Should We Pay to Enter Bookstores?

While browsing a table of new books at the Strand and spotting one that I wanted to buy, I experienced a common, modern-day itch: Do I purchase the book there and then from the Strand without pause, thus supporting bookstores, publishers, authors, and everything that I believe in? Or do I drive myself crazy by pulling out my phone and checking how much money I would save were I to buy the book online? The Strand was selling the book at a modest discount off of its suggested retail price, but I suspected that it would be less expensive on a certain ubiquitous Web site. Sure enough, the same book was listed there, brand new, for ten dollars less than the Strand’s price. If I ordered it from this Web site, it would be delivered to my door, the next day, for free.

The moral high ground is to buy the book from the Strand. The store afforded me the pleasure of browsing the shelves on a weeknight in New York. The store’s owners permitted me to pick up the book and read a few pages, for as long as I wished. They should have my money. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I chose three additional books and that each of those books was also ten dollars less online. I could save forty bucks, which isn’t chump change. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line? Are we expected to underwrite David’s battle with Goliath, no matter what the cost? I want to give my money to the Strand. I’m willing to pay more in exchange for the intangibles that I’m offered by a store’s physical existence. But I fear that this business model, whereby physical retailers are basically relying on a code of honor from their customers, is just not sustainable.

So why not monetize the intangibles? The Strand, and stores like it, could charge an admission fee. Something token, like a dollar. For a buck, you’re granted access to everything the store has to offer. You can browse to your heart’s delight. There’s no pressure to make a purchase. And, if you do buy something, perhaps the item costs close to what it would cost online, because all of those dollars would have allowed the store to lower its prices.

I’m not an economist, so maybe this idea is an unsophisticated one. More than five thousand people walk into the Strand every day, according to the owner, Nancy Bass Wyden. (“It’s department-store numbers,” she said.) Would every one of those people be willing to contribute a dollar to provide enough of a cushion to allow for quasi-online prices? And what about the little shop in the rural community, the one that might see twenty customers walk through its doors on an average day? Twenty dollars or so a day may not be enough to keep that store afloat. Is there perhaps some sort of revenue-sharing system that could be instituted, whereby all of those single dollars go into one big pot that each participating physical retailer gets an appropriate share of?

As it turns out, the idea is not entirely new. In 2013, the then U.K. HarperCollins C.E.O., Victoria Barnsley, floated the notion of a pay-to-browse model for bookstores in an interview with the BBC. A follow-up piece in the Washington Post found that a sampling of American booksellers were hostile to the idea, but a few daring retailers overseas have since begun experimenting with variations on this model. In Porto, Portugal, visitors to the world-famous Livraria Lello bookstore pony up five euros (about $5.50 USD) for an entry voucher, the cost of which is then subtracted from a purchase. And Bunkitsu, a bookstore in Tokyo, charges customers the equivalent of a whopping fourteen dollars for the experience of browsing its inventory and exhibition space. (Included with the admission fee is access to a reading area, where patrons are permitted to kick off their shoes, help themselves to unlimited quantities of coffee and green tea, and read anything they like.)

The booksellers I spoke to in New York were generally uninterested in this sort of radical move. Miles Bellamy, the majority owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown, in Williamsburg, dismissed the idea. “I would never charge people to walk into the store. No. It’s just not classy.” Spoonbill will mark its twentieth anniversary this fall, but Bellamy says that the celebration will be a muted one. The neighborhood’s real-estate explosion in the past ten or fifteen years has not resulted in what he expected to be an uptick in business, and times are challenging for the shop. The artists and intellectuals that Bellamy once relied upon, back when Williamsburg was hip, are now all but extinct, having been mostly replaced by tourists and Wall Street types. (A couple who was book-browsing overheard our conversation, and they offered themselves as proof of the former. “They’ll never get us out!” one of them exclaimed, before asking Bellamy to recommend the best book that he could think of in that moment. Bellamy immediately fetched a copy of Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder.” “It’s kinda weird, I dunno,” he told them. “Do you like weird books?”)

Bellamy was adamant that he does not want to rely on gimmicky revenue streams like coffee, tote bags, and notepads in order to stay afloat (“Anything but books,” he said, sardonically)—and certainly not an entrance fee. “I want to do it the traditional way,” he told me. “If the greatest city in the world can’t support me, I’m gonna close my doors and head up a country road,” he declared. Sarah McNally, the owner of the McNally Jackson chain, feels the same way. “Bookstores are havens,” she said. “They’re one of the few public spaces left. It’s my responsibility as a bookstore owner to figure out how to stay competitive. Charging admission?” she asked, incredulously. “What about children? What about teen-agers? Absolutely not,” she said. “I’d rather close.”

But Wyden is not opposed to exploring new models. Her store’s continued success may have as much to do with its iconic status and longevity (her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, opened its doors in 1927) as with her initiatives to drive sales through author readings and signings, both on-site and off. The Strand was hosting four different events on the day that I spoke to her, each in a different location, and all of which required attendees to either purchase the book being promoted or a fifteen-dollar Strand gift card for later use. (...)

I know that people with a fondness for other physical things that are bought in physical stores have a similar feeling about those experiences. For me, it’s bookstores. I want them to always be there. I want to be able to get lost in them, to lose track of time in them, to encounter titles and authors and subjects in them that I hadn’t anticipated, and to leave them with an armload of titles that leave me brimming with anticipation. In this confounding era of online retail, I’m certainly willing to pay a premium for such pleasures, but an extra thirty or forty per cent seems to be too large an ask. There must be a way to level the playing field a bit, ideally sooner than later.

by Howard Fishman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Robert Samuel Hanson

Age-Proofing A Home Won’t Come Cheap

Dennis and Chris Cavner, in their early 70s, are preparing to move less than two blocks away into a 2,720-square-foot, ranch-style house they bought this year. But first a renovation is underway, taking the 45-year-old property all the way back to its studs. When the work is finished, these baby boomers are confident the move will land them in their forever home.

