster movies in theaters were similar: often fun, but nothing too unexpected ever happened in them. Video Renaissance showed me that the outer boundaries of the human imagination were far beyond anything I had previously seen. The store’s logo was a picture of the eyeball from Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. In the film (spoiler alert) the eye gets sliced in half with a razor. It was a fitting analogy for the general experience. (...)

Some civilizations have preserved their cultural practices for hundreds of years. That doesn’t really happen under capitalism, where everything you love will be eaten alive the moment it ceases to be economically efficient. The video store had ceased to be “efficient,” and thus it had to be destroyed. I don’t think a single person was surprised: If anything, they were amazed it still existed at all. I’m under no illusion that there’s any world in which we could keep such places; the technology changes, and it’s impossible to stubbornly resist the inevitable spread of streaming video out of pure nostalgia for obsolete ways of doing things.

But I don’t think it is simple nostalgia. I genuinely feel worse off now, because I don’t have a place to go where friendly faces will be waiting to talk to me about movies. (And give me homemade cookies, which often happened at Video Renaissance.) A social space is gone, the cookies are gone, and all of the serendipitous interactions that would have happened in that place will now never take place. One kind of “efficiency” has been maximized even as “the efficient production of social interaction and joy” has been diminished.

The closure of Video Renaissance kind of feels like the closure of a “memory factory.” It was a place where memories are made. Now where will we make the memories? What people always tell me is that “things change,” new things emerge to replace the old things, it will just be different now. But I don’t know: When I go back to Sarasota, it’s going to feel really disturbing. One of the things that made it feel like “home” was going to stop by the store and talk about old movies. I don’t know where I’ll go now. There isn’t anywhere to go.

I know that as I get older, I’m probably likely to become curmudgeonly. I will grumble about buildings getting knocked down. I will talk about how things used to be back when everyone was cool and beautiful and people knew things and the world didn’t suck. This is all in my nature. And people will tell me that you can’t hang on to the past, that all things must pass, you have to accept the destruction of everything you’re sentimentally attached to as the price of progress, etc.

However, I’m actually beginning to conclude that the whole dismissal of “nostalgia” is simply a mistake. Some people (especially architects!) treat it as an irrational impulse, and think there’s something unduly sentimental about preservationists and people who get sad when half the buildings in their neighborhood are flattened and turned into high-rise condos. But what we call “nostalgia” often seems more properly described as a feeling of dislocation that comes from having one’s familiar world ripped apart. Many of us like “building a life,” and when the life we’ve built is suddenly taken from us without our having any say in it, we feel helpless and adrift. I don’t hate progress, I hate the psychological distress that comes from having my relationships and favorite places wrenched from me.

As I say, I’m under no illusion that video stores could be preserved. But what I do wonder is whether a better type of progress is possible. The closure of Video Renaissance made me ask myself: If we can’t keep video stores, but I don’t like a future in which everyone just sits at home and gives their money to Amazon Prime, what would movie-watching look like in my future utopia?

I guess it would be something like this: Yes, every film ever made would be instantly available at everybody’s fingertips for free through a publicly-run Spotify equivalent. But there also need to be places to meet people who know about and like movies, places like Video Renaissance. Perhaps we could have public places filled with screening rooms, which anybody could book to put on a screening of any film ever made. If you want to watch The Maltese Falcon tonight, you could do it in bed. But if you want to watch The Maltese Falcon tonight with some other people who like Humphrey Bogart, then just go on the screening-house website, click on an empty screening room, and indicate that The Maltese Falcon will be playing there at 8pm. If you intend to bring some pizzas, check the box marked “I am bringing some pizzas.” See who shows up. Make new friends.

It’s funny, though: As I was thinking about my “ideal place,” I kept coming up with things like “Well, you’d want it to have access to everything,” and “Well, you’d want anybody to be able to come there and use it for free.” And after a while of thinking, I realized that I was talking about something that strongly resembled a public library. A place where anyone can just come, access culture, meet, with no requirement to purchase anything. That’s what libraries are.

In fact, I’ve written before that public libraries are more radical and socialistic than people assume: If we provided other things people need in the way we provide books at libraries (e.g., if there was a government restaurant), it would seem quite a departure from the ordinary way of doing things. But libraries seem so natural that we don’t appreciate how remarkable they are. (...)

We need great places to make great memories. Your online life just isn’t as rich in some ways. But places like Video Renaissance are memory factories: They’re the places where the delightful encounters happen that we’ll remember. Having a town’s memory factories shut down robs it of something crucial. And it’s important that we think about what comes next: what the ideal world looks like, and how we can fill the hole left by the destruction of beloved institutions.

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

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: A Very Selective Kind of Efficiency, and For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night]

Byron Glacier Valley, AK
photo: markk

Click Here to Kill Everybody

Smart gadgets are everywhere. The chances are you have them in your workplace, in your home, and perhaps on your wrist. According to an estimate from research firm Gartner, there will be over 11 billion internet-connected devices (excluding smartphones and computers) in circulation worldwide this year, almost double the number just a couple of years ago.

Many billions more will come online soon. Their connectivity is what makes them so useful, but it’s also a cybersecurity nightmare. Hackers have already shown they can compromise everything from connected cars to medical devices, and warnings are getting louder that security is being shortchanged in the stampede to bring products to market.

In a new book called Click Here to Kill Everybody, Bruce Schneier argues that governments must step in now to force companies developing connected gadgets to make security a priority rather than an afterthought. The author of an influential security newsletter and blog, Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Among other roles, he’s also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is chief technology officer of IBM Resilient, which helps companies prepare to deal with potential cyberthreats.

Schneier spoke with MIT Technology Review about the risks we’re running in an ever more connected world and the policies he thinks are urgently needed to address them.

