Thursday, August 27, 2020
Convicted of Sex Crimes, but With No Victims
Jace Hambrick worked as an apprentice laborer during the week, renovating homes around Vancouver, Wash., and at a neighborhood gas station on weekends. Much of the rest of his life was online. He was hard-core, amassing a collection of more than 200 games. People told him it wasn’t smart to be so cut off from reality, but his internet life felt rich. As a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, he controlled other players’ destinies. As a video warrior, he was known online by his nom de guerre and was constantly messaging fellow gamers, particularly his best friend, Simon. Though the two had never met in person, over the last few years they paired up as teammates playing Rainbow Six Siege and Rocket League and grew close.
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.
The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
by Michael Winerip, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
NBA Season Up In The Air
"Just so you know, I'm the king of this place."
NBA season up in air as Lakers and Clippers reportedly vote to quit playoffs (The Guardian)
Image: New Yorker
[ed. What a shit show going down in Wisconsin. But what to expect when armed militias are allowed to roam freely, openly carrying weapons in a tinder box situation.]
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
A Lady’s Duty to Submit—Then And Now
In 1956, my Grandma Claire gave birth to the first of her five children and soon after divorced the father, an Australian who turned out to be a drunk and besotted loser. Her father was so embarrassed by the divorce that he banned her from the family home. Claire refused to submit and shortly after being disowned, she moved west. Her second child was born to her (and my grandfather) in 1959, at Grace Hospital in Vancouver.
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.
Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
The young wife must be warned again that the sexual act is a mutual relationship; both partners should take a full part, the wife throwing aside her previous modesty and inhibitions, and meeting her husband’s aggressive advances with a willing and active submission.“Men have been designed by nature to be the wooer and aggressor; women to be the receptive, surrendering partner,” the authors further explained. A husband should, therefore, “realize that his bride has been taught all her life to resist the sexual embraces of men, to maintain her chastity at all costs,” while the wife “should undertake active cooperation and response to his advances.”
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
Remember the Pandemic?
Never has the simple tense of a verb revealed so much about a political party—or seemed so plainly out of touch with reality.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.
But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
by Eric Weiner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Getty/The Atlantic
Suburbia, Reconsidered
It’s a weird time for the American suburbs.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.”
As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.” As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Clothing As Platform
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic halted fashion shows and shuttered malls, the harsh realities of the fashion industry’s race-to-the-bottom production practices were becoming all too clear: unsustainable for the environment and lethally dangerous for textile producers and garment workers. Yet despite news stories of dangerous working conditions and tragedies such as the Rana Plaza factory collapse, tons of garments continued to enter the market, resulting in record amounts of textile waste. In fact, according to the EPA, Americans buried 10.5 million tons of clothing in landfills each year. And it’s not just the mass-market H&Ms and Zaras of the retail world who are implicated; the luxury segment of the market is flooded with unwanted products too: Burberry was discovered to have burned £90 million worth of unsold stock over a five-year period rather than see it devalue its brand image in discount stores.
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)
In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
Monday, August 24, 2020
Why Every City Feels the Same Now
Some time ago, I woke up in a hotel room unable to determine where I was in the world. The room was like any other these days, with its neutral bedding, uncomfortable bouclé lounge chair, and wood-veneer accent wall—tasteful, but purgatorial. The eerie uniformity extended well beyond the interior design too: The building itself felt like it could’ve been located in any number of metropolises across the globe. From the window, I saw only the signs of ubiquitous brands, such as Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. I thought about phoning down to reception to get my bearings, but it felt too much like the beginning of an episode of The Twilight Zone. I travel a lot, so it was not the first or the last time that I would wake up in a state of placelessness or the accompanying feeling of déjà vu.
The anthropologist Marc Augé gave the name non-place to the escalating homogeneity of urban spaces. In non-places, history, identity, and human relation are not on offer. Non-places used to be relegated to the fringes of cities in retail parks or airports, or contained inside shopping malls. But they have spread. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.
The opposite of placelessness is place, and all that it implies—the resonances of history, folklore, and environment; the qualities that make a location deep, layered, and idiosyncratic. Humans are storytelling creatures. If a place has been inhabited for long enough, the stories will already be present, even if hidden. We need to uncover and resurface them, to excavate the meanings behind street names, to unearth figures lost to obscurity, and to rediscover architecture that has long since vanished. A return to vernacular architecture—the built environment of the people, tailored by and for local culture and conditions—is overdue. It can combat the placelessness that empires and corporations have imposed. (...)
