Thursday, October 11, 2018
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Portrait of a Campaign
The Problem
With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:
This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.
And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.
In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.
While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.
Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)
The Incumbent
The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.
With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".
Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.
As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.
The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.
If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)
The Voters
The voters are so unhappy!
Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.
When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.
To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.
There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]
With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:
I don't take corporate money, and I support universal health care. My opponent takes corporate PAC money, voted against the Affordable Care Act, and has refused to hold a town hall.These same polls show that the incumbent has less than 50% of the vote, and that a large proportion of voters has never heard of the challenger. Once the large group of undecided respondents hear a two-sentence message about the two candidates, they break decidedly for our challenger.
This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.
In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.
While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.
Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)
The Candidate
Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.
She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.
Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.
Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.
Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.
The Money
The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.
Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.
Call time kills the soul.
It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.
Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.
In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.
People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.
This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.
The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.
Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.
There is! And her opponent has found it.
Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.
She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.
Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.
Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.
Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.
The Money
The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.
Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.
Call time kills the soul.
It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.
Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.
In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.
People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.
This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.
The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.
Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.
There is! And her opponent has found it.
The Incumbent
The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.
With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".
Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.
As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.
The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.
If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)
The Voters
The voters are so unhappy!
Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.
When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.
To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.
There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]
DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities
DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities
"To present information in an unclassified format, we do not disclose details regarding weapon system vulnerabilities, which program offices we interviewed, or which cybersecurity assessments we reviewed. The examples we cite from cybersecurity assessments are unique to each weapon system and are not applicable to all weapon systems. Furthermore, cybersecurity assessment findings are as of a specific date, so vulnerabilities identified during system development may no longer exist when the system is fielded. In addition, we illustrated some concepts using fictitious depictions. In some cases, we were deliberately vague and excluded some details from examples to avoid identifying specific weapon systems. We also presented examples of publicly known attacks in sidebars to illustrate how poor cybersecurity can enable cyber attacks. DOD conducted a security review of the report and cleared it for public release. We will provide a classified briefing of our findings to Congress.
This is our first report specific to cybersecurity in the context of weapon systems acquisitions. For that reason, we did not look in depth at related issues in the context of weapon systems, such as the security of contractor facilities, so-called “Internet of Things” devices, microelectronics, contracting, and industrial control systems. In addition, we are not making recommendations in this report, but plan to continue evaluating key aspects of DOD’s weapon systems cybersecurity efforts in the future."
by GAO | Read more:
[ed. Full report in .pdf format here. See also: US Weapons Systems Are Easy Cyberattack Targets, New Report Finds. I suppose now we'll have to supplement DoD's 2018 $650 billion defense budget to fix cybersecurity issues that should have been secure from the get go (fyi: Dept. of Education budget in 2018: $59 billion. A 17 percent decrease from 2017).]
Projects I Wish I Had Time For
1. Everyone Is Lying Again: A blog dissecting how, in response to the majority of even slightly controversial or partisanship-evoking news stories, all “sides” (right, left, etc.) grossly misrepresent the facts and/or their scientific, historical, or cultural context. Probably one dissection per week, allowing time for substantial research for each post.
3. Evolving Sounds: Relatedly, I’ve long wanted to research, compose, and record a many-hour continuous piece of music that recapitulates the entire history of “Western music” (which is better documented than other traditions). The piece would begin with sections composed in accordance with scholarly guesses about how prehistoric music might have sounded, eventually transition into the earliest styles from recorded history, then evolve into styles covered in e.g. Burkholder’s History of Western Music, up to the present day. This is a pretty obvious idea and I’m upset that nobody has attempted it yet.