The title of your book seems deliberately alarmist. Is that just an attempt to juice sales?

It may sound like publishing clickbait, but I’m trying to make the point that the internet now affects the world in a direct physical manner, and that changes everything. It’s no longer about risks to data, but about risks to life and property. And the title really points out that there’s physical danger here, and that things are different than they were just five years ago.

How’s this shift changing our notion of cybersecurity?

Our cars, our medical devices, our household appliances are all now computers with things attached to them. Your refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold, and a microwave oven is a computer that makes things hot. And your car is a computer with four wheels and an engine. Computers are no longer just a screen we turn on and look at, and that’s the big change. What was computer security, its own separate realm, is now everything security.

You’ve come up with a new term, “Internet+,” to encapsulate this shift. But we already have the phrase “internet of things” to describe it, don’t we?

I hated having to create another buzzword, because there are already too many of them. But the internet of things is too narrow. It refers to the connected appliances, thermostats, and other gadgets. That’s just a part of what we’re talking about here. It’s really the internet of things plus the computers plus the services plus the large databases being built plus the internet companies plus us. I just shortened all this to “Internet+.”

Let’s focus on the “us” part of that equation. You say in the book that we’re becoming “virtual cyborgs.” What do you mean by that?

We’re already intimately tied to devices like our phones, which we look at many times a day, and search engines, which are kind of like our online brains. Our power system, our transportation network, our communications systems, are all on the internet. If it goes down, to a very real extent society grinds to a halt, because we’re so dependent on it at every level. Computers aren’t yet widely embedded in our bodies, but they’re deeply embedded in our lives.

Can’t we just unplug ourselves somewhat to limit the risks?

That’s getting harder and harder to do. I tried to buy a car that wasn’t connected to the internet, and I failed. It’s not that there were no cars available like this, but the ones in the range I wanted all came with an internet connection. Even if it could be turned off, there was no guarantee hackers couldn’t turn it back on remotely.

Hackers can also exploit security vulnerabilities in one kind of device to attack others, right?

There are lots of examples of this. The Mirai botnet exploited vulnerabilities in home devices like DVRs and webcams. These things were taken over by hackers and used to launch an attack on a domain-name server, which then knocked a bunch of popular websites offline. The hackers who attacked Target got into the retailer’s payment network through a vulnerability in the IT systems of a contractor working on some of its stores.

True, but these incidents didn’t lead to loss of life or limb, and we haven’t seen many cases involving potential physical harm yet, have we?

We haven’t. Most attacks still involve violations of data, privacy, and confidentiality. But we’re entering a new era. I’m obviously concerned if someone steals my medical records, but what if they change my blood type in the database? I don’t want someone hacking my car’s Bluetooth connection and listening to my conversations, but I really don’t want them to disable the steering. These attacks on the integrity and availability of systems are the ones we really have to worry about in the future, because they directly affect life and property. (...)

What implications does all this have for our current approach to computer security, such as issuing patches, or fixes, for software flaws?

Patching is a way of regaining security. We produce systems that aren’t very good, then find vulnerabilities and patch them. That works great with your phone or computer, because the cost of insecurity is relatively low. But can we do this with a car? Is it okay to suddenly say a car is insecure, a hacker can crash it, but don’t worry because there will be a patch out next week? Can we do that with an embedded heart pacemaker? Because computers now affect the world in a direct, physical manner, we can’t afford to wait for fixes.

But we already have very strict security standards for software that’s used in sensitive cyber-physical domains like aviation, don’t we?

Right, but it’s very expensive. Those standards are there because there’s already strong government regulation in this and a few other industries. In consumer goods, you don’t have that level of safety and security, and that’s going to have to change. The market right now doesn’t reward secure software at all here. As long as you, as a company, won’t gain additional market share because of being more secure, you’re not going to spend much time on the issue

So what do we need to do to make the Internet+ era safer?

There’s no industry that’s improved safety or security without governments forcing it to do so. Again and again, companies skimp on security until they are forced to take it seriously. We need government to step up here with a combination of things targeted at firms developing internet-connected devices. They include flexible standards, rigid rules, and tough liability laws whose penalties are big enough to seriously hurt a company’s earnings.

But won’t things like strict liability laws have a chilling effect on innovation?

Yes, they will chill innovation—but that’s what’s needed right now! The point is that innovation in the Internet+ world can kill you. We chill innovation in things like drug development, aircraft design, and nuclear power plants because the cost of getting it wrong is too great. We’re past the point where we need to discuss regulation versus no-regulation for connected things; we have to discuss smart regulation versus stupid regulation.

by Martin Giles, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: An Rong Xu

Casper, Mattress Firm, and the Retail Lifecycle

Over the last few years, headlines about stores have looked a little something like this: Mall brands are screwed; retail jobs are disappearing; stores are shuttering by the hundreds; department stores might become extinct; bankruptcy is the new black; and everyone must kiss Jeff Bezos’s ass to survive.

Right alongside these stories that mourn retail’s demise though is news that digital-first companies are opening locations of their own — and lots of them, too.

These dual chronologies morph together to demonstrate an important narrative about the succinct future of stores: Retail isn’t dying, it’s being radically transformed. And those that don’t keep up with this lifecycle should remember companies like Blockbuster and Radioshack (yikes).

The latest sector to colorfully illustrate this? The mattress industry. Earlier this week, sources told Reuters that Mattress Firm, the largest mattress company in the country, is looking into filing for bankruptcy. The company, which is owned by Steinhoff International Holdings, bought competitor Sleepy’s in 2016 and is now deciding how many of its 3,000 stores to close. (Racked reached out to Mattress Firm, which declined to comment.)

