The Next Pandemic: Homesickness

When will we be able to fly again, like we did in the Before Times? Earlier this month, James Fallows offered a grim answer to that question in the Atlantic, surveying experts who thought a return to normalcy might come anywhere between four years and “never.” And for a Slate roundtable, Andrés Martinez asked three experts the same question: One thought maybe 2022 or 2023, and another thought that in the course of the industry’s contractions, airlines might solve their many problems by raising prices, making safe air travel inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy.

To wonder about travel is to mourn lost pleasures—when will I ever see London again?—but also to contemplate matters much more intimate and heartbreaking. My immediate family lives in New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. My extended family is in Vermont, New Hampshire, California, Indiana, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, and Idaho. (Did I miss anyone?) We usually get together at least once a year, at a family camp on a lake in New Hampshire; this year’s outing has just been officially canceled. Will I get to see my longtime friends at our annual retreat in New York? I seriously doubt it. Will I even get to New Hampshire to see my parents—a trip I used to see as the bare minimum when it comes to summer travel? (We could possibly drive, but with a germ-spreading preschooler in tow, our uncertainty about the safety of hotels and rest stops feels acute.) The question fills me with a flood of nostalgia—for the loons on the lake, the crickets in the fields, and the lilies in my mom’s garden.

For those living across borders and oceans from their family, the situation is even worse. A friend who moved to Australia two years ago—and now has an 8-month-old baby—was planning to visit her family in the States multiple times this year; that will have to wait. “Hands down, the hardest part of having a baby right now is feeling so far away from my family,” she wrote to me. Another, stuck across the U.S.-Canada border from his elderly parents, is unsure whether and when he and his family can get across to see them, and feels “sadness and fear” when he thinks about the separation: “The future has become a zone of mystery, and it’s often easier to avoid talking about it.”

I asked readers in our Slate Parenting Facebook group about their own feelings on this question and got a flood of sadness. Children change fast, and older people have fewer years left than the rest of us have. For parents in the middle, trying to make sure that grandparents get to enjoy as much of their grandchildren’s lives as possible, the situation seems particularly cruel.

“Our trip to see my father in Spain in June was canceled, and his trip here for my son’s bar mitzvah in November may also be canceled,” one person wrote. “We normally see him twice a year, and it’s really hard. I can take a year, a year and a half, but I have to think we will be able to see him again regularly in the future.” Another admitted feeling new resentment toward a parent who had chosen, for reasons of joy, to live far away in a beautiful place, relatively inaccessible to family. (As the sibling of a dear someone who adopted Alaska as his home, I see you.) A third was contemplating leaving the Midwest to move to the East Coast, in order to be near family. “It is an extremely difficult decision,” she wrote, “to choose staying and not seeing family for the next year, or moving and risking long-term unemployment in the event we can’t find a job in the new state.”

Of course—as other respondents to my post reminded us—the world is full of people who have moved very far away from family and don’t get to see them for years due to a lack of money. American history is also replete with examples of people who, for various reasons, found themselves separated from family by huge distances. Many suffered for it. In Homesickness: An American History, Susan Matt found that homesickness and its companion, nostalgia, were omnipresent in American life before the 20th century. Despite any impression we might have that the pioneers sported stiff upper lips out there in their little houses on the prairie, the historical record is full of people weeping for the homes they left behind. During the Civil War, doctors for the Union Army diagnosed thousands of soldiers as suffering from “nostalgia”; some military bands were warned not to play the popular song “Home, Sweet Home,” lest their listeners reflect too much on what they were missing.

Perhaps we will look back at the decades before the pandemic as a historical aberration: a singular time, when a certain, privileged group of Americans could expect to use air travel to sustain their family ties and choose their homes accordingly.

by Rebecca Onion, Slate |  Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photos by Nataly-Nete/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and AlxeyPnferov/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Minneapolis Police Now Requiring Officers To Undergo Ergonomics Training To Better Protect Knees

MINNEAPOLIS - Apologizing for a lack of oversight following the death of George Floyd after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned him to the ground, Minneapolis Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they are now requiring all officers to undergo ergonomics training to better protect their knees. “After reviewing video of the incident, we are disturbed by the officer repeatedly placing excessive stress on the knee joint, and will immediately implement stretching protocols to ensure this never happens again,” said a spokesperson for the Minneapolis police, noting that the officer’s actions were completely antithetical to the department’s standards for long-term joint health. “Frankly, the officer could have done permanent damage to his ACL while crushing a suspect’s windpipe like that. If our officers are going to be out in the field kneeing people in the neck over and over again, that’s a repeat-use injury just waiting to happen, and we must address it. We need to ensure all of our officers know how to act in a more dangerous situation where they may be required to lift with their backs.” The Minneapolis Police Department added that normally they would place the involved officer on desk duty, but in this case they didn’t want to risk causing further damage to his knees.

The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First (The Onion).]

Amazon’s Big Breakdown

In the middle of March, as Americans faced down a terrifying pandemic caused by a novel and poorly understood virus, only one choice felt certain, or at least safe. It was time for America’s all-­purpose disaster response; it was time to stock up. But this time-­honored routine was newly challenging. The broad, sterile, fluorescent aisles of supermarkets and big-box retailers suddenly felt more like viral gantlets. In some cities, lines stretched out the doors, suggesting chaos and barren shelves inside. In many states, whole categories of brick­and-­mortar retail were shut down, either voluntarily or by edict. It was, at perhaps more than any moment in its history, Amazon’s time to shine.

At the online retailer, however, things were not going well. For many shoppers, it was the first place to turn, but demand for certain items was overwhelming the company’s ability to fulfill orders, not just for panic buyers but in general. By March 17, Amazon had suspended shipments to its warehouses of items that were not in ‘‘high demand,’’ scrambling, and often failing, to keep up with orders for soap, sanitizers and face masks, as well as a wide range of household staples, including food. By then, customers looking for these items were, for the first time, experiencing an Amazon that was conspicuously broken. Empty shelves in a supermarket are self-­explanatory. But on Amazon, customers were confronted with failures that were much weirder and harder to understand, with, of course, nobody around to explain them.

