Saturday, October 6, 2018
A New Kind of Economy
Andrew Yang is a 43-year-old American entrepreneur who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020. His campaign focuses on solving the problem of job losses to automation—an issue many politicians seem happy to ignore. Starting right now, Yang wants to create a whole new kind of economy from the ground up, in which automation is transformed from a threat into the foundation for widespread human flourishing.
Briefly, his policy proposals include implementing a form of Universal Basic Income (also known as UBI, or what he calls the “Freedom Dividend”), universal healthcare, a “digital social currency,” and a redefinition of GDP that more accurately reflect the health of the nation. If this sounds like socialism then, according to Yang, your thinking about the economy might be antiquated. He contends that the capitalism/socialism spectrum is no longer relevant or useful if we take an honest look at the modern world.
The following is a transcription of my phone conversation with Andrew Yang, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Andrew Yang: You would expect the current trends that we’re seeing to accelerate. Many of the trends I’m most concerned about will accelerate with either a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, because we’re talking about how technology is going to displace millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, and truck drivers. And there’s no dramatic halting of that trend that would occur if a different political party were in office.
Now, if I were president, my goal would be to accelerate meaningful countermeasures and solutions. That does not mean putting a stop to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles, but that we need to dramatically reshape the way that both value and work are experienced in our society. And that’s a generational challenge. It’s not going to happen overnight.
What I’m most concerned about is the trends we’ve seen of the automation of four million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. When that gets applied to retail workers and truck drivers and fast food workers, which are some of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, we’ll witness a continued disintegration of American society, which we can see in the numbers right now.
A lot of the automation is happening more quickly than almost anyone projected. I think I just read this week that Waymo is releasing its autonomous taxis in 2019. Do you think that this is going to sneak up on everyone in the next couple of years?
Well, I’m going to use call centers as an example. There are about 2.5 million call center workers in the United States right now making $14 an hour—typically high school graduates. So, if you’re reading this right now, how long is it going to be before Artificial Intelligence can outperform the average call center worker?
Let’s say that timeframe is two or three years. How many call center workers will that effect? How many will be out of a job shortly thereafter? And so that’s not speculative at all. That’s something that we know Google and other companies are working on right now.
If you take that one fact pattern and apply it over and over again in the economy, you’ll wind up with a massive displacement of workers. And it will sneak up on us quite quickly because that replacement of call center workers won’t affect five or ten thousand workers; it may well effect 500,000 or a million.
I know that it might take a while, even in the best case scenario, to implement Universal Basic Income or some of the other measures you’re proposing. So, is it already too late? Are we already going to see a massive dip in jobs because of automation and then huge swaths of the country are out of work?
It’s a little late in the day, truly. If you look at the labor force participation rate in the U.S., it peaked around 2000 and has declined ever since over the last 18 years—to a point where now it’s 62.9 percent, which is the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. And almost one out of five prime working-age men—between the ages of 21 and 30—have not worked in the last 12 months.
So, this is already with us. If you wait until the truckers start to riot and the taxi drivers start to riot—then it is late in the day. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running for president now. If I can get to the Oval Office and make this happen in 2021, then we can at least be able to prevent some of the disintegration that accompanies loss of work.
By the numbers, when men in particular get idle, we tend to degenerate into self-destructive and antisocial behaviors. You can see that in the surge of suicides among middle-aged Americans around the country that have brought down our country’s life expectancy over the last two years—and the fact that eight Americans are dying of opiates every hour. Again, if you look beneath the surface, all of these trends are already here with us. (...)
I am curious about how Democrats are addressing this—or not addressing this. Just this week Bernie Sanders was on Facebook saying that workers at Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, need to unionize so that they can keep their jobs and not be displaced by robots. To me this seems possibly shortsighted, but do you see any role for unionizing jobs to keep them around?
There are a few different approaches to this. And one of the things I disagree with Bernie Sanders on is that I believe he has a vision of the economy that functions like it did decades ago, where the path to prosperity is to get fair treatment by employers for workers. That relies upon a notion of the economy where, in order for a company to succeed and grow, it needs to hire more and more people and it needs to treat them well.
Unfortunately, we’re increasingly entering an age where companies can become very, very successful and profitable without hiring lots of people. And then when it does hire people, the most efficient way for them to do so is as temporary or gig workers or contract workers or outsourced workers. And so, trying to force companies to change their employment models, and then empowering workers through unions to do so, might be the right thing to do in some contexts; but in my opinion, it’s highly unlikely to solve the problem because we’ve been heading in this direction for decades, and in some ways Bernie Sanders’ solution is an attempt to turn back the clock.
As an example, let’s say that you were a fast food restaurant, and you’re paying your employees $10 an hour. Then, fast food workers quite rightfully say, hey, we can’t live on that; we need to be paid $15 an hour. So, one approach could be to say, the fast food workers should unionize and then bargain for $15 an hour. Another approach might be for the fast food companies to say—and they would do this if they had to pay $15 an hour in many instances—that maybe we can make our locations work with fewer workers.
At that point, you have to ask yourself whether you would purposefully want the fast food company to not automate its locations for the purpose of having more people in jobs that pay them between $10 and $15 an hour. And that becomes a very interesting question about what you think the purpose of jobs is.
If the purpose of jobs is to get a certain task done, then you would obviously want to automate that task because if the fast food company can serve the food with fewer workers, then that would be a good thing. If you think jobs are a way to maintain social order and make sure that someone has to be somewhere for certain shifts of the day—and that, without that, that person would struggle to find a degree of structure or purpose—then maybe you say, let’s make these fast food companies employ people just for the sake of it. That to me is a really fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves.
Outside politics, I do see a lot of intellectuals talking about how we need to redefine jobs. I know Steven Pinker recently said that we need to protect the interests of people, not the interests of jobs. Do you think it’s possible for the country at large to ever shift their perspective on jobs like this, where we don’t worry about loss of jobs, we worry about loss of human wellbeing?
I completely believe it is possible. And I think that the Freedom Dividend—the Universal Basic Income—that I’m proposing and will implement as president would enable that shift in a real way for millions of Americans quite quickly.
I will say that if you dig into the data, you find that men and women experience idleness differently. …Women who are idle, I believe, would very, very naturally adopt this project-based approach that you’re talking about. The data shows that women who are out of work get involved in the community and go back to school and do things that are quite productive and pro-social. Whereas, men who are out of work spend 75 percent of their time on the computer playing videogames and surfing porn—and then tend to devolve into substance abuse and self-destructive behaviors. Men who are out of work volunteer less than employed men, even though they have more time. And so, men and women seem to experience idleness differently.
When you talk about this project-based approach to work—for women it would be entirely natural and attainable, in my opinion, for many, many women. And for many men it would be as well. But for some men it might be less natural. …The providing of structure and purpose and fulfillment to millions of relatively unskilled men who are making transitions over the next number of years is one of the great projects of this age. (...)
You hold yourself out as a strong capitalist, which separates your campaign from Bernie Sanders, who embraces the term ‘democratic socialism.’ Do you have any strong feelings about the term socialism? Do you think it’s ever something that you’ll incorporate into the branding of your campaign, or are you shying away from that?
My honest feeling is that the entire capitalism/socialism framing is decades old and unproductive. So, what I’m suggesting is that we need to evolve to the next stage of capitalism, which prioritizes human wellbeing and development. If someone were to say to me, for example, hey, you’re for universal health care, and that’s an idea I associate with socialists…I would shrug and say, sure. [Laughs.] You know? I just think the labels are unfortunate. People have very strong associations with each one.
A friend of mine, Eric Weinstein, said a couple of things that I thought were very profound. First, he said we never knew that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son—technology. Second, we have to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different aspects of American life and the economy. And I think both of those things are true.
I just don’t think it’s constructive to try and pick a spot in this arbitrary capitalism/socialism spectrum. What I believe is we have to redefine our economy and re-write the rules so that it centers around us. Capitalism’s efficiency and GDP are going to have an increasingly nonexistent relationship to how most Americans are doing.
