Tuesday, April 2, 2019
The Amateur Golfer Who Turned Down Augusta
The green marketing machine has whirred into action early this year. The Masters can wait; Saturday will see the closing round of the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur take to the hallowed turf in Georgia. This is, according to those who will preside over it, “a historic event that promises to shine a spotlight on women’s golf and help inspire a new generation of players”.
Depending on your outlook there is a case of unfortunate timing or Augusta National demonstrating – not for the first time – that the greater good is not really its concern.
As an epic fuss is made over an international field of 72 – cut to 30 by the time the event switches from the Champions Retreat to the Masters course – a women’s major will be taking place from Thursday until Sunday at Mission Hills in California. The ANA Inspiration, the first major of the golfing year, has unquestionably been overshadowed by Augusta’s latest attempted demonstration of diversity.
The ANA had already been affected by the rising frenzy attached to the Drive, Chip and Putt Championship, where excited kids and giddy parents take to Augusta National, live on television, on the Sunday preceding Masters week.
Needless to say, the LPGA Tour, which runs the ANA Inspiration, is privately lukewarm – to put it mildly – about the whole business. This has also placed some competitors in a difficult position.
The ANA landed a coup by sealing amateur involvement from Paphangkorn Tavatanakit, the world No 2, Freda Kinhult, who is fourth, and Albane Valenzuela, currently No 5. Jennifer Kupcho, the top ranked amateur in the world, will play at Augusta.
Valenzuela’s story may be the most interesting, and she tells it impressively. Born in the US, she spent toddler time in Mexico before the Valenzuela family relocated to Geneva for 15 years.
She is now in the penultimate year of a political science and communication degree at Stanford, the California university which counts Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie among its golfing alumni.
The 21-year-old Valenzuela harbours no ill whatsoever towards Augusta, which she believes is offering an “unbelievable” opportunity to fellow amateurs this week. It was, she admits, a “tricky” decision to spurn the advances of the Green Jackets when accepting an invite for an ANA return. (...)
Two years ago, Valenzuela received the call from the ANA only for a bike accident the day before she was due to leave for the tournament meaning she had to withdraw. Her major place was offered again for 2018, when she finished 59th, and it was retained this time round.
“I don’t think many amateurs have had this number of opportunities from the ANA,” she adds. “I couldn’t say no, they have always been so supportive. It’s the first major of the year and I love the course. It’s a very significant thing that’s happening at Augusta so I’m sad to miss that but I’m very excited to be going back to the ANA. I don’t think there was a ‘wrong’ choice, that’s just my perspective. I couldn’t say no to ANA.”
[ed. Good for her. The ANA (formerly the Dinah Shore, later Kraft/Nabisco), is one of the most supportive and prestigious tournaments in women's golf. They were offering $100,000 purses back when the norm used to be around $5,000. Also, in other sports news: Alliance of American Football suspends operations after just eight games. (The Guardian). Who could have predicted?]
Depending on your outlook there is a case of unfortunate timing or Augusta National demonstrating – not for the first time – that the greater good is not really its concern.
As an epic fuss is made over an international field of 72 – cut to 30 by the time the event switches from the Champions Retreat to the Masters course – a women’s major will be taking place from Thursday until Sunday at Mission Hills in California. The ANA Inspiration, the first major of the golfing year, has unquestionably been overshadowed by Augusta’s latest attempted demonstration of diversity.
The ANA had already been affected by the rising frenzy attached to the Drive, Chip and Putt Championship, where excited kids and giddy parents take to Augusta National, live on television, on the Sunday preceding Masters week.Needless to say, the LPGA Tour, which runs the ANA Inspiration, is privately lukewarm – to put it mildly – about the whole business. This has also placed some competitors in a difficult position.
The ANA landed a coup by sealing amateur involvement from Paphangkorn Tavatanakit, the world No 2, Freda Kinhult, who is fourth, and Albane Valenzuela, currently No 5. Jennifer Kupcho, the top ranked amateur in the world, will play at Augusta.
Valenzuela’s story may be the most interesting, and she tells it impressively. Born in the US, she spent toddler time in Mexico before the Valenzuela family relocated to Geneva for 15 years.
She is now in the penultimate year of a political science and communication degree at Stanford, the California university which counts Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie among its golfing alumni.
The 21-year-old Valenzuela harbours no ill whatsoever towards Augusta, which she believes is offering an “unbelievable” opportunity to fellow amateurs this week. It was, she admits, a “tricky” decision to spurn the advances of the Green Jackets when accepting an invite for an ANA return. (...)
Two years ago, Valenzuela received the call from the ANA only for a bike accident the day before she was due to leave for the tournament meaning she had to withdraw. Her major place was offered again for 2018, when she finished 59th, and it was retained this time round.
“I don’t think many amateurs have had this number of opportunities from the ANA,” she adds. “I couldn’t say no, they have always been so supportive. It’s the first major of the year and I love the course. It’s a very significant thing that’s happening at Augusta so I’m sad to miss that but I’m very excited to be going back to the ANA. I don’t think there was a ‘wrong’ choice, that’s just my perspective. I couldn’t say no to ANA.”
by Ewan Murray, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jasen Vinlove-USA Today Sports/Sipa USA/Rex/Shutterstock[ed. Good for her. The ANA (formerly the Dinah Shore, later Kraft/Nabisco), is one of the most supportive and prestigious tournaments in women's golf. They were offering $100,000 purses back when the norm used to be around $5,000. Also, in other sports news: Alliance of American Football suspends operations after just eight games. (The Guardian). Who could have predicted?]
Campaigning Ourselves to Death
The follies of an eternal presidential sweepstakes
"Well I think he’s got a lot of hand movement, I’ve never seen so much hand movement,” the president of the United States said last month. “I said, is he crazy or is that just the way he acts? So I’ve never seen hand movement—I watched him a little while this morning doing I assume it was some kind of a news conference and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it. Study it. I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Did we agree? We consented, as Donald Trump surely imagined, to write about it. “A video of Beto O’Rourke’s wild hand gestures went viral. Does distinctive body language help or hurt a candidate?” asked the Washington Post. “Could Beto O’Rourke’s Hand Gestures Cost Him His Presidential Bid?” pondered Inside Edition. “Trevor Noah Points Out That Trump Isn’t Necessarily Wrong About Beto O’Rourke’s Hand Gestures,” Uproxx noted, delivering on the inevitable entertainment angle.
The news cycle spun and washed us out, as it always did, and we were left to nod at the various ephemeral takes on Trump’s trolling of Beto O’Rourke, among the latest entrants in the eternal presidential sweepstakes that will not go off air until November 2020, a mere twenty months from now. And when it does go off air, it will only be gone for so long—2024 will loom, as will the 2022 midterms, and the characters who so brightly populate our political universes now will either continue on for a new season or be swapped out for different—and, we hope, as entertaining—fare.
“We” is not all-encompassing, of course. Even when turnout surges, a majority of Americans or a very large minority don’t vote. And of those who do, only so many can be bothered with every addict’s twitch of the presidential news cycle. “We” can be imagined as those most wedded to the process, the people who don’t need the NFL because they have politics, the abiding red versus blue.
Those who turn away can’t be blamed. As I reminded the political journalism class I teach, the Iowa caucuses won’t begin until next February. I told them this as Beto gesticulated on the screen, announcing he was, at last, running for president, his silent wife at his side. It was information they knew but never quite processed—a little over eleven more months before actual people go to caucus? I felt like I was explaining the distance, in miles, between the Earth and the moon, and how many I-95s it would take to scissor through space to reach lunar rock. (...)
Today, the hours, days, weeks, and months of the perma-campaign must be filled, too. Beto’s hands, Amy Klobuchar’s salad comb, Bernie’s head bandage, Elizabeth Warren’s beer chug, Cory Booker’s girlfriend, Kamala Harris’s musical tastes while she smoked pot in college. No triviality is too trivial for an underpaid journalist somewhere to bundle into an article, video, or meme in the hopes of attracting attention and driving fleeting dollars to a collapsing media ecosystem. The perma-campaign is the apotheosis of reality TV because the stakes are so high—we are choosing a world leader with the power to drop civilization-annihilating bombs, and therefore every plot twist in the extended marathon can be justified in the solemn, self-satisfied way a political reporter will defend just about every absurd practice of the profession.
Beto, Bernie, Biden, Kamala, and more—these are characters the American people must get to know through their TV screens and social media. This year and next, they are all Democrats, and they are auditioning for us. They will speak to us, rally for us, and construct events in states ten months before a vote. Why? Well, the show needs content. And if you aren’t producing content, you are irrelevant. (...)
Thirty-four years ago, the media theorist Neil Postman published a book that is distressingly relevant today. Amusing Ourselves to Death was a prescient indictment of TV culture that drove to the heart of the matter in ways few academic texts ever do. Postman’s problem wasn’t so much with TV itself—people have a right to entertain themselves—but with how the rules of this dominant technology infected all serious discourse. He fought, most strenuously and fruitlessly, against the merger of politics and entertainment.
