Gary Busey: 'I Passed Away After Brain Surgery. Then I Came Back'

Gary Busey promises I won’t have come across anything like his new show, Pet Judge. He’s right; I haven’t. But, to be fair, I’ve never come across anybody like Gary Busey. He really is a one-off – Hollywood legend, coke fiend, brain-damage survivor, sobriety champion, spiritualist and reality-show winner. When he was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice in the US, Donald Trump concluded: “He’s either a genius or a moron and I can’t figure it out.” Well, I know which side I come down on.

Pet Judge is a new Amazon Prime series, with Busey playing himself – only this Busey is presiding over a court in which litigants resolve quarrels about their pets. One couple are in dispute over the death of their cat; the wife wants it buried in the family mausoleum and the husband wants a Viking funeral, with the cat sent out to sea on a flaming boat. Then there is the woman convinced that her dog is her reincarnated husband – she’s at war with an insurance company that is refusing to include the dog on the family policy. Every so often, Busey bangs his gavel, barks: “PET JUS-TICE!” and brings the court to order. Pet Judge is a fake reality show, cast with actors, largely improvised, sometimes very funny and every bit as bonkers as it sounds. “None of the other judge shows hold a candle fire, bonfire or rocket to this Pet Judge show,” Busey says.

Busey has appeared in more than 150 movies, specialising in unhinged hard men, from Leroy the Masochist (“I like pain. Any kind of pain”) in John Milius’s wonderful 1970s surfer bromance, Big Wednesday, to Mr Joshua in Lethal Weapon, who simply doesn’t feel pain. He is best known for another surfer movie, 1991’s Point Break, in which he plays Angelo Pappas, an FBI agent with a penchant for destruction.

He started out as a musician, however, playing drums with the great singer-songwriter Leon Russell. Perhaps his finest film performance came in 1978’s Buddy Holly Story. Busey was superb as Holly – singing, playing guitar and showing heart and soul, as well as the customary flashes of temper. He lit up an otherwise unremarkable biopic and deservedly won an Oscar nomination.

Today, he’s at home in Malibu, California, when we Zoom. Busey, aged 75, is hard of hearing, so his wife, Stefanie, a hypnotherapist and standup comedian, is here for support. He still has a magnificent nest of ash-blond hair, great blue eyes and huge white teeth that wouldn’t look out of place in Yosemite national park. Cancers have nibbled away at bits of his face (he has no tear ducts or sinuses), but he is still strikingly handsome in his own chewed-up, spat-out, hard-living kind of way. (...)

Busey has become known for his acronyms. Which Buseyism is most relevant to his life? “What? That’s a difficult one. The word to spell is faith. Faith – those letters stand for Fantastic, Adventurous in Trusting Him. And the second Buseyism I consider spiritually profound is hope. Hope stands for Heavenly Offerings Prevail Eternally.”

The Buseyisms, like his tics and other mannerisms, go back to his life-changing motorbike accident and subsequent brain surgery for a subdural haematoma, during which he says he briefly died. “About 25 years ago, I had an accident on a Harley-Davidson. I went off the bike without a helmet, hit my head into a kerb, split my skull, passed away after brain surgery and went to the other side – the spiritual realm where I got information. And I came back, and these messages, these definitions, came to me first-class. I’ll think of a word and write the word down without thinking.” (...)

Before his accident, Busey hardly led a conventional life. He seemed more dedicated to feeding his drug addiction than working. “My drug of choice is cocaine.” After the accident, he briefly returned to the drugs. “I OD’d on 3 May 1990, and thank God, because I realised I’d been dancing with the devil in a very small circle and the devil was leading the dance,” he says in his deep Texas drawl. “I left the dance and said: ‘You kick on from here – I’m gone. I’m dancing on my own.’ When you do a drug like cocaine, you want to get that first hit back, but you never will. That’s gone. It’s a chase to the death when you’re addicted to cocaine.”

Is he surprised he’s still alive? “What? Oh, no. You know what? You never die. Death stands for Don’t Expect a Tragedy Here. It is one transformation from one dimension to another and it is painless, free and lovely. I’ve experienced it, so I can say that.”

Back in the day, he and his close friend (and doppelganger) Nick Nolte were regarded as the hardest-partying men in Hollywood. “We were like two perfectly twin-cloned entities. We’d go to parties in Malibu and were always the last to leave. We’d be sitting under the dinner table with our panama hats on and we got known as ‘the things who will not leave’.”

by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
[ed. A true original. And totally nuts.]

A Brooklyn Guitar Hero

I remember thinking, first instinct, This will affect piano sales,” Brian Whiton said the other day, describing the moment, this winter, when he heard about the coronavirus. Whiton, the owner of Brooklyn Fine Guitars and Big Wrench Piano Care, is a piano technician by training. He started stocking guitars in his Carroll Gardens shop only because people kept wandering in asking for them.

As the outbreak reached the city, Whiton began disinfecting his merchandise. “People seemed so relieved when I would wipe a guitar down right in front of them,” he said. Initially, he didn’t think it was necessary to restrict the number of customers inside the store, crowds being a rarity. But he eventually began having customers e-mail or text him their orders, and he carried guitars out to the sidewalk for them to try. Payment was via Venmo, or Zelle. Whiton even offered to put guitars into Ubers or Lyfts and send them off to their new owners, although no one took him up on it.

