Friday, June 5, 2020
Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty
Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is one of Tyler’s favorites of the year. The book, the result of eighteen months of field research, describes how young women exchange “bodily capital” for free drinks and access to glamorous events, boosting the status of the big-spending men they accompany.
Ashley joined Tyler to discuss her book and experience as a model, including the economics of bottle service, which kinds of men seek the club experience (and which can’t get in), why Tyler is right to be suspicious of restaurants filled with beautiful women, why club music is so loud, the surprising reason party girls don’t want to be paid, what it’s like to be scouted, why fashion models don’t smile, the truths contained in Zoolander, how her own beauty and glamour have influenced her academic career, how Barbara Ehrenreich inspired her work, her unique tip for staying focused while writing, and more.
COWEN: Let’s just jump right in. When wealthy men are in clubs, why do they want other wealthy men to see them surrounded by beautiful women?
MEARS: [laughs] I feel like you don’t really need a sociologist to answer that question. Beautiful women are a sign of status, of high status. Wealthy men like to surround themselves in the same way that you would see a curated entourage in lots of different historical forms.
Beautiful women in the VIP clubland are a sign of status. And it’s a certain kind of beauty. That’s the interesting thing about beauty, right? It’s always in the eye of the beholder. But in the VIP world, which caters to these rich men, the kind of beauty is the kind that’s defined as very rare according to the fashion modeling industry: very tall, very thin, predominantly — although not exclusively — white, and with a look that you would see in a high-end fashion magazine.
COWEN: But I know, for instance, a lot of CEOs from the Midwest, and they are not seeking to see themselves surrounded by beautiful women. They hang out with their wives, whom they seem to love. Their wives are more or less the same age. What accounts for that cross-sectional variation?
MEARS: Very Important People is not about all economic elites. It’s about this subsection of economic elites who are predominantly young. They’re affluent tourists or businesspeople who are coming through places like New York, or on this global jet-set calendar in, for instance, Saint-Tropez or St. Barts or the Hamptons. It’s a certain type of predominantly young, economically powerful man that goes to these spaces and can purchase, over the course of the night, that feeling of being high status, that this feeling, this temporary feeling of being the big man in anthropological terms. (...)
COWEN: Let’s say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women, thinking that the food will be worse. Is that a good rule or a bad rule?
MEARS: I know this rule, because I was reading that when you published that book. It was when I was doing the field work in 2012, 2013. And I remember reading it and laughing, because you were saying avoid trendy restaurants with beautiful women. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m one of those people that’s actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this scene and producing status.” So yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
The thing that maybe is interesting for you about my book that helps explain your book is that the beautiful women that are inside these restaurants, giving off status — that there’s this whole organized system to bring them there. The restaurants and the clubs hire, on a contract basis, this group of people called promoters, party promoters. Their job is to go out and find a bunch of beautiful women and then bring them to the restaurant.
Then the women get dinner for free, so the food comes out family style, and they eat for free. That sets up the obligation that then she’ll go with him to the nightclub, which is usually upstairs or attached in some way, or the managers are connected. They’re both profiting on having beautiful women in there and selling the experience of being around beautiful women. But indeed, the food’s not that great.
COWEN: In this whole arrangement, how happy are the club girls? But relative to their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar.
MEARS: Well, it’s an interesting question. I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP — they’re motivated by a range of things. For many of them, because they’re recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry — and that was one thing that I found in my first book, that most models don’t make very much money — they actually need to eat. They don’t have very much money. So the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks, like expenses paid, wining and dining, and these experiences that models otherwise can’t afford.
Which is ironic because, for you, Tyler, you’re looking for a good restaurant, and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people. The reality is, most of them probably can’t afford to eat in those places on their own. Or maybe they’re actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal. So in that sense, there’s a tradeoff that’s clear. And I think that the promoters in this VIP clubland do subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry.
But the other question is, what else would a woman that’s, say, 20, of limited financial means, be doing in the city? Well, there’s lots of other things. In some ways it appeals to a woman’s taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous, high-end world and participate in it even for a short while. Definitely there’s a tradeoff. And people talked about it as being a win-win.
