The Tyranny of Terrazzo: Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?

You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.

A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.

All that pink. All those plants. All that white. It’s so clean! Everything’s fun, but not too much fun. And there, in the round mirror above the couch: It’s you. You know where you are. Or do you?

Search your brain. Swap out the monstera leaf for waxy red anthurium, WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE for GOOD VIBES ONLY. Maybe the pillows were succulent-print; maybe the ceramics had boobs. IT WAS ALL A DREAM, says a neon sign in schoolgirl cursive. You hadn’t noticed that before.

Maybe it is a dream, this room you do and don’t know, assembled from cliché and half-recollected spare parts; a fever dream — or, no, that’s too much. This room functions more like a CBD seltzer, something you might buy in a salmon-pink can. There’s not a lot of distinctive taste, but still, it’s hard to resist when you’re on a permanent search for ways to feel better. The ambience is palliative — simple but not severe. Even the palette faintly suggests a medicine cabinet: powdery pharmaceutical pastels, orange pill bottles, Band-Aid pink. (...)

Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled between embracing and rejecting what it wrought. A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal will give way to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed — which will then give way to some new variation on tech-forward mass style. (Furniture dealers joke that “brown” goes in and out with every generation.) It’s a logic that gets filtered through the reliable desire for the world the way it looked when we were young, and lately this has meant looking back 30 or so years to the Memphis-inflected pastel pop of the ’80s and ’90s. We might call the latest iteration of the cycle the “millennial aesthetic” — not to say that it was embraced by all millennials, just that it came to prominence alongside them and will one day be a recognizable artifact of their era.

Consider a previous youth-style shorthand: the hipster, preeminent cultural punch line of the aughts. Both hipster and millennial were terms that drifted away from strict definitions (hipsters being subcultural, millennials being generational) to become placeholders for “whatever fussy young people seem to like.” It is strange, now, to remember a time when chunky-framed glasses were understood as a hipster affectation; today they just look like Warby Parker. The hipster aesthetic harked back to a grimy past: Its spaces were wood-paneled, nostalgic; perhaps they contained taxidermy. Behind lumberjack beards and ’70s rec-room mustaches, there was a desire for something preindustrial or at least pre-internet.

The hipster was Vice; the millennial is virtue, or at least virtuous consumption. The hipster aesthetic was capable of rendering even plain cotton T-shirts a little gross under the gaze of Dov Charney — the grossness was, indeed, part of the appeal. The millennial aesthetic, meanwhile, could take something disgusting and attempt — through sheer force of branding — to make it cute and fun. One such product, called “Come&Gone” (sans-serif logo, pastel website, friendly gifs), attracted notice on Twitter last year. Essentially a sponge on a stick, it was marketed as an “after-sex cleanup” device by a start-up “on a mission to ban the dripping, forever.”

Sometimes the hipster flirted with racism and misogyny, couched as irony or provocation — a certain performance of exclusivity (even just daring your audience not to get the joke or know the band) was central to the hipster aesthetic’s appeal. But the millennial aesthetic aims its appeal at everyone. Propagated by brands and advertisements, it is a fundamentally commercial aesthetic — and why alienate any potential customer? Millennial marketing showcases models of many races and body types, and the products on offer are obvious in their charms. Every sofa and soft-cup bra presents itself not as evidence of distinctive taste but as the most elegant, economical, and ethical solution to the problem of sofas or soft-cup bras. Simplicity of design encourages an impression that all errors and artifice have fallen away. The millennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.

If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually.

by Molly Fischer, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Fala Atelier

Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life

Constant connectivity defines 21st-century life, and the infrastructure undergirding it all is both digital (the internet and our social media platforms) and physical (the gig economy, e-commerce, global workplaces). Despite a tumultuous first two decades of the century, much of our connected way of life has evaded the stress of a singular global event. The possibility of a global pandemic currently posed by the new coronavirus threatens to change that altogether. Should the virus reach extreme levels of infection globally, it would very likely be the first true test of the 21st-century way of life, laying bare the hidden fragility of a system that has long felt seamless.

The most obvious example is our global and connected economy, which has already weathered a deep recession. There could be shortages in crucial imports.

On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration reported one of its first shortages of a drug for human use (they did not specify which) as a result of supply chain disruptions. The agency is monitoring 63 manufacturers in China supplying medical devices “that may be prone to potential shortage if there is a supply disruption.”

Worries about the future of the global economy have had interest rates headed toward to record lows while oil prices have dropped. This past week the United States saw its worst weekly decline for stocks since the 2008 financial crisis. Major indexes around the world fell between 4 percent and 12 percent.

