[ed. Sounds like Santana but it's Ed Brady at 7:48. Kim Jordan on piano.] See also:
Pieces of a Man
Home is Where the Hatred Is
I Think I'll Call it Morning
I'm New Here
Monday, April 8, 2019
Gil Scott-Heron
[ed. Sounds like Santana but it's Ed Brady at 7:48. Kim Jordan on piano.] See also:
Pieces of a Man
Home is Where the Hatred Is
I Think I'll Call it Morning
I'm New Here
Facebook Got Caught Phishing For Friends
Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data meant for “authentication” to its own ends. Incredibly, this time, the company managed to accomplish all three in one fell swoop.
What happened?
Last weekend, news broke that Facebook has been demanding some new users enter their email passwords in order to sign up for an account on the site. First publicized by cybersecurity specialist e-sushi on Twitter, the unnervingly phishing-like process worked like this: any user who tried to create a new account on Facebook with an email from one of a few providers (including Yandex and GMX) was directed to a page that asked them to “Confirm [Their] Email”--by entering their email password.
Soon after the news was reported more widely by The Daily Beast and Business Insider, Facebook discontinued its verify-with-password program. EFF was made aware of the sign-up flow before the stories were published. Armed with a burner Yandex email and a fresh browsing session, we were able to experiment with the password-grabbing tool briefly before it was shut down. (...)
The Plot Thickens
In a statement, Facebook said it gave people “the option” to enter their password in order to verify their account. But why did the company build this tool at all? Asking for passwords you don’t need is a classic security anti-pattern: a commonly reinvented, bad solution to a common problem. Facebook is a huge company with plenty of security engineers on its payroll. Surely someone must have identified this as a terrible idea. And users around the web are familiar with the need to verify accounts with a click in a confirmation email; there was no reason to reinvent the wheel.
So why was Facebook’s design so intent on getting users to input their passwords?
It makes more sense in the context of what happened next.
When we clicked “Connect to yandex.com,” an overlay with a status bar appeared. “Authenticating,” it said. But wait—“Importing contacts?” When did that happen? What? How? Why??
Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts.
After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated. (...)
Uninformed non-consent
But the mis-education of new users is just the first layer of this onion of awfulness. By collecting sensitive information it didn’t need, Facebook put users at risk of future data breaches. Even if the company never intended to store users’ passwords, it’s hard to feel secure given its track record of, well, accidentally storing passwords. (The company said in a statement that “These passwords were not stored by Facebook.”)
Perhaps worst was Facebook’s approach to user consent. The “Confirm Your Email” page gave no context for why Facebook needed an email password and hid information about how to sidestep the process.
Everything about the page led users to believe they had no choice but to enter their email password. And once they did, nothing about the page indicated how Facebook would use it. According to the researcher who discovered it, an older version of the page had a “See how it works” link that led to… nothing. It wasn’t even a link, just a string of text that evoked the idea of one. Before users had the chance to consent to any kind of data collection, Facebook was scraping their email accounts for all of their social connections. This is worse than a typical dark pattern, which might take advantage of people’s tendency not to read fine print. It delivered unwanted behavior that even the most savvy users should not have predicted.
What happened?
Last weekend, news broke that Facebook has been demanding some new users enter their email passwords in order to sign up for an account on the site. First publicized by cybersecurity specialist e-sushi on Twitter, the unnervingly phishing-like process worked like this: any user who tried to create a new account on Facebook with an email from one of a few providers (including Yandex and GMX) was directed to a page that asked them to “Confirm [Their] Email”--by entering their email password.
Soon after the news was reported more widely by The Daily Beast and Business Insider, Facebook discontinued its verify-with-password program. EFF was made aware of the sign-up flow before the stories were published. Armed with a burner Yandex email and a fresh browsing session, we were able to experiment with the password-grabbing tool briefly before it was shut down. (...)
The Plot Thickens
In a statement, Facebook said it gave people “the option” to enter their password in order to verify their account. But why did the company build this tool at all? Asking for passwords you don’t need is a classic security anti-pattern: a commonly reinvented, bad solution to a common problem. Facebook is a huge company with plenty of security engineers on its payroll. Surely someone must have identified this as a terrible idea. And users around the web are familiar with the need to verify accounts with a click in a confirmation email; there was no reason to reinvent the wheel.
So why was Facebook’s design so intent on getting users to input their passwords?
It makes more sense in the context of what happened next.
When we clicked “Connect to yandex.com,” an overlay with a status bar appeared. “Authenticating,” it said. But wait—“Importing contacts?” When did that happen? What? How? Why??
Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts.
After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated. (...)
Why is this bad?
Where to begin.
Before we get into the manipulative data import feature, let’s talk about Facebook asking for email credentials in the first place. For all intents and purposes, this is a phishing attack. A company you don’t have a prior relationship with asks you to “confirm your email,” and tries to get you to enter your password into a website that is not your email client. This is the oldest trick in the book.