4. Everything is Awesome and We’re All Going to Die: This book would start off like a more thorough and epistemically scrupulous version of the empirical sections from Enlightenment Now, and would then proceed to explain in detail why global catastrophic risk is nevertheless increasing over time via Moore’s Law of Mad Science, inescapable asymmetry in the difficulty of creation vs. destruction, inadequate equilibria, and related phenomena.
by Luke Muehlhauser | Read more:
[ed. With respect to #3, see also: The King's Singers - Masterpiece (YouTube)]
2. The Story of Rock Music: This podcast would guide the listener through the history of rock music, playing extended clips of >10 tracks per episode and helping the listener hear exactly how different styles developed, split off from their roots, and recombined later. For example in one episode I might explain what a raga is and play an example clip, then explain what modal vs. chordal improvisation is and play contrasting clips, then explain what blues rock is and play an example clip, then explain what post-bop jazz is and play an example clip, and finally talk through (with example clips) how these forms were fused together in the classic Mike Bloomfield track “East-West,” one of the earliest examples of “raga rock.” Episodes would proceed in roughly chronological order, so that the listener could “hear” the evolution of music over time, as later episodes build on the stylistic evolutions described in past episodes.
3. Evolving Sounds: Relatedly, I’ve long wanted to research, compose, and record a many-hour continuous piece of music that recapitulates the entire history of “Western music” (which is better documented than other traditions). The piece would begin with sections composed in accordance with scholarly guesses about how prehistoric music might have sounded, eventually transition into the earliest styles from recorded history, then evolve into styles covered in e.g. Burkholder’s History of Western Music, up to the present day. This is a pretty obvious idea and I’m upset that nobody has attempted it yet.
4. Everything is Awesome and We’re All Going to Die: This book would start off like a more thorough and epistemically scrupulous version of the empirical sections from Enlightenment Now, and would then proceed to explain in detail why global catastrophic risk is nevertheless increasing over time via Moore’s Law of Mad Science, inescapable asymmetry in the difficulty of creation vs. destruction, inadequate equilibria, and related phenomena.
Partisan Polarization
Exposure to opposing views on social media increases partisan polarization. It’s not true that if people read the other side they would appreciate or like them more. I think this is probably related to everyone giving up on convincing the other side and focusing on radicalizing the base instead. If people were trying to convince you, listening to them would make you more convinced; if people are trying to radicalize your enemies, listening to them will make you more concerned. And here’s an article about people trying to do this right.
via: Slate Star Codex
Image: Bojack Horseman
[ed. See also: The partisan makeup of different occupations. Note the consistent pattern where professions that manipulate the physical world are conservative and professions that manipulate ideas are liberal (in a way that doesn’t seem to depend entirely on skills or salary).]
[ed. See also: The partisan makeup of different occupations. Note the consistent pattern where professions that manipulate the physical world are conservative and professions that manipulate ideas are liberal (in a way that doesn’t seem to depend entirely on skills or salary).]
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
How to Write About a Vanishing World
The losses on our human-dominated planet keep coming, and so, too, do the stories. These days, it’s not just species that are vanishing. Entire features of the earth are disappearing—thus, the latest batch of “witness-to” books, written by geologists.
Peter Wadhams, the author of “A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic” (Oxford), is the head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, at the University of Cambridge. He first visited the polar north in 1970, when, as an undergraduate, he got a job on a Canadian research vessel, the Hudson, which was attempting to circumnavigate the Americas. Although the Hudson was built for travel through sea ice, on the last leg of the journey it got stuck in the Northwest Passage and had to be rescued by an icebreaker. Evidently, Wadhams enjoyed the experience—in the stiff-upper-lip tradition of British adventurers, he’s largely mum on the topic of emotion—because he returned to northern Canada a few years later to work on his Ph.D. This involved flying over the ice cap in a sort of aeronautical jalopy—a Second World War-era DC-4 with the cockpit bubble of a Sabre fighter jet welded to the fuselage. The flights left from Gander, and Wadhams recalls a bar in town, called the Flyers’ Club, where a band played topless.
At the time, Wadhams imagined himself part of a glaciological tradition stretching back to the Napoleonic Wars. The idea was to map the extent of the Arctic sea ice and then, basically, forget about it. (Many died trying.) The ice cap’s size varied, expanding in winter, when the polar darkness descended, and then contracting in summer. But this cycle, like the seasons themselves, was supposed to be unchanging. The assumption, Wadhams writes, was that “everything in the ocean is constant.”