When, on Friday, March 20th, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all “non-essential businesses” to close by Sunday, the news prompted a run on guitars. On a normal weekend, Whiton sells between one and four of the instruments. That weekend, he sold sixteen. “Most of the people who were buying were beginners,” he said. Customers would say, “I’m looking for something entry-level to get through this.” Carmen Tellez, a twenty-seven-year-old who recently graduated from law school, was one of them. She faced the prospect of being cooped up with her boyfriend in their one-bedroom near Barclays Center. “I thought about whether I could just be content watching YouTube videos all day, which often I am,” she said. “Or what kind of crafting skills I have.” She’d played a little guitar as a teen-ager. “I was, like, Oh, maybe that’s something I could do.”


Tellez e-mailed Whiton. “I had my eye on the Yamaha JR1 3/4-size,” she wrote, and asked for curbside pickup. “I am healthy, social-distancing, and avoiding public transportation!” When she arrived, he was on the corner, handling a ukulele sale. “I Venmoed him the money, and he brought out the guitar, and he said he had sanitized it,” she recalled. Tellez consecrated her new axe by plucking out a little “Smoke on the Water.” She has been watching YouTube video tutorials, and during FaceTime calls with her mother she looks over notebooks from the lessons she took as a kid. She’s nearly finished learning the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Next up: “Wish You Were Here,” by Pink Floyd. Tellez’s boyfriend has pronounced the new hobby “less annoying” than he expected.

by Eric Lacsh, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: João Fazenda
[ed. See also: YouTube Guitar Teachers You Might Want to Check Out (Duck Soup).]

Billionaires Cowboy Up and Turn Wyoming Into a Gated Community

Of the 3,144 counties in the United States, the one with the highest per capita income is Teton County, Wyoming. It’s also the most unequal: Ninety percent of all income is made by 8 percent of households. Its average per capita income is $194,485, and the average income for the top 1 percent in the county is an astonishing $28.2 million.

Justin Farrell, an associate professor of sociology at Yale and a Wyoming native, spent six years interviewing the ultra-wealthy as well as the working poor in Teton County and studying the effects of wealth on this community. The result of his research is an illuminating and provocative new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. He spoke to reporter Nick Romeo.

Most people do not associate wealth inequality and environmentalism. What’s the connection you found?

The ultrarich use nature to solve dilemmas they face. The first dilemma is economic. So you made all this money: How much should you share it, how should you enjoy it, and how should you protect and multiply it? Conservation has all sorts of benefits economically. People say that they move to Teton County for the beautiful ecosystem, the wildlife and all that, but the other major reason, the primary reason really, is it’s a tax haven. I try to show that not all tax havens are off in these faraway islands, some of them are right here in the pristine mountains of the American West: Wyoming does not have corporate tax or income tax and often sits atop Bloomberg’s wealth-friendly states rankings. So you see dollars flooding in, which impacts the fabric of the community itself. In Teton County in 1980, only 30 percent of income came from financial investments, but by 2015, $8 out of every $10 in this community was made from financial investments.

I’m a big proponent of conservation, but I don’t think we look enough at who benefits from conservation, not only in terms of tax breaks but in terms of how it affects property values and low-income people who can no longer live anywhere near where they work. Some people have to drive over an 8,000-foot mountain pass every day to get to work in the dead of a Wyoming winter. So the area is transformed into an ultra-exclusive enclave, where you need the money to buy entry. It’s basically become a gated community to the extreme.

What are the other dilemmas that the rich use nature to solve?

The second dilemma is social: How do they wrestle with the stigma of being ultra-wealthy? They are burdened by a social stigma that they are greedy, and they often feel like they’ve sacrificed something along the way to wealth. So they use nature combined with a romantic view of rural people as a way to transform themselves. I found this pattern where they create versions of themselves that they view as more authentic, more virtuous, more small-town and community-minded.

The interesting thing is that they model their personal transformation on this notion of the working poor in the rural West, especially in outdoors-oriented places. They tend to romanticize them. The image is of someone with a low-status career who doesn’t have a lot of material goods but is living close to the earth, in nature, and maybe they’re going skiing or hiking, or maybe they live in a camper van, and they are free from the traps of wealth and power that the rich have had to navigate their whole careers. The rich imagine that the working poor live more of an outdoor life of contentment, are more authentic, simpler, and that they enjoy a special kinship with nature and integration into the small-town community. All that becomes central to how the ultra-wealthy transform themselves—it’s a yearning among the ultra-wealthy for this love of a bygone small-town character kind of mixed with the cowboy ethos.

You talk in the book about how the ultrarich basically play dress-up—they wear Wranglers and plaid shirts. They pull on leather cowboy boots and drive rugged trucks.

Yeah, the dress was very surprising to me. I did not go into this project focused on how those folks dressed, but it turned out to be such a communicator of something deeper and more important. Dress was an outward performance of their conversion to this way of life, of what they view as this way of life. The image is built on half-truths and a really romanticized view of the working poor, especially in this community, where the reality of the working poor tends to be two immigrant families living in a single trailer, with the adults working two or three jobs. But that’s not how the wealthy see it. This performance also includes making friends with people who are just scraping by and going out into nature with these people, whether it’s their ski guides or fishing guide.

by Nick Romeo, Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: Brownie Harris/Corbis via Getty

Hiroshige, Bowl of Sushi (1797-1858)
via:

How to Fix Globalization—for Detroit, Not Davos

Irwin Stelzer and TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin recently spoke with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers in a wide-ranging conversation. They discussed the debate over “decoupling” with China, how to reform capitalism to address legitimate grievances, what an effective response to COVID-19 might look like, and the shape of a post-pandemic U.S. fiscal policy. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Irwin Stelzer & Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: Let’s start with China, Secretary Summers. There’s a “decoupling” debate emerging now, about whether we should economically disengage from China and diversify our supply chains. If you were advising a new administration, would you keep the tariffs in place? Would you subsidize U.S. production of essential goods? How do you think about this challenge?

