Mourning Notre Dame

No doubt there will be many articles and personal testimonies about the massive fire that has gutted Notre Dame. Even if the bones of the building survive, essential elements, some and perhaps many of its stained glass windows are almost certainly gone or terribly damaged. The reports are uncertain, with an awful heavy use of words like “may”. For instance, the Telegraph says the organ survived but is damaged. Other accounts say that at least one of the great rose windows is intact.

Even if Notre Dame can be restored, the project is likely to take more than a generation, meaning even in best-case scenario, many people will never be able to see it properly again in their lives.

Others who know Notre Dame more intimately, particularly Parisians, architects and historians, will be better able to provide elegies. I nevertheless feel compelled to write about this loss because it lays bare contradictions we manage to navigate in our daily lives and that have become more acute as humans are destroying the biosphere.

The great medieval cathedrals, through their enormous scale and soaring vaults, with their narrow stained glass windows that help pull the eye upward, tell worshipers and later visitors of how small they are compared to God and his works. Yet their seeming solidity and scale also suggests the faithful can find refuge. All of our technological prowess hasn’t found a way to create spaces that inspire the same sort of awe of these centuries-old houses of worship. Modern visitors were further humbled by the audaciousness of its accomplishment: a project executed across generations, reaching heights that seem daunting even now, marshaling the skills and hard work of many artisans and laborers.

In other words, Notre Dame provided comfort and hope against that gnawing knowledge in the back of our heads of the certainty of death and the impermanence of human action. Even though all those who built Notre Dame were long dead, something of them lived on through the cathedral….or did at least till yesterday.

Human existence is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that we stare down inevitable defeat every day of our existence.

I sometimes refer to a story in the Mahabharata, in which Yudhisthira and his brothers have been tasked to find a deer with mystical powers. They camp but are thirsty. Yudhisthira sends one of his siblings to find some water. When he does not return, another brother is dispatched, and again does not return. This process repeats until Yudhisthira himself goes looking for his missing brothers.

He finds them all dead next to a pond.

In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. They are all metaphysical in nature. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”

Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”

The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death. After some further discussion, he revives the brothers.

Most of us won’t get off so well from an encounter with the Lord of Death. But on a daily basis, we derive comfort from our routines: our schedules, our interactions with familiar people, like family, co-workers, and other we see in our rounds, and the stability of our physical surroundings. I for one feel a sense of loss when buildings are torn down, even small groupings of modest old walks-ups that sat next to each other as gracefully as snaggle teeth.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Shiv Malik
[ed. See also: Notre Dame was built to last until the end of the world (New Statesman).]

via:

The Future of the Smartphone Camera is Here

Tech2 says the Huawei P30 Pro “makes the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus look redundant.” The Verge hails it as “the best camera you can’t buy in the U.S.” Others take out the qualifier altogether. Why? It’s all about zoom.

The future of the smartphone camera is here, it’s not Apple and it’s disturbing (Marketwatch).

Image: Getty
[ed. Wow.]

Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel

For centuries, China has treated its cuisine with a reverence and delight that is only just starting to emerge with Western “foodie” culture. No one understands this better than Fuchsia Dunlop, who has spent her career learning about the fantastic diversity in Chinese food, and who is one of Tyler’s favorite writers on any subject.

She joined Tyler over dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in DC to talk about all aspects of how to truly enjoy Chinese food, including where to visit, how to order, the few key ingredients to keep in your pantry, her favorite regional dishes, what Chinese chefs think about Western food, and why you should really learn to love sea cucumbers. (...)

You can watch a video of the full dinner here.

TYLER COWEN: If I think of how to present Fuchsia, there are two passages that spring immediately to mind. One is from her 1999 notebook entry, and I quote, “In the last three days I have eaten snails, frogs, snakes, sparrow gizzard, duck tongues, fish heads, duck hearts, tripe.

“Also, half a duck, most of a carp, duck’s blood, at least five eggs, smoked bacon, and stewed aromatic beef.” Of course, we had Fuchsia do the ordering for our lunch, as you might expect.

[laughter]

COWEN: One of my readers wrote to me, they summed up who she is. Again, I quote, “What a fantastic and exciting guest. I agree wholeheartedly that Fuchsia Dunlop is an absolute iconoclast, and that her achievements in examining and teaching Chinese cookery cannot possibly be overstated.

“I can say with all sincerity that my life has been absolutely enriched by her work. Her books are simply perfect models for others to follow.” Fuchsia, welcome. Everyone else, welcome as well.

FUCHSIA DUNLOP: [laughs] Thank you.

On food tours

COWEN: Now, I’ll just start in on the questions while our guests eat, and they will later on become the questioners themselves. Let me start with this idea of a food tour.

Food tours are more and more popular today. People will go to Mexico, to France, Italy, even Thailand, but the China food tour is not always so popular with Americans or Westerners.

If you were to try to sell someone on a version of a 12-day China food tour, what would your case for that sound like?

DUNLOP: China has the world’s preeminent cuisine, absolutely unparalleled in its diversity and its sophistication. You can find practically everything you could possibly desire in terms of food in China.

From exquisite banquet cookery, exciting street food, bold spicy flavors, honest farmhouse cooking, delicate soups, just everything, apart perhaps from cheese, although they do actually have a couple of kinds of cheese [laughs] in Yunnan province.

Also, because China is such a food-orientated culture, and it has been since the beginnings of history, that if you want to understand China, almost more than anywhere else, food is a really good window into the culture, into the way people live, into history, everything. (...)

