Louis, Louis

Over at The Cut, New York magazine’s ode to the stylish and sexy set, there are stories of couples considering open relationships and pro tips on “How to Whiten Your Teeth at Home” (and your skin, your apartment, yourself. . .). But the other day, I found a somewhat startling headline there. The famed fashion brand Louis Vuitton, fervently adored by those who like to showcase their status on various airport concourses, had manufactured and donated 2,500 face masks to workers at New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The masks given to the MTA, where nearly a hundred workers have lost their lives during the pandemic, another article pointedly clarified, are plain, not adorned with the company’s valuable logo.

I imagined this odious scene in my head. How had the masks been sent over to the MTA? Was there a ceremony, featuring a small gaggle of exhausted workers, an over-eager Vuitton public-relations manager, some MTA boss awoken from his work-at-home slumber? Or were they just mailed over in a large box with Louis Vuitton as the return address? I wondered why the masks were not adorned with the brand name—surely the expert artisans of repurposed Vuitton factories could put a little logo on them? I imagined the rehearsed response that would fall from the nude matte lips of a working-from-the-Hamptons publicity doyenne: “Well, the pandemic is so tragic,” she’d intone nasally, “we didn’t want people to think that we are using it as a publicity thing, or to push a secondary market for masks.”

Except that Louis Vuitton is using this moment (as are Chanel and Armani and Kate Spade and Ralph Lauren, for that matter) to do just that; they flash with a flourish the company’s caring heart. The logo on the masks would make them valuable beyond their functionality, maybe even make them (gasp) fashionable, and we all know that fashion of that high-end, snobby sort does not belong on the faces of poor MTA workers. Sharing some small bit of its billions in profits is kindly and socially responsible; giving away its logo to working stiffs is cheapening its brand.

The Vuitton caper represents the conundrum that luxury fashion brands face in this time of tragedy. Chanel, which has also allegedly repurposed its factories to make masks and protective gowns, survived World War II with a tarnished reputation. Its survival was ensured largely because Coco Chanel, the company’s namesake, became an eager agent for the Nazis. Even as she peddled her suits and gowns during the War, Chanel cozied up to a top officer in German military intelligence, happily moving into the Ritz Hotel and passing information she gleaned from her uppity and ever style-conscious French friends on to the Germans.

Louis Vuitton’s mask-donation publicity stunt is not equal to colluding with the Nazis, but it is a hypocritical effort to create the pretense of a “company conscience” where none exists. Bernard Arnault, a lover of diamonds who heads up LVMH (the company that owns Louis Vuitton) is the richest man in France. His company is valued at $166 billion; he recently gobbled up Tiffany for $16 billion. But Arnault, the mask stunt tries to say, also has a heart of gold, a desire to tend to the needs of the MTA. This caring story is the one Vuitton wants to tell.

The truth happens to be different. Vuitton’s bid for good publicity underscores just how hard it is going to be for luxury fashion brands to contort themselves into the tight moral constraints that are likely to dominate consumption in the post-Covid-19 world. Gone are the days when impossibly thin New York women could put on a Chanel suit that cost a small mountain of credit card debt and lay rightful claim to the snobbery that came with it. Similarly lost will be admiration for the branded tchotchkes that heiresses and style mavens flashed with some deliberation every chance they got.

There is research to show just how terrified the fashion industry is of all this—and of one other more important and crucial consequence of the pandemic. A report published by McKinsey & Company mentions something called “a quarantine of consumption,” where consumers already driven away from luxury brands and toward those that promise sustainability and fair labor practices will now turn away altogether and for always. Boasting about a $6,000 pair of Louboutins may have brought awe and envy to the suburban mother in the “before” times. In the after-times it just reveals a craven let-them-eat-cake sort of callousness.

Trend forecasters agree. “The virus, I think, can be seen as a representation of our conscience . . . it brings to light what is so terribly wrong with society and every day that becomes more clear,” said Li Edelkoort. “It teaches us to slow down and change our ways.” This change of ways bodes ill for all the discretionary spending that brand-boasting Americans and more crucially the jet-setting Chinese have promoted in the post-2008 recovery. With “discretionary” spending drawn into the realm of ethical consumption, a fashion brand must now signal not only style but virtue.

And so it happens that Louis Vuitton, never before concerned with anything New York’s MTA workers need or do, has to make masks for them. The hope is that websites like The Cut, which seems to have branding conundrums of its own in the post-Covid moment (like the blackly comic juxtaposition of Covid casualty numbers next to the thirteen best eye creams), will run articles on it along with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and perhaps Vanity Fair. The handing out of masks, the repurposing of factories, all the luxe brands hope, will make fashion look good, where good (revolutionarily for fashion) means actually virtuous rather than simply beautiful. If there is any embarrassment to be felt about the multi-billion-dollar LVMH handing out a few thousand masks through Louis Vuitton, it has been ignored.

by Rafia Zakaria, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: The Baffler

Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, whatever, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. News that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.

In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”

“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”

A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.

Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front.

Flynn’s case fit the pattern. We were told his plea was just the “tip of the iceberg” that would “take the trail of Russian collusion” to the “center of the plot,” i.e. Trump. It turned out he had no deeper story to tell. In fact, none of the people prosecutors tossed in jail to get at the Russian “plot” – some little more than bystanders – had anything to share. (...)