“We wanted to find a house that we could live in literally for the rest of our lives,” Dennis Cavner said. “We were looking specifically for a one-story house and one that had a flat lot, to age in place.”

For most of American history, people have moved in with relatives or gone to a care facility to live out their final years. Baby boomers don’t want either, and those with resources have generally created the modern idea of remaking old age to fit their lifestyle and retrofitting their homes for aging in place. Design and construction firms are coming up with safety features that look good as well. Think of it as the age-defying home.

Aging in place is a major financial commitment, one that may be at odds with retirees’ plans to downsize their lives and budgets and squirrel away cash in anticipation of rising health care costs. The Cavners are rebuilding this house — assessed at $700,000 around the time of the sale — from a shell. The remodel could easily cost $300,000 in the hot Austin market.

Leaving nothing to chance, the Cavners are paying for a number of modifications they might never need. For instance, neither uses a wheelchair, but contractors are making all doorways 3 feet wide — just in case. The master bath roll-in shower, flat and rimless, will provide room to maneuver. In the kitchen, drawers, rather than cabinets, will allow easy access in a wheelchair.

The Cavners are closely watching details of the renovation, but this dramatic late-life relocation wasn’t a hard decision.

For some seniors, aging in place might amount to simple modifications, such as adding shower grab bars or replacing a standard toilet with one that sits taller. But many seniors anticipate a financial crunch as they try to plan for their future on a fixed income, uncertain how far their savings and retirement funds will stretch.

A report released last week by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies may fuel these concerns. It cites growing income disparity for older Americans in the wake of the Great Recession, and says “ensuring financial and housing security in retirement will be a struggle.”

For those 65 and older, it said, “the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. By 2050, almost one-quarter of Americans will be 65 or older, according to the Census. Surveys conducted over the past decade show that older adults overwhelmingly want to age in their homes.

Yet many houses aren’t suited to “aging in place,” said Abbe Will, associate project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard.

“Currently, a lot do not have single-floor living — especially in certain parts of the country. There are lots of stairs and multistory homes when land is more valuable,” she said. And “many homeowners don’t necessarily have the funds to do aging in place.”

Home modifications and costs vary widely — starting with those simple safety features in the bathroom or lever doorknobs throughout the house — to more extensive changes, such as widening doorways or lowering light switches to wheelchair height. Will said simple retrofits, such as grab bars, “could be several hundred dollars,” but a “whole bathroom remodel would be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

In a recent survey of 1,000 people age 65 and older by the California-based nonprofit SCAN (formerly the Senior Care Action Network), 80% of respondents were concerned about their ability to age in place. The driver appears to be financial: About 60% said they have less than $10,000 in savings (including investments and retirement plans).

“We don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline as we age,” said sociologist Deborah Thorne of the University of Idaho, lead author of a study that found skyrocketing bankruptcy rates among those 65 and older.

The research, recently published in the journal Sociological Inquiry, finds the share of older Americans filing for bankruptcy has never been higher. “And bankrupt households are more likely than ever to be headed by a senior — the percent of older bankrupt filers has increased almost 500 percent since 1991,” the study found.

The Harvard report also cited the burden of debt among those ages 65 to 79, with nearly half of those homeowners carrying a mortgage in 2016. And people are carrying substantially more student loan and credit card debt into retirement as well.

by Sharon Jayson, Kaiser Health News via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Sharon Jayson

The End Of College Is Coming

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how America’s broken healthcare industry was bankrupting families. Well, the cost of college has jumped WAY more than the cost healthcare.

The cost of a four-year degree has shot up 15X in the past 40 years, as you can see here:

If car prices jumped as much as tuition, a base model Toyota Corolla would cost $90,000 today.

As costs have zoomed higher, kids are burying themselves under bigger and bigger piles of debt. Student loan balances have snowballed over 400% in the past 15 years. Last month, they hit $1.5 trillion:

If student debt were a stock, every Wall Street analyst would be screaming “bubble.”

And get this… Americans now owe more for student debt than they owe for credit cards and auto loans... combined!

In fact, the average kid takes out $35,000 in debt… a 75% jump in 10 years. That’s a deep hole to dig out of before you’re legally allowed to drink beer.

And student loans are the only type of debt you can’t escape, no matter what.

Declaring bankruptcy can wipe away your mortgage, your credit card debt, and even stop IRS wage garnishments. But it won’t take a penny off your student loans.

Turn 65 and haven’t paid off your student loans? They’ll raid your Social Security check each month.

What Do Healthcare and College Have in Common?

The government’s dirty fingerprints are all over both.

As you may know, the Federal government practically owns the student loan market.

More than 94% of all student loans come directly from the US government. And the small 6% slice that doesn’t come from the government is still fully guaranteed by the government.

If you’ve applied for a mortgage lately, you know it’s a painful process. You fill out stacks of paperwork, pay steep fees, and hand over a full accounting of your family’s finances.

But thanks to Uncle Sam, trillions of dollars in student loans get handed out to 17-year-old kids like candy on Halloween. This free money has warped the whole system and pushed college costs far beyond all reason.

Think about it this way: When banks were handing out no-money-down mortgages in the early 2000s to anyone with a pulse, what happened to house prices?

They SOARED.

Well, colleges know Uncle Sam is bankrolling students, so they hike fees year after year. A recent New York Fed study found for every new dollar of federal student aid, colleges hike tuition by 65 cents.

by Stephen McBride, Forbes |  Read more:  (and, if your ad-blocker is a problem, here):

Image: RiskHedge/Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Failing Upward

WeWork Needed a Bailout—But Adam Neumann Still Leaves a Billionaire

WeWork’s value has tumbled, about 2,000 employees are being cut and many investors are nursing losses after the firm’s bailout.