[ed. See also: America has become a gerontocracy. We must change that.]
Briefly, his policy proposals include implementing a form of Universal Basic Income (also known as UBI, or what he calls the “Freedom Dividend”), universal healthcare, a “digital social currency,” and a redefinition of GDP that more accurately reflect the health of the nation. If this sounds like socialism then, according to Yang, your thinking about the economy might be antiquated. He contends that the capitalism/socialism spectrum is no longer relevant or useful if we take an honest look at the modern world.The following is a transcription of my phone conversation with Andrew Yang, lightly edited for length and clarity.
* * *
Peter Clarke: Let’s say Donald Trump wins again in 2020 and the government continues on its current path of ignoring automation. What can we expect to happen in the near future?Andrew Yang: You would expect the current trends that we’re seeing to accelerate. Many of the trends I’m most concerned about will accelerate with either a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, because we’re talking about how technology is going to displace millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, and truck drivers. And there’s no dramatic halting of that trend that would occur if a different political party were in office.
Now, if I were president, my goal would be to accelerate meaningful countermeasures and solutions. That does not mean putting a stop to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles, but that we need to dramatically reshape the way that both value and work are experienced in our society. And that’s a generational challenge. It’s not going to happen overnight.
What I’m most concerned about is the trends we’ve seen of the automation of four million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. When that gets applied to retail workers and truck drivers and fast food workers, which are some of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, we’ll witness a continued disintegration of American society, which we can see in the numbers right now.
A lot of the automation is happening more quickly than almost anyone projected. I think I just read this week that Waymo is releasing its autonomous taxis in 2019. Do you think that this is going to sneak up on everyone in the next couple of years?
Well, I’m going to use call centers as an example. There are about 2.5 million call center workers in the United States right now making $14 an hour—typically high school graduates. So, if you’re reading this right now, how long is it going to be before Artificial Intelligence can outperform the average call center worker?
Let’s say that timeframe is two or three years. How many call center workers will that effect? How many will be out of a job shortly thereafter? And so that’s not speculative at all. That’s something that we know Google and other companies are working on right now.
If you take that one fact pattern and apply it over and over again in the economy, you’ll wind up with a massive displacement of workers. And it will sneak up on us quite quickly because that replacement of call center workers won’t affect five or ten thousand workers; it may well effect 500,000 or a million.
I know that it might take a while, even in the best case scenario, to implement Universal Basic Income or some of the other measures you’re proposing. So, is it already too late? Are we already going to see a massive dip in jobs because of automation and then huge swaths of the country are out of work?
It’s a little late in the day, truly. If you look at the labor force participation rate in the U.S., it peaked around 2000 and has declined ever since over the last 18 years—to a point where now it’s 62.9 percent, which is the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. And almost one out of five prime working-age men—between the ages of 21 and 30—have not worked in the last 12 months.
So, this is already with us. If you wait until the truckers start to riot and the taxi drivers start to riot—then it is late in the day. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running for president now. If I can get to the Oval Office and make this happen in 2021, then we can at least be able to prevent some of the disintegration that accompanies loss of work.
By the numbers, when men in particular get idle, we tend to degenerate into self-destructive and antisocial behaviors. You can see that in the surge of suicides among middle-aged Americans around the country that have brought down our country’s life expectancy over the last two years—and the fact that eight Americans are dying of opiates every hour. Again, if you look beneath the surface, all of these trends are already here with us. (...)
I am curious about how Democrats are addressing this—or not addressing this. Just this week Bernie Sanders was on Facebook saying that workers at Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, need to unionize so that they can keep their jobs and not be displaced by robots. To me this seems possibly shortsighted, but do you see any role for unionizing jobs to keep them around?
There are a few different approaches to this. And one of the things I disagree with Bernie Sanders on is that I believe he has a vision of the economy that functions like it did decades ago, where the path to prosperity is to get fair treatment by employers for workers. That relies upon a notion of the economy where, in order for a company to succeed and grow, it needs to hire more and more people and it needs to treat them well.
Unfortunately, we’re increasingly entering an age where companies can become very, very successful and profitable without hiring lots of people. And then when it does hire people, the most efficient way for them to do so is as temporary or gig workers or contract workers or outsourced workers. And so, trying to force companies to change their employment models, and then empowering workers through unions to do so, might be the right thing to do in some contexts; but in my opinion, it’s highly unlikely to solve the problem because we’ve been heading in this direction for decades, and in some ways Bernie Sanders’ solution is an attempt to turn back the clock.
As an example, let’s say that you were a fast food restaurant, and you’re paying your employees $10 an hour. Then, fast food workers quite rightfully say, hey, we can’t live on that; we need to be paid $15 an hour. So, one approach could be to say, the fast food workers should unionize and then bargain for $15 an hour. Another approach might be for the fast food companies to say—and they would do this if they had to pay $15 an hour in many instances—that maybe we can make our locations work with fewer workers.
At that point, you have to ask yourself whether you would purposefully want the fast food company to not automate its locations for the purpose of having more people in jobs that pay them between $10 and $15 an hour. And that becomes a very interesting question about what you think the purpose of jobs is.
If the purpose of jobs is to get a certain task done, then you would obviously want to automate that task because if the fast food company can serve the food with fewer workers, then that would be a good thing. If you think jobs are a way to maintain social order and make sure that someone has to be somewhere for certain shifts of the day—and that, without that, that person would struggle to find a degree of structure or purpose—then maybe you say, let’s make these fast food companies employ people just for the sake of it. That to me is a really fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves.
Outside politics, I do see a lot of intellectuals talking about how we need to redefine jobs. I know Steven Pinker recently said that we need to protect the interests of people, not the interests of jobs. Do you think it’s possible for the country at large to ever shift their perspective on jobs like this, where we don’t worry about loss of jobs, we worry about loss of human wellbeing?
I completely believe it is possible. And I think that the Freedom Dividend—the Universal Basic Income—that I’m proposing and will implement as president would enable that shift in a real way for millions of Americans quite quickly.
I will say that if you dig into the data, you find that men and women experience idleness differently. …Women who are idle, I believe, would very, very naturally adopt this project-based approach that you’re talking about. The data shows that women who are out of work get involved in the community and go back to school and do things that are quite productive and pro-social. Whereas, men who are out of work spend 75 percent of their time on the computer playing videogames and surfing porn—and then tend to devolve into substance abuse and self-destructive behaviors. Men who are out of work volunteer less than employed men, even though they have more time. And so, men and women seem to experience idleness differently.
When you talk about this project-based approach to work—for women it would be entirely natural and attainable, in my opinion, for many, many women. And for many men it would be as well. But for some men it might be less natural. …The providing of structure and purpose and fulfillment to millions of relatively unskilled men who are making transitions over the next number of years is one of the great projects of this age. (...)
You hold yourself out as a strong capitalist, which separates your campaign from Bernie Sanders, who embraces the term ‘democratic socialism.’ Do you have any strong feelings about the term socialism? Do you think it’s ever something that you’ll incorporate into the branding of your campaign, or are you shying away from that?
My honest feeling is that the entire capitalism/socialism framing is decades old and unproductive. So, what I’m suggesting is that we need to evolve to the next stage of capitalism, which prioritizes human wellbeing and development. If someone were to say to me, for example, hey, you’re for universal health care, and that’s an idea I associate with socialists…I would shrug and say, sure. [Laughs.] You know? I just think the labels are unfortunate. People have very strong associations with each one.
A friend of mine, Eric Weinstein, said a couple of things that I thought were very profound. First, he said we never knew that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son—technology. Second, we have to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different aspects of American life and the economy. And I think both of those things are true.
I just don’t think it’s constructive to try and pick a spot in this arbitrary capitalism/socialism spectrum. What I believe is we have to redefine our economy and re-write the rules so that it centers around us. Capitalism’s efficiency and GDP are going to have an increasingly nonexistent relationship to how most Americans are doing.
by Peter Clarke, Quillette | Read more:
Image: Stephen McCarthy/Collision[ed. See also: America has become a gerontocracy. We must change that.]
