Sunday, February 3, 2019
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.
I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-of-center magazine (that’s left-of-center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. As Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly can testify, it doesn’t take a thousand words, either. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger McCarthyite blacklisting. When I’ve floated this anxiety past the odd friend and colleague, their universal response has been a sorrowful shake of the head. Repeatedly I hear, “You’re exactly the sort of person this happens to.”
But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in the United Kingdom, my literary agent, my publishers in translation, and HarperCollins worldwide would decide they could no longer afford association with a pariah. My current manuscript wouldn’t see print, nor would any future projects I’m foolish enough to bother to bash out. Journalistic opportunities would dry up. Yet what I most dread about this bleak scenario is my thirteen published titles suddenly becoming unavailable—both online (gosh, would piracy sites be morally fastidious, too?) and in shops.
Because that’s the direction we’re traveling in. For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-bound to demolish the best about them as well. (...)
Back in the day when your mother spotting your name in the newspaper was mortifying, sheer social embarrassment was punishment enough. But in the rush to judgment of the modern shaming mill, disgrace is no longer sufficient. In numerous instances during the #MeToo scandals, accusation has stood in for due process, and criminal offenses like rape (Cosby and Weinstein) and unwelcome advances (Keillor) have been thrown indiscriminately into the same basket. Thus the career consequences of violating the law and violating subjective norms of “appropriateness” have too often been identical. Culprits are sentenced to cultural erasure. (...)
This erasure impulse hails primarily from terror: that the roving black cloud of calumny will move on to any individual or institution complicit in distributing a vilified artist’s work. If you join in denouncing whoever’s got it in the neck this week, presumably they won’t come for you. Severing ties even to an artist’s output also provides cultural middlemen a precious opportunity for public moral posturing, to the benefit of the brand. Erasure is also a form of rewriting history—a popular impulse of late. In this touched-up version of events, we were never taken in by these disgusting specimens. In the historical rewrite, there was always something fishy about Bill Cosby; he was never America’s dad.
Only a restricted range of misbehaviors qualifies one for being disappeared: any perceived intolerance of minorities, and any delinquency to do with sex. Other misdeeds are less likely to be career ending: fraud, tax evasion, or drug possession, say. Winona Ryder recovered from being caught shoplifting. Domestic violence will get you into trouble, but other outbursts of violence are survivable. Yet there’s no sensible reason that only bigotry and sexual misconduct should doom artists to cultural purdah. The question is whether we condition our consumption of what artists produce on their moral purity.
by Lionel Shrivner, Harper's | Read more:
I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-of-center magazine (that’s left-of-center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. As Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly can testify, it doesn’t take a thousand words, either. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger McCarthyite blacklisting. When I’ve floated this anxiety past the odd friend and colleague, their universal response has been a sorrowful shake of the head. Repeatedly I hear, “You’re exactly the sort of person this happens to.”
But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in the United Kingdom, my literary agent, my publishers in translation, and HarperCollins worldwide would decide they could no longer afford association with a pariah. My current manuscript wouldn’t see print, nor would any future projects I’m foolish enough to bother to bash out. Journalistic opportunities would dry up. Yet what I most dread about this bleak scenario is my thirteen published titles suddenly becoming unavailable—both online (gosh, would piracy sites be morally fastidious, too?) and in shops.
Because that’s the direction we’re traveling in. For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-bound to demolish the best about them as well. (...)
Back in the day when your mother spotting your name in the newspaper was mortifying, sheer social embarrassment was punishment enough. But in the rush to judgment of the modern shaming mill, disgrace is no longer sufficient. In numerous instances during the #MeToo scandals, accusation has stood in for due process, and criminal offenses like rape (Cosby and Weinstein) and unwelcome advances (Keillor) have been thrown indiscriminately into the same basket. Thus the career consequences of violating the law and violating subjective norms of “appropriateness” have too often been identical. Culprits are sentenced to cultural erasure. (...)
This erasure impulse hails primarily from terror: that the roving black cloud of calumny will move on to any individual or institution complicit in distributing a vilified artist’s work. If you join in denouncing whoever’s got it in the neck this week, presumably they won’t come for you. Severing ties even to an artist’s output also provides cultural middlemen a precious opportunity for public moral posturing, to the benefit of the brand. Erasure is also a form of rewriting history—a popular impulse of late. In this touched-up version of events, we were never taken in by these disgusting specimens. In the historical rewrite, there was always something fishy about Bill Cosby; he was never America’s dad.
Only a restricted range of misbehaviors qualifies one for being disappeared: any perceived intolerance of minorities, and any delinquency to do with sex. Other misdeeds are less likely to be career ending: fraud, tax evasion, or drug possession, say. Winona Ryder recovered from being caught shoplifting. Domestic violence will get you into trouble, but other outbursts of violence are survivable. Yet there’s no sensible reason that only bigotry and sexual misconduct should doom artists to cultural purdah. The question is whether we condition our consumption of what artists produce on their moral purity.
by Lionel Shrivner, Harper's | Read more:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It’s hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff’s, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who’ve made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way.
An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a global system designed to violate you as a revenue stream. “The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information,” Zuboff writes. “Whether you are complaining about your acne or engaging in political debate on Facebook, searching for a recipe or sensitive health information on Google, ordering laundry soap or taking photos of your nine-year-old, smiling or thinking angry thoughts, watching TV or doing wheelies in the parking lot, all of it is raw material for this burgeoning text.”
Tech’s privacy scandals, which seem to appear with increasing frequency both in private industry and in government, aren’t isolated incidents, but rather brief glimpses at an economic and social logic that’s overtaken the planet while we were enjoying Gmail and Instagram. The cliched refrain that if you’re “not paying for a product, you are the product”? Too weak, says Zuboff. You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest bidder so that this future can be altered. “Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends,” writes Zuboff. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
Zuboff recently took a moment to walk me through the implications of her urgent and crucial book. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
I was hoping you could say something about whatever semantic games Facebook and other similar data brokers are doing when they say they don’t sell data.
I remember sitting at my desk in my study early in 2012, and I was listening to a speech that [Google’s then-Executive Chair] Eric Schmidt gave somewhere. He was bragging about how privacy conscious Google is, and he said, “We don’t sell your data.” I got on the phone and started calling these various data scientists that I know and saying, “How can Eric Schmidt say we don’t sell your data, in public, knowing that it’s recorded? How does he get away with that?” It’s exactly the question I was trying to answer at the beginning of all this.
Let’s say you’re browsing, or you’re on Facebook putting stuff in a post. They’re not taking your words and going into some marketplace and selling your words. Those words, or if they’ve got you walking across the park or whatever, that’s the raw material. They’re just secretly scraping your private experience as raw material, and they’re stockpiling that raw material, constantly flowing through the pipes. They sell prediction products into a new marketplace. What are those guys really buying? They’re buying predictions of what you’re gonna do. There are a lot of businesses that want to know what you’re going to do, and they’re willing to pay for those predictions. That’s how they get away with saying, “We’re not selling your personal information.” That’s how they get away also with saying, as in the case of [recently implemented European privacy law] GDPR, “Yeah, you can have access to your data.” Because the data they’re going to give you access to is the data you already gave them. They’re not giving you access to everything that happens when the raw material goes into the sausage machine, to the prediction products.
Do you see that as substantively different than selling the raw material?
Why would they sell the raw material? Without the raw material, they’ve got nothing. They don’t want to sell raw material, they want to collect all of the raw material on earth and have it as proprietary. They sell the value added on the raw material.
It seems like what they’re actually selling is way more problematic and way more valuable.
That’s the whole point. Now we have markets of business customers that are selling and buying predictions of human futures. I believe in the values of human freedom and human autonomy as the necessary elements of a democratic society. As the competition of these prediction products heats up, it’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives, in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers. That’s where they’re making their money. These are bald-faced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy, what I call the “right to the future tense.” The very idea that I can decide what I want my future to be and design the actions that get me from here to there, that’s the very material essence of the idea of free will.