In the nineteen-eighties, satellites replaced scientists eyeballing the Arctic from DC-4s. The satellite data revealed that the ice was shrinking. By this point, the earliest climate models had been assembled, using I.B.M. punch cards, and they predicted that global warming would be felt first and foremost at the poles. In 1990, Wadhams compared surveys of the sea ice north of Greenland that had been conducted from British submarines, using upward-looking sonar. The comparison showed that the ice cap, in addition to contracting, was thinning; during the previous decade, its thickness had declined by fifteen per cent.
By the end of the summer of 2007, the ice cap was about half the size it had been at the start of the satellite era, and the Arctic sea ice had entered what an American scientist, Mark Serreze, has dubbed its “death spiral.” Today, a decade deeper into the spiral, older Arctic sea ice has mostly melted away. What’s left, in large part, is first-year ice, which forms over the winter and, since it’s thinner, is that much more prone to melt the following spring. The most recent climate models predict that within a few decades the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer. Based on his own observations, Wadhams believes that the time frame is more like the next few years. “It is clear that the summer Arctic sea ice does not have long to live,” he writes.
For his part, Serreze, who directs the National Snow and Ice Data Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder, has also written a farewell to ice. In “Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North” (Princeton), he relates that when he first started out in polar research, in the early eighties, he was taken with the idea of global cooling. “Deep down I was hoping for an ice age,” he confesses.
As the satellite and sonar images began to pile up, Serreze continued to hold out that hope. Perhaps, he theorized, the ice cap was shrinking due to a natural cycle that would eventually reverse. Years passed, the ice continued to melt, and Serreze came to favor fire. “The weight of evidence turned me,” he observes. “And then I turned hard.” He gives the perennial sea ice until 2030 or so. “That the Arctic Ocean will become free of sea ice in late summer and early autumn is a given,” he writes.
Both Wadhams and Serreze anticipate the loss will have disastrous and, as it were, snowballing consequences. Sea ice reflects sunlight, while open water absorbs it, so melting ice leads to further warming, which leads to more melt, and so on. (This past winter, parts of the Arctic saw temperatures of up to forty-five degrees above normal, even as parts of the United States and Europe were being buried under snow; some scientists believe the two phenomena are related, though others note that the link is, at this point, unproved.) Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat—another feedback loop. In the Arctic Ocean, vast stores of methane lie buried under frozen sediments. If these stores, too, are released, the resulting warming is likely to be catastrophic. “The risk of an Arctic seabed methane pulse is one of the greatest immediate risks facing the human race,” Wadhams writes.
“This is definitely disaster movie material” is how Serreze puts it.
[ed. See also: What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.]
Peter Wadhams, the author of “A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic” (Oxford), is the head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, at the University of Cambridge. He first visited the polar north in 1970, when, as an undergraduate, he got a job on a Canadian research vessel, the Hudson, which was attempting to circumnavigate the Americas. Although the Hudson was built for travel through sea ice, on the last leg of the journey it got stuck in the Northwest Passage and had to be rescued by an icebreaker. Evidently, Wadhams enjoyed the experience—in the stiff-upper-lip tradition of British adventurers, he’s largely mum on the topic of emotion—because he returned to northern Canada a few years later to work on his Ph.D. This involved flying over the ice cap in a sort of aeronautical jalopy—a Second World War-era DC-4 with the cockpit bubble of a Sabre fighter jet welded to the fuselage. The flights left from Gander, and Wadhams recalls a bar in town, called the Flyers’ Club, where a band played topless.
At the time, Wadhams imagined himself part of a glaciological tradition stretching back to the Napoleonic Wars. The idea was to map the extent of the Arctic sea ice and then, basically, forget about it. (Many died trying.) The ice cap’s size varied, expanding in winter, when the polar darkness descended, and then contracting in summer. But this cycle, like the seasons themselves, was supposed to be unchanging. The assumption, Wadhams writes, was that “everything in the ocean is constant.”In the nineteen-eighties, satellites replaced scientists eyeballing the Arctic from DC-4s. The satellite data revealed that the ice was shrinking. By this point, the earliest climate models had been assembled, using I.B.M. punch cards, and they predicted that global warming would be felt first and foremost at the poles. In 1990, Wadhams compared surveys of the sea ice north of Greenland that had been conducted from British submarines, using upward-looking sonar. The comparison showed that the ice cap, in addition to contracting, was thinning; during the previous decade, its thickness had declined by fifteen per cent.