We’ve only metastasized since Postman’s time, with the internet and smartphones slashing attention spans, polarizing voters, and allowing most people to customize the world around them. What’s remained constant, at least in certain quarters, is the principal of entertainment: most political content operates from this premise first, that it must captivate before it informs. The image-based culture triumphs.
"Well I think he’s got a lot of hand movement, I’ve never seen so much hand movement,” the president of the United States said last month. “I said, is he crazy or is that just the way he acts? So I’ve never seen hand movement—I watched him a little while this morning doing I assume it was some kind of a news conference and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it. Study it. I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Did we agree? We consented, as Donald Trump surely imagined, to write about it. “A video of Beto O’Rourke’s wild hand gestures went viral. Does distinctive body language help or hurt a candidate?” asked the Washington Post. “Could Beto O’Rourke’s Hand Gestures Cost Him His Presidential Bid?” pondered Inside Edition. “Trevor Noah Points Out That Trump Isn’t Necessarily Wrong About Beto O’Rourke’s Hand Gestures,” Uproxx noted, delivering on the inevitable entertainment angle.
The news cycle spun and washed us out, as it always did, and we were left to nod at the various ephemeral takes on Trump’s trolling of Beto O’Rourke, among the latest entrants in the eternal presidential sweepstakes that will not go off air until November 2020, a mere twenty months from now. And when it does go off air, it will only be gone for so long—2024 will loom, as will the 2022 midterms, and the characters who so brightly populate our political universes now will either continue on for a new season or be swapped out for different—and, we hope, as entertaining—fare.“We” is not all-encompassing, of course. Even when turnout surges, a majority of Americans or a very large minority don’t vote. And of those who do, only so many can be bothered with every addict’s twitch of the presidential news cycle. “We” can be imagined as those most wedded to the process, the people who don’t need the NFL because they have politics, the abiding red versus blue.
Those who turn away can’t be blamed. As I reminded the political journalism class I teach, the Iowa caucuses won’t begin until next February. I told them this as Beto gesticulated on the screen, announcing he was, at last, running for president, his silent wife at his side. It was information they knew but never quite processed—a little over eleven more months before actual people go to caucus? I felt like I was explaining the distance, in miles, between the Earth and the moon, and how many I-95s it would take to scissor through space to reach lunar rock. (...)
Today, the hours, days, weeks, and months of the perma-campaign must be filled, too. Beto’s hands, Amy Klobuchar’s salad comb, Bernie’s head bandage, Elizabeth Warren’s beer chug, Cory Booker’s girlfriend, Kamala Harris’s musical tastes while she smoked pot in college. No triviality is too trivial for an underpaid journalist somewhere to bundle into an article, video, or meme in the hopes of attracting attention and driving fleeting dollars to a collapsing media ecosystem. The perma-campaign is the apotheosis of reality TV because the stakes are so high—we are choosing a world leader with the power to drop civilization-annihilating bombs, and therefore every plot twist in the extended marathon can be justified in the solemn, self-satisfied way a political reporter will defend just about every absurd practice of the profession.
Beto, Bernie, Biden, Kamala, and more—these are characters the American people must get to know through their TV screens and social media. This year and next, they are all Democrats, and they are auditioning for us. They will speak to us, rally for us, and construct events in states ten months before a vote. Why? Well, the show needs content. And if you aren’t producing content, you are irrelevant. (...)
Thirty-four years ago, the media theorist Neil Postman published a book that is distressingly relevant today. Amusing Ourselves to Death was a prescient indictment of TV culture that drove to the heart of the matter in ways few academic texts ever do. Postman’s problem wasn’t so much with TV itself—people have a right to entertain themselves—but with how the rules of this dominant technology infected all serious discourse. He fought, most strenuously and fruitlessly, against the merger of politics and entertainment.
We’ve only metastasized since Postman’s time, with the internet and smartphones slashing attention spans, polarizing voters, and allowing most people to customize the world around them. What’s remained constant, at least in certain quarters, is the principal of entertainment: most political content operates from this premise first, that it must captivate before it informs. The image-based culture triumphs.
by Ross Barkan, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Brad Tollefson/A-J Media via:
In Praise of Public Libraries
Years ago, I lived in a remote mountain town that had never had a public library. The town was one of the largest in New York State by area but small in population, with a couple thousand residents spread out over about two hundred square miles. By the time my husband and I moved there, the town had lost most of its economic base—in the nineteenth century it had supported a number of tanneries and mills—and our neighbors were mainly employed seasonally, if at all. When the regional library system’s bookmobile was taken out of service, the town had no easy access to books. The town board proposed a small tax increase to fund a library, something on the order of ten dollars per household. It was soundly defeated. The dominant sentiments seemed to be “leave well enough alone” and “who needs books?” Then there was the man who declared that “libraries are communist.”
By then, through the machinations of the town board, which scrounged up $15,000 from its annual budget and deputized me and two retired teachers to—somehow—turn that money into a lending library, we had around three thousand books on loan from the regional library consortium tucked into a room at the back of town hall. We’d been advised by librarians at the consortium that five hundred library cards would take us through the first year. They took us through the first three weeks. Our librarian, whose previous job was running a used bookstore, turned out to be a master of handselling, even to the rough-and-tumble loggers and guys on the road crew who brought their kids in for story time and left with novels he’d pulled for them, and then came back, alone, for more. Books were being checked out by the bagful; there were lines at the circulation desk. Children especially, but sometimes adults, couldn’t believe it was all free.
By year’s end we had signed up about 1,500 patrons, and there was a book club, a preschool story hour, movie night, and a play-reading group. High school students, many of whom did not have Internet access at home, came in the afternoon to do their homework. People pressed books into the hands of strangers who did not stay strangers for long. And it occurred to me one Saturday, as I watched quilters sitting at our one table trade patterns and children clear the shelves of The Magic School Bus series, racing to check them out, that the man who had said that libraries were communist had been right. A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal. Even our little book-lined room, with its mismatched furniture and worn carpet, was, as the sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds us libraries were once called, a palace for the people.
Klinenberg is interested in the ways that common spaces can repair our fractious and polarized civic life. And though he argues in his new book, Palaces for the People, that playgrounds, sporting clubs, diners, parks, farmer’s markets, and churches—anything, really, that puts people in close contact with one another—have the capacity to strengthen what Tocqueville called the cross-cutting ties that bind us to those who in many ways are different from us, he suggests that libraries may be the most effective. “Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture,” he writes. Yet as Susan Orlean observes in her loving encomium to libraries everywhere, aptly titled The Library Book, “The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”
As Klinenberg points out:
By then, through the machinations of the town board, which scrounged up $15,000 from its annual budget and deputized me and two retired teachers to—somehow—turn that money into a lending library, we had around three thousand books on loan from the regional library consortium tucked into a room at the back of town hall. We’d been advised by librarians at the consortium that five hundred library cards would take us through the first year. They took us through the first three weeks. Our librarian, whose previous job was running a used bookstore, turned out to be a master of handselling, even to the rough-and-tumble loggers and guys on the road crew who brought their kids in for story time and left with novels he’d pulled for them, and then came back, alone, for more. Books were being checked out by the bagful; there were lines at the circulation desk. Children especially, but sometimes adults, couldn’t believe it was all free.By year’s end we had signed up about 1,500 patrons, and there was a book club, a preschool story hour, movie night, and a play-reading group. High school students, many of whom did not have Internet access at home, came in the afternoon to do their homework. People pressed books into the hands of strangers who did not stay strangers for long. And it occurred to me one Saturday, as I watched quilters sitting at our one table trade patterns and children clear the shelves of The Magic School Bus series, racing to check them out, that the man who had said that libraries were communist had been right. A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal. Even our little book-lined room, with its mismatched furniture and worn carpet, was, as the sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds us libraries were once called, a palace for the people.
