It’s Time to Archive the Internet Archive

Five of the world's largest publishers sued the Internet Archive, claiming its open-access digital library is a mass infringement on their copyright. The move puts the internet’s most important archive in danger, and has at least got some data hoarders talking about archiving the Internet Archive, and what that would even look like.

Last week, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive and five ‘Doe’ defendants, claiming that the Internet Archive is a piracy site.

In March, the Internet Archive set up a new service for people displaced from library and educational access due to COVID-19, called the "National Emergency Library." Nearly 1.4 million books are available in full for anyone to download and read, without a waitlist, until the end of June or the end of the coronavirus pandemic crisis in the US, according to an announcement on their site.

While damages haven't been set, the publishers could claim up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringement, for each of the 1.4 million copyright works in the emergency library. They're also demanding a preliminary and permanent injunction of the Internet Archive, and anyone involved with it, from reproducing and distributing more works, and that all current copyrighted copies on the site be destroyed—effectively shutting down the entire library. (...)

The move puts one of the internet’s largest repositories of knowledge in peril. Over on the DataHoarder subreddit, threads have been started about what it would take to archive the archive, which holds dozens of petabytes of data and is constantly growing (there have been attempts to simply understand the sheer amount of data the archive holds). Academics have been saying for years that the Internet Archive must be made more resilient by creating backups of the backups and storing them in other locations. When Donald Trump was elected president, the Internet Archive announced it was making a backup in Canada. Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina once had a backup of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it has not been updated in years.

by Samantha Cole and Jason Koebler, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
[ed. For background, see also: You Can Now Access 1.4 Million Books for Free Thanks to the Internet Archive (Motherboard).]

Bruce Kaphan

'A reconsideration of the white male cowboy': the rise of ambient country (The Guardian)

Whiplash: The Coronavirus Narrative Changes Overnight

When I reflect back on the extraordinary year of 2020 – from, I hope, some safer, saner vantage – one of the two defining images in my mind will be the surreal figure of the Grim Reaper stalking the blazing Florida shoreline, scythe in hand, warning the sunbathing masses of imminent death and granting interviews to reporters. The other will be a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution sparked a global protest movement against racism and police violence.

Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.

Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching. (...)

After two and a half months of death, confinement, and unemployment figures dwarfing even the Great Depression, we have now entered the stage of competing urgencies where there are zero perfect options. Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism. Catalyzed by the spectacle of Floyd’s reprehensible death, it is clear that the emergency in Minneapolis passes my own and many people’s threshold for justifying the risk of contagion. (...)

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

by Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Devon Ravine/AP

Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times

Every morning that I’m not hungover, I wake up around 8am, because that is when my two cats start howling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, and walk barefoot and unwashed (mug in hand) through my apartment building’s common hallway to the front door, where I pick up my New York Times and my Financial Times.

I then walk back to my apartment, look at the front page of the New York Times for approximately five to eight seconds, and throw the whole thing in the garbage with contempt. I drink my coffee and proceed to read the entirety of the Financial Times, excluding the particularly dense bits of the Companies & Markets section. If it’s the weekend edition, I even read most of House & Home, whose editors seem to have an incredibly generous definition of “real estate,” making room for topics like homelessness and wildlife conservation. I take care to read the kidding-not-kidding op-eds from wealthy people demanding that children be banned from restaurants and art museums.

As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.

Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique).

Conversely, the New York Times is the flagship publication for liberal triumphalism; it holds the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”—the notion that all serious ideological conflict crashed to a halt with the suspension of the Cold War, with very little at stake in future political disputes beyond regional trade accords and fine-tuning of currency regimes.

Recently, however, Fukuyamism has taken a serious blow. The past presidential election was a shock to nearly everyone whose job it was to predict its outcome, and both the Bernie and Trump upsets prove that we have not, as Fukuyama predicted, reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” The idea of the “End of History” lost credibility with anyone paying attention to skyrocketing wealth inequality and political unrest, and it’s pretty clear that the world remains a raging battle between the haves and have-nots. Karl Marx knew it, your average Detroit autoworker certainly knows it, and Edward Luce of FT knows it. Even Fukuyama himself acknowledges the instability of the American liberal political trajectory, proclaiming, “Socialism ought to come back.” David Brooks, on the other hand. . .