Phishing attacks commonly target email accounts because they are extremely rich data mines. For better or worse, email accounts often act as de facto digital passports. They connect users to social media, bank accounts, and services like gas, electric, and cable. They can be used to reset passwords for hundreds of services around the Internet. If your email is compromised, everything else about your digital identity is put at risk.
We cannot emphasize this enough: you should not give your email password to websites that are not your email provider or client. In this case, it looks like Facebook “only” wanted users’ contact lists, but that’s a paper-thin justification for the kind of access it demanded.
Tech companies, non-profits, researchers, community educators, and IT departments around the world have devoted millions of cumulative hours — writing countless explainers, giving presentations until their voices have gone hoarse, fundamentally redesigning how trust on the web works with cryptographic certificates and OAuth — all to prevent users from doing exactly this.
And Facebook, in its first interaction with a cohort of newcomers to its service, throws this all out the window. This interaction, and Facebook’s implicit assertion that nothing is out of the ordinary, is conditioning its users to be phished. For a company that is many people’s primary portal to the Internet, that’s downright irresponsible.
Where to begin.
Before we get into the manipulative data import feature, let’s talk about Facebook asking for email credentials in the first place. For all intents and purposes, this is a phishing attack. A company you don’t have a prior relationship with asks you to “confirm your email,” and tries to get you to enter your password into a website that is not your email client. This is the oldest trick in the book.
Phishing attacks commonly target email accounts because they are extremely rich data mines. For better or worse, email accounts often act as de facto digital passports. They connect users to social media, bank accounts, and services like gas, electric, and cable. They can be used to reset passwords for hundreds of services around the Internet. If your email is compromised, everything else about your digital identity is put at risk.
We cannot emphasize this enough: you should not give your email password to websites that are not your email provider or client. In this case, it looks like Facebook “only” wanted users’ contact lists, but that’s a paper-thin justification for the kind of access it demanded.
Tech companies, non-profits, researchers, community educators, and IT departments around the world have devoted millions of cumulative hours — writing countless explainers, giving presentations until their voices have gone hoarse, fundamentally redesigning how trust on the web works with cryptographic certificates and OAuth — all to prevent users from doing exactly this.
And Facebook, in its first interaction with a cohort of newcomers to its service, throws this all out the window. This interaction, and Facebook’s implicit assertion that nothing is out of the ordinary, is conditioning its users to be phished. For a company that is many people’s primary portal to the Internet, that’s downright irresponsible.
Uninformed non-consent
But the mis-education of new users is just the first layer of this onion of awfulness. By collecting sensitive information it didn’t need, Facebook put users at risk of future data breaches. Even if the company never intended to store users’ passwords, it’s hard to feel secure given its track record of, well, accidentally storing passwords. (The company said in a statement that “These passwords were not stored by Facebook.”)
Perhaps worst was Facebook’s approach to user consent. The “Confirm Your Email” page gave no context for why Facebook needed an email password and hid information about how to sidestep the process.
Everything about the page led users to believe they had no choice but to enter their email password. And once they did, nothing about the page indicated how Facebook would use it. According to the researcher who discovered it, an older version of the page had a “See how it works” link that led to… nothing. It wasn’t even a link, just a string of text that evoked the idea of one. Before users had the chance to consent to any kind of data collection, Facebook was scraping their email accounts for all of their social connections. This is worse than a typical dark pattern, which might take advantage of people’s tendency not to read fine print. It delivered unwanted behavior that even the most savvy users should not have predicted.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Google and Other Tech Giants Are Quietly Buying Up the Most Important Part of the Internet
Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it’s using those billions to buy up the internet itself — or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone.
In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company.
And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.
Google isn’t alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies — mostly telecom providers — but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google’s aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance.
I’ve been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech’s ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It’s the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control — and less privacy.
We’re reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media.
Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow. We need to decide carefully, too; these are the same companies that are gaining access to a seemingly ever-increasing share of our private lives.
Walling off the garden
If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95-99 percent of international data over bundles of fiber-optic cable strands the diameter of a garden hose. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today.
While past cable builders leveraged cable ownership to sell bandwidth, content providers are building purposefully private cables.
The internet is commonly described as a cloud. In reality, it’s a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them. The numbers speak for themselves; Google will own 10,433 miles of submarine cables internationally when the Curie cable is completed later this year.
The total shoots up to 63,605 miles when you include cables it owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Including these part-owned cables, the company has enough submarine infrastructure to wrap around the earth’s equator two-and-a-half times (with thousands of cable miles to spare).
In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company.
And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.
Google isn’t alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies — mostly telecom providers — but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google’s aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance.I’ve been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech’s ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It’s the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control — and less privacy.
We’re reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media.
Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow. We need to decide carefully, too; these are the same companies that are gaining access to a seemingly ever-increasing share of our private lives.