But founder Adam Neumann is still a billionaire.

SoftBank Group Corp.’s proposed rescue package of WeWork involves Neumann selling about $1 billion of stock and getting a $185 million consulting fee from the Japanese firm even as the deal values the struggling office-sharing company at $8 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. That’s down from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Neumann will leave the company’s board though he still can assign two seats.

On these terms, Neumann’s net worth would be at least $1 billion, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While that’s a fraction of what it was on paper in January -- the last time SoftBank made an investment in WeWork -- it’s a remarkable return from a business that has never made a profit and seen its initial public offering spurned by skeptical investors.

A spokeswoman for Neumann declined to comment.

WeWork parent We Co.’s withdrawn prospectus sketched out ways Neumann has already monetized some of his stake. He sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in earlier funding rounds, according to the Wall Street Journal. He also has a $500 million credit line -- secured by WeWork shares -- from UBS Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG. About $380 million was outstanding as of July 31. JPMorgan also loaned him $97.5 million.

That $500 million loan will now be repaid, a person familiar with the matter said. The SoftBank deal extends $500 million of credit to Neumann.

The bank loans helped Neumann, 40, collect assets worthy of a billionaire at a time when most of his net worth was on paper. Over the years he bought about $100 million of properties, including a Manhattan townhouse, a Westchester County farm and an 11-acre California estate. He also owns 10 commercial properties, four of which are leased to WeWork.

by Tom Metcalf, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Adam Neumann

[ed. There's probably a good lesson here for would-be tech billionaires. No need to have a particularly unique product (WeWork); scam the system (Martin Shkreli, Turing Pharmaceuticals); be indicted for fraudulent business practices (Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos); or even have a profitable business model (Travis Kalanick, Uber). All you need is deep market penetration. Just rope in a few big initial investors, hype your product like crazy, focus on creating a successful/lucrative IPO, exit with golden parachute (if or when everything goes to hell).]

Gmail Hooked Us on Free Storage. Now Google Is Making Us Pay.

Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. That’s beginning to change.

The Alphabet Inc. unit has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That’s happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar.

When people hit those caps, they realize they have little choice but to start paying, or risk losing access to emails, photos and personal documents. The cost isn’t excessive for most consumers, but at the scale Google operates, this could generate billions of dollars in extra revenue each year for the company. Google didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People’s in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google’s other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.

“I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn’t received any email since the day before,” said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he’d finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn’t an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way.

“I just said ‘OK, been free for a long time, now I’m paying,’” Adams said.

Other Gmail users aren’t so happy about the changes. (...)

Google has also ended or limited other promotions recently that gave people free cloud storage and helped them avoid Gmail crises. New buyers of Chromebook laptops used to get 100 GB at no charge for two years. In May 2019 that was cut to one year.

Google’s Pixel smartphone, originally launched in 2016, came with free, unlimited photo storage via the company’s Photos service. The latest Pixel 4 handset that came out in October still has free photo storage, but the images are compressed now, reducing the quality.

More than 11,500 people in a week signed an online petition to bring back the full, free Pixel photos deal. Evgeny Rezunenko, the petition organizer, called Google’s change a “hypocritical and cash grabbing move.” (...)

Smartphones dramatically increased the number of photos people take -- one estimate put the total for 2017 at 1.2 trillion. Those images quickly fill up storage space on handsets, so tech companies, including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google, offered cloud storage as an alternative. Now those online memories are piling up, some of these companies are charging users to keep them.

Apple has been doing this for several years, building its iCloud storage service into a lucrative recurring revenue stream. When iPhone users get notifications that their devices are full and they should either delete photos and other files or pay more for cloud storage, people often choose the cloud option.

In May, Google unveiled Google One, a replacement for its Drive cloud storage service. There’s a free 15 GB tier -- enough room for about 5,000 photos, depending on the resolution. Then it costs $1.99 a month for 100 GB and up from there. This includes several types of files previously stashed in Google Drive, plus Gmail emails and photos and videos. The company ended its Chromebook two-year 100 GB free storage offer around the same time, while the Pixel free photo storage deal ended in October with the release of the Pixel 4.

Gmail, Drive and Google Photos have more than 1 billion users each. As the company whittles away free storage offers and prompts more people to pay, that creates a potentially huge new revenue stream for the company. If 10% of Gmail users sign up for the new $1.99 a month Google One subscription, that would generate almost $2.4 billion a year in annual, recurring sales for the company.

by Gerrit De Vynck, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: picture alliance/Getty

What Do You Do When the Golf Course Shuts Down?

Weeds engulf the fairways. Branches break through the clubhouse windows. And buyers pass on the chance to own a home near the sixth hole.

The Crickentree golf course closed last July here in the booming northern suburbs of Columbia. Now dozens of neighbors regularly attend county meetings, wearing red shirts to show solidarity and asking officials not to grant a developer’s request to build hundreds of homes where there has been open space for decades.

“I beg you to put yourself in my shoes,” Michy Kelly recently said to the Richland County planning board, explaining why she and her husband bought their house there in 2013. “We were buying so much more than a home. We were buying peace and quiet and serenity.”

Ms. Kelly said afterward that she loves living along the fairway, though she isn’t sure which one as she has never golfed.

“It never occurred to me that people would stop doing it,” she said, “because I never understood why they did it in the first place.”

County commissioners have asked neighbors and the course’s owners to sign off on a plan for Crickentree that both sides can live with by September, when it expects to take a final vote on the rezoning. Both sides have said litigation is an option if the county decides against them.