Lawrence H. Summers: I think that there’s no more important task for a new President than reconceptualizing the U.S.-China relationship. The strategy of “engagement and hedge” that was conceptualized during the Cold War as a way of gaining leverage against Russia is no longer viable at a time when China and Russia are closer to each other than either is to the United States, when China exists on a very different scale than it did 50 years ago, and when so many of the most pressing security challenges involve cooperating globally rather than balancing powers.

It certainly has not happened that continued economic engagement has led to the convergence of China towards the United States, nor has it led consistently to greater bilateral cooperation. That has to be acknowledged as a starting point. At the same time, there is an American tendency to glom onto prime threats and overreact in ways that can be problematic. The hysteria that prevailed in the United States post-Sputnik was in some ways constructive, but also contributed to fears in Moscow that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis and brought the world closer to nuclear war than it has ever been. The Japan hysteria of the late 1980s looks vaguely ridiculous today, but at the time, it was a commonplace within both political parties that the Cold War had ended and Japan had won. Russia was not an economic threat, and Japan was not a security threat. China is potentially both, and so the alarm in the United States is that much greater.

The challenge for a new administration is to harness that alarm constructively to support necessary renewal in the United States, and to assure that our deep security interests are well protected, without succumbing to paranoia that could generate a cycle of hostility between the United States and China, without lapsing into a desire for a degree of U.S. control that’s not plausible given the economic reality, and without putting at risk the capacity to cooperate on the issues that are most important—like pandemic, like climate change, like the risks and opportunities associated with Artificial Intelligence.

We do need to develop our own capacity so that we are much less vulnerable to others in terms of our procurement capacity for key materials. We need the kind of thought that has traditionally gone into export controls and the review of foreign investment to go into the issue of supply chains and U.S. dependence.

In general, economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency. Going forward we will need more emphasis on “just in case” even at some cost in terms of “just in time.” More broadly our economic strategy will need to put less emphasis on short-term commercial advantage and pay more attention to long-run strategic advantage.

A great deal of what was in the Trump program was fundamentally irrelevant. Who cares whether China buys soybeans from us or whether Brazil buys soybeans from us? It was rearrangement of trade flows around the bilateral deficit to no particular purpose. Some of the tariffs that were placed on China had the effect of diverting production from China to Vietnam. I think that was to no real purpose.

But I do think that it is incumbent on us to make sure that we have the resilience to not be dependent on China and potential adversaries of the United States for goods that are going to be crucial for us, just as companies do contingency planning around situations where their revenues go to zero for some interval. Now there are many ways to respond. There’s the accumulation of inventories; the kind of thinking that’s behind the Strategic Petroleum Reserve should probably be applied to a much wider range of goods. There are contingency plans to build manufacturing facilities in more flexible ways so that they can be repurposed if need be.

The challenge for the U.S. system will be to implement these policies in a way that is genuinely strategic and in which the national security rationale doesn’t let itself be captured by those whose real motives are protectionism for a particular business interest. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has done this relatively well, and I think that’s the model that we should be looking to. But there’s no question that the spectacle of the Chinese airlifting masks to the United States should be a spur to much more thought about our own resilience.

Dependence as a concern goes beyond supply chains. We need to assure that we remain central to global standard setting as technologies develop, to assure that our allies are not unduly dependent on China and that there are American companies at the forefront with respect to key technologies. I am no fan of industrial policy generally, but somebody should have done something that assured that there was a serious American competitor in the 5G space.

At the broadest level, we need to craft a relationship with China from the principles of mutual respect and strategic reassurance, with rather less of the feigned affection that there has been in the past. We are not partners. We are not really friends. We are entities that find ourselves on the same small lifeboat in turbulent waters a long way from shore. We need to be pulling in unison if things are to work for either of us. If we can respect each other’s roles, respect our very substantial differences, confine our spheres of negotiation to those areas that are most important for cooperation, and represent the most fundamental interests of our societies, we can have a more successful co-evolution that we have had in recent years.

TAI: You’ve written about the need for “responsible nationalism.” What does that actually mean in terms of economic policies? How do we reform capitalism but preserve it, while making it more popular and sustainable in a democracy?

LHS: Let’s take the global dimension first. We have done too much management of globalization for the benefit of those in Davos, and too little for the benefit of those in Detroit or Dusseldorf. (...)

Someone put it to me this way: First, we said that you are going to lose your job, but it was okay because when you got your new one, you were going to have higher wages thanks to lower prices because of international trade. Then we said that your company was going to move your job overseas, but it was really necessary because if we didn’t do that, then your company was going to be less competitive. Now we’re saying that we have to cut the taxes on those companies and cut the calculus class from your kid’s high school, because otherwise we won’t be able to attract companies to the United States, and you have to pay higher taxes and live with fewer services. At a certain point, people say, “This whole global thing doesn’t work for me,” and they have a point.

by Irwin Stelzer and Jeffrey Gedmin, The American Interest | Read more:

via:

Too Little Or Too Much Time With The Kids? Grandparenting Is Tough In A Pandemic

Back in pre-pandemic times, Richard and Denise Victor would get to see their four grandchildren almost every day. One set of kids lives around the block from them in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; the others are half an hour away, all close enough for frequent visits and sleepovers.

