[ed. I've never been much of a Van Halen (band) fan, but Eddie was an innovative and exceptionally accomplished guitarist.]
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Eddie Van Halen (Jan., 1955 - Oct., 2020)
Monday, October 5, 2020
The Last Empire (Hopefully)
Meanwhile……
The minimum wage should loosely be around $22 an hour to have kept pace with inflation and productivity (it isn’t even a third of that now). Diabetic individuals are indeed rationing insulin (despite water-like prices!). Parents are being expected to work full time, have young children at home doing online school–or send them in person during a pandemic! The social contract between citizens and this government seems to be written in a very small print that none of us adequately read before agreeing to.
All this and psychedelics are illegal. Any relief from this onslaught to your very soul must be in the form of a prescription, a liquor store receipt, or the ever popular, mindless scrolling dopamine delivery smart phone. A wonderful way to shut out all meaningful contact—physical presence, but mentally checked out. We are a mangled, disjointed species to be certain, but even we deserve better than this. The question is…..what next?
It seems no longer a question of if, but when as far as the disintegration of the American Empire. It’s truly happening now. Just looking around at the crumbling infrastructure, the raging homelessness, the everyday low level panic that the average American has knowing there is no viable safety net. One misstep and….well, things will go badly.
by Kathleen Wallace, Counterpunch | Read more:
Image: Nathaniel St. Clair
The 'Hinge of History'
Image: Getty
[ed. Haven't been on BBC Futures for a while, so this and a few others.]
Why Does Vladimir Putin Walk Like That?
Image: Yuri Kochetkov / Pool via AP, file
[ed. Gunslinger's Gait. See also: The movements that betray who you are (BBC Future).]
[ed. Gunslinger's Gait. See also: The movements that betray who you are (BBC Future).]
What Would the World Do Without GPS?
Image: NASA
Inside the Lincoln Project’s War Room
The week of Labor Day, the founders of the Lincoln Project, a super pac of Republican operatives who have disavowed their own party in order to defeat President Donald Trump, set up a war room in a location far outside Washington, D.C. Since January, the group, whose founders include the consultants Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, had been targeting Trump with the kind of merciless ads that the strategists had aimed at Democratic candidates throughout their careers. A spot titled “Regret” features the comedian David Cross offering such a long list of Trump’s flaws—“the blatant racism, and the crass sexism, and the deranged narcissism, and pandering to Nazis”—that the recitation is still unspooling as the ad fades out. This type of message is aimed at convincing Republican voters that Trump’s dangerous and divisive impulses imperil the country. Another type of ad is designed to unsettle a single viewer—the President himself—and often appears during TV programs he is likely to watch. “Shrinking” directly addresses Trump, saying, of his notorious Tulsa campaign rally, in June, “You’ve probably heard this before, but it was smaller than we expected.” The founders knew that they were getting to the President when he started tweeting and talking about them, predictably calling their organization the Losers Project.
The founders, who consider themselves Trump “anthropologists,” try to predict the President’s missteps, stockpiling material that can be deployed at the ideal moment. A recent spot, “P.O.W.,” contrasted images of honorable military service with Trump’s denigration of people in the armed forces. The ad débuted shortly before The Atlantic reported that Trump, during a 2018 trip to France, had refused to visit an American cemetery and had referred to the war dead as “suckers.” In the ensuing public outcry, the Lincoln Project tweeted, “Let’s show @realDonaldTrump what real heroes look like,” and asked its followers to tweet photographs of veterans, hashtagged #WeRespectVets. Within an hour, the hashtag had become the leading Politics topic on Twitter. (...)
The Project’s founders are a murderers’ row of conservative operatives. Wilson, who has worked for Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney, counts hundreds of elections, from “dogcatcher to U.S. Senate,” that he and the other founders have helped Republicans win. Schmidt served in the George W. Bush White House, where he was instrumental in seating the Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts. He is widely known for having suggested Sarah Palin as a running mate for McCain, in 2008. Schmidt clearly regrets choosing someone whose crude populism presaged Trump. He was a source for “Game Change,” a book about the McCain campaign that characterized Palin as unprepared and difficult; in September, he said that Palin represented “the beginning of the politics of cowardice and fear.”
Another founder, Reed Galen, whose father worked for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, oversaw with Schmidt the reëlection campaign of the California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver, a Texan whom the Democratic strategist James Carville nicknamed Meat Cleaver Weaver, spent a decade trying to get McCain elected to the Presidency. Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 race against Barack Obama. A notable early Project participant was George Conway, the lawyer who antagonizes Trump on Twitter—“You. Are. Nuts.”—and whose wife, Kellyanne, was a top White House adviser until she resigned, in August. The couple, citing family demands, receded from public life, and George Conway quit the Project.
The consultant Sarah Longwell, who heads a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, said, of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, “They’ve very successfully tapped into the rage that a lot of people feel, including me.” The Project’s scorched-earth approach distinguishes it from similar organizations: the founders, some of whom have entirely shed their Republican identities, have left themselves no clear path of return. (Wilson and Schmidt are now registered Independents.) Longwell said, “In many ways, this is their last stand.”
Most of the Project’s core founders are in their fifties and came of age under Ronald Reagan. They were drawn to Reagan’s optimism and to his belief in fiscally responsible government, which, as Galen points out, “doesn’t necessarily mean lower taxes—it means being smart with taxpayers’ money.” Socially, they favor individual liberty: worship however you want, marry whomever you want. They support responsible gun ownership and a judiciously interventionist foreign policy. Weaver served in the Air Force, and Wilson worked in the Defense Department, but all the founders revere military service. In 2015, Trump disgusted them when he mocked McCain—a fighter pilot who was a P.O.W. during Vietnam—by saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump. (...)
When Schmidt publicly left the Party, in 2018, he tweeted that the Administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was “connected to the worst abuses of Humanity in our history,” including slavery, and said that the current G.O.P. represented a “danger to our democracy.” Galen’s long-held concerns about Trump intensified as he watched the President unleash unmarked officers on Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He told himself, “That’s about as anti-Republican as you can get—unfettered federal power, applied at the state level.” The Project’s sole millennial founder, Ron Steslow, a political strategist, has said, “My generation is being forced to learn that democracy cannot be taken for granted.”
The small number of Republicans who initially assembled the loose coalition now known as the Never Trump movement tended to represent certain interest areas, such as veterans’ affairs. No group had what Galen called “the skills or the willingness” to fight Trump publicly—or to convey explicitly the constitutional dangers of a second term. “He will be unrestrained,” Schmidt said. “And he will be validated.” The Project’s founders felt that the Democrats largely lacked killer instincts. Watching the primary debates, they were dismayed that the candidates rarely mentioned Trump; by focussing on liberal policy divides, they were doing little to win over Republicans. (...)