I write about the Senate committee back in the ’70s that reviewed behavioral modification from the point of view of federal funding, and found behavioral mod a reprehensible threat to the values of human autonomy and democracy. And here we are, these years later, like, La-di-da, please pass the salt.This thing is growing all around us, this new means of behavioral modification, under the auspices of private capital, without constitutional protections, done in secret, specifically designed to keep us ignorant of its operations.
by Sam Biddle, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Public Affairs Books
[ed. See also: Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers says confidential document. (The Interecpt)]
An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a global system designed to violate you as a revenue stream. “The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information,” Zuboff writes. “Whether you are complaining about your acne or engaging in political debate on Facebook, searching for a recipe or sensitive health information on Google, ordering laundry soap or taking photos of your nine-year-old, smiling or thinking angry thoughts, watching TV or doing wheelies in the parking lot, all of it is raw material for this burgeoning text.”Tech’s privacy scandals, which seem to appear with increasing frequency both in private industry and in government, aren’t isolated incidents, but rather brief glimpses at an economic and social logic that’s overtaken the planet while we were enjoying Gmail and Instagram. The cliched refrain that if you’re “not paying for a product, you are the product”? Too weak, says Zuboff. You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest bidder so that this future can be altered. “Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends,” writes Zuboff. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
Zuboff recently took a moment to walk me through the implications of her urgent and crucial book. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
I was hoping you could say something about whatever semantic games Facebook and other similar data brokers are doing when they say they don’t sell data.
I remember sitting at my desk in my study early in 2012, and I was listening to a speech that [Google’s then-Executive Chair] Eric Schmidt gave somewhere. He was bragging about how privacy conscious Google is, and he said, “We don’t sell your data.” I got on the phone and started calling these various data scientists that I know and saying, “How can Eric Schmidt say we don’t sell your data, in public, knowing that it’s recorded? How does he get away with that?” It’s exactly the question I was trying to answer at the beginning of all this.
Let’s say you’re browsing, or you’re on Facebook putting stuff in a post. They’re not taking your words and going into some marketplace and selling your words. Those words, or if they’ve got you walking across the park or whatever, that’s the raw material. They’re just secretly scraping your private experience as raw material, and they’re stockpiling that raw material, constantly flowing through the pipes. They sell prediction products into a new marketplace. What are those guys really buying? They’re buying predictions of what you’re gonna do. There are a lot of businesses that want to know what you’re going to do, and they’re willing to pay for those predictions. That’s how they get away with saying, “We’re not selling your personal information.” That’s how they get away also with saying, as in the case of [recently implemented European privacy law] GDPR, “Yeah, you can have access to your data.” Because the data they’re going to give you access to is the data you already gave them. They’re not giving you access to everything that happens when the raw material goes into the sausage machine, to the prediction products.
Do you see that as substantively different than selling the raw material?
Why would they sell the raw material? Without the raw material, they’ve got nothing. They don’t want to sell raw material, they want to collect all of the raw material on earth and have it as proprietary. They sell the value added on the raw material.
It seems like what they’re actually selling is way more problematic and way more valuable.
That’s the whole point. Now we have markets of business customers that are selling and buying predictions of human futures. I believe in the values of human freedom and human autonomy as the necessary elements of a democratic society. As the competition of these prediction products heats up, it’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives, in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers. That’s where they’re making their money. These are bald-faced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy, what I call the “right to the future tense.” The very idea that I can decide what I want my future to be and design the actions that get me from here to there, that’s the very material essence of the idea of free will.
I write about the Senate committee back in the ’70s that reviewed behavioral modification from the point of view of federal funding, and found behavioral mod a reprehensible threat to the values of human autonomy and democracy. And here we are, these years later, like, La-di-da, please pass the salt.This thing is growing all around us, this new means of behavioral modification, under the auspices of private capital, without constitutional protections, done in secret, specifically designed to keep us ignorant of its operations.
by Sam Biddle, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Public Affairs Books
[ed. See also: Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers says confidential document. (The Interecpt)]
Saturday, February 2, 2019
The Ugly Truth of Stadium Bathrooms
Inside a women's restroom on the southwest concourse of Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Scott Jenkins, the stadium's general manager, reaches down and, without hesitating, places his right hand on the floor. Uric acid, he says -- you know, the corrosive compound in our urine that often gets spilled by the gallon inside stadium bathrooms just like this one -- can eat through regular epoxy-based paint in practically no time at all. Which is why, before the $1.6 billion MBS opened in 2017, Jenkins made sure every one of his bathroom floors was coated in the shiny, space-age, dual-system polymer under his fingertips right now. It's called MMA, or methyl methacrylate, and, judging by Jenkins' reaction, this is the first time anyone's ever bothered to ask about it. "Oh, I'm geeking out right now," he laughs. "I love potty talk."
When it comes to the home of Super Bowl LIII and the taboo, bizarre but often revealing world of stadium bathrooms, well, there's quite a lot to discuss.
In Atlanta, most visitors want to know more about the flower-petal retractable roof, the 360-degree, 1,100-foot halo video screen or the 1,260 beer taps. Nobody ever discusses the building's 30 percent increase over the Georgia Dome in female toilets (22 percent for the men), the swan-neck, stainless steel hands-free faucets that actually match the building's architecture or the drum-sized JBL ceiling speakers that give the toilets better sound than most of the nightclubs in Buckhead. It's a shame, really, since the ugly (and, yes, slightly gross) truth of the matter is that the stadium bathrooms will probably end up having a much greater impact on the overall fan experience at the Super Bowl, an event often plagued by ridiculously long lines at the loo.
"You add a restaurant or a walkway feature to the stadium, some people will use it, but everyone is going to use the restroom," Jenkins says. "So the functionality, the quantity, the aesthetics of your bathrooms is critical. It seems unremarkable to most people, but, trust me, you invite 70,000 people to your house and you get the bathrooms wrong -- you've got a huge problem."
Just ask the folks in Minneapolis. At the Super Bowl, where crowds produce -- wait for it -- about 8,000 gallons of urine and where more wastewater (nearly a million gallons) is used than what flows over Niagara Falls every second, the bathrooms are often a crowded, disgusting, leaky time bomb. Horrific conditions and outrageous lines at the bathroom have become as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as lame commercials and Bill Belichick hoodies. "The restroom experience will make or break a fan's experience, especially at the Super Bowl," says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois and a board member of the American Restroom Association. "And, more often than not, my guess is it makes it more unpleasant."
Sure enough: During Super Bowl LII, even at the brand new billion-dollar U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, a building equipped with 979 toilets, while most female fans breezed in and out of the bathrooms, lines for the men's rooms snaked all the way across the concourse. The long waits meant male fans who spent upward of 30 minutes in line and paid $5,000 for a ticket -- the going rate on the street -- were essentially forced to pay $1,000 to pee. After decades of subtle but powerful gender discrimination in this part of stadiums, building codes now require teams to provide at least a 2-to-1 female-to-male toilet ratio. Which means, if sociologists are right, and public restrooms do, in fact, reflect our cultural values, then the contrast in bathroom lines at last year's Super Bowl might have also signaled a seismic shift in the evolving demographics, and power dynamics, of sports fandom.
And you thought stadium bathrooms were just a place to get rid of all that beer. Think again.
by David Fleming, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Edmund D. Fountain
When it comes to the home of Super Bowl LIII and the taboo, bizarre but often revealing world of stadium bathrooms, well, there's quite a lot to discuss.In Atlanta, most visitors want to know more about the flower-petal retractable roof, the 360-degree, 1,100-foot halo video screen or the 1,260 beer taps. Nobody ever discusses the building's 30 percent increase over the Georgia Dome in female toilets (22 percent for the men), the swan-neck, stainless steel hands-free faucets that actually match the building's architecture or the drum-sized JBL ceiling speakers that give the toilets better sound than most of the nightclubs in Buckhead. It's a shame, really, since the ugly (and, yes, slightly gross) truth of the matter is that the stadium bathrooms will probably end up having a much greater impact on the overall fan experience at the Super Bowl, an event often plagued by ridiculously long lines at the loo.
"You add a restaurant or a walkway feature to the stadium, some people will use it, but everyone is going to use the restroom," Jenkins says. "So the functionality, the quantity, the aesthetics of your bathrooms is critical. It seems unremarkable to most people, but, trust me, you invite 70,000 people to your house and you get the bathrooms wrong -- you've got a huge problem."
Just ask the folks in Minneapolis. At the Super Bowl, where crowds produce -- wait for it -- about 8,000 gallons of urine and where more wastewater (nearly a million gallons) is used than what flows over Niagara Falls every second, the bathrooms are often a crowded, disgusting, leaky time bomb. Horrific conditions and outrageous lines at the bathroom have become as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as lame commercials and Bill Belichick hoodies. "The restroom experience will make or break a fan's experience, especially at the Super Bowl," says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois and a board member of the American Restroom Association. "And, more often than not, my guess is it makes it more unpleasant."