There are downsides, clearly, that they recognize — that when the beautiful women go to these restaurants, the food comes out, but you don’t get to choose what you want off of the menu. It comes out family style, and usually it’s the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that’s cheaper. If it’s a sushi restaurant, it’s never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to. It’s the cucumber rolls. [laughs]
So there’s some downside to it, in that the women don’t get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they’re going to sit and what exactly they get to do, but they do get a piece of this affluent city that they would otherwise be excluded from.
Ashley joined Tyler to discuss her book and experience as a model, including the economics of bottle service, which kinds of men seek the club experience (and which can’t get in), why Tyler is right to be suspicious of restaurants filled with beautiful women, why club music is so loud, the surprising reason party girls don’t want to be paid, what it’s like to be scouted, why fashion models don’t smile, the truths contained in Zoolander, how her own beauty and glamour have influenced her academic career, how Barbara Ehrenreich inspired her work, her unique tip for staying focused while writing, and more.
COWEN: Let’s just jump right in. When wealthy men are in clubs, why do they want other wealthy men to see them surrounded by beautiful women?
MEARS: [laughs] I feel like you don’t really need a sociologist to answer that question. Beautiful women are a sign of status, of high status. Wealthy men like to surround themselves in the same way that you would see a curated entourage in lots of different historical forms.Beautiful women in the VIP clubland are a sign of status. And it’s a certain kind of beauty. That’s the interesting thing about beauty, right? It’s always in the eye of the beholder. But in the VIP world, which caters to these rich men, the kind of beauty is the kind that’s defined as very rare according to the fashion modeling industry: very tall, very thin, predominantly — although not exclusively — white, and with a look that you would see in a high-end fashion magazine.
COWEN: But I know, for instance, a lot of CEOs from the Midwest, and they are not seeking to see themselves surrounded by beautiful women. They hang out with their wives, whom they seem to love. Their wives are more or less the same age. What accounts for that cross-sectional variation?
MEARS: Very Important People is not about all economic elites. It’s about this subsection of economic elites who are predominantly young. They’re affluent tourists or businesspeople who are coming through places like New York, or on this global jet-set calendar in, for instance, Saint-Tropez or St. Barts or the Hamptons. It’s a certain type of predominantly young, economically powerful man that goes to these spaces and can purchase, over the course of the night, that feeling of being high status, that this feeling, this temporary feeling of being the big man in anthropological terms. (...)
COWEN: Let’s say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women, thinking that the food will be worse. Is that a good rule or a bad rule?
MEARS: I know this rule, because I was reading that when you published that book. It was when I was doing the field work in 2012, 2013. And I remember reading it and laughing, because you were saying avoid trendy restaurants with beautiful women. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m one of those people that’s actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this scene and producing status.” So yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
The thing that maybe is interesting for you about my book that helps explain your book is that the beautiful women that are inside these restaurants, giving off status — that there’s this whole organized system to bring them there. The restaurants and the clubs hire, on a contract basis, this group of people called promoters, party promoters. Their job is to go out and find a bunch of beautiful women and then bring them to the restaurant.
Then the women get dinner for free, so the food comes out family style, and they eat for free. That sets up the obligation that then she’ll go with him to the nightclub, which is usually upstairs or attached in some way, or the managers are connected. They’re both profiting on having beautiful women in there and selling the experience of being around beautiful women. But indeed, the food’s not that great.
COWEN: In this whole arrangement, how happy are the club girls? But relative to their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar.
MEARS: Well, it’s an interesting question. I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP — they’re motivated by a range of things. For many of them, because they’re recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry — and that was one thing that I found in my first book, that most models don’t make very much money — they actually need to eat. They don’t have very much money. So the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks, like expenses paid, wining and dining, and these experiences that models otherwise can’t afford.
Which is ironic because, for you, Tyler, you’re looking for a good restaurant, and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people. The reality is, most of them probably can’t afford to eat in those places on their own. Or maybe they’re actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal. So in that sense, there’s a tradeoff that’s clear. And I think that the promoters in this VIP clubland do subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry.