Walling off the garden
If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95-99 percent of international data over bundles of fiber-optic cable strands the diameter of a garden hose. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today.
While past cable builders leveraged cable ownership to sell bandwidth, content providers are building purposefully private cables.
The internet is commonly described as a cloud. In reality, it’s a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them. The numbers speak for themselves; Google will own 10,433 miles of submarine cables internationally when the Curie cable is completed later this year.
The total shoots up to 63,605 miles when you include cables it owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Including these part-owned cables, the company has enough submarine infrastructure to wrap around the earth’s equator two-and-a-half times (with thousands of cable miles to spare).
by Tyler Cooper, Venture Beat | Read more:
Image: Ander Gillenea/Getty Images
Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash
Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.
There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.
Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.
But trash scavengers exist in many United States cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of American capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.
Mr. Orta, 56, sees himself as more of a treasure hunter.
“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”
Mr. Orta says his goal is to earn around $30 to $40 a day from his discoveries, a survival income of around $300 a week.
Trash picking is illegal in California — once a bin is rolled out onto the sidewalk the contents are considered the possession of the trash collection company, according to Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, the company contracted to collect San Francisco’s garbage. But the law is rarely enforced. (...)
For years San Francisco has been a global beacon of recycling, attracting a stream of government ministers, journalists and students from across the globe to study the sorting facilities of Recology.
But the city is also full of young, affluent people preoccupied with demanding jobs and long commutes for whom the garbage can is a tempting way to get rid of that extra pair of jeans or old electronics cluttering their closet.
“We have a lot of trash of convenience,” said Mr. Reed, the spokesman for Recology. “You’ve got more and more tech people here and this city is moving faster and faster. These people have short attention spans. Some discard items that ought to be repurposed through a thrift shop.”
Trash pickers fall into several broad categories. For decades, elderly women and men have collected cardboard, paper, cans or bottles, lugging impossibly large bags around the city and bringing them to recycling centers for cash.
The city is most concerned about the battered pickup trucks, known as mosquito fleets, that buzz around San Francisco collecting recyclables on an industrial scale, depriving Recology, and ultimately the city, of income, said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for the city administrator’s office.
“That’s a significant challenge for residents because it results in higher garbage rates,” Mr. Barnes said.
Trash pickers like Mr. Orta are in yet another category, targeting items in the black landfill garbage bins whose contents would otherwise go to what’s known as the pit — a hole in the ground on the outskirts of the city that resembles a giant swimming pool, where nonrecyclable trash is crushed and compacted by a huge bulldozer and then carried by a fleet of trucks to a dump an hour and a half away. The city exports about 50 large truckloads a day.
by Thomas Fuller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
[ed. Never imagined there'd be something like a Global Alliance of Waste Pickers.]
There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.
But trash scavengers exist in many United States cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of American capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.
Mr. Orta, 56, sees himself as more of a treasure hunter.
“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”
Mr. Orta says his goal is to earn around $30 to $40 a day from his discoveries, a survival income of around $300 a week.
Trash picking is illegal in California — once a bin is rolled out onto the sidewalk the contents are considered the possession of the trash collection company, according to Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, the company contracted to collect San Francisco’s garbage. But the law is rarely enforced. (...)
For years San Francisco has been a global beacon of recycling, attracting a stream of government ministers, journalists and students from across the globe to study the sorting facilities of Recology.
But the city is also full of young, affluent people preoccupied with demanding jobs and long commutes for whom the garbage can is a tempting way to get rid of that extra pair of jeans or old electronics cluttering their closet.
“We have a lot of trash of convenience,” said Mr. Reed, the spokesman for Recology. “You’ve got more and more tech people here and this city is moving faster and faster. These people have short attention spans. Some discard items that ought to be repurposed through a thrift shop.”
Trash pickers fall into several broad categories. For decades, elderly women and men have collected cardboard, paper, cans or bottles, lugging impossibly large bags around the city and bringing them to recycling centers for cash.
The city is most concerned about the battered pickup trucks, known as mosquito fleets, that buzz around San Francisco collecting recyclables on an industrial scale, depriving Recology, and ultimately the city, of income, said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for the city administrator’s office.
“That’s a significant challenge for residents because it results in higher garbage rates,” Mr. Barnes said.
Trash pickers like Mr. Orta are in yet another category, targeting items in the black landfill garbage bins whose contents would otherwise go to what’s known as the pit — a hole in the ground on the outskirts of the city that resembles a giant swimming pool, where nonrecyclable trash is crushed and compacted by a huge bulldozer and then carried by a fleet of trucks to a dump an hour and a half away. The city exports about 50 large truckloads a day.
by Thomas Fuller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
[ed. Never imagined there'd be something like a Global Alliance of Waste Pickers.]
Saturday, April 6, 2019
They Had It Coming
Sweet Christ, vindication!
How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers, I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking, Could this be a bit too much?