Adding insult to injury, the Gray Lady is suddenly the object of constant scorn from the nation’s highest office. Having spent eight years in the comfortable favor of Barack Obama, a position so secure that they faced zero consequences for such glaring moral and journalistic failings as the endorsement of the Iraq War, the “Failing New York Times” and its fellows now thrash in fury at their sudden irrelevance to these crude new political elites. The Times is unable to conceive of a world in which it was so very wrong, and unable to cope with a political administration that speaks of it with utter contempt. Not only has it lost the king’s ear, it is finding itself entirely incapable of appealing to the peasants; the cynical and transparent hit pieces on Bernie Sanders betray the paper’s general contempt for mass politics.

Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?

There are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald.

Looking further back, the decline of newspaper publishing as an industry has left much of “flyover country” nearly totally ignored by the coastal elites (yes, it’s a fair descriptor) for years now. Smaller papers have far smaller budgets for travel and long-term investigative reporting, and many local papers have been gutted or scrapped for parts entirely. Local coverage has its own weaknesses, of course, and national news is essential to avoid the parochial politics of a highly provincial federalist United States, but if we still had good local papers, might the Times have seen more of the misery and disaffection that paved the way for Donald Trump? Might serious local coverage of the immiserating results of NAFTA and welfare reform—both enacted by Bill Clinton—have made it obvious that Hillary would be less than inspiring for the majority of working-class Americans?

The slight increase in news employment at “digital native” outlets (about 6,000 jobs between 2008 and 2017) has not only failed to replace the lost jobs at news desks, it has also produced less substantive writing. With the rise of internet “content,” major news outlets have now expanded their op-ed and opinion sections into a stupefying ne plus ultra of BuzzFeed-style clickbait. The result is a vast pool of pseudopolitical content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle. (Not only is the Times bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds, you will notice they are positioned very prominently, at the very top of the website. Meanwhile, FT sticks them at the bottom.)

Just for example, last spring I noticed not one but two pieces in the Times dedicated to a Twitter tempest in a teapot about whether it was “cultural appropriation” for a white Utah high school student to wear a cheongsam, a dress of Chinese origin, to prom. This is not journalism, cultural commentary, or even, really, a trend piece—it’s an attempt to appear relevant. (But I suppose if you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students.) In an effort to survive the internet age, the Times has stooped to tracking tweets, chasing the sound and fury of never-ending online spectacles that rarely mean anything to anyone, save for an online microculture dedicated to “the discourse.”

Some fluff could almost be confused for reportage, such as the bizarre amount of space the paper of record devoted to Alan Dershowitz’s alleged travails as a social pariah on Martha’s Vineyard for his support of Trump, but if I wanted gossip I’d read the society pages. The paper’s collective decision to dedicate space—even in the infinite arena of Web content—and resources to such utterly meaningless and unnewsworthy trivialities indicates an editorial commitment not to journalism, but to educated-middle-class dinner party talking points.

The greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself. In the absence of labor desks at local papers and a vibrant trade union movement to fund working-class publications, the labor beat goes largely unreported, or merely reported within the confines of an egregiously bourgeois myopia. Take #MeToo, a “movement” to combat the scourge of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. The media obsessively focused on wealthy movie stars and high-profile women in (you guessed it) the media. If readers had zero knowledge of the US and they picked up the Times, they might assume these rich, famous women are the most vulnerable women in the world, and not, as it is, the exact opposite.

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Image: Sara Wong

Mask Fashion

The Fabric Face Masks Our Editors and Writers Are Wearing (The Strategist)

Image: Retailers

[ed. Surreal... just surreal.]

How We Drink Now

In my apartment in Brooklyn is a blue-and-white china vase. It once held a geranium but is now a receptacle for my wine corks, which overflow onto the lightly worn oak of my kitchen table. I assume it is still there, anyway, the corks lying scattered as they fell, as I haven’t been in that apartment since the beginning of February. For four months, I’ve been on a long and unanticipated hiatus at my mother’s home in Maryland. I came here to help her through cancer treatments, a bag of laundry in the car, anticipating months of back and forth during her long battle. But she was hospitalized three days after I arrived and I had to go on immediate leave from work. The laundry was done and packed in my trunk, where it has been ever since; the pancreatic cancer claimed her life in six short and vicious weeks. When we buried her on March 10th, the country was beginning to shutter. So I stayed, confined to and quarantining in my childhood home, forced to use my time to go through her things, our things, my family’s things, room by room, with many tears. In some ways it’s been helpful, confronting all that grief head-on. In others, it is a hell I can’t escape. (...)

Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.

But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.

There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.

I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.

I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.

— Mickie Meinhardt

It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.

