Keanu Reeves Is Too Good for This World

Last week, I read a report in the Times about the current conditions on Mt. Everest, where climbers have taken to shoving one another out of the way in order to take selfies at the peak, creating a disastrous human pileup. It struck me as a cogent metaphor for how we live today: constantly teetering on the precipice to grasp at the latest popular thing. The story, like many stories these days, provoked anxiety, dread, and a kind of awe at the foolishness of fellow human beings. Luckily, the Internet has recently provided us with an unlikely antidote to everything wrong with the news cycle: the actor Keanu Reeves.

Take, for instance, a moment, a few weeks ago, when Reeves appeared on “The Late Show” to promote “John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum,” the latest installment in his action-movie franchise. Near the end of the interview, Stephen Colbert asked the actor what he thought happens after we die. Reeves was wearing a dark suit and tie, in the vein of a sensitive mafioso who is considering leaving it all behind to enter the priesthood. He paused for a moment, then answered, with some care, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” It was a response so wise, so genuinely thoughtful, that it seemed like a rebuke to the usual canned blather of late-night television. The clip was retweeted more than a hundred thousand times, but, when I watched it, I felt like I was standing alone in a rock garden, having a koan whispered into my ear.

Reeves, who is fifty-four, has had a thirty-five-year career in Hollywood. He was a moody teen stoner in “River’s Edge” and a sunny teen stoner in the “Bill & Ted” franchise; he was the tortured sci-fi action hero in the “Matrix” movies and the can-do hunky action hero in “Speed”; he was the slumming rent boy in “My Own Private Idaho,” the scheming Don John in “Much Ado About Nothing,” and the eligible middle-aged rom-com lead in “Destination Wedding.” Early in his career, his acting was often mocked for exhibiting a perceived skater-dude fuzziness; still, today, on YouTube, you can find several gleeful compilations of Reeves “acting badly.” (“I am an F.B.I. agent,” he shouts, not so convincingly, to Patrick Swayze in “Point Break.”) But over the years the peculiarities of Reeves’s acting style have come to be seen more generously. Though he possesses a classic leading-man beauty, he is no run-of-the-mill Hollywood stud; he is too aloof, too cipher-like, too mysterious. There is something a bit “Man Who Fell to Earth” about him, an otherworldliness that comes across in all of his performances, which tend to have a slightly uncanny, declamatory quality. No matter what role he plays, he is always himself. He is also clearly aware of the impression he makes. In the new Netflix comedy “Always Be My Maybe,” starring the standup comedian Ali Wong, he makes a cameo as a darkly handsome, black-clad, self-serious Keanu, speaking in huskily theatrical, quasi-spiritual sound bites that either baffle or arouse those around him. “I’ve missed your spirit,” he gasps at Wong, while kissing her, open-mouthed.

Though we’ve spent more than three decades with Reeves, we still know little about him. We know that he was born in Beirut, and that he is of English and Chinese-Hawaiian ancestry. (Ali Wong has said that she cast him in “Always Be My Maybe” in part because he’s Asian-American, even if many people forget it.) His father, who did a spell in jail for drug dealing, left home when Keanu was a young boy. His childhood was itinerant, as his mother remarried several times and moved the family from Sydney to New York and, finally, Toronto. We know that he used to play hockey, and that he is a motorcycle buff, and that he has experienced unthinkable tragedy: in the late nineties, his girlfriend, Jennifer Syme, gave birth to their child, who was stillborn; two years later, Syme died in a car accident. Otherwise, Reeves’s life is a closed book. Who is he friends with? What is his relationship with his family like? As Alex Pappademas wrote, for a cover story about the actor in GQ, in May, Reeves has somehow managed to “pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.”

by Naomi Fry, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Karwai Tang/Getty

[ed. Interesting how our culture fixates on certain celebrity icons, seemingly at random: Frida Kahlo, Debbie Harry, Bob Ross, David Byrne, Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, for example. Suddenly they're everywhere.]