“It’s common when thinking about networks to talk about the trade-off between efficiency versus resilience,” Jon Stokes, a founder of Ars Technica and a deputy editor at The Prepared, an emergency preparedness site, told me recently. “Computers enable us to dial in the efficiency and complexity to insane degrees but we lose resilience in the system.”

“We design systems presuming a steady state of normalcy,” Mr. Stokes argued. “But now, we’re about to hit this big ball of stress imminently. It will flex the system in weird ways that will cause parts to snap. And it’s impossible to predict what will snap.”

A global pandemic also threatens to test other systems in ways that are harder to quantify. Chief among them: our complex information ecosystem. In the event of widespread illness, we’ll need to rely on accurate, vetted information to keep us safe. While the internet has made distribution easier than ever before, the democratization of information has created platforms and advertising economies built to reward misinformation.

When it comes to the coronavirus, the spread of misinformation hoaxes and rumors about the outbreak in China have plagued YouTube and Facebook while adapting to new platforms. As BuzzFeed News’s Ryan Broderick recently explained, “unverified videos from Chinese social media are shared by local Twitter influencers, viral WhatsApp forwards warn users of government advisories that don’t actually exist, and people share bogus cures for the virus.” Literal virality and online virality begin to mimic and influence each other.

Over the past few years, it has become clear that our social media ecosystem is easily hijacked to incentivize behavior from the worst actors, further amplifying existing tensions and disagreements. The result? A volatile political climate, where news is weaponized for political gain — a state further exacerbated by black-box algorithms protected as corporate secrets that dictate the information we see. Their unknowable nature breeds conspiratorial ideas about the flow and control of information. Trust in what we see online decreases, and news fatigue grows more widespread, especially among the least engaged political-news consumers. Those who are checked out become even more susceptible to cynicism and deception.

A global pandemic and its attendant fear and uncertainty will only add more strain into an already flawed and complex system. Politically, we can already see the contours of the information war around the coronavirus. For Democrats, the response to the virus is a demonstration of the failure of America’s health care and private insurance systems — and a way to highlight the incompetence of the Trump administration. At the same time, the Trump administration and the pro-Trump media ecosystem are invoking factual reporting about the seriousness of the virus and concern about government ineptitude to claim political bias and downplay the risks to Americans. A legitimate public health crisis becomes yet another choose-your-own-reality event, a wedge to amplify divisions.

Information pollution bleeds into our online commerce systems as well. Conspiracy grifters like the website Infowars are already stoking fears of government-caused food shortages, using fear to drive product sales. (...)

Amazon, which is the biggest retailer on the planet, operating in over 180 countries, also represents the connection between the digital and the physical. With its Prime same-day and second-day delivery, it has reshaped shopping behaviors, supported by millions of workers managing the logistics of delivery, package sorting and fulfillment warehouses.

The company’s labor practices have already come under fire, for long, demanding shifts, dangerous expectations for delivery drivers and wage issues. Such concerns would certainly be exacerbated by a global pandemic. Increased desire to prepare to shelter from the virus will no doubt drive up grocery and essentials orders. Should U.S. coronavirus cases spike, demand would probably increase drastically, forcing low-wage employees — even those who may feel sick — to report to work, subjecting them and others to contagions. But the reverse scenario also creates problems: Imagine an impending pandemic scenario where quarantines or shelter in place orders require warehouse and delivery employees to stay home, causing panic when Amazon can no longer guarantee or fulfill orders. (...)

Each example — and there are legions more, including our current campaign and election system, which is predicated on large public gatherings — is but one node in an enormous and extremely fragile network. It’s a network that has been building for centuries but that in the past two decades has grown through seamless connection to modern technology. Our way of life has shifted — from individuals to markets, from localized to globalized. So far, this interconnectivity has largely been a strength, creating a network so big that each of its smaller nodes can be imperfect or fail while the others persist. But much like a virus exploits a small vulnerability, creating a chain of reactions that allow it to weaken its host, a true global pandemic could work its way through the interconnected ecosystems that support our present way of life.

by Charlie Warzel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth R. Fischer/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories

via:

Unbuttoned

I’ve been writing about my father for ages, but when it comes to the details of his life, the year he graduated from college, etc., I’m worthless. Even his job remains a mystery to me. He was an engineer, and I like to joke that up until my late teens I thought that he drove a train. “I don’t really know all that much about him,” I said, scooting my chair closer to his recliner. He looked twenty years older than he had on my last visit to Raleigh, six months earlier. One change was his nose. The skin covering it was stretched tight, revealing facets I’d never before noticed. His eyes were shaped differently, like the diamonds you’d find on playing cards, and his mouth looked empty, though it was in fact filled with his own teeth. He did this thing now, opening wide and stretching out his lips, as if pantomiming a scream. I kept thinking it was in preparation for speech, but then he’d say nothing.