But the other question is, what else would a woman that’s, say, 20, of limited financial means, be doing in the city? Well, there’s lots of other things. In some ways it appeals to a woman’s taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous, high-end world and participate in it even for a short while. Definitely there’s a tradeoff. And people talked about it as being a win-win.
There are downsides, clearly, that they recognize — that when the beautiful women go to these restaurants, the food comes out, but you don’t get to choose what you want off of the menu. It comes out family style, and usually it’s the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that’s cheaper. If it’s a sushi restaurant, it’s never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to. It’s the cucumber rolls. [laughs]
So there’s some downside to it, in that the women don’t get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they’re going to sit and what exactly they get to do, but they do get a piece of this affluent city that they would otherwise be excluded from.
by Ashley Mearns and Tyler Cowan, Marginal Utility | Read more:
Image: Mercatus Center
Thursday, June 4, 2020
As the Country Burns, Trump Gives Up
A more comprehensive abdication of leadership could scarcely be imagined.
America has now lost more than 105,000 people to a still-uncontrolled virus. Some 40 million are out of work, with the economy in free fall. From coast to coast, cities are burning, protests raging and chaos spiraling in an immense outpouring of pain and anger over police violence that seems only to intensify by the day. Not since the Vietnam War has the country been gripped with such unrest, or faced with so many serious crises at once.
And what is the president of the United States doing amid all this? Tweeting, mostly.
In addition to his usual mix of insults and grievances, Donald Trump has lately used his Twitter feed to air baffling conspiracy theories, express lurid fantasies and offer idle observations on the headlines of the day, as though someone else runs the government. He has scarcely even acknowledged the source of the national turmoil — the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer — let alone effectively addressed it. He betrays no urgency, offers no ideas, and shows no inclination to rise to the moment or heed the voice of the people protesting at his doorstep.
On Monday, after an unnerving speech in the Rose Garden, Trump had police officers clear out mostly peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House — aggressively using smoke canisters, flash grenades and batons, and risking their safety in the process — so he could stage a photo at a nearby church, thereby infuriating the local bishop, the mayor of Washington and a neighboring police department requisitioned for the stunt. It nearly defied belief.
To ask this president to get serious seems almost comically futile at this late date. Except it isn’t funny. The total absence of executive leadership has exacted an appalling price. A coherent national strategy for combating Covid-19 is still nowhere in evidence, even as the president’s coronavirus task force winds itself down. Faced with an economic calamity, the White House offers only blithe optimism and self-congratulation. Amid the worst civil unrest in a generation, an expression of empathy or an exhortation to better angels might palliate the national mood. Yet even these basic steps seem to be utterly beyond Trump’s capacity.
A normal president would recognize the horror of Floyd’s death and all it represents. He or she would insist that riots accomplish nothing productive, while still conceding that the frustrations they express come from centuries of discrimination. And any occupant of the Oval Office should understand that helping unite and repair the country in a time like this is part of the job description, something Trump entirely fails to grasp.
Rarely in American history has a president been so ill-suited for a moment or so decisively overmatched by events. In a crisis demanding resolve and competence, the commander in chief sits at home, feebly tapping on his phone. It’s a potent metaphor — and a national shame.
America has now lost more than 105,000 people to a still-uncontrolled virus. Some 40 million are out of work, with the economy in free fall. From coast to coast, cities are burning, protests raging and chaos spiraling in an immense outpouring of pain and anger over police violence that seems only to intensify by the day. Not since the Vietnam War has the country been gripped with such unrest, or faced with so many serious crises at once.
And what is the president of the United States doing amid all this? Tweeting, mostly.
In addition to his usual mix of insults and grievances, Donald Trump has lately used his Twitter feed to air baffling conspiracy theories, express lurid fantasies and offer idle observations on the headlines of the day, as though someone else runs the government. He has scarcely even acknowledged the source of the national turmoil — the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer — let alone effectively addressed it. He betrays no urgency, offers no ideas, and shows no inclination to rise to the moment or heed the voice of the people protesting at his doorstep.