Commercial builders also emulate architecture that conveys a desirable image. At the turn of the 20th century, the administrators and businessmen of Meiji Japan commissioned Western architects to modernize their country, adopting the structures of supposed Western progress. So did the sultan of Zanzibar, whose House of Wonders has European characteristics, along with a front entrance large enough to ride his elephant through.
It was only a matter of time before corporations began to construct their own hegemonic visions of urban life. In 1928, an American town sailed up a tributary of the Amazon. It came in pieces, to be assembled into shingled houses with lawns and picket fences, a Main Street, a dance hall, a cinema, and a golf course. Henry Ford was the visionary behind the development; his aim: to control the rubber industry via exported Americanism. He named it Fordlândia.
The settlement failed dramatically. The jungle was unforgiving, and the settlers were unprepared for malarial fevers and snake attacks. Cement and iron were unsuited to the humidity. Blight spread through the rubber plantation, which had been cultivated too intensively. Ford’s promises of free health care and fair wages were undermined by puritanical surveillance, cruelty, and incompetence. Eventually, the workers rioted. As a utopia, Fordlândia was probably doomed from the start, given its founding in neocolonial arrogance. But despite its failure almost a century ago, Fordlândia successfully predicted the future of cities: utter sameness, exported globally.
In the decades that followed, corporate architecture of the sort outside my hotel room adopted designs that expressed corporate power. It became slick and monolithic. Ruthlessly rational, it exudes aloofness—its denizens exist high above the streets in glass-and-steel boxes that maximize the expensive floor space. The earliest of these structures were inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1959 Seagram Building, which set the archetype until the 1980s. The New Formalists tried to temper this model with humanizing, historical touches—the tall, pseudo-gothic arches with which Minoru Yamasaki embellished the World Trade Center, for instance—but even then, it often harked back to earlier symbols of dominating power, like Greco-Roman classicism had done.
Eventually, aware of appearing cold and remote, corporate architecture underwent an image change. Its buildings now resemble its brands: cooler, cuter, greener, more knowing and ironic. The doughnut-shaped mothership of Apple Park or the biodome spheres of Amazon’s Seattle campus offer examples.
But these structures might be worse than the indifferent, modernist monoliths they replaced. At least the glass towers made clear that their occupants didn’t care about you, or maybe anyone. Now headquarters buildings express the hypocrisy of corporate gentility. Apple Park, with its circular form and large central garden, telegraphs connection and collaboration. But its real message is power: It is one of the most valuable corporate headquarters in the world, echoing the Pentagon in size and ambition. Shaped like a spaceship, it also suggests to the local community, which grants Apple huge tax breaks, that the company could take off and relocate anywhere in the world, whenever it wants. (...)
Vernacular is an umbrella term architects and planners use to describe local styles. Vernacular architecture arises when the people indigenous to a particular place use materials they find there to build structures that become symptomatic of and attuned to that particular environment. Augé called it “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” It aims for harmonious interaction with the environment, rather than setting itself apart from it. (...)
Creativity often works according to a dialectic process. Frank Lloyd Wright sought to “break the box” of Western architecture by shifting geometries, letting the outside in, and designing architecture within a natural setting, as he did with Fallingwater, one of his most famous designs. Wright was inspired by a love of the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai—an influence he would later repay by training Japanese architects such as Nobuko and Kameki Tsuchiura, who reinterpreted European modernist design in Japan. The goal is not to replace glass skyscrapers with thatch huts, but to see vernacular as the future, like Wright did, rather than abandoning it to the past.
by Darran Anderson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty
The anthropologist Marc Augé gave the name non-place to the escalating homogeneity of urban spaces. In non-places, history, identity, and human relation are not on offer. Non-places used to be relegated to the fringes of cities in retail parks or airports, or contained inside shopping malls. But they have spread. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.
The opposite of placelessness is place, and all that it implies—the resonances of history, folklore, and environment; the qualities that make a location deep, layered, and idiosyncratic. Humans are storytelling creatures. If a place has been inhabited for long enough, the stories will already be present, even if hidden. We need to uncover and resurface them, to excavate the meanings behind street names, to unearth figures lost to obscurity, and to rediscover architecture that has long since vanished. A return to vernacular architecture—the built environment of the people, tailored by and for local culture and conditions—is overdue. It can combat the placelessness that empires and corporations have imposed. (...)Commercial builders also emulate architecture that conveys a desirable image. At the turn of the 20th century, the administrators and businessmen of Meiji Japan commissioned Western architects to modernize their country, adopting the structures of supposed Western progress. So did the sultan of Zanzibar, whose House of Wonders has European characteristics, along with a front entrance large enough to ride his elephant through.