I was trying to push the obituary off on Lisa when we heard him call for water.

Hugh got a cup, filled it from the tap in the bathroom, and stirred in some cornstarch to thicken it. My father’s oxygen tube had fallen out of his nose, so we summoned a nurse, who showed us how to reattach it. When she left, he half raised his hand, which was purpled with spots and resembled a claw.

“What’s on your . . . mind?” he asked Amy, who had always been his favorite, and was seated a few yards away. His voice couldn’t carry for more than a foot or two, so Hugh repeated the question.

“What’s on your mind?”

“You,” Amy answered. “I’m just thinking of you and wanting you to feel better.”

My father looked up at the ceiling, and then at us. “Am I . . . real to you kids?” I had to lean in close to hear him, especially the last half of his sentences. After three seconds he’d run out of steam, and the rest was just breath. Plus the oxygen machine was loud.

“Are you what?”

“Real.” He gestured to his worn-out body, and the bag on the floor half filled with his urine. “I’m in this new . . . life now.”

“It’ll just take some getting used to,” Hugh said.

My father made a sour face. “I’m a zombie.”

I don’t know why I insisted on contradicting him. “Not really,” I said. “Zombies can walk and eat solid food. You’re actually more like a vegetable.”

“I know you,” my father said to me. He looked over at Amy, and at the spot that Gretchen had occupied until she left. “I know all you kids so well.”

I wanted to say that he knew us superficially at best. It’s how he’d have responded had I said as much to him: “You don’t know me.” Surely my sisters felt the way I did, but something—most likely fatigue—kept them from mentioning it.

As my father struggled to speak, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and dirty.

“If I just . . . dropped out of the sky like this . . . you’d think I was a freak.”

“No,” I said. “You’d think you were a freak, or at least a loser.”

Amy nodded in agreement, and I plowed ahead. “It’s what you’ve been calling your neighbors here, the ones parked in the hall who can’t walk or feed themselves. It’s what you’ve always called weak people.”

“You’re a hundred per cent right,” he said.

I didn’t expect him to agree with me. “You’re vain,” I continued. “Always were. I was at the house this morning and couldn’t believe all the clothes you own. Now you’re this person, trapped in a chair, but you’re still yourself to us. You’re like . . . like you were a year ago, but drunk.”

“That’s a very astute . . . observation,” my father said. “Still, I’d like to . . . apologize.”

“For being in this condition?” I asked.

He looked over at Amy, as if she had asked the question, and nodded.

Then he turned to me. “David,” he said, as if he’d just realized who I was. “You’ve accomplished so many fantastic things in your life. You’re, well . . . I want to tell you . . . you . . . you won.”

A moment later he asked for more water, and drifted mid-sip into that neither-here-nor-there state. Paul arrived, and I went for a short walk, thinking, of course, about my father, and about the writer Russell Baker, who had died a few weeks earlier. He and I had had the same agent, a man named Don Congdon, who was in his mid-seventies when I met him, in 1994, and who used a lot of outdated slang. “The blower,” for instance, was what he called the phone, as in “Well, let me get off the blower. I’ve been gassing all morning.”

“Russ Baker’s mother was a tough old bird,” Don told me one rainy afternoon, in his office on Fifth Avenue. “A real gorgon to hear him tell it, always insisting that her son was a hack and would never amount to anything. So on her deathbed he goes to her saying, ‘Ma, look, I made it. I’m a successful writer for the New York Times. My last book won the Pulitzer.’ ”

“She looked up at him, her expression blank, and said, ‘Who are you?’ ”

I’ve been told since then that the story may not be true, but still it struck a nerve with me. Seek approval from the one person you desperately want it from, and you’re guaranteed not to get it.

As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them, and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.

by David Sedaris, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ross MacDonald

China’s Bookstores Band Together To Survive the Epidemic

China’s Bookstores Band Together To Survive the Epidemic (Sixth Tone).

[ed. Cool pics of China's bookstores. Also, businesses that "rely heavily on social gatherings and in-person experiences" are likely to be more vulnerable than others.]

Bloomberg Has Hired the Vice Chairs of the Texas and California Democratic Parties

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has hired two state Democratic party vice chairs in Super Tuesday states with two of the top three highest number of pledged delegates. Bloomberg hired Texas Democratic Party Vice Chair Carla Brailey as a senior adviser to his campaign in December, and he hired California State Democratic Party Vice Chair Alexandra Rooker for a similar role in January.