Meanwhile, Casper, the brand that kickstarted the mattress-in-a-box craze, announced it will be opening 200 stores across the country this year. Casper already has 19 stores, and earlier this summer, it debuted a slightly absurd store concept called “The Dreamery,” where it charges $25 for 45-minute naps, complete with fancy pajamas, Instagram-brand-favorite facewash, and meditative soundtracks to plug in to.

Casper’s latest stores won’t have the luxurious snoozing accoutrements of the Dreamery, but will follow the general aesthetic of its existing stores, which are bright and airy, and include mock bedrooms to show off its mattresses, sheets, pillows, and duvets.

That Casper is getting aggressive about stores at a time when Mattress Firm is considering bankruptcy is telling, says Neil Saunders, the managing director of GlobalData Retail.

“Many mattress stores are old-fashioned and take a hard approach to selling,” Saunders says. “Fun is the main thing that’s lacking. Buying a mattress is a serious business, both because products are often expensive and because it is something that consumers are going to use for years. However, that doesn’t mean the experience should be boring or dull.”

Casper CEO Philip Krim tells Racked that his company is thinking about selling mattresses in an entirely different way than old-school stores. Retail done poorly, he adds flatly, “is on the way out.”

“Casper stores are the antithesis of traditional mattress store experience that is notorious for sky-high markups and aggressive sales tactics,” he says. “We are reimagining how people shop for sleep by listening to customers to create an atmosphere where they actually want to visit.”

Saunders notes that Mattress Firm hasn’t really adapted to the times. Casper has been around since 2013, and alongside it have launched competing mattress brands like Leesa, Allswell, Tuft & Needle, Layla, Purple, Helix, Nectar, Winkbeds, Snuz, and Tulo — I’ll stop there, but the list goes on.

Even though these brands have been threatening the mattress market for years, with Casper leading the way with $600 million in total revenue since its inception, a legacy company like Mattress Firm failed to innovate. On top of that, Saunders adds, “Mattress Firm has far too many stores and has grown rapidly through acquisition. Some of its stores have expensive leases which it now cannot afford, and it’s been caught off-guard with too many stores relative to the level of demand in the market.”

Mattress Firm’s store experience isn’t the only example of the company being stuck in old-age retail. It’s part of an industry that, as Krim points out, is “notorious for sky-high markups, commission-driven salesmen, confusing marketing jargon, and an uncomfortable in-store trial environment.”

On the flip side, while Casper is investing in stores, it’s also putting funds towards experience — money it can spend with the $239 million it has in funding. When it opened the Dreamery, for example, Casper senior vice president of experience Eleanor Morgan told Racked July that while rents are high in Soho, Casper wasn’t looking to the Dreamery store to help it sell products, but rather wanted to “build a community.”

“A big part of this is building a community of people that value sleep and want to share that with us,” she says. “They might join the brand family and ultimately become Casper customers, but the conversation around sleep is the main focus.”

All this isn’t to say Casper can kick back. As a true direct-to-consumer brand, Casper should now be focusing on building a store portfolio because retail is the necessary path for growth. Clara Sieg, a partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Revolution, which invests in startups, says that companies can only last doing digital-only for so long.

They can’t just rely on targeting the same pool of customers through Instagram and Facebook, and so retail is truly the inevitable next step. Just take a trip to New York City to see for yourself. As Inc pointed out earlier this summer, within a one-mile radius in Soho, there are a dozen brands that once boasted they were digital-only, and now have stores — Bonobos, Outdoor Voices, Everlane, Away, Allbirds, M.Gemi, and Warby Parker, just to name a few.

“As internet-native brands aim to grab market share, developing unique and tailored retail experiences creates more intimate connections with consumers and provides additional validation of the brand,” Sieg says. “We view it as an opportunity to contextualize products in ways older brands have not, while developing an in-store experience that leverages integrated technology to avoid the constraints that traditional retail faces.”

by Chavie Lieber, Racked | Read more:
Image: Casper

[ed. I'm thinking about getting a Casper. I'll tell you how it goes.]

Pigs Want To Feed at the Trough Again

After a decade of writing about the crisis, we are now subjected to an orgy of yet more chatter with not much insight. It speaks volumes that the likes of Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson are deemed fit to say anything about it, let alone pitch the need for the officialdom to have more bank bailout tools in a New York Times op-ed titled What We Need to Fight the Next Financial Crisis.

The fact that they blandly depict crises that demand extraordinary interventions as to be expected confirms that greedy technocrats like them are a big part of the problem. Their call for more help for financiers confirms that they have things backwards. How about doing more to make sure that future crises aren’t meteor-killing-the-dinosaurs level events, and foisting more costs and punishments on the financiers who got drunk and rich on too much risk-taking? The first line of defense should be stronger regulations, including prohibition of certain activities.

As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf pointed out in a recent crisis retrospective, the response of central bankers and financial regulators to the crisis was to restore the status quo ante, and not engage in root and branch reform, as took place in the Great Depression. But as we’ve pointed out, the response to the crisis represented the greatest looting of the public purse in history. The post-crisis era of super-low interest rates represented an additional transfer of income from savers to the financial system. In the US, the so-called “get out of massive mortgage securitization liability for almost free” card otherwise known as the National Mortgage Settlement represented a not-widely recognized second bailout of banks and mortgage servicers. No wonder banksters are seeking a rinse and repeat.

An overfinancialized economy is good for no one save banksters and their paid retainers. Economists in recent years have been describing how larger financial systems hurt growth. For instance, the IMF found that the optimal development of a financial system was roughly where Poland is. The IMF conceded that it might be possible to have a larger banking system not drag down the economy if it were well regulated. Other studies have found that economies with large financial sectors typically have more inequality, and inequality is separately seen as a negative for growth. So there’s no sound policy reason to coddle banks rather than cut them down to size. (...)