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism. (...)

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

by Matt Taibbi, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Have to agree. This is inside baseball. Does anyone really have a good recollection of all the twists and turns that turned out to be nothing-burgers in the Mueller investigation? Not me (and I try to keep up). But that hasn't kept the media from jumping from one outrage to another.] 

F.D.A. Halts Coronavirus Testing Program Backed by Bill Gates

An innovative coronavirus testing program in the Seattle area — promoted by the billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its work pending additional reviews.

The program involved sending home test kits to both healthy and sick people in the hope of conducting the kind of widespread monitoring that could help communities safely reopen from lockdowns. Researchers and public health authorities already had tested thousands of samples, finding dozens of previously undetected cases.

But the program, a partnership between research groups and the Seattle and King County public health department that had been operating under authorization from the state, was notified this week that it now needs approval directly from the federal government. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration told the partnership to cease its testing and reporting until the agency grants further approval.

“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the F.D.A. wrote in a memo.

The delay is the latest evidence of how a splintered national effort to develop, distribute and ramp up testing has left federal regulators struggling to keep up. Amid concerns about the reliability of a burgeoning number of coronavirus antibody tests — which check whether someone may have previously had the virus — the F.D.A. responded last week by ordering companies to submit data proving the tests’ accuracy.

But the Seattle program does not test for antibodies and has wide backing, including from public health leaders, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Mr. Gates, whose foundation has been deeply involved in fighting the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also provided an in-person technical adviser to the project.

Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who is not involved in the Seattle group, said it had “emerged as leading lights in this whole Covid-19 crisis.” He said it was “bizarre” that the F.D.A. would halt such a project. (...)

The program has roots in the Seattle Flu Study, which over the fall and winter had collected thousands of samples from people in Washington State who had symptoms of illness. As previously detailed in The New York Times, researchers there had struggled to get government approval to test those old samples for the coronavirus and report the results.

By the end of February, those researchers ended up doing some testing anyway, discovered the first case of community transmission in the region and provided key evidence that the virus had most likely been circulating for weeks.

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has committed much of his wealth to global public health issues, has backed the Seattle study. He said in a blog post Tuesday that the program could detect cases and help guide public health responses.

“Not only will it help improve our understanding of the outbreak in Seattle, it will also provide valuable information about the virus for other communities around the world,” Mr. Gates wrote.

An F.D.A. spokesperson said home collection kits raised additional concerns about safety and accuracy that required the agency’s review. The issue in the Seattle case appears to be that the test results are being used not only by researchers for surveillance of the virus in the community but that the results are also being returned to patients to inform them.

The two kinds of testing — surveillance and diagnostic — fall under different F.D.A. standards. In a pure surveillance study, the researchers may keep the results just for themselves. But coronavirus testing has largely revolved around getting results returned to doctors who can share the results with patients. (...)

Dr. Topol said it would not make sense to have people swab their noses and then not give them their test results.

“To withhold that information from people is downright absurd,” Dr. Topol said.

by Mike Baker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
[ed. Bureaucracy at its's unfuckingbeliveable finest. The federal response to this crisis has been abysmal from the beginning, and is the gift that keeps on giving. See also: What is the FDA Doing Now??! (Marginal Revolution).]

Tomo Nakayama

The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now

May 7, 2020

The sheer volume of films on Netflix — and the site’s less than ideal interface — can make finding a genuinely great movie there a difficult task. To help, we’ve plucked out the 50 best films currently streaming on the service in the United States, updated regularly as titles come and go. And as a bonus, we link to more great movies on Netflix within many of our writeups below. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without giving notice.)

Here are our lists of the best TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Disney Plus.

by Jason Bailey, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Bling Ring/Netflix

[ed. Paywall tip: Cookie Remover, a Chrome extension, works well if you're occasionally blocked from seeing NY Times articles.]

Local Sleuths Track Down Source of Mysterious Radio Songs

For days, Seattle writer and attorney Nathan Barnes has been consumed by a strange mystery: Who is broadcasting the same 20-song playlist over and over via FM radio? There are no call signs, no ad breaks, no DJ or explanation... just the same odd 59-minute playlist, cycling 24 hours a day. What?

Because we are all stuck inside, observing doom, this is exactly the kind of bonkers mystery that Twitter needs. After posting about the strange broadcast, Nathan's followers leapt into action, digging into radio records, driving around town with car radios carefully tuned, and wandering through Cal Anderson park looking for answers.

"We have a five-year-old and we’re often on the classical station during the day, especially a few weeks ago when you’re trying to be wholesome and haven’t given up yet," Barnes said in an interview with The Stranger.

The mystery began when someone, him or his wife, accidentally bumped the dial from 98.1 over to 98.5, heard some pleasantly nostalgic classic rock, and left it there. A few hours later, they observed, "I swear I've heard this song before."

The playlist starts every time with Jim Croce singing Time in a Bottle. Then it's Signs by the Five Man Electrical Band. Then Killer Queen by Queen, Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds, Mercy Mercy Me by Marvin Gaye ... and so on. Good songs! But why play them together, Nathan wondered? He started writing down the tunes as they played, puzzling over them.