--- Helen Schulman

by Mickie Meinhardt, Helen Schulman, others, Guernica | Read more:
Image: via

Liza

For his short film Liza, the French animator Bastien Dupriez aimed to create ‘a kind of visual transcription’ of the George Gershwin song Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away) (1929), as performed by the French musician Jean-Michel Pilc. As the rollicking jazz piano builds, the frame splashes with abstract shapes and colours, as well as hints of human forms. The resulting effect is of visuals built to accompany and respond to the mood of the music, rather than the much more familiar inverse experience. Beyond serving as a mesmerising slice of audiovisual eye candy – and it certainly is that – the piece also provokes a bevy of intriguing questions about our multisensory experience of art.

via: Aeon

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey

I met that elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot-springs town in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. It was a rustic or, more precisely, decrepit inn, barely hanging on, where I just happened to spend a night.

I was travelling around, wherever the spirit led me, and it was already past 7 p.m. when I arrived at the hot-springs town and got off the train. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness particular to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-size leaves rustling along the street.

I walked through the center of the town in search of a place to stay, but none of the decent inns would take in guests after the dinner hour had passed. I stopped at five or six places, but they all turned me down flat. Finally, in a deserted area outside town, I came across an inn that would take me. It was a desolate-looking, ramshackle place, almost a flophouse. It had seen a lot of years go by, but it had none of the quaint appeal you might expect in an old inn. Fittings here and there were ever so slightly slanted, as if slapdash repairs had been made that didn’t mesh with the rest of the place. I doubted it would make it through the next earthquake, and I could only hope that no temblor would hit while I was there.

The inn didn’t serve dinner, but breakfast was included, and the rate for one night was incredibly cheap. Inside the entrance was a plain reception desk, behind which sat a completely hairless old man—devoid of even eyebrows—who took my payment for one night in advance. The lack of eyebrows made the old man’s largish eyes seem to glisten bizarrely, glaringly. On a cushion on the floor beside him, a big brown cat, equally ancient, was sacked out, sound asleep. Something must have been wrong with its nose, for it snored louder than any cat I’d ever heard. Occasionally the rhythm of its snores fitfully missed a beat. Everything in this inn seemed to be old and falling apart.

The room I was shown to was cramped, like the storage area where one keeps futon bedding; the ceiling light was dim, and the flooring under the tatami creaked ominously with each step. But it was too late to be particular. I told myself I should be happy to have a roof over my head and a futon to sleep on.

I put my one piece of luggage, a large shoulder bag, down on the floor and set off back to town. (This wasn’t exactly the type of room I wanted to lounge around in.) I went into a nearby soba-noodle shop and had a simple dinner. It was that or nothing, since there were no other restaurants open. I had a beer, some bar snacks, and some hot soba. The soba was mediocre, the soup lukewarm, but, again, I wasn’t about to complain. It beat going to bed on an empty stomach. After I left the soba shop, I thought I’d buy some snacks and a small bottle of whiskey, but I couldn’t find a convenience store. It was after eight, and the only places open were the shooting-gallery game centers typically found in hot-springs towns. So I hoofed it back to the inn, changed into a yukata robe, and went downstairs to take a bath.

Compared with the shabby building and facilities, the hot-springs bath at the inn was surprisingly wonderful. The steaming water was a thick green color, not diluted, the sulfur odor more pungent than anything I’d ever experienced, and I soaked there, warming myself to the bone. There were no other bathers (I had no idea if there were even any other guests at the inn), and I was able to enjoy a long, leisurely bath. After a while, I felt a little light-headed and got out to cool off, then got back into the tub. Maybe this decrepit-looking inn was a good choice after all, I thought. It was certainly more peaceful than bathing with some noisy tour group, the way you do in the larger inns.

Iwas soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid the glass door open with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that he was a monkey. All the thick hot water had left me a bit dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t immediately make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. The monkey closed the door behind him, straightened out the little buckets that lay strewn about, and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, for all the world like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.

“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.

“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. It sounded almost mythological, not like my own voice but, rather, like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was . . . hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?

“Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice still low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a baritone in a doo-wop group. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice: if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.

“Yes, thanks,” I replied. It wasn’t as if I’d been sitting there hoping that someone would come and scrub my back, but if I turned him down I was afraid he might think I was opposed to having a monkey do it. I figured it was a kind offer on his part, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So I slowly got up out of the tub and plunked myself down on a little wooden platform, with my back to the monkey.