COWEN: Now let’s think through this idea of a food tour a little more analytically. Let’s say you’ve talked me into this food tour, which actually you’ve done indirectly through your books.

You’ve sent me to Shanghai. Your latest book, Land of Fish and Rice, in fact focuses on Shanghai and the surrounding region, which is quite diverse.

Here am I, Tyler Cowen, I’m in Shanghai. I don’t know Chinese and let’s say I don’t have Chinese friends. And I’m simply lost. How do I figure out where to actually eat in Shanghai? What do I do? What’s the heuristic?

DUNLOP: You could look for recommendations of authentic restaurants, articles by people who perhaps live in Shanghai or who understand the food.

COWEN: Say I’m just on the street. I’m walking. I don’t have my iPad. I’m away from WiFi. There’s Shanghai, there’s me confronting the alien. How do I think about finding what’s good?

DUNLOP: Use your nose, use your eyes. If you’re interested in street food, you’ll find lots of little stalls and shops where they’re cooking in full view. Use your judgment and see what looks exciting.

It’s very difficult in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, to perhaps know exactly what is local Shanghainese, what is from other parts of China because it’s always been a melting pot of different Chinese regional cuisines.

Also, if you want to taste the more refined cooking, then just going around the streets is not really going to help. You do need to do a little bit of research and have a few dishes, perhaps have the names on your phone in Chinese. That would help.

COWEN: Three dishes one absolutely has to try are what?

DUNLOP: In Shanghai?

COWEN: In Shanghai. The city, not the region.

DUNLOP: I think you should have hong shao rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking. Delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes.

I would recommend some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd’s purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghainese cooking.

Then, perhaps, if we’re talking Shanghai, you might one to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures. There’s a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghainese restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.

COWEN: As you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants three, two, one star. There’s cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? To the extent they don’t, what are they missing?

DUNLOP: If you look at the restaurants they’ve selected, there’s a bit of a Cantonese bias. They do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that’s very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants, which are missing from that list, in my opinion.

The reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. Of course in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we’re doing now with a large group and a table full of dishes.

These restaurants that I was surprised not to see on the list, you have to book a private room with a group. If you do, you’ll be able to taste some of the most wonderful renditions of Shanghainese food, and food from the broader region, with a contemporary spirit but a real reverence for traditional technique. You can’t do that really if you just go with one or two people.

by Tyler Cowen with Fuscia Dunlop, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Transcript of a 2016 podcast. Ms Dunlop has a new book coming out in October titled: The Food of Sichuan.]

The Legend of Keanu Reeves

Here, before you're quite ready for him, is Keanu Reeves: At the top of the driveway of the Chateau Marmont, smoking a cigarette on a low couch, like he's on his front porch.

He's been coming here since the early '90s. The Chateau was run-down and empty then—a seedier, pre-André Balazs version of itself. The faucets didn't always work. The carpets were dicey. “You didn't want to take your shoes off,” Reeves says.

It felt like anything could happen. Usually it did.

“You could have a conversation,” Reeves says. “You could have a tryst. You could fucking do drugs. You could hang out. For me, there's still that pulse here.”

He basically moved in for a while there. Could be found splashing in the pool with the likes of Sharon Stone or hiding in a corner “playing chess with his computer and smoking compulsively to fight stress,” depending which tabloid tall tale you bought.

Now he lives in a house, not far from here, up in the Hills. He's owned it for about 12 years. Sometimes he sits up there and wonders if it's the house he's going to die in. It's not a preoccupation—he's just curious, if this is going to be it, this place in the Hills. “I didn't think about that,” he says, “when I was 40.” (...)

Today the real Keanu Reeves has that same patchy beard. That same curtain of hair falling into his eyes. He's wearing those same chunky Merrell hiking boots he was wearing pretty much regardless of context long before normcore made The New York Times. You have to look close at the gray flyaways in his eyebrows to remember what year it is.

He's 54 and getting over a cold. His cough sounds like somebody punching their way out of a paper grocery bag. He zips his shaggy black fleece up to the neck. But then a Chateau guy wheels over a heat lamp for Keanu. Another Chateau guy wheels over another heat lamp for the other side of the table. Then the sun comes out, as if it, too, wants to make sure Keanu is warm enough. The sun bounces off the tabletop and up into Keanu's face. It's a nice, low fill light.

Keanu orders a BLT and a Coca-Cola. Fries, not salad. When it comes, the BLT, it'll be on ciabatta bread. Keanu will find himself missing the crispness of toast. Keanu isn't sure a BLT shouldn't leave your soft palate ground up, a little. That a BLT shouldn't have consequences. Soft bread is for soft-bread sandwiches. “Peanut butter and jelly,” Keanu says. Then, more dreamily, like Homer Simpson in reverie: “Peanut butter and honey.”

In his new movie, Reeves again plays John Wick, widowed master assassin and warrior with a broken heart. The first John Wick was shot for $20 million, without real expectations, by Reeves's old Matrix stunt double Chad Stahelski and Stahelski's co-director, David Leitch, who had been longtime stunt coordinators and second-unit directors but had never directed a feature before. And even with Reeves attached, the first Wick was not exactly a hot property at first.

“You have this over-the-hill assassin whose wife dies of natural causes, gives him a puppy, some Russian punk kills his puppy, and he kills 84 people,” Stahelski says. “How many studios do you think said no to that picture? The answer is all of them.”