Klinenberg is interested in the ways that common spaces can repair our fractious and polarized civic life. And though he argues in his new book, Palaces for the People, that playgrounds, sporting clubs, diners, parks, farmer’s markets, and churches—anything, really, that puts people in close contact with one another—have the capacity to strengthen what Tocqueville called the cross-cutting ties that bind us to those who in many ways are different from us, he suggests that libraries may be the most effective. “Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture,” he writes. Yet as Susan Orlean observes in her loving encomium to libraries everywhere, aptly titled The Library Book, “The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”
As Klinenberg points out:
“Infrastructure” is not a term conventionally used to describe the underpinnings of social life…[but] if states and societies do not recognize social infrastructure and how it works, they will fail to see a powerful way to promote civic engagement and social interaction, both within communities and across group lines.To glimpse what he means, one need only dip into Frederick Wiseman’s epic and inspirational three-hour-and-seventeen-minute documentary Ex Libris, a picaresque tour of the grandest people’s palace of all: the New York Public Library system, a collection of ninety-two branches with seventeen million annual patrons (and millions more online). Wiseman trains his lens on the quotidian (people lining up to get into the main branch or poring over books), the obscure (a voice actor recording a book for the blind), and the singular (Khalil Muhammad discussing the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), and without saying so explicitly (the film is unnarrated), he shows the NYPL to be an exemplar of what a library is and what it can do. Here we see librarians helping students with math homework, hosting job fairs, running literacy and citizenship classes, teaching braille, and sponsoring lectures. We see people using computers, Wi-Fi hotspots, and, of course, books. They are white, black, brown, Asian, young, homeless, not-so-young, deaf, hearing, blind; they are everyone, which is the point. If you want to understand why the Trump administration eliminated federal funding for libraries in its 2018, 2019, and 2020 proposed budgets, it’s on display in this film: public libraries dismantle the walls between us.
by Sue Halpern, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Haizhan Zheng/Getty Images
Monday, April 1, 2019
Rebooting High School
In high schools across the U.S., a quiet movement is underway to better prepare students for a hazy new future of work in which graduates will vie for fast-changing jobs being transformed by increasingly capable machines.
Details: Breaking with traditional schooling, these new models emphasize capabilities over knowledge — with extra weight on interpersonal skills that appear likely to become ever more valuable.
The big picture: No one really knows what future jobs will look like or the skills that will be necessary to carry them out. But researchers and companies alike widely believe that, as a start, interpersonal and management skills will differentiate humans from machines.
High schoolers are often being taught skills that will soon be handed over to machines, and they're missing out on more valuable ones.
by Kaveh Waddell, Axios | Read more:
Image: Rebecca Zisser/Axios
[ed. See also: Are the Humanities History? (NYRB).]
Details: Breaking with traditional schooling, these new models emphasize capabilities over knowledge — with extra weight on interpersonal skills that appear likely to become ever more valuable.The big picture: No one really knows what future jobs will look like or the skills that will be necessary to carry them out. But researchers and companies alike widely believe that, as a start, interpersonal and management skills will differentiate humans from machines.
High schoolers are often being taught skills that will soon be handed over to machines, and they're missing out on more valuable ones.
- "The current system was created to develop a large body of people who can perform repetitive tasks in a strict hierarchy," says Scott Looney, head of Hawken School in Ohio.
- "We're preparing young people for jobs that won't exist," says Russlynn Ali, CEO of the education nonprofit XQ Institute and a former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education.
- A new teaching method at Summit Shasta, a charter school just outside San Francisco, where students choose the skills they want to focus on — pegged to their college and career aspirations. (Read about my visit to Summit Shasta.)
- A curriculum revamp at Lakeside School in Seattle, in which faculty and students are developing a list of future-proof skills they want to teach.
- A "mastery transcript" under development by a group of top high schools — Hawken's Looney is the project's founder — that measures a student's skills, habits and knowledge as an alternative to the typical list of letter grades.
Image: Rebecca Zisser/Axios
[ed. See also: Are the Humanities History? (NYRB).]
Alan Walker - Faded (Remix) ♫ Shuffle Dance
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Commander in Cheat
Donald Trump plays golf more than any other modern president. And he cheats more, too. A new book is coming out Tuesday titled, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, and goes into great detail describing how, exactly, President Donald Trump cheats on the links, and the New York Post published excerpts on Saturday. To write the book, author and former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly spoke with golf professionals and celebrities who have played with the president and discovered they each had a story about his cheating.
“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,'” Reilly wrote. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”
Trump’s cheating begins with his handicap—a number that is generated based on a player’s average score, ostensibly to allow players of different abilities to compete against one another. And, theoretically, the lower a player’s handicap, the better the player they are. For example, the Post points out, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus had a handicap of 3.4, higher (and therefore worse) than the 2.8 handicap Trump claims.
“If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter,” Reilly wrote.
Even Samuel L. Jackson has witnessed our president’s cheating ways: “We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey], and his caddy told him he found it!” he recalled.
LPGA player Suzann Pettersen also told Reilly she is convinced Trump’s caddy facilitates his cheating, saying, “no matter how far into the woods [Trump] hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”
But Trump doesn’t stop at making his caddy do all the dirty work. The president has also moved his fellow players’ balls to give himself an advantage. Former ESPN football announcer Mike Tirico recalled one time he played with Trump and hit one of the best shots of his life. He knew he landed close to the green, he said, but by the time he reached the green, his ball was mysteriously 50 feet to the left the hole and in a bunker.
Tirico said that Trump’s caddy later pulled him aside after the game and told him Trump had cheated: “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it,’” he said.
by Peter Wade, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Of course. See also: Rick Reilly Is Woke Now (The Ringer).]
“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,'” Reilly wrote. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”
Trump’s cheating begins with his handicap—a number that is generated based on a player’s average score, ostensibly to allow players of different abilities to compete against one another. And, theoretically, the lower a player’s handicap, the better the player they are. For example, the Post points out, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus had a handicap of 3.4, higher (and therefore worse) than the 2.8 handicap Trump claims.“If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter,” Reilly wrote.
Even Samuel L. Jackson has witnessed our president’s cheating ways: “We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey], and his caddy told him he found it!” he recalled.
LPGA player Suzann Pettersen also told Reilly she is convinced Trump’s caddy facilitates his cheating, saying, “no matter how far into the woods [Trump] hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”
But Trump doesn’t stop at making his caddy do all the dirty work. The president has also moved his fellow players’ balls to give himself an advantage. Former ESPN football announcer Mike Tirico recalled one time he played with Trump and hit one of the best shots of his life. He knew he landed close to the green, he said, but by the time he reached the green, his ball was mysteriously 50 feet to the left the hole and in a bunker.
Tirico said that Trump’s caddy later pulled him aside after the game and told him Trump had cheated: “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it,’” he said.
by Peter Wade, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Of course. See also: Rick Reilly Is Woke Now (The Ringer).]
What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend
Abigail Disney, 59, is an activist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, making her an heiress to the Disney family fortune (she declines to say how much she inherited, but has given away over $70 million since she turned 21). Raised in North Hollywood, California, with three siblings, she has a doctorate from Columbia and currently lives in New York. Here, she talks about the paradoxes of growing up in tremendous wealth; she will also be featured on the Cut’s podcast, The Cut on Tuesdays, on April 9.
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy?
At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better than anyone else.
That said, we lived in a big enough house that we would always get two doorbells on Halloween — people would ring the front and the back thinking it was two houses. But again, it wasn’t lavish. There weren’t private airplanes and things like that until I got older.
Do most people assume you’re rich when they meet you?
People do say to me, straight up, “Oh my God, you must be really rich.” In every interaction, you don’t get to make a first impression because they’re already thought about what they want to think about you before you even shake their hand.
What about situations where people don’t know you’re rich?
If I’m in a situation where people know my last name, they usually know it. But I’m not recognizable, so I can go through the world and restaurants and airports and interact with people like a normal person. That, I love. It’s great. There are very occasionally people for whom it never crosses their mind until later, and then they get freaked out.
This is the weird thing about my life: I am usually excited to meet someone in direct disproportion to how excited they are to meet me. I’m kind of a lefty, New York City, Manhattan, pointy-headed intellectual type. Those are the people who hate Disney and think it’s the worst thing on Earth, and that’s where I probably would be if I weren’t actually related to it.
When I meet people, I have an unfair advantage in being able to make them laugh because all I have to do is make a joke about Tinkerbell or Cinderella, and they love you for it. In some cases, all I have to do is not be a huge asshole. It’s like people think you’ll come in on a chariot or something. Within about an hour, invariably, they’ll say, “Oh my God, you’re so down to Earth.” I don’t know what people expect.
Did you have a moment in your life when things started getting lavish and you realized, “Oh, I’m super rich”?
When I went off to college, Michael Eisner came in and reinvigorated the company, and then the stock price, which was basically my family’s entire net worth, was ten times, 20 times, 50 times what it had been when I was growing up. So all of the sudden, we went from being comfortable, upper-middle-class people to suddenly my dad had a private jet. That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people. I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.
In what ways did your dad change, other than having a jet?
Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.
My dad’s plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seatbelt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous. We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, “No, I think this is really bad for everybody.”
How did the jet change your dad?
It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, “Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.” So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you.
When did you stop riding the private jet?
The moment for me, when I decided I couldn’t fly in the plane anymore, was about 20 years ago. I had to fly out to California for a meeting but I had to get back to New York by the next morning for a conference. And the guy who ran our family’s company put me on the 737 alone. I flew across the country overnight, by myself on that giant plane, and I was sitting there thinking about the carbon footprint and the number of flight attendants and the other pilot on-call and what it was costing, and I just wanted to be sick. By the way, my parents always made fun of the fact that I thought it was terrible and awful because they were very comfortable with what they were doing.
What lessons did your parents teach you about money?
My mom was somebody who really liked having nice things, like Chanel suits. She would spend money on things that she really, really loved. But she also dressed like a slob, and she would be more delighted by a deal on toilet paper at the supermarket than any Chanel suit.