"With the younger ones, we have a routine of stories when they spend the night," Richard Victor says.

But when the coronavirus hit, the couple were at their vacation home in Florida, and suddenly it wasn't safe to leave. They've been sheltering there for three months, missing their grandkids and struggling with an absence that FaceTime just can't fill.

"It's very, very difficult," says Victor, a 70-year-old lawyer and founder of the nonprofit Grandparents Rights Organization. "You have to try your best, because we don't know when this will be over with."

Of all the hardships imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, among the most poignant is the reshaping of relationships between children and the grandparents who love them.

Across the U.S., where more than 70 million people are grandparents, the effort to prevent infection in older people, who are most at risk of serious COVID-19 illness, has meant self-imposed exile for many. On the other hand, some grandparents have taken over daily child care duties to help adult children who must work.

"All the grandparents in the country are aching," says Madonna Harrington Meyer, a sociology professor at Syracuse University in New York. "Some are aching because they can't see their grandchildren — and some are aching because they can't get away from them."

Both situations are the result of a fast-moving pandemic that forced families to decide quickly whether to isolate with grandparents "inside the bubble or out," Harrington Meyer says. Three months later, many are still grappling with those decisions — and worrying about an uncertain future.

"I think we all have the exact same set of issues," says Harrington Meyer, author of the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work: Juggling Families and Jobs. "What will August bring? All of us need to be prepared for this to be fluctuating."

Even as some regions begin easing restrictions, the risks posed by gathering in person haven't changed for grandparents separated from their grandchildren, says Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an affiliated clinical assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at Stanford University. Rates of serious illness and death caused by COVID-19 remain much higher in older people than among the young, and children can easily spread the disease.

"It's hard to know if a child has been exposed or whether they have an asymptomatic infection," Kuppalli says. "I would definitely recommend staying away or definitely continuing to wear masks and perform good hand hygiene."

At the same time, maintaining a connection with grandkids is important for the well-being of everyone, says Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"There's an incredible health benefit to them to interact with their grandparents," she says. The bond is special.

by Jonel Accecia, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Victor Family

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.

It all adds up.

So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).

Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the Third World out of poverty, or science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal disease, conquering hepatitis C or, curing deadly cancers with genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are, and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so one hopes). Small stuff matters too.What about the little things in an ordinary life?

The seen and the unseen.When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it.

These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list of improvements to my ordinary life.

COMPUTERS

TECHNOLOGY

SOCIETY

FOOD

by Gwern, Gwern.net |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dredging Up the Past

Growing up on the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans, it was not uncommon for a spring deluge to turn our deadend street into a waist-high pool. Just like rings on a tree, hurricane events marked the passing of generations. My parents each had their various tales from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. My own childhood was shaped, in large part, by more recent storms and evacuations. Ask any Gulf Coast resident about that “pre-hurricane feeling” and you’ll likely hear a description of anticipation, giddiness, and dread.

In May 1995, a massive flood inundated our home with three feet of water. All summer long, as workers piled moldy sheetrock and insulation along our street, my twin sister and I explored the strip of woods between our house and the Mississippi River. Drinking cans of Dr. Pepper, we imagined ourselves explorers as we watched the barges and container ships float pass us. I was fascinated by the parade of river traffic—and that fascination stuck with me throughout my childhood. As I grew, so did the size of maritime vessels. Globalization increased the amount of freight traversing the oceans and entering the Port of New Orleans. Larger boats needed deeper ports to safely dock and unload cargo. But this was somewhat of a Sisphyean endeavor, because the Mississippi River is akin to a fire hose of mud and silt. To prevent shoaling (the buildup of sand and sediment), boats called dredge vessels were needed to keep waterways navigable and ports deep enough for vessels to dock.

Dredge vessels are also ships that (literally) shape the land we live on, at least in coastal areas. They were used to build the Palm Islands off the coast of Dubai, and they’re how the low-lying Netherlands fight off the North Sea. There are many kinds of dredge vessels, but for the purposes of this story, the ones we care about are trailing suction hopper dredges, commonly known as “hopper dredges.” These are ocean-going vessels that can endure fierce currents. They do their work by deploying long pipes that suck up sediment on the seafloor, which is then deposited into a large bin, or “hopper,” and then transported to a site for restoration or land-building. I’ve always felt it helpful to think of hopper dredges as the Megamaid from Spaceballs.

By building up the shoreline, hopper dredges help keep Louisiana safe from the sea, but we don’t have nearly enough of them to protect the coastline of my home state, let alone the rest of the country. Currently, the United States’ hopper dredge fleet consists of just 19 vessels, four of which are mothballed by Congress. The other 15 are owned by five private companies. Compare this to the 55 hopper dredges in the Netherlands’ private fleet or China’s ever-growing land-building fleet. With such a paltry collection of vessels, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which we’ll refer to as “the Corps” going forward) is responsible for maintaining 12,000 miles of inland and intracoastal waterways, 180 ports, and 95,471 miles of shoreline.

History shows the Corps does not have the tools it needs to do its job. Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s and is projected to lose another 674 square miles before 2050. This is land that slows hurricanes down—land that could have slowed Hurricane Katrina down, for example. Louisiana is not the only place in need of dredge vessels, but as with other poor coastal states, many communities are forced to languish on a waiting list that moves too slow to address these emergencies in time. At the time of this writing, most of the nation’s dredge vessels were either drydocked for repairs or deployed across eight far-flung states. (...)