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The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse

For much of the 20th century, young and old people voted pretty similarly. The defining gaps in our recent politics have been the gender gap (women preferring Democrats) and the education gap. But now the generation gap is back, with a vengeance.

This is most immediately evident in the way Democrats are sorting themselves in their early primary preferences. A Democratic voter’s race, sex or education level doesn’t predict which candidate he or she is leaning toward, but age does.

In one early New Hampshire poll, Joe Biden won 39 percent of the vote of those over 55, but just 22 percent of those under 35, trailing Bernie Sanders. Similarly, in an early Iowa poll, Biden won 41 percent of the oldster vote, but just 17 percent of the young adult vote, placing third, behind Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

As Ronald Brownstein pointed out in The Atlantic, older Democrats prefer a more moderate candidate who they think can win. Younger Democrats prefer a more progressive candidate who they think can bring systemic change.

The generation gap is even more powerful when it comes to Republicans. To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.

In 2018, voters under 30 supported Democratic House candidates over Republican ones by an astounding 67 percent to 32 percent. A 2018 Pew survey found that 59 percent of millennial voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while only 32 percent identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

The difference is ideological. According to Pew, 57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.

Recent surveys of Generation Z voters (those born after 1996) find that, if anything, they are even more liberal than millennials.

In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted electoral doom for the G.O.P. based on demographic data. That prediction turned out to be wrong, or at least wildly premature.

The authors did not foresee how older white voters would swing over to the Republican side and the way many assimilated Hispanics would vote like non-Hispanic whites. The failure of that book’s predictions has scared people off from making demographic forecasts.

But it’s hard to look at the generational data and not see long-term disaster for Republicans. Some people think generations get more conservative as they age, but that is not borne out by the evidence. Moreover, today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.

Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is. If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort. In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country.

Young voters approve of these trends. Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America.

They have constructed an ethos that is mostly about dealing with difference. They are much more sympathetic to those who identify as transgender. They are much more likely than other groups to say that racial discrimination is the main barrier to black progress. They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world.

These days the Republican Party looks like a direct reaction against this ethos — against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism. Moreover, conservative thought seems to be getting less relevant to the America that is coming into being. (...)

The most burning question for conservatives should be: What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in? Instead, conservative intellectuals seem hellbent on taking their 12 percent share among the young and turning it to 3.

by David Brooks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eric Thayer for The New York Times

[ed. We can only hope. Here's a question for conservatives: wouldn't it be great to see a Trump/Palin ticket in the next election? If not, why? See also: George Will’s Political Philosophy (NY Times).]

Metamotivation

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top.While the pyramid has become the de facto way to represent the hierarchy, Maslow himself never used a pyramid to describe these levels in any of his writings on the subject.

The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "d-needs": esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. With the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) needs, if these "deficiency needs" are not met, the body gives no physical indication but the individual feels anxious and tense. Maslow's theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. Maslow also coined the term Metamotivation to describe the motivation of people who go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment. Metamotivated people are driven by B-needs (Being Needs), instead of deficiency needs (D-Needs).

via: Wikipedia
[ed. Repost]
[ed. I was familiar with Maslow's general hierarchy of needs but not the term Metamotivation i.e., striving to realize one's fullest potential. I wonder how a person's outlook on life and their personality are affected by an inability to achieve that need (if it is felt)? Furthermore, since basic needs are fluid (like health, friendship, economic security, intimacy, etc.) is metamotivation a temporary luxury (and ultimately an unsustainable goal)?]

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RIP, iTunes

At long last, the demise of iTunes has come. On Monday, Apple announced that it will phase out the software once and for all. “If there’s one thing we hear over and over, it’s ‘Can iTunes do even more?’” quipped Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, onstage during the company’s annual developers conference. He then ran a demo of the trio of apps that will soon replace the platform: Music, TV, and Podcasts.