The decline in the popularity of golf is having ripple effects in suburbs across the Sun Belt, as nearly 200 courses closed last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Communities are left with empty courses because of overbuilding during the housing boom, compounded by a 20% decline in the number of golfers since 2003, according to the trade group.

The options range from allowing the development of new neighborhoods to turning courses into public parks. It commonly takes years to sort through legal battles over zoning, obligations between the course owners and homeowners and other political fallout. In Phoenix, ongoing legal disputes have left the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course surrounded by a chain-link fence and overgrown with sagebrush for the better part of five years.

Local officials must parse through the impact of building homes in the center of an existing subdivision and potentially overtaxing schools and roads in already booming areas. Property values for nearby homes typically fall about 25% when a course fails, said Blake Plumley, an Orlando, Fla.-based golf development consultant. They can fall more than 40% if a dispute ends up in court, he said.

Here in Richland County, ECapital Management, a Fort Worth, Texas-based firm, bought the Crickentree course out of bankruptcy last year and intends to sell to a developer. It originally proposed building as many as 450 homes. Neighbors fought back with radio ads, yard signs and crowded public meetings. (...)

Crickentree homeowner Michael Koska said his 5,200-square-foot home on what was once the fifth tee box has lost at least a third of its value, based on the list prices of Crickentree homes and sales patterns for homes on other failed courses. He built the house for $565,000 in 2005 and it was appraised at $710,000 a decade ago.

“That’s life-changing kind of money, that’s ‘your kid doesn’t get to go to college, you don’t get to retire early kind of money,’ ” Mr. Koska said.

He wished he had read his neighborhood’s agreement with the course owners more closely when he built the house 14 years ago, he said. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

Crickentree is one of at least 33 courses in South Carolina that have failed since 2012, according to Kelly Cederberg, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Arizona.

“The people who were building golf courses were not thinking about how many people were out there playing golf,” she said. “They built them to sell homes.”

by Valerie Bauerlein, WSJ | Read more:
Image: NASA/Google Earth
[ed. See also: There Aren't Enough Golfers To Keep All Of The U.S. Courses In Business (NPR); and Not All Golf Course Closures Are Failures (NGF - Q).]

via: here and here

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The Silent Heart Attack You Didn’t Know You Had

When my Aunt Gert suffered a heart attack in her mid-70s, the examining doctor told her that it was not her first. Tests done to assess the damage to her heart revealed a section of dead muscle from a previous unrecognized heart attack. Sometime in the past, she had had what doctors call a “silent myocardial infarction,” or S.M.I., silent in that any symptoms she might have had at the time did not register as related to her heart and were not brought to medical attention.

My aunt was lucky. She survived her second heart attack and, by keeping cardiac risk factors under control, lived another two decades without further heart-related problems.

There are millions of people walking around in this country who, like my aunt, are oblivious to the fact that they have had an S.M.I. and face an increased risk of having another, more obvious one that could cause severe heart damage and possibly death.

You might think a silent heart attack is better than a recognized one: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Unfortunately, it can. Although knowing you’re at risk of a heart attack can be emotionally distressing, not knowing can have much more serious consequences, prompting you to continue living in ways that endanger the health of your heart and your life.

A recognized heart attack is a wake-up call to adopt medical and lifestyle measures that can minimize cardiac risk, like normalizing blood pressure and cholesterol levels, quitting smoking, losing weight if you’re overweight, getting regular exercise and controlling Type 2 diabetes. If diet and exercise are not sufficiently protective, there are now many medications that can help nature along.

Even without medication, if everyone at increased coronary risk adhered to a heart-healthy lifestyle, “the incidence of heart disease would be reduced by 80 percent,” Dr. Rekha Mankad, cardiologist and director of the Women’s Heart Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told me.

Recent studies conducted in Iceland and Finland, which maintain excellent medical records on all citizens, have helped to determine how often S.M.I.s occur and the long-term consequences associated with them. The findings, published in JAMA Cardiology last October, highlight the critical importance of not waiting until your heart sends a clear message that its life-sustaining ability has been compromised; instead, acknowledge the presence of coronary risk factors and take preventive measures to bring them under control before it’s too late.

Perhaps most revealing was the very thorough study conducted in Iceland among 935 men and women initially aged 67 to 93 who were followed for up to more than 13 years. When they enrolled in the study, each participant underwent a noninvasive test called cardiac magnetic resonance imaging that can most reliably show whether a silent heart attack had already occurred. Initially, 17 percent were found to have had an S.M.I. and 10 percent had had a recognized attack. (...)

“A silent heart attack is not always so silent, but its symptoms — mild chest discomfort, heartburn, nausea, shortness of breath — happen to lots of people and are typically attributed to other causes and not brought to medical attention,” Dr. Robert O. Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told me. Women, whose symptoms are often vague, are especially unlikely to realize they are having a heart attack. (...)

“While screening with cardiac M.R.I. is not recommended, identification of risk factors certainly is,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the Iceland study.

“It’s important for doctors to recognize people at risk and prescribe appropriate treatments to reduce that risk,” he said in an interview. “Although it’s human nature to ignore certain things until you have an event, adherence to preventive treatment can be lifesaving. In the United States, a heart attack is the leading cause of sudden death in people 65 and older.”

by Jane E. Brody, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lam

The Case for Checking a Bag

Travel is a chaotic, exhausting experience exacerbated by people who forget the social contract the moment they step foot in an airport. I travel constantly. I chase miles and have status on three airlines. I read websites about how to best manage airline and hotel loyalty programs, airline credit cards, and the like. I have an app that shows me where every single plane currently flying is and other aviation geek information. I have an app that lets me listen to air traffic control chatter. There is a small park near the edge of LAX where I sit and watch incoming planes landing. I have favorite planes (Airbus 380, Boeing 787, Boeing 757, Boeing 737) and planes I truly despise (CRJ 700, Embraer 145). In short, I have made a necessary condition of my work something of a hobby.