Since the 1970s, the private dredging industry has fought a relentless war to eliminate competition from the public sector. Between 1899 and 1949, the Corps built 150 dredges which were used to develop waterways and ports. But when it came time to replace these aging vessels in the mid-1960s, private businesses saw an opportunity to seize those lucrative contracts for themselves.

by Megan Milliken Biven, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Prophecies of Q

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

I. GENESIS

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

Comet happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my then-baby daughter tried her first-ever sip of water. Kids gather there with their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands perform on the weekends. In the back, children challenge their grandparents to Ping-Pong matches as they wait for their pizzas to come out of the big clay oven in the middle of the restaurant. Comet Ping Pong is a beloved spot in Washington.

That day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, but especially at a place like Comet. As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.

Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks made public a trove of emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish corners of the internet (such as 4chan) and then spread to more accessible precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to “pizza” and “pasta” were interpreted as code words for “girls” and “little boys.”

Shortly after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.

Welch seems to have sincerely believed that children were being held at Comet Ping Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, describing him as a dedicated father, a devout Christian, and a man who went out of his way to care for others. Welch had trained as a volunteer firefighter. He had gone on an earthquake-response mission to Haiti with the local Baptist Men’s Association. A friend from his church wrote, “He exhibits the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply it.” Welch himself expressed what seemed like genuine remorse, saying in a handwritten note submitted to the judge by his lawyers: “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.” He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Pizzagate seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news channel One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal action by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio show, apologized for promoting Pizzagate.

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.

by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: uncredited

State Colleges and Universities Face a Tough Financial Future

Washington’s public colleges and universities are bracing for a money crisis this fall that is likely to decimate higher education budgets.

Not only will schools likely lose some students — and the tuition money that comes with them — but the state is expected to slash funding, since higher education dollars aren’t protected by the state constitution in the same way K-12 dollars are.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging this spring, universities lost hundreds of millions in residence hall rents, meal plans, parking fees and sports tickets. At community colleges, many hands-on vocational programs were canceled. And at the state’s flagship University of Washington, which runs a medical center that has been key to keeping people alive, the hospital is expected to lose a staggering $500 million through September. On Monday, it announced it would furlough 1,500 workers.

The virus lockdown has also struck at the heart of what makes college years so satisfying — the intellectual rewards of wrestling with new ideas, developing a passion for a subject, building friendships with people from other states and countries, living on one’s own. In March, most college students were forced to return home, trying to make what they could of the college experience through the blue light of a computer screen.

When — or if — they return, campus is likely to feel quite different, with big lectures taught online, dorm rooms reconfigured to keep people apart and social distancing measures that will discourage parties.

“I’m a little worried people don’t understand quite how bad this is going to be,” said Western Washington University English professor Bill Lyne, president of United Faculty of Washington State, a faculty union for four Washington public schools (Eastern, Western and Central Washington universities and The Evergreen State College). A veteran of the 2008 recession, he believes a pandemic-induced economic downturn will be particularly hard on higher education. (...)

What the 2008 recession was like, and why this will be different

During the 2008 recession, higher education institutions were among the hardest-hit state agencies. State funding per student declined by about 35 percent in Washington between 2007 and 2012. Only five other states cut higher-education funding by a higher percentage than Washington during the recession years.

Colleges and universities laid off workers, eliminated academic programs, restricted admissions, increased class sizes, decreased the number of advisers, and froze faculty recruitments and salaries. Yet the crisis wasn’t ruinous for the system because state lawmakers also allowed four-year colleges to raise tuition. The UW increased tuition by 82% between 2008 and 2012, arguing the price was justified. Other schools hiked college costs by double-digit amounts, too.

After 2008, state lawmakers made a series of choices that included tuition rollbacks and a generous program to give low- and middle-income families more money to send their children to college. National leaders hailed those choices, but they will surely complicate efforts to stabilize higher education funding here.

In 2015, state legislators rolled back tuition by 5 to 20 percent over the 2015-17 biennium, making Washington one of the few states in the nation to cut tuition rates. At the same time, lawmakers passed a bill that capped tuition increases, tying them to the average annual growth in median hourly wages. That means that under existing laws, tuition can only be raised by about 2.5% this year.

Legislators are expected to return to the Capitol this summer for a special session to help fix the impending budget crisis, and it’s possible they could amend the law capping tuition. But leaders acknowledge it’s going to be hard to raise tuition much anyway, because so many families are dealing with dire financial problems too. “We’re in the middle of a crisis that, in terms of its effect across the population, is very, very deep,” Cauce said. “We’re not going to see double-digit tuition increases.”

Experts predict college enrollment will drop by as much as 20% at some schools, with regional public universities among the hardest hit. Students and their families are likely to demand, as some already have, a cut in the price if some or all classes are taught online.

by Katherine Long, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Donna Grethen/Special to The Seattle Times

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Silent-Reading Party (The Stranger)

Image: uncredited

[ed. I don't know whether to feel heartened or depressed. Strange times.]

Bruce

via:

Sylviane Girard
via:

St. Vincent

The Ultimate Guide to Instant Noodles

As a semi-professional noodle slurper and collector, I’ve eaten hundreds of noodles in my life, but I have a particular soft spot for one type, specifically: the instant kind. You know, those hard squiggly bricks of dried, fried noodles with accompanying seasoning packets that have long been the foundation of the American collegiate diet. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been showing off my impressive collection of instant noodles to my friends on FaceTime like a YouTube beauty guru flaunting their makeup stash.