There are plenty of strategic reasons to put that poor 18-year-old software down to rest. Business-wise, this is all part of Apple’s strategy to transform into a bonafide entertainment studio. Separating different content into specialized platforms allows the company to promote its ever-growing slate of original programming, while expanding the possibilities for monthly subscription services. But even from the user perspective, iTunes has long felt old and clunky. What began as a music player meant to compete with winamp (rest its soul) has over the years become a bloated catch-all for every media file on a person’s computer. It lurches between music, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks, and blends confusing promotional subcategories like “For You” and “Browse” with a person’s permanent libraries. In its past few updates, it has grown only more confusing to navigate, becoming a constant flashpoint on Apple bulletin boards. I interact with iTunes in its current form in the same way that I interact with that one package of chicken that has become a permanent, icy fixture in the back of my freezer: accidentally and as infrequently as possible.

iTunes is the 8-track of the millennial generation: a mostly inefficient technology that bridged shifting eras of music distribution. The media player launched in January 2001, a little less than a year before the iPod, and laid the groundwork for a DIY listening experience that was no longer dictated by albums, or CDs, or buying music altogether. In the late ’90s, most teens’ exposure to artists was limited to the radio, Total Request Live, and what they could afford at their local Sam Goody. iTunes’s easy-to-use CD-burning capabilities, paired with rising peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster (and Limewire, and Kazaa), broke open the possibilities of what a young internet-savvy music fan could listen to—basically anything, anytime—and paved the way for the on-demand streaming services we have today.

Though iTunes quite famously became the first major platform to sell songs for a dollar, most millennials of a certain age used the program as a laundering system for illegally downloaded music. The ritual went like this: (1) find the right moment to capitalize the family room computer—preferably a late evening when the little download progress bars from your P2P network could stretch uninterrupted into the night— and jumpstart as many illegal downloads as you possibly could without crashing your computer, (2) go to bed, (3) harvest your mp3s in the morning, discarding the specimen that languished in an unsteady DSL connection, (4) transfer the completed files to your library, and (5) transfer them onto a CD or iPod, for mobile consumption. (Note: steps 1 through 3 could be skipped if you happened to be sourcing your music from a CD you rented from your local library.)

The fourth step of that process was the most time-intensive form of data entry that I’ve endured in my entire life. It was important—no, necessary—that the names and titles and album art of every song I stole from the internet looked as if it had arrived there legitimately. Standard capitalization. No symbols. No electronic signature from the downloader. I vaguely recall a get-off-my-lawn narrative at the time, suggesting that all these free-flowing mp3s were bound to leave us directionless and musically inept—listening to stray songs with no appreciation of the album or discography from which they came. But if anything, all those hours of editing were like a musical boot camp, an accelerated way to catalog discographies both in my digital library and my mind. Of course, there was always the chance that when you finally got around to listening to the hours and hours of music you’d stolen, a song would rudely be interrupted by grating static, or Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Napster was free, yes, but full of trolls.

The end goal, I suppose, was ownership. As a teen, you strive to assert an identity separate from your family at every opportunity possible, all while living under their close supervision. The ability to amass as much music as your hard drive could shoulder meant a listening experience tailored to your own personal tastes. Not the radio. Not MTV. Not what was in your parents’ CD collection. Your stuff. And when I finally got my hands on an iPod, it was a little like carrying around a comfort blanket. My iTunes library was my identity, and I spent hours cherishing and growing it.

by Alyssa Bereznak , The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration

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Too Many People Want to Travel

Late in May, the Louvre closed. The museum’s workers walked out, arguing that overcrowding at the home of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo had made the place dangerous and unmanageable. “The Louvre suffocates,” the workers’ union said in a statement written in French, citing the “total inadequacy” of the museum’s facilities to manage the high volume of visitors.

Half a world away, a conga line of mountaineers waited to approach the summit of Mount Everest, queued up on a knife’s-edge ridge, looking as if they had chosen to hit the DMV at lunchtime. A photograph of the pileup went viral; nearly a dozen climbers died, with guides and survivors arguing that overcrowding at the world’s highest peak was a primary cause, if not the only one.

