Science for Sale

Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop making this stuff.”

In fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. As an epidemiologist and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health under President Obama, I have seen this behavior firsthand. The instinct for corporations is to take the low road: deny the allegations, defend the product at all costs, and attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, corporate leaders and anti-regulation ideologues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public, or that they care less about our water and air than environmentalists do. But their actions belie their rhetoric.

Decision makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals they place profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision. This is not to say that decisions at the highest level are black-and-white or simple; they are dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation and potential loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.

Unfortunately, though, this story is old news: most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to put profit above all else. Still, we mostly don’t expect there to be mercenary scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This commonsense view misses the rise of science-for-sale specialists over the last several decades and a “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want.

There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field. Consider, as a silly but representative example, the “Deflategate” controversy in the National Football League (NFL)—the allegations that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady directed that footballs be deflated during a 2014 championship game. As part of the ensuing investigation, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hired an attorney who in turn hired Exponent, one of the nation’s best-known and most successful product defense firms.

These operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.

I describe this corporate strategy as “manufacturing doubt” or “manufacturing uncertainty.” In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there’s too much doubt about the evidence, and not enough proof of harm, or not enough proof of enough harm.

This ploy is public relations disguised as science. Companies’ PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair-minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were hurt by the product in question. Corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as “sound science,” but in reality they merely sound like science. Such bought-and-paid-for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interests is vilified.

Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine-tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry, there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment; debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy. In earlier decades—as documented in detail by a great deal of scholarship, including Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010) and my earlier book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008)—we have seen this play out with tobacco, secondhand smoke, asbestos, industrial pollution, and a host of chemicals and products. These industries’ strategy of denial is still alive and well today. Nor is this practice of hiring experts and hiding data about harms limited to health concerns and the environment. Beyond toxic chemicals, we see it with toxic information as well. (Consider the corporate misbehaviors of Facebook.)

This is not to assert that the conclusions of every study or report produced by product defense experts are necessarily wrong; it certainly is legitimate for scientists to work to prove one hypothesis in the cause of disproving another. One means by which science moves toward the real truth is by challenging and disproving supposed truth and received wisdom. Maybe there are two sides to every story—but maybe not two valid sides, and definitely not when one has been purchased at a high price, and produced by firms whose financial success rests on delivering the studies and reports that support whatever conclusion their corporate clients need.

The strategy of manufacturing doubt has worked wonders, in particular, as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. In the long run, product defense campaigns rarely hold up; some don’t pass the laugh test to begin with. But the main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product. Doubt can delay or obstruct public health or environmental protections, or just convince some jurors that the science isn’t strong enough to label a product as responsible for terrible illnesses.

Eventually, as the serious scientific studies get stronger and more definitive, and as the corporate studies are revealed as unconvincing or simply wrong (then generally forgotten, with the authors paying no penalty for their prevarications), the manufacturers give up and acknowledge the harm done by their products. Then they submit to stronger regulation, sometimes even costing themselves more money than they would have paid in the first place. But they can do the math: they have also been making a lot of money for all those years. Their wealth compounds. And as for the people who have been sickened or worse in the interim? Or the despoiled environment? Well, those are unfortunate. Sorry. (...)

It is not an exaggeration to say that in the product defense model, the investigator starts with an answer, then figures out the best way to support it. As often as not, the product defense investigator starts with someone else’s answer, then reviews the evidence or subjects an important study to a post-hoc “re-analysis” that magically produces the sponsor’s preferred conclusions—that the risk is not that high, the harm not that bad, or the data fatally flawed (or maybe all of these at once). These are the studies that are flogged to regulatory agencies or in litigation.

Recognizing these firms’ methods can be tremendously valuable in trying to frame public discourse in today’s toxic political environment. What follows is a kind of disinformation playbook: a field guide to the way science gets sold.

by David Michaels, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?

To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”

Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.

If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong. (...)

Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.

In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”

Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.

“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.

by David Freedlander, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Julia Rendleman for Politico Magazine
[ed. Negative partisianship. See also: Taxing the SuperRich (Boston Review).]

Hee Young Park

Kirk Douglas (December, 1916 – February, 2020)

Sonny Sharrock

Kanpachi
via: (Blue Ocean Mariculture)
[ed. See also: The Poke Paradox (Longreads)

Fire Threatens Worldwide Vinyl Record Supply

“Devastating” Manufacturing Plant Fire Threatens Worldwide Vinyl Record Supply" (Pitchfork).