By the end of the summer of 2007, the ice cap was about half the size it had been at the start of the satellite era, and the Arctic sea ice had entered what an American scientist, Mark Serreze, has dubbed its “death spiral.” Today, a decade deeper into the spiral, older Arctic sea ice has mostly melted away. What’s left, in large part, is first-year ice, which forms over the winter and, since it’s thinner, is that much more prone to melt the following spring. The most recent climate models predict that within a few decades the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer. Based on his own observations, Wadhams believes that the time frame is more like the next few years. “It is clear that the summer Arctic sea ice does not have long to live,” he writes.
For his part, Serreze, who directs the National Snow and Ice Data Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder, has also written a farewell to ice. In “Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North” (Princeton), he relates that when he first started out in polar research, in the early eighties, he was taken with the idea of global cooling. “Deep down I was hoping for an ice age,” he confesses.
As the satellite and sonar images began to pile up, Serreze continued to hold out that hope. Perhaps, he theorized, the ice cap was shrinking due to a natural cycle that would eventually reverse. Years passed, the ice continued to melt, and Serreze came to favor fire. “The weight of evidence turned me,” he observes. “And then I turned hard.” He gives the perennial sea ice until 2030 or so. “That the Arctic Ocean will become free of sea ice in late summer and early autumn is a given,” he writes.
Both Wadhams and Serreze anticipate the loss will have disastrous and, as it were, snowballing consequences. Sea ice reflects sunlight, while open water absorbs it, so melting ice leads to further warming, which leads to more melt, and so on. (This past winter, parts of the Arctic saw temperatures of up to forty-five degrees above normal, even as parts of the United States and Europe were being buried under snow; some scientists believe the two phenomena are related, though others note that the link is, at this point, unproved.) Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat—another feedback loop. In the Arctic Ocean, vast stores of methane lie buried under frozen sediments. If these stores, too, are released, the resulting warming is likely to be catastrophic. “The risk of an Arctic seabed methane pulse is one of the greatest immediate risks facing the human race,” Wadhams writes.
“This is definitely disaster movie material” is how Serreze puts it.
by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Emiliano Ponzi[ed. See also: What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.]
Murakami is Terrible Now
There is no way to put this nicely: Haruki Murakami is terrible now.
I say this as one of the novelist's biggest fans. For years, I was that person, the one who would exclaim wait, you haven't read Murakami!? and proceed to hand over a list of what to read and in what order (start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, don't neglect his short stories). But with the publication of his latest novel, Killing Commendatore, into English on Tuesday, I have to admit at last that Murakami is getting harder and harder to defend. At this point, it feels as if he is just filling in Murakami Bingo spaces at the neglect of actual engaging storytelling.
A perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murakami is one of the most beloved writers in the world, with his work published in more than 50 languages. He is the only author in translation who can pack midnight release parties in the United States. In his native Japan, Killing Commendatore got an eye-popping first-run of 1.3 million copies last year. More than being known for, say, his prose style or his richly plotted narratives, Murakami is beloved for the genre he has created, his own particular take on magical realism, recognizable by tropes like pasta, cats, an oppressive sense of loneliness, and secret worlds that coexist in or beside our own.
It is a formula that has worked well for him for decades although after finishing Killing Commendatore this weekend, I couldn't help but look back at Murakami's last three novels and wonder ... were they even any good? While Killing Commendatore's predecessors, 1Q84 (published in English in 2011) and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014), received generally positive reviews in the U.S., both were deeply flawed books: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a vague probing of the fallout of a false rape allegation, more interested in the impact on the male victim than the motivations of his female friend, and 1Q84 is an unwieldy door-stopper in desperate need of an editor. Where was the depth of Wind-Up Bird? Or the concision of A Wild Sheep Chase?