Some progressives do not see the Project as righteous. They worry that its founders are pushing Democrats to repeat moral and tactical mistakes: tabling transformative proposals that galvanize the liberal base in favor of courting centrists with establishment bromides. The analyst Lincoln Mitchell, writing for CNN, recently observed, “If Biden wins, organizations like the Lincoln Project will have newfound influence and options.” He continued, “They will be well positioned to be a conservative counter to the progressives who would like to see a President Biden tack left once elected.
by Paige Williams, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; source photographs from The Lincoln Project / YouTube
The Project’s founders are a murderers’ row of conservative operatives. Wilson, who has worked for Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney, counts hundreds of elections, from “dogcatcher to U.S. Senate,” that he and the other founders have helped Republicans win. Schmidt served in the George W. Bush White House, where he was instrumental in seating the Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts. He is widely known for having suggested Sarah Palin as a running mate for McCain, in 2008. Schmidt clearly regrets choosing someone whose crude populism presaged Trump. He was a source for “Game Change,” a book about the McCain campaign that characterized Palin as unprepared and difficult; in September, he said that Palin represented “the beginning of the politics of cowardice and fear.”
Another founder, Reed Galen, whose father worked for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, oversaw with Schmidt the reëlection campaign of the California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver, a Texan whom the Democratic strategist James Carville nicknamed Meat Cleaver Weaver, spent a decade trying to get McCain elected to the Presidency. Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 race against Barack Obama. A notable early Project participant was George Conway, the lawyer who antagonizes Trump on Twitter—“You. Are. Nuts.”—and whose wife, Kellyanne, was a top White House adviser until she resigned, in August. The couple, citing family demands, receded from public life, and George Conway quit the Project.
The consultant Sarah Longwell, who heads a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, said, of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, “They’ve very successfully tapped into the rage that a lot of people feel, including me.” The Project’s scorched-earth approach distinguishes it from similar organizations: the founders, some of whom have entirely shed their Republican identities, have left themselves no clear path of return. (Wilson and Schmidt are now registered Independents.) Longwell said, “In many ways, this is their last stand.”
Most of the Project’s core founders are in their fifties and came of age under Ronald Reagan. They were drawn to Reagan’s optimism and to his belief in fiscally responsible government, which, as Galen points out, “doesn’t necessarily mean lower taxes—it means being smart with taxpayers’ money.” Socially, they favor individual liberty: worship however you want, marry whomever you want. They support responsible gun ownership and a judiciously interventionist foreign policy. Weaver served in the Air Force, and Wilson worked in the Defense Department, but all the founders revere military service. In 2015, Trump disgusted them when he mocked McCain—a fighter pilot who was a P.O.W. during Vietnam—by saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump. (...)
When Schmidt publicly left the Party, in 2018, he tweeted that the Administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was “connected to the worst abuses of Humanity in our history,” including slavery, and said that the current G.O.P. represented a “danger to our democracy.” Galen’s long-held concerns about Trump intensified as he watched the President unleash unmarked officers on Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He told himself, “That’s about as anti-Republican as you can get—unfettered federal power, applied at the state level.” The Project’s sole millennial founder, Ron Steslow, a political strategist, has said, “My generation is being forced to learn that democracy cannot be taken for granted.”
The small number of Republicans who initially assembled the loose coalition now known as the Never Trump movement tended to represent certain interest areas, such as veterans’ affairs. No group had what Galen called “the skills or the willingness” to fight Trump publicly—or to convey explicitly the constitutional dangers of a second term. “He will be unrestrained,” Schmidt said. “And he will be validated.” The Project’s founders felt that the Democrats largely lacked killer instincts. Watching the primary debates, they were dismayed that the candidates rarely mentioned Trump; by focussing on liberal policy divides, they were doing little to win over Republicans. (...)
Some progressives do not see the Project as righteous. They worry that its founders are pushing Democrats to repeat moral and tactical mistakes: tabling transformative proposals that galvanize the liberal base in favor of courting centrists with establishment bromides. The analyst Lincoln Mitchell, writing for CNN, recently observed, “If Biden wins, organizations like the Lincoln Project will have newfound influence and options.” He continued, “They will be well positioned to be a conservative counter to the progressives who would like to see a President Biden tack left once elected.
by Paige Williams, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; source photographs from The Lincoln Project / YouTube
Lockdown Feels Pretty Different the Second Time Around
When Israel imposed a coronavirus lockdown in March, I walked home after raiding the supermarket and was able to hear the birds chirping on Dizengoff Street, one of the busiest arteries here.
The next day I spoke to my father in Jerusalem, where the country’s first death from coronavirus had just been recorded. We both danced around the fact that, since his age made him more susceptible to complications from the virus, it would probably be a long time before we could see each other.
Movement was restricted to within 100 meters (about 330 feet) from one’s home. I taped to our fridge a “schedule” for my children, who were 3½ and 1½, which included assembling puzzles in the living room, coloring on our tiny porch and tent-building in their room. Five days later, I scrapped the “schedule” because every unfilled task felt like a personal failure. When my husband got off work (our dining table became his home office), I would lock myself on the porch with the shutters down to write.
On May 26, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, eager to score a win after barely scraping by in the latest election, declared that we had managed to flatten the curve. Israel had suffered 281 deaths and more than 16,000 people had been infected, but the new infections had dropped to a few dozen cases. “Go have fun!” he said.
The government reopened schools, allowed indoor dining, stopped enforcing social distancing in shopping malls and permitted large weddings. These reckless decisions reversed the public health gains of the first lockdown.
Cases started to spike to over 8,000 a day and hospital beds filled perilously close to capacity by September, and it became clear that another closure was inevitable. On Sept. 18, the government imposed a second national lockdown. But it did not feel like déjà vu.
Whatever trust Israelis had had in the government to lead us through the pandemic has evaporated. The sense of national solidarity — the kind of wartime singleness of purpose that characterized the first lockdown — has been replaced by what can only be described as a free-for-all.
by Ruth Margalit, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Amir Cohen/Reuters
The next day I spoke to my father in Jerusalem, where the country’s first death from coronavirus had just been recorded. We both danced around the fact that, since his age made him more susceptible to complications from the virus, it would probably be a long time before we could see each other.
Movement was restricted to within 100 meters (about 330 feet) from one’s home. I taped to our fridge a “schedule” for my children, who were 3½ and 1½, which included assembling puzzles in the living room, coloring on our tiny porch and tent-building in their room. Five days later, I scrapped the “schedule” because every unfilled task felt like a personal failure. When my husband got off work (our dining table became his home office), I would lock myself on the porch with the shutters down to write.
The government reopened schools, allowed indoor dining, stopped enforcing social distancing in shopping malls and permitted large weddings. These reckless decisions reversed the public health gains of the first lockdown.
Cases started to spike to over 8,000 a day and hospital beds filled perilously close to capacity by September, and it became clear that another closure was inevitable. On Sept. 18, the government imposed a second national lockdown. But it did not feel like déjà vu.