"I'm writing down the tracks like oh my gosh this must mean something," he recalls. "I was obsessing over it and eventually I had to get it out on Twitter."

A post on Tuesday immediately attracted attention, and amateur sleuths joined in. Some people analyzed the years in which the songs came out — no pattern. Others ran their initials through cypher keys — nothing.

Someone suggested looking for patterns in the time signatures. Someone else translated the years into binary. Another theory is that someone couldn't be near a loved one in the hospital, so they (somehow) broadcast the playlist of their favorite songs so they could feel close.

My guess was a community college radio project that someone forgot to turn off before the lockdown. My partner thought it was a service for retail stores to play over the speakers.

Everyone was thrown into a tizzy when the station unexpectedly broadcast a government PSA about getting a flu shot, then went back to the playlist.

Folks began chiming in with their location so they could triangulate the source, and Nathan kept his ear to the dial when he had to run an errand in Eastlake.

"I had convinced myself this was some kind of pirate radio station, someone in SODO who was pumping this out, just based on my drive," Nathan says.

The enigma was a welcome break from ... you know, everything else.

"Of course we’re all sitting around the house, everyone’s job is up in the air, businesses are closing, there’s a lot of anxiety," he says. "Thousands of people are now putting some amount of minor mental effort to shoehorn meaning into twenty songs picked at random by some software."

Wait, what? Picked at random by some software? Yes, as it turns out, the mystery has been solved and it meant ...

by Matt Baume, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Joyce Marrero/Getty
[ed. Quarantine is making everyone crazy(er).]

Fred Willard (Sept., 1933 - May, 2020)

Fred Willard, Scene Stealer Extraordinaire, Dies At 86 (NPR). Also this tribute from Rolling Stone.]

[ed. Here's a clip from early in Fred's career when he starred with Martin Mull on Fernwood 2 Night, one of the funniest and most subversive comedy shows back in the late 70s. Also, check out the old commercials. Begins at 0:52]

America’s Chilling Experiment in Human Sacrifice

“There is no wealth but life.”
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)

A chilling experiment is underway in America, with plenty of unwilling human guinea pigs.

Many parts of the country are reopening for business against the warnings of medical experts, flying in the face of grim predictions of sharply rising body counts. Two-thirds of Americans fear that the restart is happening too quickly, and the President himself acknowledges that by easing restrictions, “there’ll be more death.” Yet he presses on, even as his own White House suffers a viral outbreak. (...)

Meanwhile Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, offered his own assessment of the trade-off between capitalism and the lives of America’s senior citizens, explaining, “there are more important things than living.”

Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic engines revved.

Patrick’s words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly, there have always been requirements of human sacrifice — a certain portion of the population was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing homo communis, focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If these people can’t social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If there isn’t enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.

But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy in the world, but is a country’s wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?

Wealth v. “illth”

To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin, the 19th-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era, and his work presciently points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.

Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between people, the economy, and the state?

In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. (...)

Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him, wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the song in your heart: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” (Unto this Last).

By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus which is stealing our wealth away.

Playing on the root of the word “wealth” from the Old English word “weal,” signifying health, Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called “illth” from the Old Norse word for bad – the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.

Economists have a term for Ruskin’s concept of illth, referring to it as “negative externalities,” even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and inequality, are fueled by illth. (...)

Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.

We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that she would offer up the city’s workers as a “control group” in a reopening experiment. If they weren’t able to social distance, Goodman was unconcerned: “In my opinion, you have to go ahead,” she said. “Every day you get up, it’s a gamble.”

Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto ordinary people: “But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms.” (Unto This Last).

In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples’ lives; they are oblivious to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more fairly. (...)

President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country’s leader, which he called the “Goddess of getting on.” Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor “not of everybody’s getting on – but only of somebody’s getting on,” — what he called a “vital, or rather deathful, distinction.” For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints for our lives. (...)

The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, “I only regret that you have but one life to give for my country.”

Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.

by Lynn Parramore and Jeffery L. Spear, INEC via Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Unknown, The Triumph of Death (Trionfo della Morte)

via: here and here

Have the Record Number of Investors in the Stock Market Lost Their Minds?

This past weekend, I drove out to Bethpage State Park, the public golf mecca on Long Island that Robert Moses built during the Great Depression. The park, which has five courses, recently reopened with new safety rules: no carts, no clubhouse amenities, and payments processed in advance by phone. Among the three players I got teamed up with was a local retiree who had returned from Florida just in time for the lockdown. As we social-distanced our way around the Red course, I asked how he was filling his time. He said that he was watching television and trading in the stock market. That sounded dangerous, I ventured, but my playing partner dismissed my concerns. He had faith in the market, he said, and, in any case, he had set aside a fixed sum, to limit his exposure.