The monkey didn’t have any clothes on. Which, of course, is usually the case for a monkey, so it didn’t strike me as odd. He seemed to be fairly old; he had a lot of white in his hair. He brought over a small towel, rubbed soap on it, and with a practiced hand gave my back a good scrubbing.

“It’s got very cold these days, hasn’t it?” the monkey remarked.

“That it has.”

“Before long this place will be covered in snow. And then they’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs, which is no easy task, believe me.”

There was a brief pause, and I jumped in. “So you can speak human language?”

“I can indeed,” the monkey replied briskly. He was probably asked that a lot. “I was raised by humans from an early age, and before I knew it I was able to speak. I lived for quite a long time in Tokyo, in Shinagawa.”

“What part of Shinagawa?”

“Around Gotenyama.”

“That’s a nice area.”

“Yes, as you know, it’s a very pleasant place to live. Nearby is the Gotenyama Garden, and I enjoyed the natural scenery there.”

Our conversation paused at this point. The monkey continued firmly scrubbing my back (which felt great), and all the while I tried to puzzle things out rationally. A monkey raised in Shinagawa? The Gotenyama Garden? And such a fluent speaker? How was that possible? This was a monkey, for goodness’ sake. A monkey, and nothing else.

“I live in Minato-ku,” I said, a basically meaningless statement.

“We were almost neighbors, then,” the monkey said in a friendly tone.

“What kind of person raised you in Shinagawa?” I asked.

“My master was a college professor. He specialized in physics, and held a chair at Tokyo Gakugei University.”

“Quite an intellectual, then.”

“He certainly was. He loved music more than anything, particularly the music of Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Thanks to which, I developed a fondness for that music myself. I heard it all the time. Picked up a knowledge of it without even realizing it, you could say.”

“You enjoy Bruckner?”

“Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”

“I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.

“Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.

“So that professor taught you language?”

“He did. He didn’t have any children, and, perhaps to compensate for that, he trained me fairly strictly whenever he had time. He was very patient, a person who valued order and regularity above all. He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom. His wife was a quiet, sweet person, always kind to me. They got along well, and I hesitate to mention this to an outsider, but, believe me, their nighttime activities could be quite intense.”

“Really,” I said.

The monkey finally finished scrubbing my back. “Thanks for your patience,” he said, and bowed his head.

“Thank you,” I said. “It really felt good. So, do you work here at this inn?”

“I do. They’ve been kind enough to let me work here. The larger, more upscale inns would never hire a monkey. But they’re always shorthanded around here and, if you can make yourself useful, they don’t care if you’re a monkey or whatever. For a monkey, the pay is minimal, and they let me work only where I can stay mostly out of sight. Straightening up the bath area, cleaning, things of that sort. Most guests would be shocked if a monkey served them tea and so on. Working in the kitchen is out, too, since I’d run into issues with the food-sanitation law.”

“Have you been working here for a long time?” I asked.

“It’s been about three years.”

“But you must have gone through all sorts of things before you settled down here?”

The monkey gave a quick nod. “Very true.”

I hesitated, but then came out and asked him, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about your background?”

The monkey considered this, and then said, “Yes, that would be fine. It might not be as interesting as you expect, but I’m off work at ten and I could stop by your room after that. Would that be convenient?”

“Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be grateful if you could bring some beer then.”

“Understood. Some cold beers it is. Would Sapporo be all right?”

“That would be fine. So, you drink beer?”

“A little bit, yes.”

“Then please bring two large bottles.”

“Of course. If I understand correctly, you are staying in the Araiso Suite, on the second floor?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“It’s a little strange, though, don’t you think?” the monkey said. “An inn in the mountains with a room named araiso—‘rugged shore.’ ” He chuckled. I’d never in my life heard a monkey laugh. But I guess monkeys do laugh, and even cry, at times. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was talking.

“By the way, do you have a name?” I asked.

“No, no name, per se. But everyone calls me the Shinagawa Monkey.”

The monkey slid open the glass door, turned, and gave a polite bow, then slowly closed the door.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Hisashi Okawa

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.

No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.

In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.

Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.

Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.

All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.

The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.

Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.

How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.

by Marilynne Robinson, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Doña Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black/Magnum

Seattle, June 5, 2020
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Space X Dragon Docking With International Space Station

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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.

by Ashley Mearns and Tyler Cowan, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: Mercatus Center

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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.

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).]

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.”

by Matt Simon, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Josef Lindau/Getty via:

[ed. See also: All This Chaos Might Be Giving You 'Crisis Fatigue' (Wired).]

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?”

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).]

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