Such incidents are not isolated. Crowds of Instagrammers caused a public-safety debacle during a California poppy super bloom. An “extreme environmental crisis” fomented a “summer of action” against visitors to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Barcelona and Venice and Reykjavik and Dubrovnik, inundated. Beaches in Thailand and Mexico and the Philippines, destroyed. Natural wonders from the Sierra Nevadas to the Andes, jeopardized. Religious sites from Cambodia to India to Rome, damaged.

This phenomenon is known as overtourism, and like breakfast margaritas on an all-inclusive cruise, it is suddenly everywhere. A confluence of macroeconomic factors and changing business trends have led more tourists crowding to popular destinations. That has led to environmental degradation, dangerous conditions, and the immiseration and pricing-out of locals in many places. And it has cities around the world asking one question: Is there anything to be done about being too popular?

Locals have of course complained about tourists since time immemorial, and the masses have disrespected, thronged, and vandalized wonders natural and fabricated for as long as they have been visiting them. But tourism as we know it was a much more limited affair until recent decades. Through the early 19th century, travel for personal fulfillment was the provenance of “wealthy nobles and educated professionals” only, people for whom it was a “demonstrative expression of their social class, which communicated power, status, money and leisure,” as one history of tourism notes. It was only in the 1840s that commercialized mass tourism developed, growing as the middle class grew.

If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations—30 million visitors a year to Barcelona, population 1.6 million; 20 million visitors to Venice, population 50,000. La Rambla and the Piazza San Marco fit only so many people, and the summertime now seems like a test to find out just how many that is.

The root cause of this surge in tourism is macroeconomic. The middle class is global now, and tens of millions of people have acquired the means to travel over the past few decades. China is responsible for much of this growth, with the number of overseas trips made by its citizens rising from 10.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 156 million last year. But it is not solely responsible. International-tourist arrivals around the world have gone from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today: Mass tourism, again, is a very new thing and a very big thing.

by Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Charles Platiau/Reuters

King Weir

The first thing I want to talk to Bob Weir about is the dead.

Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.

“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.

We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.

Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. “He had a full-on Yosemite Sam mustache. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. On account of all the beard. (...)

“This motion”—he mimics strumming a guitar—“this one limited motion, repeated a million times, has turned my right rhomboid muscle into a strip of gristle that gets extremely painful after a couple of hours, to the point where it's like trying to play with an ice pick in your back. I went to doctors. I went to physical therapists. But the only thing that really worked was opiates, and so I got good and strung out on them. I would have to come home and go through withdrawal after every tour.”

He's always used alcohol, too—wine, in particular—to combat stage fright, a condition he says he shared with Garcia. “Every night, before I go on, it's I can't believe I put myself in this position again. Thousands of times.” He is so self-conscious about his playing before warming up that he needs to do so in solitude.

Weir's struggles became publicly apparent in 2013, when he collapsed onstage with Furthur. The next year, RatDog called off an entire tour. Today he is, to all appearances, healthy. He has replaced a drink before getting onstage with a shot of ginseng and, for the most part, pharmaceutical painkillers with herbal supplements. But he stops short of saying he's sober.

“I've tried that, and I'm not as happy as when I drink,” he says. He is adamant that he is able to have a glass of wine these days and stop there. Likewise, the occasional painkiller when the exercise and herbal remedies prove inadequate.

“There was a time, way back, when getting trashed and completely nuts was, I felt, my best approach to the blank page—which is a horrifying prospect in and of itself,” he says. “But I've been there and done that, and I don't think there is anything more to be found there for me. What I want now is to be in the same frame of mind when I wake up in the morning as when I went to bed. That's pretty much how I operate.”

This flies in the face of conventional thinking about how addiction works, but Weir says he's not cut out for traditional 12-step programs. “I'm not sure I buy the basic tenet, which is that you're powerless,” he says. “I think that we humans are enormously powerful, and I tend to think there's nothing that you can't do. It's a matter of self-mastery, and if self-mastery amounts to total abstinence, I think that's incomplete. I think you're selling yourself short. But I get that that's real dangerous for some people. So I don't talk about it much.” (...)