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.
There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.
One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”
But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Scott Gelber
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Out of Office Reply
Bill Watterson
via:
[ed. Taking a short vacation and will be back soon. Enjoy the archives. Update: Returning tomorrow (Oct. 6).]
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Smart Reply
Last week I got an email from my boss about a recent piece I’d written on Donald Trump’s penis (just out here doing the family name proud). Surprisingly, it was a kind email as opposed to a notification of the termination of my employment for besmirching the paper of CP Scott with wisecracks about Trump’s junk, but, kind or otherwise, I’ve never known how to respond to messages from my editors.
The informality of the email form clashes with my natural instinct, which is – as New Yorker writer Anthony Lane once wrote of his former editor Tina Brown – to stand to attention every time they call me on the phone. Is email the internet equivalent of going out for drinks with someone after work? Are you expected to be casual with each other in a way you aren’t in the office? Or should I express myself in a way that reflects my true feelings? “Dear Boss, I humbly thank you. Really sorry about all the dick jokes. Respectfully yours, Hadley K Freeman.” After more than 20 years of using email, I have not figured this out.
Unexpectedly, at the bottom of this email, Google itself stepped in to help me. Beneath my boss’s message were three suggested responses: “Love it!” “Haha that’s awesome!” “That’s a good one!” Turns out “respectfully yours” is just not very Silicon Valley 2018.
Once I’d recovered from the hernia caused by laughing for 72 hours at Google’s noble effort to make me sound like a fembot (“Haha, that’s a good one, Hadley!”), I investigated what was going on here. It turned out that my Gmail had updated itself, which is kind of creepy in itself, though not nearly as creepy as its suggested responses, a feature Google has dubbed “Smart Reply” and what I dub “Hell”. Smart Reply is conclusive proof that Google does, as we already kinda knew, read our emails; now it has decided it can answer them better than we do. No need to read any sci-fi books about the dystopian future, kids, because we’re already here. Love it!
I could talk about how furious I am about this bizarrely open disregard of privacy (though in today’s world, the only thing that marks one out as more of an oldster than starting an email with “Dear” are concerns about privacy) because, sure, of course I am. But I have to be honest: I enjoy the banality of these automated answers, so much so that I’ve started reading them before the actual emails. When my mother wrote to ask if we were meeting up over the weekend, the suggested responses were “Let me get back to you on that!” “Amazing!” and “No way!” For the record, Google, if I ever replied “Let me get back to you on that!” to my mother, she would call the police to say my body had been possessed by an alien.
These responses confirm something anyone who’s ever been on social media already knows: online, there is no middle ground. Everything is either “Amazing!” or “No way!” Meanwhile the exclamation mark continues its deadening march to become as ubiquitous as the “x” for kiss: a once almost ironic stylistic extra that was strictly reserved for close friends is now the downright, earnest norm.
I think what tickles me most about these suggested replies is the way they lay bare some of the most irksome elements of our age. Most of us have become inured to the point of obliviousness to those jarring, algorithm-driven adverts, all faux chumminess mixed with creepy surveillance, topped off with spectacularly unhelpful help: “Hey! We noticed you once bought a red coat! Here are some other red coats! To add to your red coat collection! We’re just being helpful!” (...)
And there is something of this soulless mentality in Gmail’s Smart Responses. On the one hand, email is supposed to make it easier for all of us to keep in touch. On the other, we are now being urged to outsource that correspondence to an exclamation-happy bot that makes us sound more robot than human.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
The informality of the email form clashes with my natural instinct, which is – as New Yorker writer Anthony Lane once wrote of his former editor Tina Brown – to stand to attention every time they call me on the phone. Is email the internet equivalent of going out for drinks with someone after work? Are you expected to be casual with each other in a way you aren’t in the office? Or should I express myself in a way that reflects my true feelings? “Dear Boss, I humbly thank you. Really sorry about all the dick jokes. Respectfully yours, Hadley K Freeman.” After more than 20 years of using email, I have not figured this out.
Unexpectedly, at the bottom of this email, Google itself stepped in to help me. Beneath my boss’s message were three suggested responses: “Love it!” “Haha that’s awesome!” “That’s a good one!” Turns out “respectfully yours” is just not very Silicon Valley 2018.Once I’d recovered from the hernia caused by laughing for 72 hours at Google’s noble effort to make me sound like a fembot (“Haha, that’s a good one, Hadley!”), I investigated what was going on here. It turned out that my Gmail had updated itself, which is kind of creepy in itself, though not nearly as creepy as its suggested responses, a feature Google has dubbed “Smart Reply” and what I dub “Hell”. Smart Reply is conclusive proof that Google does, as we already kinda knew, read our emails; now it has decided it can answer them better than we do. No need to read any sci-fi books about the dystopian future, kids, because we’re already here. Love it!
I could talk about how furious I am about this bizarrely open disregard of privacy (though in today’s world, the only thing that marks one out as more of an oldster than starting an email with “Dear” are concerns about privacy) because, sure, of course I am. But I have to be honest: I enjoy the banality of these automated answers, so much so that I’ve started reading them before the actual emails. When my mother wrote to ask if we were meeting up over the weekend, the suggested responses were “Let me get back to you on that!” “Amazing!” and “No way!” For the record, Google, if I ever replied “Let me get back to you on that!” to my mother, she would call the police to say my body had been possessed by an alien.
These responses confirm something anyone who’s ever been on social media already knows: online, there is no middle ground. Everything is either “Amazing!” or “No way!” Meanwhile the exclamation mark continues its deadening march to become as ubiquitous as the “x” for kiss: a once almost ironic stylistic extra that was strictly reserved for close friends is now the downright, earnest norm.
I think what tickles me most about these suggested replies is the way they lay bare some of the most irksome elements of our age. Most of us have become inured to the point of obliviousness to those jarring, algorithm-driven adverts, all faux chumminess mixed with creepy surveillance, topped off with spectacularly unhelpful help: “Hey! We noticed you once bought a red coat! Here are some other red coats! To add to your red coat collection! We’re just being helpful!” (...)
And there is something of this soulless mentality in Gmail’s Smart Responses. On the one hand, email is supposed to make it easier for all of us to keep in touch. On the other, we are now being urged to outsource that correspondence to an exclamation-happy bot that makes us sound more robot than human.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Project Twins/Synergy
How Chefs Have Reinvented the Dishes They Envy Most
Image (and Scotch egg recipe): via (Bon Appétit)
Bonfire of Republican Vanities
If you put a man in the White House who openly boasts of being a sexual predator, a president credibly accused by more than a dozen people of misconduct, you are no friend of women and the good men who love them.
If your rallies are highlighted by “lock her up” chants against a person who has never been charged with a crime, you cannot wrap yourself in due process or presumption of innocence.
If your men of God, led by the Rev. Franklin Graham, say attempted rape is not a crime because “if it was true, these are two teenagers, and she said no and he respected that,” you need a new faith in which to cover your hypocrisies.
Story follows character, as the Greeks knew, and what we’re seeing now with the Bonfire of Republican Vanities is the predictable outcome of those who enabled the amoral presidency of Donald Trump.
The bargain was simple: Republicans would get tax cuts for the well-connected and a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and in turn would overlook every assault on decency, truth, our oldest allies and most venerable principles. They expected Trump to govern by grudges, lie eight times a day, call women dogs, act as a useful idiot for foreign adversaries, make himself a laughingstock to the world.
“I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus,” as Ann Coulter said, “but I didn’t care.”
In the end, they would get what they wanted. In the end, they would get a court to return America to one imagined by the elites who put forth the lifetime protectors of the permanent class. They would get justices who came through a laboratory of privilege, someone “who was born for” a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, as Trump said of Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Oh, but the price has gone up. Republicans are left with a roomful of men standing athwart the #MeToo movement and yelling, “Stop!” They are left with Trump, who outlined the game plan for sexual predation, saying women who remember atrocities from the past are part of a “con game.” And men better watch out. George Washington would lose his teeth if he were around today.