On Monday, after an unnerving speech in the Rose Garden, Trump had police officers clear out mostly peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House — aggressively using smoke canisters, flash grenades and batons, and risking their safety in the process — so he could stage a photo at a nearby church, thereby infuriating the local bishop, the mayor of Washington and a neighboring police department requisitioned for the stunt. It nearly defied belief.To ask this president to get serious seems almost comically futile at this late date. Except it isn’t funny. The total absence of executive leadership has exacted an appalling price. A coherent national strategy for combating Covid-19 is still nowhere in evidence, even as the president’s coronavirus task force winds itself down. Faced with an economic calamity, the White House offers only blithe optimism and self-congratulation. Amid the worst civil unrest in a generation, an expression of empathy or an exhortation to better angels might palliate the national mood. Yet even these basic steps seem to be utterly beyond Trump’s capacity.
A normal president would recognize the horror of Floyd’s death and all it represents. He or she would insist that riots accomplish nothing productive, while still conceding that the frustrations they express come from centuries of discrimination. And any occupant of the Oval Office should understand that helping unite and repair the country in a time like this is part of the job description, something Trump entirely fails to grasp.
Rarely in American history has a president been so ill-suited for a moment or so decisively overmatched by events. In a crisis demanding resolve and competence, the commander in chief sits at home, feebly tapping on his phone. It’s a potent metaphor — and a national shame.
by Editorial Board, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. Reprinted in full (and taken down if requested by the authors).]
Sports Have Never Felt More Meaningless Than Right Now
One of the many frustrations people have had with the ongoing battles between Major League Baseball owners and the players union about how to get the sport going in 2020 — currently, neither party can even get the other to review their proposals, let alone negotiate on them — is that the two sides are blowing an incredible opportunity to return on July 4. The idea that baseball — a sport whose best players left at the height of their careers to fight in World War II, whose New York teams were a balm after September 11 — is inextricably tied to trying moments in American history is ingrained in the romanticism of the game. Surely owners had that in mind when they proposed Independence Day as a resumption point in the first place. July 4! America! Hot dogs! Apple pie! How could baseball miss such a fastball right down the middle?
But suddenly, after the last week of American history, the idea of a glorious return of the game on the nation’s birthday seems less triumphant than almost unseemly. After two months inside, the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?
This is not baseball’s fault, of course. It has felt inappropriate to talk about any sort of diversion in the wake of this tumult, the president’s rapid public meltdown, the gassing of peaceful American citizens for a photo op, and the sense that everything might just be falling apart; I haven’t noticed people having heated debates about the Dakota Johnson romantic comedy that came out last weekend either, after all. But it sure does make the rush to get back in time for an artificial, rally-together-America deadline seem awfully unnecessary, and maybe even actively ill-advised. Sports, like much of entertainment, exist as a distraction. But, boy, does it seem irresponsible to be distracted right now. (...)
The NBA, typically, has been better than other leagues about this — Spurs coach Gregg Popovich cut loose on Trump and police violence to The Nation’s Dave Zirin — but again, these were issues that Popovich (and his fellow coach Steve Kerr, who said “this is why racists shouldn’t be allowed to be President” on Twitter) had already spoken up about, and ones that have little to do with the sport itself. And while the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver have been ahead of the curve on issues of race and power, eventually they have to get back to the business of playing games. Doing so has been heralded as a “return to normal” since the beginning of this pandemic. But that idea, and that phrasing, looks reactionary, even retrograde and damaging, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the demonstrations across the country. “Return to normal” stops sounding like a plea for reopening the economy and the world of sports and more like something we should be actively fighting against. The whole argument for getting sports back quickly — other than the financial argument — was to give us all some way to get away from our troubles and fears. But maybe we should be facing those troubles and fears. Maybe that’s what this is all about.
There is still a long way to go for sports to return. The NBA has to figure out its format and health procedures; MLB and the MLS have to figure out their financial issues; college sports has to figure out how in the world to justify unpaid college students smashing into each other during a public-health crisis. There is much work to be done. Perhaps it is best if this work is done in private. On Sunday night, the union-management battles of both MLB and MLS splashed into public view — the MLB players gave their seemingly reasonable response to the owners’ proposal but were reportedly met with even more contention (though there might be at last a small sliver of negotiating room in that regard), and the MLS owners threatened to lock out their players before a summer tournament in Orlando began. Regardless of your thoughts on the merits of each side’s viewpoints, when you looked around at America burning, it was hard not to think, Honestly, who gives a shit about any of this right now? Eventually sports are going to return, and we will all cheer. But maybe it’s okay if, in this particular moment, they take their time.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Five Ideas for How Sports TV Could Adapt to a Fanless Universe (The Ringer).]