Sure enough: During Super Bowl LII, even at the brand new billion-dollar U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, a building equipped with 979 toilets, while most female fans breezed in and out of the bathrooms, lines for the men's rooms snaked all the way across the concourse. The long waits meant male fans who spent upward of 30 minutes in line and paid $5,000 for a ticket -- the going rate on the street -- were essentially forced to pay $1,000 to pee. After decades of subtle but powerful gender discrimination in this part of stadiums, building codes now require teams to provide at least a 2-to-1 female-to-male toilet ratio. Which means, if sociologists are right, and public restrooms do, in fact, reflect our cultural values, then the contrast in bathroom lines at last year's Super Bowl might have also signaled a seismic shift in the evolving demographics, and power dynamics, of sports fandom.
And you thought stadium bathrooms were just a place to get rid of all that beer. Think again.
by David Fleming, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Edmund D. Fountain
Friday, February 1, 2019
About Saving Capitalism
“This is about saving capitalism,”
If so its not the capitalism that most contemporary capitalists recognise.
Sure there was the post WWII golden age but that had more to do with the class and social solidarity established within nations and between the Western allies in the face of a common enemy and the steadily rising wages for the working and middle class arising out of the economic boom created in America's centralised and socialised wartime economy.
The US quickly realised that this could not last without viable trading partners and set about rebuilding the two most effective economies it could find, those of the erstwhile enemy: Japan and Germany.
But in establishing the new world economic order at Bretton Woods the American delegation steamrolled the British and John Maynard Keynes in the name of anti-communism (with a liberal dose of unenlightened self-interest) and sowed the seeds of the current crisis by promoting the hidden hand of markets at the expense of globally agreed regulation to mediate human society.
Fast forward to the 1980s and the victory of the Neoliberals led by Milton Friedman and his fellow Mont Pellerin Society fanatics (who had worked so hard to assume the commanding heights) and the doomed future of capitalism was sealed.
Ever since Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society and Ronald Reagan told us that government was the problem not the solution to our problems, the Davos Emperors and the current perversion of capitalism was inevitable.
To 'fix' capitalism, the damage caused by the last 40 years of neoclassical and neoliberal economic thought must be reversed.
Thorlar1
[ed. Amazingly concise summary of post-war economics (from the comments section of): 'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite (The Guardian)]
If so its not the capitalism that most contemporary capitalists recognise.
Sure there was the post WWII golden age but that had more to do with the class and social solidarity established within nations and between the Western allies in the face of a common enemy and the steadily rising wages for the working and middle class arising out of the economic boom created in America's centralised and socialised wartime economy.
The US quickly realised that this could not last without viable trading partners and set about rebuilding the two most effective economies it could find, those of the erstwhile enemy: Japan and Germany.
But in establishing the new world economic order at Bretton Woods the American delegation steamrolled the British and John Maynard Keynes in the name of anti-communism (with a liberal dose of unenlightened self-interest) and sowed the seeds of the current crisis by promoting the hidden hand of markets at the expense of globally agreed regulation to mediate human society.
Fast forward to the 1980s and the victory of the Neoliberals led by Milton Friedman and his fellow Mont Pellerin Society fanatics (who had worked so hard to assume the commanding heights) and the doomed future of capitalism was sealed.
Ever since Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society and Ronald Reagan told us that government was the problem not the solution to our problems, the Davos Emperors and the current perversion of capitalism was inevitable.
To 'fix' capitalism, the damage caused by the last 40 years of neoclassical and neoliberal economic thought must be reversed.
Thorlar1
[ed. Amazingly concise summary of post-war economics (from the comments section of): 'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite (The Guardian)]
McKinsey & Company: Capital's Willing Executioners
To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are Illuminati, Lizard People, or “globalists.” They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.
The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide. It has acted as a catalyst and accelerant to every trend in the world economy: firm consolidation, the rise of advertising, runaway executive compensation, globalization, automation, and corporate restructuring and strategy.
I came into my job as a McKinsey consultant hoping to change the world from the inside, believing that the best way to make progress is through influencing those who control the levers of power. Instead of being a force for good, I found myself party to the most damaging forces affecting the world: the resurgence of authoritarianism and the continued creep of markets into all parts of life.
Your views of McKinsey’s impact on the world will be largely determined by your views on capitalism’s impact on the world, for few firms have made a greater impact on the prevailing economic system. If you believe, as I once did, that capitalism is the least bad system devised so far, that its worst excesses can be reined in through effective regulation, that it has been the largest engine for human progress in human history, then McKinsey is a Good Thing. As missionaries for capital, it has helped spread the Good Word far and wide, making the world more productive and efficient as a result.
If, however, you believe that, whatever capitalism’s role in history, its continued practice poses an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over, then the firm’s role is that of a co-conspirator to a crime in which we are all victims. McKinsey is capitalism distilled. It is global, mobile, flexible, and unabashedly pro-market and pro-management. The firm has an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are. Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo. And it is through this claim that the firm attracts thousands of “the best and the brightest” away from careers that actually serve the public.
“The firm does execution, not policy.” I remember the phrase vividly. We were on a conference call with the entire client-service team, including senior leadership. Trump had just begun his term, and the direction of our client, a federal agency, had markedly but predictably shifted. Our team of mostly young do-gooders were concerned about the role we were playing to enable this shift. We were up-in-arms! Well, as up-in-arms as overachieving Ivy League graduates get. To quell dissent, the leader reassured us: We only do execution, not policy.
This categorical claim was meant to assuage our fears. We weren’t the ones steering the ship towards the cliffs, we were merely tasked with keeping the ship afloat until it reached its destination.
But politics touches all things. When the direction of an agency is set by the president, helping execute on that direction means participating in politics. Had McKinsey been as global in the 1940s, the “no policy” line of reasoning would not have prohibited them from helping Bayer optimize its production of Zyklon B, adding a grim double meaning to the partner’s promise to only focus on execution.
How did things turn out this way? McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against. The firm hires from top universities and many of its consultants have graduate degrees, both strong predictors of liberal political tendencies. McKinsey is at the top of its field, affording it the unique opportunity to turn down lucrative work that other firms cannot. The firm’s 14 values serve as a gold standard for professional services firms and are actually discussed and largely adhered to.
The best explanation is structural. McKinsey’s governing model, when compared to other firms of its size and age, is anarchy. The Managing Director (CEO equivalent) has surprisingly little ability to control who the firm serves (said a partner about the Managing Director, “you are definitely not in charge”). McKinsey remains the world’s largest partnership, and partners rule. The general rule of thumb is that if a partner can staff a team, the firm will do the work. If associates don’t want to work with a tobacco company or a defense contractor, they don’t have to. As a result, only a small portion of the consultants need to buy into a client relationship for McKinsey to do work with them. What this means in practice is that the firm doesn’t work with North Korea, but that’s about it.
McKinsey has grown to the point that it is taking on work that prior incarnations of the firm would have turned down due to the political risk involved. To keep lavishing its partners with multimillion dollar annual compensation packages, the firm needs to sustain double digits year over year growth. In a world that’s been thoroughly McKinseyfied, this requires a loosening of standards. With its fingers in more pots than ever, McKinsey continues to be at the epicenter of world-shaping events.
by Anonymous, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Mike Freiheit
[ed. See also: Quiz: Could You Be a Management Consultant?]
The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide. It has acted as a catalyst and accelerant to every trend in the world economy: firm consolidation, the rise of advertising, runaway executive compensation, globalization, automation, and corporate restructuring and strategy.
I came into my job as a McKinsey consultant hoping to change the world from the inside, believing that the best way to make progress is through influencing those who control the levers of power. Instead of being a force for good, I found myself party to the most damaging forces affecting the world: the resurgence of authoritarianism and the continued creep of markets into all parts of life.
Your views of McKinsey’s impact on the world will be largely determined by your views on capitalism’s impact on the world, for few firms have made a greater impact on the prevailing economic system. If you believe, as I once did, that capitalism is the least bad system devised so far, that its worst excesses can be reined in through effective regulation, that it has been the largest engine for human progress in human history, then McKinsey is a Good Thing. As missionaries for capital, it has helped spread the Good Word far and wide, making the world more productive and efficient as a result.If, however, you believe that, whatever capitalism’s role in history, its continued practice poses an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over, then the firm’s role is that of a co-conspirator to a crime in which we are all victims. McKinsey is capitalism distilled. It is global, mobile, flexible, and unabashedly pro-market and pro-management. The firm has an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are. Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo. And it is through this claim that the firm attracts thousands of “the best and the brightest” away from careers that actually serve the public.