Searches for antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer turned up page after page of irrelevant products, scams and overpriced items with shipping times weeks or months in the future. (By the end of March, the company said it had removed over 3,900 seller accounts and half a million products in the U.S. for price-­gouging alone.) As time went on, widening shortages told the story of customers’ evolving attitudes, lifestyles and needs in the time of ­Covid-19: webcams, exercise equipment, video-­game consoles, diapers, bleach. (By April, hair clippers.) In categories under high demand, well-known brands appeared to be sold out, as were direct competitors, also-rans and half-­related items. By May, some customers searching for hand sanitizer were still being presented, on the first page of search results, with Kindle ­e-books about how to mix it at home.

Here, in a time of crisis, Amazon’s vaunted e-­commerce machinery was failing, and at the very tasks for which its millions of customers flocked to it. All of a sudden, the Everything Store wasn’t even as well stocked as, say, an urban corner store, or a gas station, or a smaller online retailer. To customers trying to place orders, it didn’t just seem overwhelmed — the site seemed broken, more like a sprawling, malfunctioning machine than a retailer under unusual stress. More than just failing them, it seemed to be exposing them to scams and exploitation, a peculiar sort of store that seemed to have lost control of its own shelves. There were signs of distress in Amazon’s vast network of fulfillment centers, too. Employees were falling ill. Some workers were staying home out of fear for their own health; others staged walkouts.

In so many ways, this was the future Amazon had been planning for: Brick-­and-­mortar stores were closed, consumers were eager to order all manner of things online and the brand was all but synonymous, already, with e-­commerce. And yet in a statement released with Amazon’s first-­quarter earnings, the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, braced investors for a rocky period. ‘‘If you’re a share­owner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,’’ he said. About $4 billion in expected operating profit for the next quarter — ‘‘and perhaps a bit more’’ — would instead be absorbed into Covid-­related expenses. The company had experienced a surge in demand, but quarterly operating income had fallen by 43 percent in North America year over year. Internationally, it had lost money. In the statement, Bezos praised his company’s ‘‘adaptability and durability’’ but said the Covid crisis had been ‘‘the hardest time we’ve ever faced.’’

In April, however, Amazon announced that it had hired 175,000 workers in its fulfillment-­and­delivery network — a sign of supreme confidence. Wall Street, too, has proved to be more confident in the company than ever; after a brief dip at the height of Amazon’s Covid-­related troubles, the company’s stock price is hovering near a record high, assuring Bezos’s status as the richest person in the world by a large margin. Indeed, few doubt that Amazon will overcome this ‘‘hardest time.’’ To customers and investors alike, the company has long been the alternative to modes of shopping that may now be in accelerated and terminal decline. But for a few weeks, Amazon — the borderline-­magic website that makes things appear on your doorstep — showed us what it was really made of, revealing something more complicated and delicate than its seamless surface usually lets on: machinery half-built and already straining under its own success, supported by an army of invisible middlemen and kept running by hundreds of thousands of workers.

As of its most recent disclosure, Amazon employed 840,400 workers around the world. More than 150 million people subscribed to Prime, paying an annual fee in exchange for, among other things, access to free, fast shipping. In recent years, Amazon has been scaling up aggressively in virtually every dimension that matters: Each year, its systems are bolstered to handle more people, more demand, more volume, more stress. Since 2014, its revenue has tripled.

Entering 2020, well into its third decade of ruthless expansion, Amazon was operating with a powerful tailwind. More Americans were doing more shopping online; its biggest online competitors were still hopelessly behind; the collapse of American brick-­and-­mortar retail — Amazon’s true competition — was accelerating, and its acquisition of Whole Foods had successfully given the company a way into another industry on which it had ambitious designs. For regular customers, ordering from Amazon is less an experience than a routine — a repetitive, second-­nature interaction with a machine that brings you things; a faint but recognizable consumer version of the processes that repeat, ever faster, in Amazon’s warehouses.

It benefits Amazon to be understood as an online store because it leads to underestimation. Amazon competes with Walmart, but Walmart isn’t its competition — at least not in the way that Target was to Walmart, or Walmart was to Kmart. Rather than a retail operation with a website, Amazon is better understood as a set of far more ambitious commerce-­related systems overseen by a single company. This arrangement might be easiest to see in Amazon Web Services. Through A.W.S., Amazon rents hosting and computing infrastructure to companies big and small. Instead of buying, operating and updating their own data centers, clients including Netflix, Apple and the United States government rent space and computing power from Amazon. Where possible, Amazon engages with this infrastructure as something like a customer. Netflix runs on A.W.S. — but so does Amazon’s Netflix competitor, Prime Video.

Beneath the surface, Amazon’s retail operation works in much the same way. It is not a unified retail company through which Amazon sells products it has sourced or manufactured itself. It’s a platform connecting millions of customers with millions of sellers — none, of course, as large as Amazon itself. In exchange for a fee, Amazon lets a wide variety of parties sell goods through Amazon, right alongside those sold by Amazon. In exchange for more fees, Amazon will let you advertise those items against others, and its own. In accordance with another fee structure, Amazon will receive your products into its warehouses, process your orders and ship them to customers with the urgency associated with Amazon Prime, with which your listings will be badged. More than half of the products sold through Amazon are sold by third parties, many of which are effectively leasing floor space and logistics capacity — not computer servers but an actual work force — from the company. For brands and manufacturers, not entirely unlike regular users, Amazon is a thing you sign up for and give money to and then live inside, and with, for better or for worse.