Stahelski spent years doubling Reeves on three Matrix movies and knew exactly what he was capable of. “I don't know anyone that puts more into the game, collaboratively, physically, intellectually,” he says. “I've never experienced anyone that could have survived [The Matrix]. It just took a different type of person. To be open to that. To allow yourself to be constantly soaking wet, sore, tired, beaten up, for years.” (...)

The Wick films have since become a $140 million franchise, something that no one, including the people involved with them, can quite believe. Starz is making a TV series set in the John Wick universe, further leveraging the series' elaborately detailed underworld-building.

Meanwhile there's John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, which finds John excommunicado—assassins' guild parlance for CANCELED—and on the run from a $14 million bounty after killing a guy in a no-killing zone. But the true stakes are the same as they've always been. John's psychic struggle is what Reeves loves about these ludicrous, gun-crazy movies.

“He's got this beautiful, tragic conundrum—these two selves,” says Reeves. “The John who was married, and John Wick, the assassin. John wants to be free. But the only way he knows how is through John Wick. And John Wick keeps fucking killing people and breaking rules. We're really watching a person fight for their life and their soul.”

Plus in this one he rides around the streets of New York on a fucking horse. Leaked images and videos from the day he shot this scene had half the Internet screaming at John Wick: Chapter 3 to just take their money. Not since Eadweard Muybridge filmed one in the 1870s has a moving picture of a guy riding a horse made people so excited. (...)

He's determined to act like a normal person, even though his mere presence creates an atmosphere of unreality, and it's helped him pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.

You remember. He headlined the Matrix trilogy to the tune of something like $3 billion. Changed the way action movies looked and felt and moved, changed the culture. People come up to him, say it turned them on to cinema, made them question the power structures shaping their perceptions of reality, inspired them to go to grad school.

You'd think he'd have his choice of projects. But you'd be surprised. “Movie jail” is real. He's been there. He was excommunicado at Fox for a decade after turning down Speed 2 to go play Hamlet onstage in fucking Winnipeg: “I didn't work with [Fox] again until The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

He is not in jail now, as far as he knows. But he hasn't done a studio movie since 47 Ronin, another pricey bomb. Sometimes the fan base that remains so grateful for his continued existence does not remember to vote with its dollars. Reeves's name can still help secure financing for action movies of a certain size, and sometimes those turn into a John Wick. He's not unhappy playing John, says he'll make more of these things if the demand is there. “As far as my legs can take me,” he says. “As far as the audience wants to go.”

by Alex Pappademas GQ |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Jackson

Uber IPO: Not for the Squeamish

Uber Technologies’ IPO filing was made public today. The 330-page or so S-1 filing disclosed all kinds of goodies, including detailed but still unaudited pro-forma financial statements as of December 31, 2018, huge losses from operations, big tax benefits, large gains from the sale of some operations, stagnating rideshare revenues, and an enormous list of chilling “Risk Factors” that go beyond the usual CYA.

The filing, however, didn’t disclose the share price, the IPO valuation, and how much money the IPO will raise for Uber. On Tuesday, “people familiar with the matter” had told Reuters that Uber plans to raise $10 billion in the IPO. Most of the IPO shares would be sold by the company to raise funds, and a smaller amount would be sold by investors cashing out, the sources said.

The filing did not confirm this and instead left blanks or used placeholder amounts. But if true, $10 billion in shares sold would make this IPO one of the biggest tech IPOs. And the rumored $90 billion to $100 billion valuation would make it the biggest since Alibaba’s $169 billion IPO.

Uber will need every dime it raises in the IPO going forward because it’s got a little cash-burn situation in its operations that persists going forward, as it admitted in its “Risk Factors,” and it will need to raise more money, and if it cannot raise more money, it might not make it. Uber is upfront about this.

The company has already raised – and mostly burned through – over $20 billion so far in its 10 years of existence. This includes $15 billion in equity funding and over $6 billion in debt. (...)

The huge section of about 50 densely filled pages of “Risk Factors” contains the usual warnings about the things that might happen to the company that are typical in IPO filings. These items are a CYA exercise. If you get wiped out and sue the company or the underwriters, they will point you to the correct paragraph and tell you that you should have read this, and that if you had read this you would have known that you’d get wiped out, or something.

But Uber’s list contains all kinds of other stuff that is unique to the scandal-infested company that is defending itself in court on numerous life-threatening issues.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:
Image: Uber S-1/Wolf Street

Gocycle's GX E-Bike Folds in a Flash

Gocycle's GX is a head-turning e-bike that folds in a flash (Endgadget)

[ed. Cool. I imagine this market could expand significantly.]

Tiger Woods Wins the 2019 Masters in a Triumph for the Ages

Tiger Woods’s comeback from personal and professional adversity is complete: He captured his fifth Masters title and his 15th major tournament on Sunday, snapping a championship drought of nearly 11 years.

It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a magical, come-from-behind win for a player who had not won a major championship since his personal life began to unravel on Thanksgiving night in 2009, when a marital dispute led to a car accident and a succession of lurid tabloid headlines. On the golf course, he had a series of back and leg injuries that led to an addiction to painkillers and culminated in pain so searing that, before surgery in 2017, he had questioned whether he could play professionally again.

Woods, who at 43 became the second-oldest winner of the Masters at Augusta National, after the then 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus in 1986, last achieved major success in one of golf’s four major tournaments at the 2008 United States Open.

“It’s overwhelming just because of what has transpired,” Woods said in a television interview after it was over. “To now be the champion — 22 years between wins is a long time — it’s unreal for me to experience this. It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”

He had come close on some Sundays to winning his 15th major over the years but could not get it done. Yet after the surgery in 2017, a spinal-fusion procedure he called a “last resort,” he began a new lease on his career. (...)