“The firm does execution, not policy.” I remember the phrase vividly. We were on a conference call with the entire client-service team, including senior leadership. Trump had just begun his term, and the direction of our client, a federal agency, had markedly but predictably shifted. Our team of mostly young do-gooders were concerned about the role we were playing to enable this shift. We were up-in-arms! Well, as up-in-arms as overachieving Ivy League graduates get. To quell dissent, the leader reassured us: We only do execution, not policy.
This categorical claim was meant to assuage our fears. We weren’t the ones steering the ship towards the cliffs, we were merely tasked with keeping the ship afloat until it reached its destination.
But politics touches all things. When the direction of an agency is set by the president, helping execute on that direction means participating in politics. Had McKinsey been as global in the 1940s, the “no policy” line of reasoning would not have prohibited them from helping Bayer optimize its production of Zyklon B, adding a grim double meaning to the partner’s promise to only focus on execution.
How did things turn out this way? McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against. The firm hires from top universities and many of its consultants have graduate degrees, both strong predictors of liberal political tendencies. McKinsey is at the top of its field, affording it the unique opportunity to turn down lucrative work that other firms cannot. The firm’s 14 values serve as a gold standard for professional services firms and are actually discussed and largely adhered to.
The best explanation is structural. McKinsey’s governing model, when compared to other firms of its size and age, is anarchy. The Managing Director (CEO equivalent) has surprisingly little ability to control who the firm serves (said a partner about the Managing Director, “you are definitely not in charge”). McKinsey remains the world’s largest partnership, and partners rule. The general rule of thumb is that if a partner can staff a team, the firm will do the work. If associates don’t want to work with a tobacco company or a defense contractor, they don’t have to. As a result, only a small portion of the consultants need to buy into a client relationship for McKinsey to do work with them. What this means in practice is that the firm doesn’t work with North Korea, but that’s about it.
McKinsey has grown to the point that it is taking on work that prior incarnations of the firm would have turned down due to the political risk involved. To keep lavishing its partners with multimillion dollar annual compensation packages, the firm needs to sustain double digits year over year growth. In a world that’s been thoroughly McKinseyfied, this requires a loosening of standards. With its fingers in more pots than ever, McKinsey continues to be at the epicenter of world-shaping events.
by Anonymous, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Mike Freiheit
[ed. See also: Quiz: Could You Be a Management Consultant?]
Charter Will Spend Less on Cable Network in 2019 But Charge Customers More
Charter Communications will spend nearly $2 billion less on capital improvements to its Spectrum cable network and services this year, despite raising TV and broadband prices—and despite Ajit Pai's claims that repealing net neutrality rules would boost capital investment.
"We currently expect capital expenditures, excluding capital expenditures related to mobile, to be approximately $7 billion in 2019, versus $8.9 billion in 2018," Charter wrote in an earnings announcement today. "Our expectation for lower capital expenditures in 2019 versus 2018 is primarily driven by our expectation for lower customer premise equipment spend with the completion of our all-digital conversion [and] lower scalable infrastructure spend with the completion of the rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 technology across our footprint." Charter's costs are also going down because it has largely finished integrating Time Warner Cable and Bright House, after buying the cable companies in 2016. (...)
Charter raised prices in November
Despite the expected decrease in costs, Charter raised prices throughout its 41-state cable territory in November. The price hikes affect both broadband and cable TV service and could amount to $91 extra per year for individual customers who buy both.
Charter said its cable revenue per residential customer was $111.78 a month in the fourth quarter, up 0.9 percent from the previous year. Charter said that "promotional rate step-ups and modest rate adjustments"—price increases, in other words—helped offset the fact that many customers purchase only Internet service and thus aren't paying for TV.
Charter told Ars in October that its new price hike "reflects the dramatically faster speeds and investments we've made in reliability and quality."
But the speed increases in 2018 were achieved without a major increase in capital spending. Charter's total capital spending for 2018 was $9.1 billion, including $242 million in costs for its new mobile service, up from $8.7 billion in 2017. Charter is a reseller of Verizon network capacity, so it isn't actually building its own mobile network. But it spent money on back-office systems and retail store upgrades in order to launch the mobile service in June 2018.
by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Charter
[ed. Monopoly capitalism. See also: Net neutrality court case preview: Did FCC mess up by redefining broadband? (Mess up?).]
"We currently expect capital expenditures, excluding capital expenditures related to mobile, to be approximately $7 billion in 2019, versus $8.9 billion in 2018," Charter wrote in an earnings announcement today. "Our expectation for lower capital expenditures in 2019 versus 2018 is primarily driven by our expectation for lower customer premise equipment spend with the completion of our all-digital conversion [and] lower scalable infrastructure spend with the completion of the rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 technology across our footprint." Charter's costs are also going down because it has largely finished integrating Time Warner Cable and Bright House, after buying the cable companies in 2016. (...)Charter raised prices in November
Despite the expected decrease in costs, Charter raised prices throughout its 41-state cable territory in November. The price hikes affect both broadband and cable TV service and could amount to $91 extra per year for individual customers who buy both.
Charter said its cable revenue per residential customer was $111.78 a month in the fourth quarter, up 0.9 percent from the previous year. Charter said that "promotional rate step-ups and modest rate adjustments"—price increases, in other words—helped offset the fact that many customers purchase only Internet service and thus aren't paying for TV.
Charter told Ars in October that its new price hike "reflects the dramatically faster speeds and investments we've made in reliability and quality."
But the speed increases in 2018 were achieved without a major increase in capital spending. Charter's total capital spending for 2018 was $9.1 billion, including $242 million in costs for its new mobile service, up from $8.7 billion in 2017. Charter is a reseller of Verizon network capacity, so it isn't actually building its own mobile network. But it spent money on back-office systems and retail store upgrades in order to launch the mobile service in June 2018.
by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Charter
[ed. Monopoly capitalism. See also: Net neutrality court case preview: Did FCC mess up by redefining broadband? (Mess up?).]
Thursday, January 31, 2019
All That's Left When You Die
Last month my dad turned seventy-eight years old. A few days before his birthday, I drove down to San Diego to see him.
“What do you want for your birthday,” I asked, as we sat in his living room.
“I want to talk to you about something. Let’s take the dog for a walk,” he said, as he grabbed a leash that sat next to his recliner. “You take the shit bag,” he added, handing me a bundled up plastic baggy.
We headed up his quiet suburban street as his large brown Rottweiler mix walked ahead.
“The human body wasn’t meant to live this long,” he said.
“Seventy-eight is not that old,” I replied.
“Do we have to sit here and dignify a clearly horseshit statement such as that, or can you cease to pander to me and just have a conversation?”
“Okay. Seventy-eight is old.”
He hiked up his sweatpants and quickened the pace of our walk.
“I’m not complaining. I’m just saying people peddle this ridiculous idea that you can be an old person and go water skiing and fuck whenever you want and it’s bullshit. It’s fucking hubris that’s specific to humans and no other species,” he said, as he yanked the dog’s leash, pulling it away from the neighbor’s lawn right before it trampled their flowers.
“Well, the other option is to just accept that death is coming for you,” I replied.
“It is coming for you. You can’t beat death. It’s un-fucking-defeated. And if you fight it, it will humiliate you. It’ll chain you to a bed and make someone have to wipe your shitty ass. It’ll make you forget who your own fucking kids are. It takes your dignity and it whips its’ dick out and pisses on it. When you’re younger and it comes for you, it’s worth it to fight it and suffer through the humiliation. When you’re older, what the fuck does it get you to go through that?,” he said, then took a deep breath and stopped on the sidewalk.
I looked at him collecting his thoughts and every muscle in my stomach contracted in fear. I could barely get out my next words.
“Are you dying?” I asked.
“What? Fuck no. If I was dying I’d just call you up and say ‘Hey, I’m dying.’
“I would prefer you didn’t do it like that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.
“Like I’m going to give a shit what you prefer when I’m dying,” he laughed, as he began walking again.
“So then why are you bringing this up?”