Image: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Story of How You Came to Buy That Car

They routinely ask some of life’s deepest questions: Who are you? What do you care about? What are your goals in life? What do you struggle with? What do you love and hate?

But these are not psychiatrists or spiritual advisers; they’re marketers probing consumers to figure out why we buy. Whether it’s sleek sports cars, laundry detergents, or cellphones, mapping the views and yearnings of potential buyers helps these specialists construct ad campaigns and brand identities. Though people say they buy for rational reasons like effectiveness or price, the truth is that they often make purchases for more complex reasons, so marketers dig deep with their pitches, targeting our values, fears, and aspirations. And these days the preferred delivery vehicle is often a story.

“It always starts with understanding people — fleshing out a full portrait of who a potential customer might be for this product. Because doing laundry is never just about doing laundry. It’s about being a mom or dad and taking care of my family and presenting a clean front to the world,” said Jill Avery, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School who studies brand management and teaches “Creating Brand Value,” an M.B.A. course for investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers.

Branding used to be a shorthand way to convey reputation to potential buyers who prized claims of performance (“gets whites whiter”) and expert opinion (“four out of five dentists recommend this chewing gum”) over all else. But since the 1960s, consumers have become tougher to persuade with rational sales pitches.

“Whereas prior to this, ‘Why should I buy?’ was all about function, in this era, ‘Why should I buy?’ has become wrapped up in who my identity is or who I want to be or what kind of lifestyle I aspire to,” said Avery. “In many product categories, you’re buying into the brand much more than you’re buying into the product.”

Some of the world’s most famous brands, like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola, have successfully trained consumers to associate their companies with emotional concepts — rebelling, winning, and belonging, respectively — rather than merely the goods they sell.

“People want to believe that they’re not swayed by brands,” said Avery. “They are.”

As firms attach ever-more-sophisticated meanings to their brands, marketing professionals now reach for the tools and techniques used by authors and filmmakers to leverage the human fascination with stories in order to lure audiences in a way that obvious sales pitches cannot.

Stories “generate higher levels of engagement, learning, persuasion, and inspiration for action” than other forms of communication, making them a “superior” vehicle to reach and affect consumer behavior, Avery wrote in a recent HBS Technical Note on brand storytelling. That’s important, because in “today’s world, where attention is scarce and consumers are bombarded with thousands of brand messages each day, brands that are able to tell compelling stories can break through the clutter and create engagement.”

Using humor, romance, sex, or even irony, effective narratives include compelling characters, a conflict and plot that feel fresh yet familiar, and a clear message that comes across as transparent and authentic, not manipulative, she said.

Brand stories are told in many ways, such as on Twitter, through a retail store experience, through packaging and logos, or via a social media influencer’s posts on Instagram or Facebook. Figuring out what will grab would-be buyers is a dicey, complicated task for marketing professionals, for as times and people change, so do the stories that resonate.

“What are we anxious about right now? If we can figure that out as marketers, then we can deliver stories that … help release that anxiety through consumption,” she said.

by Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette | Read more:
Image: "The Hero and the Outlaw,” Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson; “Brand Storytelling,” Jill Avery

Netflix Users Rejoice: Goodbye, Autoplay

Twitter spoke, and Netflix listened.

On Thursday, the streaming behemoth announced that it would give viewers a choice: autoplay or no autoplay. Viewers can now not only skip automatic previews, but also prevent the next episode in a series from playing immediately after the previous one. It’s a seemingly minor change, but some subscribers celebrated the announcement as if it was a great populist victory.

It’s a common annoyance for some Netflix users. While you’re scrolling through the vast library of movies and television shows, if the cursor hovers for a nanosecond too long, the beast that is Netflix autoplay is unleashed. (...)

Autoplay, which has existed as a built-in feature since 2016, seemed designed to keep subscribers’ eyes on Netflix and off their streaming competitors (and real life, for that matter). When one episode of “Arrested Development” ended, another would begin in seconds — no need to wear yourself out by clicking a button. And if no title was revealing itself as the pick of the night, an automatic preview might whet your binge-watching appetite.