Whatever trust Israelis had had in the government to lead us through the pandemic has evaporated. The sense of national solidarity — the kind of wartime singleness of purpose that characterized the first lockdown — has been replaced by what can only be described as a free-for-all.
by Ruth Margalit, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Amir Cohen/Reuters
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Cinema Therapy: The Sequel
Dee: Jane, do you ever feel like you are just this far from being completely hysterical twenty-four hours a day?
Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day.
— from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
— from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy!
— from Tootsie, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal
Man…2020 has been one long, strange century.
As Howard Beale once said, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Four score and seven years ago (back in March), when portions of America went into a pandemic-driven lock down and our nation turned its lonely eyes to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms in a desperate search for binge-worthy distraction, I published a post sharing 10 of my favorite “therapy movies”.
Now its October (where have the decades gone?) and things are…unsettled. The news cycle of this past week has been particularly trying for those of us who follow that sort of thing (which I assume to be “most of us” who gravitate to this corner of the blogosphere).
With that in mind, here are 10 more personal faves that I’ve watched an unhealthy number of times; films I’m most likely to reach for when I’m depressed, feeling anxious, uncertain about the future…or all the above. These films, like my oldest and dearest friends, have never, ever let me down. Take one or two before bedtime; cocktail optional. (...)
Harold and Maude (Amazon Prime) – Harold loves Maude. And Maude loves Harold. It’s a match made in heaven-if only “society” would agree. Because Harold (Bud Cort) is a teenager, and Maude (Ruth Gordon) is about to turn 80. Falling in love with a woman old enough to be his great-grandmother is the least of Harold’s quirks. He’s a chronically depressed trustafarian who amuses himself by staging fake suicides to freak out his patrician mother (wonderfully droll Vivian Pickles). He also “enjoys” attending funerals-which is where they Meet Cute.
The effervescent Maude is Harold’s opposite; while he wallows in morbid speculation how any day could be your last, she seizes each day as if it actually were. Obviously, she has something to teach him. Despite dark undertones, this is one “midnight movie” that somehow manages to be life-affirming. The late Hal Ashby directed, and Colin Higgins wrote the screenplay. The memorable soundtrack is by Cat Stevens.
Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day.
— from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
— from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy!
— from Tootsie, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal
Man…2020 has been one long, strange century.
As Howard Beale once said, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Four score and seven years ago (back in March), when portions of America went into a pandemic-driven lock down and our nation turned its lonely eyes to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms in a desperate search for binge-worthy distraction, I published a post sharing 10 of my favorite “therapy movies”.
Now its October (where have the decades gone?) and things are…unsettled. The news cycle of this past week has been particularly trying for those of us who follow that sort of thing (which I assume to be “most of us” who gravitate to this corner of the blogosphere).
With that in mind, here are 10 more personal faves that I’ve watched an unhealthy number of times; films I’m most likely to reach for when I’m depressed, feeling anxious, uncertain about the future…or all the above. These films, like my oldest and dearest friends, have never, ever let me down. Take one or two before bedtime; cocktail optional. (...)
The effervescent Maude is Harold’s opposite; while he wallows in morbid speculation how any day could be your last, she seizes each day as if it actually were. Obviously, she has something to teach him. Despite dark undertones, this is one “midnight movie” that somehow manages to be life-affirming. The late Hal Ashby directed, and Colin Higgins wrote the screenplay. The memorable soundtrack is by Cat Stevens.
by Dennis Hartley, Digby's Hullabaloo | Read more:
Image: Harold and Maude
[ed. Glad to see Harold and Maude mentioned here (also, The Man Who Would Be King). Check out the initial post: Cinema Therapy: 10 Films That Never Let Me Down (which includes another all-time favorite: Local Hero). See also: Pathologizing Desire (Boston Review).]
The Masque of the Red Death
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. (...)
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. (...)
The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
by Edgar Allan Poe, Project Guttenberg | Read more:
[ed. See also: The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House (New Yorker).]
Thursday, October 1, 2020
Say Goodbye to Hold Music
Sometimes, a phone call is the best way to get something done. We call retailers to locate missing packages, utilities to adjust our internet speeds, airlines to change our travel itineraries...the list goes on. But more often than not, we need to wait on hold during these calls—listening closely to hold music and repetitive messages—before we reach a customer support representative who can help. In fact, people in the United States spent over 10 million hours on hold with businesses last week.
Save time with Hold for Me
Hold for Me, our latest Phone app feature, helps you get that time back, starting with an early preview on Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G) in the U.S. Now, when you call a toll-free number and a business puts you on hold, Google Assistant can wait on the line for you. You can go back to your day, and Google Assistant will notify you with sound, vibration and a prompt on your screen once someone is on the line and ready to talk. That means you’ll spend more time doing what’s important to you, and less time listening to hold music.
Hold for Me is our latest effort to make phone calls better and save you time. Last year, we introduced an update to Call Screen that helps you avoid interruptions from spam calls once and for all, and last month, we launched Verified Calls to help you know why a business is calling before you answer. Hold for Me is now another way we’re making it simpler to say hello.
Powered by Google AI
Every business’s hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes onto the call. Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like “Hello, thank you for waiting”) and a representative on the line. Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call. We gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives, to help us design these interactions and make the feature as helpful as possible to the people on both sides of the call.
While Google Assistant waits on hold for you, Google’s natural language understanding also keeps you informed. Your call will be muted to let you focus on something else, but at any time, you can check real-time captions on your screen to know what’s happening on the call.
Keeping your data safe
Hold for Me is an optional feature you can enable in settings and choose to activate during each call to a toll-free number. To determine when a representative is on the line, audio is processed entirely on your device and does not require a Wi-Fi or data connection. This makes the experience fast and also protects your privacy—no audio from the call will be shared with Google or saved to your Google account unless you explicitly decide to share it and help improve the feature. When you return to the call after Google Assistant was on hold for you, audio stops being processed altogether.
We’re excited to bring an early preview of Hold for Me to our latest Pixel devices and continue making the experience better over time. Your feedback will help us bring the feature to more people over the coming months, so they too can say goodbye to hold music and say hello to more free time.
by Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara, Google | Read more:
Image: Google
Save time with Hold for Me
Hold for Me is our latest effort to make phone calls better and save you time. Last year, we introduced an update to Call Screen that helps you avoid interruptions from spam calls once and for all, and last month, we launched Verified Calls to help you know why a business is calling before you answer. Hold for Me is now another way we’re making it simpler to say hello.
Powered by Google AI
Every business’s hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes onto the call. Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like “Hello, thank you for waiting”) and a representative on the line. Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call. We gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives, to help us design these interactions and make the feature as helpful as possible to the people on both sides of the call.
