Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World

An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where it began.

Here’s an example. What caused the financial crisis?

Well, you have to understand the mortgage market.

What shaped the mortgage market? Well, you have to understand the 30-year decline in interest rates that preceded it.

What caused falling interest rates? Well, you have to understand the inflation of the 1970s.

What caused that inflation? Well, you have to understand the monetary system of the 1970s and the hangover effects from the Vietnam War.

What caused the Vietnam War? Well, you have to understand the West’s fear of communism after World War II …

And so on endlessly.

Every current event – big or small – has parents, grandparents, great grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Ignoring that family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might happen again. Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation for their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.

Those roots can snake back infinitely. But the deeper you dig, the closer you get to the Big Things: the handful of events that are so powerful they influence a range of seemingly unrelated topics.

The ultimate of those great-grandmother events was World War II.

It’s hard to overstate how much the world reset from 1939 to 1945, and how deeply the changes the war left behind went on to define virtually everything that’s happened since.

Penicillin owes its existence to the war. So do radar, jets, nuclear energy, rockets, and helicopters. Subsidizing consumption with consumer credit and tax-deductible interest were deliberate policies meant to keep the economy afloat after war-time production ended. The highways you drove on this morning were built to evacuate cities and mobilize the military in case of a nuclear bomb attack during the Cold War, and the Cold War was a WW2 cousin. Same for the internet.

The Civil Rights movement – perhaps the most important social and political event of our time – began in earnest with racial integration during the war.

The female laborforce grew by 6.5 million during the war because women were needed in factories. Most kept working after the war ended, beginning a trend that led to a doubling of the female laborforce participation rate by 1990. It’s probably the single most important economic event of our lifetime.

Find something that’s important to you in 2019 – social, political, economic, whatever – and with a little effort you can trace the roots of its importance back to World War II. There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding.

But it’s not just astounding. It’s an example of something easy to overlook: If you don’t spend a little time understanding World War II’s causes and outcomes, you’re going to have a hard time understanding why the last 60 years have played out the way they have.

You’ll struggle to understand how the biggest technologies got off the ground, and how the most important innovations are born from panic-induced necessity more than cozy visions.

Or why household debt has risen the way it has.

Or why Europeans have different views on social safety nets than Americans. John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security,” and indeed they did. Historian Tony Judt writes of post-war Europe:

Only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.

There are so many things happening today that aren’t easy to grasp without a working knowledge of the 75-year-old wartime forces that got them going in the first place. To me, the war is fascinating to study not because of what happened, but what it went on to influence.

Which raises the question: What else is like World War II?

What are the other Big Things – the great-grandparents – of important topics today that we need to study if we want to understand what’s happening in the world?

Nothing is as influential as World War II has been. But there are a few other Big Things worth paying attention to, because they’re the root influencer of so many other topics.

The three big ones that stick out are demographics, inequality, and access to information.

There are hundreds of forces shaping the world not mentioned here. But I’d argue that many, even most, are derivatives of those three.

Each of these Big Things will have a profound impact on the coming decades because they’re both transformational and ubiquitous. They impact nearly everyone, albeit in different ways. With that comes the reality that we don’t know exactly how their influence will unfold. No one in 1945 knew exactly how World War II would go on to shape the world, only that it would in extreme ways. But we can guess some of the likeliest changes.

by Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund | Read more:
Image: Census Bureau

Guide to Aging

Look down at your hand. Flex the tendons, watch them ripple under the skin. What a nice design! So silent and quick. That’s what they never get in these cyborg movies: the fact that a really good design doesn’t whirr and clank. It’s silent and quick, like bodies are. Like yours. Yours, these sinews; and that long, stretchable leg, genital toy, brave shoulders, stubborn toes, a zoo of perfect forms and all yours for the price of admission.

There’s only one little flaw: you are trapped in the body of a dying animal. In fact, you can see how far gone you are just by testing the skin of that hand of yours. Try pinching the skin on the back of your hand. Now let it go. Count the seconds it takes to smooth itself out. The longer it takes, the older your skin is.

And here’s a really cheering bit of news: your skin, the largest organ in your body, is also the organ which ages most slowly. So however depressing it may be to look at the skin of your hand wearily resuming its proper shape, you can make yourself feel even worse by remembering that things are much, much worse on the inside. Your liver, your lungs, your heart, your joints — all the things you can’t see are decaying much faster than your skin.

When you first see your skin dying, you assume there’s a quick fix: what’s that stuff, rototonin or something? You rub it on and your skin youngs up. But it’s expensive, embarrassing, and only works for a while. You forget to put it on, and the wadis of your skin deepen. Meanwhile, the last fringe of hair has vanished from the Sahel of your forehead, your eyebrows begin to look Brezhnevian, your back is hairier than a tarantula’s, and your breasts are bigger than your wife’s.