Killing Commendatore is at least the best of Murakami's most recent novels — it is coherent and not outwardly offensive — although it still succumbs to the author's worst tendencies. Modeled very roughly after The Great Gatsby, the novel follows an unnamed portrait painter during the nine months he is living in the mountains while separated from his wife. Yet over the course of 700 pages, you come to deeply feel Killing Commendatore's length; passages of exposition are redundant, and the excruciatingly slow build to action makes you wonder about Murakami's strategy of not having "any plan at all" when he begins a new book. What's more, the tropes that served as delightful flavoring in his earlier works begin to feel practically meme-like in their appearances, almost like mechanical inclusions by the author. Of 19 spaces on Grant Snider's "Haruki Murakami Bingo" board, I counted 16 in reading Killing Commendatore, including "weird sex," "dried-up well," and "unusual name." By the time a "secret passageway" was mentioned, I was practically rolling my eyes.
While Murakami has never been known for being a brilliant prose writer, on a sentence-by-sentence level Killing Commendatore is a sadly unimpressive effort: "Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within," the narrator reflects, although not very deeply. The mysterious Gatsby-like neighbor Menshiki is always smiling "faintly." Murakami uses variations of the simile "like a cat" 12 different times. Certain turns of phrase indicate the author still has a unique eye he can turn on the world — a night is as hushed "as if I were at the bottom of a deep sea," clouds are "like some wandering spirits from the past ... in search of lost memories" — but too often mornings are "chilly," coffee "as black as a moonless night," and silence "too quiet." (...)
Without 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Killing Commendatore might have just feel like a misstep in Murakami's career, a misguided effort to revisit the weird themes and images that helped make him a household name. But looking at the last decade of the author's career, it is hard to dismiss another terrible book as a fluke.
I say this as one of the novelist's biggest fans. For years, I was that person, the one who would exclaim wait, you haven't read Murakami!? and proceed to hand over a list of what to read and in what order (start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, don't neglect his short stories). But with the publication of his latest novel, Killing Commendatore, into English on Tuesday, I have to admit at last that Murakami is getting harder and harder to defend. At this point, it feels as if he is just filling in Murakami Bingo spaces at the neglect of actual engaging storytelling.
A perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murakami is one of the most beloved writers in the world, with his work published in more than 50 languages. He is the only author in translation who can pack midnight release parties in the United States. In his native Japan, Killing Commendatore got an eye-popping first-run of 1.3 million copies last year. More than being known for, say, his prose style or his richly plotted narratives, Murakami is beloved for the genre he has created, his own particular take on magical realism, recognizable by tropes like pasta, cats, an oppressive sense of loneliness, and secret worlds that coexist in or beside our own.It is a formula that has worked well for him for decades although after finishing Killing Commendatore this weekend, I couldn't help but look back at Murakami's last three novels and wonder ... were they even any good? While Killing Commendatore's predecessors, 1Q84 (published in English in 2011) and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014), received generally positive reviews in the U.S., both were deeply flawed books: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a vague probing of the fallout of a false rape allegation, more interested in the impact on the male victim than the motivations of his female friend, and 1Q84 is an unwieldy door-stopper in desperate need of an editor. Where was the depth of Wind-Up Bird? Or the concision of A Wild Sheep Chase?
Killing Commendatore is at least the best of Murakami's most recent novels — it is coherent and not outwardly offensive — although it still succumbs to the author's worst tendencies. Modeled very roughly after The Great Gatsby, the novel follows an unnamed portrait painter during the nine months he is living in the mountains while separated from his wife. Yet over the course of 700 pages, you come to deeply feel Killing Commendatore's length; passages of exposition are redundant, and the excruciatingly slow build to action makes you wonder about Murakami's strategy of not having "any plan at all" when he begins a new book. What's more, the tropes that served as delightful flavoring in his earlier works begin to feel practically meme-like in their appearances, almost like mechanical inclusions by the author. Of 19 spaces on Grant Snider's "Haruki Murakami Bingo" board, I counted 16 in reading Killing Commendatore, including "weird sex," "dried-up well," and "unusual name." By the time a "secret passageway" was mentioned, I was practically rolling my eyes.