“Take a look at the dog,” he said, pointing at his best friend. “The dog gives a shit about three things, in this order; Living, fucking, eating. Now, if he’s eating, and the opportunity to fuck presents itself, he’d stop eating so that he could fuck. And if he’s fucking, and something threatens his livelihood, he’d stop fucking so that he could protect himself. What does that tell you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, isn’t that, like, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or something?”
“I’m okay with you just saying ‘I don’t know.’ I’d actually prefer that to a dumb answer.”
“I don’t know, dad,” I said, getting a little annoyed.
“The dog, just like every other animal including us, thinks first and foremost about staying alive and passing on their genetics. It’s in our DNA to do so. You spend all your time when you’re young making sure you do all the best eating, fucking, and living you can. But then you get old like me and you can’t even tell if you farted and nothing in your body works like it used to. And you start to think, or at least I do, about how you can spend all your most effective years on this planet, which is filled with billions of people, not giving a shit about anybody but the ten or so motherfuckers that share your blood. And I think human beings are capable of more than just that. And we should want to be. Because when you die, all that’s left of you is the people you gave a shit about. Everybody loves to say how much we’ve evolved, but the real measure of whether or not a species has evolved is if they can look their DNA in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you, I can do better than you think I can.’
“What do you want for your birthday,” I asked, as we sat in his living room.
“I want to talk to you about something. Let’s take the dog for a walk,” he said, as he grabbed a leash that sat next to his recliner. “You take the shit bag,” he added, handing me a bundled up plastic baggy.
We headed up his quiet suburban street as his large brown Rottweiler mix walked ahead.“The human body wasn’t meant to live this long,” he said.
“Seventy-eight is not that old,” I replied.
“Do we have to sit here and dignify a clearly horseshit statement such as that, or can you cease to pander to me and just have a conversation?”
“Okay. Seventy-eight is old.”
He hiked up his sweatpants and quickened the pace of our walk.
“I’m not complaining. I’m just saying people peddle this ridiculous idea that you can be an old person and go water skiing and fuck whenever you want and it’s bullshit. It’s fucking hubris that’s specific to humans and no other species,” he said, as he yanked the dog’s leash, pulling it away from the neighbor’s lawn right before it trampled their flowers.
“Well, the other option is to just accept that death is coming for you,” I replied.
“It is coming for you. You can’t beat death. It’s un-fucking-defeated. And if you fight it, it will humiliate you. It’ll chain you to a bed and make someone have to wipe your shitty ass. It’ll make you forget who your own fucking kids are. It takes your dignity and it whips its’ dick out and pisses on it. When you’re younger and it comes for you, it’s worth it to fight it and suffer through the humiliation. When you’re older, what the fuck does it get you to go through that?,” he said, then took a deep breath and stopped on the sidewalk.
I looked at him collecting his thoughts and every muscle in my stomach contracted in fear. I could barely get out my next words.
“Are you dying?” I asked.
“What? Fuck no. If I was dying I’d just call you up and say ‘Hey, I’m dying.’
“I would prefer you didn’t do it like that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.
“Like I’m going to give a shit what you prefer when I’m dying,” he laughed, as he began walking again.
“So then why are you bringing this up?”
“Take a look at the dog,” he said, pointing at his best friend. “The dog gives a shit about three things, in this order; Living, fucking, eating. Now, if he’s eating, and the opportunity to fuck presents itself, he’d stop eating so that he could fuck. And if he’s fucking, and something threatens his livelihood, he’d stop fucking so that he could protect himself. What does that tell you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, isn’t that, like, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or something?”
“I’m okay with you just saying ‘I don’t know.’ I’d actually prefer that to a dumb answer.”
“I don’t know, dad,” I said, getting a little annoyed.
“The dog, just like every other animal including us, thinks first and foremost about staying alive and passing on their genetics. It’s in our DNA to do so. You spend all your time when you’re young making sure you do all the best eating, fucking, and living you can. But then you get old like me and you can’t even tell if you farted and nothing in your body works like it used to. And you start to think, or at least I do, about how you can spend all your most effective years on this planet, which is filled with billions of people, not giving a shit about anybody but the ten or so motherfuckers that share your blood. And I think human beings are capable of more than just that. And we should want to be. Because when you die, all that’s left of you is the people you gave a shit about. Everybody loves to say how much we’ve evolved, but the real measure of whether or not a species has evolved is if they can look their DNA in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you, I can do better than you think I can.’
by Justin Halpern, GQ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Who Looks Like That. From the collection: Sh*t My Dad Says (recommended)]
[ed. See also: You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Who Looks Like That. From the collection: Sh*t My Dad Says (recommended)]
Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued
On the roof of a luxury building at the edge of Central Park, 585 feet above the concrete, a lawyer named David Goodfriend has attached a modest four-foot antenna that is a threat to the entire TV-industrial complex.
The device is there to soak up TV signals coursing through the air — content from NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS and CBS, including megahits like “This Is Us” and this Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl LIII. Once plucked from the ether, the content is piped through the internet and assembled into an app called Locast. It’s a streaming service, and it makes all of this network programming available to subscribers in ways that are more convenient than relying on a home antenna: It’s viewable on almost any device, at any time, in pristine quality that doesn’t cut in and out. It’s also completely free.
If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee — while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you’ll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.
Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Goodfriend, 50, said he hoped to cover the entire nation as quickly as possible. “I’m not stopping,” he said. “I can’t now.”
The comment is basically a dare to the networks to take legal action against him. By giving away TV, Mr. Goodfriend is undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies — a sum that will exceed $10 billion this year, according to the research firm Kagan S&P Global Market Intelligence. For cable customers, the traditional network channels typically add about $12 to a monthly bill.
With consumers increasingly willing to piece together their own bespoke packages of content — paying a few bucks to Netflix here, a few to HBO there — anything that encourages people to cut their cable cords is a challenge to the cable TV empire. That calculus makes tiny Locast, whose modest website (“Help us free your TV!”) asks for donations starting at $5, perhaps the most audacious media experiment in years. (...)
Mr. Goodfriend is not a rich tech entrepreneur or a wealthy heir — just a lawyer who has made a decent living. Locast could still meet the fate of Aereo and be sued into financial oblivion by the networks. So why is he doing this?
The answer is partly principle, and partly intellectual mischief: With his public-private background, he has spotted an imbalance in the media ecosystem, he said, and decided to give the whole thing a shake.
“I ask people all the time, ‘Do you know you’re supposed to get television for free?’” Mr. Goodfriend said during an interview in Central Park, gesturing to a gaggle of visitors. “Most people under 50 don’t get it.”
by Edmund Lee, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeenah Moon
The device is there to soak up TV signals coursing through the air — content from NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS and CBS, including megahits like “This Is Us” and this Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl LIII. Once plucked from the ether, the content is piped through the internet and assembled into an app called Locast. It’s a streaming service, and it makes all of this network programming available to subscribers in ways that are more convenient than relying on a home antenna: It’s viewable on almost any device, at any time, in pristine quality that doesn’t cut in and out. It’s also completely free.
If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee — while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you’ll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.
Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C.Mr. Goodfriend, 50, said he hoped to cover the entire nation as quickly as possible. “I’m not stopping,” he said. “I can’t now.”
The comment is basically a dare to the networks to take legal action against him. By giving away TV, Mr. Goodfriend is undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies — a sum that will exceed $10 billion this year, according to the research firm Kagan S&P Global Market Intelligence. For cable customers, the traditional network channels typically add about $12 to a monthly bill.
With consumers increasingly willing to piece together their own bespoke packages of content — paying a few bucks to Netflix here, a few to HBO there — anything that encourages people to cut their cable cords is a challenge to the cable TV empire. That calculus makes tiny Locast, whose modest website (“Help us free your TV!”) asks for donations starting at $5, perhaps the most audacious media experiment in years. (...)
Mr. Goodfriend is not a rich tech entrepreneur or a wealthy heir — just a lawyer who has made a decent living. Locast could still meet the fate of Aereo and be sued into financial oblivion by the networks. So why is he doing this?
The answer is partly principle, and partly intellectual mischief: With his public-private background, he has spotted an imbalance in the media ecosystem, he said, and decided to give the whole thing a shake.
“I ask people all the time, ‘Do you know you’re supposed to get television for free?’” Mr. Goodfriend said during an interview in Central Park, gesturing to a gaggle of visitors. “Most people under 50 don’t get it.”
Image: Jeenah Moon
Smoked Out
Last spring, my wife, wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the climate change books I had agreed to write about for this paper in a cardboard box and put the box on top of the others starting to fill our garage, and soon spring turned to endless, destructive summer.