There’s been a mistake. Someone screwed up the design, with malicious intent. Can you sue Darwin? Can you negotiate an exit from this dying animal? Apparently not. What are we, mere medieval peasants, serfs? Absolutely.

It gets worse. Aging is drying; the cells get scaly, reptilian, sagging like Iguana-hide. It’s not so droll anymore. It invades your dreams: quick cuts of teeth crumbling and hair shedding like an old dog’s ass, in close-ups that scare you awake. (...)

Aging is shrinking: cells wink out and you’re literally a smaller person than you were. You’re a walking brownout. Dead muscle, never to be replaced, is squeezed through your increasingly inefficient anus. In a typical Darwinian joke, the dead cells are processed into hard, unfriendly turds which sandpaper the anus until you grow a little grape-cluster of hemorrhoids. Nature is efficient, and never smacks you once when it can whack you twice.

As biological catastrophes accumulate, more and more of your mental energy is devoted to blocking the signals broadcasting damage and decay from sites all over the body. If you listened to these signals, you’d scream and collapse. You’re a dry-land version of those salmon in the grizzly documentaries, the humped mutant fish whose bodies are dead but still swimming, covered with necrotic patches, constantly flaking away downstream.

All these pain-broadcasts have their bitter stories, most of them reminders of avoidable injuries. The knee — whose fault is that? Yours. Every time you walk more than fifty yards, that knee broadcasts the phrase “bone on bone.” The tissues that were installed at the factory have worn down like old shock absorbers that bang against the frame. Then there’s your heart, and the jaw thing, and your queasy gut. Your fault, your fault, and your fault, respectively.

But the worst torments are the ones too dumb to be tragic — the gnat buzzes of the aging body. There’s a patch of skin in your left ear that starts itching as soon as you get into bed, and grows a pale scab which you must scrape away with the nail of your little finger every week or so. The doctor doesn’t believe in it, and you sound like a whining fool when you try to explain. So you resort to the fingernail-gouging approach. Naturally, it gets infected. This is your own fault. All these trivial nightmares are (a) ridiculous, and (b) your own fault.

You’re married to a slut, a slave: a human body. And try getting a divorce from that wife, baby. When you’re married to your body, it really is “till death do you part.” Short of walking off the tenth floor or eating a 12-gauge, you and your body are as married as a couple of Mormons. That’s Earth, man: one big Utah. Monogamy, you and your body sliding into decay hand in hand. Touching, huh?

But it all started out so well! You replay it over and over (because you seem to spend a lot of hours lying down these days)…but no matter how many times you rewind, it comes out the same way. Let’s face it: you never had a chance, any more than the trilobites did. All you can do is play it back, and back, and back.

Ready? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready. The eXile is here to dim the lantern as we guide you through a tour of the most horrible plot the world has ever known: Aging.

Age: Birth to 10 Years

The first three years were nightmare material, from falling out of a uterus to facing the fact that you’re going to be a tetraplegic feces-factory for a couple of years. Come to think of it, that’s how you’re likely to spend your last few years, thanks to modern medicine, so maybe infancy is good training for your slow and expensive stay at the Pray for Death Convalescent Hospital. But Nature, the sadistic tapeworm who set up this existence, doesn’t trust you to deal with the horrible memories of your first three years. That’s why she set up this clever little subprogram: at the age of four, your brain will automatically delete all memories. Every wonder why kids smile? That’s why: they’ve had a brainwipe, and it’s the nicest thing, maybe the only nice thing, Ma Nature will ever do for them.

But from five to puberty it gets better. After you bang your head against the table 10,000 times, your growing brain begins to suspect it might be better to duck. This is how we learn: pain and pain and pain and pain. But at least you’re getting better. Well, taller at least. There are finally other children who are smaller and weaker than you. Nature put these creatures on earth as victims, so after you do your time as jailhouse bitch to the other kids in kindergarten, it’s your turn to torture and fondle the fresh fish. The body understands and appreciates this and becomes happy. This is because the body is a fascist thug.

At the end of the first decade, you’re an old hand. You can make the body do pretty much anything you want. Nothing breaks. Everything heals. And you know, from watching older kids, that there’s this weird mutation ahead, something to do with the wriggly parts of movies.

by John Dolan, eXile | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Steely Dan

[I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong. I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that. ~ Almost Gothic. 

[ed. Sizzling like an isotope. See also: What a Shame About Me (lyrics) and West of Hollywood.]

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.) ‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad. There’s so much of him, spread over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike.