A spokeswoman for Netflix said that autoplay was intended to help make it “faster and easier for our members to find titles tailored to their tastes.” Some viewers clearly didn’t feel helped.

by Julia Jacobs, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Hallelujah. Autoplay is/was a royal pain in the ass. It actually made me want to check out other streaming services first. I don't know why they took so long to get rid of it.]

Multimillionaire Invents 'Bin Pods' for Homeless

Multimillionaire invents 'bin pods' for rough sleepers by joining wheelie bins together (Mirror).
Image: Peter Dawe/Triangle News
[ed. So thoughtful. Do they come in different colors?]

Range Balls

USGA/R&A declares distance increases must stop in findings from Distance Insights Project

While golf’s ruling bodies are unclear as to what should happen next, the nearly two-year study of how far the golf ball is flying—known as the Distance Insights Project—is resoundingly clear on one specific conclusion:

Distance must be stopped.

On Tuesday, the USGA and the R&A officially released the conclusions of their report, which involved a holistic review of distance’s effect on the game over the last century that included multiple surveys and commissioned research programs.

“We believe that golf will best thrive over the next decades and beyond if this continuing cycle of ever-increasing hitting distances and golf course lengths is brought to an end,” the report’s 16-page “Conclusions” document reads. “Longer distances, longer courses, playing from longer tees and longer times to play are taking golf in the wrong direction and are not necessary to make golf challenging, enjoyable or sustainable in the future. In reaching this conclusion, our focus is forward-looking with a goal of building on the strengths of the game today while taking steps to alter the direction and impacts of hitting distances in the best interests of its long-term future.”

In an exclusive interview with Golf Digest on Monday, USGA CEO Mike Davis and current USGA president Mark Newell said the game had reached what amounts to a tipping point with regard to distance. Davis cited how “almost all golf courses” have been affected by distance over the past 100 years.

“As distance increases, golf courses have either altered themselves or will alter themselves,” he said. Davis also noted the increase in distance has distorted the skill set required to compete at the highest level, and the strategic challenge has been taken away on certain holes.

“We want the cycle of distance increases to stop,” Davis said. “We think distance is relative, and it’s always been relative. This concept of every generation having to hit it farther than the previous generation, we just don’t think when all is said and done that that is good for the game.”

Davis said he didn’t see the current situation as “a crisis, but we clearly have identified a problem that the industry should solve in a collective way.”

Newell said the distance trend extends to many levels of competitive golf down to state and local tournaments. “It isn’t just a sliver of professionals,” he said. “There’s really a pressure that is felt by many golf courses to keep getting longer in order to accommodate that.”

While no official equipment-related rule changes were proposed, they are without question on the table. The report acknowledges players’ improving skills and athleticism along with the enhanced course conditions that will only get firmer as water use becomes even more restricted in the coming decades, but the ruling bodies’ plan is to focus on how equipment rules could lead to the desired chilling effect on hitting distances. Those changes could target adjustments in the current rules specifications for clubs and balls, but also would consider the possibility of allowing tournament committees to institute local rules that would require a certain kind of ball or club to be used on that course for that tournament.

That idea naturally leads to questions of whether the game should have separate rules for elite golfers compared to the rest of golf. In a Tuesday press conference announcing the report, Davis remained opposed to two sets of rules, but opened the door for a kind of bifurcation where a local rule might be employed.

“We are steadfast in our belief that one set of rules is in the best interest of the game for everyone,” Davis said. “The concept of the local rule goes back to the 1700s and allows courses or tournament committees to have flexibility where it makes sense.”

by Mike Stachura, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Stan Badz/PGA Tour

[ed.This is big. Somehow, I don't see golf equipment manufacturers supporting policies that foundationally threaten their raison d'etre (or bottom line). And average golfers clamoring for less distance, different equipment, or separate rules.]

Taylor Swift's Self-Scrutiny in "Miss Americana"

Perhaps the biggest downside of being rich and famous is that no one will ever feel sorry for you again. Once a gleaming black S.U.V. has deposited you directly at the foot of a stairway leading to a private jet, you are suddenly and irrevocably beyond compassion. Most celebrities seem to understand this fact instinctively, though occasionally, in interviews, it’s possible to catch a brief but vivid flash of panic in a star’s eyes when she is asked about how many days she has to spend on the road, or what it’s like to feel the constant adoration of a fan base. Still, no matter how miserable or inhumane the circumstances of her life have become—no griping!