The stock market fell for three days in a row to start this week, and Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Wednesday that there is a growing sense that “the recovery may come more slowly than we would like.” In a Zoom presentation to the Economic Club of New York, on Tuesday, Stanley Druckenmiller, a former hedge-fund manager who now invests his own money, said, “The risk-reward for equity”—that is, stocks—“is maybe as bad as I’ve seen it in my career.” And yet many small investors, like my golfing companion, do not seem fazed by warnings like these. Since the Dow plunged more than ten thousand points in February and March, individual traders have been buying and selling stocks at record rates. On Thursday, E-Trade, the discount brokerage, reported that its daily trading volume in April was more than three times as large as it was in April, 2019. Other discount brokers have reported similar figures. TD Ameritrade said that it did more than three million trades a day in April, compared with eight hundred and seventeen thousand a year earlier.

This trading frenzy is taking place in the context of a price war that has prompted firms such as E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab to eliminate commissions for stock purchases and sales, exchange-traded funds, and index options. Since the shutdowns began, many investors have taken advantage of this era of free trades, which began last fall, well before the coronavirus pandemic hit, to exploit what they seem to view as a good money-making opportunity. In March alone, TD Ameritrade added more than four hundred thousand accounts, CNBC’s Maggie Fitzgerald reported earlier this week. Charles Schwab added nearly three hundred thousand accounts.

In rational terms, getting rid of commissions shouldn’t have had a substantial impact. If you invest five thousand dollars in Apple or Tesla, the five or ten dollars you saved in fees won’t have much effect on the ultimate outcome. “How much trading would you have to do for it to make a difference?” Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago—who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his contribution to behavioral economics—said to me on Thursday, when I called and asked him about the surge in online trading. On the other hand, Thaler added, “Free is always appealing. Everybody likes a free lunch, even though my colleagues don’t think they exist.” Having taken a friendly jab at the Chicago disciples of Milton Friedman, Thaler said that nobody really knows what is driving all the stock trading. “It could be that it’s just a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands,” he said. “One friend suggested to me it is replacing gambling. The casinos are closed and there are no sports to bet on.”

For some active traders, this theory does seem to apply. “I like betting on sports,” Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, told Business Insider. “Sports ended, and this was something that was still going that I could do during the day.” After the shutdowns began, Portnoy put three million dollars in an E-Trade account “to play around with.” He’s been busy sharing his exploits with his large Twitter following. (On Friday morning, he reported, “I’m up fifty grand.”) Of course, most investors don’t have the same resources as Portnoy, who made a fortune earlier this year when a big gambling company took a majority stake in his Web site. And many small investors aren’t day-trading. They are simply moving money into exchange-traded funds or blue-chip stocks, some of which are still pretty beaten up, while others, such as Apple and Alphabet, have already made up most of their losses.

The Yale economist Robert Shiller, who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for his studies of what drives stock prices, suggested to me that investors are responding to a widely shared narrative that says stock prices tend to rebound sharply after a big fall, and that you have to get in early to make the biggest gains. “I hear the term ‘ “V”-shaped’ a lot,” he said. Shiller’s book “Irrational Exuberance,” from 2000, came out just before the dot-com bubble burst, and “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events,” from last year, explores what he describes as the power of “contagious popular stories that spread through word of mouth, the news media, and social media.” In standard economic theory, investors are supposed to carefully weigh things like the level of prices, interest rates, and expected profits before they invest. But Shiller told me that “a narrative is often more emotionally compelling and resonant than an argument about valuation or something else.”

After stocks dipped at the end of 2018, and again in the spring of last year, the market did rebound, and quickly reached new highs. This strengthened the “V”-shaped” narrative, Shiller said. So does the widespread belief that the Federal Reserve, through its massive asset purchases, has put a floor under the stock market. “The consensus seems to be, ‘Don’t worry, the Fed has your back,’ ” Druckenmiller said in his presentation. “There’s one problem with that: our analysis says it’s not true.”

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jeenah Moon / Bloomberg / Getty

Bruno Barbey, Poland, 1981
via:

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The Coming Disruption to College

In 2017, Scott Galloway anticipated Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods a month before it was announced. Last year, he called WeWork on its “seriously loco” $47 billion valuation a month before the company’s IPO imploded. Now, Galloway, a Silicon Valley runaway who teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, believes the pandemic has greased the wheels for big tech’s entrée into higher education. The post-pandemic future, he says, will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities. MIT@Google. iStanford. HarvardxFacebook. According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees, the affordability and value of which will seismically alter the landscape of higher education. Galloway, who also founded his own virtual classroom start-up, predicts hundreds, if not thousands, of brick-and-mortar universities will go out of business and those that remain will have student bodies composed primarily of the children of the one percent.

At the same time, more people than ever will have access to a solid education, albeit one that is delivered mostly over the internet. The partnerships he envisions will make life easier for hundreds of millions of people while sapping humanity of a face-to face system of learning that has evolved over centuries. Of course, it will also make a handful of people very, very rich. It may not be long before Galloway’s predictions are put to the test.

Colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what to do next year if students can’t come back to campus. Half the schools have pushed back their May 1 deadlines for accepting seats. What do you expect to happen over the next month?

There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.

At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of “This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,” which is Latin for “We’re not lowering our prices, bitches.” Universities are still in a period of consensual hallucination with each saying, “We’re going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering.”