This is often true of rich people, isn’t it?
Yes. A lot of people go back and forth between these identities. My parents’ financial life changed in the ’80s, and I was an adult by then and I watched them kind of relax into it. I think of it as slouching into money. They were in their 50s and they liked the shortcuts that wealth gave them. It’s very hard to say no to things like that. But what ends up happening is you end up being surrounded by people who don’t tell “no,” ever. And as my father’s drinking problem grew, he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t say, “You have a terrible drinking problem. You need to go get some help.” (...)
What do you enjoy spending money on?
I live in a constant state of tension about that. I really love a very good meal at very good restaurants and a very good bottle of wine. I really love a beautiful pair of shoes, and I’ll spend way too much money on that, or a purse. Luckily, I’m not a real-estate girl; I don’t need a ranch and a ski resort and whatever else. And I don’t want a private jet because it hollows you out from the inside. So I’m lucky that the things I love are really not expensive, considering. But to most normal people, what I spend on a really good dinner at a really good restaurant, that would be horrifying. They couldn’t even imagine spending that. So I wouldn’t pass muster with a lot of lefties, I have to say.
Has the way you spend money changed?
I think that people who grow up in this kind of life go one of two ways. They either go the Kim Kardashian route, which is spending, spending, spending, completely absorbing the idea that, “Yes, you are that special,” and wanting everyone to look at you. Or, and I know a lot of people who’ve gone this way — especially my women friends — you do the opposite. I wore shitty clothes around. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had. I spent most of my 20s in graduate school, and graduate school is where people shame you for having money. I was embarrassed by it. I didn’t want anyone to know. And actually, my kids are kind of that way now. They don’t want anyone to know and they want to support themselves. I keep trying to tell them that money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person. You are who you are and the least important thing about you is what you have. That was not, “You haven’t earned it,” you know. So my philosophy is you try to earn it in reverse.
What’s that dynamic like? Do you see other wealthy people and think, “Oh, you earned your money, whereas I was given it”?
I certainly have an inferiority complex around people who have actually earned their money. I did grow up with this doubt about myself. Like, did Yale really say yes because I was that good, or did Yale say yes because of my last name? I’ll never know. I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self. That is handing your self-esteem to the world to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to have any. And that’s a dangerous game.
by Sarah McVeigh with Abigal Disney, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Jemal Countess/Getty
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy?
At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better than anyone else.
That said, we lived in a big enough house that we would always get two doorbells on Halloween — people would ring the front and the back thinking it was two houses. But again, it wasn’t lavish. There weren’t private airplanes and things like that until I got older.
Do most people assume you’re rich when they meet you?People do say to me, straight up, “Oh my God, you must be really rich.” In every interaction, you don’t get to make a first impression because they’re already thought about what they want to think about you before you even shake their hand.
What about situations where people don’t know you’re rich?
If I’m in a situation where people know my last name, they usually know it. But I’m not recognizable, so I can go through the world and restaurants and airports and interact with people like a normal person. That, I love. It’s great. There are very occasionally people for whom it never crosses their mind until later, and then they get freaked out.
This is the weird thing about my life: I am usually excited to meet someone in direct disproportion to how excited they are to meet me. I’m kind of a lefty, New York City, Manhattan, pointy-headed intellectual type. Those are the people who hate Disney and think it’s the worst thing on Earth, and that’s where I probably would be if I weren’t actually related to it.
When I meet people, I have an unfair advantage in being able to make them laugh because all I have to do is make a joke about Tinkerbell or Cinderella, and they love you for it. In some cases, all I have to do is not be a huge asshole. It’s like people think you’ll come in on a chariot or something. Within about an hour, invariably, they’ll say, “Oh my God, you’re so down to Earth.” I don’t know what people expect.
Did you have a moment in your life when things started getting lavish and you realized, “Oh, I’m super rich”?
When I went off to college, Michael Eisner came in and reinvigorated the company, and then the stock price, which was basically my family’s entire net worth, was ten times, 20 times, 50 times what it had been when I was growing up. So all of the sudden, we went from being comfortable, upper-middle-class people to suddenly my dad had a private jet. That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people. I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.
In what ways did your dad change, other than having a jet?
Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.
My dad’s plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seatbelt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous. We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, “No, I think this is really bad for everybody.”
How did the jet change your dad?
It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, “Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.” So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you.
When did you stop riding the private jet?
The moment for me, when I decided I couldn’t fly in the plane anymore, was about 20 years ago. I had to fly out to California for a meeting but I had to get back to New York by the next morning for a conference. And the guy who ran our family’s company put me on the 737 alone. I flew across the country overnight, by myself on that giant plane, and I was sitting there thinking about the carbon footprint and the number of flight attendants and the other pilot on-call and what it was costing, and I just wanted to be sick. By the way, my parents always made fun of the fact that I thought it was terrible and awful because they were very comfortable with what they were doing.
My mom was somebody who really liked having nice things, like Chanel suits. She would spend money on things that she really, really loved. But she also dressed like a slob, and she would be more delighted by a deal on toilet paper at the supermarket than any Chanel suit.
This is often true of rich people, isn’t it?
Yes. A lot of people go back and forth between these identities. My parents’ financial life changed in the ’80s, and I was an adult by then and I watched them kind of relax into it. I think of it as slouching into money. They were in their 50s and they liked the shortcuts that wealth gave them. It’s very hard to say no to things like that. But what ends up happening is you end up being surrounded by people who don’t tell “no,” ever. And as my father’s drinking problem grew, he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t say, “You have a terrible drinking problem. You need to go get some help.” (...)
What do you enjoy spending money on?
I live in a constant state of tension about that. I really love a very good meal at very good restaurants and a very good bottle of wine. I really love a beautiful pair of shoes, and I’ll spend way too much money on that, or a purse. Luckily, I’m not a real-estate girl; I don’t need a ranch and a ski resort and whatever else. And I don’t want a private jet because it hollows you out from the inside. So I’m lucky that the things I love are really not expensive, considering. But to most normal people, what I spend on a really good dinner at a really good restaurant, that would be horrifying. They couldn’t even imagine spending that. So I wouldn’t pass muster with a lot of lefties, I have to say.
Has the way you spend money changed?
I think that people who grow up in this kind of life go one of two ways. They either go the Kim Kardashian route, which is spending, spending, spending, completely absorbing the idea that, “Yes, you are that special,” and wanting everyone to look at you. Or, and I know a lot of people who’ve gone this way — especially my women friends — you do the opposite. I wore shitty clothes around. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had. I spent most of my 20s in graduate school, and graduate school is where people shame you for having money. I was embarrassed by it. I didn’t want anyone to know. And actually, my kids are kind of that way now. They don’t want anyone to know and they want to support themselves. I keep trying to tell them that money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person. You are who you are and the least important thing about you is what you have. That was not, “You haven’t earned it,” you know. So my philosophy is you try to earn it in reverse.
What’s that dynamic like? Do you see other wealthy people and think, “Oh, you earned your money, whereas I was given it”?
I certainly have an inferiority complex around people who have actually earned their money. I did grow up with this doubt about myself. Like, did Yale really say yes because I was that good, or did Yale say yes because of my last name? I’ll never know. I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self. That is handing your self-esteem to the world to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to have any. And that’s a dangerous game.
by Sarah McVeigh with Abigal Disney, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Jemal Countess/Getty
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Friday, March 29, 2019
The Barr Gambit
A former federal prosecutor has some thoughts on the Barr Gambit …
[ed. See also: Why the Mueller Summary Is a Big Win for America (NY Mag).]
A few thoughts on the Barr Gambit, which I think will go down as a singular achievement in the annals of intellectual dishonesty and bad faith legal jujitsu:
1. It is undisputed that the Russian government brazenly interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump. In so doing, the Russians and those acting on their behalf committed a variety of federal crimes including computer hacking and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those crimes were committed to benefit (a) Vladimir Putin and the interests of the Russian government; and (b) Donald J. Trump. It is also undisputed that Trump and his campaign joyfully used and weaponized the information the Russians stole against Hillary Clinton. Trump personally trumpeted the Wikileaks disclosures 141 times during the campaign, and his surrogates countless more times. While Mueller’s team apparently “did not establish” (i.e., did not find enough evidence to charge criminally) that Trump personally conspired with the Russian government to commit the underlying crimes, there is no question that he was (along with Putin) the single biggest beneficiary of those criminal efforts.