Forced gratitude can feel like a modern plague, but most people still bristle when a celebrity suggests that perhaps she is also a victim. “Miss Americana,” a new documentary about the pop singer Taylor Swift, premièred on Netflix last Friday. The film was directed by Lana Wilson, and takes its title from “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” a track on “Lover,” Swift’s most recent album. (“No cameras catch my pageant smile / I counted days, I counted miles,” she sings, presumably describing the time she spent settling down with her boyfriend, the English actor Joe Alwyn, and attempting to avoid public scrutiny.) The film covers Swift’s entire life and career, but it lingers on recent events, including a political awakening, which was apparently hastened by an incident in 2013, in which she was sexually assaulted at a meet and greet by a radio d.j. named David Mueller. (He later sued her, for defamation, and lost.)

Swift is known for her expertise at persona creation, so it would be reasonable to expect that “Miss Americana” might feel like hagiography in a cloak of quasi-confessionalism. That stance, after all, is now the default mode on social media, where the smartest celebrities figure out a way to artfully portray themselves as accidental heroes. But “Miss Americana” is a compelling and thoughtful portrait of an artist reckoning with what she’s capable of, and, more interestingly, what the culture will accept from her. “As I’m reaching thirty, I’m, like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful,” she says. Ouch.

Because she is young, white, and conventionally pretty, Swift has enjoyed some degree of privilege her entire life. Yet, though her background has buoyed her in some very obvious ways (her father, a stockbroker, and her mother, a former marketing executive, moved their family from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, so that Swift could work Music Row), it has also been a funny sort of albatross. From the start of her career, Swift has radiated a kind of frantic ambition, which made it especially easy for critics to dismiss her as a high-achieving cheerleader type, rather than a visionary, a savant, or a mogul. Swift is right to be frustrated by this—it’s another brutal example of how even women who hew close to patriarchal strictures can be punished for their victories.

“Miss Americana” reframes Swift’s hunger for validation as nearly pathological. “I wish I didn’t feel like there’s a better version of me out there,” she says. The film opens with her showing the camera her early journals, a pile of notebooks in shades of pink and purple, some with tiny locks. At one point, Swift says, she used a quill and ink to write. When she was thirteen, she scribbled “my life, my career, my dream, my reality” on one cover. She described her earliest ideology as “do the right thing, do the good thing,” which might seem admirable but quickly became punishing. (Swift identifies as Christian in the film, but her idea of goodness has less to do with morality than with the overwhelming demands of late capitalism—for Swift, goodness is mostly just synonymous with commercial achievement.)

Swift is certainly not exceptional in her yearning for approval, but her life has unfolded on an unprecedented scale. In one scene, the camera follows her as she prepares to appear onstage at one of the stops on her “Reputation” tour. She stands on a platform, and someone raises a sequinned hood over her head. A barrier slowly parts, and suddenly Swift is facing an arena full of people fully losing their minds. It is hard to imagine what it must feel like to stare down that sort of hysterical, churning energy, especially alone. Watching her, I felt neither envy nor curiosity, merely terror.

by Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Emma McIntyre/Getty

[ed. Despite knowing almost nothing about Ms. Swift, I stumbled onto this documentary on Netflix and was pleasantly surprised at its depth.] 

A Love Letter to Making Movies

[ed. Oscar hunting.]

Amazon Dating

Content creator and filmmaker Ani Acopian says: "I wasn’t having much luck with dating apps so I partnered with @amazon to make a better one."

This is Amazon Dating!

(No, it isn't real. Yet.)

by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

America: The Land of Make-Believe

If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and having the world's largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents' arms and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.

The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. (...)

The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.

This destruction, which cuts across the political divide, leads us to place our faith in systems, including the electoral process, that are burlesque. It diverts our energy toward useless debates and sterile political activity. It calls on us to place our faith for the survival of the human species in ruling elites who will do nothing to halt the ecocide. It sees us accept facile explanations for our predicament, whether they involve blaming the Russians for the election of Trump or blaming undocumented workers for our economic decline. We live in a culture awash in lies, the most dangerous being those we tell ourselves.

Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in "Civilizations and Its Discontents," distressed societies whose difficulties "will not yield at any attempt at reform." But this is too harsh a truth for most people, especially Americans, to accept.