Woods, in his 22nd Masters appearance, closed with a final round of 70 and finished 13 under par at 275, one stroke better than Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele. He took the lead with just three holes to play after a birdie putt on the par-5 15th hole and held on from there. With thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, organizers of the Masters moved up the start times by five hours. Players were also placed players into groups of three, rather than the traditional two, in hopes of speeding up play.

But by the time the tournament leaders went into the second half of their rounds on Sunday, the wind picked up and it briefly began to rain.

Both of the players with whom Woods was grouped in the final threesome, Francesco Molinari, 36, and Tony Finau, 29, described Woods as their childhood idols. Both eventually succumbed to the pressure of the final round, but Woods did not.

“I was just trying to plod my way along the golf course all day,” Woods said in the televised interview. “All of a sudden I had a lead. Coming up to 18 it was just trying to make a 5. When I tapped the putt in — I don’t know what I did, I know I screamed.”

Now, after more than a decade of being stuck in place, Woods suddenly seems to have a full head of steam moving forward. The next two majors, the P.G.A. Championship at Bethpage Black on Long Island in May and the United States Open at Pebble Beach in California in June, are at courses where Woods has won before. He seems primed to do so again.

Those events seem far off, though. The glow from Sunday will surely last for weeks and months, and will be discussed for years as one of the pivotal moments in the career of an athlete who has been more than a golfer ever since he burst on the scene in 1996.

by Karen Crouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills
[ed. What a Masters. Hats off to Francesco Molinari, Brooks Koepka, DJ, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, and everyone else who played truly great golf this week. See also: He Did It! (Golf Digest). And, The Best Woman Golfer in America (YouTube). Ouch!]

Tadanori Yokoo, Anniversary Performance of the Garumella Dance Company, 1970
via:

The Comet is Coming

[ed. A nice distorted guitar would add a lot.]

The Professor and the Adjunct

In “The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission,” Herb Childress describes a very different kind of commute. He writes about one of his friends, a sixty-year-old scholar who juggles teaching positions in Boston and New York. She grades papers on her four-hour bus rides between the two cities and, when she gets to New York, crashes on her elderly mother’s couch. Calculating her pay against the time she spends not only teaching but holding meetings, preparing lessons, giving feedback to students, and answering e-mails, Childress estimates that this friend earns roughly nine dollars per hour. There are others, Childress notes, who have it worse. He recounts the story of an adjunct who lived out of her car while teaching four classes per semester, often grading papers by the light of a headlamp in the parking lot of a Home Depot. After a while, the adjunct learned in which neighborhoods she needed to park in order to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He also recalls the tragic, widely reported story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity. She died in her home, in 2013, at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.

In “Standing for Reason,” Sexton remembers Charlie Winans telling his students, “Consider teaching, boys. It is the noblest and most fulfilling of all vocations.” But, by and large, at the more prestigious universities, teaching is the least valued part of an academic’s life. More measurable indicators, like grants and publications, do much more to advance one’s career. The task of teaching—of unpacking complex ideas in the classroom, grading papers, helping students shape their arguments and smooth out the kinks in their sentences or equations—increasingly falls to the adjuncts whom Childress writes about. In the nineteen-seventies, about a quarter of college faculty were on limited-term, adjunct contracts; the majority of professors were tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, it’s estimated that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts. Reading “The Adjunct Underclass,” whatever sympathy one might have had for Sexton’s jet-setting workaholism quickly evaporates. There’s a privilege in the weariness that comes with having too many opportunities.

Childress completed his dissertation in 1996, and he describes the praise that he received for his work. But he was unable to find a full-time academic job, and he took short-term teaching gigs wherever he could find them. He also sold furniture, volunteered, and worked for nonprofits. He now runs an ethnographic research firm and writes about higher education. Childress brings acid humor and earnest conviction to the latter pursuit, as well as the insights and the fury of someone who once cherished the idea of a life spent on campus. He has an eye for the finer distinctions within academia. Small liberal-arts colleges—like the one where I teach—are “uniquely specialized ecosystems, with wildlife as specifically evolved as that of Madagascar,” he explains. He is witheringly accurate when describing the atmosphere of faculty-wide meetings:

Scholars have made their entire careers out of finding problems within what is perceived to be settled knowledge. They carve out that tiny bubble at the edge of what we know, and they focus all of their ample energies and intelligence on precisely defining, or redefining that small issue. Gather a hundred of these people together, and give them a policy to review. You think that’s going to go well?

Childress knows the outward academic scene; he also knows who is backstage, making sure that appearances are kept. “A quick visit to any college will feel like a historical reenactment, the past lovingly restored and maintained for daily use,” he writes. But the famous professors, the “public face of the project,” are propped up through “the labor of the unseen.” Students—the “protected consumer”—rarely delineate between those who will still be there years after they’re gone and those with short-time gigs and no job security. Even when students do become aware of the discrepancy between these separate classes, and try to do something about it, their activism tends to run, inevitably, in four-year cycles.