What they hadn’t bargained on was Christine Blasey Ford staring down a wall of men in power, a private woman in the most public moment on earth, recounting a horror that “drastically altered my life.”
She was not supposed to be on trial, any more than Kavanaugh. She’s a character witness for one of the most powerful jobs on earth. The last-minute cries for due process are a joke. If Republicans wanted the truth, they would have called Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge — a bro buddy, the author of “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” They would have asked for an F.B.I. investigation 10 days ago.
Kavanaugh says he’s appalled that sordid details of one’s past are being used to destroy reputation. Is this the same Kavanaugh who once demanded that the most graphic details of another man’s private life, Bill Clinton, be made public “piece by painful piece”?
When Republicans made this pact with Trump, they did not expect that the lab for long-term governance — elite prep school, Ivy League college and law school, the right mentors, think tank promoters, lawyers and judges — would be shown as an incubator of social pathologies.
What they have now is an immolation of principle. A lifetime of Republican pieties, put forth by the bow-tied best and brightest, has gone up in a poof. Free trade? It’s been swamped by America First. Balanced budgets, living within our means? Get to love the trillion-dollar deficit, courtesy of those tax cuts. (...)
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, complains about Democrats making a mockery of the court confirmation hearing. McConnell, of course, did them one better: he wouldn’t even give President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court a hearing. That’s when the match was lit.
One good thing to come out of this debacle is the shining of a light on the policy shops promoting and protecting their own, the Ivy Leagues and fraternity of connected clerks. The gold standard.
God forbid we would ever look outside the bubble of entitlement — to someone who went to a public university, to someone from the Midwest or West, to a person with life experiences closer to that of average Americans.
If your rallies are highlighted by “lock her up” chants against a person who has never been charged with a crime, you cannot wrap yourself in due process or presumption of innocence.
If your men of God, led by the Rev. Franklin Graham, say attempted rape is not a crime because “if it was true, these are two teenagers, and she said no and he respected that,” you need a new faith in which to cover your hypocrisies.
Story follows character, as the Greeks knew, and what we’re seeing now with the Bonfire of Republican Vanities is the predictable outcome of those who enabled the amoral presidency of Donald Trump.
The bargain was simple: Republicans would get tax cuts for the well-connected and a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and in turn would overlook every assault on decency, truth, our oldest allies and most venerable principles. They expected Trump to govern by grudges, lie eight times a day, call women dogs, act as a useful idiot for foreign adversaries, make himself a laughingstock to the world.“I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus,” as Ann Coulter said, “but I didn’t care.”
In the end, they would get what they wanted. In the end, they would get a court to return America to one imagined by the elites who put forth the lifetime protectors of the permanent class. They would get justices who came through a laboratory of privilege, someone “who was born for” a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, as Trump said of Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Oh, but the price has gone up. Republicans are left with a roomful of men standing athwart the #MeToo movement and yelling, “Stop!” They are left with Trump, who outlined the game plan for sexual predation, saying women who remember atrocities from the past are part of a “con game.” And men better watch out. George Washington would lose his teeth if he were around today.
What they hadn’t bargained on was Christine Blasey Ford staring down a wall of men in power, a private woman in the most public moment on earth, recounting a horror that “drastically altered my life.”
She was not supposed to be on trial, any more than Kavanaugh. She’s a character witness for one of the most powerful jobs on earth. The last-minute cries for due process are a joke. If Republicans wanted the truth, they would have called Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge — a bro buddy, the author of “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” They would have asked for an F.B.I. investigation 10 days ago.
Kavanaugh says he’s appalled that sordid details of one’s past are being used to destroy reputation. Is this the same Kavanaugh who once demanded that the most graphic details of another man’s private life, Bill Clinton, be made public “piece by painful piece”?
When Republicans made this pact with Trump, they did not expect that the lab for long-term governance — elite prep school, Ivy League college and law school, the right mentors, think tank promoters, lawyers and judges — would be shown as an incubator of social pathologies.
What they have now is an immolation of principle. A lifetime of Republican pieties, put forth by the bow-tied best and brightest, has gone up in a poof. Free trade? It’s been swamped by America First. Balanced budgets, living within our means? Get to love the trillion-dollar deficit, courtesy of those tax cuts. (...)
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, complains about Democrats making a mockery of the court confirmation hearing. McConnell, of course, did them one better: he wouldn’t even give President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court a hearing. That’s when the match was lit.
One good thing to come out of this debacle is the shining of a light on the policy shops promoting and protecting their own, the Ivy Leagues and fraternity of connected clerks. The gold standard.
God forbid we would ever look outside the bubble of entitlement — to someone who went to a public university, to someone from the Midwest or West, to a person with life experiences closer to that of average Americans.
by Tim Egan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Melina Mara/WP/AP via
[ed. See also: The Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings Will Be Remembered as a Grotesque Display of Patriarchal Resentment (New Yorker).]
[ed. See also: The Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings Will Be Remembered as a Grotesque Display of Patriarchal Resentment (New Yorker).]
What’s More Appealing: Eight Seasons of ‘Suits’ or Six Volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard?
Which would prevail — Scandinavian high literature or Meghan Markle?
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which time I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of “My Struggle” and watching all of “Suits.” “My Struggle,” as readers of this or any other literary publication will know, is the sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, intermittently frustrating and always genre-defying 3,600-page autobiographical novel by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard that became a phenomenon among Anglo-American literati when the translation of Book 1 appeared here, in 2012, and whose sixth and last volume appears this month.
“Suits,” as readers of pretty much every other publication will have known since Prince Harry of Wales became engaged last autumn to Markle, one of the show’s stars, is a popular USA Network legal drama, currently in its eighth season — now of course sans Markle, who has abandoned fictional dramas forever, although whether being a member of the British royal family (currently the subject of another popular TV series) constitutes “reality” is a question beyond the scope of this essay.
But it is within the scope of this essay to ponder some implications of the differences between the two fictions, as I found myself doing over the course of the four months during which I was wrapped up in both — not the least of those implications being questions about precisely what fiction is and how it relates to reality, and the extent to which traditional narrative can be a delivery vehicle for saying something true about life. These, as it happens, lie at the intellectual and aesthetic heart of Knausgaard’s huge undertaking.
Both “My Struggle” and “Suits” are serial entertainments, with the difference that the TV show is a turbid middlebrow melodrama that places all of its aesthetic chips on plot — patently contrived story lines engineered to generate further incident. (The gimmick that sets the whole drama in motion is typically high concept: The brilliant young lawyer who is the show’s hero never actually went to law school — a dire secret that motivates his, and eventually more and more of his colleagues’, actions, as they go to increasingly desperate lengths to conceal his past.) “My Struggle,” by contrast, has no plot. Confidently bestriding the increasingly popular gray zone that lies between fiction and autobiography (the genre the French call “autofiction”), it purports to be a minutely accurate reconstruction of the author’s life from earliest childhood to the present, populated by characters who bear the names of, or are identifiable with, people he knows in real life, its meandering narrative dutifully reproducing events as they unfolded with few visible attempts to shape or edit their flow to suit expectations of “story.” All this is an expression of the author’s conviction, announced in Book 1, that “our ludicrously inconsequential lives … had a part in this world.”
The great technical ambition of this work is the attempt to reconstruct the rich inconsequentiality of our quotidian experience in prose stripped of the usual novelistic devices. Before embarking on “My Struggle,” Knausgaard had published two atmospheric novels — one an eccentric but rather beautiful re-creation of Genesis in a Norwegian setting, complete with angels — and since then he’s produced a series of four gossamer volumes, each named after a season and filled with artfully etched observations about everyday things and experiences; but in the magnum opus he claims to eschew any prettifying literary technique. Every object, every event, it seems, is reduced to its bare mechanical particulars: There’s a reason that an account of teenagers trying to get some booze for a New Year’s Eve party, which might have occupied a paragraph in another kind of novel, takes 70 pages. Where some authors might write “He drove off,” Knausgaard gives us “Yngve plumped down in the seat beside me, inserted the key in the ignition, twisted it, craned his head and began to reverse down the little slope.”