While Google Assistant waits on hold for you, Google’s natural language understanding also keeps you informed. Your call will be muted to let you focus on something else, but at any time, you can check real-time captions on your screen to know what’s happening on the call.
Keeping your data safe
Hold for Me is an optional feature you can enable in settings and choose to activate during each call to a toll-free number. To determine when a representative is on the line, audio is processed entirely on your device and does not require a Wi-Fi or data connection. This makes the experience fast and also protects your privacy—no audio from the call will be shared with Google or saved to your Google account unless you explicitly decide to share it and help improve the feature. When you return to the call after Google Assistant was on hold for you, audio stops being processed altogether.
We’re excited to bring an early preview of Hold for Me to our latest Pixel devices and continue making the experience better over time. Your feedback will help us bring the feature to more people over the coming months, so they too can say goodbye to hold music and say hello to more free time.
by Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara, Google | Read more:
Image: Google
Lily He
[ed. The Men's PGA Tour is so far removed from my game I frequently watch the LPGA Women's Tour instead. There are other reasons, too.]
The Rules Have Changed
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you to the distinguished members of the Senate Select Committee on Rulemaking for inviting me here today to testify before you. I’d like to thank also my home state senator, the gentleman from Indiana. It was his idea to reach out to a few ordinary citizens, to see what “the voice of the American voter” might sound like in this hallowed chamber. It is a bold experiment, and I hope my remarks don’t lead senators to conclude it was a bad idea.
I was asked to speak, from an outsider’s perspective, about the “rules of the game” in politics, and how the current practice of representative democracy in Washington looks to a person out in the hinterlands. As we move now toward another contentious Supreme Court confirmation, I’ve taken a special interest in a certain set of rules that have governed the Senate, especially concerning the “advice and consent” responsibilities with regard to presidential appointments of federal judges. The Senate, as we all know, has lately been embroiled in controversy over the matter of Supreme Court nominations. This body has created a great deal of confusion on the simple question of whether vacancies should or should not be filled during an election year. You’re about to do it now, and in an especially hurried manner, with only weeks to go before the presidential election. And yet many of us were told only four years ago that such things ought never happen in a Senate that respects the voters.
To prepare for this testimony, I have studied carefully the public statements of leading senators, giving special attention to principles stated by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. These are two of the most experienced senators in this Congress, so it stands to reason they would have deeply considered beliefs about rules that promote fairness in the democratic process. Let us consider their views.
It is well known that Senator McConnell developed a firm conviction after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016 that vacancies on the Supreme Court should not be filled in an election year. His statement at that time was: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Just about every Republican senator echoed this stance. Senator Graham explained it further: “We’re setting a precedent here today, Republicans are, that in the last year—at least of a lame-duck eight-year term, I would say it’s going to [apply to] a four-year term—that you’re not going to fill a vacancy of the Supreme Court, based on what we’re doing here today. That’s going to be the new rule.” As McConnell often noted, others had previously advocated such a rule, including the former senator from Delaware, Joe Biden. Therefore, President Obama’s nominee in 2016, Judge Merrick Garland, was deprived of a hearing and a vote and the seat was not filled until the following year, after Obama left office.
What is the core democratic principle that senators so passionately articulated here? It is “the American people should have a voice.” Of course, the voters had a voice in choosing the sitting president, and the president’s constitutional power is to nominate justices to the Supreme Court. The voters also chose the Senate, which has the constitutional power to withhold consent. But as an election approaches, McConnell seemed to believe, the president’s power is nullified. In the final year of his term, he loses his power to fill court vacancies. However, the Senate’s power is not nullified. Those senators who are also in their final year of a term do not lose their power to veto the president, or to confirm a nominee if they so choose.
So “the American people should have a voice” does not sufficiently explain the principle at work. We now know that Senator McConnell and Senator Graham spoke simplistically in explaining their stance against an Obama appointment. As we learned in 2020, the new rule was not, as Graham said, “that in the last year . . . you’re not going to fill a vacancy.” Once a vacancy was created by the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both McConnell and Graham clarified that election-year appointments to the bench are acceptable—even as close as a month before the voters go to the polls—if the presidency and the Senate are controlled by the same party. In this case, there would be no need to wait to hear the voice of the American people, because they’ve already spoken through the results of the previous election, not the upcoming one. Once again, just about every Republican senator immediately echoed this stance.
In explaining how the rule really works, McConnell has clarified that certain past elections are more important than others. Obama’s reelection mandate in 2012 was mitigated by the midterm election of 2014, in which Republicans were granted a 54-46 Senate majority. Divided government is what caused the president to lose his power to appoint judges. It was the vote in 2014 that expressed the true will of the people, not the one in 2012.
The Republicans lost a couple of Senate seats in 2016 but managed to secure the presidency and hold the Senate. And after the 2018 midterms, they enjoyed a 53-47 majority. Therefore “the American people” were presumed to be voicing their support for the Republican agenda. You might conclude from the statements of our principled leaders that what guides their decision-making is deep respect for the opinions of the American people as discerned from election results. Let us then look a little closer at the partisan opinions of voters.
How are we to understand majority opinion—for that is what McConnell is claiming gives the GOP its mandate—other than by counting the number of votes? Certainly he would not claim that ten thousand votes have more weight than twenty thousand votes. It seems essential to note, then, that Barack Obama was elected in 2012 with 62.6 million votes. Two years later, Mitch McConnell was re-elected to the Senate in Kentucky with less than 2 percent of the president’s backing: 806,787 votes. Yet McConnell knows that the rules allow him to arrogate almost as much power as the president. That power gives him deep satisfaction, as we saw when he told a group of supporters in Kentucky, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.’”
We understand, though, that the Majority Leader’s power derives not just from his own voters, but from the support of his Republican caucus. So we might ask how many voters the full Republican majority represents. And here’s the awful truth: if you add up the votes most recently won by each of the current fifty-three GOP senators—the class produced by the elections of 2014, 2016, and 2018—it comes to 55.1 million. Not only is that quite short of the 62.6 million votes for Obama in 2012, it’s less than the 65.8 million votes Hillary Clinton won as she edged out Donald Trump in the 2016 popular vote. But there’s one total that’s even higher than that: today’s forty-five Democratic senators together won their seats with 68.1 million votes. (Add in the two independents—Sanders of Vermont and King of Maine—and the total comes to 68.7 million.) Imagine that: the minority of forty-seven senators was elected with about 5.7 million more votes than President Trump received in 2016.
Though we are discussing the Senate, we should also note the recent election results in the House of Representatives, which reflect the will of the voters more reliably than Senate races do. Recall that the Republican leadership put great stock in their gains in the midterm elections of 2014, which they interpreted as a rejection of President Obama (creating the “divided government” that made it appropriate to stymie his judicial nominations). Yet today they ignore the Democratic wave election of 2018, which suggested a rejection of President Trump’s agenda. Democrats gained forty seats in the 2018 midterms, giving them a 235-200 majority in the House. Did this suggest a questionable mandate for the president? The Democratic House candidates that year racked up 60.7 million votes. The Republican candidates won just under 51 million votes.