Both Brailey and Rooker are superdelegates who will likely vote for the Democratic presidential nominee at the party’s national convention this summer. Hiring the leadership of a state party doesn’t appear to break any campaign laws, but it indicates Bloomberg’s intent to effectively purchase political support, said Brendan Fischer, the federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center. “This does seem to fit a longstanding pattern of Bloomberg using his billions to help generate support among political elites,” he said.

Rooker is one of two members of Bloomberg’s campaign staff who also sits on the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee, which recommends rules for the convention, the convention agenda, the convention’s permanent officers, amendments to the party’s charter, and other resolutions. In November, the month he entered the presidential race, Bloomberg gave $320,000 to the DNC, his first contributions to the committee since 1998. (He was a registered Republican from 2001 to 2007, after which he became an independent. He registered as a Democrat in 2018.) He also donated $10,000 to the Texas Democratic Party, where Brailey has been vice chair since June 2018, as well as $10,000 to the California Democratic Party. Brailey, Rooker, and the Bloomberg campaign did not respond to requests for comment on their hiring. (...)

Bloomberg will appear on the ballot for the first time on Super Tuesday, March 3. His campaign has poured tens of millions of dollars into both Texas and California where there are 228 and 416 delegates up for grabs, respectively.

by Akela Lacy, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Steve Breen, via
[ed. Swamp people. So far, everything I've read about the DNC's so-called leadership is pretty disgusting. Speaking of which, superdelegates: DNC Superdelegate Promoting Brokered Convention is a Significant GOP Donor, Health Care Lobbyist (The Intercept); and A Field Guide for Bloomberg-Campaign Deputy Digital Organizers (New Yorker)]

British models showcasing Jaguars at the Geneva Motor Show in 1973
via:

The Dirtbag Media

The Pied Pipers of the Dirtbag Left Want to Lead Everyone to Bernie Sanders (NY Times)
Image: Tom Brenner

[ed. Character assassination by association. This type of article is a good example of how the media (and freaked-out elites) do their dirty business. They must be pretty scared. See also: Finally, Can We All Agree? Everything We Were Told About Bernie Sanders Was Wrong (The Intercept).]

Kanye, Out West

It’s surprising that a global celebrity who frequently self-identifies as the greatest artist living or dead has become an everyday presence in a tightly connected town of about 10,000 people. It’s more surprising just how much the town’s leaders want him to stay.

There Kanye West is at the McDonald’s, the Best Western and the Boot Barn. He hangs out at the Cody Steakhouse on the main drag, where he met one of his intern videographers, a student at Cody High School. His ranch is close to town, and to get where he needs to go, Kanye drives around town in a fleet of blacked-out Ford Raptors, the exact number of which is a topic of local speculation. Gina Mummery, the saleswoman at the Fremont Motor Company dealership, would only say that she sold him between two and six.

Kanye started taking trips to Wyoming regularly in 2017, shortly after he was hospitalized for what was characterized on a dispatch call as a “psychiatric emergency.” He spent lots of time making music in the state in 2018, holding an incredible listening party for his album “Ye” in late May in Jackson, a town famous for its skiing, fishing and ultrawealthy residents.

And then, in September, The Cody Enterprise reported that he’d bought a property called Monster Lake Ranch, about eight miles outside Cody, which is a five-hour drive northeast from Jackson. Suddenly, he and his family, including his spouse, Kim Kardashian West, who is an entrepreneur, television star and law student, were there: zooming around on four-wheelers, crashing wedding preparations and shopping for clothing and jewelry on the town’s main street, Sheridan Avenue.

Since then, Kanye has recorded portions of his ninth studio album, “Jesus Is King,” in Cody. He purchased about 11 acres of commercial property within the town’s limits. He also purchased a second ranch about an hour away in the town of Greybull.

He has moved members of the Yeezy team into the area. In plans submitted to the city, he has detailed his intention to establish a prototype lab for the brand, in a warehouse on Road 2AB.

And he has been characteristically forthcoming about his long-term intentions. He has talked about going from “seed to sew” in Cody — that means farming the raw material and doing the manufacturing all in one place. He’s said he hopes the town will be for him what Dayton, Ohio, was for the Wright brothers.

But in the past several years, Kanye has announced so many plans. That he wants to start a church. That he plans to run for president in 2024. That he will invent a method for autocorrecting emoticons. That he aims to redesign the standard American home. That he might legally change his name to “Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West” for a year.

It can be hard, with Kanye West, to separate concrete plans from jokes, fancies or outlandish aspirations. For now, the people of Cody have to wait and see what develops. (...)

Cody was brought into being by Buffalo Bill Cody, another bombastic showman who was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the biggest celebrity in the world. More famous in his time than Theodore Roosevelt and better-traveled than the Grateful Dead in ours, Buffalo Bill basically invented the fantasy of the American West through his touring Wild West Show.