Likewise, the volumes obey few of the laws of narrative structure; the most you can say for each is that it covers some phase of the author’s life, although not necessarily in chronological order. Book 1 is set in motion by the death, in the late 1990s, of Knausgaard’s schoolteacher father — by far the most powerful “character” here, a grandiose alcoholic whose abusiveness is elliptically yet indelibly evoked in a series of long flashbacks to the author’s childhood. These alternate with scenes set in the present, at the funeral home and the house where the father ended his days sordidly, sitting in his own excrement and surrounded by empty bottles. This first installment is by far the most artful (many would say the most successful) of the six, not least because it self-consciously emulates Proust, to whose own multivolume autobiographical novel Knausgaard acknowledges his indebtedness. Some readers of Book 1 will feel as though they’re on a treasure hunt for allusions to the French masterpiece: There are reflections on how different rooms feel, meditations on famous paintings, a preoccupation with a beloved grandmother, early fumblings with girls that result in premature ejaculations.
Through all this, the author’s past is reconstituted at a level of detail so dense that you’re persuaded of the narrative’s factuality even as you’re forced to acknowledge that it has to have been, at the least, greatly enhanced, however close to some emotional truth or memory an individual scene or stretch of dialogue may be. This technique raises — as Knausgaard wants it to — questions about the limits both of memory and of fictional representation. “The 14 years I lived in Bergen,” he writes at the beginning of Book 5, “are long gone, no traces of them are left” — a sly claim, given that the 614 pages that follow constitute a seemingly “factual” re-creation of that very period.
This faux factuality is the hallmark of all six volumes. Book 2 begins in the “present” of 2008, when Knausgaard, nearing 40, is living in Malmo, Sweden, with his wife, Linda, and their children, contemplating the novel that would become “My Struggle.” These scenes alternate with flashbacks to the period several years earlier when he had left Norway for Sweden; it is there, crippled by emotional and intellectual insecurities, that he arduously courts Linda, a poet with psychological troubles of her own. Book 3 leapfrogs back in time to provide an unexpected and often charming glimpse of his childhood and teenage years — the source of those awful insecurities (he describes his childhood as a “ghetto-like state of incompleteness”); in this volume, the author’s desire to recreate every aspect of the past extends to descriptions of his bowel movements. Book 4 finds the 18-year-old Karl Ove living in a tiny town in northern Norway, where he spends a year as a schoolteacher, struggling with an increasingly alarming drinking problem, his attraction to some of the underage girls in his class and his attempts to write serious fiction. Book 5 moves on to the author’s 20s and early 30s — those 14 years during which he lived in Bergen and experienced his first literary failures and successes, as well as an early marriage that collapsed in part because of his infidelity.
As this summary suggests, the life recounted here is one of unusually intense emotional extremes of the sort that can make for powerful writing. The childhood abuse, the alcoholism, the affairs and breakups are the stuff of many a memoir — a genre that, curiously, doesn’t figure at all in the numerous digressions on literature that dot the landscape of intentional quotidian banality here, even though “My Struggle” has far more in common with memoir than it does with fiction. (I suspect that Knausgaard decided to call his work a novel because memoir continues to be seen as a “soft” genre, and he’s after bigger literary game.)
And yet, despite all the emotional drama, I was rarely moved by this vast and often impressive work. As with some blogs or soap operas, the ongoing narration, however tedious it often is, can be weirdly addictive, and the suggestive play with fact and fiction can be intriguing. But in the end, the books left me cold and, not infrequently, exasperated.
by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rachell Sumpter
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which time I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of “My Struggle” and watching all of “Suits.” “My Struggle,” as readers of this or any other literary publication will know, is the sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, intermittently frustrating and always genre-defying 3,600-page autobiographical novel by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard that became a phenomenon among Anglo-American literati when the translation of Book 1 appeared here, in 2012, and whose sixth and last volume appears this month.
“Suits,” as readers of pretty much every other publication will have known since Prince Harry of Wales became engaged last autumn to Markle, one of the show’s stars, is a popular USA Network legal drama, currently in its eighth season — now of course sans Markle, who has abandoned fictional dramas forever, although whether being a member of the British royal family (currently the subject of another popular TV series) constitutes “reality” is a question beyond the scope of this essay.But it is within the scope of this essay to ponder some implications of the differences between the two fictions, as I found myself doing over the course of the four months during which I was wrapped up in both — not the least of those implications being questions about precisely what fiction is and how it relates to reality, and the extent to which traditional narrative can be a delivery vehicle for saying something true about life. These, as it happens, lie at the intellectual and aesthetic heart of Knausgaard’s huge undertaking.
Both “My Struggle” and “Suits” are serial entertainments, with the difference that the TV show is a turbid middlebrow melodrama that places all of its aesthetic chips on plot — patently contrived story lines engineered to generate further incident. (The gimmick that sets the whole drama in motion is typically high concept: The brilliant young lawyer who is the show’s hero never actually went to law school — a dire secret that motivates his, and eventually more and more of his colleagues’, actions, as they go to increasingly desperate lengths to conceal his past.) “My Struggle,” by contrast, has no plot. Confidently bestriding the increasingly popular gray zone that lies between fiction and autobiography (the genre the French call “autofiction”), it purports to be a minutely accurate reconstruction of the author’s life from earliest childhood to the present, populated by characters who bear the names of, or are identifiable with, people he knows in real life, its meandering narrative dutifully reproducing events as they unfolded with few visible attempts to shape or edit their flow to suit expectations of “story.” All this is an expression of the author’s conviction, announced in Book 1, that “our ludicrously inconsequential lives … had a part in this world.”
The great technical ambition of this work is the attempt to reconstruct the rich inconsequentiality of our quotidian experience in prose stripped of the usual novelistic devices. Before embarking on “My Struggle,” Knausgaard had published two atmospheric novels — one an eccentric but rather beautiful re-creation of Genesis in a Norwegian setting, complete with angels — and since then he’s produced a series of four gossamer volumes, each named after a season and filled with artfully etched observations about everyday things and experiences; but in the magnum opus he claims to eschew any prettifying literary technique. Every object, every event, it seems, is reduced to its bare mechanical particulars: There’s a reason that an account of teenagers trying to get some booze for a New Year’s Eve party, which might have occupied a paragraph in another kind of novel, takes 70 pages. Where some authors might write “He drove off,” Knausgaard gives us “Yngve plumped down in the seat beside me, inserted the key in the ignition, twisted it, craned his head and began to reverse down the little slope.”
Likewise, the volumes obey few of the laws of narrative structure; the most you can say for each is that it covers some phase of the author’s life, although not necessarily in chronological order. Book 1 is set in motion by the death, in the late 1990s, of Knausgaard’s schoolteacher father — by far the most powerful “character” here, a grandiose alcoholic whose abusiveness is elliptically yet indelibly evoked in a series of long flashbacks to the author’s childhood. These alternate with scenes set in the present, at the funeral home and the house where the father ended his days sordidly, sitting in his own excrement and surrounded by empty bottles. This first installment is by far the most artful (many would say the most successful) of the six, not least because it self-consciously emulates Proust, to whose own multivolume autobiographical novel Knausgaard acknowledges his indebtedness. Some readers of Book 1 will feel as though they’re on a treasure hunt for allusions to the French masterpiece: There are reflections on how different rooms feel, meditations on famous paintings, a preoccupation with a beloved grandmother, early fumblings with girls that result in premature ejaculations.
Through all this, the author’s past is reconstituted at a level of detail so dense that you’re persuaded of the narrative’s factuality even as you’re forced to acknowledge that it has to have been, at the least, greatly enhanced, however close to some emotional truth or memory an individual scene or stretch of dialogue may be. This technique raises — as Knausgaard wants it to — questions about the limits both of memory and of fictional representation. “The 14 years I lived in Bergen,” he writes at the beginning of Book 5, “are long gone, no traces of them are left” — a sly claim, given that the 614 pages that follow constitute a seemingly “factual” re-creation of that very period.