“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”

These somewhat hyperbolic analogies understate the oddness of academic life. When journalists and other writers point out the gross inequities on display in the treatment of adjuncts at many American universities, one popular response is to say that nobody is forced to pursue a graduate degree—and, in fact, those who go to graduate school typically have advantages that, say, garment workers in Bangladesh do not have. (The entire quit-lit genre has been described as a form of “humblebragging.”) People usually try to become professors because they are passionately curious about a particular subject, and the academic system encourages them to believe that this is all that matters. Prospective graduate students are rarely told by department heads or other administrators that they are entering a system that relies on contingent labor to survive. “I went into higher ed because I was selfish, because I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, because those things mattered to me,” Childress writes. The subsequent realization that academia preys on these dreams devastates him. A string of adjunct positions gets him no closer to joining the tenure track; it is “morally indefensible,” he writes, to lure adjuncts to work by dangling a “vague hope” that they may one day be welcome as a permanent faculty member. For people stuck in this permanent holding pattern, that hope of being selected is the contemporary academic version of the larger American dream, and it feels, at this point, no less dubious.

by Hua Hsu, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Cathryn Virginia

“Time passed again. I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.” 

― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

via:

Why I Gave A Buck to Mike Gravel

I just gave a dollar to Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign, and I think it was a pretty good decision.

Perhaps you don’t know that Mike Gravel is running for president. Perhaps you don’t even know who Mike Gravel is. This would be your loss.

First, Mike Gravel is the former Alaska senator most well-known for putting the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record. After leaving office in the early ’80s, he drifted a bit and got involved with some quixotic causes, before resurfacing in the Democratic primary for 2008. I remember Gravel in the primaries very well. He stood out from every other candidate: He was much older, much brasher, and willing to thunderously denounce the other candidates over their support for the Iraq war. He was a hoot to watch, but he was also right about a lot of things, and he espoused “fringe” positions that are today taken far more seriously. Gravel infamously recorded some of the oddest campaign commercials of all time, including one in which he stared into the camera before tossing a rock into a lake.

Mike Gravel did not want to run for president in 2020. He is 88 years old, walks with a cane, and his chances of success are even lower this time than they were in 2008, when he got less than 1 percent of the vote. But Mike Gravel is running for president, thanks to a group of Twitter-savvy teenagers—David Oks, Henry Williams, and Elijah Emery—who somehow convinced him to run.

A few weeks ago, something strange began happening with the @MikeGravel Twitter account. Dormant for a long time, it began issuing forth scathing opinions on contemporary politics and the 2020 Democratic candidates. “Mike Gravel” has been saying things like:

• if you want a vision of the future under Cory Booker, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. and every once in a while it stops for an inspirational lecture on how we should never stop dreaming

• if you think that the candidate to beat a president who won campaigning against a careerist, self-serving elite that literally 90 percent of the country despises is Buttigieg, the literal embodiment of that elite, honestly you couldn’t win a third grade class president election

• Hello young voters! This is the very relatable, everywoman Kirsten Gillibrand. I do things that other homo sapiens do. This should paper over the anti-immigrant, anti-Palestinian, pro-Wall Street stances I took when it benefitted me politically

At first, you may think that the teens were simply trolls. They’d gotten Senator Gravel, who at 88 didn’t care much about his Twitter presence, to hand over his password, and used the account to humorously taunt other candidates. But the more tweets the feed spat out, the more it became clear that something much more serious was going on. The jokes had a kind of “moral core,” they were rooted in righteous outrage at those who rationalized injustice and oppression. Many tweets were deadly serious comments on the human costs of American foreign policy:

• The first step in smashing American imperialism is radical honesty with ourselves. We don’t “intervene” – we invade. That’s not “collateral damage” – those are the corpses of parents and children. Ours is not a Department of Defense – it’s a Department of War.

• Today, on the 16th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, remember the half a million Iraqi civilians who died for nothing. Our leaders knew the only thing Iraq and Al-Qaeda had in common was the letter Q. They must face justice for their war crimes.

• Those who see “glory” or “heroism” in war often never fought. As Benjamin Rush wrote in 1793: “Let the following…be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office…an office for butchering the human species.” There is no glory in war – only blood.

• Moral culpability falls on every single politician who isn’t actively fighting against our empire’s brutality. If you sit in a seat of power and stay silent, you are just as guilty as the decision makers.

The swipes at other 2020 candidates may get the attention, but the Mike Gravel Twitter account has a consistent message: The United States has failed to hold itself accountable for crimes committed around the world, its bloated military is a global empire, and a serious presidential candidate must be willing to call out the bipartisan embrace of the defense establishment, the construction of terrifying new autonomous drone technology, and the embrace of human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

When Current Affairs talked to Oks and Williams about their campaign, they did not joke around at all. The Democratic Party, they said, needed an antiwar voice. Someone needs to be pushing for a foreign policy agenda that moves toward peace with all nations. Bernie Sanders, they said, had been a “fairweather friend” to the antiwar movement, and has shamefully remained silent on serious issues of justice, such as the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning. If Mike Gravel could get on the debate stage with the other candidates, he could do what he did in 2008, and confront them directly.

The Gravel campaign has put out a 29-page platform. It is radical, almost a “wish list” for the left. It includes cutting the military budget by 50 percent, closing Guantanamo Bay, ending the use of drones, vowing not to invade any sovereign nation in the absence of a first strike, closing all military bases abroad, and abolishing the Senate and the electoral college. It contains many ideas that no other Democratic candidate would ever dare to mention. Bernie Sanders, Oks and Williams say, is concerned with appearing electable, and so is careful not to become too “radical.” Mike Gravel, with no chance whatsoever of winning the nomination, can say as he pleases.

So their goal is this: get the 65,000 individual donations necessary to qualify Mike Gravel for the Democratic debates. The donation amounts don’t matter for the purposes of qualifying—they can be as small as $1, which is what I donated. Mike Gravel can say things on stage that Bernie Sanders would never say. He can call for completely terminating U.S. military aid to Israel. He will talk about U.S. intervention in Venezuela. He will bring a radically pacifist voice onto the debate stage and discuss the reality of what war means and why we must prioritize global peace.