The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.
I first heard about the smoke problem from a publisher of religious and philosophical books who had lived in Ashland for 24 years, raising his three children in a blue, three-bedroom house near the business district. Now they were grown up and publishing was dying and he found he had trouble breathing in the summer months because there were an increasing number of fires in the surrounding hills. The forests here are dense and dry. The valley is shaped like a trough. When wildfires burned, the smoke lingered in the valley for weeks, and he had to stay indoors. It had happened almost every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at the beginning. The house wasn’t quite right for us. I decided we should rent instead and found a place a few blocks away, across the creek.
Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.
When a building is burning, firefighters usually try to extinguish every last flame. It’s a fight to the death, over in a matter of hours. When thousands or tens of thousands of acres of forest are burning, the major goal is containment, a kind of negotiated peace with a force greater than man. Wildland firefighters try to halt a blaze’s progress, encircling it with natural or manmade firebreaks. They work to keep the flames away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions – humidity, wind speed and direction – change and the autumn rains finally arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be.
On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.
The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the visitors’ centre, where they sang songs about the forest and built fairy houses out of bark and moss and acorns. Some days, the AQI dropped into the orange zone, and at least once into the yellow, but the smoke always returned when the wind shifted. I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt.
By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives. I had brought the long neglected box of climate change books with me, and now, safe in the mountain air, I began reading.
There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.
by McKenzie Funk, LRB | Read more:
The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.
I first heard about the smoke problem from a publisher of religious and philosophical books who had lived in Ashland for 24 years, raising his three children in a blue, three-bedroom house near the business district. Now they were grown up and publishing was dying and he found he had trouble breathing in the summer months because there were an increasing number of fires in the surrounding hills. The forests here are dense and dry. The valley is shaped like a trough. When wildfires burned, the smoke lingered in the valley for weeks, and he had to stay indoors. It had happened almost every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at the beginning. The house wasn’t quite right for us. I decided we should rent instead and found a place a few blocks away, across the creek.Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.
When a building is burning, firefighters usually try to extinguish every last flame. It’s a fight to the death, over in a matter of hours. When thousands or tens of thousands of acres of forest are burning, the major goal is containment, a kind of negotiated peace with a force greater than man. Wildland firefighters try to halt a blaze’s progress, encircling it with natural or manmade firebreaks. They work to keep the flames away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions – humidity, wind speed and direction – change and the autumn rains finally arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be.
On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.
The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the visitors’ centre, where they sang songs about the forest and built fairy houses out of bark and moss and acorns. Some days, the AQI dropped into the orange zone, and at least once into the yellow, but the smoke always returned when the wind shifted. I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt.
By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives. I had brought the long neglected box of climate change books with me, and now, safe in the mountain air, I began reading.
There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.
by McKenzie Funk, LRB | Read more:
Image:
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Nihilist Dad Jokes, Part 2
What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Every bite is a flavorless and hollow lie. Every meal gives me less pleasure with each passing day.
“No, they won’t fit me. I have outgrown small shoes, just as I have outgrown feeling awe at the sun’s rise, joy at your mother’s smile, and belief in a just and loving God.”
“Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad.”
“Why’d you name me ‘Hungry,’ Dad?”
“Because every day you will consume food and entertainment until you are sick, yet every night you will fall asleep empty inside.”
Deer, raccoons, and greedy children will devour the apples, thoughtlessly, for years. One day our poisoned climate will collect its debts and choke all life. Tsunamis will flood the lands, trees and fruit will wither in a miasma, and the remaining scavengers will scream in the face of extinction. Mother Nature’s last word will be blind, despotic, and final.
That’s the deal with the apples.
“No, I got them all cut! Hair is dead skin, and a barber’s scissors are a sneak preview of the reaper’s scythe.”
I sat on the beast hoping to excavate some boyish excitement. Yet I felt nothing. When I was young I dreamed of changing the world with my ideas. But people care not for ideas — they value conformity, popularity, and the fantasy of having sex with someone who has never thought about them. So I gave up on philosophy. Now I spew jokes like a trained circus animal.
“What’s the leading cause of dry skin? Towels!”
“I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something!”
“Dad, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”
My son stares at the television, hypnotized by a pop culture I no longer understand. I am now an obsolete machine: begging to be noticed, desperate to feel relevant, and doomed to annihilation. I run from the house trembling and screaming and throw my fist toward a darkened sky — only to find a thundercloud in the shape of an elephant. “WHY DO YOU MOCK ME LIKE THIS!? THESE ELEPHANTS DO NOTHING FOR ME!!” But this cloud, like all clouds, is meaningless: just random water droplets that will vanish like every wisp of cotton candy I’ve ever used to purchase a brief smile from a boy who once revered me.
- - -
“Dad, can you put my shoes on?”“No, they won’t fit me. I have outgrown small shoes, just as I have outgrown feeling awe at the sun’s rise, joy at your mother’s smile, and belief in a just and loving God.”
- - -
I’d tell you a chemistry joke… but I doubt I’d get a reaction! Laughter is worthless. It is a servile submission reflex to avoid being singled out and crushed by the group alpha.
- - -
“Dad, I’m hungry”“Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad.”
“Why’d you name me ‘Hungry,’ Dad?”
“Because every day you will consume food and entertainment until you are sick, yet every night you will fall asleep empty inside.”
- - -
Have you tried eating a clock? It’s time-consuming! Soon I will stand on the precipice of eternal sleep, and the tides of time will sweep away everything I have ever known. So I’m not feeling motivated to perform kitchen renovations right now. (...)
- - -
How many apples grow on a tree? All of them!Deer, raccoons, and greedy children will devour the apples, thoughtlessly, for years. One day our poisoned climate will collect its debts and choke all life. Tsunamis will flood the lands, trees and fruit will wither in a miasma, and the remaining scavengers will scream in the face of extinction. Mother Nature’s last word will be blind, despotic, and final.
That’s the deal with the apples.
- - -
“Dad, did you get a haircut?”“No, I got them all cut! Hair is dead skin, and a barber’s scissors are a sneak preview of the reaper’s scythe.”
- - -
I bought a cheap elephant ride yesterday… I got it for peanuts!I sat on the beast hoping to excavate some boyish excitement. Yet I felt nothing. When I was young I dreamed of changing the world with my ideas. But people care not for ideas — they value conformity, popularity, and the fantasy of having sex with someone who has never thought about them. So I gave up on philosophy. Now I spew jokes like a trained circus animal.
“What’s the leading cause of dry skin? Towels!”
“I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something!”
“Dad, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”
My son stares at the television, hypnotized by a pop culture I no longer understand. I am now an obsolete machine: begging to be noticed, desperate to feel relevant, and doomed to annihilation. I run from the house trembling and screaming and throw my fist toward a darkened sky — only to find a thundercloud in the shape of an elephant. “WHY DO YOU MOCK ME LIKE THIS!? THESE ELEPHANTS DO NOTHING FOR ME!!” But this cloud, like all clouds, is meaningless: just random water droplets that will vanish like every wisp of cotton candy I’ve ever used to purchase a brief smile from a boy who once revered me.
by Alex Baia, McSweeny's | Read more:
Why We Care (and Don’t Care) About the New Rules of Golf
If the rules of football worked the way that the rules of golf work, the Saints, not the Rams, would be playing in the Super Bowl. With one minute and forty-five seconds to go in the N.F.C. championship game, Nickell Robey-Coleman, a cornerback for the Rams, would have penalized himself for pass interference and a helmet-to-helmet hit—flagrant violations that the officials on the field inexplicably failed to call—and the Saints would have run down the clock before kicking an unanswerable field goal.
Golf tournaments have officials, too, but their role is mainly advisory; the golfers are responsible for policing themselves, and, to a remarkable extent, they really do. The most famous example occurred during the U.S. Open in 1925, when Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself for an infraction that only he had observed: his ball, he said, had moved slightly when he addressed it in the rough. His honesty possibly cost him the title, but he dismissed those who applauded him: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as praise him for playing by the rules.” By contrast, a running back who didn’t try to steal an extra foot by sliding the ball downfield after being tackled would be considered almost negligent. Robey-Coleman, to his credit, said, after the game, that he should have been called for pass interference. But, in football, what a player does matters only if it matters to a referee.