This faux factuality is the hallmark of all six volumes. Book 2 begins in the “present” of 2008, when Knausgaard, nearing 40, is living in Malmo, Sweden, with his wife, Linda, and their children, contemplating the novel that would become “My Struggle.” These scenes alternate with flashbacks to the period several years earlier when he had left Norway for Sweden; it is there, crippled by emotional and intellectual insecurities, that he arduously courts Linda, a poet with psychological troubles of her own. Book 3 leapfrogs back in time to provide an unexpected and often charming glimpse of his childhood and teenage years — the source of those awful insecurities (he describes his childhood as a “ghetto-like state of incompleteness”); in this volume, the author’s desire to recreate every aspect of the past extends to descriptions of his bowel movements. Book 4 finds the 18-year-old Karl Ove living in a tiny town in northern Norway, where he spends a year as a schoolteacher, struggling with an increasingly alarming drinking problem, his attraction to some of the underage girls in his class and his attempts to write serious fiction. Book 5 moves on to the author’s 20s and early 30s — those 14 years during which he lived in Bergen and experienced his first literary failures and successes, as well as an early marriage that collapsed in part because of his infidelity.
As this summary suggests, the life recounted here is one of unusually intense emotional extremes of the sort that can make for powerful writing. The childhood abuse, the alcoholism, the affairs and breakups are the stuff of many a memoir — a genre that, curiously, doesn’t figure at all in the numerous digressions on literature that dot the landscape of intentional quotidian banality here, even though “My Struggle” has far more in common with memoir than it does with fiction. (I suspect that Knausgaard decided to call his work a novel because memoir continues to be seen as a “soft” genre, and he’s after bigger literary game.)
And yet, despite all the emotional drama, I was rarely moved by this vast and often impressive work. As with some blogs or soap operas, the ongoing narration, however tedious it often is, can be weirdly addictive, and the suggestive play with fact and fiction can be intriguing. But in the end, the books left me cold and, not infrequently, exasperated.
by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rachell Sumpter
[ed.Knausgaard seems to be one of those authors you either "get" or don't. I don't (and would add the likes of Bolano and Calvino to that list as well, among many others). God help anyone that actually made it through all six volumes (I barely made it through the first). They can be great sleeping aids though.]
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Proptech: Opendoor
Opendoor, a start-up that flips homes, attracted attention in June when it announced it had raised $325 million from a long list of venture capitalists. The financing valued the four-year-old company at more than $2 billion.
That was only an appetizer. Three months later, Opendoor has more than doubled its cash pile. On Thursday, the company said it had gotten a $400 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The valuation for Opendoor remains the same.
The so-called mega-round for Opendoor was not the Vision Fund’s only major real estate-related deal on Thursday. The firm also co-led a $400 million investment in the high-end brokerage Compass that valued the company at $4.4 billion.
The hauls are part of a race by investors to pour money into technology for real estate, or what Silicon Valley now calls proptech.
Having watched tech start-ups upend old-line industries like taxis and hotels, venture capitalists are casting about for the next area to be infused with software and data. Many have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient. (...)
Opendoor’s goal is to make moving as simple as the click of a button, according to Mr. Wu. While that remains a far-off reality, the company has simplified the process of selling a home. It uses a combination of data, software and a team of 50 human evaluators to assess a home’s value. If a customer accepts Opendoor’s value for their home, the company will buy the property, charging a 6.5 percent fee on average.
The company said it offers sellers certainty — many conventional home sales fall through — and flexible closing dates, helping them avoid paying double mortgages. It also eliminates the need for a real estate agent. Opendoor employs 100 licensed real estate agents to advise customers if they request it.
Opendoor only buys homes built in 1960 or later, worth $175,000 to $500,000, and not in need of major renovations or repairs. Operating in more than a dozen cities, mostly in the South, it bought $316 million of homes in August, up from around $100 million in January. After some light fixes, it sells the homes in an average of 90 days.
Before its latest cash infusion, Opendoor planned to expand into one new city a month. Now it plans to double that pace. The company said it expects to be in 22 cities in the United States by the end of the year.
Its growth has spawned competitors: OfferPad and Knock offer comparable services to Opendoor, and Zillow and Redfin, which are both publicly traded, have entered the house-flipping market as well. (...)
Opendoor’s business model has not been tested by a major dip in the housing market, causing some skepticism about whether it can work over the long term.
“The vast majority of investors who hear about it initially think it’s a bad idea,” said Stephen Kim, an analyst at Evercore ISI, a market research company. But the skepticism often fades as they realize Opendoor makes money by providing a service to home sellers, rather than on price appreciation, Mr. Kim said. Even if the company breaks even on a sale, the transaction fees are a meaningful business.
That was only an appetizer. Three months later, Opendoor has more than doubled its cash pile. On Thursday, the company said it had gotten a $400 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The valuation for Opendoor remains the same.
The so-called mega-round for Opendoor was not the Vision Fund’s only major real estate-related deal on Thursday. The firm also co-led a $400 million investment in the high-end brokerage Compass that valued the company at $4.4 billion.The hauls are part of a race by investors to pour money into technology for real estate, or what Silicon Valley now calls proptech.
Having watched tech start-ups upend old-line industries like taxis and hotels, venture capitalists are casting about for the next area to be infused with software and data. Many have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient. (...)
Opendoor’s goal is to make moving as simple as the click of a button, according to Mr. Wu. While that remains a far-off reality, the company has simplified the process of selling a home. It uses a combination of data, software and a team of 50 human evaluators to assess a home’s value. If a customer accepts Opendoor’s value for their home, the company will buy the property, charging a 6.5 percent fee on average.
The company said it offers sellers certainty — many conventional home sales fall through — and flexible closing dates, helping them avoid paying double mortgages. It also eliminates the need for a real estate agent. Opendoor employs 100 licensed real estate agents to advise customers if they request it.
Opendoor only buys homes built in 1960 or later, worth $175,000 to $500,000, and not in need of major renovations or repairs. Operating in more than a dozen cities, mostly in the South, it bought $316 million of homes in August, up from around $100 million in January. After some light fixes, it sells the homes in an average of 90 days.
Before its latest cash infusion, Opendoor planned to expand into one new city a month. Now it plans to double that pace. The company said it expects to be in 22 cities in the United States by the end of the year.
Its growth has spawned competitors: OfferPad and Knock offer comparable services to Opendoor, and Zillow and Redfin, which are both publicly traded, have entered the house-flipping market as well. (...)
Opendoor’s business model has not been tested by a major dip in the housing market, causing some skepticism about whether it can work over the long term.
“The vast majority of investors who hear about it initially think it’s a bad idea,” said Stephen Kim, an analyst at Evercore ISI, a market research company. But the skepticism often fades as they realize Opendoor makes money by providing a service to home sellers, rather than on price appreciation, Mr. Kim said. Even if the company breaks even on a sale, the transaction fees are a meaningful business.
by Erin Griffith, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
‘This Guy Doesn’t Know Anything’: The Inside Story of Trump’s Shambolic Transition Team
Chris Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.
Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.
And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.
Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. (...)
The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition. (...)
Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.
Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like ... I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.
That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but also stepped down from his job.) (...)
In the days after the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building.
It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”
They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.
All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.
Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.
Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. (...)
The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition. (...)
Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.
Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like ... I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.
That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but also stepped down from his job.) (...)
In the days after the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building.
It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”
They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.
All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Judge Kavanaugh Has Taught Me So Much About How the World Works
I can’t stop reading about Judge Kavanaugh. I am learning so much about how the world works.
His yearbook from high school is horrifying. There were derogatory jokes about women throughout the pages. Everyone knew, but the boys were rich, and they were going to top colleges, so it was okay. I didn’t know there were yearbooks like that.
I knew that in those rich-kid private schools the teachers decide who goes to which school. I know that, for example, Yale takes a certain number of kids from Choate, and Choate tells Yale which kids will be the best fit. There is a symbiotic relationship. Choate can say they always get kids into Yale. And Yale knows they’ll get the best kids for Yale without having to do much searching.
What I didn’t know was that the most coveted clerkships work the same way. Judge Kavanaugh always takes law students from Yale. The symbiotic relationship there is that Yale can say their students always get great clerkships, and in exchange Yale law professor Amy Chua makes sure Kavanaugh always has a stream of female law school students who look like models. Really. Click that link.
Kavanaugh fed law clerks to Judge Alex Kozinski. That’s part of what made Kavanaugh such a great place to start a law career. Kozinski was famous. For power. But also for harassment. Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor and also already under investigation, knew about the harassment. It was common knowledge among Yale faculty.
That feeder system is done. Kozinski was forced to resign. And Chua is on mysterious, emergency medical leave, not even able to write her own emails to the press.
People like to hire people who are like them. We have so much research that supports that. The only way to get around that is to be way, way better than everyone else (black men often do this) or to be really hot. Middle-aged men do not have access to young, hot women except when they pay for it, or it’s their daughter’s friends. But if the men have power they can have access to those women at work.
I knew there were not a lot of female staff in the Senate. But I did not realize that every time there was a female issue, the male Senators sent a woman to deal with it. The all-male Republican judiciary committee does not want to have to question Kavanaugh’s accusers. They think the optics are bad. So they want a female staff member to do it. But the female staff are saying no.They say it’s part of a Senator’s job to know how to work with women. The female staff are sick of doing it for the male Senators.
I have done this job for men my whole career. I have stepped in to tell my boss that there are women in the company not making as much as their male counterparts and we have to fix it. I have told male leadership that we have a client who keeps harassing the women in the company. I thought it was my job to take care of lower-level women because I knew leadership would not. I did not even know I was doing that. I never expected the men to look out for the women.
I’m not doing that anymore — I will ask the men why they are not making sure themselves. I will show them how to do it. It’s a mentality. To know what to look out for. It is not the job of women like me. It’s the job of all of senior management.
I didn’t know that women so bright and successful as Christine Blasey Ford got derailed for years after sexual assault. I got derailed for years from sexual assault. But I thought it was because I was weak. I thought I was making too big a deal out of it. I am shocked that the time in her life when she finally told her husband, in couples counseling, is similar to the time in my life I finally told people about my experience.
I was shocked that Debbie Ramirez was so ashamed of having been forced to touch Kavanaugh’s penis that she never talked about it with anyone. I am shocked because I was forced to touch someone’s penis. But, like Ramirez, I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. I’m still not. I mean, I was there with a penis in front of me. And I said no, get away from me, gross. But I still touched it. I am shocked that it’s hard for Ramirez to put a coherent story together. I thought not having a coherent story meant maybe what I thought happened didn’t happen.
But now I understand that not having the words to describe it is part of the problem. We have no word in the English language for being so stressed and so full of shame that you start trying so hard to block it out the minute you get way. Of course we have no word for that. Because it’s only women feeling a loss of power who need that word.
His yearbook from high school is horrifying. There were derogatory jokes about women throughout the pages. Everyone knew, but the boys were rich, and they were going to top colleges, so it was okay. I didn’t know there were yearbooks like that.
I knew that in those rich-kid private schools the teachers decide who goes to which school. I know that, for example, Yale takes a certain number of kids from Choate, and Choate tells Yale which kids will be the best fit. There is a symbiotic relationship. Choate can say they always get kids into Yale. And Yale knows they’ll get the best kids for Yale without having to do much searching.What I didn’t know was that the most coveted clerkships work the same way. Judge Kavanaugh always takes law students from Yale. The symbiotic relationship there is that Yale can say their students always get great clerkships, and in exchange Yale law professor Amy Chua makes sure Kavanaugh always has a stream of female law school students who look like models. Really. Click that link.
Kavanaugh fed law clerks to Judge Alex Kozinski. That’s part of what made Kavanaugh such a great place to start a law career. Kozinski was famous. For power. But also for harassment. Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor and also already under investigation, knew about the harassment. It was common knowledge among Yale faculty.
That feeder system is done. Kozinski was forced to resign. And Chua is on mysterious, emergency medical leave, not even able to write her own emails to the press.
People like to hire people who are like them. We have so much research that supports that. The only way to get around that is to be way, way better than everyone else (black men often do this) or to be really hot. Middle-aged men do not have access to young, hot women except when they pay for it, or it’s their daughter’s friends. But if the men have power they can have access to those women at work.
I knew there were not a lot of female staff in the Senate. But I did not realize that every time there was a female issue, the male Senators sent a woman to deal with it. The all-male Republican judiciary committee does not want to have to question Kavanaugh’s accusers. They think the optics are bad. So they want a female staff member to do it. But the female staff are saying no.They say it’s part of a Senator’s job to know how to work with women. The female staff are sick of doing it for the male Senators.
I have done this job for men my whole career. I have stepped in to tell my boss that there are women in the company not making as much as their male counterparts and we have to fix it. I have told male leadership that we have a client who keeps harassing the women in the company. I thought it was my job to take care of lower-level women because I knew leadership would not. I did not even know I was doing that. I never expected the men to look out for the women.
I’m not doing that anymore — I will ask the men why they are not making sure themselves. I will show them how to do it. It’s a mentality. To know what to look out for. It is not the job of women like me. It’s the job of all of senior management.
I didn’t know that women so bright and successful as Christine Blasey Ford got derailed for years after sexual assault. I got derailed for years from sexual assault. But I thought it was because I was weak. I thought I was making too big a deal out of it. I am shocked that the time in her life when she finally told her husband, in couples counseling, is similar to the time in my life I finally told people about my experience.
I was shocked that Debbie Ramirez was so ashamed of having been forced to touch Kavanaugh’s penis that she never talked about it with anyone. I am shocked because I was forced to touch someone’s penis. But, like Ramirez, I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. I’m still not. I mean, I was there with a penis in front of me. And I said no, get away from me, gross. But I still touched it. I am shocked that it’s hard for Ramirez to put a coherent story together. I thought not having a coherent story meant maybe what I thought happened didn’t happen.
But now I understand that not having the words to describe it is part of the problem. We have no word in the English language for being so stressed and so full of shame that you start trying so hard to block it out the minute you get way. Of course we have no word for that. Because it’s only women feeling a loss of power who need that word.
by Penelope Trunk | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Update: Jesus, just look at the videos: In Emotional Hearing, Kavanaugh and Blasey Present Senators With Stark Choice. Fuck you, Lindsey Graham. See also: "I Was Ashamed": After Ford's Accusation, Holton-Arms Alumnae Wrestle With Their Own Truths-Together.]
[ed. Update: Jesus, just look at the videos: In Emotional Hearing, Kavanaugh and Blasey Present Senators With Stark Choice. Fuck you, Lindsey Graham. See also: "I Was Ashamed": After Ford's Accusation, Holton-Arms Alumnae Wrestle With Their Own Truths-Together.]
Chicken Francese: The Single Best Thing to Cook With Chicken Breasts
There are people who never get tired of breaded chicken cutlets. (I know, because some of them live in my house.)
For the rest of us, finding a higher purpose for boneless, skinless chicken breasts is a lifelong mission. Their virtues are well known: They are quick-cooking, high-protein, crowd-pleasing, low-fat. As are their drawbacks: They are dry, tough, tasteless. A really well-seasoned, crunchy chicken cutlet is a fine thing to eat, but many other cooking methods — marinating, grilling, searing, poaching — only take the cut from bad to worse.
Chicken francese, with its butter lemon sauce, is the single best thing you can make with chicken cutlets. Chicken and lemon are a classic combination that almost every meat-eater likes. And it is one of those rare restaurant dishes that is truly easy to make at home.
“It’s one of our most popular dishes, but I have no idea where it came from,” Lisa Bamonte said at her family’s 118-year-old restaurant, Bamonte’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the chicken francese is considered one of the best in the city. Four generations of her family, including Ms. Bamonte, have worked in the kitchen, so she is more than familiar with the recipe’s signature elements: a flour dredge, an egg wash and a bright, plentiful sauce.
Like piccata, Marsala and saltimbocca, francese was originally made with veal cutlets. Those dishes are Italian classics, and they all work the same way: A thin cut of meat gets a light coating of flour, then just enough time to brown in oil, then a drizzle of instant pan sauce. It is a fast but challenging formula. The veal or chicken must cook through in a flash to avoid scorching the coating, and you must immediately make the sauce and serve the dish, or it will be cold and dry.
Francese is a more forgiving dish, and here’s why: It has an egg coating to keep the meat moist, and a plentiful pan sauce to keep the whole dish comfortingly warm. A dip in beaten eggs is traditional for European fried chicken (yes, there is such a thing) and classic dishes like Wiener schnitzel and fritto misto. During cooking, egg proteins form a thin but critical coating that protects the meat or fish from drying out. An egg-batter crust is not as crunchy as an American-style one, which adds a thick layer of flour or bread crumbs.
But that’s O.K., because you’re going to tuck the cooked cutlets back into the pan anyway, to reheat them and to give them a nice coating of sauce. And that means the dish is not such a split-second operation; you can cook the cutlets and make the sauce a few hours ahead, then reheat them just before serving.
INGREDIENTS
2 eggs
2 tablespoons whole milk
1 teaspoon salt, plus more for seasoning
½ teaspoon ground black pepper, plus more for seasoning
1 cup all-purpose flour
⅓ cup olive oil
⅓ cup vegetable oil
4 to 6 large boneless, skinless chicken cutlets (buy the cutlets thinly sliced, or buy regular boneless breasts and slice them in half horizontally to make thin pieces)
3 to 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 lemon, thinly sliced, seeds removed (optional)
½ cup dry white wine
Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon, more to taste
2 cups chicken stock
3 to 4 tablespoons freshly minced parsley
PREPARATION
In a wide, shallow bowl, whisk eggs, milk, salt and pepper until blended. Place the flour in a separate bowl. Line a baking sheet with paper towels.
In a wide skillet, heat olive and vegetable oils over medium heat until shimmering.
Working in batches to avoid crowding the pan, lightly dredge the chicken in flour and shake off any excess. Dip into egg batter, let excess batter drip back into the bowl and place in the skillet. Fry, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 4 minutes per side. Adjust the heat as the cutlets cook so they brown slowly and evenly, with a steady bubbling. Transfer to the paper-towel-lined pan and repeat with remaining cutlets.
If making the lemon slices (if not, skip to Step 6 below): Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter and then scatter the lemon slices over the bottom of the pan. Cook, stirring gently occasionally, until the lemon slices are golden and browning around the edges, about 3 minutes. Scoop out the lemon slices and set them aside.
Add 3 tablespoons of butter, the wine and lemon juice and bring to a boil. Boil until the liquid is syrupy, 3 to 4 minutes. Pour in the stock, bring to a boil and cook until thickened into a sauce, about 5 minutes. (It will thicken more when you add the cutlets.) Taste and adjust the seasonings with lemon, salt and pepper; it should be quite lemony and not too salty.
Reduce the heat, tuck the cutlets into the pan and simmer very gently until the sauce is velvety and the chicken pieces are heated through, about 4 minutes. Turn the cutlets over occasionally in the sauce. Place the browned lemon slices on top. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve, spooning some of the sauce over each serving.
Read more (with video):
For the rest of us, finding a higher purpose for boneless, skinless chicken breasts is a lifelong mission. Their virtues are well known: They are quick-cooking, high-protein, crowd-pleasing, low-fat. As are their drawbacks: They are dry, tough, tasteless. A really well-seasoned, crunchy chicken cutlet is a fine thing to eat, but many other cooking methods — marinating, grilling, searing, poaching — only take the cut from bad to worse.
Chicken francese, with its butter lemon sauce, is the single best thing you can make with chicken cutlets. Chicken and lemon are a classic combination that almost every meat-eater likes. And it is one of those rare restaurant dishes that is truly easy to make at home.“It’s one of our most popular dishes, but I have no idea where it came from,” Lisa Bamonte said at her family’s 118-year-old restaurant, Bamonte’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the chicken francese is considered one of the best in the city. Four generations of her family, including Ms. Bamonte, have worked in the kitchen, so she is more than familiar with the recipe’s signature elements: a flour dredge, an egg wash and a bright, plentiful sauce.
Like piccata, Marsala and saltimbocca, francese was originally made with veal cutlets. Those dishes are Italian classics, and they all work the same way: A thin cut of meat gets a light coating of flour, then just enough time to brown in oil, then a drizzle of instant pan sauce. It is a fast but challenging formula. The veal or chicken must cook through in a flash to avoid scorching the coating, and you must immediately make the sauce and serve the dish, or it will be cold and dry.
Francese is a more forgiving dish, and here’s why: It has an egg coating to keep the meat moist, and a plentiful pan sauce to keep the whole dish comfortingly warm. A dip in beaten eggs is traditional for European fried chicken (yes, there is such a thing) and classic dishes like Wiener schnitzel and fritto misto. During cooking, egg proteins form a thin but critical coating that protects the meat or fish from drying out. An egg-batter crust is not as crunchy as an American-style one, which adds a thick layer of flour or bread crumbs.
But that’s O.K., because you’re going to tuck the cooked cutlets back into the pan anyway, to reheat them and to give them a nice coating of sauce. And that means the dish is not such a split-second operation; you can cook the cutlets and make the sauce a few hours ahead, then reheat them just before serving.
by Julia Moskin, NY Times | Read more:
INGREDIENTS
2 eggs
2 tablespoons whole milk
1 teaspoon salt, plus more for seasoning
½ teaspoon ground black pepper, plus more for seasoning
1 cup all-purpose flour
⅓ cup olive oil
⅓ cup vegetable oil
4 to 6 large boneless, skinless chicken cutlets (buy the cutlets thinly sliced, or buy regular boneless breasts and slice them in half horizontally to make thin pieces)
3 to 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 lemon, thinly sliced, seeds removed (optional)
½ cup dry white wine
Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon, more to taste
2 cups chicken stock
3 to 4 tablespoons freshly minced parsley
PREPARATION
In a wide, shallow bowl, whisk eggs, milk, salt and pepper until blended. Place the flour in a separate bowl. Line a baking sheet with paper towels.
In a wide skillet, heat olive and vegetable oils over medium heat until shimmering.
Working in batches to avoid crowding the pan, lightly dredge the chicken in flour and shake off any excess. Dip into egg batter, let excess batter drip back into the bowl and place in the skillet. Fry, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 4 minutes per side. Adjust the heat as the cutlets cook so they brown slowly and evenly, with a steady bubbling. Transfer to the paper-towel-lined pan and repeat with remaining cutlets.
When all cutlets are browned, remove the pan from the heat and pour off the oil. Wipe out the pan with paper towels. Return the pan to low heat.
If making the lemon slices (if not, skip to Step 6 below): Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter and then scatter the lemon slices over the bottom of the pan. Cook, stirring gently occasionally, until the lemon slices are golden and browning around the edges, about 3 minutes. Scoop out the lemon slices and set them aside.
Add 3 tablespoons of butter, the wine and lemon juice and bring to a boil. Boil until the liquid is syrupy, 3 to 4 minutes. Pour in the stock, bring to a boil and cook until thickened into a sauce, about 5 minutes. (It will thicken more when you add the cutlets.) Taste and adjust the seasonings with lemon, salt and pepper; it should be quite lemony and not too salty.
Reduce the heat, tuck the cutlets into the pan and simmer very gently until the sauce is velvety and the chicken pieces are heated through, about 4 minutes. Turn the cutlets over occasionally in the sauce. Place the browned lemon slices on top. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve, spooning some of the sauce over each serving.
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[ed. See also: The Future Of 1.4 Million Floridians With Felony Convictions Is On The Ballot In November and Will Florida’s Ex-Felons Finally Regain the Right to Vote?]
Image: Mike Luckovich
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
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