So again, we must ask: What is the core principle Leader McConnell is acting on? It is not that “the American people” should have a chance to vote for a new president before another lifetime appointment to the High Court is made. Nor is it that they have already sanctioned an election-season choice by giving Republicans the White House and the Senate—neither the president nor the GOP Senate majority won majority support from the electorate. To state the principle honestly, McConnell would have to acknowledge it’s not the majority opinion of the American people that matters, it’s the unbalanced power of the states. Kentucky stands on equal footing with California in deciding upon these lifetime appointments. So I would suggest to you that the McConnell Rule amounts to this: “Supreme Court appointments are acceptable in an election year when a few large conservative states with active voter suppression programs (Texas, Florida, and Georgia) combine with mostly rural low-population states to elect a president and a Senate without an electoral majority.” This is what he calls a “united government” with a clear mandate.
I’m sure many of you on this distinguished panel are aware of the bitter partisan complaints that have been engendered by Leader McConnell’s governing style. He has been called a cynic, a “dollar-store Machiavelli,” and “the gravedigger of American democracy.” And yet those of us who have studied his career know he sees himself as a devoted student of the Constitution and the rules of the Senate. We can be sure he would be little interested in the critique of his inconsistent rationales that I have outlined here. The fact that Republicans hold power in the Senate with 13.6 million fewer votes in their column than Democratic senators is simply an artifact of our constitutional structure. And it is the states that choose the president through the Electoral College, not the people through the national vote. Majority Leader McConnell operates within this constitutional framework and no doubt sleeps easily at night in his conviction that he faithfully follows the letter of the laws.
But we are here today to discuss rules. We are well aware that the rules of the Senate, both the written and unwritten ones, change over time. Senator Lindsey Graham has given us a good understanding of how mercurial and emotional the rule-making process of the Senate can be. He sounded firm in his conviction in 2016 when he declared “the new rule” against filling Supreme Court vacancies in an election year. In explaining his change of heart in a letter to his fellow senators recently, he confessed he was still angry over the way Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh, and for that matter Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, when they appeared before the Senate for confirmation hearings. Consequently, Graham recently explained, “the rules have changed.”
I think we can all agree that spite is not necessarily the highest justification for changing the rules. If you haven’t thought more than a few minutes about the question, you might take the high-minded stand that seeking partisan advantage is not a good justification, either. But what do we do when partisan advantage is inherent in existing rules? The pursuit of new rules is bound to either add to those advantages or to reverse them. There is no neutrality in politics. Yet, there ought to be a pursuit of fairness. This is a sports-crazed nation: everyone should be able to understand the problem if a basketball game is played with one team getting four points for every shot made from behind the “three-point” line, while the other team gets only two points.
It seems to me to be a damn shame that we don’t currently have a political party that is willing to stand up and fight for the true interests of the American voter.
We have seen the results of crafty Republican partisanship: control of the presidency, the Senate, and many state legislatures, all as part of a drive to impose minority rule on the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party fails to defend essential principles of fairness and democracy. I saw the other day a Republican strategist quoted by a newspaper columnist claiming that Mitch McConnell and the Democrats’ Senate leader Chuck Schumer “play the same game. McConnell just plays it a little better.” This is wrong on both counts. Minority Leader Schumer plays a different game. He and others in the Democratic leadership believe they can impress voters by acting like reasonable and civil moderates who “play by the rules,” which are stacked against them. We also can’t know whether McConnell truly plays the game better. He uses a structure that gives him many built-in advantages.
The difference is that he is willing to use the rules—and change the rules—in whatever ways benefit his party’s hold on power. So I now come to my modest proposals. These are premised on the possibility that the Democratic Party will someday win back control of the White House and the Senate, while holding a majority in the House. And further, that leaders of the Democratic Party might decide to remake the party as a powerful force for a functioning and fair democracy.
by Dave Denison, The Baffler | Read more:
I was asked to speak, from an outsider’s perspective, about the “rules of the game” in politics, and how the current practice of representative democracy in Washington looks to a person out in the hinterlands. As we move now toward another contentious Supreme Court confirmation, I’ve taken a special interest in a certain set of rules that have governed the Senate, especially concerning the “advice and consent” responsibilities with regard to presidential appointments of federal judges. The Senate, as we all know, has lately been embroiled in controversy over the matter of Supreme Court nominations. This body has created a great deal of confusion on the simple question of whether vacancies should or should not be filled during an election year. You’re about to do it now, and in an especially hurried manner, with only weeks to go before the presidential election. And yet many of us were told only four years ago that such things ought never happen in a Senate that respects the voters.
To prepare for this testimony, I have studied carefully the public statements of leading senators, giving special attention to principles stated by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. These are two of the most experienced senators in this Congress, so it stands to reason they would have deeply considered beliefs about rules that promote fairness in the democratic process. Let us consider their views.
What is the core democratic principle that senators so passionately articulated here? It is “the American people should have a voice.” Of course, the voters had a voice in choosing the sitting president, and the president’s constitutional power is to nominate justices to the Supreme Court. The voters also chose the Senate, which has the constitutional power to withhold consent. But as an election approaches, McConnell seemed to believe, the president’s power is nullified. In the final year of his term, he loses his power to fill court vacancies. However, the Senate’s power is not nullified. Those senators who are also in their final year of a term do not lose their power to veto the president, or to confirm a nominee if they so choose.
So “the American people should have a voice” does not sufficiently explain the principle at work. We now know that Senator McConnell and Senator Graham spoke simplistically in explaining their stance against an Obama appointment. As we learned in 2020, the new rule was not, as Graham said, “that in the last year . . . you’re not going to fill a vacancy.” Once a vacancy was created by the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both McConnell and Graham clarified that election-year appointments to the bench are acceptable—even as close as a month before the voters go to the polls—if the presidency and the Senate are controlled by the same party. In this case, there would be no need to wait to hear the voice of the American people, because they’ve already spoken through the results of the previous election, not the upcoming one. Once again, just about every Republican senator immediately echoed this stance.
In explaining how the rule really works, McConnell has clarified that certain past elections are more important than others. Obama’s reelection mandate in 2012 was mitigated by the midterm election of 2014, in which Republicans were granted a 54-46 Senate majority. Divided government is what caused the president to lose his power to appoint judges. It was the vote in 2014 that expressed the true will of the people, not the one in 2012.
The Republicans lost a couple of Senate seats in 2016 but managed to secure the presidency and hold the Senate. And after the 2018 midterms, they enjoyed a 53-47 majority. Therefore “the American people” were presumed to be voicing their support for the Republican agenda. You might conclude from the statements of our principled leaders that what guides their decision-making is deep respect for the opinions of the American people as discerned from election results. Let us then look a little closer at the partisan opinions of voters.