2. Mueller apparently pulled together significant evidence that the President attempted to obstruct the investigation into these crimes. But to support his decision not to prosecute the President for obstruction of justice, Barr relied in part on Mueller’s conclusion that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President was involved in an underlying criminal conspiracy. Therefore, Barr’s reasoning goes, Trump lacked corrupt intent to obstruct because, at least in part, he was not involved in any underlying crime. This argument is both legally wrong (obstruction charges don’t depend on the existence of an underlying crime, just an investigation or proceeding), and it flies in the face of one simple fact: Trump was a prime beneficiary of the undisputed criminal conduct that did occur. He of course had a strong personal interest in seeking to obstruct this investigation for a variety of reasons. If you receive and use stolen money, even if you weren’t involved in the theft, you have a strong interest in thwarting any efforts to investigate the underlying theft. Why? Because you don’t want to lose the right to hold onto your money. Same here. This investigation posed a direct threat to the Presidency. It also posed a direct threat to prying open Trump’s shady business empire. Barr’s argument might hold water if the Russian election interference was intended to help Hillary and Trump’s campaign was not the subject of the investigation. As it stands, the President had a deep personal stake in the outcome of the investigation and it appears he used his executive power to thwart it. That cannot be countenanced.
3. The non-charging decision on obstruction by Mueller cannot be explained as a failure of evidence. On conspiracy or coordination, it appears Mueller made a clear decision not to charge because of a lack of evidence. As too many members of the media seem to get wrong, this was not a “no evidence” situation, but rather a failure to get to the required level of admissible evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. And the level of proof had to be something in between probable cause (you can’t get 500 search warrants without it) and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I have no problem with that decision from a prosecutorial discretion standpoint. There was lots of evidence of an underlying conspiracy, but it was always going to be very difficult to prove the President’s direct involvement with sufficient admissible evidence (classified intercepts from foreign governments won’t do it). And Manafort and Stone holding the line seems to have been the stopped the Mueller team short. Mueller made a decision not to charge conspiracy because of a lack of evidence, so why not obstruction? If it’s a 50-50 call and a pure “jump ball” that’s easy. You decline. If it’s “more likely than not,” the civil standard, you also decline. Even if it’s “clear and convincing” evidence that doesn’t rise to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you decline the case. So what is going on here? To me, the only answer is that they had a chargeable obstruction case but stopped short of making a decision to charge the President–because he’s the President. It could have been the policy not to indict a sitting President, it could have been the legal and policy arguments around executive authority, or it could have been out of deference to the legislative branch and its impeachment prerogatives. Any way you cut it, I just can’t see Mueller shying away from a tough evidentiary call. If we ever get to see it, I fully expect the actual Mueller report to contain a devastating case against the President for obstruction of justice.by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
[ed. See also: Why the Mueller Summary Is a Big Win for America (NY Mag).]
The Personal Business of Being Laid Off
When I need comfort and familiarity, I cycle through five or so different movies I’ve seen at least a half dozen times each. Nora Ephron’s 1998 classic You’ve Got Mail is a frequent go-to. Watching Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), a smug but charming business man, destroy Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) livelihood by opening a big chain bookshop beside her tiny independent while they fall in love anonymously online is somehow the perfect romantic comedy.
On my most recent watch, though, I found myself emotional over one particular exchange. Joe visits Kathleen in a bid to win her over romantically and begins telling her that destroying her business wasn’t personal. In response, she tells him, “I am so sick of that. All it means is that it’s not personal to you, but it’s personal to me. Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
“It’s not personal, it’s just business” is a film and television trope so pervasive that up until recently I didn’t question its truth. When I was laid off from what I thought was my dream job, nearly a year ago, some version of it was repeated by almost everyone who talked to me.
One morning in mid-July 2017, nearly ten months into my employment as a staff writer, my entire office gathered for an emergency town hall where it was announced that the media giant I worked for would be cutting sixty or so positions worldwide. We were told in vague terms this was because the company was growing and resources had to be allocated elsewhere, elsewhere being our television and film studio. Headlines called this a “pivot to video.” It was a phrase popularized earlier that same year, when MTV News in New York City laid off almost its entire editorial staff.
For an entire week at my office, in hushed tones, water cooler talk turned into discussions about who would get cut and why. “This happens with every media company at some point,” was the general consensus on how to deal with the news. That week, I went for dinner with friends of mine who also worked in media. They all assured me I had nothing to worry about. “You’re too good for them to let you go.” A part of me believed it, as illogical as it was. I was far from the best writer or most efficient worker on my team, and layoffs weren’t a popularity contest. It was all about money, and not us as individuals.
It was a Thursday morning, shortly after my team’s daily meeting, when I received a Slack message from my boss asking me to come to the most secluded meeting room in our trendy, open concept office. Immediately, I knew what was about to happen. The director of HR told me my position was redundant and laying me off had nothing to do with my performance. I was then instructed to leave the office within five minutes with my coat and bag (the rest of my stuff would be mailed to me) and to absolutely not say goodbye to anyone so as to not disrupt the process. My emails and Google Docs disappeared as I was in my meeting, I was not given a chance to save anything.
As I was packing up what I could, trying to blink back tears while also not alerting my coworkers I had been let go, I couldn’t believe it was over in such an unceremonious way. I meant nothing to this job that had meant so much to me.
I had nowhere to go. Not wanting to cry on public transit I ended up in a Burger King down the street. I openly sobbed in public for the first time in my adult life. Nobody in the restaurant noticed.
It’s not personal, it’s business. (...)
I was let go just a few days before my 26th birthday and two weeks before a holiday to the Netherlands and Germany with my brother and cousins. After announcing the layoff on Twitter, my inbox was flooded with opportunities from people who wanted to work with me. I’m privileged enough to have the support of my family, I knew I’d never be destitute. Still, I felt sorry for myself. I went to my brother’s house in Ottawa and played video games until late into the night in a dark basement. Each time I remembered what had happened, I’d burst into tears. I deactivated my Instagram and Twitter because I felt too much pressure to show my followers a brave face. My friends and family gave me endless pep talks, but my mind would always go back to feeling like I had lost a part of myself I couldn’t get back.
My more experienced friends told me I’d get a job in no time. This still hasn’t happened, but I’m not surprised. Job scarcity and low pay from traditional media companies means dozens of my former colleagues and peers have pivoted to working for tech companies that are “creating content,” a concept that not many people can define when I ask. They’re getting paid enough to live comfortably in Toronto, something they couldn’t do before. Now, without a regular 9-5 job, I’m freelancing again, doing about any type of writing or media adjacent work I can.
On my most recent watch, though, I found myself emotional over one particular exchange. Joe visits Kathleen in a bid to win her over romantically and begins telling her that destroying her business wasn’t personal. In response, she tells him, “I am so sick of that. All it means is that it’s not personal to you, but it’s personal to me. Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
“It’s not personal, it’s just business” is a film and television trope so pervasive that up until recently I didn’t question its truth. When I was laid off from what I thought was my dream job, nearly a year ago, some version of it was repeated by almost everyone who talked to me.
One morning in mid-July 2017, nearly ten months into my employment as a staff writer, my entire office gathered for an emergency town hall where it was announced that the media giant I worked for would be cutting sixty or so positions worldwide. We were told in vague terms this was because the company was growing and resources had to be allocated elsewhere, elsewhere being our television and film studio. Headlines called this a “pivot to video.” It was a phrase popularized earlier that same year, when MTV News in New York City laid off almost its entire editorial staff.For an entire week at my office, in hushed tones, water cooler talk turned into discussions about who would get cut and why. “This happens with every media company at some point,” was the general consensus on how to deal with the news. That week, I went for dinner with friends of mine who also worked in media. They all assured me I had nothing to worry about. “You’re too good for them to let you go.” A part of me believed it, as illogical as it was. I was far from the best writer or most efficient worker on my team, and layoffs weren’t a popularity contest. It was all about money, and not us as individuals.
It was a Thursday morning, shortly after my team’s daily meeting, when I received a Slack message from my boss asking me to come to the most secluded meeting room in our trendy, open concept office. Immediately, I knew what was about to happen. The director of HR told me my position was redundant and laying me off had nothing to do with my performance. I was then instructed to leave the office within five minutes with my coat and bag (the rest of my stuff would be mailed to me) and to absolutely not say goodbye to anyone so as to not disrupt the process. My emails and Google Docs disappeared as I was in my meeting, I was not given a chance to save anything.
As I was packing up what I could, trying to blink back tears while also not alerting my coworkers I had been let go, I couldn’t believe it was over in such an unceremonious way. I meant nothing to this job that had meant so much to me.
I had nowhere to go. Not wanting to cry on public transit I ended up in a Burger King down the street. I openly sobbed in public for the first time in my adult life. Nobody in the restaurant noticed.
It’s not personal, it’s business. (...)
I was let go just a few days before my 26th birthday and two weeks before a holiday to the Netherlands and Germany with my brother and cousins. After announcing the layoff on Twitter, my inbox was flooded with opportunities from people who wanted to work with me. I’m privileged enough to have the support of my family, I knew I’d never be destitute. Still, I felt sorry for myself. I went to my brother’s house in Ottawa and played video games until late into the night in a dark basement. Each time I remembered what had happened, I’d burst into tears. I deactivated my Instagram and Twitter because I felt too much pressure to show my followers a brave face. My friends and family gave me endless pep talks, but my mind would always go back to feeling like I had lost a part of myself I couldn’t get back.