In New Orleans, Weir had told me a story to illustrate how, by the end, addiction and the pressures of fame had conspired to shrink Garcia's life.

“One time we came here after a long absence, and our publicist, who was also a good friend, asked Jerry how was it getting back to New Orleans, because it's such a great music town,” he said. “Jerry's answer was, ‘Well, one hotel's the same as another.’ That was pretty much the life he was given.”

We sat there for a few moments, listening to the bus's air-conditioning hum, sunlight peeking in around the edges of the blackout curtains.

“Yeah, well,” Weir said dryly, “I don't get out much, either.” (...)

There is a sequence in the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir in which various musical admirers struggle to describe Weir's style of rhythm guitar, falling back on such terms as “unique,” “unusual,” and “strange.” It would be easy to conclude that these were euphemisms, but it's apparently not so. When I ask Don Was about it, he is silent for several seconds.

“I've spent hundred of hours focused on him in the past few months, and he's still absolutely enigmatic to me,” Was says. “He's part Segovia and part John Lee Hooker, and he does both simultaneously—this exotic blend of the raw and the cerebral. He obliterates the lines between rhythm guitar and lead guitar. He doesn't just bash out chords—his rhythm parts are really melodic, so they also serve as lead parts. Sometimes I think there's a second guitarist sitting in, because he can also play separate lead lines and rhythm parts at the same time.”

This is reminiscent of Weir's description of his lifelong dyslexia, how words on the page, as he tells it, refuse to hold their shape and meaning, threatening always to go off in some new direction. “I let my brain run, I guess. I let it go and have more freedom than some folks do,” he says. “So if I'm reading a word, there are innumerable considerations to take into account about what I just read.”

According to Mickey Hart, “He became totally unique because he was in a band that was totally unique! Remember that Bobby had to play under the shadow of Jerry. It was a benevolent shadow, but that was challenging. Once Jerry got cranked up, he could really take a band away. So Bob had to learn a new way of playing. He had to re-invent himself as this partner, this other side to Jerry. He started playing strange.”

“I derived a lot of what I do on guitar from listening to piano players,” Weir says, citing McCoy Tyner's work with John Coltrane in particular. “He would constantly nudge and coax amazing stuff out of Coltrane.”

He says Garcia is still present when he plays. “I can hear him: ‘Don't go there. Don't go there,’ or ‘Go here. Go here.’ And either I listen or I don't, depending on how I'm feeling. But it's always ‘How's old Jerry going to feel about this riff?’ Sometimes I know he'd hate it. But he'd adjust.”

by Brett Martin, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Adrian Boot
[ed. A greatly underrated guitarist.]

Congressman Duncan Hunter Says He Probably Killed "Hundred of Civilians" in Iraq

California representative Duncan Hunter has been very vocal in his defense of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of stabbing an injured captive to death in Iraq. In a recent interview on a Barstool Sports podcast, Hunter said, "I frankly don’t care if he was killed. I just don’t care. And that’s my personal point of view. And as a congressman, that’s my prerogative to help a guy out like that. If—even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think."

Hunter's making an unusual and pretty extreme argument for why Gallagher shouldn't be held responsible for the war crimes charges he's facing—by claiming it's a non-issue because he's done the same. "I was an artillery officer," he said. "And we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians, if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians. Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged, too?" Probably yes.

According to CNN, Gallagher also reportedly "shot at noncombatants, posed for a photo and performed his re-enlistment ceremony next to a corpse." The biggest difference between what the two men did, Hunter seems to be arguing, is a technical one: Hunter's artillery unit was following orders while Gallagher wasn't.

Hunter isn't the only high-profile conservative veteran arguing that what Gallagher did isn't remarkable enough to hold him accountable for it. Fox News contributor and veteran Pete Hegseth has been defending Gallagher in private phone calls to Donald Trump, according to the Daily Beast. (Trump reportedly so trusts Hegseth that he nearly appointed him head of Veterans Affairs.) In a Fox & Friends Weekend segment with Hunter, Hegseth said, "If he committed premeditated murder, then Duncan did as well, then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?"