Let’s back up.
Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I moved to Los Angeles (long story) and got hired at the top boys’ school in the city, which would soon become co-educational. For the first four years, I taught English. Best job I’ve ever had. For the next three, I was a college counselor. Worst job I’ve ever had.
When I was a teacher, my job was a source of self-respect; I had joined a great tradition. I was a young woman from a certain kind of good but not moneyed family who could exchange her only salable talents—an abiding love of books and a fondness for teenagers—for a job. Poor, obscure, plain, and little, I would drive though the exotic air of early-morning Los Angeles to the school, which was on a street with a beautiful name, Coldwater Canyon, in a part of the city originally designated the Central Motion Picture District. It sat on a plot of land that in the 1920s composed part of the Hollywood Hills Country Club, an institution that has a Narnia-like aspect, in that not even the California historian Kevin Starr knew whether it ever really existed, or whether it was merely a fiction promoted by real-estate developers trying to entice new homeowners to the Edenic San Fernando Valley. Across from a round tower connecting the upper and lower campuses was Saint Saviour’s, a chapel that the founders of the school built in 1914 as an exact replica of the one built in 1567 for the Rugby School in England, with pews facing the center aisle in the Tudor style. This combination of the possibly imaginary country club and the assumption behind the building of the chapel—get the set right, and you can make the whole production work—seemed to me like something from an Evelyn Waugh novel. But it also meant that—unlike Exeter or Choate—this school was a place where I could belong. There were no traditions, no expectation of familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer. All you needed to have was a piercing love of your subject and a willingness to enter into an apprenticeship with great teachers. I had those things. (...)
And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.
I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.
Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.
The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.
I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.
Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.
by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Gretchen Ertl/Reuters
How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers, I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking, Could this be a bit too much?
Let’s back up.
Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I moved to Los Angeles (long story) and got hired at the top boys’ school in the city, which would soon become co-educational. For the first four years, I taught English. Best job I’ve ever had. For the next three, I was a college counselor. Worst job I’ve ever had.When I was a teacher, my job was a source of self-respect; I had joined a great tradition. I was a young woman from a certain kind of good but not moneyed family who could exchange her only salable talents—an abiding love of books and a fondness for teenagers—for a job. Poor, obscure, plain, and little, I would drive though the exotic air of early-morning Los Angeles to the school, which was on a street with a beautiful name, Coldwater Canyon, in a part of the city originally designated the Central Motion Picture District. It sat on a plot of land that in the 1920s composed part of the Hollywood Hills Country Club, an institution that has a Narnia-like aspect, in that not even the California historian Kevin Starr knew whether it ever really existed, or whether it was merely a fiction promoted by real-estate developers trying to entice new homeowners to the Edenic San Fernando Valley. Across from a round tower connecting the upper and lower campuses was Saint Saviour’s, a chapel that the founders of the school built in 1914 as an exact replica of the one built in 1567 for the Rugby School in England, with pews facing the center aisle in the Tudor style. This combination of the possibly imaginary country club and the assumption behind the building of the chapel—get the set right, and you can make the whole production work—seemed to me like something from an Evelyn Waugh novel. But it also meant that—unlike Exeter or Choate—this school was a place where I could belong. There were no traditions, no expectation of familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer. All you needed to have was a piercing love of your subject and a willingness to enter into an apprenticeship with great teachers. I had those things. (...)
And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.
I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.
Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.
The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.
I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.
Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.
by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Gretchen Ertl/Reuters
40 Best Chicken Thighs Recipes for Frying, Baking and More
40 Best Chicken Thighs Recipes for Frying, Baking and More (Bon Appétit)
Here's one:
DescriptioBon Appétit
1½ pounds fingerling potatoes, halved lengthwise
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
3 links sweet Italian sausage
6 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
2 large onions, chopped
½ large red bell pepper, chopped
6 garlic cloves, finely grated
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
½ cup chopped hot, sweet pickled Peppadew peppers in brine
¼ cup white wine vinegar
3 sprigs rosemary
Chopped parsley (for serving)
***
Arrange racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 450°. Toss potatoes with 3 Tbsp. oil on a rimmed baking sheet; season with salt and pepper. Arrange cut side down and roast on lower rack until tender and cut sides are browned, 20–30 minutes; set aside.Meanwhile, heat remaining 3 Tbsp. oil in a large skillet over medium-high. Cook sausages, turning occasionally, until browned on all sides, 6–8 minutes (they will not be fully cooked). Transfer to a plate.
Season chicken on both sides with salt and pepper. Cook in same skillet, turning occasionally, until golden brown on both sides, 8–10 minutes (they will also be undercooked). Transfer to plate with sausage.