It was only a matter of time before corporations began to construct their own hegemonic visions of urban life. In 1928, an American town sailed up a tributary of the Amazon. It came in pieces, to be assembled into shingled houses with lawns and picket fences, a Main Street, a dance hall, a cinema, and a golf course. Henry Ford was the visionary behind the development; his aim: to control the rubber industry via exported Americanism. He named it Fordlândia.
The settlement failed dramatically. The jungle was unforgiving, and the settlers were unprepared for malarial fevers and snake attacks. Cement and iron were unsuited to the humidity. Blight spread through the rubber plantation, which had been cultivated too intensively. Ford’s promises of free health care and fair wages were undermined by puritanical surveillance, cruelty, and incompetence. Eventually, the workers rioted. As a utopia, Fordlândia was probably doomed from the start, given its founding in neocolonial arrogance. But despite its failure almost a century ago, Fordlândia successfully predicted the future of cities: utter sameness, exported globally.
In the decades that followed, corporate architecture of the sort outside my hotel room adopted designs that expressed corporate power. It became slick and monolithic. Ruthlessly rational, it exudes aloofness—its denizens exist high above the streets in glass-and-steel boxes that maximize the expensive floor space. The earliest of these structures were inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1959 Seagram Building, which set the archetype until the 1980s. The New Formalists tried to temper this model with humanizing, historical touches—the tall, pseudo-gothic arches with which Minoru Yamasaki embellished the World Trade Center, for instance—but even then, it often harked back to earlier symbols of dominating power, like Greco-Roman classicism had done.
Eventually, aware of appearing cold and remote, corporate architecture underwent an image change. Its buildings now resemble its brands: cooler, cuter, greener, more knowing and ironic. The doughnut-shaped mothership of Apple Park or the biodome spheres of Amazon’s Seattle campus offer examples.
But these structures might be worse than the indifferent, modernist monoliths they replaced. At least the glass towers made clear that their occupants didn’t care about you, or maybe anyone. Now headquarters buildings express the hypocrisy of corporate gentility. Apple Park, with its circular form and large central garden, telegraphs connection and collaboration. But its real message is power: It is one of the most valuable corporate headquarters in the world, echoing the Pentagon in size and ambition. Shaped like a spaceship, it also suggests to the local community, which grants Apple huge tax breaks, that the company could take off and relocate anywhere in the world, whenever it wants. (...)
Vernacular is an umbrella term architects and planners use to describe local styles. Vernacular architecture arises when the people indigenous to a particular place use materials they find there to build structures that become symptomatic of and attuned to that particular environment. Augé called it “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” It aims for harmonious interaction with the environment, rather than setting itself apart from it. (...)
Creativity often works according to a dialectic process. Frank Lloyd Wright sought to “break the box” of Western architecture by shifting geometries, letting the outside in, and designing architecture within a natural setting, as he did with Fallingwater, one of his most famous designs. Wright was inspired by a love of the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai—an influence he would later repay by training Japanese architects such as Nobuko and Kameki Tsuchiura, who reinterpreted European modernist design in Japan. The goal is not to replace glass skyscrapers with thatch huts, but to see vernacular as the future, like Wright did, rather than abandoning it to the past.
by Darran Anderson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty
[ed. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as so many cultural institutions die left and right, victims of pandemic economics.]
Defunding the Police: Seattle's Stumbling Blocks
Seattle was on the verge of taking one of the most radical steps of late toward large-scale police reform of any city in the US just last month.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.
But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.
The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers.
Mere hours after the vote, Best, the first African American leader of the department who has held the position for only two years, announced her retirement.
“The idea of letting, after we worked so incredibly hard to make sure that our department was diverse, that reflects the community that we serve, to just turn that all on a dime and hack it off without having a plan in place to move forward, it’s highly distressful to me,” she said during a news conference last week. “It goes against my principles and my conviction and I really couldn’t do it.” (...)
Stephen Page, associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, told the Guardian that what appears to be missing in Seattle, Minneapolis and New York is leaders transforming police reform from a rallying cry to a precise plan.
“None of those discussions in any of those cities at this point seem to be taking seriously these questions of what, exactly, are we doing if we’re not funding the police and how are we going to do it,” he said. (...)