As you might expect, I have a great many travel-related opinions, most but not all of which are wildly uncharitable. For instance, United is Satan’s airline and I will take almost any convoluted route to avoid flying them. Alaska Airlines planes smell weird. The food on American Airlines flights is worse than what I imagine dog food tastes like. Delta serves delicious Biscoff cookies and the flight attendants wear festive purple uniforms. The Atlanta airport is a cruel mistress. There is a bathroom attendant in the Charlotte Airport who likes to sing gospel as she does her work, serenading weary passengers and she is a delight. LaGuardia is unspeakable. You basically have to walk ten miles from the gate to customs in Montreal. The Indianapolis airport is the best airport in the United States; fight me. There aren’t nearly enough women or people of color serving as pilots. It is incredibly grating to get a chatty pilot who wants to narrate the entire flight when all you want to do is sleep or stare into the Grand Canyon. The way people treat flight attendants is, for the most part, absolutely disgraceful.

People have no sense of personal space when sitting at the gate. They use the seats around them for their personal items and luggage as if it is entirely reasonable to take up three seats while countless people stand, staring at them with fatigued malice. People are strangely obsessed with boarding early as if they want to sit on the plane longer than necessary. They hover around the boarding gate, no matter how often the gate agents provide clear, concise instructions about boarding. There is signage. There are often overhead monitors detailing the process. And still people hover whether they are in Group 1 or Group 7 and boarding has yet to begin. Then there are those who feel the need to monitor the boarding line, questioning the presence of anyone they deem wrongly positioned within the hierarchy of the travel universe. They love to ask if you are in the appropriate line or they try, inelegantly, to glance at your boarding pass, or they huff aggressively, desperate for you to acknowledge that they have something to say.

Airlines oversell flights and then act like they had no hand in it as they frantically call for volunteers to change their travel plans and take later flights. There are all kinds of mysterious “mechanical issues” that delay flights in infuriating fifteen-minute increments until the airline gives up and stops communicating to passengers altogether. When flights are cancelled, airlines will do anything to abdicate responsibility, handing you a $10 meal voucher even though there is nothing open and $10 in an airport will probably only get you a bottle of water because the prices, for everything, are outrageous.

I pick my seat on any given flight for specific reasons but all too often, some couple didn’t pick seats together and just have to sit next to each other or, like, they won’t survive the flight. They plead for someone, anyone, to switch seats with them and then the flight attendants get in on it and everyone is staring at you, judging you for being reluctant to give up your seat when all you want to do is put your noise-cancelling headphones on and get to your destination. Some flights feel more like a menagerie, so many little dogs in overpriced purses, yipping and yapping while their owners coo at them and expect you to be charmed. I’m allergic, no thank you.

There are, inevitably, crying babies and overexcited children who have simply had enough four hours into a seven-hour flight. I actually don’t mind the children and feel quite a lot of tenderness toward them on a plane because I, too, want to not be on a plane. I, too, want to cry and be held. What I mind is all the adults who sigh and roll their eyes and mutter under their breath while children act like children and are generally doing the best they can as their parents pray for mercy or death. (...)

I have opinions about how people walk through the concourse, how people should go through security, how there should be separate lanes for experienced travelers and infrequent travelers, how people watch videos on their phones without headphones, how they stand, even in the last row, the minute the plane pulls into the gate, even though it will be quite some time before they deplane, and on and on and on the list goes.

I reserve my most passionate opinions, however, for carry-on luggage. If you are ever wondering if you should check your luggage or carry-on, the answer is that you should check your luggage. I don’t care why you want to carry-on your luggage. You should check your bag. I say this with the caveat that air travel is prohibitively expensive and baggage fees are horrible and if you can’t afford the fees, you do what you must. For everyone else, check your bag.

In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back. Once people realized they were going to have to pay even more than the cost of their plane ticket to travel, all hell broke loose with carry-ons. Suddenly packing for trips of most any length became an exercise in austerity.

Writers, in particular, love to discuss the ways in which they contort themselves toward austerity to go on book tour. Nearly every writer active on social media has discussed, at length, how they will travel or have traveled with only a carry-on suitcase for a five-day trip or ten-day trip or three-week trip. It is something of a competition, as if there is valor in self-imposed deprivation. They offer tips, like rolling your clothes or stuffing your socks in your shoes or traveling without toiletries. They talk about wearing the same, increasingly soiled outfit for days on end because hey, you can wash it in the hotel bathroom sink or not.

When people talk about checking a bag, the conversations are ominous. There is always a story, a dark, dark story about the one time a suitcase was lost. Ultimately, life went on but there were moments of unbearable inconvenience. This story of the lost suitcase is so terrifying, people are willing to do anything to avoid it even though in reality, most airlines have a pretty solid grasp on luggage handling. In April 2019, airlines only mishandled 5.44 of every 1,000 bags they processed.

This fear of lost luggage is so wildly blown out of proportion that sometimes, checking a bag feels like an act of rebellion. I almost always check a bag. I check a very big bag.

by Roxanne Gay, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Griggs
[ed. Spare me. Here's the kicker: "In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back."]