I love instant noodles for many reasons: They have a nearly indefinite shelf life; they are an easy breakfast, snack, or — with the right bolstering — a full meal; and, they come in a panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, and colorful packaging styles. But while there is nothing wrong with eating instant noodles according to the instructions, it’s their versatility that’s made me a devoted fan. Here’s how to mash-up, deconstruct, and upgrade the dorm room staple.

1. Load up on protein

Yes, many instant noodles come with their own packets of dehydrated vegetable or meat flavoring, but they rarely provide much real taste and add zero in the way of texture. Supplementing your own additional proteins will do a lot to make your instant noodles more satisfying and nutrition-rich. Try simple items like ground meat, sausage, tofu, and leftover fried chicken — or my personal favorite ramen topping, pork char siu. Meat shortage got ya down? Just crack an egg. You can stir it right in to create an egg-drop soup effect, or poach the egg gently in the soup broth to enjoy breaking the creamy yolk.Chicken-flavored ramen with garlicky sautéed kale, roasted chicken legs, and carrots.

2. Go big with toppings

Going nuts with the add-ons at ramen restaurants can mean spending $30 on a bowl of noodles (toppings normally cost between $1 and $3 each.) But at home, you can have as many toppings as the inventory of your fridge’s produce drawer allows: scallions, corn, mushrooms, kale, you name it. Not sure about what to do with all those weird greens in your CSA farm box? Add them to your instant noodles! Fact: There is no such thing as a lousy topping for instant noodles.

3. Deconstruct everything

Each element of the instant noodle package is a multi-purpose cooking superstar. The seasoning packets add a pop to stir-fried vegetables. Broken into bits, the uncooked noodles are an excellent crunchy topping for a salad or even another non-instant pasta dish. Do yourself a favor and add some ramen seasoning to mac and cheese, or how about using those instant noodles to make buns for an at-home ramen burger?

4. Switch up the liquid

To deepen the character of the soup, try cooking the noodles in vegetable or chicken broth instead of plain water. There are plenty of wilder recipes out there, including this one I’m skeptical of that uses milk, but homemade stock is a safe jumping off point.

5. Mash-up different styles

Mixing different instant noodle styles and seasoning packets is a culinary art form in itself, and can have big payoff. Jjapaguri (also called ram-don), the famous dish from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, is actually just a hybrid of two different kinds of instant noodles — Neoguri and Jjappaghetti — and has become one of Korea’s national dishes. The magic comes from the mixing of Neguri’s spicy seafood powder with Jjappaghetti’s savory black bean powder, which ignites a lethal umami bomb. But jjapaguri is just the start. Try mixing Neoguri and curry noodles to create an exuberant, spicy curry broth. Combining super spicy noodles with something cheesy is also 100 percent never a bad idea.

The Ones to Know

Here, then, are some of the best instant noodles to stock up on, categorized by whether or not they’re “brothy” (the noodle soup kind) or “saucy” (brothless noodles with a separate sauce).

BROTHY

MyKuali Penang White Curry Noodle

If you love Penang curry, try adding this noodle to your cart. These wildly popular Malaysian instant noodles are considered some of the best in the world on this heavily opinionated ranking. Three whole flavor pouches — one of them is a paste — make for a deep, coconut-y taste and hearty portion size that you rarely get from instant noodles. Add toppings like fried tofu or prawns.

Neoguri, Spicy Seafood Udon Noodles

Neoguri, a Korean word for raccoon dog (neither a raccoon nor a dog; discuss), has been my top choice for ramen since I started slurping noodles at the age of three. This beloved Korean instant noodle is known for two things: thick udon-like noodles and a spicy seafood broth with actual dried seafood. It’s fantastic with any fishy topping or add-ins.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup

Shin Ramyun might be the very first Korean instant noodle brand, as well as one of the easiest to find internationally: I still remember the exciting moment when I found Shin Ramyun in a random gas station in Alabama. It’s known for its spicy broth, and doubles as an excellent noodle for Korean ramen beginners. Top this with a slice of American cheese to tone down the spice and pump up the greatness.

Prima Taste Laksa Coconut Curry Lamian Noodles

This Singaporean instant noodle inspired by traditional laksa has a paste sachet that can and should be used for stir-frying vegetables, too. The noodles are rounder and less wavy than others, and the white powder adds the signature creaminess.

Mama Noodles

Thai cooking doesn’t shy away from acid, and neither do these Thai instant noodles, with just the right balance of acidic and salty flavors. The wavy noodles and the powdery seasonings make a great snack — though it may not be hearty enough to be a standalone meal. Beef it up with a hard-boiled egg and other vegetable toppings, like scallions.

Sapporo Ichiban Tokyo Chicken Momosan Ramen
Think Japanese shoyu ramen, in instant form: salty, slightly smokey, and clean tasting. It’s great with plain old white-meat chicken breast — which is hard to say about anything, really.

Paldo Gomtang Oriental Style Noodles with Beef Soup Base
Not all Korean instant noodles are spicy! This mild, creamy Korean noodle soup is inspired by gomtang, or beef bone broth. It has an intense beefiness and is excellent with hearty greens like cabbage or scallions. Add some ground beef to make it more filling.

SAUCY

Nongshim, Jjapaghetti (Noodle Pasta with jjajang Sauce)
“On Sundays, I’m the chef for Jjapaghetti” has been a Korean catchphrase for more than a decade. A combination of two dishes — jajangmyun (black bean noodles) and spaghetti— this saucy Korean instant noodle is also what spurred the ram-don trend after its crucial role in Parasite. The accompanying savory black bean sauce is all it really needs, though I highly recommend a luxe drizzle of truffle oil, too.