While Murakami has never been known for being a brilliant prose writer, on a sentence-by-sentence level Killing Commendatore is a sadly unimpressive effort: "Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within," the narrator reflects, although not very deeply. The mysterious Gatsby-like neighbor Menshiki is always smiling "faintly." Murakami uses variations of the simile "like a cat" 12 different times. Certain turns of phrase indicate the author still has a unique eye he can turn on the world — a night is as hushed "as if I were at the bottom of a deep sea," clouds are "like some wandering spirits from the past ... in search of lost memories" — but too often mornings are "chilly," coffee "as black as a moonless night," and silence "too quiet." (...)
Without 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Killing Commendatore might have just feel like a misstep in Murakami's career, a misguided effort to revisit the weird themes and images that helped make him a household name. But looking at the last decade of the author's career, it is hard to dismiss another terrible book as a fluke.
by Jeva Lange, The Week | Read more:
Image: Knopf
[ed. I'd agree, although I actually enjoyed 1Q84 (except for all the Little People and Air Chyrsalis nonsense). I'd recommend Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, and maybe Norwegian Wood. Everything else just seems repetitive (and the surrealism grating). See also: Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review (The Guardian).]
The Distinction Between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Pleasures
Parents often say that they don’t mind what their children do in life just as long as they are happy. Happiness and pleasure are almost universally seen as among the most precious human goods; only the most curmudgeonly would question whether benign enjoyment is anything other than a good thing. Disagreement soon creeps in, however, if you ask whether some forms of pleasure are better than others. Does it matter whether our pleasures are spiritual or carnal, intellectual or stupid? Or are all pleasures pretty much the same?
Utilitarianism, as a moral philosophy, puts pleasure at the centre of its concerns, arguing that actions are right to the extent that they increase happiness and decrease suffering, wrong to the extent that they cause the opposite. Yet even the early Utilitarians couldn’t agree about whether pleasures should be ranked. Jeremy Bentham believed that all sources of pleasure are of equal quality. ‘Prejudice apart,’ he wrote in The Rationale of Reward (1825), ‘the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.’ His protégé John Stuart Mill disagreed, arguing in Utilitarianism (1863) that: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’
Mill argued for a distinction between ‘higher’ and lower pleasures. His distinction is difficult to pin down, but it more or less tracks the distinction between capacities thought to be unique to humans and those we share with other animals. Higher pleasures depend on distinctively human capacities, which have a more complex cognitive element, requiring abilities such as rational thought, self-awareness or language use. Lower pleasures, in contrast, require mere sentience. Humans and other animals alike enjoy basking in the sun, eating something tasty or having sex. Only humans engage in art, philosophy and so on.
Mill was certainly not the first to make this distinction. Aristotle among others thought that the senses of touch and taste were ‘servile and brutish’; the pleasures of eating were ‘as brutes also share in’ and so less valuable than those that used the more developed human mind. Yet many would continue to side with Bentham, arguing that we are really not so intellectual and high-minded as all that, and we might as well accept ourselves for the brutes that we are, shaped by biochemistry and animal drives.
The difficulty with resolving this disagreement about the kinds of pleasure is not that we struggle to agree on the right answer. It’s that we’re asking the wrong question. The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the intellectual and bodily, the human and the animal, which is no longer tenable. These days, few of us are card-carrying dualists who believe that we are made of immaterial minds and material bodies. We have plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of biochemistry and hormones in all that we do and think. Nonetheless, dualistic assumptions still inform our thinking. So, what happens if we take seriously the idea that the physical and the mental are inseparable, that we are fully embodied beings? What would it mean for our ideas about pleasure?
The dining table is a good place to start. Along with sex, food is usually considered to be the quintessential lower pleasure. All animals eat, using the senses of smell and taste. It doesn’t require any complex cognition to conclude that something is delicious. Philosophers have generally assumed that to take pleasure in eating is simply to sate a primitive desire. So, for instance, Plato believed that cookery could never be a form of art, because it ‘never regards either the nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes herself, but goes straight to her end’.