My more experienced friends told me I’d get a job in no time. This still hasn’t happened, but I’m not surprised. Job scarcity and low pay from traditional media companies means dozens of my former colleagues and peers have pivoted to working for tech companies that are “creating content,” a concept that not many people can define when I ask. They’re getting paid enough to live comfortably in Toronto, something they couldn’t do before. Now, without a regular 9-5 job, I’m freelancing again, doing about any type of writing or media adjacent work I can.
by Sarah Hagi, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image: You've Got Mail
The Gurus of Tidiness: If You Like Marie Kondo …
Spring cleaning started early this year, with the January release of the Netflix series “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo” initiating something of a national closet-clearing frenzy.
Charities have been inundated with donations, and Instagram feeds have overflowed with tidying hash tags like #sparkjoy and #konmari, nods to the Japanese organizer’s method of keeping only items that bring you joy.
Ms. Kondo, who leapt into the American consciousness in 2014 with the release of her book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” is not alone in her fascination with order. Three new books also grapple with the topic, offering clutter-weary readers various perspectives, and strategies, on managing their stuff.
There’s “Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness,” by Gretchen Rubin, author of the best-selling book “The Happiness Project.” And “The Home Edit: A Guide to Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals,” by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, a home-organizing duo with a million Instagram followers. And also Joshua Becker’s “The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life.”
The books hit shelves at a moment when Americans are collectively looking into their closets and wondering what could go.
When Ms. Kondo’s show first aired on Netflix, thredUP, the online consignment shop, reported an 80 percent surge in requests for Clean Out kits, the bags customers fill with everything they want to sell. And Housing Works saw a 15 percent increase in donations to its New York City thrift stores.
No longer a mundane household chore, home organizing now falls squarely into the wellness category, another step on the endless road to self-improvement. Clean up your living room and you can clean up your life.
Each of the recently released books espouses the need for a more streamlined approach to life, but with slightly different recommendations on how to get there, and different expectations for how much stuff you need in your home. (...)
Tidying, it turns out, is big business, with the home-organization industry growing at 4 percent a year, and earning $16 billion in retail sales in 2016, Mr. Becker said in “The Minimalist Home.” And it’s no wonder. As baby boomers downsize, they have less room to store stuff, and their grown children have little interest in taking their parents’ bureaus and dining sets.
by Ronda Kaysen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Charities have been inundated with donations, and Instagram feeds have overflowed with tidying hash tags like #sparkjoy and #konmari, nods to the Japanese organizer’s method of keeping only items that bring you joy.
Ms. Kondo, who leapt into the American consciousness in 2014 with the release of her book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” is not alone in her fascination with order. Three new books also grapple with the topic, offering clutter-weary readers various perspectives, and strategies, on managing their stuff.
There’s “Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness,” by Gretchen Rubin, author of the best-selling book “The Happiness Project.” And “The Home Edit: A Guide to Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals,” by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, a home-organizing duo with a million Instagram followers. And also Joshua Becker’s “The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life.”The books hit shelves at a moment when Americans are collectively looking into their closets and wondering what could go.
When Ms. Kondo’s show first aired on Netflix, thredUP, the online consignment shop, reported an 80 percent surge in requests for Clean Out kits, the bags customers fill with everything they want to sell. And Housing Works saw a 15 percent increase in donations to its New York City thrift stores.
No longer a mundane household chore, home organizing now falls squarely into the wellness category, another step on the endless road to self-improvement. Clean up your living room and you can clean up your life.
Each of the recently released books espouses the need for a more streamlined approach to life, but with slightly different recommendations on how to get there, and different expectations for how much stuff you need in your home. (...)
Tidying, it turns out, is big business, with the home-organization industry growing at 4 percent a year, and earning $16 billion in retail sales in 2016, Mr. Becker said in “The Minimalist Home.” And it’s no wonder. As baby boomers downsize, they have less room to store stuff, and their grown children have little interest in taking their parents’ bureaus and dining sets.
by Ronda Kaysen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Thursday, March 28, 2019
In Search of Generation Z
The marketing gurus have only recently completed their lovingly assembled profile of the millennial generation, and their work is a true wonder to behold: a trail of mangled slang, twitching meme-gifs, and fast food brands masquerading as witty, clinically depressed twenty-somethings. But now a new generation—61 million strong—is marching to maturity, wreathed in Juul vapor and wielding billions of dollars in purchasing power.
The brands, naturally, want to know about them. What are these creatures like? What are their hopes, their dreams? Do they value fresh ingredients? What is their attitude, in aggregate, toward shopping at the mall? And what might that imply for Nabisco’s bottom line?
The ethnographic entrepreneurs who cut their teeth on the millennials are rapidly expanding into the Generation Z racket. None of them could reasonably aspire to the glory of a William Strauss or Neil Howe—the pop-historians who coined the term “millennial”—but that is not for want of trying. They are throwing out catch phrases and neologisms, seeing what will stick. Out of case studies, stats, and raw intuition, they are conjuring a character—the representative Z—who will haunt public discourse well into the next decade. And they are, inevitably, going to get it very wrong.
Though “Generation Z,” as a moniker, has gained a toehold in the public consciousness, this fledgling cohort, whose birth-range most experts place between 1995 and 2005, is so green that its very name is still up for grabs. Jean Twenge, a tirelessly meme-generating psychologist and brand consultant, went with “iGen” in her book of the same name. Futurecast, a subsidiary of a major ad agency and the force behind a couple of millennial marketing guides, has settled on “Pivotals” (because “they are pivoting away from common millennial behaviors and attitudes”). David Stillman, one of the field’s biggest names, and Jonah Stillman, his college-aged son, offer “weconomists” in their book Gen Z at Work, in reference to the younger generation’s supposed affinity for the sharing economy. Also in the running: Digital Natives, the Homeland Generation, the Meme Generation, the Throwback Generation, post-millennials, Plurals, Founders, and “Philanthroteens.”
But if Gen Z’s name is in flux, a narrative has already started to emerge about what makes this generation tick. Experts tend to subvert the expected narrative of Zs as “millennials on steroids”: screen-poisoned shut-ins reared on benzos and niche porn, readying the kill shot on Olive Garden, monogamy, and the traditional nine-to-five. By their lights, a generation that grew up on reboots and revivals has itself, somehow, become one: a kind of woke Silent Generation. (...)
Much is made of the fact that, unlike millennials, these Zs have never known a world without the internet. Lifelong immersion in a “phigital” environment (the Stillmans’ portmanteau), in which “the real world and the virtual world naturally overlap,” has wrecked their attention spans—down to an average of eight seconds from the millennials’ comparatively ample twelve, according to Fromm and Read. The Stillmans address this generational twitchiness from a workplace perspective, suggesting that employers dice their training into dozens of short, easy-to-digest tutorials, each instantly followed by hands-on practice. To the marketing crowd, Fromm and Read suggest exploiting this deficiency with “direct, quick, and simple” ads—“snackable” content memorable enough to make an impact before the eight-second window closes.
A slideshow currently making the rounds at conferences and corporate headquarters breaks Generation Z down further. Called “Reign Makers,” it is the product of Bustle Digital Group, which, in addition to its slate of lifestyle sites, hosts a robust thought leadership division—“a consultancy within a consultancy,” as Jessica Tarlov, head of research at BDG, describes it. Tarlov’s division had noticed that, more and more, their presentations on millennials were being interrupted by questions about Gen Z. “Reign Makers” represents the stolid if nonsensical effort of BDG marketers to draw a bright line between the two.
The presentation sections Zs into four types—The Gypsy Kings and Queens (“eclectic and entrepreneurial risk-takers”), The Free Radicals (“independent, alternative thinkers”), The Challengers (“strong, steadfast, educated doers”), and The American Dreamers (“optimistic team players”)—and explains the best ways to market to each one. (...)
I was talking to Lavigne-Delville at the Bowery Hotel in New York, shortly before six Zs were set to arrive for an informal focus group. It was a Wednesday night in January, midway through a ruthlessly cold week, but Lavigne-Delville looked strikingly unmiserable, her perma-smile never wavering. A self-described proud Xer who could pass for old millennial, Lavigne-Delville got her start over a decade ago, deciphering her own generation for Creative Artists Agency. She prospered through the millennial boom (the late aughts: a terrible time to be a millennial, an excellent time to be a millennial-expert) and is now among those leading the way on Gen Z.
Tonight’s batch of Zs—all women or non-binary people—had been curated by Abby Spector, Lavigne-Delville’s laid-back millennial-aged research manager. They were there to provide insights for the next issue of Humanly, Culture Co-Op’s calling card, a more or less yearly distillation of the company’s research. The last installment highlighted trends like “rogue vogue” (the embrace, among Zs, of the trashy or obscene, as a punkish rebuke to Instagram’s lifestyle cult) and “nouveau beat” (a resurgence of Kerouac-style counterculturalism, but expressed via podcasts and DIY urban farming initiatives).