And none other than the New York Fed’s William Dudley came up with a way to bring partnership-type incentive structures back to big banks by requiring executives and producers to have a high percentage of their bonuses retained in the firms as a type of junior equity to be the first funds tapped in the event of losses or large legal settlements. Not only would this lead key players to be far more concerned about risk, but as Dudley pointed out, it would also lead everyone to be far more concerned if they saw another business unit engaged in dodgy practices that they might wind up paying for, and apply pressure to have them shut down. Predictably, this idea made far too much sense to get any traction.

By contrast, Bernanke was a true believer in the Great Moderation, the mid-2000s self-congratulatory mainstream economist view that they had produced the best of all possible worlds. Bernanke in fact continued the so-called Greenspan put which incentivized investors and bankers to take on financial risks, since they knew if anything bad happened, the Fed would rush to their rescue. The Fed, and Bernanke in particular, were badly behind the curve. In May 2007, Bernanke said that subprime was contained, and in July 2008, gave Fannie and Freddie clean bills of health.

Geithner, when he was head of the New York Fed, did acknowledge that the brave new world of slicing, dicing, and distributing risk might make it more difficult to manage a crisis, but then insisted that there was no way to roll the clock back. Linear projections of trends is naive but a great excuse for inaction. Geithner said nary a peep when banks who had just been bailed out gave a raised middle finger to the American public by paying their executives and staffs record bonuses in 2009 and 2010 rather than rebuilding their balance sheets. The Bush Administration considerately left $75 billion of TARP monies unspent for the Obama Administration to use to fund mortgage modifications. Funny how the Treasury never took that up. Instead, Geithner instituted supposed mortgage assistance programs like HAMP whose purpose, as Geithner put it to SIGTARP head Neil Barofsky, was to “foam the runway” for banks by spreading out when foreclosures would happen rather than preventing them. Recall that 9 million homes were foreclosed upon. Many had missed only a payment or two due to job loss or hours cutbacks; some were victims of bad servicing. Giving borrowers with viable levels of income mortgage modifications would have been a win for investors too. But the Treasury never cared about borrowers and convinced itself that taking care of banks would help the real economy, in a Wall Street variant of trickle-down theory.

And Paulson? Although he wasn’t on the scene as long as Bernanke and Geithner, recall that Treasury staffer Neel Kashkari whipped up a 50,000 foot “How do we deal with a crisis” think piece that Paulson & Co. deemed to be just terrific and tossed in a drawer. Recall that Paulson’s first TARP proposal was a mere 3 pages demanding $700 billion, more than the hard costs of the Iraq War, and even worse, put the Treasury beyond the rule of law with this provision:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

At the time, we called it a financial coup d’etat.

So the bailer-outers-in-chief are keen to prescribe more of what they foisted on the American public. It should come as no surprise that they didn’t pump for stronger financial reforms, were perfectly content to allow the Fed to authorize banks subject to stress tests to pay dividends and bonuses rather than have them build up much bigger capital cushions, and in Bernanke’s case, call for a resumption of austerity policies in 2012.

Each one of this terrible trio has a much longer rap sheet. But the mere fact that they have the temerity to subject the public to their cronyistic blather, and worse, the New York Times dignifies it, shows that, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, that policymakers and pundits have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. I had the same reaction, but less printable.]

Carbon Ideologies

Authors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,” a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.” (...)

Nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions, because he does not believe any are possible: “Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.” This makes Carbon Ideologies, for all its merits and flaws, one of the most honest books yet written on climate change. Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences. (...)

These qualities reach their fullest expression in the statements made by government and industry officials against charges of environmental menace. In Fukushima, objects in the fallout zone are not radiated but “contaminated.” In West Virginia, mountains do not have their summits chopped off but are granted “removal of overburden.” Fracking “is safer and has less environmental impact than driving a car,” a marketing director from Shale Crescent USA claims, while coal miners, according to the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, “are the greatest practicing environmentalists in the world.” Vollmann records such inanities alongside observations from figures such as Buddha (“People are ignorant and selfish”), Edmund Spenser (“Worse is the danger hidden than descried”), and Loren Eiseley (“Just as instincts may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation”). Vollmann longs to prove Buddha, Spenser, and Eiseley wrong, and submits softball questions to every industry executive he encounters; but outside of Japan, almost nobody in a position of authority agrees to comment.

Most of the extensive interviews that dominate Carbon Ideologies are thus conducted with men who work in caves or pits to produce the energy we waste. If “nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action” (Goethe), these encounters are a waking nightmare. Oil-refinery workers in Mexico, coal miners in Bangladesh, and fracking commissioners in Colorado are united in their shaky apprehension of the environmental damage they do, not to mention the basic facts of climate change and its ramifications. “Mostly their replies came out calm and bland,” Vollmann reports, though this doesn’t prevent him from recording them at length, nearly verbatim. On occasion his questions do elicit a gem of accidental lyricism, as when an Indian steelworker at a UAE oil company, asked for his views on climate change, replies, “Now a little bit okay, but in future it’s very danger.” It’s hard to improve on that.

Vollmann doesn’t blame the migrant steelworker for his complacency or ignorance, of course. He blames himself—often and profusely. He takes special delight in quantifying, in painstaking detail, the energy he burns in such activities as writing a draft of Carbon Ideologies, walking around the corner from his Tokyo hotel to buy a tray of convenience-store tonkatsu, and making a milkshake for his daughter. These passages are as instructive as they are tedious. They dramatize not only the tenacity of our reliance on fossil fuels, but the impossibility of truly comprehending our own culpability in our planet’s fate. How often do you pause to think about the amount of coal burned every time you take an elevator, charge your phone, or operate your blender? Even extravagant acts of self-denial are powerless in the face of such profligate consumption. Vollmann likens our most ambitious energy-conservation efforts to “a dieter who keeps eating his daily fill of cheese, pastries and ice cream … despite the laudable fact that he put broccoli on his lunch plate last Thursday.”