Gallagher is one of several accused U.S. war criminals that Donald Trump is considering giving presidential pardons, along with a Blackwater mercenary who reportedly opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi civilians and Army Ranger Michael Behenna who reportedly murdered a prisoner he was tasked with transporting. The American Civil Liberties Union has called the pardons "an endorsement of murder."

by Luke Darby, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Bill Clark

[ed. Yeah, this guy. What a piece of work. The only conclusion I can come to is it has to be some long-term US strategy to inflame as many Middle-Eastern jihadists as possible to justify our massive military-industrial spending (which at last count, totalled $750 billion/yr. - and that's just for "Defense", not counting Homeland Security, NSA, ICE, CIA, and all the "foreign aid" we bestow on other countries).

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Jonathan Gardner - The Ballroom 2019
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Kelp Has Been Slow To Catch On

A few years ago, many news stories announced that "kelp is the new kale." That the global seaweed harvest is worth more than lemons and limes. That it's the "next great food craze." And that it will be "everywhere by the next decade."

Where are we now?

Kelp is a type of seaweed that grows in large underwater forests and looks a little like green lasagna noodles with curly edges.

Seaweed farming has a lot going for it: It doesn't require any fertilizer, can actually be used as fertilizer, helps fight climate change, and cleans up ocean water by taking in nitrogen compounds. It's also a nutritious sea vegetable — rich in vitamins C and K and minerals like iron and calcium.

But now, the growing industry in the U.S. needs to build infrastructure and to change people's tastes on a larger scale.

Bren Smith is a leading advocate for what he calls restorative ocean farming — growing seaweed alongside shellfish like mussels and oysters, which absorb carbon dioxide and nitrogen compounds, protect shorelines from storm surges, and rebuild marine ecosystems. He co-founded a nonprofit called GreenWave to promote the movement and train aspiring farmers.

"The momentum's been unbelievable ... we have requests to start farms in every coastal state in North America, 20 countries around the world," Smith says.

Smith's farm is just off the coast of Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. There are now farms up and down the New England coast, with more getting started in California and the Pacific Northwest.

"We're growing, and people are eating it," Smith says. "This isn't like a cute little Brooklyn bee farm project creating nice little bottles of honey at the farmers market. ... There are hundreds of thousands of pounds being produced and sold at this point."

Kelp can be used as a pasta substitute, as noodles, sautéed with butter and mushrooms, or ground into powder to use as seasoning. High end restaurants have also used seaweed as a side vegetable and on cookies.

However, some industry specialists say growing seaweed has become perhaps too popular. Anoushka Concepcion is an assistant extension educator with the Connecticut Sea Grant; she works with seafood producers and researchers and answers questions about the latest technology and trends.

"The idea sort of took off before all the practical challenges could be addressed," Concepcion says. "Farmers are finding it difficult now just to get rid of their seaweed."

by Alan Yu, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Flip Nicklin/Plainpicture via

A Kafkaesque List of Things

Today is the 95th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. And I love Franz Kafka. He was one of my earliest literary obsessions—I even read Philip Roth’s The Breast, for him. I know: sacrifice. So on the day of his death, I decided to grease (if only slightly) what really must be a constant spinning of his corpse in his grave by collating a number of things that we, as a societal group, have decided to count as “Kafkaesque.”

Many people have pointed out that the term “Kafkaesque” is grossly overused. Others have noted how it is quite often misused. For the record, in 1991, Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way:

What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

Other definitions suggest that it describes something with “oppressive or nightmarish qualities,” or “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Sure, all of the above. Maybe the problem is that the term only technically (or at least etymologically) means “like Kafka,” so it could really refer to any element the user has identified both in the writer’s work and in the world.