“You guys are literally the guinea pig group,” said Lavigne-Delville, once the Zs had settled in around a low glass table cluttered with candles, free pizza, and three strategically positioned iPhones (Melissa’s, Abby’s, and my own, all set to recording mode). The Zs checked texts, sipped meager flutes of rosé, discreetly wiped pizza grease on their coats and pants. Most of them had come here from the fringes of the culture class: prestige-scented drudgework at design studios, museums, experimental theater clubs.
Lavigne-Delville wanted to know what had caught the group’s attention lately. “It could be a person, it could be an advertising campaign, it could be a movement,” she said. Her only request was that, at least at first, they “veer clear of politics” (as Lavigne-Delville told me, once things land on a political subject “good luck getting off of it”). In response, a 21-year-old in track pants and an oversized thrifted sweater asked if anyone in the group had seen the Netflix show You, which led to a lengthy back-and-forth about internet privacy, creepy men, and the politics of hotness.
The brands, naturally, want to know about them. What are these creatures like? What are their hopes, their dreams? Do they value fresh ingredients? What is their attitude, in aggregate, toward shopping at the mall? And what might that imply for Nabisco’s bottom line?
The ethnographic entrepreneurs who cut their teeth on the millennials are rapidly expanding into the Generation Z racket. None of them could reasonably aspire to the glory of a William Strauss or Neil Howe—the pop-historians who coined the term “millennial”—but that is not for want of trying. They are throwing out catch phrases and neologisms, seeing what will stick. Out of case studies, stats, and raw intuition, they are conjuring a character—the representative Z—who will haunt public discourse well into the next decade. And they are, inevitably, going to get it very wrong.
Though “Generation Z,” as a moniker, has gained a toehold in the public consciousness, this fledgling cohort, whose birth-range most experts place between 1995 and 2005, is so green that its very name is still up for grabs. Jean Twenge, a tirelessly meme-generating psychologist and brand consultant, went with “iGen” in her book of the same name. Futurecast, a subsidiary of a major ad agency and the force behind a couple of millennial marketing guides, has settled on “Pivotals” (because “they are pivoting away from common millennial behaviors and attitudes”). David Stillman, one of the field’s biggest names, and Jonah Stillman, his college-aged son, offer “weconomists” in their book Gen Z at Work, in reference to the younger generation’s supposed affinity for the sharing economy. Also in the running: Digital Natives, the Homeland Generation, the Meme Generation, the Throwback Generation, post-millennials, Plurals, Founders, and “Philanthroteens.”But if Gen Z’s name is in flux, a narrative has already started to emerge about what makes this generation tick. Experts tend to subvert the expected narrative of Zs as “millennials on steroids”: screen-poisoned shut-ins reared on benzos and niche porn, readying the kill shot on Olive Garden, monogamy, and the traditional nine-to-five. By their lights, a generation that grew up on reboots and revivals has itself, somehow, become one: a kind of woke Silent Generation. (...)
Much is made of the fact that, unlike millennials, these Zs have never known a world without the internet. Lifelong immersion in a “phigital” environment (the Stillmans’ portmanteau), in which “the real world and the virtual world naturally overlap,” has wrecked their attention spans—down to an average of eight seconds from the millennials’ comparatively ample twelve, according to Fromm and Read. The Stillmans address this generational twitchiness from a workplace perspective, suggesting that employers dice their training into dozens of short, easy-to-digest tutorials, each instantly followed by hands-on practice. To the marketing crowd, Fromm and Read suggest exploiting this deficiency with “direct, quick, and simple” ads—“snackable” content memorable enough to make an impact before the eight-second window closes.
A slideshow currently making the rounds at conferences and corporate headquarters breaks Generation Z down further. Called “Reign Makers,” it is the product of Bustle Digital Group, which, in addition to its slate of lifestyle sites, hosts a robust thought leadership division—“a consultancy within a consultancy,” as Jessica Tarlov, head of research at BDG, describes it. Tarlov’s division had noticed that, more and more, their presentations on millennials were being interrupted by questions about Gen Z. “Reign Makers” represents the stolid if nonsensical effort of BDG marketers to draw a bright line between the two.
The presentation sections Zs into four types—The Gypsy Kings and Queens (“eclectic and entrepreneurial risk-takers”), The Free Radicals (“independent, alternative thinkers”), The Challengers (“strong, steadfast, educated doers”), and The American Dreamers (“optimistic team players”)—and explains the best ways to market to each one. (...)
I was talking to Lavigne-Delville at the Bowery Hotel in New York, shortly before six Zs were set to arrive for an informal focus group. It was a Wednesday night in January, midway through a ruthlessly cold week, but Lavigne-Delville looked strikingly unmiserable, her perma-smile never wavering. A self-described proud Xer who could pass for old millennial, Lavigne-Delville got her start over a decade ago, deciphering her own generation for Creative Artists Agency. She prospered through the millennial boom (the late aughts: a terrible time to be a millennial, an excellent time to be a millennial-expert) and is now among those leading the way on Gen Z.
Tonight’s batch of Zs—all women or non-binary people—had been curated by Abby Spector, Lavigne-Delville’s laid-back millennial-aged research manager. They were there to provide insights for the next issue of Humanly, Culture Co-Op’s calling card, a more or less yearly distillation of the company’s research. The last installment highlighted trends like “rogue vogue” (the embrace, among Zs, of the trashy or obscene, as a punkish rebuke to Instagram’s lifestyle cult) and “nouveau beat” (a resurgence of Kerouac-style counterculturalism, but expressed via podcasts and DIY urban farming initiatives).
“You guys are literally the guinea pig group,” said Lavigne-Delville, once the Zs had settled in around a low glass table cluttered with candles, free pizza, and three strategically positioned iPhones (Melissa’s, Abby’s, and my own, all set to recording mode). The Zs checked texts, sipped meager flutes of rosé, discreetly wiped pizza grease on their coats and pants. Most of them had come here from the fringes of the culture class: prestige-scented drudgework at design studios, museums, experimental theater clubs.
Lavigne-Delville wanted to know what had caught the group’s attention lately. “It could be a person, it could be an advertising campaign, it could be a movement,” she said. Her only request was that, at least at first, they “veer clear of politics” (as Lavigne-Delville told me, once things land on a political subject “good luck getting off of it”). In response, a 21-year-old in track pants and an oversized thrifted sweater asked if anyone in the group had seen the Netflix show You, which led to a lengthy back-and-forth about internet privacy, creepy men, and the politics of hotness.
A white woman named Maddie then praised ZocDoc, specifically its utility in screening out white male physicians. The next person went with safe spaces. The person after that went with the new Ariana Grande album, occasioning a discussion of cultural appropriation. By the time the Zs were gathering their coats and providing Abby with their PayPal info (each was being paid $75 for their time) Lavigne-Delville had gotten them to open up on MAGA Kanye (“it’s not even a disappointment”), money (“we have no money”), and their future careers (one was mulling some combination of photography, marketing, fashion directing, performance art, and philanthropy).
The conversation culminated in a complex, impassioned discussion of gender as it relates to The Wing, the Women’s March, and #MeToo. “Why would we go forward in any sort of revolution without being able to revolutionize ourselves?” asked the track-panted Z, with real feeling. You could almost picture the question, tweaked and decontextualized, in an eight-second Instagram ad. Yoga pants, maybe, or online banking.
The conversation culminated in a complex, impassioned discussion of gender as it relates to The Wing, the Women’s March, and #MeToo. “Why would we go forward in any sort of revolution without being able to revolutionize ourselves?” asked the track-panted Z, with real feeling. You could almost picture the question, tweaked and decontextualized, in an eight-second Instagram ad. Yoga pants, maybe, or online banking.
by Daniel Kolitz, New Republic | Read more:
Image: Peter Strain
[ed. Barf. How to exploit and manipulate another generation. See also: Gen Z: In Their Own Words (NY Times).]
Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018
Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018 (Axios):
Over the past few years the fire beneath Apple's red-hot stock price has largely been stock buybacks. The company has dwarfed other companies in terms of the number and amount of buybacks last year and for the past decade.
Driving the news: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Monday that companies bought back $806.4 billion worth of their own shares, including $223 billion in just the fourth quarter in 2018. It was short of the $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicted in August, but still an all-time record.
Of that record total, Apple bought back $10.1 billion worth of its own stock in Q4 and $74.2 billion for the year, more than a third of the entire S&P 500 total. The closest company to that total was Oracle, which spent $29.3 billion.
Between the lines: Companies have shown a very clear preference for buybacks over dividends so far this decade, with a major uptick in this trend in 2018 after the passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.
- Over the past decade, Apple has bought back more than $260.4 billion of its own shares. The No. 2 company on the buybacks list is Microsoft, which has bought back less than half that amount, $118.5 billion.
Image: Data: S&P Dow Jones Indices; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios
[ed. See also: here, here and here.]