Amazon’s systems are designed to scale up without clear limits. ‘‘On the internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs,’’ Bezos told Businessweek in 2001. ‘‘You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small.’’ Amazon, two decades later, is a collection of systems that are either already big or that Bezos believes might one day become big: its stores, including Amazon, Zappos and Whole Foods; Amazon Web Services; its media platforms, Prime Video and Music, the Kindle store and Audible; its newer acquisitions and platforms, like the streaming site Twitch, or Ring, the home-­security-­camera company. Most Amazon investments are engineered for the possibility, at least, of category supremacy. Some have already achieved it.

by John Herrman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Comrie

[ed. Recommended: Cookie Remover (Chrome) if you're having problems viewing NYT articles.]

Over It

We’re over it. The masks, the kids, the Lysol. Over it. The tragic hair, the diminished hygiene, the endless construction next door, the Zoom meetings from hell, the mind games with the unemployment office, the celibacy, the short tempers and long evenings, the looking forward to the mail, the feeling guilty about the mail carrier working double time, the corporate compassion pushing products we didn’t need even before the world went funky and febrile. The now-more-than-everness, the president-said-whatness. Over it. Does 99.1 count as a fever? Over it. Some of us have reached the outskirts of Netflix, and we’re over it. Some of us can’t make rent; over it. And so we are deciding to have a summer after all, it seems. A summer of playing freely, of living dangerously. One hundred thousand dead, 40.8 million jobless claims. Not past it, but over it.

"We can't keep fighting the virus from our living room," Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R, clearly over it, said Wednesday.

"There is a pent-up demand" to resume normal life, said President Donald Trump, also over it, in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "And you're going to see it more and more."

"I think everybody is kind of over it, you know what I mean?" says a Realtor named Toni Mock, on the phone from Jacksonville, Fla.

Her 2019 was better than any of her 25 years in the business. She wants that roaring Trump economy back. One thing that helped her get over it was the "boaters for Trump" flotilla May 16. She hopped in a friend's 40-foot sportfishing boat with some chicken wings and Corona beers (lol) and joined a fleet of vessels in the Intracoastal Waterway. The sun, the breeze, the "Trump 2020" and "Stop the Bulls---" flags, the kayaks and jetskis, the boats dubbed with carefree puns like "Knot to Worry" - it was "almost biblical," according to Mock.

"It's all a part of getting out there and letting everybody know we're not going to die from this."

And what if the coronavirus surges back, because we’re all over it and having a summer, and we do die from this?

"I have God in my heart, so God could take me out any day," Mock says. "He can take me out in any way he wants to. And if it's my time to go, it's my time to go. I don't think anyone I know is personally concerned. None of us are afraid, because we have God in our souls and God in our hearts. And we don't watch CNN." (...)

"Because everything has changed, everything will change," Mendoza says. "I have friends that planned out their life for the next few years, and now they have to do a whole new thing. I think a lot of students, myself included, are trying to release ourselves from expectations of what might have been, and grapple with reality."

Reality means grappling with the idea that the coronavirus might stalk us for years, even if scientists come up with a vaccine. Reality means wondering how much more we can take. Who wouldn't want to be over it? Beats being under it.

The percentage of American adults experiencing depressed moods has doubled during the pandemic, according to an emergency weekly survey conducted in April by the Census Bureau. Nearly half of adults in Mississippi reported symptoms of anxiety or depression; no state had a higher percentage.

This makes sense to Michael W. Preston, a marriage and family therapist in Jackson, Miss.: The lower your socioeconomic class, the higher your anxiety and susceptibility to mental illness. Preston, whose sessions are exclusively online for now, finds that his patients are frustrated either because others are not taking the pandemic seriously enough, or because they're taking it too seriously. Over the past three months he has seen the balm of togetherness replaced by the irritant of politics, made worse by the fact that there's nothing to do but sit in it.

"There's been a spike not necessarily in anxiety related to covid, but related to being stuck," Preston says. "People are just at the end of their wits. 'Michael, I cannot stay home for another day.' They will and they do, but I think most people are talking about being stuck."

byDan Zak, The Washington Post via ADN | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

[ed. Such a disorienting state of being. A mixture of fear, uncertainty, loss, unreality, anger, hopelessness, helplessness, depression, desperation, etc. etc. A whole range of disquieting emotions, even after so-called 'openings' occur. Trying to be normal, but actually not, psychologically.]

I Will Miss What I Wanted to Lose

Near the end of my tour, in March, the coronavirus cases were rising back home in New York, and the emergency declarations kept coming, as we left California, as we left Colorado, as we got to Idaho. “I just want to go home,” I told John, my husband and musical partner, over and over. On the day of our Boise show, the Idaho governor declared a state of emergency. John and I got on the phone with my agent and my manager to discuss the risk—physical and professional—of canceling. But it was too late. Refunding tickets at that point would have been a nightmare, and I felt a responsibility to the audience. Ten minutes before the show, I had the driver drop me at the stage door. I didn’t go into the green room, didn’t look in a mirror and fix my hair, didn’t pace or make tea. I stood like a statue in the wings, then walked onstage, sang, walked off, got in the car, went back to the hotel, packed, and got the earliest flight back home the next day.

The Boise audience acted like they were at an end-of-the-world party. There were a lot of empty seats—the state of emergency had spooked people—but those who did show up were a little crazed, and really happy. Maybe they realized they weren’t going back out in public for a while. Even though I had a nagging sense of foreboding, my heart opened to them, and theirs to me. I still remember certain faces in that crowd.

I’ve long had a complicated relationship with touring, and the pandemic has made it only more difficult. I always knew what life on the road was costing me. But I didn’t fully appreciate what it gave me until suddenly it was gone.