In fact, the coronavirus is forcing people to take a hard look at that $51,000 tuition they’re spending. Even wealthy people just can’t swallow the jagged pill of tuition if it doesn’t involve getting to send their kids away for four years. It’s like, “Wait, my kid’s going to be home most of the year? Staring at a computer screen?” There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level. I can’t tell you the number of people who have asked me, “Should my kid consider taking a gap year?”

What do you tell them?

I tell them it’s a great year to take a gap year. I think most 18-year-olds are not prepared for college. A combination of helicopter parenting and social media have stunted and arrested the development of America’s youth. University administrators have unwittingly become mental-health counselors. I think a lot of young people, especially boys, could use another year of seasoning experience, work experience, or some sort of service. A lot of these kids just aren’t ready for the competition and the kind of intense environment that is college.

When will there be a reckoning? It has to come before classes begin this fall.

Over the next six weeks, when we realize that the deposits and registrations for the fall are down 10 to 30 percent. The better universities are fine in the short term because they just fill spots from the waiting lists. The kid who’s going to Boston College will get into MIT. But if that snakes down the supply chain, and you start getting to universities that don’t have waiting lists, those are the ones that get hit.

How many schools will collapse between now and next year?

It will be like department stores in 2018. Everyone will recognize they’re going out of business, but it will take longer than people think. There will be a lot of zombie universities. Alumni will step in to help. They’ll cut costs to figure out how to stay alive, but they’ll effectively be the walking dead. I don’t think you’re going to see massive shutdowns, but there’s going to be a strain on tier-two colleges.

There will be a dip, the mother of all V’s, among the top-50 universities, where the revenues are hit in the short run and then technology will expand their enrollments and they will come back stronger. In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves. I don’t want to say that education is going to be reinvented, but it’s going to be dramatically different.

How?

Ultimately, universities are going to partner with companies to help them expand. I think that partnership will look something like MIT and Google partnering. Microsoft and Berkeley. Big-tech companies are about to enter education and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to.

Let’s look at Apple. It does something like $250 billion a year in revenue. Apple has to convince its stockholders that its stock price will double in five years, otherwise its stockholders will go buy Salesforce or Zoom or some other stock. Apple doesn’t need to double revenue to double its stock price, but it needs to increase it by 60 or 80 percent. That means, in the next five years, Apple probably needs to increase its revenue base by $150 billion. To do this, you have to go big-game hunting. You can’t feed a city raising squirrels. Those big-tech companies have to turn their eyes to new prey, the list of which gets pretty short pretty fast if you look at how big these industries need to be in that weight class. Things like automobiles. They’ll be in the brains of automobiles, but they don’t want to be in the business of manufacturing automobiles because it’s a shitty, low-margin business. The rest of the list is government, defense, education, and health care. People ask if big tech wants to get into education and health care, and I say no, they have to get into education and health care. They have no choice.

The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script. It’s not true of everyone. The chancellor at Berkeley is working hard to expand seats. I think the University of California and the University of Texas both see that it’s important that those seats expand as the population grows.

But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.

by James D. Walsh, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Joe Darrow

How Big Tech Plans to Profit From the Pandemic

For a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it … We realise that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a panel to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband … We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system”. Calling Gates a “visionary”, Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms – why, with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, the CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalised pitch. “There has been a distinct warming up to humanless, contactless technology,” she said. “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”

It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future that is hastily being constructed, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.

This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control), and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence”, but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centres, content-moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyper-exploitation. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fuelled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalisation. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids’ mental health. About “smart cities” filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.

And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication – eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail or transportation.

That was the ancient past, also known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Thanks to Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the gleaming showroom for this grim future – but the ambitions reach far beyond the borders of any one state or country.

And at the dead centre of it all is Eric Schmidt.

Well before Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive lobbying and public-relations campaign, pushing precisely the Black Mirror vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants – with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.

by Naomi Klein, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: AFP via Getty

The People Behind the Counter Are People (NY Times)
Image: Celeste Sloman

The Crisis on Campus Is Here To Stay

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced American colleges and universities to shut dormitories, cancel sporting events, halt graduation ceremonies and shift lectures and classroom instruction online. This has caused unprecedented disruption to institutions that are averse to change in the best of times. As the economic crisis deepens, higher education will face even more serious problems, which are likely to persist even after the worst of the public health dangers has passed.

The vast majority of colleges and universities, both public and private, will soon face a shortage of two key sources of revenue: foreign students and students paying high out-of-state tuition rates. The crisis thus threatens the financial model that has sustained many schools and will force some to downsize, cut programs or go out of business altogether. These developments will be bad news for American research and development, and also for the many towns and cities that rely on universities as engines of economic growth.

To understand the dynamic that will be set in motion, let’s start with parents. Most still wish to send their kids to college, and indeed they will. But consider their calculus in more detail. At this point, we cannot be sure whether there will be a true fall semester in the traditional sense. Even if face-to-face classes are held, will the school of your choice still offer exciting dorm life and that wonderful football team? Maybe not.

Incoming students are required to leave deposits for tuition and dorm room and board in advance, sometimes as early as May 1. It’s already the case that most schools have kept room and board (and tuition checks) for the spring semester and not issued refunds. As a paying customer, why take this chance again? We should expect to see an abnormally high number of students take a gap year, which will deprive colleges of tuition revenue. And that’s happening when higher education was financially ailing to begin with.