Cook onions, bell pepper, and garlic in same skillet over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally and scraping bottom of pan, until tender and beginning to brown, 10–12 minutes. Add wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced and you can no longer smell the alcohol, about 8 minutes. Add broth, peppers, vinegar, and rosemary and bring to a boil; cook until slightly reduced, about 5 minutes. Nestle chicken into onion mixture, then transfer skillet to upper rack of oven and roast chicken 10 minutes. Add sausages to skillet, pushing them into onion mixture, and continue to roast until chicken is cooked through and an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of thigh registers 165°, 5–10 minutes.
Top with parsley and serve with roasted potatoes alongside.
[ed. See also: Is Your Wellness Practice Just a Diet in Disguise? (Bon Appétit).]
I Get Comments
Friday, April 5, 2019
The Universal Design Ideal
The Universal Design Ideal (Aeon)
[ed. Product packaging has to be the worst. See also: Wrap Rage (Wikipedia).]
Philanthropy is Broken
Globalisation and trade liberalisation were supposed to make us all better-off through the mechanism of trickledown economics,’ said the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz. ‘What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics.’
While this period has been arguably one of the most innovative in human history, wealth inequality has widened. In a much-disputed Oxfam report last year, it was argued that a trend of ‘widening inequality’ was continuing, as 82 per cent of money generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent of the global population. The nine richest men on the planet have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people, and wealth is more concentrated at a company level, too. (...)
People are not happy with the status quo, and the super-rich are to blame. For Anand Giridharadas, author of the controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropists must shoulder a large chunk of this blame. He believes elites such as Zuckerberg who speak the grand language of changing the world for the better are, in effect, making things worse by reinforcing the unjust systems that allowed them to acquire their wealth in the first instance.
The Facebook founder is one of many in this ‘new gilded age’ who are guilty of what Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant and New York Times columnist, calls philanthropic ‘fake change’. It’s also expressed by the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who announced a $2 billion fund to support homelessness and education while presiding over a company where workers reportedly live in fear of ‘losing their jobs just because they needed the loo’.
‘The modest good that philanthropy does do is in certain cases part of abetting the active commission of harm that is actually causing these problems in the first place,’ the author tells Spear’s over a coffee in central London. ‘The people who won from this age of extraordinary innovation, built, maintained and operated, wittingly and unwittingly, systems that actually deprive most people of progress.’
The paradox, as he sees it, is that ‘we encourage people to become really successful and have money to give away by being slash-and-burn capitalists on the way up’.
Giridharadas characterises this as: ‘Pay people as little as you can, evade and lobby against regulation as much as you can, be as monopolistic as you can, asphyxiate competition as much as you can – and pay as little taxes as you can.’ As a result, he argues that philanthropy is an ‘after the fact way of being kind to people’, when in fact ‘the most important ways to be kind to people are what you do in your day job’. It’s a symptom of the faults in contemporary capitalism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic pledges, Giridharadas would rather he not ‘urinate on our democracies’ with his company. (...)
At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, similar arguments were relayed in front of an elite audience. ‘Stop talking about philanthropy, start talking about taxes,’ declared Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists. Bregman added: ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.’ Quite some opponent, however: institutional philanthropy is global and formidable. According to a report from UBS last year, its global reach encompasses more than 260,000 foundations in 39 countries.
Assets exceed $1.5 trillion, and expenditures exceed $150 billion a year. The wealth transfer, says Giridharadas, must shift away from philanthropy to a new species – from ‘giving back to giving up’. He’s talking about giving away not only money, but power too. Governments will need to be ‘crowded in’ to a discussion of regulation if the economic system is to be reformed in a rigorous way that offers a meaningful resolution to grievances expressed from the have-nots.
While this period has been arguably one of the most innovative in human history, wealth inequality has widened. In a much-disputed Oxfam report last year, it was argued that a trend of ‘widening inequality’ was continuing, as 82 per cent of money generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent of the global population. The nine richest men on the planet have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people, and wealth is more concentrated at a company level, too. (...)
People are not happy with the status quo, and the super-rich are to blame. For Anand Giridharadas, author of the controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropists must shoulder a large chunk of this blame. He believes elites such as Zuckerberg who speak the grand language of changing the world for the better are, in effect, making things worse by reinforcing the unjust systems that allowed them to acquire their wealth in the first instance.The Facebook founder is one of many in this ‘new gilded age’ who are guilty of what Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant and New York Times columnist, calls philanthropic ‘fake change’. It’s also expressed by the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who announced a $2 billion fund to support homelessness and education while presiding over a company where workers reportedly live in fear of ‘losing their jobs just because they needed the loo’.
‘The modest good that philanthropy does do is in certain cases part of abetting the active commission of harm that is actually causing these problems in the first place,’ the author tells Spear’s over a coffee in central London. ‘The people who won from this age of extraordinary innovation, built, maintained and operated, wittingly and unwittingly, systems that actually deprive most people of progress.’
The paradox, as he sees it, is that ‘we encourage people to become really successful and have money to give away by being slash-and-burn capitalists on the way up’.