In Seattle, one of the key challenges during this process has been collaboration. While city council members have said they’ve tried to work with the police chief and mayor during the defunding process, at last week’s news conference Durkan characterized the last few weeks as an “absolute breakdown of collaboration and civil dialogue”. (...)
The council president M Lorena González, council member Teresa Mosqueda and council member Tammy J Morales said in a statement that they were sorry to see Best go, and again stressed the importance of city leaders working together during the law enforcement reform process. But they also made it clear that this has in no way deterred their efforts.
“The council will remain focused on the need to begin the process of transforming community safety in our city,” the statement said. “This historic opportunity to transition the SPD from reform to transformation will continue.”
Isaac Joy, an organizer with King County Equity Now, one of the coalitions that has pushed to defund the department by 50%, said there is potentially a silver lining to Best’s departure: it presents an opportunity to find someone to lead the department who can be a “thought partner on listening and responding to the community’s demands, to divest from our police force, demilitarize our police force and start reinvesting and making Seattle a city that everyone can thrive in”.
He also stressed that the leader should also be Black.
Joy explained that’s because of the “police history, specifically as it relates to the enslaved, the Black population and that being the root of the police force. And so, in order to rectify and address that root, you do need Black leadership, you just, along with Black leadership, you need the support of the department, the support of the mayor, the support of the council.”
Earlier this month, the coalition released a blueprint for cutting the police budget and reinvesting that money into such groups as those developing alternatives to policing and providing housing for people in need.
On Monday, the council unanimously approved a resolution that includes a variety of goals for 2021, including creating a civilian-led department of community safety and violence prevention, and moving the city’s 911 dispatch out of the police department.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.
But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.
The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers.Mere hours after the vote, Best, the first African American leader of the department who has held the position for only two years, announced her retirement.
“The idea of letting, after we worked so incredibly hard to make sure that our department was diverse, that reflects the community that we serve, to just turn that all on a dime and hack it off without having a plan in place to move forward, it’s highly distressful to me,” she said during a news conference last week. “It goes against my principles and my conviction and I really couldn’t do it.” (...)
Stephen Page, associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, told the Guardian that what appears to be missing in Seattle, Minneapolis and New York is leaders transforming police reform from a rallying cry to a precise plan.
“None of those discussions in any of those cities at this point seem to be taking seriously these questions of what, exactly, are we doing if we’re not funding the police and how are we going to do it,” he said. (...)
In Seattle, one of the key challenges during this process has been collaboration. While city council members have said they’ve tried to work with the police chief and mayor during the defunding process, at last week’s news conference Durkan characterized the last few weeks as an “absolute breakdown of collaboration and civil dialogue”. (...)
The council president M Lorena González, council member Teresa Mosqueda and council member Tammy J Morales said in a statement that they were sorry to see Best go, and again stressed the importance of city leaders working together during the law enforcement reform process. But they also made it clear that this has in no way deterred their efforts.
“The council will remain focused on the need to begin the process of transforming community safety in our city,” the statement said. “This historic opportunity to transition the SPD from reform to transformation will continue.”
Isaac Joy, an organizer with King County Equity Now, one of the coalitions that has pushed to defund the department by 50%, said there is potentially a silver lining to Best’s departure: it presents an opportunity to find someone to lead the department who can be a “thought partner on listening and responding to the community’s demands, to divest from our police force, demilitarize our police force and start reinvesting and making Seattle a city that everyone can thrive in”.
He also stressed that the leader should also be Black.
Joy explained that’s because of the “police history, specifically as it relates to the enslaved, the Black population and that being the root of the police force. And so, in order to rectify and address that root, you do need Black leadership, you just, along with Black leadership, you need the support of the department, the support of the mayor, the support of the council.”
Earlier this month, the coalition released a blueprint for cutting the police budget and reinvesting that money into such groups as those developing alternatives to policing and providing housing for people in need.
On Monday, the council unanimously approved a resolution that includes a variety of goals for 2021, including creating a civilian-led department of community safety and violence prevention, and moving the city’s 911 dispatch out of the police department.
by Hallie Golden, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Karen Ducey/Getty Images
[ed. This once beloved city has gone absolutely nuts. Forcing your first black female police chief into retirement is not, as they say, a good look. Good luck to Carmen Best, she tried her best.]