This time last year, I was walking through an airport parking garage in Reno at midnight, pulling my bag behind me, following John and my tour manager, David, to a rental van, when I suddenly felt as if glue were pouring through the top of my head and working its way to my feet. I stopped and looked around at the rows of rental cars. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me. They didn’t even turn around. Touring musicians have a survivalist attitude.

Once, many years ago, I did a photo session with Annie Leibovitz on a beach on an island off the coast of Maine, in the dead of winter. It was 3 degrees below zero, and she had a team on hand as large as a film crew. There was one heater, powered by a generator, trained on me and no one else. Annie didn’t wear gloves, because she had to shoot. Not a single person commented on the unbearable conditions, not that day, not the next, not ever, although when I saw Annie a few months later she did tell me that she couldn’t bend her fingers for a week afterward.

That’s the essential attitude adopted by most touring musicians I know. Just show up and do it, and don’t whine about the lack of sleep, the equipment problems, the long drives, the missed meals, the airports, the delayed flights, the sometimes-weird audiences, the stalkers, the reviews, the food, or the hotel. As Charlie Watts said, in the early days of being in the Rolling Stones, “I’m not paid for the show. I’m paid for the other 22 hours.” (At least, I think Charlie Watts said that. The genesis of that aphorism is lost in the mists of rock-and-roll history.)

But in that parking garage, the veil lifted: How I was spending my time was how I was spending my life. I no longer wanted to find myself in an airport parking garage at midnight, exhausted and depressed, on the way to a hotel that looked exactly like the one I had just left. I had reached the point that when I got home and someone asked where I had been the week before, I couldn’t remember. It was starting to scare me.

I’ve been touring, on and off, for 40 years. I didn’t envision it, and it wasn’t in my life plan, if I even had a life plan in my early 20s. All I knew was that I wanted to write—prose, songs, poetry, nonfiction, everything. I was a writer from the age of 9. In my late teens, I started writing songs, then recorded demos of those songs; then I got a record deal and made records, and then I found myself in a parking garage at midnight. It was part of the package. You didn’t write songs just to play them in your living room.

I’m not addicted to the road, like many of my friends who are touring musicians. I don’t want to be in motion all the time. I regret time spent away from my children. I never bought a tour bus; the implication of that level of commitment was too much for me, so there have been a lot of airports and a lot of 14-passenger vans. I seldom even rented buses because I was always doing strategic strikes, since I had kids and I wanted to make the parent-teacher meetings and the school plays and help with the homework. Three days out, four at home. One week out, three at home.

by Roseanne Cash, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Roseanne Cash

Yamaha’s “Remote Cheerer” Brings Fan Applause Back to Empty Stadiums

This week, Yamaha announced a plan to put fans back in the stadiums for major sporting events this summer—virtually, at least.

The company's new smartphone application, Remote Cheerer, is designed to allow sports fans to cheer from home in a way their teams can hear in the stadium. The app itself looks and functions much like a typical soundboard app you might use to summon up a Homer Simpson D'oh!—but instead of just making a noise on your phone, it integrates the cheers of potentially tens of thousands of fans and plays them on loudspeakers at the stadium where their teams are playing.

When fully integrated at the stadium itself, the application does a better job of emulating normal crowd noise than the short description suggests. For Yamaha's field test at Shizuoka Stadium, there were amplified loudspeakers placed in each seating section of the stadium, and fans' cheers were localized to the section where they would sit, had they been able to attend the football match personally. The result is a much more diffuse and authentic-sounding crowd noise. (...)

In addition to a preset selection of cheers and boos—which can be customized by the venue to be applicable to the teams that are playing—the app offers repeated-tap options for the crowd to engage in rhythmic clapping or chanting, which should reproduce the imperfect timing of real-life chants and stomps.

by Jim Salter, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Yamaha

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Performance Anxiety

Will the Adult Film Industry Survive the Pandemic?

Like most businesses, the adult movie industry began to seriously discuss the COVID-19 crisis in late February. Keiran Lee, a veteran porn actor-director, relates an incident from that period before the lockdown. “We had a girl call in [who] said, ‘Hey, I’m not feeling too great this morning. I’ve got flu-type symptoms.’ The first thing we said was, `Don’t come to set.’ Because it’s not worth the risk – in our industry, we’re intimate, we’re up close and personal with each other, even the camera guys. So we just canceled the scene that day.”

Two weeks later the pandemic hit.

In a time when a simple touch can kill, one might think a pandemic might be the death knell for a business that relies on physical intimacy now that the industry has instituted a voluntary hold on video productions. But for the time being, this sector of the greater porn industry seems to have landed on its feet, thanks to a decade-long shift in content distribution that has favored performers over large video producers like Vivid Entertainment and Wicked Pictures. Today performers are increasingly able to disseminate their content directly to consumers on a variety of cam and so-called tube sites similar to YouTube, as well as on their social media accounts.

Lee sees the trend continuing through the pandemic – especially for women, who earn about twice what their male counterparts make. “Some of these girls are earning over $40,000 to $50,000 a month from their social,” he says. “Instead of going to work for these companies and being on set for 10, 12 hours a day, earning $1,500 to $2,000, they’re now staying at home and making maybe $1,000 or $1,500 – but they own that content and they make royalties on it.”

Or, as Kevin Blatt, another longtime industry insider puts it: “Cam sites and tubes are absolutely proving that porn is 100 percent recession-proof.”

But not everyone in the adult film industry is recession-proof. Lee admits that “the average male performer is probably seeing his income drop 60 to 70 percent. The average scene rate is maybe about $900 to $1,000 a day, and [before the pandemic] he was probably doing a minimum of 20 scenes a month. So he’s losing a lot.”

The pandemic has completely shut down gay porn star Ray Diesel’s routine. A performer for six years, Diesel usually travels the world doing, he says, “live shows, hosting events and even escorting.”