The global hunger for pastries grows more ravenous each year. Whatever Good Samaritan savings we can make by improving infrastructure or bicycling to work will be dwarfed by the billions who will leap onto the grid in the coming decades. About a third of the human population cooks meals over biomass—wood, charcoal, farm scraps, and animal dung. Nearly 1 billion people have no access to electricity. It will not take all of India’s adopting “the American way of life” to trigger gargantuan increases in global emissions. India’s ascending to the Namibian way of life will be enough.

The demand problem, the growth problem, the complexity problem, the cost-benefit problem, the industry problem, the political problem, the generational-delay problem, the denial problem—Vollmann scrupulously catalogs all the major unsolved problems that contribute to the colossus of climate change. “Whatever ‘solution’ I could have proposed in 2017,” he writes, “would have been found wanting before the oceans rose even one more inch!” (The title of a late chapter, “A Ray of Hope,” is to be read sarcastically.) Nor have his six years of traveling the world, tabulating data, and interviewing experts changed his mind about any major aspect of the issue. The reader who begins Carbon Ideologies hopeless will finish it hopeless. So will the hopeful reader.

But there exist other kinds of readers—those who do not read for advice or encouragement or comfort. Those who are sick of dishonesty crusading as optimism. Those who seek to understand human nature, and themselves. Because human nature is Vollmann’s true subject—as it must be. The story of climate change hangs on human behavior, not geophysics. Vollmann seeks to understand how “we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise of atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness and resentment.” Why did we take such insane risks? Could we have behaved any other way? Can we behave any other way? If not, what conclusions must we draw about our lives and our futures? Vollmann admits that even he has shied away from fully comprehending the damage we’ve done. “I had never loathed myself sufficiently to craft the punishment of full understanding,” he writes. “How could I? No one person could.” He’s right, though books like Carbon Ideologies will bring us closer.

The planet’s atmosphere will change but human nature won’t. Vollmann’s meager wish is for future readers to appreciate that they would have made the same mistakes we have. This might seem a humble ambition for a project of this scope, but only if you mistake Carbon Ideologies for a work of activism. Vollmann’s project is nothing so conventional. His “letter to the future” is a suicide note. He does not seek an intervention—only acceptance. If not forgiveness, then at least acceptance.

by Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Michal Klimczak

“Best of all, he has this wonderful passion for life that he doesn’t expect me to share.”

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Above It All: How the Court Got So Supreme

Nine mornings after Antonin Scalia died at Cíbolo Creek, the justices resumed work without their beloved, blustery colleague. The rich traditions of the Court continued unabated. After the justices all shook hands in the small robing room across the hallway from the back of the courtroom, they lined up to await the gavel of the marshal. The assembled throng grew silent, then arose. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal chanted at the stroke of 10, as always. The eight justices emerged from behind the tall crimson velvet drapes and somberly took their upholstered swivel chairs on the bench. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting,” the marshal continued. “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

It’s an opening worthy of “Hail to the Chief,” the introductory anthem for the leader of another branch of the federal government. It’s all carefully choreographed. The justices don’t merely walk in, and they’re not already seated when Court begins. From different curtains, they materialize in unison, in three groups based on where they sit. As institutional stagecraft goes, the Court puts on quite a show.

At the corner of East Capitol and First in Washington, D.C., across the street and a world away from the workaday Congress, resides the Court. Its proximity to Congress serves as a reminder of the looming power of the third branch of government. Built on the site of a prison for captured Confederates — the prison held Mary Surratt, Samuel Mudd and others arrested after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — the Court is the closest thing we have to a secular shrine. When its cornerstone was laid in 1932, amid the Great Depression, Charles Evans Hughes, the chief justice, proclaimed, “The Republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith.” The Court is the most powerful in the history of the world.

In the old days (before heightened security screening), you entered by first walking up 44 broad majestic steps and then passing through two 6 1/2-ton sliding bronze doors centered behind columns of the front portico. High above the entrance, engraved across the facade, are the words equal justice under law. Inside, at the end of the Great Hall on the main floor, the courtroom is as magnificent a setting as exists in American government, a testament to the splendor of Italian and Spanish marble. The Oval Office at the White House is relatively small, decorated with furniture arranged on a human scale. By contrast, the gold-trimmed Supreme Chamber is a tableau of grandiosity — 82 feet long by 91 feet wide, flanked by massive windows and 24 columns, with richly colored coffers in the four-story-high ceiling. It’s no wonder that for decades they had a problem with echoes during oral arguments.

Above the columns are friezes depicting such historic lawgivers as Moses, Confucius and the Prophet Muhammad. On the elevated Honduran mahogany bench, the chief sits in the middle, with the eight associate justices alternating by seniority on both sides. (The most senior justice sits to the chief’s immediate right, the next most senior justice sits to the chief’s immediate left, and so forth.) Since 1972, the bench has formed a crescent so that justices can better see each other. Overlooking the bench is a stately clock with Roman numerals. The gates to side corridors are in sparkling bronze latticework. Each justice gets a pewter mug of water and a porcelain spittoon that now serves as a wastebasket.

The lawyers sit at tables in front of the bench. When it’s their turn to argue, they stand at a lectern in the center, barely nine feet from the bench, closer than at other courts. A red light on the lectern signals when time runs out. Ordinarily each side gets 30 minutes to make its case beyond the extensive briefs it has already submitted. Most presentations consist not of speeches but of the interruptions by justices and a lawyer’s responses to their questions. Counsel tables have white-goose-quill pens at the ready. They’re “gifts to you,” advises the Court’s Guide for Counsel, “a souvenir of your having argued before the highest Court in the land.”