Not that golfers don’t cheat. There’s an old joke about a weekend player who is so accustomed to fudging his score that when he one day makes a hole-in-one he marks it on his scorecard as a zero. Nevertheless, even at the recreational level—and certainly on the tour—when golfers break rules it’s usually not because they’re trying to get away with something but because they don’t know what they’re doing. The rules of golf are hard even for rules officials to keep straight. Every few years, the United States Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews address confusions, anachronisms, and other issues by revising the rulebook, which they’ve published jointly since 1952. Sometimes the changes make things better, and sometimes they make things worse. The 2019 revision, which was unusually extensive, does both.
Golf’s first written rules were set down, in 1744, by the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, whose home course, in Edinburgh, Scotland, had five holes. There were thirteen succinct “articles,” of which the tenth was “If a Ball be stopp’d by any person, Horse, Dog, or any thing else, The Ball so stop’d must be play’d where it lyes.” That last clause contains what can be thought of as the game’s foundational commandment. Many of golf’s other rules—in a book that now runs to two hundred and forty pages—are, in effect, exceptions to it.
Several of the 2019 changes were made in the hope of speeding up what has become a painfully slow game. Players used to be allowed five minutes to search for a lost ball; they now get three. The old rulebook said little about pace of play; the new one recommends (though it doesn’t require) taking no more than forty seconds to hit each shot, and it encourages “ready golf” in stroke play rather than requiring, as the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith did, that the player “whose Ball lyes farthest from the Hole” play first. There used to be a penalty for hitting an unattended flagstick with a putted ball; that penalty is now gone.
Putting with the flagstick in the hole really will speed up play if all golfers do it—but if only some do, as is certain to be the case, it will actually make things slower, by creating a whole new layer of pointless putting-green housekeeping: flag in for me, flag out for you, flag back in for my partner, flag out again for yours. Nevertheless, I welcome this rule change, because I think that putting with the flagstick in the hole makes me a slightly better putter, both by forcing me to focus on a skinnier, more visible target, and by giving me a backstop for overly energetic strokes. The tour player who has taken the greatest advantage, so far, is Bryson DeChambeau, who has said that putting with the flagstick in the hole is “statistically proven to be a benefit in 99 per cent of situations.” He won last weekend, in Dubai. (...)
The U.S.G.A. and the R. & A. used to publish a supplemental volume, called “Decisions on the Rules of Golf,” which came out every two years and was hundreds of pages longer than the rulebook. Its purpose was to “clarify matters which may not be entirely clear” from the rules themselves, based on issues that the governing bodies had had to settle for baffled players and rules officials. What used to be called “decisions” have now been renamed “interpretations.” Some of them have been incorporated into the rulebook itself, while others have been collected in a new publication, “The Official Guidebook to the Rules of Golf,” which contains other explanatory material as well.
I own several old editions of the “Decisions,” and they have long been my favorite bathroom reading. They have made me appreciate the tremendous challenge involved in trying to behave as Bobby Jones expected all golfers to behave, in addition to providing an agreeable exercise in Schadenfreude: “A player misses a shot completely and, in swinging his club back, he accidentally knocks his ball backwards. Was the backward swing a stroke? If the ball comes to rest out of bounds, how does the player proceed?” Also: “A tumbleweed blowing across the course strikes a ball at rest and knocks it into the hole. What is the procedure?” Furthermore: “Is a worm, when half on top of the surface of the ground and half below, a loose impediment which may be removed? Or is it fixed and solidly embedded and therefore not a loose impediment?”
All these problems are given definitive solutions, but the real pleasure in studying them lies not in learning the answers but in imagining the situations in which they arose: “After a player putts, the flagstick attendant removes the flagstick and a knob attached to the top of the flagstick falls off. The knob strikes the player’s moving ball and deflects it. What is the ruling?” You can easily picture the scene: the imbecile tending the flag; the brilliant fifty-foot putt that would have dropped if the detached knob hadn’t struck it; the ensuing screams. Next question!
Golf tournaments have officials, too, but their role is mainly advisory; the golfers are responsible for policing themselves, and, to a remarkable extent, they really do. The most famous example occurred during the U.S. Open in 1925, when Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself for an infraction that only he had observed: his ball, he said, had moved slightly when he addressed it in the rough. His honesty possibly cost him the title, but he dismissed those who applauded him: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as praise him for playing by the rules.” By contrast, a running back who didn’t try to steal an extra foot by sliding the ball downfield after being tackled would be considered almost negligent. Robey-Coleman, to his credit, said, after the game, that he should have been called for pass interference. But, in football, what a player does matters only if it matters to a referee.
Not that golfers don’t cheat. There’s an old joke about a weekend player who is so accustomed to fudging his score that when he one day makes a hole-in-one he marks it on his scorecard as a zero. Nevertheless, even at the recreational level—and certainly on the tour—when golfers break rules it’s usually not because they’re trying to get away with something but because they don’t know what they’re doing. The rules of golf are hard even for rules officials to keep straight. Every few years, the United States Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews address confusions, anachronisms, and other issues by revising the rulebook, which they’ve published jointly since 1952. Sometimes the changes make things better, and sometimes they make things worse. The 2019 revision, which was unusually extensive, does both.Golf’s first written rules were set down, in 1744, by the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, whose home course, in Edinburgh, Scotland, had five holes. There were thirteen succinct “articles,” of which the tenth was “If a Ball be stopp’d by any person, Horse, Dog, or any thing else, The Ball so stop’d must be play’d where it lyes.” That last clause contains what can be thought of as the game’s foundational commandment. Many of golf’s other rules—in a book that now runs to two hundred and forty pages—are, in effect, exceptions to it.
Several of the 2019 changes were made in the hope of speeding up what has become a painfully slow game. Players used to be allowed five minutes to search for a lost ball; they now get three. The old rulebook said little about pace of play; the new one recommends (though it doesn’t require) taking no more than forty seconds to hit each shot, and it encourages “ready golf” in stroke play rather than requiring, as the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith did, that the player “whose Ball lyes farthest from the Hole” play first. There used to be a penalty for hitting an unattended flagstick with a putted ball; that penalty is now gone.
Putting with the flagstick in the hole really will speed up play if all golfers do it—but if only some do, as is certain to be the case, it will actually make things slower, by creating a whole new layer of pointless putting-green housekeeping: flag in for me, flag out for you, flag back in for my partner, flag out again for yours. Nevertheless, I welcome this rule change, because I think that putting with the flagstick in the hole makes me a slightly better putter, both by forcing me to focus on a skinnier, more visible target, and by giving me a backstop for overly energetic strokes. The tour player who has taken the greatest advantage, so far, is Bryson DeChambeau, who has said that putting with the flagstick in the hole is “statistically proven to be a benefit in 99 per cent of situations.” He won last weekend, in Dubai. (...)
The U.S.G.A. and the R. & A. used to publish a supplemental volume, called “Decisions on the Rules of Golf,” which came out every two years and was hundreds of pages longer than the rulebook. Its purpose was to “clarify matters which may not be entirely clear” from the rules themselves, based on issues that the governing bodies had had to settle for baffled players and rules officials. What used to be called “decisions” have now been renamed “interpretations.” Some of them have been incorporated into the rulebook itself, while others have been collected in a new publication, “The Official Guidebook to the Rules of Golf,” which contains other explanatory material as well.
I own several old editions of the “Decisions,” and they have long been my favorite bathroom reading. They have made me appreciate the tremendous challenge involved in trying to behave as Bobby Jones expected all golfers to behave, in addition to providing an agreeable exercise in Schadenfreude: “A player misses a shot completely and, in swinging his club back, he accidentally knocks his ball backwards. Was the backward swing a stroke? If the ball comes to rest out of bounds, how does the player proceed?” Also: “A tumbleweed blowing across the course strikes a ball at rest and knocks it into the hole. What is the procedure?” Furthermore: “Is a worm, when half on top of the surface of the ground and half below, a loose impediment which may be removed? Or is it fixed and solidly embedded and therefore not a loose impediment?”
All these problems are given definitive solutions, but the real pleasure in studying them lies not in learning the answers but in imagining the situations in which they arose: “After a player putts, the flagstick attendant removes the flagstick and a knob attached to the top of the flagstick falls off. The knob strikes the player’s moving ball and deflects it. What is the ruling?” You can easily picture the scene: the imbecile tending the flag; the brilliant fifty-foot putt that would have dropped if the detached knob hadn’t struck it; the ensuing screams. Next question!
by David Owen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Martin Parr/Magnum
The Twisting Nature of Love
Water comes over the screen in waves for long minutes as the film opens. Offscreen, we hear the scrubbing of a straw bristle brush, as soapsuds float in and out of the frame, and at last the shot widens to reveal a young woman, tin bucket in one hand, long-handled squeegee in the other.