Bob Dylan

[ed. What a weirdo (and he likes it like that). Lyrics]

John Rawlings, Lauren Bacall
via:

Heel Turns: The History of Modern Celebrity

When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians. The fame-babies of a double murder (their father Robert Kardashian represented O. J. Simpson), the Kardashians and their extension pack, the Jenners, morphed from Los Angeles socialites into seemingly inevitable magnets of scandal, desire and money. Kim set the pace with a leaked sex tape in 2007, teaching the clan to cheerfully break the boundaries of good taste and common sense, to absorb the energy of the world’s criticism and translate it into cash. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality show centred on the lives and careers of the family, first aired in late 2007 and is now in its sixteenth series. In 2014, Kim posed for Paper Magazine holding a champagne bottle, the foamy liquid squirting over her head and into the glass perched on her extended backside. Critics noted the channelling of the eighteenth-century Khoikhoi woman Sara “Saartjie” Baartman and debated whether Kim understood that she was the butt of an old racist joke. That year she made $28 million, overtaking Meryl Streep, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling on Forbes’s list of highest-paid celebrities. Her little sister, meanwhile, plumped her lips with filler, lied about it, and became the unwitting namesake of the “Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge”, in which masses of people pressed their lips into shot glasses, sucked as hard as possible, and then recoiled in horror at their own self-mutilation. Kylie responded by selling lipstick and, at twenty-one, quietly became the world’s youngest billionaire. No doubt the gang’s current racket hawking laxative teas, diet lollipops and candy-coloured vitamins will leap right over the naysayers and fuddy-duddys to reach the kids who can truly appreciate it. Like Antaeus drawing his fighting strength from the earth, the family is invigorated by Mother Notoriety, growing more powerful every time it seems to fall.

The Kardashian-Jenners have all the external trappings of charisma without its sacred core. This makes them useful for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity, much as a body whose soul has departed is handier for studying anatomy. They are famous for being famous, but why, after all, are they famous? Why, of all the personal stylists, exhibitionists and rich kids in Calabasas, CA, did they become such magnets for attention? You may not be one of Kim’s 143 million Instagram followers but you do know who she is.

There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.

The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.

In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.

Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.

by Irina Dumitrescu, TLS |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Tachman/MG19/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

We Need A Truth-In-Advertising Commission For Voters

It was a pretty good troll. On Friday, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign ran an ad on Facebook saying that the social media giant had endorsed President Trump.

It hasn’t, of course — as the ad acknowledged a few sentences later. The goal, which it achieved and then some, was to draw attention to Facebook’s recent refusal to take down a Trump campaign ad that makes an objectively false claim about former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, and the threat that stance poses to fair elections. Let’s see how you like having lies told publicly about you, Warren was saying to Mark Zuckerberg and company.

Facebook’s decision on the Biden ad wasn’t a one-off. As Warren later noted on Twitter, Facebook recently tweaked its policies to make its stance on false political content even more hands-off than before. “It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” a company VP wrote in explaining the move.

Attacks that play fast and loose with the facts may seem like the kind of hardball politics that’s gone on forever. After all, in 1828, Andrew Jackson’s campaign falsely accused President John Quincy Adams of pimping out an American girl to the Russian czar earlier in his career. But when voters make decisions based on false information spread virally to millions, the damage to the integrity of our elections is profound.

Think of it this way: We understand the harm done by voter suppression schemes that tell people the wrong location for their polling place or that the election is Wednesday not Tuesday, and the Brennan Center has helped draft legislation to crack down on them. There’s also the danger from “deep fakes” — manipulated images, spread online, that aim to falsely discredit or embarrass a candidate — a threat California recently aimed to tackle with a new law. Why should false facts aimed at affecting voters’ decisions be treated differently?

Or consider a different analogy: if advertisers make false claims about their own products or their competitors’, they can be fined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That’s because we recognize that the free market can’t function effectively if consumers don’t have accurate facts — just as voters need accurate facts for free elections to work properly.

This isn’t just about Facebook. It shouldn’t be up to for-profit companies alone to decide which campaign messages can responsibly be aired and which aim to mislead voters. Instead, that should be done by an entity whose only goal is to further the public interest.

That’s why we need a neutral government regulator tasked with ensuring misinformation doesn’t undermine our elections. In my perfect world, this body would be empowered to block or punish false or substantially misleading campaign speech — whether in the form of campaign ads or comments by candidates and their backers. But the Supreme Court’s broad reading of the First Amendment makes that a nonstarter for the foreseeable future. Indeed, as of 2014, 27 states barred false political statements, but four of those laws have since been struck down. And state-level bans seem poorly suited to regulate campaign speech that, especially in a presidential race, is national in reach.

So for now, this body would function simply as an authoritative fact-checker, stamping “False” — or perhaps in some cases, a designation like “Unproven” or “Dubious”— on any political communication that merited it based on a careful, transparent investigation, just as health authorities stamp warnings on cigarettes.

That’s a role that appears to put it on much firmer constitutional ground than if it were authorized to actually block false speech. And it still falls well short of some measures adopted by other advanced democracies, including Canada, which criminalizes “knowingly making or publishing a false statement of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of a candidate with the intention of affecting the result of an election.”

Of course, voters are deceived not only by ads that make flatly false claims, but also by broader attacks or storylines that are based on a false or misleading premise, even if no specific assertion is narrowly untrue. These kinds of made-up scandals can often be even more damaging than narrowly false statements, since the mainstream media has more trouble ignoring them. A prime example is the Biden-Ukraine story — in which Trump and his allies charge Biden had Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired in order to protect Biden’s son, even though the evidence shows Biden did no such thing — which despite being essentially false, may have done real damage to the former vice president’s campaign.

That’s why this body might also be authorized to declare such storylines broadly illegitimate. Yes, that would force it to make more subjective judgments about which attacks are fundamentally bogus and which are valid. But again, the FTC is authorized to go beyond narrow true or false determinations when considering whether an ad misleads consumers. Why should voters get less protection?