A Blizzard of Prescriptions
In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’
The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including Percocet (where it is mixed with paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone-based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and came in small doses. While people did become addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates they contained made it hard to overdose on them, and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.
OxyContin distinguished itself from these medications, and received a patent, on the basis of an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to serve an urgent public health need but because the patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a time-release morphine pill called MS Contin. Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry often makes small adjustments to existing medications in order to patent and market them as new. OxyContin was one such drug.
OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive system, titrating the oxycodone into the body. Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the manufacturers claimed a patient could take OxyContin once in the morning and once at night and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-acting nature of OxyContin justified the manufacture of pills that contained much higher quantities of oxycodone than had ever been available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at first; 160 milligrams a few years later.
‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum describing the addiction she developed to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. (...)
The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the number of deaths from opiate overdoses increased by a factor of six in the US between 1999 and 2017 – is the subject of several recent books. Dopesick, by Beth Macy, describes the effects of opiate use in Appalachia, where she worked as a newspaper reporter. Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, describes the rise of a super-efficient network of dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go unchecked by the healthcare industry, government or law enforcement.
Each of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country’s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can’t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world. (...)
McGreal, Macy and Quinones all document the rise in the late 1990s of pill mills, where in some instances doctors dispensed as many as 200,000 prescriptions for painkillers over the course of a few years. Complicit with the doctors were pharmacies, drug distribution companies, sales representatives and, of course, Purdue itself, whose executives knew very well they were flooding the market with a highly addictive substance. Young people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’ medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall prescription at a party were now taking a much more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who had had her wisdom teeth taken out had no reason to suspect that OxyContin would affect them differently. A common theme in interviews in these books reveals how little scepticism there is towards pills – many people had no idea what they were taking until they were deep into their habit. A generation raised on televised ‘this is your brain on drugs’ propaganda and pop cultural depictions of addicts had no warning system in place for prescription drugs. It is common in the US for people who would never dabble in cocaine or LSD to take psychoactive pills without shame or suspicion. (...)
Macy is the author of another book, Factory Man (2014), about the effects of globalisation, automation and the decline of coal in Virginia, which once had thriving textile and furniture industries. Dopesick could be read, in part, as a sequel to that book. ‘The federal disability programme was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed,’ she writes, ‘a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivising poor people to stay sick with mental illness and chronic pain.’ In both the Ohio towns Quinones writes about, as well as the Appalachian towns described by Macy, pills became currency. Elderly people or those on disability who received government-funded health insurance through Medicare or Medicaid would get prescriptions for pain pills that were paid for by the government. At a going rate of $1 per milligram on the black market, thousands of dollars could be made from a 30-day OxyContin prescription. ‘Peddling pills was now the modern-day moonshining,’ Macy writes. In small towns where independent commerce had disappeared, addicts would shoplift goods from under the noses of unmotivated, underpaid Walmart employees and trade them for pills. Pill dealers would keep stores of stolen goods, where pills could buy everything from stolen televisions to nappies to laundry detergent – all at a discount. ‘Some large though immeasurable amount of the merchandise supporting addiction, as the opiates settled on heartland America, was mined from the aisles of Walmart, where Main Streets had gone to die,’ Quinones writes. ‘The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them.’
In 2010, Purdue introduced an ‘abuse deterrent’ to the drug which caused it to congeal when crushed, making snorting or injecting impossible. Conveniently, this also allowed Purdue to renew OxyContin’s patent, which was on the verge of expiring. (Through minor tweaks and reformulations, Purdue has re-patented OxyContin 13 times. Under its original patent the company would have lost exclusive rights to the drug in 2013. Now it maintains them until 2030.) It was in part the 2010 reformulation that provoked many users of OxyContin to try heroin and realise that it could also sate their cravings. By 2010 most of the pill mills had finally been shut down. Heroin was also significantly cheaper, especially for people who had built up tolerance to Oxy and required multiple pills a day to avoid the debilitating symptoms of withdrawal.
As the market for opiates expanded, heroin dealers stepped in to supplement the pharmaceutical supply. Of all the books available about the epidemic, Dreamland is by far the best account of how heroin dealers quickly came to understand the market opened up for them by prescription opiate painkillers. Quinones was a reporter for the LA Times when he first wrote about a network of heroin dealers who came from a small city in Mexico called Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit, where a sticky kind of heroin known as black tar is made from poppies that grow in the hills. The Xalisco boys, as Quinones calls them, were no Medellin cartel. They ran efficient, low-profile businesses, averse to violence and with a premium placed on customer service.
by Emily Witt, LRB | Read more:
The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including Percocet (where it is mixed with paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone-based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and came in small doses. While people did become addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates they contained made it hard to overdose on them, and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.
OxyContin distinguished itself from these medications, and received a patent, on the basis of an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to serve an urgent public health need but because the patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a time-release morphine pill called MS Contin. Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry often makes small adjustments to existing medications in order to patent and market them as new. OxyContin was one such drug.OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive system, titrating the oxycodone into the body. Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the manufacturers claimed a patient could take OxyContin once in the morning and once at night and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-acting nature of OxyContin justified the manufacture of pills that contained much higher quantities of oxycodone than had ever been available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at first; 160 milligrams a few years later.
‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum describing the addiction she developed to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. (...)
The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the number of deaths from opiate overdoses increased by a factor of six in the US between 1999 and 2017 – is the subject of several recent books. Dopesick, by Beth Macy, describes the effects of opiate use in Appalachia, where she worked as a newspaper reporter. Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, describes the rise of a super-efficient network of dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go unchecked by the healthcare industry, government or law enforcement.
Each of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country’s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can’t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world. (...)
McGreal, Macy and Quinones all document the rise in the late 1990s of pill mills, where in some instances doctors dispensed as many as 200,000 prescriptions for painkillers over the course of a few years. Complicit with the doctors were pharmacies, drug distribution companies, sales representatives and, of course, Purdue itself, whose executives knew very well they were flooding the market with a highly addictive substance. Young people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’ medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall prescription at a party were now taking a much more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who had had her wisdom teeth taken out had no reason to suspect that OxyContin would affect them differently. A common theme in interviews in these books reveals how little scepticism there is towards pills – many people had no idea what they were taking until they were deep into their habit. A generation raised on televised ‘this is your brain on drugs’ propaganda and pop cultural depictions of addicts had no warning system in place for prescription drugs. It is common in the US for people who would never dabble in cocaine or LSD to take psychoactive pills without shame or suspicion. (...)
Macy is the author of another book, Factory Man (2014), about the effects of globalisation, automation and the decline of coal in Virginia, which once had thriving textile and furniture industries. Dopesick could be read, in part, as a sequel to that book. ‘The federal disability programme was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed,’ she writes, ‘a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivising poor people to stay sick with mental illness and chronic pain.’ In both the Ohio towns Quinones writes about, as well as the Appalachian towns described by Macy, pills became currency. Elderly people or those on disability who received government-funded health insurance through Medicare or Medicaid would get prescriptions for pain pills that were paid for by the government. At a going rate of $1 per milligram on the black market, thousands of dollars could be made from a 30-day OxyContin prescription. ‘Peddling pills was now the modern-day moonshining,’ Macy writes. In small towns where independent commerce had disappeared, addicts would shoplift goods from under the noses of unmotivated, underpaid Walmart employees and trade them for pills. Pill dealers would keep stores of stolen goods, where pills could buy everything from stolen televisions to nappies to laundry detergent – all at a discount. ‘Some large though immeasurable amount of the merchandise supporting addiction, as the opiates settled on heartland America, was mined from the aisles of Walmart, where Main Streets had gone to die,’ Quinones writes. ‘The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them.’
In 2010, Purdue introduced an ‘abuse deterrent’ to the drug which caused it to congeal when crushed, making snorting or injecting impossible. Conveniently, this also allowed Purdue to renew OxyContin’s patent, which was on the verge of expiring. (Through minor tweaks and reformulations, Purdue has re-patented OxyContin 13 times. Under its original patent the company would have lost exclusive rights to the drug in 2013. Now it maintains them until 2030.) It was in part the 2010 reformulation that provoked many users of OxyContin to try heroin and realise that it could also sate their cravings. By 2010 most of the pill mills had finally been shut down. Heroin was also significantly cheaper, especially for people who had built up tolerance to Oxy and required multiple pills a day to avoid the debilitating symptoms of withdrawal.
As the market for opiates expanded, heroin dealers stepped in to supplement the pharmaceutical supply. Of all the books available about the epidemic, Dreamland is by far the best account of how heroin dealers quickly came to understand the market opened up for them by prescription opiate painkillers. Quinones was a reporter for the LA Times when he first wrote about a network of heroin dealers who came from a small city in Mexico called Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit, where a sticky kind of heroin known as black tar is made from poppies that grow in the hills. The Xalisco boys, as Quinones calls them, were no Medellin cartel. They ran efficient, low-profile businesses, averse to violence and with a premium placed on customer service.
by Emily Witt, LRB | Read more:
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)