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Basketball Was Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience
I knew there were way more important things than basketball, and I was all for canceling everything back in March: in-person school, sports, plays, concerts, conferences, just shut it down. But, in order to hold this line, I had to force myself to stop thinking all the damn time about the interruption of the Milwaukee Bucks’ magical season, the second consecutive MVP season of Giannis Antetokounmpo, their certain progress toward their first NBA Finals in decades. This was supposed to be Milwaukee’s summer, with a long playoff run for the basketball team followed by the Democratic National Convention in the same new arena built for just such moments. Months later, when it was official that the NBA season would resume at Disney World, encased in a quarantined bubble, tears formed in my eyes. From mid-March until the beginning of summer, I watched no live TV. The news was too awful, and sports were all reruns. Since late July, I’ve been watching the Bucks again, and like everything else in America, it’s been strange.
As sports, the competitions from the NBA bubble, like the football (soccer), baseball, and ice hockey games I’ve watched, are more or less the same. But as television shows, as a variety of broadcast media, and as an aesthetic experience made up of images and sounds, the NBA games so far have been a departure from the usual, and nothing feels right. It’s been a bit like another newly familiar experience: getting takeout from a restaurant where you previously would dine in. The food might taste like you remember it, but the sensory and social environment of the meal makes you realize how much context matters. (...)
The NBA bubble games have had a particularly sitcommy feel. The courts at Disney’s Wide World of Sports are walled in on three sides by tall video displays, obscuring whatever seats or walls are beyond the court except for rare glimpses when the director cuts to a camera behind the scorer’s table for a referee’s call. The images almost always stay on one side of the action facing these displays, and unlike the usual games from the before times, there are no camera operators on the court itself under the basket. The visual array is reminiscent of the kind of three-wall sets that television comedies adopted from the stage, with their proscenium effect of positioning the viewer across an invisible fourth wall. In a typical American sitcom, you hear but do not see an audience. Many are recorded with a live audience in the studio, and sometimes begin with a voice-over telling you as much (“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience”). The combination of the three-wall set and audience audio makes the television comedy much more like theater than many kinds of television (the difference between this aesthetic and the “single-camera” comedy style of shows like The Office often prompts comparisons of the latter to cinema).
The sitcom “laugh track” is an old convention. It has sometimes been held up as the epitome of commercial television’s basically fraudulent nature. In the absence of a live audience, or when the audience isn’t demonstrative in the way the producers would like, the sound track of a comedy can be massaged by sweetening the recording or adding canned laughter. This isn’t that different from an older tradition in live performance of the claque, the audience members hired to applaud. But in any event, the sounds of the audience recreate for the viewer at home a sense of participation in a live event among members of a community who experience the show together. This is true for sports just as much as it is for scripted comedy or late-night variety shows. The audible audience for televised sports is always manipulated to be an accompaniment that suggests the space of a live event. A sports stadium or arena is a big television studio in the first place, a stage for the cameras with a raucous in-person audience. Your ticket gets you into the show as an extra. The sensory pandemonium of the live event is never really captured on TV, the blaring music and sound effects are kept low in the mix to keep the booth broadcasters’ voices loud and centered, and no one shoots a T-shirt cannon in your direction when you’re watching at home. But the crowd is essential to the visual and auditory qualities of sports, and the missing elements in these games from Florida have been a present absence. (...)
The video displays are part of what makes each game have a “home team,” as the imagery conveys the identity of one of the two competitors with the text, colors, and advertisements you would find in their home arena. The displays, expansive like digital billboards, also show images of the home team’s fans, which is a nice touch in theory. But the way this works in practice is bizarre. The low-res webcam images of the individual faces are abstracted against backgrounds that look like arena seats, and these are arrayed in a grid to create a large rectangle of spectators. The images are presumably live, but they could be out of sync for all we know as the fans seldom react to anything in the moment, have no way of feeding off one another, and are not audible. The arena has set up a grade of rows that recede away from the court, and some fans are more visible than others as they are courtside or behind the bench or scorer’s table. The close proximity of fans, separated by no barrier from the stars, is one of the thrills of watching live basketball. These virtual fans are by contrast one big upright surface of blurry, laggy heads, and they are reminiscent of the Hollywood Squares of meeting attendees now all too familiar from Zoom’s gallery view. Like many elements of live television of the past few months, these visuals of the NBA’s bubble games are the optics of a pandemic that has turned our lives inside out. (...)