I began from a place of love, the charmed garden of his early novels, stories and critical essays. I read Rabbit, Run when I was 12 with a sense of accumulating speed and transport I have rarely felt since, though a confusion about what exactly Rabbit was doing to Janice’s ass in that fateful scene persisted into adulthood and probably did lasting damage. (Women! Let your husbands come on your ass extremely soon after you give birth or else you will drown your own baby!) I assumed he would continue in this general tradition, his landscapes delicately dotted with the dandelions of misogyny. I knew he had no idea how women pissed. Was I wrong about the rest? Had I misremembered certain splendours? It was possible. Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing. My antagonism toward the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them, is far milder than might be expected, and mostly takes the form of my wanting to wrestle them at sleepovers, slowly but inexorably, through the use of black magic, turning them into lumberjack lesbians. (...)

The plainness of his biography offers the consolations of the lumberyard: all that neatly stacked blond wood, a testament not just to his soundness and his industry, but to some rich green complacency in the valley that grew him. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1932 to Wesley and Linda Hoyer Updike. His parents, and grandparents, rocked him like a handmade cradle; in ‘Midpoint’ he calls himself the fifth point of their star. ‘I was made to feel that I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend never to lose it.’

The one reverberating trauma of his childhood seems to have been the family’s 1945 move from Shillington, where he spent the first 13 years of his life, to a farm in Plowville, after his mother made a command decision to buy the house where she had been born in 1904 and return them to a place she remembered as paradise. The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer. Linda, who possessed literary aspirations for both of them, and who published her own stories in the New Yorker after her son became a fixture there, had believed it would, and she was right, but he never really forgave her. It is his father’s teacherly portrait that is fixed with so much sympathy in the National Book Award-winning The Centaur, but it is his mother’s figure that walks the halls of his fiction, wearing through the floorboards in her rounds, casting illumination on the walls and ceilings. She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him. ‘He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close; when in fact between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough,’ he wrote in ‘A Sandstone Farmhouse’ (1990). In a fine late interview Barbara Probst Solomon asked him about his habit of painting women in his fiction, rather than inhabiting them. ‘I suppose I’m male enough to be more excited by the outsides of women than their insides,’ he began.

I don’t know. My mother was a very eloquent woman who was constantly offering to share her thoughts with me, and maybe I got an overdose of female thought early. There’s a kind of a heat about female confidences, this tremendous female heat, and you sort of run backwards and try to find some guys to play a little softball with. But, oh, there’s this sense of women being almost too much, too wonderful, too sensitive, and yet somehow wounded – wounded I suppose by their disadvantage within the society.

If I linger here, it is because this is the ground that gives us some of his best stories and most unusual perceptions. Here he was tormented by a sense of immensity that sometimes leaned down to peer at him through its microscope, or descended from a screaming height to chase him through the streets. He felt his smallness, a single squirm in an unbearable swarm. The slow-ticking clock on the wall took little bites of him, his eyes were bright with hayfever, his asthmatic lungs gasped for air. The halo of selfhood had descended: one minute it was wide enough to circle the globe, and the next minute it was tight enough to squeeze the breath out of him. What must he do – how must he underline and lift himself – to ensure that God did not ever let him die? (...)

In a chronological reading, the serious lapse in form comes earlier – with Couples (1968), the novel that chronicled the adulterous whirlwind of the early Ipswich years and notoriously made Updike a million dollars. Perhaps I am more puritanical than I realised, because the mere thought of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the beginning of Rabbit, Run had spilled and seeped into the text. Dim, carpeted, brown, pressing our faces perpetually into the plaid of some couch. It is also the book in which Updike becomes 25 per cent more interested in feet, which is not something the world needed.

As I read I actually felt my teeth getting stronger, like a teenage dinosaur. I wanted to grab at the waist, wrench and kill – what? Some part of my own history, the story of my grandparents crawling home drunk after bridge games in the new suburban paradises my grandfather helped build, dressed in the loudest of loud checks. Updike’s reliably beautiful descriptions, always his strength far above dialogue, plot and characterisation, now betrayed my faith on every other page: how can a man who lights on the phrase ‘tulip sheen’ to describe the skin of a woman’s breast use a racial slur to describe another woman’s labia in the same book? Some cruelty in him moves to the forefront, as well as a burgeoning distaste for the politics of the counterculture whose sexual advances made it possible for him to write in extended milky detail about swingers breastfeeding one another in the bathroom.

by Patricia Lockwood, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe
[ed. 911? Hello. I'd like to report a murder. What an essay/retrospective by Ms Lockwood! This is how you do it.]

Abandoning a Cat

Of course I have a lot of memories of my father. It’s only natural, considering that we lived under the same roof of our not exactly spacious home from the time I was born until I left home at eighteen. And, as is the case with most children and parents, I imagine, some of my memories of my father are happy, some not quite so much. But the memories that remain most vividly in my mind now fall into neither category; they involve more ordinary events.