Giridharadas characterises this as: ‘Pay people as little as you can, evade and lobby against regulation as much as you can, be as monopolistic as you can, asphyxiate competition as much as you can – and pay as little taxes as you can.’ As a result, he argues that philanthropy is an ‘after the fact way of being kind to people’, when in fact ‘the most important ways to be kind to people are what you do in your day job’. It’s a symptom of the faults in contemporary capitalism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic pledges, Giridharadas would rather he not ‘urinate on our democracies’ with his company. (...)
At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, similar arguments were relayed in front of an elite audience. ‘Stop talking about philanthropy, start talking about taxes,’ declared Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists. Bregman added: ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.’ Quite some opponent, however: institutional philanthropy is global and formidable. According to a report from UBS last year, its global reach encompasses more than 260,000 foundations in 39 countries.
Assets exceed $1.5 trillion, and expenditures exceed $150 billion a year. The wealth transfer, says Giridharadas, must shift away from philanthropy to a new species – from ‘giving back to giving up’. He’s talking about giving away not only money, but power too. Governments will need to be ‘crowded in’ to a discussion of regulation if the economic system is to be reformed in a rigorous way that offers a meaningful resolution to grievances expressed from the have-nots.
by Arun Kakar, Spear's | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world (YouTube).]
[ed. See also: Top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world (YouTube).]
Leave No Trace
The grassed back half of the school where we played when I was a child was called the Back Paddock, and sometimes we found things there. The Back Paddock bordered a quiet suburban street on one side, and on the other was the high barbed wire of one of the state’s largest juvenile-detention facilities. Teenagers broke into the Back Paddock at night. It must have been perfect in the privacy of the dark. In the mornings before class began we would find beer cans and broken bottles of rum, KitKat wrappers, syringes, and wet condoms filled with semen. These, and the strange things that sometimes happened, like the teenage boy who once bicycled naked past the window of my grade-two classroom, were frequently attributed to the juvenile-detention center next door. There was, in the end, no real way of knowing where the bicyclists and beer cans and condoms came from. Besides, it was never those things that rattled me. What rattled me was the clothing.
When I was six, I found a pair of pink underpants by a tree stump. The next year, I found a pair of adult men’s track pants. I was eight when the clothing began migrating from the Back Paddock proper to the concrete playground outside my classroom doors. One winter morning I arrived early to school and found an entire outfit outside the grade-four classrooms. There was a blouse, a jumper, jeans, a bra, socks, and underwear. I remember that the underwear was dirty and had been left crotch-up on top of the pile. The pile frightened me for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and I backed away from it to the wet-weather shed, where I waited for the other children to arrive.
I asked our teacher later that day about the woman those clothes must have belonged to, and whether she was naked now. I was worried because it had been so cold the night before. Why were the woman’s clothes there, I asked, and not on her body? And where was that body now?
There is a scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock in which Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French tutor at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, is overcome with horror. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film version, she looks around and shakes her head, but in Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel, the tutor’s thoughts are explicit. She stands by the edge of a creek, looking up at the rock overhead, and wonders “how anything so beautiful could be the instrument of evil.”
That nonspecific evil is at the center of both the novel and the film. Both follow a group of schoolgirls in rural Victoria who travel two hours outside of Melbourne to Hanging Rock, a volcanic outcrop that rises abruptly out of the plains. Four of the girls ascend the Rock shortly after lunchtime. Our last glimpse of them occurs as they disappear one by one, barefoot and corsetless, between two boulders at the top. One of girls is terrified and wants to turn back. She begs the others to stop. But they don’t listen, or else they cannot hear her. The girl stumbles, screaming, down the slope of the rock, passing their middle-aged mathematics instructor, Miss McGraw, as she descends. None of the three schoolgirls nor Miss McGraw ever return. They leave no trace. The mystery of what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock, never solved, reverberates in the town for years to come. It seems as though the landscape itself swallowed them up. (...)
“I used to go there when I was a kid,” recalled Helen Morse, who played Mademoiselle de Poitiers in the film. “We’d go for picnics and climb all over the rock, but it was only going back to make Picnic at Hanging Rock that I actually became aware of those faces in the rock.” The film lingers on these faces—ancient, volcanic, otherworldly—and, visiting the site, I saw for myself how the pockmarks and holes in the rock can, in the right light, seem to be literally looking down at you. “We were asserting that the landscape took these girls,” Hal McElroy, the film’s coproducer, explained. “So the landscape had to be alive. And anyone who’s spent any time in the Australian bush knows it is. It’s a kind of living, throbbing, and in fact a very noisy place.”
In Lindsay’s novel, the landscape is full of that throb and noise, that gloom. The bush is full of cicadas that “shrill” and leaves that “hang lifeless.” The slabs of the Rock “repudiate” the landscape around it. The boulders “force” their way toward the sky. In some instances Bush is capitalized, as if it were a proper noun, just as possessed of power and agency as a person.