America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity, along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with America's triumphalism. "The illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.

In decay, however, these illusions are fatal. Powerful nations have the luxury of imbibing myth, even if decisions and policies based on the myth inflict damage and widespread suffering. But nations whose foundations are rotting have little latitude. The miscalculations they make, based on fantasy, accelerate their mortality.

by Chris Hedges, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

The Story of YouTube

April 2006: A video is uploaded to YouTube showing two boys in China lip-synching to American boy band the Backstreet Boys. Susan Wojcicki – YouTube’s current CEO who was in charge of Google’s acquisitions at the time – credits this video with convincing her that it would be worth it for Google to invest in user-generated content by purchasing YouTube.

The Story of YouTube (South China Morning Post)

[ed. Never gets old.]

The Curious Bond Between Arnold Palmer and Mister Rogers

Fred Rogers—“Mister Rogers” to us—grew up in a house 3.9 miles from Latrobe Country Club, where he learned to play golf by taking lessons from Deacon Palmer at the same time as the pro’s son. Fred and Arnie both attended Latrobe High School, a year apart, and went on to achieve worldwide fame while always remaining close to their hometown in Western Pennsylvania (pop. 8,338). “It’s with me wherever I am,” Fred once said; Arnie never left. Each became defined by their humility, warmth and empathy for others. Tom Hanks played one of them in the movies, but he could have played both.

LAY-trobe is the way the locals say it. Go into Arnie’s clubhouse and you’ve stepped back in time to his prime, the 1960s. It’s across the street from the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, where the best Italian restaurant in town, DeNunzio’s, is on the second floor of the airport terminal. Down the road is Saint Vincent College, where Arnie’s memorial was held in 2016 at the Benedictine basilica on the hill. I hadn’t made the connection between these two American heroes until I attended the reception at the Fred Rogers Center on campus.

Inspired by Tom Hanks’ movie, I returned to look for Arnie among Fred’s archives at the center last fall and spent the day with their mutual friend, the Benedictine Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, who oversees the college. Nowicki used to consult on Rogers’ television show and was there in the New York City subway when a group of teenagers noticed Fred and spontaneously broke out singing his theme song, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” one of the real-life scenes depicted in the film.

The archabbot, a nongolfer, recalled the time Palmer asked him to play golf. He demurred, but Arnie insisted. On the first hole, he took a huge clump of a divot and left the ball on the tee. “Maybe you better just drive the cart,” Arnie said. The archabbot was also with him when he died. Palmer had called that morning and asked, “Hey, Doug, don’t preachers come see their clients anymore?” They visited for an hour that day, said the Lord’s Prayer together, and 10 minutes later, Arnie was gone. Both Palmer and Rogers were Presbyterians, which I guess is only a club-length from Catholics. (I’m a Catholic, but my closest preacher is a rabbi—we all hedge our bets.)

Fred’s father owned a couple of manufacturing companies, and his mother was a beloved philanthropist and socialite in town. They had a reputation for looking out for their employees and making loans they knew would never be repaid. Fred was a victim of bullying as a child and suffered from asthma, spending summers indoors when his parents bought one of the first window air-conditioners. He studied music, married a concert pianist and came to believe that the Arts more than anything else spoke to humanity and gave access to our inner feelings.

“He pioneered child psychology based on social emotional development as opposed to cognitive behavioral theory,” Nowicki said. “That’s ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ versus ‘Sesame Street.’ Fred taught that people are open to learning when they feel affirmed and loved.”

Palmer’s parents came from the other end of the economic spectrum, forged in sports. Arnie learned to use the service entrance to the club until one day he owned it all. “Growing up, my father and Fred didn’t hang out together,” Amy Palmer Saunders said. “But as adults, they had a mutual respect and were family friends. When I was young, our families had gatherings at Christmas time.” On the same campus as the Fred Rogers Center is the 50-acre Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve, disparate symbols of their two families.

What they had in common was profound. Fred liked to recall advice he received from the old actor Gabby Hayes: “When I’m on the air, I see just one little buckaroo out there.” That was the sense Fred gave through the television set to generations of children. It was also the sense that Arnie gave to everyone in his gallery as we thought he was looking only at us. Rogers focused his life on children; Palmer founded two children’s hospitals that bear his family name.