The tiled area under the brush is the carport of a home in one of the older parts of Mexico City, and if you’re a Mexican viewer you’ll know without thinking that the person with the bucket is a servant, doing the daily morning clean-up. You’ll know her occupation even before you really see her face because she is dark-skinned and too poorly dressed to be anything else in a house of that size, and because she exudes an air of calm and ingrained patience. What you won’t necessarily realize is that she, Cleo, is the protagonist of the film, because no Mexican film, other than the farcical and offensive comedies featuring la India Maria, has ever had a household servant at its center.
(It is only later that we’ll understand that what Cleo is so busily scrubbing away is the filthiest of all filth: dog shit, supplied in large quantities by Borras, a cheerful mutt who is the house dog, but not exactly the house pet. American-style pets didn’t really exist in Mexico back in 1970, when the film begins.)
For an American viewer—or at least for those viewers who have never met or been a domestic employee, known anyone who employs a full- or part-time servant, or hired a woman to provide domestic help—reading the character of Cleo, and by extension those of her employers, is possibly even more complicated. But start by looking carefully at the house: it is in the no longer elegant Roma neighborhood. Large but not enormous, and somewhat run-down, it’s certainly not luxurious. In addition to Cleo and her best friend, the household cook, seven people live here: four children, who share two bedrooms; their father, who is a doctor, and his wife, a chemist; and the wife’s mother. The furniture, heavy and dark, most likely belongs to the wife’s mother, as, in fact, the whole house probably does. (How do I know this? Because in the 1960s professionals like Cleo’s employers lived in newer, more comfortable houses in the suburbs, or in apartments that were cheaper and easier to care for.)
This is the house that Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Roma, grew up in. Or at least it’s the recreation, meticulous to the point of madness, of that house. And this is the story of Cuarón’s memory of a turbulent time in his childhood. The movie is shot parallel to the action, as if the camera were the ghost of Cuarón revisiting his childhood and looking on it silently, with the compassion and distance we are sometimes lucky enough to muster for our sinning youth and that of our parents. The hero, though, is Cleo, the nanny whose affection, unlike the parents’, is never wavering or disconcerting, and who, unlike a different, infinitely tiresome nanny on other screens around the city, performs true miracles. (...)
So who is Cleo? The subtitles tell us that the language she speaks with Adela, the cook, is Mixteco, so we know she is from a desperately poor highland area of southern Mexico comprising parts of the states of Puebla and Oaxaca. Her small size and the shape of her face tell us so, too, because the dozens of nationalities, languages, and customs of the first peoples in Mexico were as highly distinct as those of Europeans; there were, among others, long-boned Apaches in the north, Purépechas and Mexicas in the middle, and delicately built Zapotecs, Mayas, and Mixtecos in the south. (Both the real-life Liboria and the first-time actress who plays her, Yalitza Aparicio, a recently graduated preschool teacher, are Mixtecas. Aparicio was living in her native village in the highlands of Oaxaca when Cuarón recruited her to play Cleo.)
Lastly, Cleo is part of a family, or rather two. She belongs to a family back home, of course, but Roma is about the family she works for and lives with. Nannies everywhere are often considered part of the family, and families tend to reflect the societies of which they are the building blocks. In this particular case, Cleo is and will remain throughout the film—and, we understand, beyond it, as the real-life Libo has remained to this day—part of a hierarchical, exploitative, unequal, unstable, and nevertheless unstintingly loyal and, yes, loving, Mexican family.
Cleo and Adela (played with relaxed authority by another Mixteca nonprofessional actress, Nancy García) are probably kin. Adela, the older of the two, may have emigrated first to the city, in search, like Cleo, of a life better than the parched subsistence she and her family eked out back home, with its grueling workload of endless days that transformed women into hags before they turned forty. But Cuarón is not interested in portraying Cleo anthropologically: he wants to show us what she was to him, and to tell the story of Mexico City and what happened to Cleo the year that his own family shattered.
by Alma Guillermoprieto, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Carlos Somonte/Netflix
The tiled area under the brush is the carport of a home in one of the older parts of Mexico City, and if you’re a Mexican viewer you’ll know without thinking that the person with the bucket is a servant, doing the daily morning clean-up. You’ll know her occupation even before you really see her face because she is dark-skinned and too poorly dressed to be anything else in a house of that size, and because she exudes an air of calm and ingrained patience. What you won’t necessarily realize is that she, Cleo, is the protagonist of the film, because no Mexican film, other than the farcical and offensive comedies featuring la India Maria, has ever had a household servant at its center.
(It is only later that we’ll understand that what Cleo is so busily scrubbing away is the filthiest of all filth: dog shit, supplied in large quantities by Borras, a cheerful mutt who is the house dog, but not exactly the house pet. American-style pets didn’t really exist in Mexico back in 1970, when the film begins.)
For an American viewer—or at least for those viewers who have never met or been a domestic employee, known anyone who employs a full- or part-time servant, or hired a woman to provide domestic help—reading the character of Cleo, and by extension those of her employers, is possibly even more complicated. But start by looking carefully at the house: it is in the no longer elegant Roma neighborhood. Large but not enormous, and somewhat run-down, it’s certainly not luxurious. In addition to Cleo and her best friend, the household cook, seven people live here: four children, who share two bedrooms; their father, who is a doctor, and his wife, a chemist; and the wife’s mother. The furniture, heavy and dark, most likely belongs to the wife’s mother, as, in fact, the whole house probably does. (How do I know this? Because in the 1960s professionals like Cleo’s employers lived in newer, more comfortable houses in the suburbs, or in apartments that were cheaper and easier to care for.)This is the house that Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Roma, grew up in. Or at least it’s the recreation, meticulous to the point of madness, of that house. And this is the story of Cuarón’s memory of a turbulent time in his childhood. The movie is shot parallel to the action, as if the camera were the ghost of Cuarón revisiting his childhood and looking on it silently, with the compassion and distance we are sometimes lucky enough to muster for our sinning youth and that of our parents. The hero, though, is Cleo, the nanny whose affection, unlike the parents’, is never wavering or disconcerting, and who, unlike a different, infinitely tiresome nanny on other screens around the city, performs true miracles. (...)
So who is Cleo? The subtitles tell us that the language she speaks with Adela, the cook, is Mixteco, so we know she is from a desperately poor highland area of southern Mexico comprising parts of the states of Puebla and Oaxaca. Her small size and the shape of her face tell us so, too, because the dozens of nationalities, languages, and customs of the first peoples in Mexico were as highly distinct as those of Europeans; there were, among others, long-boned Apaches in the north, Purépechas and Mexicas in the middle, and delicately built Zapotecs, Mayas, and Mixtecos in the south. (Both the real-life Liboria and the first-time actress who plays her, Yalitza Aparicio, a recently graduated preschool teacher, are Mixtecas. Aparicio was living in her native village in the highlands of Oaxaca when Cuarón recruited her to play Cleo.)
Lastly, Cleo is part of a family, or rather two. She belongs to a family back home, of course, but Roma is about the family she works for and lives with. Nannies everywhere are often considered part of the family, and families tend to reflect the societies of which they are the building blocks. In this particular case, Cleo is and will remain throughout the film—and, we understand, beyond it, as the real-life Libo has remained to this day—part of a hierarchical, exploitative, unequal, unstable, and nevertheless unstintingly loyal and, yes, loving, Mexican family.
Cleo and Adela (played with relaxed authority by another Mixteca nonprofessional actress, Nancy García) are probably kin. Adela, the older of the two, may have emigrated first to the city, in search, like Cleo, of a life better than the parched subsistence she and her family eked out back home, with its grueling workload of endless days that transformed women into hags before they turned forty. But Cuarón is not interested in portraying Cleo anthropologically: he wants to show us what she was to him, and to tell the story of Mexico City and what happened to Cleo the year that his own family shattered.
by Alma Guillermoprieto, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Carlos Somonte/Netflix
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Kamala Harris on Truancy
[ed. Ok, this is not the kind of politician we need going forward (listen to her talk about the intimidating power of her letterhead). Apparently, Kirsten Gillibrand was there too and thought it was hilarious. See also: this (Twitter).]
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