Indomie Mi Goreng Instant Stir Fry Noodles
If you haven’t tried this Indonesian instant noodle, stop what you’re doing and fix that immediately. The package comes with a liquid seasoning mix of savory onion-flavored oil, sweet-spicy chili sauce, and sweet soy sauce, creating a salty-and-sweet coating for the wavy noodles. Any optional toppings like grilled steak or boiled eggs are just gravy.

by James Park, Eater |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pacific Voyages

After shutting down Buck’s Restaurant my wife Margaret and I got down to the serious business of home defense from our redoubt in the Santa Cruz Mountains by making a half dozen stuffed dummies out of our old clothes from the 70s (‘look out, you vicious hoards, we have hippies on guard!’) and lashed them to the parapets of the hastily erected stockade, armed them with wooden muskets, posted the “Danger—rabid dogs with stainless steel teeth” signs (much to the pups amusement as they lolled about drooling and snoring on the couches) and battened down for the eventual zombie apocalypse

We then inventoried our 21 bags of flour and wondered whose job it was to pick up the yeast. In reality we are off the grid as we have been for 43 years. I realized I have been predicting the apocalypse for decades and thank god I’m finally right. Please send me likes.

And so, I launch Pacific Voyages which is a series of vignettes about mostly obscure islands of the Pacific which populate this ocean most abundantly.

So just sit back and take a break from the end of the world and travel with me to the ends of the world.

The Pacific, with its amazing history, is now going to be my main focus until the cows come home and if they do the dummies, vigilant at the ramparts, will probably shoot them anyway.

I’ll tell you about a French island named Clipperton. A place you have never heard of relatively near California.

And of course I will cover Pitcairn, where the Mutiny on the Bounty folks went and where their descents (at last count 58 of them) still live. They are among the least fun folks I have encountered. Certainly it’s one of most remote places to live. Half the population of the men alternate spending time in Australian prisons for pedophilia and then they switch with the other half because they need at least 10 men to launch the boat to the supply ships.

And I will discuss Ball’s Pyramid. This is an extremely narrow 1,844’ tall rock. It is only here that the third largest bugs in the world live in obscurity.

So trust me when I say I will take to places you will most likely never go. In any case this is a vacation from the cares of the world with not a wiff of virus. Just watch out for malaria, beriberi, blackwater fever, typhus, cannibals, murderous mosquitos, sharks, sea urchins, saltwater crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, political shenanigans, white bread with Spam and wildly overpriced pina coladas.

Behold, the world of mostly boring places awaits.

by Jamis MacNiven, Pacific Voyages |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. For example: Gravina Island (Alaska).]

Trump Administration Moves to Ease Rules for Hunting Bears and Wolves on Federal Lands in Alaska

Two federal agencies this week took steps to increase hunting and trapping on several national preserves in Alaska and in the popular Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

The moves drew alarm from conservation groups who said the new rules will support extreme measures to kill predators and their young in national preserves in Alaska. They said a proposed rule change would allow brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for the first time.

Alaska leaders praised the changes, and hunting groups and a tribal consortium said the new rules will support sport and subsistence hunters in the national preserves.

The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in separate statements that their actions are designed to align federal and state law.

In the broadest action, the park service announced a final rule that will roll back 2015 prohibitions, adopted under President Barack Obama, affecting hunting and trapping in national preserves in Alaska.

The agency manages 10 preserves in the state, including at Denali National Park and Preserve, where the preserve lies west of the park.

Park lands would not be affected by the new rule, the agency said. The new rule should be published in the Federal Register at the end of the month, said Peter Christian, a spokesman with the agency in Alaska.

He said the new rules are designed to allow hunters to take:

• Black bears, including cubs and sows with cubs, with artificial light at den sites.

• Black and brown bears over bait.

• Wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the denning season.

• Swimming caribou.

• Caribou from traveling motorboats.

“These harvest practices would be allowed in national preserves where authorized by the state of Alaska,” Christian said.

In a statement, Defenders of Wildlife called the plans part of an “onslaught” against wildlife by the Trump administration. They allege that the state wants to increase game populations by driving down carnivore numbers, and they say the federal changes are meant to support that effort.

“The Trump administration has shockingly reached a new low in its treatment of wildlife," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife. “Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane.”

by Alex DeMarban, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Bob Hallinen /ADN archive
[ed. Unbelievable.]

Nonessential Work

I have always been a dutiful reader. For most of my adult life, the question of what I want to read has never seemed as the urgent as the question of what I am supposed to read. Which means that, even now, I’m still basically the college freshman I once was, diligently crossing titles off the mental checklist that only ever grows longer. As with many compulsions, the reasons for this sense of obligation are mysterious to me. But I suppose I must at some point have believed that literature was a deeply important human experience, one that I could help foster by becoming an English professor. If I sound unsure, it’s because I have struggled lately to believe in the mission to which I have devoted myself.

I wish I could blame COVID-19 for my loss of faith, but I know it dates back further. Tasked with acting inspired, moved, transported by literature in front of roomfuls of students on a weekly basis, I have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to summon the requisite emotions. In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether literature really is worthy of devotion or whether I have just been conning myself and—with mixed results—my students. When, several weeks ago, all nonessential workers were asked to stay home, I felt a pang of self-recognition.