But suddenly, after the last week of American history, the idea of a glorious return of the game on the nation’s birthday seems less triumphant than almost unseemly. After two months inside, the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?
This is not baseball’s fault, of course. It has felt inappropriate to talk about any sort of diversion in the wake of this tumult, the president’s rapid public meltdown, the gassing of peaceful American citizens for a photo op, and the sense that everything might just be falling apart; I haven’t noticed people having heated debates about the Dakota Johnson romantic comedy that came out last weekend either, after all. But it sure does make the rush to get back in time for an artificial, rally-together-America deadline seem awfully unnecessary, and maybe even actively ill-advised. Sports, like much of entertainment, exist as a distraction. But, boy, does it seem irresponsible to be distracted right now. (...)The NBA, typically, has been better than other leagues about this — Spurs coach Gregg Popovich cut loose on Trump and police violence to The Nation’s Dave Zirin — but again, these were issues that Popovich (and his fellow coach Steve Kerr, who said “this is why racists shouldn’t be allowed to be President” on Twitter) had already spoken up about, and ones that have little to do with the sport itself. And while the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver have been ahead of the curve on issues of race and power, eventually they have to get back to the business of playing games. Doing so has been heralded as a “return to normal” since the beginning of this pandemic. But that idea, and that phrasing, looks reactionary, even retrograde and damaging, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the demonstrations across the country. “Return to normal” stops sounding like a plea for reopening the economy and the world of sports and more like something we should be actively fighting against. The whole argument for getting sports back quickly — other than the financial argument — was to give us all some way to get away from our troubles and fears. But maybe we should be facing those troubles and fears. Maybe that’s what this is all about.
There is still a long way to go for sports to return. The NBA has to figure out its format and health procedures; MLB and the MLS have to figure out their financial issues; college sports has to figure out how in the world to justify unpaid college students smashing into each other during a public-health crisis. There is much work to be done. Perhaps it is best if this work is done in private. On Sunday night, the union-management battles of both MLB and MLS splashed into public view — the MLB players gave their seemingly reasonable response to the owners’ proposal but were reportedly met with even more contention (though there might be at last a small sliver of negotiating room in that regard), and the MLS owners threatened to lock out their players before a summer tournament in Orlando began. Regardless of your thoughts on the merits of each side’s viewpoints, when you looked around at America burning, it was hard not to think, Honestly, who gives a shit about any of this right now? Eventually sports are going to return, and we will all cheer. But maybe it’s okay if, in this particular moment, they take their time.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Five Ideas for How Sports TV Could Adapt to a Fanless Universe (The Ringer).]
Why Everything Feels So Surreal
Maybe it was when you were standing in line at the grocery store—not at the checkout stand, but in front of the grocery store, neatly arranged 6 feet apart from your fellow shoppers.
Maybe it was when you visited your grandma at the nursing home but had to stand outside her window, talking to her on your phone.
Maybe it was when you heard a New York City doctor talk about how her hospital got so overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, they had to bring in a refrigerated semi trailer to hold the dead.
Maybe it was when you saw that in the space of a week, jobless claims in the US went from 282,000 to 3.3 million, as the restaurant and bar and hospitality industries have imploded.
Maybe it was when you realized that toilet paper doesn’t grow on trees after all.
This is surreal, you said to yourself. Maybe over and over. You’ve heard your friends and family say it: just surreal. We in the media call it surreal all the time. Because it is surreal, “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” so says Merriam-Webster. (...)
Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated. We can’t go to happy hour, we can’t get toilet paper when we want it, we can’t plan our annual trip. “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says.