This one, for instance:

When we were living in Shukugawa (part of Nishinomiya City, in Hyogo Prefecture), one day we went to the beach to get rid of a cat. Not a kitten but an older female cat. Why we needed to get rid of it I can’t recall. The house we lived in was a single-family home with a garden and plenty of room for a cat. Maybe it was a stray we’d taken in that was now pregnant, and my parents felt they couldn’t care for it anymore. My memory isn’t clear on this point. Getting rid of cats back then was a common occurrence, not something that anyone would criticize you for. The idea of neutering cats never crossed anyone’s mind. I was in one of the lower grades in elementary school at the time, I believe, so it was probably around 1955, or a little later. Near our home were the ruins of a bank building that had been bombed by American planes—one of a few still visible scars of the war.

My father and I set off that summer afternoon to leave the cat by the shore. He pedalled his bicycle, while I sat on the back holding a box with the cat inside. We rode along the Shukugawa River, arrived at the beach at Koroen, set the box down among some trees there, and, without a backward glance, headed home. The beach must have been about two kilometres from our house.

At home, we got off the bike—discussing how we felt sorry for the cat, but what could we do?—and when we opened the front door the cat we’d just abandoned was there, greeting us with a friendly meow, its tail standing tall. It had beaten us home. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how it had done that. We’d been on a bike, after all. My father was stumped as well. The two of us stood there for a while, at a total loss for words. Slowly, my father’s look of blank amazement changed to one of admiration and, finally, to an expression of relief. And the cat went back to being our pet.

We always had cats at home, and we liked them. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. I loved to sit on the veranda with a cat, sunning myself. So why did we have to take that cat to the beach and abandon it? Why didn’t I protest? These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. (...)

I recall now the expression on my father’s face—surprised at first, then impressed, then relieved—when that cat we had supposedly abandoned beat us home.

I’ve never experienced anything like that. I was brought up—fairly lovingly, I’d say—as the only child in an ordinary family. So I can’t understand, on a practical or an emotional level, what kind of psychic scars may result when a child is abandoned by his parents. I can only imagine it on a superficial level.

The French director François Truffaut talked about being forced to live apart from his parents when he was young. And for the rest of his life he pursued this theme of abandonment in his films. Most people probably have some depressing experience they can’t quite put into words but also can’t forget.

My father graduated from Higashiyama Junior High School (equivalent to a high school today) in 1936 and entered the School for Seizan Studies at eighteen. Students generally received a four-year exemption from military service, but he forgot to take care of some administrative paperwork, and in 1938, when he was twenty, he was drafted. It was a procedural error, but once that kind of mistake is made you can’t just apologize your way out of it. Bureaucracies and the military are like that. Protocol has to be followed.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Emiliano Ponzi

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The Writer’s Routine

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Lola Marsh

How Bill Clinton and American Financiers Armed China

It’s the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, which Xi Jinping is celebrating with aggressive rhetoric and a militaristic display of his ICBMs that can strike at the U.S. in 30 minutes. So today I’m going to write about how American aerospace monopolists, dumb Pentagon procurement choices, and the Bill Clinton administration helped create the Chinese missile threat we are now confronting.

In August of 1994, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, flew to China to try and seal two deals for American corporations. The first was to enable Chrysler the ability to build minivans in China, and the second was to get the Chinese to buy 40 MD-90 aircraft ‘Trunkliners” from McDonnell Douglas.

The McConnell Douglas deal was particularly important to the Clinton administration for a number of reasons. The company was dying; it was badly run by financiers who lacked an appreciation for quality production. More importantly, it had lost a key military contract for the F-22 in 1986, so the government felt an obligation to find customers to prop it up. There was also politics, with Bill Clinton trying to honor his unofficial 1992 campaign slogan, “it’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton would indeed hail the deal on the eve of the 1994 midterm election.

The Chinese agreed to buy the planes, but with one caveat. They wanted a side deal; McDonnell Douglas should sell a mysterious company called the China National Aero Technology Import and Export Corporation (CATIC) a set of specialist machine tools that shape and bend aircraft parts stashed in a factory in Columbus, Ohio.

When Chinese representatives went to Columbus, Ohio, workers wouldn’t let them see the tools, because workers realized that they would lose their jobs if the tools were sold to the Chinese. The Chinese then sent a letter to the corporation saying that the deal for the Trunkliners was at a stalemate, but if the machine tools were sold to a mysterious Chinese company, well, that would have a “big influence” on whether McDonnell Douglas could close the deal on the planes.

It wasn’t just the workers who caused problems. The government could have been a hurdle for McDonnell Douglas as well, because these weren’t just any old machine tools. “According to military experts,” reported the New York Times, “the machines would enable the Chinese military to improve significantly the performance abilities -- speed, range and maneuverability -- of their aircraft. And if diverted, they could do the same for missiles and bombers.” Selling the tools wasn’t just a commercial deal, the machining equipment was subject to export controls for sensitive national security technology.