Oks and Williams pointed out to me that among Democratic candidates, even leftier ones like Sanders and Warren, there is a moral hole in their policies: They talk a lot about justice, but they don’t talk much about justice for people outside the United States. It’s “American workers” this and “American jobs” that. But from a moral perspective, Americans do not matter more than people in other countries, and our policies have serious ramifications for the lives of people elsewhere.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. When Mike was our junior senator from Alaska I remember him being all over the map with ideas - some good, some strange (like building a teflon-domed city near Denali National Park). The thing is though, he cared. Here's his Wikipedia entry.]

Is This the End of the American Century?

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the American-led world order rests on three claims. First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That such a man can be elected president of the United States reveals a deep degeneration of American political culture and permanently damages the country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened America’s alliances and instigated a departure from globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses an unprecedented challenge to Western-led globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny, but do they in fact add up to a historically significant shift in the foundations of America’s global power?

No question, Trump has done massive damage to the dignity of the American presidency. Even allowing for the personal and political failings of some previous incumbents, he marks a new low. What ought to be of no less concern is that he has received so little open criticism from the supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican leadership. Similarly, American big business leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation. He has been applauded by the section of the US media that caters to the right. And a solid minority of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply Trump himself, but the forces in America that enable him.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash has historical roots in America’s domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between a free-market, pro-business elite and a xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. This was always a fragile arrangement, held together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of big government. It was able to govern in large part owing to the willingness of Democratic Party centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against the opposition of the American labour movement. It was Clinton’s administration that righted the fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan era, only for the budget to be blown back into deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, and the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006, the right became ever more dominant within the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress abandoned the Bush administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite.

A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long thought in private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass incarceration of black men since the 1970s has been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of open borders. The question – and it is a real question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even darker. The concern is that he will trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and abroad. (...)

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to present-day China is so shocking is that US business is entangled with China to an immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of the American world order that is really being tested at the present moment, look no further than Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM currently sells more cars in China than it does in the US. America’s farmers converted their fields wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China, only to find themselves cut out of their biggest market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just American firms that are caught up in the escalation of tension. Important European, South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked huge wagers on China.

Given these investments, one might have expected more pushback against Trump’s China strategy from US business. So far there has been little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and American economies may be so horrible a prospect that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it in public. They may be lying low hoping the row blows over. Or it may be that American business itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of the US intelligence and defence community, who argue China’s persistent protectionism and economic nationalism may mean that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.

The hardening of attitudes towards China is not confined to America. It was the Anglo-American intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build back doors into the West’s most sensitive telecommunications networks. Canada and Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric globalisation isn’t confined to security policy hawks, but shared by many mainstream economists and political scientists in US academia, the think-tank world, and journalists and commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal version of the American world order is deeply influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the up to date version of which is encapsulated in the doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large countries have managed to grow beyond China’s current level of income. Those that have done so have kitted themselves out with the full set of liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of the population as a long-term effect of the one-child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the administration, that the tide may be turning against Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to harden the front.

This would indeed constitute a break with the narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it would hardly be a break in the American-led world order. To imagine the American world order as fully global is after all a relatively recent development. After 1945, the postwar order that is generally seen as the non plus ultra of American hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue is not so much America’s intention to lead as whether others are willing to follow. Building the Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In the event of an escalation with China, particularly in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so much an end of the American-led order, as an inversion of its terms. Where the US previously offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat of communist military power, backed up by hard power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may become the provider of military security against the blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.

But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

by Adam Tooze, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Rob Dobi/Politico

Thanks, Turbotax

Congress is about to ban the government from offering free online tax filing

Just in time for Tax Day, the for-profit tax preparation industry is about to realize one of its long-sought goals. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.

Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Mike Kelly (R-Pa).

In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits.

“This could be a disaster. It could be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the IRS ever being able to create its own program,” said Mandi Matlock, a tax attorney who does work for the National Consumer Law Center.

Experts have long argued that the IRS has failed to make filing taxes as easy and cheap as it could be. In addition to a free system of online tax preparation and filing, the agency could provide people with pre-filled tax forms containing the salary data the agency already has, as ProPublica first reported on in 2013.

The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible US taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option, and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.

The congressional move would codify the status quo. Under an existing memorandum of understanding with the industry group, the IRS pledges not create its own online filing system and, in exchange, the companies offer their free filing services to those below the income threshold.

One member of the Free File Alliance explicitly told shareholders that the IRS “developing software or other systems to facilitate tax return preparation…may present a continued competitive threat to our business for the foreseeable future.”

The IRS’ deal with the Free File Alliance is regularly renegotiated and there have been repeated, bipartisan efforts in Congress to put the deal into law.

Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.

by Justin Elliot, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Ken Teagardin

The Death of Smartphones

The Death of Smartphones (Safehaven)
Image: "Focals" via CNBC
[ed. See also: I Didn’t Write This Column. I Spoke It. (NY Times)]

Have We Reached Peak Lyft?