Founding a town in Wyoming was just one of Buffalo Bill’s many late-life enterprises. It has proved, in some ways, to be his most concrete legacy.

Cody was incorporated in 1901, becoming “the new center of William Cody’s continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism,” the historian Louis S. Warren wrote in his 2005 book “Buffalo Bill’s America.”

Buffalo Bill advertised Cody in a Wild West show program, promising air that was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing” that it would act as an intoxicant to city-clogged lungs. In reality, the settlement was plopped down in the arid Big Horn Basin where the wind rarely stops blowing and there was once so much sulfur in the river that it was known as Stinking Water.

by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elliot Ross
[ed. Surreal.]

When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult

So, here’s the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It’s actually good for America. Also, it’s a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it’s no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we’ll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn’t believe in science.

From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we’ve gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing.

And the results aren’t looking good.

The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.

Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition.

And the microbes came.

The first reaction of the Trumpers was to see the coronavirus as a Chinese problem — and to see whatever is bad for China as being good for us. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, cheered it on as a development that would “accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

The story changed once it became clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China. At that point it became a hoax perpetrated by the news media. Rush Limbaugh weighed in: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Limbaugh was, you may not be surprised to hear, projecting. Back in 2014 right-wing politicians and media did indeed try to politically weaponize a disease outbreak, the Ebola virus, with Trump himself responsible for more than 100 tweets denouncing the Obama administration’s response (which was actually competent and effective).

And in case you’re wondering, no, the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.

Financial markets evidently don’t agree that the virus is a hoax; by Thursday afternoon the Dow was off more than 3,000 points since last week. Falling markets appear to worry the administration more than the prospect of, you know, people dying. So Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economist, made a point of declaring that the virus was “contained” — contradicting the C.D.C. — and suggested that Americans buy stocks. The market continued to drop.

At that point the administration appears to have finally realized that it might need to do something beyond insisting that things were great. But according to The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, it initially proposed paying for a virus response by cutting aid to the poor — specifically, low-income heating subsidies. Cruelty in all things.

On Wednesday Trump held a news conference on the virus, much of it devoted to incoherent jabs at Democrats and the media. He did, however, announce the leader of the government response to the threat. Instead of putting a health care professional in charge, however, he handed the job to Vice President Mike Pence, who has an interesting relationship with both health policy and science.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gabriella Demczuk

Graphic Designs of Japanese Modernism

Saitō Kazō, The Cabaret Hostess’s Song, 1930

From: Vibrant, progressive and bold: graphic designs of Japanese modernism – in pictures (The Guardian).

[ed. If you like Japanese art deco (as I do), get Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945 from the exhibit of the same name. It's a bit pricey but well worth it. See also: An Urbane and Unexpected Leap From West to East (NY Times).]

Disaster Capitalism

Amazon has barred a million products for making false coronavirus claims (while removing tens of thousands for price gouging - The Verge).

Image: Vivek Prakash/AFP/Getty via

[ed. Never let a good disaster go to waste. See also: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein), and As Covid-19 Spreads, Amazon Tries to Curb Mask Price Gouging (Wired).]

Checkup for $30, Teeth Cleaning $25: Walmart Gets Into Health Care

The main drag of Calhoun, Ga., a town of about 16,000 an hour’s drive north of Atlanta, is dotted with pawnshops, liquor stores, and fast-food joints. Here, as in thousands of other communities across America, the local Walmart fulfills most everyday needs—groceries, car repairs, money transfers, even hair styling. But now visitors to the Calhoun Walmart can also get a $30 medical checkup or a $25 teeth cleaning, or talk about their anxieties with a counselor for $1 a minute.

Prices for those services and more are clearly listed on bright digital billboards in a cozy waiting room inside a new Walmart Health center. Walk-ins are welcome, but most appointments are booked online beforehand. No insurance? No problem. Need a lab test on a Sunday? Sure thing.

Walmart “care hosts” take customers from the waiting area to one of 12 care rooms in the 6,500-square-foot facility. Afterward, patients are steered to the in-store pharmacy. While they wait for their prescriptions, they can visit the produce section and grab some veggies recommended by the doctor. Later, there’s even a free Zumba class in the community room.

Welcome to health care, Walmart style.

The center in Calhoun, along with one about an hour south in Dallas, Ga., represents the retailer’s attempt to grab a bigger slice of the nation’s $3.6 trillion in health spending by harnessing its greatest asset—the 150 million people coming through its 4,756 stores each week. While Walmart hasn’t said how many clinics it plans to build, it’s signaled that the health center expansion is one of its top growth initiatives. The move pits Walmart against rivals such as CVS Health Corp., which is rolling out its own “HealthHubs,” and creates a new front in Walmart’s battle against Amazon.com Inc., which also wants to disrupt the U.S. health-care system. “We have an opportunity to help the country and to build a stronger business,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon told investors in December.