The upending of our normal lives also obliterated the routines, however mundane, that keep us levelheaded: getting up, putting on pants, making breakfast and coffee, commuting to work. “Research does show that when you take people away from the things that are familiar to them, it's surprisingly easy for people to lose track of themselves—their identity, the things that are important to them,” says Susan Clayton, a psychologist at the College of Wooster. “This is one thing that you see happening in cults. And that may sound like a stretch, but when people try and recruit other people into cults, one of the strategies is to take them away from what's normal.” When the recruits are no longer surrounded by their usual physical surroundings and social interactions, it's easier to convince them to adopt new practices and reconsider what’s important to them.
“Our routine is the scaffolding of life,” says Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at the Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD. “It's how we organize information and our time. And without it, we can feel really lost.”
With that comes tremendous stress. The lonely and isolated are now more lonely and isolated. Existing conflicts and stressors, like substance abuse and abusive relationships, can resurface or worsen. “I'm also really worried about families,” says Heinz. “I'm worried about increases in alcohol use. I'm worried about domestic violence. I'm worried about child abuse, because parents are under-resourced.” (...)
If we’d been through this kind of thing before, in the absence of cohesive guidance from the top maybe we could have calmly guided ourselves. But without clear advice for how to handle an unprecedented crisis, we feel helpless. “I think it conveys a sort of dreamlike quality,” says Clayton. “It doesn't feel real because we have no points of reference.”
[ed. See also: All This Chaos Might Be Giving You 'Crisis Fatigue' (Wired).]
Maybe it was when you visited your grandma at the nursing home but had to stand outside her window, talking to her on your phone.
Maybe it was when you heard a New York City doctor talk about how her hospital got so overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, they had to bring in a refrigerated semi trailer to hold the dead.
Maybe it was when you saw that in the space of a week, jobless claims in the US went from 282,000 to 3.3 million, as the restaurant and bar and hospitality industries have imploded.
Maybe it was when you realized that toilet paper doesn’t grow on trees after all.This is surreal, you said to yourself. Maybe over and over. You’ve heard your friends and family say it: just surreal. We in the media call it surreal all the time. Because it is surreal, “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” so says Merriam-Webster. (...)
Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated. We can’t go to happy hour, we can’t get toilet paper when we want it, we can’t plan our annual trip. “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says.
The upending of our normal lives also obliterated the routines, however mundane, that keep us levelheaded: getting up, putting on pants, making breakfast and coffee, commuting to work. “Research does show that when you take people away from the things that are familiar to them, it's surprisingly easy for people to lose track of themselves—their identity, the things that are important to them,” says Susan Clayton, a psychologist at the College of Wooster. “This is one thing that you see happening in cults. And that may sound like a stretch, but when people try and recruit other people into cults, one of the strategies is to take them away from what's normal.” When the recruits are no longer surrounded by their usual physical surroundings and social interactions, it's easier to convince them to adopt new practices and reconsider what’s important to them.
“Our routine is the scaffolding of life,” says Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at the Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD. “It's how we organize information and our time. And without it, we can feel really lost.”
With that comes tremendous stress. The lonely and isolated are now more lonely and isolated. Existing conflicts and stressors, like substance abuse and abusive relationships, can resurface or worsen. “I'm also really worried about families,” says Heinz. “I'm worried about increases in alcohol use. I'm worried about domestic violence. I'm worried about child abuse, because parents are under-resourced.” (...)
If we’d been through this kind of thing before, in the absence of cohesive guidance from the top maybe we could have calmly guided ourselves. But without clear advice for how to handle an unprecedented crisis, we feel helpless. “I think it conveys a sort of dreamlike quality,” says Clayton. “It doesn't feel real because we have no points of reference.”
[ed. See also: All This Chaos Might Be Giving You 'Crisis Fatigue' (Wired).]
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
With Precautions, Golf Is Back. So Are Scoring Squabbles.
The culture of golf is swathed in a code of honor, with players compelled to call penalties on themselves. Golf during a pandemic, however, has introduced quirks to test the game’s noble protocols.
New safety regulations, adopted by golf courses to adhere to coronavirus guidelines, have altered certain game fundamentals and left some golfers quibbling over artificially low scores — which can in turn upend the hierarchy, and gambling outcomes, of a regular golfing foursome. Even the hole in one, golf’s holy grail, is prompting disputes over what constitutes a holed tee shot.