But that’s no really excuse for the following list of things that have been called, at one time or another, “Kafkaesque”—from the deadly serious to the extremely silly, from the actually Kafkaesque to the merely annoying. I present this list with my apologies to Franz.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”

Seinfeld

Sex with Alvy Singer

Online outrage

Customer service

(Especially Comcast’s customer service)

Hookup culture

Breaking Bad, Season 3, Episode 9

The NSA

The no-fly list

Ikea

Bond court

The California housing crisis

The comparison of Justin Bieber to Brad Pitt

by Emily Temple, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: Andy Warhol

The Annuity Trap That Teachers Need to Avoid

Tony Isola was the kind of guy other teachers liked to approach for help with their retirement plans. Which investments should they be in? They felt Tony would know, because he used to be a currency trader, and because his wife, Dina Isola, worked on Wall Street. Plus, a guy who could teach social studies to hormone-addled middle schoolers was good at making simple financial concepts intelligible.

“Ask me a question, and I’ll give you the answer,” he’d say. “Usually, it’s ‘I don’t know.’ ” But his colleagues didn’t even know where to start. So, save regularly, he told them. Stay in the market through thick and thin—it will reward you. “Focus on things you have control over: Your costs. Your behavior.” They asked Tony to look at their statements.

He couldn’t believe what he saw. Many of his fellow teachers were in high-cost annuities, lured by tax-deferred growth and a lifetime stream of income. It made no sense—savers don’t need income; they need growth. And they don’t need tax-deferred products, since their retirement plans were already tax shelters. For these unnecessary “features,” the annuities imposed high sales charges on every paycheck withdrawal. And a 2% annual management fee. And large surrender fees of, say, 7%.

Why was this even possible? Teacher retirement plans, known as 403(b)s, are similar to private-sector 401(k)s, with one important difference: Because they evolved separately, they are exempt from protections of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. That act says 401(k) plan providers have a fiduciary duty to participants—in other words, they have to put the investors’ interests first. Teachers’ 403(b) plans are sold directly to individuals, rather than to employers, so the interest of the salesman was coming first. “Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher and they’ve given you a 400-page prospectus about variable annuities,” Tony says. That’s why three-quarters of $1 trillion in 403(b) plans are in annuities, which enjoy record sales. Insurance is a high-commission business, which you can see from Tony’s Twitter feed, where he likes to share screenshots of insurance agent literature. One says “6% commission.…Finally! A short-term FA that pays you the commission you deserve.”

Dina, too, was horrified. At firms where she had worked, brokers were rewarded with lavish vacations for beating sales quotas. When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a broker tried to make her mother liquidate their portfolio, creating an unneeded tax bill.

Thus began a journey to educate teachers about retirement and to push for reforms—specifically, that 403(b) investors should have the same protections as people in 401(k) plans. In 2005, Tony began offering financial planning while keeping his social-studies job. A couple of years later, after their twins turned three and Dina left her job in financial communications, she joined his advisory firm. They both started blogs: His is called A Teachable Moment, and hers, Real$martica. In 2015, Tony decided to work full-time as an advisor. He and Dina joined Ritholtz Asset Management, specifically to manage 403(b) plans. Operating from Stony Brook, N.Y., they manage $100 million in assets, including $12 million in 403(b) plans for teachers. Using index funds, they average 0.62% in annual fees in each account. There is no account minimum for 403(b) plans.

The stories continued to make their heads spin. How high were the fees? One young teacher was paying 3% a year to own the market, with a guarantee that he’d get his original investment at the end of 20 years. Dina shook her head. There has never been a 20-year period in the stock market’s history when it has lost value. Another teacher was paying $2,418 a year in fees on an $80,000 account. To get out, she needed to pay $3,000 in surrender fees.

by Leslie P. Norton, Barron's |  Read more:

Image: Twitter
[ed. See also: Confusing Options May Be Coming to Your 401(k). It Could Cost You. (NY Times).]

Jackson Browne

Our College Sports System is Broken

The college admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues has served up a powerful cocktail of outrage and schadenfreude. We’ve witnessed unabashed “Aunt Becky” blithely signing autographs outside Boston’s federal courthouse and learned about CEO dads staging photos of their fake-athlete kids as haplessly as Mr. Felicity Huffman’s car salesman character in Fargoattempted fraud with his pencil.