It was an insane idea, selling the Chinese government this important machining capacity. The Pentagon protested vehemently, as did Republican Congressman Tillie Fowler, who was on the Armed Services Committee. Fowler said allowing the transfer to reflects an ''emphasis on short-term gain at the expense of national security and long-term economic gain.'' And yet that’s what McDonnell Douglas sought, and what the Clinton administration pushed through. The Commerce Department cleared the deal, in return for a pledge (or behavioral remedy) that China would not use the tools to build missiles, but would dedicate them to a civilian aircraft machine tool center in Beijing.

McDonnell Douglas basically knew the behavioral remedies were fraudulent almost immediately; one of the most important pieces of equipment was shipped not to Beijing but directly to a Nanchang military plant. It wasn’t just McDonnell Douglas who understood the con; Clinton officials had the details of the deal, and let it go through anyway. Why? They used the same excuses we hear today - competitiveness and a fear of offending China. Here’s the NYT explaining what happened.

“American officials want to avoid sending any signals that would fuel China's belief that the United States is trying to ''contain'' China's power, militarily or economically. And they know that if they deny a range of industrial technology to China, other competitors -- chiefly France and Germany -- are ready to leap in and fill the void.”

China never honored the overall deal. By 1999, China had acquired only one of the 20 promised Trunkliner airplanes. And three years later, the Federal government indicted McDonnell Douglas for “conspiracy, false statements and misrepresentations in connection with a 1994 export license to sell 13 pieces of machining equipment to China.” The government also went after the Chinese company.

Still, this was too little too late. The episode was by any metric catastrophic; the Chinese government got missile making machine tools in return for a promise they didn’t honor, which should have been a massive scandal, borderline treason. But ultimately it wasn’t a scandal, because Republicans, leading globalization thinkers, and Clinton Democrats decided that transferring missile technology to China didn’t matter.

Remember, during this entire period, Bill Clinton pressed aggressively to open up the U.S. industrial base to Chinese offshoring. And towards the end of the Clinton administration, McDonnell Douglas, as we all now know, later merged with Boeing, and that merger ended up destroying the capacity of Boeing - by then the sole American large civilian aircraft maker - to manufacture safe civilian planes.

How Bill Clinton Made the Worst Strategic Decisions in American History

Chinese power today is a result of a large number of incidents similar to this one, the wholesale transfer of knowhow, technology, and physical stuff from American communities to Chinese ones. And the confused politics of China is a result of the failure of the many policymaking elites who participated in such rancid episodes, and are embarrassed about it. As we peer at an ascendant and dangerous China, it makes sense to look back at how Clinton thought about the world, and why he would engage in such a foolish strategy.

Broadly speaking, there were two catastrophic decisions Clinton made in 1993 that ended up eroding the long-term American defense posture. The first was to radically break from the post-World War II trading system. This system was organized around free trade of goods and services among democratic nations, along with somewhat restricted financial capital flows. He did this by passing NAFTA, by bailing out Mexico and thus American banks, by creating the World Trade Organization, and by opening up the United States to China as deep commercial partners.

The Clinton framework gutted the ability of U.S. policymakers to protect industrial power, and empowered Wall Street and foreign officials to force the U.S. to export its industrial base abroad, in particular to China. The radicalism of the choice was in the intertwining of the U.S. industrial base with an autocratic strategic competitor. During the Cold War, we had never relied on the USSR for key inputs, and basically didn’t trade with them. Now, we would deeply integrate our technology and manufacturing with an enemy (and yes, the Chinese leaders saw and currently still see us as enemies).

The second choice was to reorganize the American defense industrial base, ripping out contracting rules and consolidating power into the hands of a small group of defense giants. In the early 1990s, as part of the ‘reinventing government’ initiative, the Clinton team sought to radically empower private contractors in the government procurement process. This new philosophy was most significant when it hit the military, a process led by William Perry.

In 1993, Defense Department official William Perry gathered CEOs of top defense contractors and told them that they would have to merge into larger entities because of reduced Cold War spending. “Consolidate or evaporate,” he said at what became known as “The Last Supper” in military lore. Former secretary of the Navy John Lehman noted, “industry leaders took the warning to heart.” They reduced the number of prime contractors from 16 to six; subcontractor mergers quadrupled from 1990 to 1998. They also loosened rules on sole source—i.e. monopoly—contracts, and slashed the Defense Logistics Agency, resulting in thousands of employees with deep knowledge of defense contracting leaving the public sector.

Perry was a former merger specialist who fetishized expensive technology in weapons systems. But what Perry was doing was part of an overall political deal. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration radically raised defense spending. Democrats went along with the spending boost, on condition that they get to write the contracting rules. So while the Reagan build-up was big and corrupt, it was not unusually corrupt. When Clinton came into office, his team asked defense contractor how to make them happy in an environment of stagnant or reduced defense spending. The answer was simple. Raise their margins. The merger wave and sole source contracting was the result.