The decisions of American families also will choke off out-of-state tuition revenue. Note that about three-quarters of America’s higher education sector, by enrollment, is state schools. The out-of-state tuition rate is the real cash cow of American higher education, and sometimes it can approach three times the in-state rate. Schools’ reliance on out-of-state revenue is going to take a big hit, as it was premised on a degree of individual geographic mobility that simply does not exist right now and may not be restored anytime soon. (...)

Another problem will be the plummeting enrollment of foreign students, who typically are paying out-of-state tuition rates. An increasing number of U.S. colleges and universities have relied on Chinese and other foreign students to balance their books, and this revenue stream is about to dry up. It seems unlikely that immigration and student visas will, by the fall, be at anything close to a normal level, and in any case travel and study plans need to be made well in advance. Even Singapore and Taiwan, which have done some of the best jobs combating the virus, are mostly keeping their borders closed. The foreign students already here will remain (though some will not be able to continue to pay tuition), but the incoming flow is likely to turn into a trickle. Once the cohorts are broken up, and foreign students opt for alternatives closer to home, the future might evolve along those lines. The University of Rochester, with about 27% foreign students, will find this adjustment especially difficult.

As the quantity of available students declines, so will their overall quality. Schools will try to cannibalize students from other schools, in part by lowering standards. Recently the University of California announced it would process admissions without requiring their usual standards of testing and grades. That was presented as an act of great generosity, to ease the work burden on applicants, and indeed it is. At the same time, it likely will pull many students away from lower-tiered schools. Maybe a year ago you could not have entered the U.C. system, but now you can. So why not take advantage of this upgrade in your options? (...)

Given the scale of the problems facing higher education, how should policy makers and colleges themselves respond?

First, we should accept that debates over higher education will never be the same again. Only a few months ago, the idea of making four-year college free for all was a major idea in the Democratic Party, endorsed most prominently by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The notion was that state governments would step up and fill in the revenue gaps from the loss of tuition revenue. I don’t think that was ever a practical vision, but it is now beyond the pale, given all the pressures on state budgets. It is a bit like arguing that restaurants should move to zero prices, and we will make up for the revenue difference by having a more active fiscal and loan policy from the federal government.

Instead of debating free college, the federal government should grant a new round of stimulus to state and local governments, as that at least will tide over many colleges and universities and give them time to adjust to the new circumstances. Those funds cannot make up for lower tuition revenue for more than a few years, but they can allow for an orderly shrinkage of many institutions.

As for how campuses operate going forward, most schools will try a hybrid model of mixed in-person and online options. If a student doesn’t want to come to class, he or she can do all of the work remotely. Older faculty will be given the option of paid leave, but having to teach more in the future, or teaching online. The creation of more online sections and classes will drain students away from the classroom and allow for a reasonable degree of spacing and social distancing. Some classes will be held outside in tents or under the trees. The dorms will be largely empty, though some foreign students may have no other choice. Many more students will have to live off campus and also bring their lunches. The level of stress will be high at first, but humans are capable of adjusting to many strange situations. The students who most want to learn will respond by working harder on their own.

Professors like me will need to adapt as well. My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it. Students will have the flexibility of doing the work and listening to the videos when they choose, and not having to show up in class. As for meeting with students, there is Zoom and also the 10-foot distance across a long park bench, at least until the cold of December rolls around.

In the longer run, the induced restructurings might give higher education some new pathways forward, including with virtual options, as we already are seeing. Schools will have to learn how to market such offerings to large public audiences, much as they currently do with their athletic events. That will mean truly global competition in the higher education arena, as networks of learning and instruction, as well as seminars, are opened up to everyone, or at least to paying customers.

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Otis Redding

Palaka: The Hawaiian Denim

What is palaka?

What it is changed from the cloth to the pattern and with the Issei (original Japanese) it meant exactly a woven checkered pattern of dark blue and white like their summer kata’s were made of back home.

Palaka’s definition is an ever changing one and that gives it a home in many Hawaiian’s hearts, but the conotations of what palaka is and means are ever changing.

The pre-Hawaii Years

According to research by Alfons Korn, a retired UH English Professor, palaka dates back to the time of King Kamehameha the great, when explorers were infrequent visitors to Hawaiian shores. The pattern made it’s way in the late 1900’s when Americans ordered tons of checkered-patterned thick cloth from England to make the uniforms for the field workers. Originally a pattern type in England for the sailors, it was seen as plain and therefore cheap. The cloth of Nelson’s navy and Yankeedom’s clipper wasn’t known by any name until the Hawaiians and Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) named it after the Hawaiian work for ‘frock’ which was also a mistranslation for “checkered.” Interestingly, the sailors decendents moved to New England and a popular style of furnishing cover can be found in much of the local upholstery.

Peter Youn Kaeo (1836 – 1980), an inmate of the leprosy settlement at Kalapapa, reported in a letter to his cousin Queen Emma, dated November 4, 1873, that he recently visited the settlement store and there bought several yards of cotton twill “to make me some frocks palaka” this is the first known use of the word palaka to describe the style of clothing: Short cuts with no tail and meant to be worn outside of the pants.