Perhaps the most obvious danger of a body like this is that it would be captured by one side. After all, giving Trump the power to upgrade his claims of “fake news” into official government rulings would be disastrous. So the issue of how its members would be chosen to ensure it stayed unbiased would be crucial. But that concern shouldn’t kill this conversation in its cradle. Perhaps the answer is to split membership between the two parties, or maybe it’s to try to ensure that commissioners are genuinely nonpartisan. But if states can create independent commissions to handle redistricting — an area that’s no less politically fraught — we shouldn’t assume it’s impossible to do the same here.

Of course, in the current political climate, plenty of highly engaged partisan voters will automatically view the decisions of a government panel — however fairly its members are appointed, and however transparent its decision-making —as illegitimate if the decision hurts that voter’s favored candidate. But having a claim officially declared false might still make an impression on some swing voters. More importantly, it could lead news outlets and fair-minded opinion-shapers to avoid amplifying the message, ultimately starving it of oxygen.

by Zachary Roth, TPM | Read more:
Image: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

[ed. Everyone hates the refs, but at least accept some objective authority calling the penalties.]

Grant Snider
via:

Revolution? There's an App For That.

Tsunami Democràtic is a radical, decentralized wing of the resurgent Catalan independence movement, centered around an anonymously authored app designed to coordinate revolutionary uprisings.

The Tsunami Democràtic app embodies the "be water" motto of the Hong Kong uprising and builds on the Sukey anti-kettling app from the UK's 2011 student protests: it can only be activated by scanning a QR code from an existing member, and once it is activated, it places you in a "cell" with nearby users and shows you actions taking place nearby -- measures designed to both coordinate protests and to limit the exposure when the police get ahold of the app.

The app is a sideloaded Android app and there's no Ios version, meaning that there's no way for either Google or Apple to remove the app from their stores under pressure from Madrid (Apple bans sideloading apps so it's Android-only).

The app was first made available on Oct 14 and in-app messages have promised its first major use tomorrow, on Oct 21. The app's had more than 270,000 downloads.

The app is a fork of an existing tool, Retroshare, and some of its source has been published for inspection. No one is sure whether the fork was created by a team of programmers or a dedicated individual, and without a full code audit, it's impossible to say whether it is either maliciously or accidentally exposing its users.

This is essentially a reworking of the revolutionary tactical doctrine set out by Heinlein in his 1966 science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (which also served as the inspiration for Ian McDonald's incredible Luna trilogy).

But another theory is also gaining ground. “I think it's a change of strategy of the main groups, which were involved in the first of our referendum two years ago,” says Luján. He believes that Tsunami Democràtic is a proxy group for the larger separatist organisations, and former members of the former Catalan government, currently residing in Brussels after fleeing the country in 2017. 

Some Catalan politicians – including president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra; its vice president, Pere Aragonès, and the president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent – have publicly supported the group on social media. Tsunami Democràtic denies any link. 

Spain’s interior ministry has expressed the desire to discover who is behind the group and the app, but this will likely be difficult – given it could be set up and run from anywhere in the world.

Catalonia has created a new kind of online activism. Everyone should pay attention [Laurie Clarke/Wired UK]

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Radical Survival Strategies for Struggling Colleges

When Steve Thorsett crunched the numbers, things looked grim.

Business was flagging. His flow of customers had fallen to a 10-year low, down nearly 20 percent since 2015. By the year after that, annual expenses were outpacing operating revenues by $14 million.

In an increasingly unforgiving market, Mr. Thorsett needed to do more than chip away at the margins of this problem. He could make cuts, but that was complicated in his industry, and would likely only speed the downward spiral. To differentiate himself from his competitors, this chief executive determined that his operation needed to grow bigger, not smaller.

So Mr. Thorsett took a classic shortcut to expansion. He found a partner that was on even shakier ground. The resulting acquisition will bring with it several hundred new consumers, allowing efficiencies of scale that can lower costs.

Now Mr. Thorsett radiates optimism about the future — something rare these days among his counterparts, many of whom face challenges as bad as or worse than he did.

Mr. Thorsett is the president of Willamette University, part of a higher education sector grappling with a sharp decline in enrollment and financial challenges that cry out not for incremental change, but for radical solutions. Colleges and universities that fail to adapt risk joining the average of 11 per year that the bond-rating firm Moody’s says have shut down in the last three years.

Thanks, among other reasons, to a decline in the number of 18-year-olds and low unemployment luring potential students straight into the work force, enrollment is down by more than 2.9 million since the last peak, in the fall of 2011, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. More than 400 colleges and universities still had seats available for freshmen and transfer students after the traditional May 1 deadline to enroll for this fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports.

More are likely to go under; Moody’s projects that the pace of closings will soon reach 15 per year. Yet when asked what steps they are taking to avoid this fate, some campus leaders responded like the president of one small private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. It would, he said, “continue to graduate students who will make a tangible and constructive difference in the world.”

The crisis has advanced beyond the point where those sorts of good intentions are enough, Mr. Thorsett said. He and others in higher education have been actively searching for concrete new ways to rebuild enrollment and produce much-needed revenue.

“This is a business,” Mr. Thorsett said. “It’s not for profit, but we have to keep the lights on. We have to build a model that’s sustainable.”

One way is through acquisitions like the one his university has made of the Claremont School of Theology in California, or C.S.T., which is being moved to the Salem, Ore., campus of Willamette, just as private companies might do to increase their size and cost-effectiveness.

The pace of mergers and acquisitions is predicted to pick up so quickly that the self-described first full-service university and college merger consulting firm, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, hung out its shingle in August. “Will there be more? Yeah, we’re betting on it,” said Brian Weinblatt, the firm’s founder.

Colleges are also working to reduce the number of dropouts, on the principle that it’s cheaper to provide the support required to keep tuition-paying students than to recruit more. A few are pushing job and on-time graduation guarantees as selling points. Several are getting into the business of corporate training, which is lucrative because employers foot the bill for workers who don’t need financial aid or fitness centers.