“My subscriptions have doubled on [online sites],” says Diesel, “which is amazing, and fans are actually tipping me more, so that’s great, but I’m not making nowhere near what I usually will make a month. I would say I’m making a little less than half of what I was making.” The coronavirus has hit video crew members even harder. They have seen all their employment disappear virtually overnight. Former gay performer Leo Forte, who now works exclusively behind the camera, has had to try and find other ways to pay his bills. He’s helped his boyfriend do maintenance work on rental properties. He’s also one of the 489 people who have applied to get some help from the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the North American trade association for the adult industry. The FSC Emergency Fund was organized on March 23 to help the industry’s hundreds of out of work crew members.

As of May 12, the fund for this multibillion dollar industry had raised little more than $146,000, with 400 of 489 applicants each receiving a $300 stipend. “It’s probably unrealistic to expect adult businesses to be better than their mainstream counterparts in this respect,” says Frederick Lane, an attorney who has written about the porn industry for 25 years and is the author of the book Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. “It’s all reflective of an economic system that has gotten badly out of whack.”

“It’s not a lot, but it’s a grocery run for the week or couple of weeks,” says Forte of his stipend. “It’s better than nothing.”

by Alex Demyanenko, Capital & Main | Read more:
Image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

via:

Ry Cooder

Dirty Tricks Of The Public Relations Industry

The birth of the public relations industry was one of the most quietly calamitous events in American history. While much derided and downplayed—try finding a movie or TV show where P.R. professionals aren’t repugnant slimeballs—the industry has been a massively influential presence in our lives since the turn of the 20th century, shaping our thoughts and feelings in ways that have caused immense damage to our environment, our fellow humans, and ourselves. The world would be better off if it simply didn’t exist. But like many unscrupulous activities, P.R. is both extremely profitable and useful to the interests of the wealthy, and for that reason it’s grown and prospered.

The metastasis of the P.R. industry came thanks to a number of simple-yet-effective tricks (more on those later) that most of us would prefer to believe are too obvious to work. Yet more often than not they do work, which is why few people remember that Coca-Cola hired death squads to kill unionized workers in Colombia or that Chiquita bananas are the product of a century’s worth of ecological devastation and human rights abuses. Some (especially the victims’ families) haven’t forgotten, yet their cries for justice have been drowned out by the cheerful, relentless hum of these companies’ powerful P.R. machines. To paraphrase Bob Marley, you can’t fool all the people all the time—but it turns out you don’t have to.

All you need to do is persuade—or bore—a critical mass of people into swallowing your message. Few have ever been adept at this as Edward Bernays, widely regarded as the father of public relations (and modern propaganda). The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays made his bones by helping to stir up public support for U.S. intervention in World War I, then parlayed that success into a long and lucrative career which included such accomplishments as convincing American women that cigarettes (which he dubbed “Torches of Freedom”) were empowering and good for their health, and convincing the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (which has since changed its name to Chiquita).

In his influential book Propaganda (1928), Bernays made a case for the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.” According to Bernays, while some bad actors might seek to manipulate the public for the wrong reasons, “such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life.” He laid out a vision of the world that is chillingly familiar today: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” In his view this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since it was people like him doing most of the governing, molding, forming, and suggesting.

Modern P.R. specialists are both strongly influenced by Bernays’ work and, in some cases, alarmed by its implications. Take Andrew Mckenzie, who penned an article for the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) that urged P.R. pros to be “the conscience of an organization,” and to insist that harmful actions “cannot be reframed or spun,” since this “is bad business, destroys shareholder wealth and ruins brands.” It’s a noble sentiment, but one that is fundamentally at odds with reality. As our editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson has written before, doing harm is often profitable, and the number of brands (personal or corporate) that have been irrevocably tarnished by their misdeeds is far smaller than those who have gotten off largely scot-free. Johnson & Johnson might have had to pay $4.7 billion in damages to women who developed ovarian cancer from using its baby powder, but that’s a tiny fraction of the company’s revenue ($81.5 billion in 2018 alone), and people are still buying Listerine, Neutrogena, and Band-Aids.

It’s clear that the idea of P.R. as a force for good is little more than wishful thinking. In the words of British journalist and author Heather Brooke: “Public Relations is at best promotion or manipulation, and at worst, evasion and outright deception. However, what it is never about is a free flow of information.” Today’s P.R. industry is exceptionally skilled at pretending otherwise. Whether its practitioners are working within an organization or as part of an outside agency, whether they’re representing individuals, businesses, or governments, the methods used are largely similar. None of these tricks are particularly complex at first glance, but that’s why they’re so effective—the best grifts are often the simplest ones.

We’ll now examine the three most important tricks in the P.R. professional’s repertoire. It’s worth noting that none of these tricks are intrinsically evil. In theory (and sometimes in practice) the same methods can be used to advance the goals of saving coral reefs or ensuring healthcare for all, just as easily as they can be used to advocate nuking Iran or using killer drones to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the rules of the P.R. game are much the same as those of college admissions: Those who start off with a big pile of money and know the right kinds of people have an all-but-insurmountable advantage.

Trick #1: “Media Placements”

The most valuable P.R. people in the world are those who can reliably secure their clients a platform in “A1” media outlets like the New York Times, Time magazine, and CNN. For customers who prefer to keep a lower profile, top P.R. pros can also seed favorable coverage of their preferred policies and positions in those same outlets while being careful to omit any mention of their involvement.

The firms who do this work are the crème de la crème of the P.R. profession, pulling in multi-million dollar retainers from ultra-wealthy clients. Take, for example, APCO Worldwide. One of the largest P.R. firms in the United States (it also claims to have 35 offices worldwide in cities from Paris to Tel Aviv to Shanghai), its website proudly proclaims: “We work for bold clients.” Many of those clients, like the Saudi Arabian royal family, are bold indeed—at least when it comes to beheading journalists, causing famines that kill millions of people, or torturing and murdering political opponents.

by Nick Slater, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The American Virus: Two Weeks in May

Week one:​ 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.