Remember that at this time, people were still wearing top hats, so imagine how laid back Hawaii seemed when you had no intention of even tucking in your shirt. The workers began to wear the cloth knowing that it was a white people invention, however unaware of how that would soon change.

The plantation years (1885 – 1941)

At one point, Hope, in his book, estimates that nearly every single man, woman and child in Hawaii wore and had a piece of palaka clothing. It’s hard to imagine because today the closest thing to that saturation-level is the surf shirt. However, the surf shirt is made by many different brands with multiple colors and cuts. In that sense, we are just talking about surfer themed T-shirts, but with palaka, everyone had one and they were all the same color.

A young man by the name of Zempan Arakawa, saw a need for the workers to find cheaper and faster pieces of clothing. He saved up $5 to buy a sewing machine and began to make different styles of cloth. His store began making a majority of the long sleeve work shirts out of their Waipahu store.

According to the 1932 Industries in Hawaii survey, palakas, “have their place in the wordrobe of every islander. — Boys and girls wear them to school, to play, to football games, to parties, the younger set war them to house parties, to coctail parties and beach parties; and one of Hawaii’s most charming matrons, going to the mountains on her honeymoon, wore a palaka with riding breeches and boots as a going-away costume at her wedding.

Palaka began to dip into popularity with the advent of the Hawaiian shirt by Musa-Shiya Shoten Limited, on South King Street which began advertising the “radiant” colors and freedom of the aloha shirt.

This is also when the largest and most well-respected mass-producer of palaka clothing emerged. Goro Arakawa was just a baby when he remembers people in the village begging for the repairs and custom palaka clothing from the end of the Arakawa’s family sewing machine. Up until its closing in 1995, Arakawa sold thousands of palaka clothing and mainstreamed the use of different colors. It is for this reason that he is both reviled and respected in the Hawaiian community.

Margaret S. Young in an open letter to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1980, remembered when everyone she knew wore a long-sleeve, dark blue and white palaka shirt. “We wore them, long sleeves and all, for picnics and hikes.” she said

The Silver Screen years (1945 – 1960) 

There was a time when palaka was as in demand as the aloha shirt to tourists. According to a transcription by Bob Ebert, a photographer who took pictures of the Hawaiian clothing styles over the years, for a time palaka’s authenticity was just as appealing as the bright and color saturated aloha shirt.

“I don’t know what they called’em, was part of the uniform and the aloha shirt, every tourist that has ever come to Hawaii usually ends up with a shirt or wore one.”

According to Alfons L. Korn a researcher for the book, “Hawaiian Shirts: frock, shmock-frock, block and palaka,” palaka was already riding its second surge of popularity in 1950. palaka was thought of as a standard piece of clothing and patterning too closely associated with field work for the younger Hawaiians; and the popularity of the aloha shirt in Hawaii in 1930, meant that after hours, workers would change into their aloha attire instead of a palaka-styled cloth. While in the fields, palaka was being rejected in favor of overalls and jeans since it kept workes more protected. But, palaka would become popular once again after it became associated with one of our nations biggest tragedies.

Pearl Harbor brought a greater focus on Hawaii from Hollywood. Moonlight in Hawaii (1941) or Hawaii Calls (1938) were just a few examples of movies that were made to captialize on Hawaii-mania. There were movies that capitalized on the war (“From Here to Eternity”), musicals (“Blue Hawaii”),. and multiple movies that encouraged people to, “go Hawaiian” just like Gidget (“Gidget goes Hawaiian”). 

With these movies, Hawaii began to move away from being culturally represented and move closer into the realm of fantasy. The wave began in 1938 when the first photo of a man wearing an aloha shirt was photographed for Pardise of the Pacific. Soon after, movie stars began to wear the fad. By 1940, officials of the Territorial and City and County governments were allowing their employees to wear aloha shirts, at least in warm weather. These would be one of the first death-nails into palaka’s reign as the official shirt of the Hawaiian kingdom. It’s appeal was beginning to be eclipsed by the aloha shirts appeal to both tourist and locals both due to its fresh style as well as rayon being cooler than the thick draping of cotton from palaka.

by hawaiipalaka |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. I grew up next to the canefields in Waipahu, and we did all our shopping at Arakawa's. The best word I can use to describe the store is "overstuffed". It was fun going there and just looking for treasures under all the piled goods (you had to really do some digging). I don't remember palaka being anything special, it was just what everyone wore in the fields back then.]

A Gentleman in Moscow

Beyond the door of the luxurious ­Hotel Metropol lies Theater Square and the rest of Moscow, and beyond its city limits the tumultuous landscape of 20th-century Russia. The year 1922 is a good starting point for a Russian epic, but for the purposes of his sly and winning second ­novel, Amor Towles forgoes descriptions of icy roads and wintry dachas and instead retreats into the warm hotel lobby. The Metropol, with its customs and routines, is a world unto itself.