How are we to understand majority opinion—for that is what McConnell is claiming gives the GOP its mandate—other than by counting the number of votes? Certainly he would not claim that ten thousand votes have more weight than twenty thousand votes. It seems essential to note, then, that Barack Obama was elected in 2012 with 62.6 million votes. Two years later, Mitch McConnell was re-elected to the Senate in Kentucky with less than 2 percent of the president’s backing: 806,787 votes. Yet McConnell knows that the rules allow him to arrogate almost as much power as the president. That power gives him deep satisfaction, as we saw when he told a group of supporters in Kentucky, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.’”
We understand, though, that the Majority Leader’s power derives not just from his own voters, but from the support of his Republican caucus. So we might ask how many voters the full Republican majority represents. And here’s the awful truth: if you add up the votes most recently won by each of the current fifty-three GOP senators—the class produced by the elections of 2014, 2016, and 2018—it comes to 55.1 million. Not only is that quite short of the 62.6 million votes for Obama in 2012, it’s less than the 65.8 million votes Hillary Clinton won as she edged out Donald Trump in the 2016 popular vote. But there’s one total that’s even higher than that: today’s forty-five Democratic senators together won their seats with 68.1 million votes. (Add in the two independents—Sanders of Vermont and King of Maine—and the total comes to 68.7 million.) Imagine that: the minority of forty-seven senators was elected with about 5.7 million more votes than President Trump received in 2016.
Though we are discussing the Senate, we should also note the recent election results in the House of Representatives, which reflect the will of the voters more reliably than Senate races do. Recall that the Republican leadership put great stock in their gains in the midterm elections of 2014, which they interpreted as a rejection of President Obama (creating the “divided government” that made it appropriate to stymie his judicial nominations). Yet today they ignore the Democratic wave election of 2018, which suggested a rejection of President Trump’s agenda. Democrats gained forty seats in the 2018 midterms, giving them a 235-200 majority in the House. Did this suggest a questionable mandate for the president? The Democratic House candidates that year racked up 60.7 million votes. The Republican candidates won just under 51 million votes.
So again, we must ask: What is the core principle Leader McConnell is acting on? It is not that “the American people” should have a chance to vote for a new president before another lifetime appointment to the High Court is made. Nor is it that they have already sanctioned an election-season choice by giving Republicans the White House and the Senate—neither the president nor the GOP Senate majority won majority support from the electorate. To state the principle honestly, McConnell would have to acknowledge it’s not the majority opinion of the American people that matters, it’s the unbalanced power of the states. Kentucky stands on equal footing with California in deciding upon these lifetime appointments. So I would suggest to you that the McConnell Rule amounts to this: “Supreme Court appointments are acceptable in an election year when a few large conservative states with active voter suppression programs (Texas, Florida, and Georgia) combine with mostly rural low-population states to elect a president and a Senate without an electoral majority.” This is what he calls a “united government” with a clear mandate.
I’m sure many of you on this distinguished panel are aware of the bitter partisan complaints that have been engendered by Leader McConnell’s governing style. He has been called a cynic, a “dollar-store Machiavelli,” and “the gravedigger of American democracy.” And yet those of us who have studied his career know he sees himself as a devoted student of the Constitution and the rules of the Senate. We can be sure he would be little interested in the critique of his inconsistent rationales that I have outlined here. The fact that Republicans hold power in the Senate with 13.6 million fewer votes in their column than Democratic senators is simply an artifact of our constitutional structure. And it is the states that choose the president through the Electoral College, not the people through the national vote. Majority Leader McConnell operates within this constitutional framework and no doubt sleeps easily at night in his conviction that he faithfully follows the letter of the laws.
But we are here today to discuss rules. We are well aware that the rules of the Senate, both the written and unwritten ones, change over time. Senator Lindsey Graham has given us a good understanding of how mercurial and emotional the rule-making process of the Senate can be. He sounded firm in his conviction in 2016 when he declared “the new rule” against filling Supreme Court vacancies in an election year. In explaining his change of heart in a letter to his fellow senators recently, he confessed he was still angry over the way Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh, and for that matter Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, when they appeared before the Senate for confirmation hearings. Consequently, Graham recently explained, “the rules have changed.”
I think we can all agree that spite is not necessarily the highest justification for changing the rules. If you haven’t thought more than a few minutes about the question, you might take the high-minded stand that seeking partisan advantage is not a good justification, either. But what do we do when partisan advantage is inherent in existing rules? The pursuit of new rules is bound to either add to those advantages or to reverse them. There is no neutrality in politics. Yet, there ought to be a pursuit of fairness. This is a sports-crazed nation: everyone should be able to understand the problem if a basketball game is played with one team getting four points for every shot made from behind the “three-point” line, while the other team gets only two points.
It seems to me to be a damn shame that we don’t currently have a political party that is willing to stand up and fight for the true interests of the American voter.
We have seen the results of crafty Republican partisanship: control of the presidency, the Senate, and many state legislatures, all as part of a drive to impose minority rule on the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party fails to defend essential principles of fairness and democracy. I saw the other day a Republican strategist quoted by a newspaper columnist claiming that Mitch McConnell and the Democrats’ Senate leader Chuck Schumer “play the same game. McConnell just plays it a little better.” This is wrong on both counts. Minority Leader Schumer plays a different game. He and others in the Democratic leadership believe they can impress voters by acting like reasonable and civil moderates who “play by the rules,” which are stacked against them. We also can’t know whether McConnell truly plays the game better. He uses a structure that gives him many built-in advantages.
The difference is that he is willing to use the rules—and change the rules—in whatever ways benefit his party’s hold on power. So I now come to my modest proposals. These are premised on the possibility that the Democratic Party will someday win back control of the White House and the Senate, while holding a majority in the House. And further, that leaders of the Democratic Party might decide to remake the party as a powerful force for a functioning and fair democracy.
by Dave Denison, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Gage Skidmore/The Baffler
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows
As computer systems and software applications come to play an ever-larger role in shaping our lives and the world, we have an obligation to be more, not less, involved in decisions about their design and use—before progress forecloses our options. We should be careful about what we make.
If that sounds naive or hopeless, it’s because we have been misled by a metaphor. We’ve defined our relation with technology not as that of body and limb or even that of sibling and sibling but as that of master and slave. The idea goes way back. It took hold at the dawn of Western philosophical thought, emerging first with the ancient Athenians. Aristotle, in discussing the operation of households at the beginning of his Politics, argued that slaves and tools are essentially equivalent, the former acting as “animate instruments” and the latter as “inanimate instruments” in the service of the master of the house. If tools could somehow become animate, Aristotle posited, they would be able to substitute directly for the labor of slaves. “There is only one condition on which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves,” he mused, anticipating the arrival of computer automation and even machine learning. “This condition would be that each [inanimate] instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation.” It would be “as if a shuttle should weave itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp-playing.”