These bubble games remind us, minute by minute, what life is like now. They afford us the dreamworld of a space where you can safely breathe heavily, unmasked, indoors with nine other players and three refs on the same basketball court. But they also televise this newly risky world of facemasks and six feet, of conversations mediated by plexiglass and video screens. I have felt for the NBA players whose season was abruptly arrested as it was getting good, but now I also envy the careful setup that their filthy rich sports league can afford, while my cash-strapped public university takes its chances and opens its dorms and classrooms without such a luxury of frequent testing and exceptional security.
by Michael Z. Newman, LARB | Read more:
Image: CNN
As sports, the competitions from the NBA bubble, like the football (soccer), baseball, and ice hockey games I’ve watched, are more or less the same. But as television shows, as a variety of broadcast media, and as an aesthetic experience made up of images and sounds, the NBA games so far have been a departure from the usual, and nothing feels right. It’s been a bit like another newly familiar experience: getting takeout from a restaurant where you previously would dine in. The food might taste like you remember it, but the sensory and social environment of the meal makes you realize how much context matters. (...)
The NBA bubble games have had a particularly sitcommy feel. The courts at Disney’s Wide World of Sports are walled in on three sides by tall video displays, obscuring whatever seats or walls are beyond the court except for rare glimpses when the director cuts to a camera behind the scorer’s table for a referee’s call. The images almost always stay on one side of the action facing these displays, and unlike the usual games from the before times, there are no camera operators on the court itself under the basket. The visual array is reminiscent of the kind of three-wall sets that television comedies adopted from the stage, with their proscenium effect of positioning the viewer across an invisible fourth wall. In a typical American sitcom, you hear but do not see an audience. Many are recorded with a live audience in the studio, and sometimes begin with a voice-over telling you as much (“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience”). The combination of the three-wall set and audience audio makes the television comedy much more like theater than many kinds of television (the difference between this aesthetic and the “single-camera” comedy style of shows like The Office often prompts comparisons of the latter to cinema).The sitcom “laugh track” is an old convention. It has sometimes been held up as the epitome of commercial television’s basically fraudulent nature. In the absence of a live audience, or when the audience isn’t demonstrative in the way the producers would like, the sound track of a comedy can be massaged by sweetening the recording or adding canned laughter. This isn’t that different from an older tradition in live performance of the claque, the audience members hired to applaud. But in any event, the sounds of the audience recreate for the viewer at home a sense of participation in a live event among members of a community who experience the show together. This is true for sports just as much as it is for scripted comedy or late-night variety shows. The audible audience for televised sports is always manipulated to be an accompaniment that suggests the space of a live event. A sports stadium or arena is a big television studio in the first place, a stage for the cameras with a raucous in-person audience. Your ticket gets you into the show as an extra. The sensory pandemonium of the live event is never really captured on TV, the blaring music and sound effects are kept low in the mix to keep the booth broadcasters’ voices loud and centered, and no one shoots a T-shirt cannon in your direction when you’re watching at home. But the crowd is essential to the visual and auditory qualities of sports, and the missing elements in these games from Florida have been a present absence. (...)
The video displays are part of what makes each game have a “home team,” as the imagery conveys the identity of one of the two competitors with the text, colors, and advertisements you would find in their home arena. The displays, expansive like digital billboards, also show images of the home team’s fans, which is a nice touch in theory. But the way this works in practice is bizarre. The low-res webcam images of the individual faces are abstracted against backgrounds that look like arena seats, and these are arrayed in a grid to create a large rectangle of spectators. The images are presumably live, but they could be out of sync for all we know as the fans seldom react to anything in the moment, have no way of feeding off one another, and are not audible. The arena has set up a grade of rows that recede away from the court, and some fans are more visible than others as they are courtside or behind the bench or scorer’s table. The close proximity of fans, separated by no barrier from the stars, is one of the thrills of watching live basketball. These virtual fans are by contrast one big upright surface of blurry, laggy heads, and they are reminiscent of the Hollywood Squares of meeting attendees now all too familiar from Zoom’s gallery view. Like many elements of live television of the past few months, these visuals of the NBA’s bubble games are the optics of a pandemic that has turned our lives inside out. (...)
These bubble games remind us, minute by minute, what life is like now. They afford us the dreamworld of a space where you can safely breathe heavily, unmasked, indoors with nine other players and three refs on the same basketball court. But they also televise this newly risky world of facemasks and six feet, of conversations mediated by plexiglass and video screens. I have felt for the NBA players whose season was abruptly arrested as it was getting good, but now I also envy the careful setup that their filthy rich sports league can afford, while my cash-strapped public university takes its chances and opens its dorms and classrooms without such a luxury of frequent testing and exceptional security.
by Michael Z. Newman, LARB | Read more:
Image: CNN
Friday, August 21, 2020
Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Evangelical Redemption Story
Two weeks ago, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in America, posted an Instagram photo of himself on a yacht with his arm around a young woman whose midriff was bare and whose pants were unzipped. This would have been remarkable by itself, but it was all the more so because Falwell’s midriff was also bare and his pants also unzipped. In his hand, Falwell held a plastic cup of what he described winkingly in his caption as “black water.”