It won’t be easy to persuade Americans to entrust their health to a big-box discount retailer, especially one that still sells unhealthy items such as cigarettes and guns and has long been criticized for skimping on the health-care needs of its own employees.

Even McMillon, whose father was a dentist, admits he “just can’t imagine being a dentist working at Walmart,” and he’s not alone. When Dee Artis saw an online job listing for a Walmart Health center, she didn’t believe it: “I thought it was spam,” she recalls. She’s now the assistant clinical administrator at the location in Dallas, an Atlanta suburb, which has been busy since opening in September and has drawn patients—many of them uninsured—from towns as far away as a 75-minute drive. “I knew it would be big because hey, this is Walmart,” Artis says. “But I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be.”

The man responsible for determining that is Sean Slovenski, Walmart’s president for U.S. health and wellness, who joined the retailer in 2018 after stints at insurer Humana Inc., where he oversaw innovation, and a health-care joint venture between Intel Corp. and General Electric Co. Now he’s in charge of a $36 billion division that already fills upwards of 400 million prescriptions annually and operates 3,000 vision centers.

by Matthew Boyle, Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Peyton Fuford

1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT

1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT
via: here and here (more pics)

[ed. For when I make my first billion. Click on the links for more pictures.]

Backroom Deals

Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, hear constant warnings from allies about congressional losses in November if the party nominates Bernie Sanders for president. Democratic House members share their Sanders fears on text-messaging chains. Bill Clinton, in calls with old friends, vents about the party getting wiped out in the general election.

And officials in the national and state parties are increasingly anxious about splintered primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond, where the liberal Mr. Sanders edges out moderate candidates who collectively win more votes.

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.

“We’re way, way, way past the day where party leaders can determine an outcome here, but I think there’s a vibrant conversation about whether there is anything that can be done,” said Jim Himes, a Connecticut congressman and superdelegate, who believed the nominee should have a majority of delegates.

From California to the Carolinas, and North Dakota to Ohio, the party leaders say they worry that Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist with passionate but limited support so far, will lose to President Trump, and drag down moderate House and Senate candidates in swing states with his left-wing agenda of “Medicare for all” and free four-year public college.

Mr. Sanders and his advisers insist that the opposite is true — that his ideas will generate huge excitement among young and working-class voters, and lead to record turnout. Such hopes have yet to be borne out in nominating contests so far.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

This article is based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders. A vast majority of those superdelegates — whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and D.N.C. members — predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee. (...)

Officials at the Democratic National Committee maintain that it is highly improbable to head to the convention without an assured nominee. Historically, superdelegates had always supported the candidate who won the most pledged delegates, which accrue from primary and caucus wins. While those delegates are proportioned based on the results of those elections, they are not legally bound — meaning that they are technically free to change their votes as the race progresses.

by Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

[ed. The Dems are trying their damnedest to lose this election (and it's working). See also: The Primaries Are Just Dumb (NY Times), and Mike Bloomberg’s Campaign is Polluting the Internet (The Guardian).]

Sexy Baby Voice

The new Netflix show Love is Blind – in which people fall in love and get engaged without seeing each other first – has sparked many questions. These include: shouldn’t these people be in therapy? If looks don’t matter, why are they all so hot? And: what is up with Jessica Batten’s sexy baby voice?

I can’t take credit for that term: it was actually coined on Twitter last week, and written about since. “Sexy baby voice” may sound like an oxymoron, but it is in fact an affectation that a lot of women use. Just look at the clip in which Batten is first shown to be very capable of speaking in a normal adult voice, before just a moment later sounding like she has a tampon in each nostril.

But is sexy baby voice really, truly a thing? Why would a woman opt to sound like a tiny scared creature? What exactly is sexy about sounding like a baby?

Sociologist Anne Karpf wrote an entire book about the human voice and how it is far less anatomically determined than we think. We use our voice to denote status, power, wealth – and it is affected by society. Women’s voices have deepened over the last 40 years, and are more similar to men’s voices in more egalitarian countries.

Many of us hate hearing our voice played back to us, which some say is because we are used to hearing our own voice through our bones (which sounds less high-pitched) rather than unfiltered through the air. But Karpf believes our voices embarrass us because we hear in them the things we hoped to have edited out. Like a Freudian slip, they tell people things about us we would rather they didn’t know. “We feel betrayed by them,” she says.

“If the contestant heard that baby voice played back to her, she would probably be squirming with discomfort,” says Karpf.