The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.

Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.

So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.

The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.

It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?

The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.

Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.

Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.

The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”

by Neil Swidey, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Adobe Stock

Am I Too Poor to Play Golf?

A few years back, I was traveling down the West Coast when I realized I was near a famous course. For the heck of it, I went online to check if a last-minute tee time was available. I can’t recall if I could get on, but I remember doing a double take at the green fee, which was slightly more than my weekly salary.

Looking back, I’m shocked at how shocked I was. What was I expecting? It costs me at least $80 to play at my local courses. It stands to reason I might need to borrow against my 401k to play a world-renowned course.

Eighty dollars is about the average weekend rate for the three public golf courses closest to me, one of which is a city-run venue. That’s just for the tee time; if I want to grab a hot dog and Coke at the turn, or a couple drinks after the round, add another $20. Forget hobby; at those prices, golf really is an addiction.

I have a stable income with my family’s business, and I’m good at it, too, recognized as one of the Top 40 Under 40 in my industry. My wife has a steady job as well. At first glance, we shouldn’t have to think twice about our recreation budget. However, we own a home, have car and school payments, and are saving to start a family—realities most young couples face. That we reside in Connecticut, one of the most expensive states for living in the country, doesn’t help. In short, dropping $80 for 18 holes is a difficult decision for me. (...)

Am I too poor to play golf?

That’s not self-pity; my friends—all relatively in the same tax bracket—discuss it as well. I know I’m well off compared to a lot of people, but golf makes me question that.

It’s a feeling that can lead to cognitive dissonance when my friends and I play. Instead of standing on the first tee ready for our round, we think, Well, let’s hope this is worth it, because there goes getting dinner and a movie. It’s hard enough to hit the fairway as is. Add that thought, and, well, no wonder my scores stink. (Maybe I’d consider taking lessons if they weren’t $120 an hour.)

When I hear about initiatives designed to grow the game—which typically include faster pace or ancillary-themed activities like Topgolf—they don’t resonate with my friends and me. If we want to make golf more accessible, that conversation starts and ends with lowering the cost of entry.

Many public courses have junior rates and programs that make the game affordable for kids, which is great. But once kids turn 18 years old, they’re often out of luck. Why can’t more courses designate a day or league, or perhaps six and 12-hole rounds, at lower prices? There are pockets around the country with such endeavors, and The First Tee does its part at the youth level, but it hasn’t spread around the country yet.

Yes, it will attract inexperienced golfers, which brings its share of etiquette breaches and slow play, but new customers are something the game needs. Discounted greens fees could be exactly what’s needed to open the funnel.

What’s worse, some of the public club pros and workers understand this, but far too often these decisions are made by public administrators, not golf-specific officials. It’s tough to get that conversation started when they view the sport not as a passion but as a number in the accounting books.

In Scotland, the home of golf, it really is the people’s game. Residents can access some of the best courses in the world for $200 a year, and there are no cart fees, because only the disabled ride. Players aren’t passed on the unnecessary maintenance costs: Scottish links depend on nature, not sprinkler systems, for water, and if there’s not much rain in a summer, well, the fairways will be rolling. Last I checked, things are still going strong over there. Some of the tenets are being applied in the United States, but nowhere near the scale it needs to be successful.

by Brian Zimmerli (with Joel Beall), Golf Digest |  Read more:
Image: Guy Billout
[ed. It's always been a problem. What's really frustrating is to pay crazy prices then feel like you're stuck in a traffic jam once you get on the course.]

Fleabag: Season 2

The Pain and Pleasure of the ‘Fleabag’ Dinner Party From Hell (Eater)

[ed. Such a good show. I especially like her relationship with her sister Claire (the meditation retreat in the first season was totally bonkers.] See also: When Your Dad Gets You Therapy For Your Birthday]

Peter Tosh

Repost