Last Friday, Lyft became America’s latest decacorn with an initial public offering that valued it at $24.3 billion; analysts expect Uber’s IPO, scheduled for later this year, to fetch $120 billion. These eye-popping valuations are bolstered not by profits—Lyft lost nearly a billion dollars in 2018—but by narrative. The story goes like this: Uber and Lyft are upending how we live by reversing a century-long trend of ever-increasing automobile dependence, with its attendant deadening sprawl, omnipresent danger, and environmental harm. Their revolution will transform the $1.5 trillion business of selling cars into a $10 trillion “mobility as service” business, according to a report by Morgan Stanley (now the lead underwriter for the Uber IPO).

As if to pump up the stock in the run-up to Lyft’s market debut (not that I’m making accusations), Bloomberg Businessweek devoted its March 4 issue to Peak Car. “We still drive 1.3 billion automobiles,” the headline said. “But not for long. The mobility revolution is almost here.” This was followed by a Peak Car Bloomberg Opinion Piece and a half-hour Peak Car interview on Bloomberg television. One week to the day before Lyft went public, tech reporter Kara Swisher published an op-ed in the Times that declared: “Owning a car will soon be as quaint as a horse.” She had given up her car. Soon, she said, you would, too.

The claims for Peak Car have passed from inference to incantation. Millennials are getting their drivers’ licenses at diminishing rates because they prefer walkable cities to suburban sprawl. Traffic congestion is bad and getting worse. Driving is a mind-numbing chore. Buying a two-ton hunk of metal that sits idle most of the time has become an anachronism in an optimized world of Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Seamless. Automobile travel by smartphone app is just how digital natives do things! As Swisher puts it, “everything that can be digitized must be digitized.” Big data, AI, autonomous vehicles—all add up to smarter, greener, hipper urban living. What killjoy would claim otherwise?

Peak Car is a new name for an old idea. In 1925, auto executive Charles Nash, who not only had a major car company of his own but was in on the ground floor of General Motors, declared to a national gathering of automobile dealers that car sales had already peaked. Everyone who could afford a car already had one. But carmakers found a solution: the car loan. Dealers demanded ever smaller down payments and extended ever longer loans. The bursting of that credit bubble was one of the causes of the Great Depression. But in the years that followed the great crash, gasoline sales fell only marginally and, after a steep drop of 29 percent between 1929 and 1932, sales began to recover even as the Depression ground on.

In 1958, when car sales again fell off a cliff, commentators declared that Americans had “fallen out of love” with Detroit’s chromed boats. Traffic congestion was bad and getting worse. The Big Three responded with the compact car and the imports arrived, perfectly sized for one-car families who wanted to become two-car families. These new models also appealed to Baby Boomers, the first of whom, not coincidentally, reached driving age in 1962. By the late 1960s, we had arrived at Peak Car once again. This time traffic fatalities were skyrocketing, smog was blanketing cities, and traffic congestion was bad and getting worse. The future belonged to mass transit. Instead, we got safer and cleaner cars. Automobility metastasized and mass transit withered.

Peak Car offers a compelling story of vast riches and better living. Yet the evidence is thin. The rate at which young people get their licenses has indeed been falling, but the trend began in 1983, when the internet was still a science experiment. Today, the three best-selling vehicles in the US by far are pickup trucks. Most of those trucks are used as personal vehicles, as their pristine empty beds make clear. Whatever madness causes Americans to drive empty-bedded trucks around is not something Uber or Lyft can cure. And for those of us in the suburbs, minivans and three-row SUVs are more than transportation. They are waiting rooms, warm cabins on a cold day, and a place to leave the squash racket so we don’t forget it every week. It may be possible to find a Lyft big enough to carry the soccer team, but piling in with muddy cleats and leaving behind lost balls will earn you the dreaded one-star rating. Do it regularly and you’ll get you banned from the app. (...)

Still, Lyft investors are betting on the Peak Car theory, as an analysis by NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran shows. “Reviewing Lyft’s (very long) prospectus, I was struck by the repetition of the mantra that it saw its future as a ‘US transportation’ company,” Damodaran wrote on his blog. “Lyft’s use of the word ‘transportation’ is intended to draw attention to the size of that market, which is $1.2 trillion.” But that $1.2 trillion “includes what people spend on acquiring cars.” In fact, Lyft is in the transportation services business, which right now amounts to $120 billion—one tenth the size of the transportation business as a whole. By inflating the addressable market, Lyft inflates its valuation.

by Daniel Albert, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

DJ - 2019 Masters Interview

[ed. Despite questions ranging from the banal to inane, Dustin Johnson stays cool and distills the essence of golf in one minute (at: 4:15 - 5:22).]

The N.F.L.’s Great Cherry Tree Caper

Last Saturday morning, all across the city, Nashville residents woke up to news that seemed almost Orwellian — or if not Orwellian, then at least Onionian: City officials had decided to cut down 21 mature cherry trees in full bloom.

On less than 72 hours’ notice.

Because the National Football League asked them to.

The cherry trees in question line downtown’s First Avenue North, which runs along the Cumberland River and fronts Riverfront Park, site of the city’s grandest celebrations. Later this month that park will be where the N.F.L. holds its annual draft, an event that seems to require a giant stage the likes of which Nashville — and possibly all of Tennessee, maybe even the whole country — has never seen. Nashville, otherwise known as Music City, is pretty well set with stages, but apparently none of them is sufficiently grand to suit the N.F.L. Better to chop down a bunch of living trees and build an even grander stage, and all for a three-day event that may be moved indoors anyway. Perhaps you’ve heard of April showers?