We all hold multiple voices – one for our boss, our parents, our partner and so on. We switch between these, sometimes at will, sometimes unconsciously, to appear more powerful, to ask for protection and so on.

For women, the desire to “baby-talk” can be especially strong because of societal pressure to protect a man’s ego. “Often, extremely bright women have huge difficulty using their voice. They are terrified to use the full force of it. I’ve rarely encountered a man with that same problem,” Karpf says.

Women’s voices have always been contentious. Karpf reminds us that women were once banned from speaking in church in case their voices caused impure thoughts in a man, and they were thought to be too emotional for newsreading.

“Women’s voices have always been seen in relation to the desire that they’ve evoked in men rather than the desires of the woman and what she wants to express,” she says. And so comes sexy baby voice: “Babies don’t possess social power, economic power, or sexual power.”

So are we all being sexist for judging women who use a baby voice?

by Poppy Noor, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy Stock

[ed. Umm... because it works? (I'm not defining what 'works' means). C'mon, leave it alone. No need for more political correctness. Just let people relate to each other in any way they find most satisfying. ]

Removing a GPS Tracking Device From Your Car Isn’t theft

An Indiana man may beat a drug prosecution after the state's highest court threw out a search warrant against him late last week. The search warrant was based on the idea that the man had "stolen" a GPS tracking device belonging to the government. But Indiana's Supreme Court concluded that he'd done no such thing—and the cops should have known it.

Last November, we wrote about the case of Derek Heuring, an Indiana man the Warrick County Sheriff's Office suspected of selling meth. Authorities got a warrant to put a GPS tracker on Heuring's car, getting a stream of data on his location for six days. But then the data stopped.

Officers suspected Heuring had discovered and removed the tracking device. After waiting for a few more days, they got a warrant to search his home and a barn belonging to his father. They argued the disappearance of the tracking device was evidence that Heuring had stolen it.

During their search, police found the tracking device and some methamphetamine. They charged Heuring with drug-related crimes as well as theft of the GPS device.

But at trial, Heuring's lawyers argued that the warrant to search the home and barn had been illegal. An application for a search warrant must provide probable cause to believe a crime was committed. But removing a small, unmarked object from your personal vehicle is no crime at all, Heuring's lawyers argued. Heuring had no way of knowing what the device was or who it belonged to—and certainly no obligation to leave the device on his vehicle.

An Indiana appeals court ruled against Heuring last year. But Indiana's Supreme Court seemed more sympathetic to Heuring's case during oral arguments last November.

"I'm really struggling with how is that theft," said Justice Steven David during November's oral arguments.

“We find it reckless”

Last Thursday, Indiana's highest court made it official, ruling that the search warrant that allowed police to recover Heuring's meth was illegal. The police had no more than a hunch that Heuring had removed the device, the court said, and that wasn't enough to get a search warrant.

Even if the police could have proved that Heuring had removed the device, that wouldn't prove he stole it, the high court said. It's hard to "steal" something if you have no idea to whom it belongs. Classifying his action as theft would lead to absurd results, the court noted.

"To find a fair probability of unauthorized control here, we would need to conclude the Hoosiers don't have the authority to remove unknown, unmarked objects from their personal vehicles," Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote for a unanimous court.

by Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Indiana Supreme Court

[ed. Harassment pure and simple (how did this ever get past an appeals court?). I hope Mr. Heuring is now able to recover legal expenses (and more) from the police department. Cop logic: if you remove something of ours from your property it's called theft, if we seize all of your belongings during an arrest it's called civil forfeiture.]

Maria Delliou, Beer Cap
via:

Craigslist Turns 25 – A Reminder That a More Democratic Version of the Internet Can Still Thrive

Fake news. Online surveillance. Phishing scams. Biased algorithms.

It’s easy to be cynical about the internet, and harder to remember a time when being online felt less commercial and more democratic. But there was a period when websites didn’t rely on user data for profit margins, when people still viewed the internet as a radical laboratory for freedom and liberty.

Can those ideas and values from the earliest days of the web be revived? Or is the internet a lost cause?

In my new book, “An Internet for the People,” I look at one popular website that has a lot to teach us: Craigslist. Twenty-five years after its launch, Craigslist is a reminder that the earlier, more democratic version of the internet can still thrive.

The platform has weathered the internet’s boom-and-bust cycle, with countless peers and competitors coming and going. The site looks more or less the same today as it did in the late 1990s.

Sort of like a shark that’s never had to evolve, Craigslist has remained incredibly successful without giving up values of anonymity, accessibility and transparency.