Plato and his successors, however, failed to appreciate something that the French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin captured pithily in The Physiology of Taste (1825): ‘Animals feed; man eats; only the man of intellect knows how to eat.’ Brillat-Savarin drew a distinction between mere animal feeding, which is the ingestion of food as fuel, and human eating, which can and should engage more than just our most basic carnal desires. Eating is a complex act. Simply gathering the ingredients takes thought, since what we buy not only requires planning but affects the wellbeing of growers, producers, animals and the planet. Cooking involves knowledge of ingredients, the application of skills, the balancing of different flavours and textures, considerations of nutrition, care for the ordering of courses or the place of the dish in the rhythm of the day. Eating, at its best, brings all these things together, adding an attentive aesthetic appreciation of the end result.
Eating illustrates how the difference between higher and lower pleasures is not what you enjoy but how you enjoy it. Wolfing down your food like a pig at a trough is a lower kind of pleasure. Preparing and eating it using the powers of reflection and attention that only a human being possesses turns it into a higher pleasure. This form of higher pleasure need not be intellectual in the academic sense. An accomplished chef might be judging the balance of flavours and textures intuitively; a home cook might simply be thinking about what his guests are most likely to enjoy. What makes the pleasure higher is that it engages our more complex human abilities. It expresses more than just the brute desire to satisfy a craving.
For every pleasure, it should not be difficult to see that the how matters more than the what. Furthermore, the highest pleasures do not merely use our distinctively human capacities, they use them for a valuable end. Someone who goes to the opera to be seen in a new dress is not experiencing the higher pleasures of music but indulging the lower pleasures of vanity. Someone who reads Dr Seuss with a careful ear for language gets a higher pleasure than someone who mechanically recites The Waste Land (1922) without any understanding of what T S Eliot was doing.
by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Ramen heaven. From Juzo Itami’s 1985 noodle-western Tampopo. Courtesy Criterion Collection
Utilitarianism, as a moral philosophy, puts pleasure at the centre of its concerns, arguing that actions are right to the extent that they increase happiness and decrease suffering, wrong to the extent that they cause the opposite. Yet even the early Utilitarians couldn’t agree about whether pleasures should be ranked. Jeremy Bentham believed that all sources of pleasure are of equal quality. ‘Prejudice apart,’ he wrote in The Rationale of Reward (1825), ‘the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.’ His protégé John Stuart Mill disagreed, arguing in Utilitarianism (1863) that: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’
Mill argued for a distinction between ‘higher’ and lower pleasures. His distinction is difficult to pin down, but it more or less tracks the distinction between capacities thought to be unique to humans and those we share with other animals. Higher pleasures depend on distinctively human capacities, which have a more complex cognitive element, requiring abilities such as rational thought, self-awareness or language use. Lower pleasures, in contrast, require mere sentience. Humans and other animals alike enjoy basking in the sun, eating something tasty or having sex. Only humans engage in art, philosophy and so on.
Mill was certainly not the first to make this distinction. Aristotle among others thought that the senses of touch and taste were ‘servile and brutish’; the pleasures of eating were ‘as brutes also share in’ and so less valuable than those that used the more developed human mind. Yet many would continue to side with Bentham, arguing that we are really not so intellectual and high-minded as all that, and we might as well accept ourselves for the brutes that we are, shaped by biochemistry and animal drives.The difficulty with resolving this disagreement about the kinds of pleasure is not that we struggle to agree on the right answer. It’s that we’re asking the wrong question. The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the intellectual and bodily, the human and the animal, which is no longer tenable. These days, few of us are card-carrying dualists who believe that we are made of immaterial minds and material bodies. We have plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of biochemistry and hormones in all that we do and think. Nonetheless, dualistic assumptions still inform our thinking. So, what happens if we take seriously the idea that the physical and the mental are inseparable, that we are fully embodied beings? What would it mean for our ideas about pleasure?