In the Rogers Center, among hundreds of boxes of Fred’s papers, the archivist Emily Uhrin showed me a handwritten speech about local people who inspired characters in his productions; he cited Deke Palmer for giving him “a feel of golf and was glad to be able to pass it on to the children of the next generation” (1976). There were also letters asking Arnie to be profiled on his show “Old Friends... New Friends” (1979)—but it never worked out—and later an elegantly penned note to Winnie and Arnie that was signed, “Love to you both, as always, Fred” (1992).

by Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Evening Standard/Getty Images

The Rise of Smart Camera Networks

The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them (The Intercept)

Image: Brittany Greeson/The New York Times via Redux

A Book Recommendation: Catch and Kill

As I’ve noted before I seldom read books about contemporary politics or current affairs. When I open a virtual or physical book it’s almost always history and generally in the distant past. But I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to reading a number of recent books for a project I’m planning. One of those I just finished is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.

I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.

Farrow is a fascinating person on our public landscape. Like many of you I first heard about him as the child of famous parents. Then there were various stories about how he graduated college at some ridiculously young age, was working at the State Department under Hillary Clinton at some equally nonsensical age. Then he had that show on MSNBC which rapidly crashed and burned. Then, since network morning TV is off my radar, I didn’t really hear much about him until he exploded back on to the scene in 2017 with his string of path-breaking exclusives on Harvey Weinstein and what we now know as the #MeToo movement.

The MSNBC show always struck me as an uncomfortably privileged exercise. Basically his first turn in journalism in his mid-20s and it’s his own show on a top cable news network. It seemed predictable and not entirely undeserved when it flopped. But that clearly wasn’t the whole story. Farrow seems to be that rare person who gets a lot handed to him and yet manages to live up to the billing and more. Investigative journalism, which usually turns on some mix of smarts, obsessiveness and charisma, was what he was meant for.

I say all of this because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up the book. What got me to read it was my interest in and project about the culture of secrecy, extortion and private surveillance, to which the #MeToo movement is inextricably tied and yet distinct from. The core reporting on Weinstein and others, which won Farrow a Pulitzer, you likely know about. Most of that was in the original articles which began at NBC and were all published in The New Yorker. They’ve rippled out into numerous secondary accounts, news coverage and more. That’s in the book of course but again we mostly know that story.

The book is really about the process of reporting the story, which is a tale about NBC News and their on again, off again efforts to kill or declaw story and Weinstein’s army of lawyers, PR people, private investigators and private intelligence operatives effort to disrupt or kill the stories being written about him. This meant not only Farrow’s at NBC/New Yorker but also Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s at the Times. It is about the sheer power, resources and weapons an enormously wealthy and powerful person can bring to bear to prevent exposure.

Let’s be honest: most current affairs books aren’t good. Or to be a bit more generous they are serviceable and informational, which is generally fine because you want the information. You want to go deeper on some story you learned about in the daily press. If they’re cleanly written and organized you get that information. I decided to read this book looking for information. I was pleasantly surprised to find more.

One of the themes and plot elements of this book is Farrow’s feeling of paranoia about whether he’s being watched, surveilled; whether his bosses at NBC News are being straight with him or whether they’re furtively in contact with the people he’s pursuing. In part because we, the readers, probably know some of the final story the book is filled with a negative capacity – he’s paranoid but it’s actually much worse than he imagines. We know part of that future before he does, before the narrative confirms it. But not all of it.

Lisa Bloom, the crusading feminist lawyer (daughter of Gloria Allred), shows up to help in his work. He takes her partly into his confidence. She’s actually working for Harvey Weinstein. He really is being surveilled – not just with traditional tails and stakeouts. But his movements are being tracked electronically – probably illegally. (Another tantalizing part of the narrative is the number of operatives he’s eventually able to turn against the private intelligence firm.) Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s ur-accusers, was befriended by and took on as her confidante a woman who was actually working for the Israeli private intelligence firm (Black Cube) Weinstein had hired to kill stories about his predation. Through the writing he and those he’s talking to are being crowded around by people working for or controlled by Harvey Weinstein. But he and they don’t know it. As the reader you can feel their presence crowding around you – a weird mix of claustrophobia and second-guessing.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:
Image: Brigitte Lacombe; Little, Brown and Company via

Robert Rauschenberg, Rhyme 1956
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