As the schoolgirls ascend the rock, they are described as “unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth.” But the animals know. The snakes and insects are attuned to the “creakings and shudderings” of the landscape, and they flee. The girls climb higher, as if bewitched, or seduced. The frightening thing about the seduction is what Lindsay suggests with all her anthropomorphisms—not merely that the landscape might possess its own agency, but that it might also have very bad intentions.
Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in 1900, a year before six separate British colonies were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Federation was an era of Australian life when newly minted citizens set about casting their recent history into oblivion, trying to forget 112 years of institutional violence and bureaucratic bungling, indigenous displacement and massacre, and a vast prison experiment unmatched until the Soviet gulags. Australians in 1900, observed historian Robert Hughes, “embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy.” (...)
The scholar Elspeth Tilley has observed that all lost-child stories employ what she calls “the white-vanishing trope”: they begin with a white character—more often than not a girl—occupying a safe, familiar place, then crossing some kind of threshold. She enters an area of the unknown, where both spatial and temporal conditions are disrupted. Then she disappears. Whether or not she is found matters very little. The psychological effect on the community is always the real point, because the lost child is a kind of human sacrifice the culture gives up once in a while in order to vouchsafe its go-getting pursuit of oblivion. Because, Tilley argues, the white-vanishing trope is another way to keep Australians from fully confronting their history. “In endlessly retelling narratives of its members vanishing,” she writes, “white Australia… builds an ongoing myth of itself occupying a victim position.”
Pierce argues, in The Country of Lost Children, that these stories work to dramatize fears about the legitimacy of white occupation—the niggling feeling that not only were Europeans trespassing on the land of others’, but that their presence on the continent was uniquely unwelcome. By the nineteenth century, he says, Australians had begun to fear they might never feel legitimately “at home” in the country. “Children lost in places they might not belong focused anxieties,” Pierce writes, “not only over the legitimacy of land tenure, but of European Australians’ spiritual and psychological lodgement.” (...)
by Madeleine Watts, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Lost by Frederick McCubbin
When I was six, I found a pair of pink underpants by a tree stump. The next year, I found a pair of adult men’s track pants. I was eight when the clothing began migrating from the Back Paddock proper to the concrete playground outside my classroom doors. One winter morning I arrived early to school and found an entire outfit outside the grade-four classrooms. There was a blouse, a jumper, jeans, a bra, socks, and underwear. I remember that the underwear was dirty and had been left crotch-up on top of the pile. The pile frightened me for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and I backed away from it to the wet-weather shed, where I waited for the other children to arrive.
I asked our teacher later that day about the woman those clothes must have belonged to, and whether she was naked now. I was worried because it had been so cold the night before. Why were the woman’s clothes there, I asked, and not on her body? And where was that body now?
There is a scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock in which Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French tutor at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, is overcome with horror. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film version, she looks around and shakes her head, but in Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel, the tutor’s thoughts are explicit. She stands by the edge of a creek, looking up at the rock overhead, and wonders “how anything so beautiful could be the instrument of evil.”That nonspecific evil is at the center of both the novel and the film. Both follow a group of schoolgirls in rural Victoria who travel two hours outside of Melbourne to Hanging Rock, a volcanic outcrop that rises abruptly out of the plains. Four of the girls ascend the Rock shortly after lunchtime. Our last glimpse of them occurs as they disappear one by one, barefoot and corsetless, between two boulders at the top. One of girls is terrified and wants to turn back. She begs the others to stop. But they don’t listen, or else they cannot hear her. The girl stumbles, screaming, down the slope of the rock, passing their middle-aged mathematics instructor, Miss McGraw, as she descends. None of the three schoolgirls nor Miss McGraw ever return. They leave no trace. The mystery of what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock, never solved, reverberates in the town for years to come. It seems as though the landscape itself swallowed them up. (...)
“I used to go there when I was a kid,” recalled Helen Morse, who played Mademoiselle de Poitiers in the film. “We’d go for picnics and climb all over the rock, but it was only going back to make Picnic at Hanging Rock that I actually became aware of those faces in the rock.” The film lingers on these faces—ancient, volcanic, otherworldly—and, visiting the site, I saw for myself how the pockmarks and holes in the rock can, in the right light, seem to be literally looking down at you. “We were asserting that the landscape took these girls,” Hal McElroy, the film’s coproducer, explained. “So the landscape had to be alive. And anyone who’s spent any time in the Australian bush knows it is. It’s a kind of living, throbbing, and in fact a very noisy place.”
In Lindsay’s novel, the landscape is full of that throb and noise, that gloom. The bush is full of cicadas that “shrill” and leaves that “hang lifeless.” The slabs of the Rock “repudiate” the landscape around it. The boulders “force” their way toward the sky. In some instances Bush is capitalized, as if it were a proper noun, just as possessed of power and agency as a person.