The conception of tools as slaves has colored our thinking ever since. It informs society’s recurring dream of emancipation from toil. “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” John Maynard Keynes, in a 1930 essay, predicted that mechanical slaves would free humankind from “the struggle for subsistence” and propel us to “our destination of economic bliss.” In 2013, Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum declared that “a robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us.” By 2040, he forecast, our computer slaves—“they never get tired, they’re never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes”—will have rescued us from labor and delivered us into a new Eden. “Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It’s up to us.”
With its roles reversed, the metaphor also informs society’s nightmares about technology. As we become dependent on our technological slaves, the thinking goes, we turn into slaves ourselves. From the eighteenth century on, social critics have routinely portrayed factory machinery as forcing workers into bondage. “Masses of labourers,” wrote Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, “are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.” Today, people complain all the time about feeling like slaves to their appliances and gadgets. “Smart devices are sometimes empowering,” observed The Economist in “Slaves to the Smartphone,” an article published in 2012. “But for most people the servant has become the master.” More dramatically still, the idea of a robot uprising, in which computers with artificial intelligence transform themselves from our slaves to our masters, has for a century been a central theme in dystopian fantasies about the future. The very word “robot,” coined by a science fiction writer in 1920, comes from robota, a Czech term for servitude.
The master-slave metaphor, in addition to being morally fraught, distorts the way we look at technology. It reinforces the sense that our tools are separate from ourselves, that our instruments have an agency independent of our own. We start to judge our technologies not on what they enable us to do but rather on their intrinsic qualities as products—their cleverness, their efficiency, their novelty, their style. We choose a tool because it’s new or it’s cool or it’s fast, not because it brings us more fully into the world and expands the ground of our experiences and perceptions. We become mere consumers of technology.
The metaphor encourages society to take a simplistic and fatalistic view of technology and progress. If we assume that our tools act as slaves on our behalf, always working in our best interest, then any attempt to place limits on technology becomes hard to defend. Each advance grants us greater freedom and takes us a stride closer to, if not utopia, then at least the best of all possible worlds. Any misstep, we tell ourselves, will be quickly corrected by subsequent innovations. If we just let progress do its thing, it will find remedies for the problems it creates. “Technology is not neutral but serves as an overwhelming positive force in human culture,” writes one pundit, expressing the self-serving Silicon Valley ideology that in recent years has gained wide currency. “We have a moral obligation to increase technology because it increases opportunities.” The sense of moral obligation strengthens with the advance of automation, which, after all, provides us with the most animate of instruments, the slaves that, as Aristotle anticipated, are most capable of releasing us from our labors.
The belief in technology as a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force is seductive. It allows us to feel optimistic about the future while relieving us of responsibility for that future. It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.” But, he hastens to add, “it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.” Being freed up sounds a lot more pleasant than being fired.
There’s a callousness to such grandiose futurism. As history reminds us, high-flown rhetoric about using technology to liberate workers often masks a contempt for labor. It strains credulity to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth-redistribution scheme that would be necessary to fund the self-actualizing leisure-time pursuits of the jobless multitudes. Even if society were to come up with some magic spell, or magic algorithm, for equitably parceling out the spoils of automation, there’s good reason to doubt whether anything resembling the “economic bliss” imagined by Keynes would ensue.
In a prescient passage in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observed that if automation’s utopian promise were actually to pan out, the result would probably feel less like paradise than like a cruel practical joke. The whole of modern society, she wrote, has been organized as “a laboring society,” where working for pay, and then spending that pay, is the way people define themselves and measure their worth. Most of the “higher and more meaningful activities” revered in the distant past have been pushed to the margin or forgotten, and “only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living.” For technology to fulfill humankind’s abiding “wish to be liberated from labor’s ‘toil and trouble’ ” at this point would be perverse. It would cast us deeper into a purgatory of malaise. What automation confronts us with, Arendt concluded, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.” Utopianism, she understood, is a form of self-delusion.
If that sounds naive or hopeless, it’s because we have been misled by a metaphor. We’ve defined our relation with technology not as that of body and limb or even that of sibling and sibling but as that of master and slave. The idea goes way back. It took hold at the dawn of Western philosophical thought, emerging first with the ancient Athenians. Aristotle, in discussing the operation of households at the beginning of his Politics, argued that slaves and tools are essentially equivalent, the former acting as “animate instruments” and the latter as “inanimate instruments” in the service of the master of the house. If tools could somehow become animate, Aristotle posited, they would be able to substitute directly for the labor of slaves. “There is only one condition on which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves,” he mused, anticipating the arrival of computer automation and even machine learning. “This condition would be that each [inanimate] instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation.” It would be “as if a shuttle should weave itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp-playing.”
The conception of tools as slaves has colored our thinking ever since. It informs society’s recurring dream of emancipation from toil. “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” John Maynard Keynes, in a 1930 essay, predicted that mechanical slaves would free humankind from “the struggle for subsistence” and propel us to “our destination of economic bliss.” In 2013, Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum declared that “a robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us.” By 2040, he forecast, our computer slaves—“they never get tired, they’re never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes”—will have rescued us from labor and delivered us into a new Eden. “Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It’s up to us.”
With its roles reversed, the metaphor also informs society’s nightmares about technology. As we become dependent on our technological slaves, the thinking goes, we turn into slaves ourselves. From the eighteenth century on, social critics have routinely portrayed factory machinery as forcing workers into bondage. “Masses of labourers,” wrote Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, “are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.” Today, people complain all the time about feeling like slaves to their appliances and gadgets. “Smart devices are sometimes empowering,” observed The Economist in “Slaves to the Smartphone,” an article published in 2012. “But for most people the servant has become the master.” More dramatically still, the idea of a robot uprising, in which computers with artificial intelligence transform themselves from our slaves to our masters, has for a century been a central theme in dystopian fantasies about the future. The very word “robot,” coined by a science fiction writer in 1920, comes from robota, a Czech term for servitude.
The master-slave metaphor, in addition to being morally fraught, distorts the way we look at technology. It reinforces the sense that our tools are separate from ourselves, that our instruments have an agency independent of our own. We start to judge our technologies not on what they enable us to do but rather on their intrinsic qualities as products—their cleverness, their efficiency, their novelty, their style. We choose a tool because it’s new or it’s cool or it’s fast, not because it brings us more fully into the world and expands the ground of our experiences and perceptions. We become mere consumers of technology.