Many institutions are adding programs tied to real-time workplace demand, including online courses that appeal to people who are balancing their educations with families and work. Some are even squeezing small amounts of money from such things as renting out their dorm rooms in the summers on Airbnb, catering weddings and licensing their logos for products including (in the case of 48 universities and colleges) caskets and urns.

“You have to be thinking beyond the current business model, whoever you are,” said Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Babson College, whose Academy for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurial Learning makes money for the business university by training educators worldwide how to teach entrepreneurship. “That’s what higher education is going to have to do if it’s going to survive.”

Distinguishing itself is also part of Willamette’s even more aggressive strategy in acquiring the 134-year-old C.S.T., which was suffering multimillion-dollar annual shortfalls that, unlike Willamette, it could not make up from its endowment.

Among the institutions Willamette considers its competitors are small liberal-arts colleges such as Reed and Whitman. But it has something they don’t: several graduate divisions (Reed offers one master’s degree in liberal studies) and a goal of increasing its enrollment from the current 2,700 to 4,000 over the next 10 years, starting with about 400 from the theology school.

“‘Midsize university’ is a sweet spot,” said Mr. Thorsett, who is working to position his school as small enough to promise personal attention but big enough to offer lots of choice, while not coincidentally lowering per-unit costs by serving a larger study body. “The university nature of our institution lets us do things our competitors can’t do.”

by Jon Marcus, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ashlee Culverhouse/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated Press
[ed. Tip: The NY Times paywall seems to have gotten tighter lately, so if you're having trouble accessing articles I'd recommend Cookie Remover (Chrome extension). Another tip for articles that require disabling your ad-blocker: just cut and paste the url in Outline.]

Surveying the Entire Great Barrier Reef

Massive Citizen Science Effort Seeks to Survey the Entire Great Barrier Reef (Smithsonian).

Image: Damian Bennett

Watching and Its Implications

In the 35 years that I have followed boxing, I’ve witnessed perhaps a dozen fighters killed or catastrophically injured. Indeed, most fights are in part spectacles of risk and are marketed as such. I once left an arena with the blood of the great American cruiserweight Steve Cunningham spattered over my lapels, a measure of the cost he paid in a fight that he nearly won. It was a thrilling evening, not because Cunningham shed blood but because he held his dignity against great odds fighting a much younger and stronger man. He was down four times, but he ended the bout on his feet. I hope that Cunningham, who has since retired, has no regrets.

Once among America’s most popular sports, boxing was brought low by its inveterate corruption—and the National Football League was a primary beneficiary of its downfall. Professional football’s violence is somewhat more sanitized, and it replaces the ethnic tribalism of boxing with slightly less corrosive regional loyalties. It’s therefore more appealing to the affluent audiences that advertisers want to reach. We’re discovering, though, that football is nearly as dangerous as boxing, and in the same way. Head trauma, it turns out, doesn’t discriminate.

A number of writers have recently suggested that moral disgust should cause spectators to turn their backs on football, or more saliently, to turn off their televisions. Though I disagree with this argument, we should take it seriously. A sports spectator is implicated in the violence of the games he watches, if only because the games wouldn’t be played without him. The NFL’s enormous television audience—now 45 percent female—creates the incentive structure that induces players to take risks with their health. The categorical imperative works like this: if no one watched football, the games wouldn’t be played, at least not on the same scale; less football would mean less head trauma; head trauma can generate debilitating chronic conditions in later life; therefore, we should not watch football.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker claims in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that, notwithstanding what we see on the evening news, the broad arc of human history is moving away from violence and toward cooperation and community. Evolutionary biology increasingly rewards those who channel their aggression into productive work. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal, but in the end, it’s as much narrative as science, and the story may seem to take one shape in Cambridge and quite another in Camden or Kabul. For now, it remains true that violence is endemic to human life. The terms on which we engage it may be more or less in our control, depending upon our environment, but it finds us all eventually.

The ethical implications of spectatorship have inspired many books, though it’s doubtful as to how practically useful that literature is for people deciding whether they can permit themselves to watch a college football game or a Mixed Martial Arts fight. A leading work in the field is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, a book-length essay that explores war photography and its effect on the viewer, securely away from the front lines. Sontag doesn’t speak directly where circumlocution is possible, and what she believes about the ethics of spectatorship is not always evident, but she gave the subject a vocabulary. She notes that war photography often recapitulates an insidious process of war itself—the depersonalization of the individual. Wars kill indiscriminately and in large numbers, and the images captured by war photographers are often of soldiers destined to remain anonymous.

Surely the opposite is true in sports, however. A fighter who dies in the ring retains his personhood. Indeed, he gains a kind of unsought immortality. Any serious fight fan can toll the names: Benny Paret, Davey Moore, Duk-Koo Kim—or 27-year-old Patrick Day, who died on Wednesday from injuries suffered in a bout last weekend. (...)

Each of us has his own ethical economy. Often that economy stems from how we were raised: with religion or without; with or without respect for the law; with our eyes trained to local or universal concerns. That some retired athletes suffer from terrible injuries incurred from competition is a fact that we should not turn away from. But what is the precise ethical principle being invoked by the claim that we may not watch contests in which adults voluntarily compete, and with the usual social goods as their quarry—money, fame, sexual opportunity—along with psychic benefits impossible to quantify? We know that athletes derive enormous satisfaction from pursuing excellence in sports, in addition to significant material benefits. Most of those walking around on artificial knees say that they would do it all again, even knowing the costs. We should not lightly assume that athletes don’t know what is good for them—or that we are responsible for protecting them from themselves.

by Jonathan Clarke, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Dustin Bradford/Getty Images