The empowering of finance friendly giant contractors bent the bureaucracies towards only seeing global capital flows, not the flow of stuff or the ability to produce. This was already how most Clinton administration officials saw the world. They just assumed, wrongly, that stuff moves around the world without friction, and that American corporations operate in a magic fairy tale where practical problems are solved by finance and this thing called ‘the free market.’ In their Goldman, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group-ified haze of elitist disdain for actually making and doing real things, they didn’t notice or care that the Chinese Communist Party was centralizing production in China. They just assumed that Chinese production was ‘the free market’ at work, instead of a carefully state-sponsored effort by Chinese bureaucrats to build strategic military and economic power.

Part of this myopia was straightforward racism, an inability to imagine that a non-white country could topple Western power. Part of it was greed, as Chinese money poured into the coffers of Bush-era and Clinton-era officials, as well as private equity barons. This spigot of cash continued through the Bush and Obama administrations.

by Matt Stoller, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Toshihiko Okuya, study #127
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Lerson
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Beachheads and Obstacles

Apple and Google may be the first companies people think of when you ask who won mobile, but Amazon and Facebook were not far behind.

Amazon spent the smartphone era not only building out Amazon.com, but also Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS was just as much a critical platform for the smartphone revolution as were iOS and Android: many apps ran on the phone with data or compute on Amazon’s cloud; mobile also created a vacuum in the enterprise for SaaS companies eager to take advantage of Microsoft’s desire to prop up its own mobile platforms instead of supporting iOS and Android, and those SaaS companies were built on AWS.

Smartphones, meanwhile, saved Facebook from itself: instead of a futile attempt to be a platform within the browser, mobile made Facebook just an app, and it was the best possible thing that could have happened to the company. Facebook was freed to focus solely on content its users wanted and advertising to go along with it, generating billions of dollars and a deep moat in targeting advertising along the way.

What is not clear is if Amazon’s and Facebook’s management teams agree. After all, both launched smartphones of their own, and both failed spectacularly.

Facebook’s attempt was rather half-assed (to use the technical term). Instead of writing their own operating system, Facebook Home was a launcher that sat on top of Android; instead of designing their own hardware, the Facebook One was built by HTC. Both decisions ended up being good ones because they made failure less expensive.

Amazon, meanwhile, went all out to build the Fire Phone: a new operating system (based on Android, but incompatible with it), new hardware, including a complicated camera system that included four front-facing cameras, and a sky-high price to match. It fared about as well as the Facebook One, which is to say not well at all.

That, though, is what made last week’s events so interesting: it is these two failures that seemed to play a bigger role in what was announced than did the successes.

Amazon and Facebook’s Announcements

Start with Amazon: the company announced a full fifteen hardware products. In order: Echo Dot with Clock, a new Echo, Echo Studio (an Echo with a high-end speaker system), Echo Show 8 (a third-size of the Echo with a screen), Echo Glow (a lamp), new Eero routers, Echo Flex (a microphone only Echo that hangs off an outlet), Ring Retrofit Alarm Kit (that lets you leverage your preinstalled alarm), Ring Stick Up Cam (a smaller Ring camera), Ring Indoor Cam (an even smaller Ring camera), Amazon Smart Oven (an oven that integrates with Alexa), Fetch (a pet tracker), Echo Buds (wireless headphones with Alexa), Echo Frames (eyeglasses with Alexa), and Echo Loop (a ring with Alexa). Whew!

This is an approach that is the exact opposite of the Fire Phone: instead of pouring all of its resources into one high-priced device, Amazon is making just about every device it can think of, and seeing if they sell. Moreover, they are doing so at prices that significantly undercut the competition: the Echo Studio is $150 cheaper than a HomePod, the Echo Show 8 is $60 cheaper than the Google Nest Hub, and the new Eero is $150 cheaper than the product Eero sold as an independent company. Amazon is clearly pushing for ubiquity; a whale strategy this is not.

Facebook, meanwhile, effectively consolidated its Oculus product line from three to one: the mid-tier Oculus Quest, a standalone virtual reality (VR) unit, gained the capability to connect to a gaming PC in order to play high-end Oculus Rift games; Oculus Go apps, meanwhile, gained the capability to run on the relatively higher-specced Oculus Quest. It is not clear why either the Go or Rift should be a target for developers or customers going forward.

The broader goal, though, remains the same: Facebook is determined to own a platform; the lesson the company seems to have drawn from its smartphone experience is the importance of doing it all.

Beachheads and Obstacles

What Amazon and Facebook do have in common — and perhaps this is why both seem to look back at their very successful smartphone eras with regret — is that Apple and Google are their biggest obstacles to success, and it’s because of their smartphone platforms.