As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.’ A Twitter wit writes that, for the massive marble sculpture looming above, ‘It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched.’

Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end of May. The president tweets: ‘Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic.’ He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf World magazine as the best golf course in the UK and Ireland for 2020.

The Senate reconvenes, but not for further pandemic legislation or to consider the more than six hundred bills that have already been passed by the Democrat-controlled House, which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician says that he does not have enough coronavirus tests for all of them.

Republicans continue the fight against voting by mail. (The president has said that if this were universally allowed, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,’ though he himself mails in his ballot.) In Wisconsin in April, the Republican-majority Supreme Court had demanded that voters appear in person, leading to a spike in infections. In Texas, which permits voting by mail for the ill, the attorney general rules that fear of Covid-19 is an ‘emotional reaction ... and does not, by itself, amount to a “sickness”’. (...)

In the ten days after the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, reopens gyms, spas, hair salons, tattoo parlours and other essential services, confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rise by 42 per cent.

Ohio representative Nino Vitale explains why he is opposed to face masks: ‘We’re created in the image and likeness of God. When we think of image, do we think of a chest or our legs or our arms? We think of their faces. I don’t want to cover people’s faces ... That’s the image of God right there and I want to see it in my brothers and sisters.’

As part of the Republican strategy to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment as a rallying point for the presidential election and distraction from the pandemic, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo (who, like many Republicans, calls Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’), says: ‘There is a significant amount of evidence that [the virus] came from that laboratory in Wuhan. The best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.’ When it is pointed out that the director of national intelligence has said that the scientific consensus is that the virus was not artificial or genetically modified, Pompeo says: ‘That’s right. I agree with that. Yeah. I’ve seen their analysis ... I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate.’

Asked by an interviewer what lessons have been learned from the coronavirus, the president replies: ‘Now, the one thing that the pandemic has taught us is that I was right.’ He explains: ‘You know, I had people say, “No, no, it’s good. You keep – you do this and that.” Now those people are really agreeing with me. And that includes medicine and other things, you know.’

by Eliot Weinberger, LRB |  Read more:
[ed. See also: Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over (The Guardian).]

How to Make a Virtual Choir Music Video

Assignment: Select a vocal arrangement, have your group of singers and/or instrumentalists record their performances on their phones, have them send you the videos, edit them together into a virtual choir performance, and post the final video online. Sounds simple, right? Well, I decided to try. Here’s what I discovered along the way.

What are the steps involved in making one of these music videos? Here you go.

Contact Your Musicians

You can use any means you are comfortable with such as email, Facebook Messenger, etc. I would recommend not texting, so you aren’t overwhelmed with messages!

Choose a Song

You can open up the song-selection process and allow everyone on the project to give suggestions. Once you decide on the song, you can purchase a vocal arrangement or write your own. You can create a backing track for the musicians to use when recording or just have everyone record to a metronome or a click track. Since you’re going to blend them all together, you’ll definitely need a pitch reference, so some musical guide track is recommended. It would be wise to select a constant tempo. This will allow you to edit to a grid and make post production much, much easier.

Instruct Your Musicians on How to Record

Your musicians will likely have varied experience with recording and will probably be using their phones to capture both audio and video. In that case, you need to give clear instructions to ensure everyone captures the best recording possible. Here’s a list of guidelines to pass on to your musicians.

1. Ask everyone to record to your backing track or click track. Have them use earbuds/headphones to ensure there is minimal bleed from the track into the phone microphone. Ask people to not turn up the volume of the track too loud so it isn’t picked up by the mic.

2. Ask everyone to find the quietest place in their house. Remind people not to run major appliances while recording and to limit other sources of noise like dogs, children, etc. Even then, there will be some unwanted noise and an audible hiss from the phone mics. This can be minimized with noise reduction software, which I will discuss later on.

3. Have all your musicians select the part they want to sing (e.g., soprano, alto, tenor, bass, solo, etc.). If you lack enough singers for a section, you can always have some singers record two parts.

4. Ask everyone to find a neutral backdrop, such as a blank wall, with decent lighting for their video. You may wish to send them a screenshot of another virtual choir video to use as a reference.

5. You may want to ask everyone to shoot their videos in portrait mode (vertical) rather than landscape (horizontal). This will make video editing simpler and cleaner. The above screenshot is a good example of that.

6. Remind people not to hold their phones while recording. It will be moving around and distracting. You can rest the phone on a solid surface or use a cheap phone tripod. I like using an iKlip Xpand Mini attached to a mic stand when I record with my phone.

7. Ask everyone to upload their videos to a shared folder through a service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Alternatively, using services like WeTransfer or Hightail will work, but uploading all of them to a single location will allow you to be more organized throughout the editing process.

8. Once everyone has uploaded their videos, download them to a designated folder on your computer or hard drive.

Now for the fun part: editing!

by Jacob Dupre, Sweetwater |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jonathan Wateridge, Another Place: Valley Home, 2009
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Stig Claesson, Composition with Moose and Fir Tree
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Corporate Rescue

March 23, 2020 was a critical day in U.S. history, though at the time it felt like another 24 hours on the road to pandemic apocalypse. Over 47,000 Americans had contracted the coronavirus by official count, and hundreds of thousands more were walking around with it undiagnosed. Deaths were just starting to spike. Historic job losses had commenced, as lockdowns cascaded across America with no end in sight. The stock market closed more than 35 percent off its peak, continuing an epic slide that had started a month earlier.

But two actions on March 23 would swing investors from despair to relief, and reveal who really matters in America.