The aesthetics of the photo would be familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a frat party, but they were jarringly out of place for the son of Moral Majority cofounder Jerry Falwell Sr. and a professional evangelical Christian whose public rhetoric is built on a scaffolding of sexual conservatism and an antagonism to physical pleasure more generally.
The backdrop of a yacht represents an entirely different hypocrisy, arguably a more egregious one: the embrace of materialism and the open accumulation of enormous wealth. Falwell, who has a net worth estimated to be more than $100 million, is not formally a “prosperity gospel” adherent, but he has nonetheless jettisoned those inconvenient parts of Christian theology that preach the virtues of living modestly and using wealth to help the less fortunate.
But for his public, the problem with the photo was the optics of carnal sin—the attractive young woman who was not his wife, the recreational drinking, the unzipped pants—none of which would be acceptable at Liberty University, where coed dancing is penalized with a demerit. In the moral hierarchy of white evangelical Christianity, carnal sin is the worst, and this thinking drives the social conservatism that allows evangelicals to justify persecuting LGBTQ people, opposing sexual education in schools, distorting the very real problem of sex trafficking to punish sex workers, restricting access to abortion, eliminating contraception from employer-provided healthcare, and prosecuting culture wars against everything from medical marijuana to pop music. Evangelicalism’s official morality treats all pleasure as inherently suspect, the more so when those pleasures might belong to women or people of color.
Fortunately for Falwell, evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web: the worst sins make for the best redemption stories. Even better, a fall from grace followed by a period of regret and repentance can be turned into a highly remunerative rehabilitation. That, in fact, has been many a traveling preacher’s grift from time immemorial.
I grew up hearing such “testimonies,” personal stories that articulate a life in sin and a coming to Jesus, firsthand. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s in a family of Southern Baptists who viewed Episcopalians as raging liberals and Catholics, of which we knew precisely two, as an alien species. These were perfectly ordinary sentiments in the rural Alabama town we lived in. My dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and my mom worked at my school, first as a janitor and, later, as a lunch lady. Nobody in my family had gone to college.
Besides school and Little League, church was the primary basis of our social existence. As a child and into my early teens, my own religiosity was maybe a tick above average for our community. I went on mission trips to parts of the US that were more economically distressed than my hometown, handed out Chick tracts (named for the publisher and cartoonist Jack Chick) with as much zeal and sincerity as a twelve-year-old could muster, and on one occasion destroyed cassette tapes of my favorite bands (Nirvana, the Dead Kennedys, the Beastie Boys) in a fit of self-righteousness, only to re-buy them weeks later because, well, my faith had its limits.
All the while, I was—to use a word evangelicals like to misapply to any sort of secular education—“indoctrinated” by teachers, family, church staff, ministry organizations, and other members of the community to view everything I encountered in the world through an evangelical lens. If I went to the mall and lost my friends for a few minutes, I briefly suspected everyone had been raptured away except me, a particular brand of eschatological fantasy that we were taught was perpetually in danger of happening. Even my scandalous moments, which, do-goody overachiever that I was, were few and far between, were colored by the church. My first real kiss, at fourteen, was an epic make-out session on a sidewalk during a mission trip to a suburb of Orlando, with an eighteen-year-old assistant youth pastor named Matt.
I was ten or eleven when I was baptized—or in Southern Baptist parlance, “born again”—and part of this process involved constructing my own redemption narrative: I lived in sin and would be saved by Christ. I recently rediscovered my own handwritten testimony on a visit to my mom’s house. In a child’s rounded, looping handwriting, I had confessed that I used to “cheat at games,” something I don’t remember doing at all. The likely explanation for this is that because sin is such an important prerequisite for redemption, my ten-year-old self had to fabricate one to conform to the required convention (never mind that such a falsification would be sinful itself).
by Elizabeth Spiers, NY Review | Read more:
Image: Instagram
The aesthetics of the photo would be familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a frat party, but they were jarringly out of place for the son of Moral Majority cofounder Jerry Falwell Sr. and a professional evangelical Christian whose public rhetoric is built on a scaffolding of sexual conservatism and an antagonism to physical pleasure more generally.