A more important suggestion: “If you are in doubt about the name of a justice who is addressing you, it is better to use ‘Your Honor’ rather than mistakenly address the justice by another justice’s name.” A luckless lawyer who does get a justice’s name wrong might get needled by a justice — or rebuked by the chief. Once, when William H. Rehnquist, John Roberts’s predecessor as chief justice from 1986 to 2005, was addressed as the mere “Justice Rehnquist,” he leaned forward from the bench, wagged his finger, and snarled, “I am the chief justice!” Rehnquist, who had been an associate justice, even went so far as to ask the clerk of the Court to formally instruct lawyers about his proper title. The clerk also has cough drops at the ready, as well as sewing kits, hearing aids, and a spare necktie for the hapless counsel who spills his coffee right before going on stage.

Everything about the place signifies that “something different is going on here than what goes on in the Capitol Building or in the White House,” Roberts has said. Visitors to the Supreme Court instinctively whisper. Among the other rules during arguments: No arms extending out to other seats. No visible tattoos. And if you’re wearing a headdress, beware the chief justice noticing, then sending a guard over. That’s what happened in 2002 when Rehnquist saw a 24-year-old Indian-American woman with an orange scarf covering part of her head. He sent over a security guard, who asked, “Is that for religious purposes?”

“No, bad-hair day,” she replied, quite humiliated. She was told to remove the scarf. The case the justices were hearing at the time concerned the First Amendment, not that they were aware of the irony.

The solemnity of the courtroom is broken only by an occasional protester in the audience, or perhaps by the bounce of a basketball in the gym that’s right above the courtroom — the real “highest court in the land,” as everybody calls it. (A sign in the gym warns against playing when they’re hearing cases below. The sign supposedly dates to when Justice Byron R. White, recused from a case in the early 1980s, went up-stairs to shoot hoops. The noise so irritated Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that she had a note delivered to the ballplayer: “You’re fired.” Amused, White wrote back, “Please inform Sandy that she cannot fire me. I have life tenure.” O’Connor has said she has no memory of the episode, but “it’s such a good story — you should keep telling it.”)

Someone once remarked that if the gods had an office, it would look like the Supreme Chamber. By any other name in our constitutional system, the justices are a priesthood, with all the trappings. They certainly dress the part — that’s why they wear the black robes, a practice dating to the estimable John Marshall, chief justice in the early 19th century. “I’m sure we could do our work without the robes,” Scalia acknowledged in an interview, but they “impart the significance of what goes on here.” The justices wear them even at such nonjudicial events as the State of the Union by the president in the Capitol. For Rehnquist, austere black was not enough. He started wearing his robes with four personally designed gold stripes festooned on each sleeve, inspired by the Lord Chancellor in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe.” (Roberts abandoned the self-congratulatory practice.) (...)

When justices keep their distance, it’s easier for them to make the case they are different. That is why none ever tweet. That’s also why they’ve never permitted TV cameras in the courtroom — visitors aren’t allowed to take still photos, even when the Court’s not in session. Congress likely could force the Court to televise oral arguments, but it has never taken on the justices on that issue. We’re well into the 21st century, but the only visual representations of what happens in the courtroom remain the quaint color sketches that publications and TV have used for decades. Courtroom sketches go back to the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s, but one might have thought their utility had waned.

Most of the justices believe TV would diminish public understanding of their work more than enhance it. They like to say that sound bites offered up by Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity could distort the meaning of a case. That might be true, but no more so than would an article on Page 1 of the Washington Post. A few justices cited a 2016 survey that showed 13 percent of Americans believed Judge Judy was on the Supreme Court, though that would seem to cut in favor of, not against, televised proceedings. Roberts has been candid enough to admit his view that “our job is not to educate the public” but only to decide cases. He insisted that cameras would inhibit justices in their questioning of lawyers during argument. “We might end up talking like they do in Congress — ‘with all due deference to my good friend from wherever,’ ” he told a college audience in 2017, taking a shot at the branch of government that many justices particularly scorn. But hubris better explains why the Court doesn’t allow TV. Appearing before the House Appropriations Committee in 2007, Kennedy justified the exclusion of cameras this way: “We teach, by having no cameras, that we are different.”

The justices do make one technological exception — for audio recordings of oral arguments. Before 2010, and back to 1955, the audio was normally available only at the beginning of the following term. Since 2010, the Court has agreed to release audio at the end of each week, as opposed to live-streaming them as many courts do. But that wasn’t a major concession. Audio from a case argued a few days ago isn’t likely ever to make it onto the evening news. In 2012, the justices did agree to same-day release of audio in the first Obamacare case. The Republican National Committee promptly released an ad that doctored the audio to exaggerate the halting performance by the government lawyer defending Obamacare. Several justices cited the RNC ad as Exhibit A why recordings of Court proceedings were best kept under wraps for a while. (Still, the Court has continued to allow same-day release of audio in certain high-profile appeals, most recently in a Trump travel ban case.)

The law clerks who serve the justices — usually four per chambers — might in theory be a weak link in the Court’s tight control over information. But the clerks treat their bosses as demigods. For one year, those top 36 recent law school graduates do research, draft opinions, act as sounding boards — and in return get a lifelong ticket to blue-chip law firm partnerships, corporate titles, teaching posts, and judgeships. Apart from having to work long nights and weekends, the first stipulation, spelled out in an internal code of conduct, is that clerks keep their mouths shut. Clerks who breach the vow of omertà, even years later, are forever ostracized within the cult of the Court. The bond between clerk and justice, and among clerks, is close and lasting — about the only way to break it is to be a talker.

by David A. Kaplan, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: Robert Alexander/Getty

Tiger in Twilight

Tiger Woods still has the most famous silhouette in sports, even after all these years.