“There’s definitely been a little change in attitudes,” Howie Friday, the head golf professional at the Stanley Golf Course in New Britain, Conn., said with a chuckle last week. In April, Friday had grown accustomed to scores of golfers thanking him for the opportunity to play.
“A month ago, it was nurses, doctors and golf pros and we couldn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Not so much anymore — back to normal.”
The principal source of consternation, a concern shared mostly by serious not casual golfers, is new health guidelines that have affected the golf hole itself. In an effort to reduce high-touch surfaces from golfers reaching into holes to retrieve their balls or removing the flagstick, course operators have tried various solutions, including raising the white liner cup, which is normally inserted in the hole, to about two inches above the green surface. An approaching ball bounces off the cup liner instead of falling into the hole.
The United States Golf Association, a national governing body, issued a temporary rule amendment in March that qualified such a situation as a holed shot — with caveats (more on that later).
Other golf courses have instead inserted into the hole a small piece of foam, similar to noodle-shaped flotation devices used in swimming pools. It allows the ball to descend into the hole, but only slightly, so a player can easily retrieve it without touching anything else.
Golfers, however, have universally found that aiming at the raised hole liner is easier than putting in normal conditions, in part because sometimes the ball barely skims its edge. The same shot, without the modification, would likely lip out or scoot past the hole. Golfers have also appeared to putt more confidently, knowing that an overly aggressive putt would just bang into the cup liner and still be counted as a holed shot.
The pool-noodle option has its complexities, too, since some well-struck putts seem to descend into the hole only to rebound and keep going.
“Every day, we have that question over and over,” Friday said. “Was this putt in or was it out?”
New safety regulations, adopted by golf courses to adhere to coronavirus guidelines, have altered certain game fundamentals and left some golfers quibbling over artificially low scores — which can in turn upend the hierarchy, and gambling outcomes, of a regular golfing foursome. Even the hole in one, golf’s holy grail, is prompting disputes over what constitutes a holed tee shot.
“There’s definitely been a little change in attitudes,” Howie Friday, the head golf professional at the Stanley Golf Course in New Britain, Conn., said with a chuckle last week. In April, Friday had grown accustomed to scores of golfers thanking him for the opportunity to play.“A month ago, it was nurses, doctors and golf pros and we couldn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Not so much anymore — back to normal.”
The principal source of consternation, a concern shared mostly by serious not casual golfers, is new health guidelines that have affected the golf hole itself. In an effort to reduce high-touch surfaces from golfers reaching into holes to retrieve their balls or removing the flagstick, course operators have tried various solutions, including raising the white liner cup, which is normally inserted in the hole, to about two inches above the green surface. An approaching ball bounces off the cup liner instead of falling into the hole.
The United States Golf Association, a national governing body, issued a temporary rule amendment in March that qualified such a situation as a holed shot — with caveats (more on that later).
Other golf courses have instead inserted into the hole a small piece of foam, similar to noodle-shaped flotation devices used in swimming pools. It allows the ball to descend into the hole, but only slightly, so a player can easily retrieve it without touching anything else.
Golfers, however, have universally found that aiming at the raised hole liner is easier than putting in normal conditions, in part because sometimes the ball barely skims its edge. The same shot, without the modification, would likely lip out or scoot past the hole. Golfers have also appeared to putt more confidently, knowing that an overly aggressive putt would just bang into the cup liner and still be counted as a holed shot.
The pool-noodle option has its complexities, too, since some well-struck putts seem to descend into the hole only to rebound and keep going.
“Every day, we have that question over and over,” Friday said. “Was this putt in or was it out?”
by Bill Pennington, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michael Hanson for The New York Times
[ed. See also: As Golf Courses Reopen, New Players Take Up the Long Walk (NYT).]
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Monday, June 1, 2020
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.
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
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.
[ed. Recommended: Cookie Remover (Chrome) if you're having problems viewing NYT articles.]
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
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
"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.]
Sunday, May 31, 2020
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.
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
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
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
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
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