Amazon to its great credit — and perhaps because the company did not have a smartphone to rely on — found a beachhead in the home, the one place where your phone may not be with you. Now it is trying to not only saturate the home but also extend beyond it, both through on-body accessories and also an expanding number of deals with automakers.

Facebook, meanwhile, is searching for a beachhead of its own in virtual reality. That, the company believes, will give it the track to augmented reality, and by extension, usefulness in the real world.

Amazon’s challenge is Google: Android phones are already everywhere, and Google is catching up in the home more quickly and more effectively than Amazon is pushing outside of it. Google also has a much stronger position when it comes to the sort of Internet services that provide the rough grist of intelligence of virtual assistants: emails, calendars, and maps.

Facebook, meanwhile, is ultimately challenging Apple: augmented reality is going to start at the high end with an integrated solution, and Apple has considerably more experience building physical products for the real world, and a major lead in chip design and miniaturization, not to mention consumer trust. Moreover, while there is obviously technical overlap when it comes to creating virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, the product experience is fundamentally distinct.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How to Set Your Google Data to Self-Destruct

Last year you may have been addicted to Beyoncé. But nowadays you’re more into Lizzo. You also once went through a phase of being obsessed with houseplants, but have lately gotten into collecting ballpoint pens.

People’s tastes and interests change. So why should our Google data histories be eternal?

For years, Google has kept a record of our internet searches by default. The company hoards that data so it can build detailed profiles on us, which helps it make personalized recommendations for content but also lets marketers better target us with ads. While there have been tools we can use to manually purge our Google search histories, few of us remember to do so.

So I’m recommending that we all try Google’s new privacy tools. In May, the company introduced an option that lets us automatically delete data related to our Google searches, requests made with its virtual assistant and our location history.

On Wednesday, Google followed up by expanding the auto-delete ability to YouTube. In the coming weeks, it will begin rolling out a new private mode for when you’re navigating to a destination with its Google Maps app, which could come in handy if you’re going somewhere you want to keep secret, like a therapist’s office.

“All of this work is in service of having a great user experience,” Eric Miraglia, Google’s data protection officer, said about the new privacy features. “Part of that experience is, how does the user feel about the control they have?”

How do we best use Google’s new privacy tools? The company gave me a demonstration of the newest controls this week, and I tested the tools that it released earlier this year. Here’s what to know about them.

Brian X. Chen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Glenn Harvey

10 Hours of Cats Purring

[ed. There's a NY Times article out today about ASMR "boyfriends" that help you get to sleep: What Does Having a Boyfriend Have to Do With Sleep? Despite the overall creepiness of the story and the actual genre itself, the quote that got me was:

“My family is so supportive,” he said. “They thought it was cool I could get that many subscribers from whispering into a microphone.” And those subscribers mean views, which means money. But just how much? 

“For every 1,000 views, I make $3,” he said without a hint of braggadocio. The views on his role-play videos range from 155,000 to two million. “You can do the math.”

Wow. A quick curious look down the ASMR rabbit hole revealed all types of videos, even 10 hrs of cats purring. What a world (and distracting waste of time). It would be interesting to play one of these with a cat on your lap and see what happens. Another interesting fact: did you know that Bob Ross (of DYI painting fame) is considered by many to be the godfather of ASMR?]

My Astounding And Yet Not At All Unusual Day In Culture

9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.

9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!

9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.

10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.

T.S Elliot

10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my “writing mode.” Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill’s dentist. Soak it in.

11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.

12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother"; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.

2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.

3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.

4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.

4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.

6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.

6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”

6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.

6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”

6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.

6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”

6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.

8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.

9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.

10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.

12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.

12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.

12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.

1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.

2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.

2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.

by David Orr, The Awl |  Read more:
Image: T.S. Elliot, Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Repost]

Ingesting a Credit Card's Weight in Plastic Every Week

Globally, we are ingesting an average of 5 grams of plastic every week, the equivalent of a credit card, a new study suggests.

This plastic contamination comes from "microplastics" -- particles smaller than five millimeters -- which are making their way into our food, drinking water and even the air.

Around the world, people ingest an average of around 2,000 microplastic particles a week, according to the study by the University of Newcastle, in Australia.

These tiny particles can originate from a variety of sources, including artificial clothes fibers, microbeads found in some toothpastes, or bigger pieces of plastic which gradually break into smaller pieces when they're thrown away and exposed to the elements.

They make their way into our rivers and oceans, and can be eaten by fish and other marine animals, ending up as part of the food chain.

Microplastics have been found in many everyday foods and drinks, such as water, beer, shellfish and salt, co-lead researcher Kala Senathirajah told CNN.

"It is very clear that the issue of microplastics is a global one. Even if countries clean up their backyard, it doesn't mean they will be safe as those [microplastic] particles could be entering from other sources," she said.