From behind, the V-shaped back that tapers to the same 32-inch waist. From the front, the same muscular arms gripping a club, right hand over left, in that quiet moment before he coils. Relaxed in the fairway, one hand resting atop a club, the other on a hip, one foot crossed over the other.

All of them classically, identifiably Tiger Woods. Time and age haven’t altered the outline.

Woods is 42 now. He has not won a tournament in five years, a major in 10. He thought as recently as a year ago that he might never play competitive golf again because he could barely stand up. Golf would have to soldier on with stars named Dustin and Justin and Brooks. None of them Tiger, or anything like him.

Yet here he is, Tiger in twilight, and he looks the same, mostly acts the same, and is finally playing somewhat like the man everyone remembers, back in those good years before health and scandal took an ax to his growing legacy.

He even reintroduced the celebratory uppercut on the 18th green at the P.G.A. Championship in August, puncturing the steamy St. Louis air, and it was strange only because he did not win. But even in second place, it signaled that he was back.

He knew it. The swelling galleries and television audiences knew it. Those who started wearing red T-shirts with the silhouette of his uppercut and the words “Make Tiger Great Again,” they knew it, too.

Funny, that borrowed allusion. Woods rejoins the cultural landscape in 2018, a far different time and place than when he was last great — everywhere but a golf course, at least. That his re-emergence comes in the Age of Trump is a delicious coincidence, wrought with complexity that Woods would rather avoid.

A golfer who still may be the most famous multicultural athlete on the planet. A president cleaving the country on cultural and racial lines. Occasional golf partners, Woods designing a course that will have Trump’s name on it, Woods evading the subject of their relationship — “We all must respect the office” — while Trump tweets his appreciation.

Somehow, none of that matters. Not here. Not if Woods can help it.

He comes back into view with his familiar walk — purposeful, confident, shoulders up, eyes locked forward. Nobody walks like him, just like nobody swings like him or stands like him.

“Tiger!” cry the voices, too many to count. Nobody calls him “Woods,” even in middle age.

Fans freeze and go quiet as he gets close and stops, as if the Sunday school teacher just walked in. They aim eyes and cameras at him. That’s one change from a few years ago — everyone with a cellphone, as many cameras as faces, practically.

Zoom in. The only visible sign that he is older, beyond the faintest hint of age in his boyish face, comes after he completes the 18th hole.

The familiar applause carries him off the green, and he removes his “TW”-branded cap for a few moments, as golfers do as a gesture of decorum.

His hairline is in slow retreat. It is a thinning ring, like a faded halo.

More Approachable, But Better?

The working angle of his latest act, filled with presumption as much as proof, is that Woods is different now — humbled by the lost years, appreciative of the ongoing support, relieved at the opportunity to be here again.

But is he different? Maybe he’s more relaxed. Chattier during a round, though Woods disagrees. Veteran reporters and close friends say he’s lightened up, more like what they see in private. The testiness that used to accompany bad days has dissolved.

That all seems true, if you’re looking for it. Maybe it’s age and appreciation. Maybe the stakes and expectations haven’t been high enough yet.

To trail Woods at a golf tournament each day, from the moment he arrives to the moment he leaves, is to see two sides of a man who works hard to show only one. There is a person and a persona.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sam Hodgson

[ed. Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I'm in Alaska. You should probably just come back next week (or check out the Archives). Saw a bumper sticker yesterday: 'I support the rights of gay married couples to protect their marijuana plants with guns.' Pretty much sums up the local politics.]

Local News is Dying

Local News Is Dying, and It’s Taking Small Town America With It

Image: Joe Sohm/Getty

The Calm Before the Storm

A few times over the last month I’ve had the sense that I may actually struggle to acclimate to a post-Trump politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t want it or look forward to it. As basically every sensible person has argued, the rise of Trump has been a catastrophe for the United States and every day he remains in office inflicts greater damage. But recently I’ve been thinking back to the Obama years and – crazy as they often seemed – how comparatively placid they were, even though they were not really placid at all. But the sheer intensity, drama, bad-acting nature of Trump’s presidency is in an entirely different category.

As I wrote before Trump even became President, living with a Trump presidency, at least if your work is politics, is comparable to living in the home of an abuser or someone with a severe personality disorder. People who live in those settings develop tools, coping mechanisms to handle that level of emotional turbulence, aggression, craziness. They can require a degree of unlearning once they find a more healthy environment. The tools you develop living in close proximity to an abuser are usually mal-adaptive when the abuser is no longer present.

I should state explicitly that the Trump presidency is of course an entirely different experience for those who are its direct targets: undocumented immigrants as the central focus of Trump’s aggression, all immigrants, all non-whites, women, in differing degrees members of the LGBT community. But the ‘living in close proximity’ to an abuser still applies to a lesser degree to everyone who doesn’t view Trump as their champion. Indeed, living in close proximity to an abuser has an effect on those who are not even the primary targets of abuse.

I say all this as a preliminary to saying that I think it is all about to get, if not worse, than more intense, accelerated and more kinetic.

Part of this is the traditional kick off of the midterm election cycle proper, which is Labor Day. We’re gearing up for the two months’ sprint to election day, with all that usually entails. But there’s something more than President Trump on the ballot. Roughly since the middle of August both President Trump’s approval and the so-called congressional generic ballot have both begun to move clearly against the Republicans. The trend is clearer with the President than for the Congress. But is clear in both cases. It appears to be outside the realm of mere noise. Here’s the best place to visualize the trend for the President and Congress. History tells us that the trend in early September is usually, though not always, decisive.