You don’t need to turn users into data

Craigslist started as an email listserv in 1995, when early web enthusiasts were looking for a sense of community and DIY education. By 1996, it had become a website with job listings, apartment rentals and personal ads. Almost as soon as the internet was becoming widely available – roughly 1 out of 5 households was online at the time – Craigslist was there to help people find roommates, look for jobs, go on blind dates or sell used furniture.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been at the helm since 2001 and the founder, Craig Newmark, is still involved in the company. For years, Newmark did customer service, responding to design complaints and concerns about scams. Today, Craigslist has more monthly page visits than The New York Times or ESPN, and it’s been incredibly profitable.

Its profitability might come as a surprise to some. Many of those I spoke with thought Craigslist was a nonprofit or that it was community-run. In fact, Craigslist has always charged money for certain ads, like job postings and classified ads. (By siphoning revenue from classified ads, Craigslist has been one reason newspapers across the country have struggled to stay in business.)

More recently, Craigslist has started charging for other kinds of ads, like real estate listings from firms and car ads from dealers.

But regular users don’t have to pay a fee. The site doesn’t display banner ads, nor does it sell user data to third parties.

This is a very direct relationship between user and platform – and it’s totally different from the convoluted streams of data and targeted advertising used by platforms like Facebook and Google. When Facebook users aren’t sure how the platform makes money, it’s because the process of analyzing data and selling ads is deliberately hidden.

When Craigslist users don’t know how the platform makes money, it’s because they’re part of the user group who simply doesn’t get charged. With its straightforward relationship between people and profits, Craigslist is an important reminder that platforms don’t have to turn their users into data in order to make money.

by Jessa Lingel, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
[ed. See also: At 25 Years, Understanding The Longevity Of Craigslist (NPR).]

The American Media Elite Has Learned Nothing From 2016

The biases of the professional classes replicate themselves, and we find figures as horrified and baffled by the progressive left as they are by the reactionary right.

Journalism was supposed to save us. They promised. After the election of Donald Trump, which the good gentlemen and ladies of journalism assisted in facilitating, much was made of the ability of the fourth estate to soften the blow, to shorten the reign of corruption, to protect the public from the madman in the White House. It hasn’t really worked out that way, and the increasingly unhinged rhetoric of the opinion-havers and the public faces of news networks does little to restore our faith.

The media has come under fire for its role in helping President Trump make his way to the highest office in the land – from making too much of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, to giving Trump untold hours of free publicity by broadcasting his every word and deed, to fundamentally misunderstanding their own country and what the people who live between New York and Los Angeles might want or need.

Yet, for the most part, the media did not take its failure to foresee or prevent the results of the 2016 election as a cue to pause, assess what it has been doing wrong, and realign itself and its mission in response to the hard lessons it has learned.

Instead, the media rebranded, like an oil company recently discovered to be dumping toxic sludge down the throats of sea turtles. It announced it would be the bulwark against Trump and all of his cronies, the last line of protection between us and fascism. Ta-da. It created whole ad campaigns around Trump’s hatred for the press. If he hates us, that must mean we’re good, right? Right?

Like those companies, it never stopped its sludge dumping, just changed the name under which it committed its sea turtle murder. No one lost their job for assuring the country of the impossibility of Hillary Clinton losing the election. No pundits had to apologize for never once stepping inside a red state before pontificating about the state of things in Trump country. The New York Times relied on the same six “swing voters” to provide commentary whenever the paper of record decided it need to prove it was in touch with the common people.

Billionaires buying newspapers also became something of a trend, like fidget spinners or insulin rationing due to a lack of comprehensive health insurance – either because these billionaires seek to make themselves look philanthropic, or because they want to control the coverage of their financial goings-on, or both. (Democracy dies in darkness, Mr Bezos? Yeah, well, so do workers on your warehouse floors.)

Yes, the media made a few cosmetic changes to prove they understood the diversity of thought across this nation. The New York Times, for example, decided it lacked the conservative voices that could explain the populist rightward tilt the electorate took, so the paper hired man-of-the-people Bret Stephens – son of a corporate scion, graduate of the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics – as a columnist. You know, someone who could really give some insight into the kind of opinions circulating at the Beloit, Kansas, diner at harvest time. Other publications followed suit, fawning over anyone who might have accidentally found themselves briefly living in a conservative state before their inevitable elevation to the elite university system, like the Yale graduate/Appalachia expert/venture capitalist JD Vance, despite the multitude of critics who say his theories about the white working class are naive at best.

Journalism has become a well-gate-kept little bubble, if bubbles were created out of ignorance and contempt for what lay outside of them instead of just soap. And unlike soap bubbles, so easily pricked and burst, the walls of the ideological bubbles of our professional class are nearly impenetrable.

by Jessa Crispin, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. See also: The Populist Pundits (Jacobin), and 'A Wake Up Moment for the American Power Establishment' (Common Dreams).]