The ironies here abound. Just last October, Nashville’s mayor, David Briley, announced a major initiative to plant 500,000 trees by 2050 — an effort to replace the roughly 9,000 trees the city is losing each year to its explosive growth. But the trees in question here hadn’t been lost at all. They are mature Yoshino cherry trees, the same trees that bloom so extravagantly along the mall in Washington during the National Cherry Blossom Festival. And Nashville’s own Cherry Blossom Festival, which National Geographic ranks as one of the best in the country, is set for April 13, less than two weeks after news broke that 21 of the 68 trees on First Avenue North would be destroyed. (...)

Nashvillians erupted with fury. Conservation groups like the Nashville Tree Foundation and the Nashville Tree Conservation Corps mobilized their followers, who sent up a great alarm that quickly rippled across Facebook and Twitter and from there to local, and then national, news outlets.

A Change.org petition posted at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning racked up thousands of signatures — more than 61,000 by Sunday afternoon — and city officials were scrambling to respond, at first announcing that the 21 trees would be dug up and relocated in the city, and then reconfiguring the plan itself so that only 10 trees would be moved, leaving all the trees on First Avenue itself in place. “In our own brand promise, we talk about protecting the authenticity of the city,” Butch Spryidon, the chief executive of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., said in a public apology on Sunday. “I think it’s a balance. I think it’s a good reminder of that balance. Lesson learned. Hard lesson learned.”

Well, no. A lesson truly learned would have meant moving that stage. Mature trees can with great effort be transplanted successfully under ideal circumstances, but these are not ideal circumstances. Their roots lie under a public walkway paved with bricks, a location that makes it difficult to remove enough of the root structure for successful relocation. And transplanting a tree once it has already begun to bud out in spring, just before the stress of summer heat, makes the challenges to its survival even greater. Moving these trees, in other words, is just a more expensive way to kill them. (...)

When the N.F.L. draft was held in Dallas last year, it inspired some $74 million in visitor spending, according to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., so it’s easy to see why city officials gave the cherry trees so little thought. These people are not villains. They aren’t sitting in a bunker plotting to steal Nashville’s trees. They aren’t thinking about trees at all. They’re thinking about landing a deal to bring a bunch of spending money to downtown Nashville, a city with a cash-flow problem so troubling that last year it reneged on a promised cost-of-living increase for city employees. (Mayor Briley’s proposed budget for the 2019-2020 fiscal year restores those raises.)

But sometimes good intentions can be as harmful as villainy. There is no “authenticity to the city” left in downtown Nashville anymore. Lower Broad is a neon wasteland of rooftop bars and pedal taverns and motorized scooters and horse-drawn carriages in the shape of Cinderella’s pumpkin and a terrible new rolling atrocity called the Music City Party Tub. Such tourist attractions are to the real Nashville what Las Vegas is to the pristine sands of the Mojave Desert before white people found it.

Nashvillians are not alone in finding their own city unrecognizable, in getting lost on once-familiar routes because longtime landmarks are gone and monstrous new buildings have risen, seemingly overnight, where they once stood. All across the country, in growing cities like Austin and Burlington and Charlotte and Denver, people are looking around and wondering if they still belong in the place where they actually live. We all have the same secret fear: What if this town we love so much is just the next Atlanta?

by Margaret Renkl, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Humphrey/AP

As Baby Powder Concerns Mounted, J&J Focused Marketing on Minority, Overweight Women

In 2006, an arm of the World Health Organization began classifying cosmetic talc such as Baby Powder as “possibly carcinogenic” when women used it as a genital antiperspirant and deodorant, as many had been doing for years. Talc supplier Luzenac America Inc started including that information on its shipments to J&J and other customers.

J&J, meanwhile, looked for ways to sell more Baby Powder to two key groups of longtime users: African-American and overweight women. The “right place” to focus, according to a 2006 internal J&J marketing presentation, was “under developed geographical areas with hot weather, and higher AA population,” the “AA” referring to African-Americans.

“Powder is still considered a relevant product among AA consumers,” the presentation said. “This could be an opportunity.”

In the following years, J&J turned those proposals into action, internal company documents show. It distributed Baby Powder samples through churches and beauty salons in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods, ran digital and print promotions with weight-loss and wellness company Weight Watchers and launched a $300,000 radio advertising campaign in a half-dozen markets aiming to reach “curvy Southern women 18-49 skewing African American.”

These are only some of the more recent examples of J&J’s decades-long efforts to offset declining Baby Powder sales amid rising concern about the health effects of talc, based on a Reuters review of years of J&J print, radio and digital advertising campaigns and thousands of pages of internal marketing documents and email correspondence.

Adults have been the main users of Johnson’s Baby Powder since at least the 1970s, after pediatricians started warning of the danger to infants of inhaling talc. As adults became ever more crucial to the brand – accounting for 91 percent of Baby Powder use by the mid-2000s – J&J honed its powder pitches to court a variety of targeted markets, from teen-focused ads touting the product’s “fresh and natural” qualities, to promotions aimed at older minority and overweight women.

Today, women who fall into those categories make up a large number of the 13,000 plaintiffs alleging that J&J’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, a powder brand the company sold off in 2012, caused their ovarian cancer or mesothelioma.

Many of the ovarian cancer lawsuits have blamed the disease on perineal use of J&J cosmetic talcs – a claim supported by some studies showing an association between such use and increased cancer risk. The most recent cases have alleged that J&J’s talc products contained asbestos, long a known carcinogen.

In an investigation published Dec. 14 here, Reuters revealed that J&J knew for decades that small amounts of asbestos had occasionally been found in its raw talc and in Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, based on test results from the early 1970s to the early 2000s – information it did not disclose to regulators or the public.

by Chris Kirkham, Lisa Girion, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela