How Much Power Do ‘Millennials’ Actually Have?

Whatever future civilization picks over the ruins of our own will find a curious ritual preserved in the archaeological record of the late 2010s — an outlet, they may suspect, for the anxieties of a society in free-fall. First comes a report revealing that young people have abandoned and destroyed yet another cornerstone of postwar American life, like country clubs or breakfast cereal or mayonnaise. Then young people read the report, for all the same reasons you pick at a scab, and completely lose their minds.

This future archaeologist might note how apt it was that these young people were given such a portentous, end-of-days name: millennials. At this point, “millennials” stand accused of “killing” so many industries that there is a whole meta-genre of articles mocking the cliché: Mashable’s “R.I.P.: Here Are 70 Things Millennials Have Killed,” BuzzFeed’s “Here Are 28 Things Millennials Are Accused of Killing in Cold Blood,” Broadly’s “I Did All the Things Millennials Are Accused of Killing.” Business Insider keeps something like an authoritative list of the body count, which includes casual-dining chains, golf, “breastauraunts” like Hooters, diamonds, starter homes, homeownership in general, designer handbags and banks.

Millennials, clearly, are not living the lives of easy abundance bestowed on generations past — no fighting over the check at Outback Steakhouse, no need (or budget) for a station wagon. What young people seem to find galling is the implication that they’ve had any choice in this. Structural shifts in the economy — stagnant wages, the skyrocketing cost of housing, colossal student debt — have put millennials on the path to a lower quality of life than their parents. So when some Australian guy claims that the reason they can’t buy homes is that they spend too much on avocado toast, as the millionaire developer Tim Gurner did last year, it’s easy to see why young people would explode.

But these claims to abject poverty might actually miss the point. Taken as a whole, millennials do wield an incredible amount of economic and cultural power. This is why they terrify moribund industries, and why those industries are so desperate to fit themselves into young people’s curious lifestyles. (It’s hard to remember, but just a few years ago you could not yet use your phone to hire a stranger to go to Chipotle for you and bring your burrito bowl to your door, all so you can watch a cartoon about a depressed horse without interruption.) By virtue of their sheer numbers, millennials are revealing that much of the American way of life is no more permanent than the baby boomers who codified it. If you were one of those geriatric businesses, you would rightly see millennials as an existential threat — even as they continued to see themselves as powerless, completely battered by the world their elders built for them. At the heart of every online dust-up about millennials is a possibly unanswerable question: To what extent does a generation shape history, and to what extent is it shaped by history?

by Willy Staley, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Derek Brahney/New Studio
[ed. This might be one reason why millennials (and everyone else) don't exert more political power: First Comes the ‘Shocking’ News. Then Comes the Navel-Gazing.]

Bojack Horseman and Better Call Saul

[ed. Note: spoiler alert]

BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up

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

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

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

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

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

By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor. The ordeal sends him on a long bender, a dizzying descent toward tragedy. But for a moment, the show conveys all the ache of another person’s loss, whether he is man or beast.

by Rachel Syme, TNR | Read more:
Image: Netflix

***

Better Call Saul Ends a Bleak, Beautiful Season

“S’all good, man.”

That is the parting shot of Better Call Saul’s fourth season, as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is led away from his partner Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) to sign papers that will return him to the field. “Good” is a concept that Jimmy’s gotten further away from during the run of the show, and there is nothing good about the way he achieves his victory here. Kim’s reaction to his revelation of insincerity — the same quality that caused a different tribunal to reject him the previous week — is wrenching in part because it stands in for viewers who like Jimmy, and who want to continue to see redeemable qualities along with his amazing facility for con games and improvised bullshit. It’s hard to see Jimmy going the other way between now and the end of this show, whenever that turns out to be. The look on Kim’s face at the end is heartbreaking: deep disappointment shading into nausea at what an empty-hearted manipulator Jimmy has become. (...)

The other characters end the season in morally precarious places, too — Mike (Jonathan Banks) more than anybody, after executing the runaway German engineer Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock). This is the first killing we’ve seen Mike commit that was cold-blooded — housekeeping with a gun instead of a mop. He was on the gray scale already when we met him, but things are looking a lot darker now. Meanwhile, Mike’s boss, the canny individualist Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), is on the brink of being fully absorbed into the Salamanca empire — I’d rather not say how that story resolves in Breaking Bad, as increasing numbers of people tell me that they’re watching BCS despite never having seen a frame of the other series — and Salamanca captain Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) is facing what looks a purgatorial sentence, somewhat mirroring Jimmy’s season of doing without a law license. He’s forced to deal with a new Salamanca, Eduardo a.k.a. Lalo (Tony Dalton), not long after trying and failing to kill another one (Mark Margolis’s Don Hector, to whom Lalo presents the desk bell that will become his aural signature).

But for now, Kim is still the closest thing Better Call Saul has to a voice of conscience, her attraction to Jimmy an Achilles heel inseparable from her attraction to danger as well as her sentimental attachment to winning seemingly unwinnable cases. The switcheroo that she pulled with the architectural plans for Mesa Verde’s El Paso branch could also get her in trouble, thrilling as it was to team up with Jimmy again in what could’ve been a deleted scene from The Sting. Her hands are dirty for sure, but she hasn’t smeared herself from head to toe in muck like Jimmy, or knowingly slithered deeper into the swamp like Mike. But in one respect, Kim’s position might be the saddest of all, because she gets to watch somebody she cares about and believes in turn colder and more manipulative over time, with no reasonable hope of pulling him back in the other direction.

It’s a gut punch even if you knew that Jimmy McGill had to become Saul, that his corruption would be a subtle process, and that — as on Breaking Bad, the series that created Jimmy/Saul, as well as Mike, Gus, and other BCS regulars — it wouldn’t be the sort you could analyze like a soil sample and then display with each layer named and tagged. Saul was always present in Jimmy, just as Heisenberg was always present in Walter White. To the credit of both shows, the writing, directing, and acting gave you a lot of information to process but tended to stop short of telling you exactly how you were supposed to read it.

None of that numbs the bruising sadness of Better Call Saul’s fourth season finale, the capper to the best and bleakest season of this excellent comedy-drama. This batch of episodes embraced the bifurcated nature of the show, which always spent roughly half of its time in the high-dollar world of white-collar crime and the other half among physically violent drug dealers and street criminals — embraced it so fully, in fact, that it often felt as if we were watching two shows in one, starring three central protagonists (Jimmy, Mike, and Kim) and many major supporting players, all sliding on the moral spectrum between pure and corrupt, each landing farther along by the end.

Series creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and their peerless writing staff (which includes Gennifer Hutchison, Alison Tatlock, Ann Cherkis, Thomas Schnauz, Heather Marion, and Gordon Smith) have created a series that’s nearly immaculate in its construction, with every story beat taking the form of a clearly laid-out montage, sequence, or theater-style scene — one that usually unfolds at a much slower pace than TV’s usual, leaving room for pregnant pauses, entrances and exits, and moments where we get to just stare at a character’s face as they contemplate what they’re about to do, what they’ve just done, or what’s about to happen to them. 

by Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
[ed. I haven't seen BCS's fourth season yet and will have to wait until it's released in its entirety on Netflix. However, I did finally watch Bojack deliver his eulogy in the "Free Churro" episode last night, and it's both brilliant and riveting. Both shows are incredibly nuanced and intelligent. If you haven't seen one or the other, do yourself a favor and check them out. TV doesn't get much better than this.] 

What Sarah Palin Saw Clearly

Ten years ago, we first met Sarah Palin, then the governor of Alaska, for a series of TV interviews. At the time, Palin might not have been able to name a single newspaper or magazine—but she did read where the electorate, at least a significant part of it, was moving. Her candidacy revealed that long-standing political norms were being pushed aside by a new style of divisive, personality-driven populism. A decade later, it’s clear that Palin was more than a historical footnote; she was the harbinger of things to come.

In 2008, John McCain wanted to change politics with his selection of a running mate; his idea was to pick Joe Lieberman, an independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. According to aides, McCain wanted to confront extreme partisanship and forge a kind of national-unity government built on comity and compromise, pledging to serve a single term. But after Senator Lindsey Graham floated the idea, the hard-core party faithful rejected the notion out of hand. Faced with the choice of picking a fight with the most loyal (and ideological) Republican voters, or picking a more doctrinaire candidate, McCain decided to appease the base.

Historically, vice-presidential nominees have been selected for a variety of reasons, a combination of campaign politics and compatible skill sets. Despite the slogan “Country first,” the McCain team focused exclusively on politics—desperate for an edge that would help the GOP win a rare third term, even in a weak economy. (A month later, the economy would go from problematic to cataclysmic.)

We recently spoke with top McCain and Obama aides for our podcast marking 10 years since the Palin interviews. According to Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, Palin’s vetting did not include asking any questions like “Do you understand the U.S. tax system?” or “Do you know where Iraq is?” Schmidt said they simply assumed that a governor would be knowledgeable about public policy.

Fundamentally, it was the priority the campaign placed on optics—Palin’s outsider image and undeniable charisma—that led to the selection of a politician who believed that Saddam Hussein attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and that the British government was run by Queen Elizabeth. (...)

As the campaign went on, Palin bridled at the tone McCain set. When a McCain supporter said “I don’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s an Arab,” McCain responded, “No ma’am, no ma’am … He's [a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” When one man said he was scared of Obama, McCain replied that “[Obama] is a decent person, and a person that you do not have to be scared [of] as president of the United States.” The crowd booed. McCain also said, “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him and I want everyone to be respectful, and let’s make sure we are.”

Palin took the opposite tack: She stoked her supporters’ fears—and won their cheers. At her rallies, Palin said, “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America.” At one, a man shouted “Treason” and Palin said nothing. At another, Palin’s anti-Obama diatribe led a man to yell out, “Kill him!” Palin did not push back against her often-angry crowds. In the strongest echo of today’s Trump rallies, she instead used her speeches to go after the free press (or the “lamestream media”), reserving particular scorn for elite publications. Palin’s supporters then started verbally attacking her traveling press corps, including hurling a racial epithet at an African American journalist. Again, Palin not only refused to lower the temperature, she seemed to bask in that kind of heat.

This is not to say that McCain or other “old school” politicians were unwilling to go negative or attack their political opponents. They would and did. It’s that there were lines they wouldn’t cross—especially when it came to respecting the legitimacy of their opponents and of journalists. These are lines that politicians like Palin and President Trump won’t even acknowledge. And in a big, diverse democracy, where power is transferred peacefully, where compromise and consensus are required to get things done, those boundaries matter.

Another corrosive trend: Palin’s contempt for experts and elites. The then-governor didn’t study policy journals or even follow national news. She resisted when McCain aides tried to get her to focus on preparing for our interviews. But she thrilled her supporters with attacks on coastal liberals and support for “normal Joe Six Pack Americans.” Among some conservatives, a disdain for the liberal intelligentsia morphed into a disdain for the highly educated or for facts that contradicted their worldview. That has led to the current environment, where no matter what evidence the experts have brought to bear—against Brexit, against Trump’s trade and tax policies—it doesn’t matter to many voters. These elites, and the arguments they make, are dismissed out of hand.

by Katie Couric and Brian Goldsmith, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst
[ed. What she saw most clearly was opportunity. A dimwitted Alaska hillbilly (who briefly was my governor). Does anyone remember that "high profile" meeting she had with Donald Trump ahead of the 2012 elections? She must be really burned she didn't get any reward once he was elected.]

The Uninvited

NFL Quarterbacks Are Breaking Records: What's Behind the Passing Explosion?

The NFL is the middle of an offensive explosion, and it is the jump in passing production that has been most jarring. Teams have thrown more passing touchdowns in the first four weeks – 228 – than ever before, shattering the previous record of 205, which was set in 2003. The average yards per attempt has also skyrocketed. In 1977, teams averaged 6.5 yards per pass attempt (YPA). In 2001, it was 6.8. That figure has jumped to 7.5 in 2018.

Below we’ll look at the reasons for the astonishing rise (the statistics below do not include Thursday night’s game between the Colts and Patriots).

Penalties are helping the passing game

This is the one fans instinctively point to. Rules have changed up and down the field: roughing the passer; hand fighting; pass interference calls; freedom for skill talent to go over the middle of the field without fear their head will be dislodged from their neck. It’s tough to be a defender these days.

The effect is undeniable. First, there’s the fact that more penalties lead to extended drives, which leads to more opportunities to catapult the ball all over the field. Further, offensive coaches know the rules are in their favor and that breeds bravery. Coaches, by their nature, often coach to minimise risks. But this new breed of head honcho seems a little different. They go for it on fourth down. They’re unafraid to drop their quarterback back 50 times. Why? All the advantages are in their favor.

Throwing the ball deep in the NFL is a gigantic market inefficiency, particularly because pass interference is a spot foul. The reward far outweighs the risk: any semblance of contact and the call is going to the offense. Teams still are not going far enough with deep shots.

Think of this as similar to when the NBA discovered the efficiency of the three-point shot. For years, slow, methodical, pound-the-ball-inside offenses dominated basketball. And it was nonsense! There was a more valuable shot a couple of feet away. Sure, you’d miss more, but the ones you did make more than made up for that fact.

And the more draconian interpretation of the roughing-the-passer rule has changed things too. Why would quarterbacks be intimated about standing in the pocket in this era? They have every protection imaginable. Defenders have to play a tick slower, wondering whether they’re hitting at the right angle or whether they can keep their body weight from tumbling on the poor, helpless quarterback (sarcasm intended). It’s a major psychological edge. 

Teams are passing more often

It seems the league as a whole has cottoned on to the idea that passing is more efficient than running. Teams are slinging the ball on first down – traditionally a run down – more than ever before.

That’s partly because fossilized coaches have made way for a slew of wunderkinds, and a fresh batch of offensive coordinators has pushed the quarterback-driven league into overdrive, down-and-distance be damned.

It seems that every down is now a passing down. Kirk Cousins is on pace to attempt 756 passes, despite having an exciting, explosive running back accompanying him in the backfield, and the very worst offensive line through four weeks in league history.

Meanwhile, teams such as Miami and Atlanta use the quick passing game as an extension of the run game. They rely on yards after the catch. They use similar run-game principles, get the ball to the perimeter and force the defense to drive downhill and pursue. Only the approach is different to slamming the ball into one guy’s belly in the backfield. Any eligible player could get the ball, not one. Screen passes continue to steadily rise year on year.

There’s an intangible effect to that, too: quarterbacks juice their efficiency numbers, completing more balls and lowering their interception and sack rates. That breeds confidence.

Quarterbacks are getting better

At this point, you may be wondering whether the league-wide trends are being pumped up by a couple of pass-happy teams. That’s not the case. True, the Chiefs and Rams have been at the forefront of the bombs away movement, but this evolution is taking place everywhere.

If you erase the Rams and Chiefs passing offense, the NFL league average quarterback rating drops from 94.5 to 90.5, according to Mike Tanier of Football Outsiders. That’s still four points higher than the league average quarterback a year ago. (...)

Offensive and defensive schemes are evolving

The NFL can only use the talent that college provides. That’s always been true: the professionals like to the think of themselves as the wise ones. They send down football decrees from on high and the rest of the football universe takes note.

The reverse is actually true. High school coaches innovate. College guys steal and evolve those ideas. And the NFL folks do the same, pinching players and ideas from college, before twisting and contorting them to fit their own needs. Evolution in high school takes weeks. It’s a genius born of desperation. Evolution in the NFL, meanwhile, takes decades.

We’re finally seeing the fruits of the changes at the high school and college level paying dividends in the NFL – if you like high-scoring games, that is.

College style offenses – which feature multi-receiver sets, an emphasis on spacing the field, switch releases to attack man-coverage (receivers crisscrossing at the line of scrimmage), spread formations, and all manner of pre-snap deception – make the game easier for quarterbacks. There’s no other way to say it. It’s how schools routinely chuck out 4,000-yard passers, regardless of the individual player’s talent.

by Oliver Connolly, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mark J Terrill/AP
[ed. Football is dying. See also: Why the Seahawks' Earl Thomas flipped off his own team after fracturing his leg.]

via:

Harry Nilsson

Goat Yoga

Goat Yoga Is 'Preposterous,' Says Goat Yoga Teacher. It's Also ... Terrific!

[ed. A friend told me about goat yoga last week and I thought he was kidding (pun intended), but apparently it's a real thing. And popular (here's a video). How do they get those little goats to stand on people?]

Image via:

Banksy Painting Self-Destructs

Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby’s

[ed. Brilliant.]

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.

* * *

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

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

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

Out of Office Reply

Bill Watterson
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[ed. Taking a short vacation and will be back soon. Enjoy the archives. Update: Returning tomorrow (Oct. 6).]

Michelle Roberts
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Nuart 2018
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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:

Image: The Project Twins/Synergy

How Chefs Have Reinvented the Dishes They Envy Most

Image (and Scotch egg recipe): via (Bon Appétit)

Trigger
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Yuko Shimizu
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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.

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).]

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

[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.]