As the schoolgirls ascend the rock, they are described as “unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth.” But the animals know. The snakes and insects are attuned to the “creakings and shudderings” of the landscape, and they flee. The girls climb higher, as if bewitched, or seduced. The frightening thing about the seduction is what Lindsay suggests with all her anthropomorphisms—not merely that the landscape might possess its own agency, but that it might also have very bad intentions.
Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in 1900, a year before six separate British colonies were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Federation was an era of Australian life when newly minted citizens set about casting their recent history into oblivion, trying to forget 112 years of institutional violence and bureaucratic bungling, indigenous displacement and massacre, and a vast prison experiment unmatched until the Soviet gulags. Australians in 1900, observed historian Robert Hughes, “embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy.” (...)
The scholar Elspeth Tilley has observed that all lost-child stories employ what she calls “the white-vanishing trope”: they begin with a white character—more often than not a girl—occupying a safe, familiar place, then crossing some kind of threshold. She enters an area of the unknown, where both spatial and temporal conditions are disrupted. Then she disappears. Whether or not she is found matters very little. The psychological effect on the community is always the real point, because the lost child is a kind of human sacrifice the culture gives up once in a while in order to vouchsafe its go-getting pursuit of oblivion. Because, Tilley argues, the white-vanishing trope is another way to keep Australians from fully confronting their history. “In endlessly retelling narratives of its members vanishing,” she writes, “white Australia… builds an ongoing myth of itself occupying a victim position.”
Pierce argues, in The Country of Lost Children, that these stories work to dramatize fears about the legitimacy of white occupation—the niggling feeling that not only were Europeans trespassing on the land of others’, but that their presence on the continent was uniquely unwelcome. By the nineteenth century, he says, Australians had begun to fear they might never feel legitimately “at home” in the country. “Children lost in places they might not belong focused anxieties,” Pierce writes, “not only over the legitimacy of land tenure, but of European Australians’ spiritual and psychological lodgement.” (...)
The stories began, in Australia, with the wilderness swallowing up its lost white girls, but over time the girls began to fall victim to men. If the landscape was thought to act on the country’s women by seducing or absorbing them, it acted on men in quite another way. Men often seemed to emerge out of the landscape, like some kind of malevolent byproduct of the country’s cult of “mateship.” They were cast in the mold of John Jarratt’s rifle-wielding Mick in the film Wolf Creek, the infernal flip side of Paul Hogan’s friendly, larrikin Mick in Crocodile Dundee. But it was rarely felt that the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the country manifested the savagery of the men who had occupied, settled, and killed upon it. Rather, the evil of the land that Mademoiselle de Poitiers can see at Hanging Rock was the thing that worked through the men. (...)
To this day, electioneering politicians go out into the bush every three years to try and connect with the electorate. They praise the egalitarian, hardworking spirit of the bush, and thank the farmers who live there for extracting sugar and wheat and gold from the soil. They describe their policies as being “fair dinkum” and, wearing Akubra hats and standing in the middle of farms, surrounded by eucalyptus and drought-stricken plains, affirm their belief in Australia as “the land of the fair go.” While they’re at it, they praise the spirit of mateship, which is everywhere in the bush. The men turn and give each other those big Australian handshakes, roaring, “Good to see you, mate” in a way that never feels not aggressive.
The politicians know this is where the country conceives of its heart, even if most of us don’t live there. The work of the bush was done by men and their mates—mates built the farms, drove the sheep, felled the trees. Such work built character, made Australians eccentric, but pleasantly so—different, but not so different as to look anything less than British with a suntan. But there was no room for women in the mythology of the bush. Women weren’t mates.
To this day, electioneering politicians go out into the bush every three years to try and connect with the electorate. They praise the egalitarian, hardworking spirit of the bush, and thank the farmers who live there for extracting sugar and wheat and gold from the soil. They describe their policies as being “fair dinkum” and, wearing Akubra hats and standing in the middle of farms, surrounded by eucalyptus and drought-stricken plains, affirm their belief in Australia as “the land of the fair go.” While they’re at it, they praise the spirit of mateship, which is everywhere in the bush. The men turn and give each other those big Australian handshakes, roaring, “Good to see you, mate” in a way that never feels not aggressive.
The politicians know this is where the country conceives of its heart, even if most of us don’t live there. The work of the bush was done by men and their mates—mates built the farms, drove the sheep, felled the trees. Such work built character, made Australians eccentric, but pleasantly so—different, but not so different as to look anything less than British with a suntan. But there was no room for women in the mythology of the bush. Women weren’t mates.
by Madeleine Watts, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Lost by Frederick McCubbin
[ed. See also: The Sunburnt Country (The Believer).]
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts
via:
[ed. I'm down with the flu so posts may be a bit sporadic. Update: Still down. Feels like being stabbed in the brain and thrown in the freezer.]
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
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
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