The dining table is a good place to start. Along with sex, food is usually considered to be the quintessential lower pleasure. All animals eat, using the senses of smell and taste. It doesn’t require any complex cognition to conclude that something is delicious. Philosophers have generally assumed that to take pleasure in eating is simply to sate a primitive desire. So, for instance, Plato believed that cookery could never be a form of art, because it ‘never regards either the nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes herself, but goes straight to her end’.
Plato and his successors, however, failed to appreciate something that the French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin captured pithily in The Physiology of Taste (1825): ‘Animals feed; man eats; only the man of intellect knows how to eat.’ Brillat-Savarin drew a distinction between mere animal feeding, which is the ingestion of food as fuel, and human eating, which can and should engage more than just our most basic carnal desires. Eating is a complex act. Simply gathering the ingredients takes thought, since what we buy not only requires planning but affects the wellbeing of growers, producers, animals and the planet. Cooking involves knowledge of ingredients, the application of skills, the balancing of different flavours and textures, considerations of nutrition, care for the ordering of courses or the place of the dish in the rhythm of the day. Eating, at its best, brings all these things together, adding an attentive aesthetic appreciation of the end result.
Eating illustrates how the difference between higher and lower pleasures is not what you enjoy but how you enjoy it. Wolfing down your food like a pig at a trough is a lower kind of pleasure. Preparing and eating it using the powers of reflection and attention that only a human being possesses turns it into a higher pleasure. This form of higher pleasure need not be intellectual in the academic sense. An accomplished chef might be judging the balance of flavours and textures intuitively; a home cook might simply be thinking about what his guests are most likely to enjoy. What makes the pleasure higher is that it engages our more complex human abilities. It expresses more than just the brute desire to satisfy a craving.
For every pleasure, it should not be difficult to see that the how matters more than the what. Furthermore, the highest pleasures do not merely use our distinctively human capacities, they use them for a valuable end. Someone who goes to the opera to be seen in a new dress is not experiencing the higher pleasures of music but indulging the lower pleasures of vanity. Someone who reads Dr Seuss with a careful ear for language gets a higher pleasure than someone who mechanically recites The Waste Land (1922) without any understanding of what T S Eliot was doing.
by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Ramen heaven. From Juzo Itami’s 1985 noodle-western Tampopo. Courtesy Criterion Collection
The Story of My Tits
The Story of My Tits, Jennifer Hayden (click on the preview)
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: The New York Times, NPR, Library Journal, Amazon, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and many more! (...)
"The Story of My Tits details three different women’s battle with breast cancer… and all the cultural and emotional weight that gets carried by a bra. What leavens the story is Hayden’s drawing, packed with wiggly detail, and her voice, irreverent and blunt... it’s a voice that faces heartbreak head-on and comes out swinging." — The Village Voice
"A living, breathing monument to the ways in which illness doesn’t just rewrite your life but allows you, in some fundamental way, to begin seeing, writing, and rewriting the shape and pattern of your own story." — Public Books
When Jennifer Hayden was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 43, she realized that her tits told a story. Across a lifetime, they’d held so many meanings: hope and fear, pride and embarrassment, life and death. And then they were gone.
Now, their story has become a way of understanding her story: a journey from the innocence of youth to the chaos of adulthood, through her mother’s mastectomy, her father’s mistress, her husband’s music, and the endlessly evolving definition of family.
As cancer strikes three different lives, some relationships crumble while others emerge even stronger, and this sarcastic child of the ‘70s finally finds a goddess she can believe in.
For everyone who’s faced cancer personally, or watched a loved one fight that battle, Hayden’s story is a much-needed breath of fresh air, an irresistible blend of sweetness and skepticism. Rich with both symbolism & humor, The Story of My Tits will leave you laughing, weeping, and feeling grateful for every day. -- a 352-page softcover graphic novel with French flaps (B&W Interiors), 8” x 8”
Joni Mitchell
“But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories.
“You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.” — Joni Mitchell
via:
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?
[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.]
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
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.]
BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up
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.
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.]
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