The largest source of plastic ingestion is drinking water, according to the research, which reviews 52 existing studies to estimate plastic ingestion around the world.

The research was commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for its report "No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People."

It found that the average person consumes as many as 1,769 particles of plastic every week just by drinking water -- bottled or from the tap. But there could be large regional variations. It quotes a 2018 study that found twice as much plastic in water in the United States and India than in European or Indonesian tap water.

A separate study this month found that Americans eat, drink and breathe between 74,000 and 121,000 microplastic particles each year, and those who exclusively drink bottled water rather than tap water can add up to 90,000 plastic particles to their yearly total.

by Isabelle Gerretsen, CNN | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. See also: A single tea bag can leak billions of pieces of microplastic into your brew (CNN).]

El Camino: 95 Minutes With Aaron Paul

I can only show you this ’cause you’ve seen the film,” Aaron Paul says, grinning proudly as he scrolls through hundreds — maybe thousands? — of photos featuring his 19-month-old daughter, Story. He settles on a short video of the two of them taken during a break in the filming of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. The clip finds the actor in full makeup as Jesse Pinkman, the emotionally pulverized, physically lacerated meth-maker. As Paul gently describes to Story the harrowing (and very top-secret) El Camino scene he has just filmed, his daughter gazes at her father’s bruised and grubby face with affection. “She’s totally fine when she sees Jesse’s scars,” Paul says, putting down his phone. “She looks past all of that and right into my eyes.”

It’s less than a month before the release of El Camino, and the 40-year-old Paul is sitting on the back terrace of his Los Feliz home, dressed in a beige linen shirt and matching slacks. A red Radio Flyer wagon — piloted by a lone teddy bear — is parked nearby at the foot of an immense artificial waterfall that cascades down an entire hillside. The nearly 100-year-old estate has been home to several Hollywood dignitaries over the years — including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Parsons, and Twilight-era Robert Pattinson — and is anchored by a lush, panoramic garden so large Paul is still sorting through every plant. “When we moved in,” he says, “they gave us two binders of information about running this place.”

Paul and his wife, the anti-bullying-nonprofit founder Lauren Parsekian, took over the estate earlier this year, not long after a family trip to New Mexico. That’s where Paul had spent several months covertly reprising the role of Jesse, last seen in Breaking Bad’s 2013 conclusion. In his final onscreen moments, Jesse plows through the gates of a desert compound in a stolen El Camino, sobbing and howling after having escaped not only his Aryan Brotherhood captors but also the emotional clutches of his mentor turned manipulator, Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston.

For those who’d come to root for Jesse, the send-off felt victorious. But it also left some questions in the balance. Ever since the finale, Paul notes, “people always ask, ‘What happened to Jesse? Is he okay?’ And I’d say, ‘You know as much as I do.’ ”

Written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, El Camino, which debuts on Netflix on October 11, begins right after the massacre in the show’s finale, which left Walter dead and tipped off police to the vast drug empire Jesse had helped build. The movie is deeply satisfying on its own, featuring all the twists and pivots of a gnarly, on-the-run thriller; but for Breaking Bad devotees, there’s the added emotional investment of having watched (and worried about) Jesse Pinkman for five seasons. El Camino also pairs Paul with several of his former Breaking Bad cronies, though to name them, or to reveal even the haziest plot points, would violate Netflix’s demands of secrecy. Suffice it to say that many of the show’s hallmarks — revelatory flashbacks, grisly humor, and abrupt violence — are still very much in effect in El Camino.

Still, it gives away nothing to note that the sole focus of El Camino is Jesse Pinkman, whose heartaches and fears were like psychological open wounds made visible through Paul’s fidgety physicality and sad, searching eyes. “I couldn’t be more opposite of that guy,” notes the actor, “other than the fact that I wear my heart on my sleeve. I don’t bury anything.” That on-the-surface rawness made for one of the more intensely symbiotic performances on television (while also earning Paul a trio of Emmys during Breaking Bad’s run). So much so that, in the years after the show ended, Paul himself wondered what had become of his troubled old friend. “He was real to me,” the actor says. “I loved Jesse. I cared for him. I wanted him to be okay.” (...)

It’s possible, of course, that the traits that make Paul such a transfixing TV presence are too nuanced for the big screen: For all of Jesse’s spaz-outs and “bitch”-snaps, Paul carries much of the character’s pain and (minimal) joy in his face — the kind of subtle gestures that work best within the intimacy of a prime-time drama. There’s also the fact that Jesse has never actually gone away, since Breaking Bad is effectively in a state of perpetual reruns on Netflix. Television actors — even those with multiple Emmys — have always struggled to navigate the gulf between TV and film. That’s all the more difficult when your best-known character is being rediscovered on a daily basis.

by Brian Raftery, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty Images

Michele Mikesell
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Al Varlez
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Top 20 Acoustic Guitar Intros of All Time