This means more than that it looks likely, but by no means certain, Democrats will have a good cycle. There’s an increasing recognition that a change in control of the House will create a countervailing source of constitutional power in Washington – something that has been entirely lacking for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, in which Congress has deferred entirely to Trump’s power. This is addressed in shorthand as the threat of impeachment. But as I explained here that is both misleading as prognostication and misguided as strategy: the real issue, the real threat to the President is broad, public and constitutionally-empowered investigations, ones that would expose all manner of wrongdoing which has taken place in 2017 and 2018, as well as during the corrupted 2016 election. Over time, those revelations will likely trigger further criminal prosecutions and threaten the kind of collapse of public support which could lead to removal from office.

That prospect also comes as the Mueller probe appears to be accelerating. We don’t know precisely what is happening inside the probe. But we can best read its progress through President Trump’s actions and affect, which have become more threatened, antic and untethered. He is the most readable of men. Trump has already signaled that after the midterm election he will dismiss his White House Counsel and Attorney General, likely for the purpose of issuing obstructionist pardons and dismissing or defanging the Special Counsel investigation.

The United States has been gripped by a profound polarization for almost two years. Yes, the polarization predated Trump’s presidency. But having a maximalist representative of the right in power in the White House has intensified it massively. We’ve had public shouting matches, one-sided legislative fights, political mobilizations and protests. But in a constitutional sense the battle has really yet to be joined. The Courts have played some role restraining Trump. But that has been at the margins. Indeed, Trump’s additions to the Supreme Court signal that he is likely to be backed at the highest level, at least on the ground of presidential power if not immunity to the law. The President has vast powers which are matched, or potentially matched, by Congress. But Congress has been AWOL in the face of President Trump’s abuses and lawlessness for going on two years. There’s a decent chance that is about to change. It will change just as the Special Counsel investigation appears to be arriving at President Trump’s inner circle.

All of this suggests that the pace of events is likely to accelerate and become more kinetic, volatile and potentially dangerous.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

Tod Wizon, Points of Release, 1983
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The Heartbreakers at Chain Restaurants

Who is to blame for fattening up Americans and killing their hearts? McDonald’s, it seems, is not even in the running. In fact, when you compare the fare under the Golden Arches with many of the dishes served at chain restaurants around the country, a Big Mac with large fries and soda begins to sound like health food.

Hungry for a hearty breakfast? You could — if you dare to test the resilience of your heart — try the Cheesecake Factory’s Breakfast Burrito: “warm tortilla filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken chorizo, cheese, crispy potatoes, avocado, peppers and onions, over spicy ranchero sauce.” Nutritional information: 2,730 calories (more than a day’s worth, so I hope you’ll skip lunch and dinner), 4,630 milligrams of sodium (two days’ worth) and 73 grams of saturated fat (more than three days’ worth).

You’d have to eat seven Sausage McMuffins from McDonald’s to equal the cardiovascular and waistline damage done by one burrito, according to the latest Xtreme Eating Awards bestowed by the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington.

Or maybe you’d prefer another 2018 awardee to start your day: Chili’s Honey-Chipotle Crispers & Waffles that dishes up Belgian waffles topped with battered fried chicken, bacon, jalapeños and ancho-chili ranch sauce and fries with honey-chipotle sauce. With 2,510 calories, 40 grams of saturated fat, 4,480 milligrams of sodium and 105 grams (26 teaspoons) of sugar, it’s like eating five Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts with 30 McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and five packets of barbecue sauce.

Perhaps you’re a breakfast skipper and would rather dig into a super-hearty lunch like the Cheesecake Factory’s newest version of pizza: “Chopped chicken breast coated with bread crumbs, covered with marinara sauce and lots of melted cheese,” and get this, “topped with angel hair pasta in an Alfredo cream sauce.” It adds up to 1,870 calories, 55 grams of saturated fat and 3,080 milligrams of sodium. That’s like eating four pieces of Popeyes fried chicken and four biscuits, Nutrition Action calculated.

I suspect, though, that Red Lobster’s Create Your Own Combination shrimp meal is the all-time Xtreme Eating winner, an award bestowed on it in 2015. It delivers a whopping 2,710 calories and 6,530 milligrams of sodium; for that amount you could down a KFC meal of an entire eight-piece bucket of fried chicken, four side orders of mashed potatoes with gravy, four pieces of corn on the cob and eight packets of buttery spread.

For comparison’s sake, you might keep in mind that 2,000 calories is what the average person should be eating for an entire day including snacks, not just at a single meal.

But there’s some good news lurking behind all those extra calories and artery-damaging nutrients. After long delays, as of last May chain restaurants with 20 or more outlets must post calories on menus and menu boards for all their offerings, a regulation in the Affordable Care Act of 2010. (A number of big chains, including Panera Bread and Au Bon Pain, did not wait to be required to post calories, and in 2012 McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to do so.)

Although I once heard a Starbucks customer complain “Do I really have to know the calories in my Frappuccino?” there’s a better chance that, as a result of the menu listings, 1) diners who care will have an easier time and a greater incentive to choose lighter fare, and 2) restaurants may start competing to offer lower-calorie options of similar dishes.

A McDonald’s customer trying to decide between a Big Mac and a Double Quarter Pounder with cheese might be swayed by the fact that the Big Mac has 200 fewer calories. But diners faced with the seemingly healthier choice of the Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken might be more tempted by the Double Cheeseburger, which has 10 fewer calories than the salad.

In New York City, menu calorie postings have been required since 2008, and a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that Starbucks customers ordered food with 6 percent fewer calories, on average, as a result. This may not sound like much, but over time such small changes add up; this country’s obesity epidemic can be explained by a mere 100 extra calories a day for each person.

by Jane E. Brody, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lam
[ed. See also: Good Fats, Bad Fats.]