For years, its florist adhered to the code of polite society and knew “which flower to send when one has been late; when one has spoken out of turn.” The barbershop remained a kind of Switzerland, “a land of optimism, precision and political neutrality.” As post-revolution scarcity set in, the chef of the upscale Boyarsky restaurant worked magic with cornmeal, cauliflower and cabbage, while the Shalyapin bar offered candlelight and dark corners so Bolshoi dancers could sneak a postperformance drink. In the lobby, politicians whispered and movie starlets swanned across the floor, dragging recalcitrant borzois on their leashes.

Towles’s novel spans a number of difficult decades, but no Bolshevik, Stalinist or bureaucrat can dampen the Metropol’s life; World War II only briefly forces a pause. A great hotel is eternal, and the ­tidal movement of individuals and ideas into its lounges and ballrooms is a necessity for one longtime resident. He’s not difficult to spot: a man who enacts a set of rituals and routines, grooming and dining, conversing and brandy-drinking, before ascending each night to his room on the sixth floor, which has barely enough space for his Louis XVI desk and ebony elephant lamps.

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov — a member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt — was already ensconced in luxury in Suite 317 when he was sentenced to house arrest in a 1922 trial, condemned for writing a poem. Saved from a bullet to the head or exile in Siberia because he was deemed a hero of the pre-revolutionary cause, he has been forcefully installed on a new floor. But Rostov is an optimist: The cramped room will at the very least keep him away from the Bolsheviks below, clacking out directives on their typewriters. He bounces on the bedsprings and observes that they’re creaking in G sharp. When he bangs his head on the slope of the low ceiling, he announces: “Just so.”

Rostov is an aesthete, an intellectual who will maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Yet even with this aim, the walls begin to close in. As he climbs the 110 steps to his room, he can’t wait to descend them again; he has begun, early on in his confinement, to be “threatened by a sense of ennui — that dreaded mire of the human emotions.”

What is a cultured man to do? Suicide is an obvious choice. (Just so!) But the Metropol won’t let him simply drop and splatter from its roof. Towles has an educational scheme for his protagonist: If the hotel contains the world, Towles assiduously offers pleasures and lessons, room by room, as a reborn Rostov bears witness to his era.

Solzhenitsyn this is not. The frost gathers outside, but the book proceeds with intentional lightness. The tone is generally not far removed from the Fitzgeraldian tributes of Towles’s first novel, “Rules of Civility.” The book is narrated not by Rostov but by a hovering third person, sporting what seems to be a permanently arched eyebrow, who occasionally ­lapses into aristocratic fussiness. Wonder abounds. Secret panels open. A former juggler reaches out to grab a falling torte just in time. One-eyed cats look away at crucial moments. Although its style is never overbearing, the Metropol is imbued with a sense of idiosyncratic wonder. Listen closely and you might hear a Wes Anderson soundtrack playing down the hall. We’re not in the Grand Budapest, but more than once I imagined F. Murray Abraham narrating a long, panning shot. (...)

What happens when a novel centers on a character so capable, so witty and at ease in the world, even as that world convulses around him? Rostov has a portrait of his long-dead sister on the wall of his room, so it’s evident his life is anchored in pain — Russia is pain — but he remains untouchable, built to outwit the system. Part of the problem is that Towles repeatedly invokes the tortured, challenged, hand-wringing, deeply human characters of Russian literature. In contrast, Rostov seems destined always to succeed.

Towles is a craftsman. What saves the book is the gorgeous sleight of hand that draws it to a satisfying end, and the way he chooses themes that run deeper than mere sociopolitical commentary: parental duty, friendship, romance, the call of home. Human beings, after all, “deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration” — even those from the leisured class. Who will save Rostov from the intrusions of the state if not the ­seamstresses, chefs, bartenders and doormen? In the end, ­Towles’s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of ­decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.

by Craig Taylor, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. I'm about half-way through this book and can recommend it highly despite its theme of prolonged house arrest (but, in a first-class hotel!). The Count is certainly an endearing and memorable character. This follows another book I just finished, which also (unexpectedly) uses sheltering in place as a central theme: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (NPR Review). Art imitiating life I guess, or vice versa. Anyway, here's an excerpt from A Gentleman in Moscow that seems appropriate given our present situation:]

"Even men in the most trying of circumstances - like those lost at sea or confined to prison - will find the means to carefully account the passing of a year. Despite the fact that all the splendid modulations of the seasons and those colorful festivities that recur in the course of normal life have been replaced by the tyranny of indistinguishable days, the men in such situations will carve their 365 notches into a piece of wood or scratch them into the walls of their cell.

Why do they go to such lengths to mark time? When, ostensibly, to do so should matter to them least of all? Well,  for one, it provides an occasion to reflect on the inevitable progress of the world they've left behind: "Ah Aloysha must now be able to climb a tree in the yard; and Vanya must be entering the academy; and Nadya, dear Nadya, will soon be of an age to marry..."

But just as important, a careful accounting of days allows the isolated to note that another year of hardship has been endured; survived; bested. Whether they have found the strength to perservere through a tireless determination or some foolhardy optimism, those 365 hatch marks stand measured as proof of their indomitability. For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years. Or, if philosophical investigations are not to your taste, then let us simply agree that the wise man celebrates what he can."