And yet, ironically, since the classes I was teaching at the time continued, I was also in a position where I had to urge my students to keep reading. I had to ask them to find a relatively quiet place in their crowded apartments and sit at their computers discussing what they had read. Why was I insisting on this? What purpose did it serve? One student told me he still had to go to the construction site where he worked, but everyone was trying to stay six feet apart. Another informed me that both her parents were sick, and she had been instructed to remain in her bedroom indefinitely. I expressed sympathy and then turned the conversation back to the text. “Stay safe, everyone!” I announced at the end of our Zoom session, “and don’t forget to read through chapter four.”

Since my whole family is now home all the time, I need to sequester myself in my son’s bedroom to get any work done. Through the door, I can hear him doing his math in the living room, arguing with my wife, food being eaten, dishes being done, news on the radio announcing fatality rates. I’m teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for my American Novel class, which I’m excited about because A) it’s a book that’s never before failed to revive my sense of the world as worthy of awe and wonder and B) I’ve taught it already and I know I can get through it quickly and return to all the other things I need to do.

I read:

One evening that summer we came into the kitchen and Sylvie was sitting in the moonlight, waiting for us. The table was already set, and we could smell that bacon had already been fried. Sylvie went to the stove and began cracking eggs on the edge of the frying pan and dropping them shoosh into the fat. I knew what the silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses.

It’s a perfect passage for people trapped inside their apartments staring out their windows. Yet I am unmoved. I’m alarmed to discover my old underlinings practically gouged into the page. I remember spending an evening with the lights turned off to see what it was like. I look at my notes and find the following: “Idle chatter closes us off from the world. Robinson’s trying to capture the condition of silence, but she needs to put words on it. So the meaning of some of these moments resides in the silence after we finish the sentence.” I sit in silence after I finish the sentence, waiting for the epiphany to arrive. It doesn’t. The sentence is just syllables strung together. Have I lost my capacity to feel literature?

Then I do what I’ve always done as a dutiful reader—move on to the next book on the syllabus. In this case, it’s Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum. I’ve never read it before, so I have to pay much closer attention than I did to Housekeeping. I feel guilty devoting several hours a day to reading, but in a kind of fight-or-flight reaction to all the pressures around me, my attention rivets itself to the text. I don’t find it extraordinary. But I do begin to feel the effects that reading literature carefully can have on me. My mind composes itself; the oxygen seems to reach deeper into my body; the world relaxes its grip.

Erdrich’s novel is about a drum made by a Native American man broken by his wife’s desertion and his daughter’s death. It’s about lives going off track and then sometimes righting themselves. It’s about how the labor of crafting well-made objects can be therapeutic, but also what happens when those objects are taken from the communities they are meant to serve. The cast of characters is large and initially confusing, but on my fourth day of reading I start to see how their storylines are going to converge. While I find the slow process of tracking the various characters’ journeys toward resolution almost hypnotically satisfying I also begin looking forward to the final page, to that moment of culmination that well-designed novels are sometimes able to produce when everything feels connected, when the end recalls the beginning, and when I briefly seem to experience the whole thing all at once. Ideally, after I’m finished, I’ll get that strange post-reading high, that feeling of being both outside and inside my own life, like my quotidian experiences have assumed a novelistic shape, like I’m revisiting this particular afternoon from the afterlife, free of all the worry and dread that prevented me from appreciating it the first time around.

But I don’t quite make it. (...)

At first I am annoyed. The narrator’s voice suddenly sounds trite, too eager for uplift. But then it occurs to me there might be another reason I’m resisting her experience. Contemplating a sacred object thought to heal and redeem those who come into contact with it, she admits she cannot say, “I believe, I am convinced.” Is it possible I identify too much with her? The source of the drum’s power, Erdrich suggests, is precisely the conviction of those who “come together around it”—a conviction inspired by the drum but also responsible for its transformative influence. Might there be an answer here to my own dilemma? If I had conviction, in other words, would literature magically regain its power?

by Timothy Aubry, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Ojibwa drum ca. 1875, Detroit Institute of Arts
[ed. As mentioned earlier, A Gentleman in Moscow is a great book for these tough times.]

Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement

There is a script to life that most of us have internalized, whether consciously or not. It’s in many of the most beloved fictional stories, and—from the outside, at least—it looks like the lives of successful people tend to follow it as well. It is often called the hero’s journey, or the monomyth.

The 19th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor was the first to identify the hero’s journey in literature. As he showed, many great adventure stories throughout history follow the basic formula. This is true from the Bible’s story of King David to Star Wars today. You can think of it as having three parts. The first is the call to adventure, where the hero-to-be is stimulated to act in some bold way, usually to meet a daunting task—say, fighting Goliath, or the Empire. The second is the ordeal, in which the hero is brutally tested and has to beat long odds—such as vanquishing a giant in battle or blowing up the Death Star. The third is victory, where the hero wins against these odds and returns home, triumphant.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that successful people tend to see their own lives through the lens of this myth. “He is no hero who never met the dragon,” Jung wrote. “Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.” Jung sounds like an egg-headed Tony Robbins there: Want to be a winner in your career? Then live your own hero’s journey—set your goals, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, win, and return victorious! The End.

It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.

Of course, some people enjoy retirement, but since I have been writing about happiness later in life, many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored. In search of—well, they’re not quite sure what—some have made bad choices, tanking their marriages (leading to what social scientists call “gray divorce,” which doubled in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015) or making stupid business decisions they don’t think they would have made when they were still employed. One person told me, “Since I quit working, I feel like a stranger to myself.”

The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.

by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Jan Buchczik
[ed. See also: 4 Rules for Identifying Your Life’s Work; and Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think (The Atlantic).]