That morning, the Federal Reserve announced the deployment of additional “tools to support households, businesses, and the U.S. economy overall in this challenging time.” The measures included many actions taken during the 2008 financial crisis, with one new wrinkle: Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

Backstopping corporate bond markets would support investors and capital owners. By the evening of March 23, investor confidence was lifted even further; reports announced progress on a record $2.2 trillion congressional rescue package, a large chunk of which would go to support the Fed’s interventions in corporate bond and other markets.

What would become known as the CARES Act became law on March 27, and the investor class has never looked back. While Americans struggle to file unemployment claims and extract stimulus checks from their banks, while small businesses face extinction amid a meager and under-baked federal grant program, the Fed has, at least temporarily, propped up every equity and credit market in America. And in a testament to its strength, it did so without spending a single cent.

The mere announcement of future spending heartened investors, who have relied on Fed support since the last financial crisis. This explains the shocking dissonance between collapsing economic conditions and the relative comfort on Wall Street. Between March 23 and April 30, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketed nearly 6,000 points, a jump of nearly 31 percent, creating over $7 trillion in capital wealth. The April gains were the biggest in one month since 1987.

The same month, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs.

Similarly, the Fed’s promises to purchase corporate and municipal bonds and asset-backed securities and really anything else uplifted credit markets and made corporate borrowing cheaper, a tangible subsidy for large companies. March ended up setting a record for issuance of investment-grade corporate debt — the safest kind of corporate debt. Two hundred and sixty eight billion dollars traded hands that month, according to a Moody’s Analytics study, and April surpassed it, at $296 billion. Overall, $1 trillion in investment-grade bonds have been issued this year, nearly as much as all of 2019, along with tens of billions more in junk bonds from risky companies, which the Fed has also signaled that it would purchase.

Dozens of companies, from troubled aircraft maker Boeing to airline Delta, from Exxon Mobil to T-Mobile, have been tapping credit markets they might never have been able to access, at lower rates than previously offered. The American Prospect and The Intercept have identified at least 49 large companies that have issued corporate bonds since the Federal Reserve announced that it would purchase them. For some, the benefit of cheaper borrowing was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is meaningfully changing the way investors are evaluating the risks for a swath of companies,” said Kathryn Judge, a law professor at Columbia University and expert in financial markets and regulations. The Fed’s support disproportionately flows to large corporations with access to credit markets, Joyce pointed out. “Small and midsized businesses with much more need are more likely to struggle.”

Unlike in 2008, the large corporate entities in line for a bailout didn’t create the crisis in the first place. The Fed’s actions to save corporations from instant bankruptcy, simply by nodding in their direction, beats the alternative. The problem is that this same level of thunderous rescue hasn’t been extended beyond the biggest firms, which could lead to an economic landscape where they dominate society in the very near future. We have a system for central bankers to throw a life preserver to any large corporation, while everyone else must swim several miles to shore themselves.

Congress made the choice to empower the Fed, rather than figure out how to adequately support the rest of the economy and its citizens. And it gave the central bank wide discretion over the process, absolving members of Congress from blame but introducing the Fed’s bias toward large corporations and banks into who gets saved and who doesn’t.

In short, while activists nitpicked about which companies got small business grants worth $10 million, the real bailout, with trillions on the line rather than millions, was happening, quietly, at the Fed.

Investors are supposed to be risk-takers, who earn outsized returns because they put their money on the line. The Fed’s extraordinary support completely flips that, giving a safety net to those who don’t need it and making a mockery of the alleged virtues of free-market capitalism. If nothing the wealthy ventures can be lost, the only people who bear risks in our society are those who don’t have any money to begin with. That’s a recipe for soaring sales in pitchforks.

But what the Fed is doing may not even be sufficient to protect capital. The week of May 11 saw the biggest percentage drop in the stock market in nearly two months. As the Fed actually starts to actually outlay money, even it recognizes that not every crisis can necessarily be solved by lending gobs of money to General Electric. Not only is it socially unsustainable to protect just the rich from a crisis of this magnitude, it may not even work.

by David Dayen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

Existence

If and when our civilization expires, we may not even agree on the cause of death. Autopsies of empires are often inconclusive.

Sixty years ago, a German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class-divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tuckered out after a while.

Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety vs. too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance vs. the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.

Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end. (...)

The Great Filter

Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunchbreak from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be with others to talk to!

Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others ... where are they?”

His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.

Astronomers now use planet-hunting telescopes to estimate how many stars have companion worlds with molten water, and how often that leads to life. Others cogently guess what fraction of those Life Worlds develop technological beings. And what portion of those will either travel or transmit messages. Most conclude -- we shouldn’t be alone. Yet, silence reigns.

Eventually it sank in -- this wasn’t just theoretical. Something must be suppressing the outcome. Some “filter” may winnow the number of sapient races, low enough to explain our apparent isolation. Our loneliness.

Over 10 dozen pat “explanations for the Fermi Paradox” have been offered. Some claim that our lush planet is unique. (And, so far, nothing like Earth has been found, though life certainly exists out there.) Or that most eco-worlds suffer more lethal accidents -- like the one that killed the dinosaurs -- than Earth has.

Might intelligence be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said -- “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the 50 billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.” Or else, Earth may have some unique trait, rare elsewhere, that helped humans move from mere intelligence to brilliance at technology.

Sound gloomy? These are the optimistic explanations! They suggest the “great filter” -- whatever’s kept the numbers down -- lies behind us. Not ahead.

But what if life-bearing planets turn out to be common and intelligence arises frequently? Then the filter lies ahead. Perhaps some mistake that all sapient races make. Or several. A minefield of potential ways to fail. Each time we face some worrisome step along our road, from avoiding nuclear war to becoming skilled planetary-managers, to genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and so on, we must ask: "Is this it? The Big Blunder? The trap underlying Fermi’s question?”

That’s the context of our story. The specter at our banquet, slinking between reflection and foresight, as we turn now to examine a long list of threats to our existence.

Those we can see. (...)