The backdrop of a yacht represents an entirely different hypocrisy, arguably a more egregious one: the embrace of materialism and the open accumulation of enormous wealth. Falwell, who has a net worth estimated to be more than $100 million, is not formally a “prosperity gospel” adherent, but he has nonetheless jettisoned those inconvenient parts of Christian theology that preach the virtues of living modestly and using wealth to help the less fortunate.
But for his public, the problem with the photo was the optics of carnal sin—the attractive young woman who was not his wife, the recreational drinking, the unzipped pants—none of which would be acceptable at Liberty University, where coed dancing is penalized with a demerit. In the moral hierarchy of white evangelical Christianity, carnal sin is the worst, and this thinking drives the social conservatism that allows evangelicals to justify persecuting LGBTQ people, opposing sexual education in schools, distorting the very real problem of sex trafficking to punish sex workers, restricting access to abortion, eliminating contraception from employer-provided healthcare, and prosecuting culture wars against everything from medical marijuana to pop music. Evangelicalism’s official morality treats all pleasure as inherently suspect, the more so when those pleasures might belong to women or people of color.
Fortunately for Falwell, evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web: the worst sins make for the best redemption stories. Even better, a fall from grace followed by a period of regret and repentance can be turned into a highly remunerative rehabilitation. That, in fact, has been many a traveling preacher’s grift from time immemorial.I grew up hearing such “testimonies,” personal stories that articulate a life in sin and a coming to Jesus, firsthand. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s in a family of Southern Baptists who viewed Episcopalians as raging liberals and Catholics, of which we knew precisely two, as an alien species. These were perfectly ordinary sentiments in the rural Alabama town we lived in. My dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and my mom worked at my school, first as a janitor and, later, as a lunch lady. Nobody in my family had gone to college.
Besides school and Little League, church was the primary basis of our social existence. As a child and into my early teens, my own religiosity was maybe a tick above average for our community. I went on mission trips to parts of the US that were more economically distressed than my hometown, handed out Chick tracts (named for the publisher and cartoonist Jack Chick) with as much zeal and sincerity as a twelve-year-old could muster, and on one occasion destroyed cassette tapes of my favorite bands (Nirvana, the Dead Kennedys, the Beastie Boys) in a fit of self-righteousness, only to re-buy them weeks later because, well, my faith had its limits.
All the while, I was—to use a word evangelicals like to misapply to any sort of secular education—“indoctrinated” by teachers, family, church staff, ministry organizations, and other members of the community to view everything I encountered in the world through an evangelical lens. If I went to the mall and lost my friends for a few minutes, I briefly suspected everyone had been raptured away except me, a particular brand of eschatological fantasy that we were taught was perpetually in danger of happening. Even my scandalous moments, which, do-goody overachiever that I was, were few and far between, were colored by the church. My first real kiss, at fourteen, was an epic make-out session on a sidewalk during a mission trip to a suburb of Orlando, with an eighteen-year-old assistant youth pastor named Matt.
I was ten or eleven when I was baptized—or in Southern Baptist parlance, “born again”—and part of this process involved constructing my own redemption narrative: I lived in sin and would be saved by Christ. I recently rediscovered my own handwritten testimony on a visit to my mom’s house. In a child’s rounded, looping handwriting, I had confessed that I used to “cheat at games,” something I don’t remember doing at all. The likely explanation for this is that because sin is such an important prerequisite for redemption, my ten-year-old self had to fabricate one to conform to the required convention (never mind that such a falsification would be sinful itself).
by Elizabeth Spiers, NY Review | Read more:
Image: Instagram
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Chart House
An iconic restaurant in Waikiki has closed its doors for good.
Management of Chart House Waikiki said they decided to stop operations citing coronavirus hardships. It’s unlikely they will reopen as many businesses especially in Waikiki continue to struggle.
The eatery has served customers for the past 52 years with beautiful views of the small boat harbor and stunning south shore sunsets.
In a simple statement on their website, Joey Cabell and Scott Okamoto said, “At this time we would like to say Mahalo to everyone who has supported us over the past 52 years.”
by HNN Staff, Hawaii News Now | Read more:
Image: Charthouse
[ed. Oh no. I'm grief-stricken. My all-time favorite bar, overlooking the Ala Wai Boat Harbor in Waikiki. So many great memories. It's the only place I make a special point of visiting everytime I go back.]
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