The Enemy Of Wisdom

Suppose we manage to avoid the worst calamities. The world wreckers, extinction-makers and civilization destroyers. And let’s say no black holes gobble the Earth. No big wars pound us back to the dark ages. Eco-collapse is averted and the economic system is kept alive.

Let’s further imagine that we’re not alone in achieving this miraculous endurance. That many other intelligent life forms also manage to escape the worst pitfalls and survive their awkward adolescence. Well, there are still plenty of ways that some promising sapient species might rise up, looking skyward with high hopes, and yet -- even so -- fail to achieve its potential. What traps might await us because we are smart?

Take one of the earliest and greatest human innovations -- specialization. Even way back when we lived in caves and huts, there was division of effort. Top hunters hunted, expert gatherers gathered, and skilled technicians spent long hours by the riverbank fashioning intricate baskets and stone blades. When farming created a surplus that could be stored, markets arose, along with kings and priests, who allocated extra food to subsidize carpenters and masons, scribes and calendar-keeping astronomers. Of course, the priests and kings kept the best share. Isn’t administration also a specialty? And so, soon a few dominated the many, across 99% of history.

Eventually though, skill and knowledge spread, increasing that precious surplus, letting more people read, write, invent ... which created more wealth, allowing more specialization and so on, until only a few remained on the land, and those farmers were mostly well-educated specialists, too.

In the West, one trend spanned the whole 20th Century: a steady professionalization of everything. By the end of the millennium, almost everything a husband and wife used to do for their family had been packaged as a product or service, provided by either the market or the state. And in return? A pilot had merely to pilot, and a firefighter just fought fires. The professor simply professed, and a dentist had only to dent. Benefits abounded. Productivity skyrocketed. Cheap goods flowed across the globe. Middle-class citizens ate strawberries in winter, flown in from the other hemisphere. Science burgeoned, as the amount that people knew expanded even faster than the pile of things they owned.

And that is where -- to some of us -- things started to look worrisome. (...)

You see, science kept making discoveries at an accelerating clip. Already, a researcher had to keep learning ever-increasing amounts in order to discover more. It seemed that just keeping up would force each of us to focus on ever-narrower fields of study, forsaking the forest in order to zero-in on tiny portions of a single tree. Eventually, new generations of students might spend half a lifetime learning enough to start a thesis. And even then, how to tell if someone else was duplicating your effort across the world or down the hall?

That prospect -- having to know more and more about less and less -- seemed daunting. Unavoidable. There seemed to be no way out ...

... until, almost overnight, we veered in a new direction! Our civ evaded that crisis with a technological side-step that seemed so obvious, so easy and graceful, that few even noticed or commented. There were so many exciting aspects to the Internet Age, after all. The old fear of narrow over-specialization suddenly seemed quaint, as biologists started collaborating with physicists and cross-disciplinary partnerships abounded. Instead of being vexed by overspecialized terminology, experts conversed excitedly, more so than ever!

Today, hardly anybody speaks of the danger that vexed us so. It’s been replaced by the opposite concern -- one that we’ll get to next time.

Only first consider this.

Sure, we may have escaped the specialization trap, for now, but will everyone else manage the same trick, out there across the stars? Our solution now seems obvious -- to surf the tsunami! To meet the flood of knowledge with eager, eclectic agility. Refusing to be constrained by official classifications, we let knowledge bounce and jostle into new forms, supplementing professional skill with tides of zealous amateurism.

But don’t take it for granted! The approach may not be repeated elsewhere. Not if it emerged out of some rare quality of our natures. Or pure luck.

Nor would it have been allowed in most human cultures! Which of our past military or commercial or hereditary empires would have unleashed something as powerful as the Internet, letting it spread -- unfettered and free -- to every tower and hovel? Or allow so many skilled tasks to be performed by the unlicensed?

One can imagine countless other species -- and our own fragile renaissance -- faltering back into the dour scenario that we students mulled on those gloomy nights. Slipping into an endless, grinding cycle where specialization -- once a friend -- becomes the worst enemy of wisdom.

The Opposite Extreme

We just talked about one more way that civilizations might fail to achieve their dreams -- not because of calamity, or war, or ecological collapse, but at the hands of something mundane, even banal. (...)

Much has been written about the problems that accompany Continuously Divided Attention. The loss of focus. A susceptibility for simplistic/viral notions. An anchorless tendency to drift or lose concentration. And these are just the mildest symptoms. At the extreme are dozens of newly named mental illnesses, like Noakes’s Syndrome and Leninger’s Disease, many of them blamed on the vast freedom we have won -- to skitter our minds hither and yon.

Have we evaded one dismal failure mode -- the trap of narrow overspecialization -- only to stumble into the opposite extreme? Shallow-mindedness? Pondering thoughts that span the farthest horizons, but only finger-deep?

Listen to those dour curmudgeons out there, decrying the faults of our current “Age of Amateurs.” They call for a restoration of expertise, for a return to credentialed knowledge-tending, for restoring order and disciplined focus to our professions and arts and academe. Is this just self-interested guild-tending, as some call it? Or are they prescribing another badly needed course correction to stave off disaster?

Will the new AI systems help us deal with this plague of shallowness ... or make it worse?

One thing is clear. It isn’t easy to be smart in this galaxy of ours. We keep barely evading a myriad pitfalls along our way to ... whatever we hope to become.

When you add it all up, there’s not much surprise that we seem so alone.

by David Brin, Salon (excerpted from his novel Existence) |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Geez... I just finished one of the most uplifting novels one could read in a quarantined pandemic and then started this one. Bad choice. If you're unfamiliar with the Lifeboat Foundation, check out this FAQ. Plus, can I say I detest all the damn ads on this site? (usually have Adblocker working, but can't read the article with it on - a good reason to avoid Salon in the future.)]

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via: here and here