The metaphor encourages society to take a simplistic and fatalistic view of technology and progress. If we assume that our tools act as slaves on our behalf, always working in our best interest, then any attempt to place limits on technology becomes hard to defend. Each advance grants us greater freedom and takes us a stride closer to, if not utopia, then at least the best of all possible worlds. Any misstep, we tell ourselves, will be quickly corrected by subsequent innovations. If we just let progress do its thing, it will find remedies for the problems it creates. “Technology is not neutral but serves as an overwhelming positive force in human culture,” writes one pundit, expressing the self-serving Silicon Valley ideology that in recent years has gained wide currency. “We have a moral obligation to increase technology because it increases opportunities.” The sense of moral obligation strengthens with the advance of automation, which, after all, provides us with the most animate of instruments, the slaves that, as Aristotle anticipated, are most capable of releasing us from our labors.
The belief in technology as a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force is seductive. It allows us to feel optimistic about the future while relieving us of responsibility for that future. It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.” But, he hastens to add, “it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.” Being freed up sounds a lot more pleasant than being fired.
There’s a callousness to such grandiose futurism. As history reminds us, high-flown rhetoric about using technology to liberate workers often masks a contempt for labor. It strains credulity to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth-redistribution scheme that would be necessary to fund the self-actualizing leisure-time pursuits of the jobless multitudes. Even if society were to come up with some magic spell, or magic algorithm, for equitably parceling out the spoils of automation, there’s good reason to doubt whether anything resembling the “economic bliss” imagined by Keynes would ensue.
In a prescient passage in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observed that if automation’s utopian promise were actually to pan out, the result would probably feel less like paradise than like a cruel practical joke. The whole of modern society, she wrote, has been organized as “a laboring society,” where working for pay, and then spending that pay, is the way people define themselves and measure their worth. Most of the “higher and more meaningful activities” revered in the distant past have been pushed to the margin or forgotten, and “only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living.” For technology to fulfill humankind’s abiding “wish to be liberated from labor’s ‘toil and trouble’ ” at this point would be perverse. It would cast us deeper into a purgatory of malaise. What automation confronts us with, Arendt concluded, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.” Utopianism, she understood, is a form of self-delusion.
by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type | Read more:
[ed. See also: What is it like to be a smartphone? (Rough Type).]
Writing a Book: Is It Worth It?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it! 😄
To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don’t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.
To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don’t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.
Is it financially worth it?
Most books make very little money for both authors and publishers, but then occasionally something like Harry Potter comes along. If you are considering writing a book, I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero. Like starting a band with friends and hoping to become rock stars, it’s difficult to predict in advance what will be a hit and what will flop. Maybe this applies less to technical books than to fiction and music, but I suspect that even with technical books, there are a small number of hits, and most books sell quite modest numbers.
That said, in my case, I am happy to report that writing this book has in retrospect turned out to be a financially sound decision. These graphs show the royalties I have been paid since the book first went on sale:
For the first 2½ years the book was in “early release”: during this period I was still writing, and we released it in unedited form, one chapter at a time, as ebook only. Then in March 2017 the book was officially published, and the print edition went on sale. Since then, the sales have fluctuated from month to month, but on average they have stayed remarkably constant. At some point I would expect the market to become saturated (i.e. most people who were going to buy the book have already bought it), but that does not seem to have happened yet: indeed, sales noticeably increased in late 2018 (I don’t know why). The x axis ends in July 2020 because from the time of sale, it takes a couple of months for the money to trickle through the system.
My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations. That’s a percentage of the wholesale price that retailers/distributors pay to the publisher, so it doesn’t include the retailers’ markup. The figures in this section are the royalties I was paid, after the retailer and publisher have taken their cut, but before tax.
The total sales since the beginning have been (in US dollars):
- Print: 68,763 copies, $161,549 royalties ($2.35/book)
- Ebook: 33,420 copies, $169,350 royalties ($5.07/book)
- O’Reilly online access (formerly called Safari Books Online): $110,069 royalties (I don’t get readership numbers for this channel)
- Translations: 5,896 copies, $8,278 royalties ($1.40/book)
- Other licensing and sponsorship: $34,600 royalties
- Total: 108,079 copies, $477,916
Now, in retrospect, it turns out that those 2.5 years were a good investment, because the income that this work has generated is in the same ballpark as the Silicon Valley software engineering salary (including stock and benefits) I could have received in the same time if I hadn’t quit LinkedIn in 2014 to work on the book. But of course I didn’t know that at the time! The royalties could easily have turned out to be a factor of 10 lower, in which case it would have been a financially much less compelling proposition.
by Martin Kleppmann | Read more:
Images: Martin Kleppmann
Social Cooling
Big Data is supercharging this effect.
This could limit your desire to take risks or exercise free speech.
Over the long term these 'chilling effects' could 'cool down' society.
via: Social Cooling
[ed. Comments (Hacker News).]
[ed. Comments (Hacker News).]
Monday, September 28, 2020
Antidote to COVID-19 Science Overload
Remember early spring, when it felt like we were all plunged into a crash course in epidemiology, heads spinning with terms like “R-naught,” “flatten the curve” and “herd immunity?” Every new nugget of data and scientific insight about the novel coronavirus was headline news, ricocheting from Twitter to technical journals to talking heads.
The wall-to-wall coverage has eased since then, but the pace of discovery hasn’t. Every day, hundreds of new research papers are published or posted about the virus and pandemic, ranging from case studies of single patients to randomized, controlled trials of potential treatments.
It’s a fire hose of information that overwhelms even the most fervent COVID-19 science junkies.
But there’s a way to keep current without having to spend your days and nights clicking through journal websites. For the past five months, a small group of faculty and students at the University of Washington has been wading through the deluge so you don’t have to. Five days a week, the Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness produces the “COVID-19 Literature Situation Report,” which provides a succinct summary of key scientific developments.
It’s a quick read and mostly jargon-free in keeping with a target audience that includes not only public health officials, but also politicians, community leaders and the general public. The group also prepares occasional in-depth reports about issues of pressing interest, like the long-term health effects of COVID-19.
The project started as an effort by staff at the Washington Department of Health (DOH) to keep up with rapid-fire developments early in the outbreak. But the agency was stretched too thin and contracted with Guthrie and his colleagues to continue and expand the work.
Their initial distribution list was 40 people. Today, about 1,600 subscribers get the email newsletter, many of whom share it via other websites and online bulletin boards. Guthrie has heard from readers at the CDC and top universities around the country. Members of Gov. Jay Inslee’s staff are on the distribution list.
Producing what the team calls the “LitRep” is a daily deadline dance that starts at 6 a.m. and doesn’t end until Guthrie or his co-leader Dr. Jennifer Ross, an infectious disease specialist at UW Medicine, hit the “send” button about 12 hours later.
Much of the work is done by a rotating group of five students — mostly doctoral candidates in global health or epidemiology — who work in shifts on a kind of virtual assembly line.
The early birds gather the raw materials, using standard search terms to pull all the new studies posted on PubMed, a free government search engine, and medRxiv and bioRxiv, which posts preprints before peer review. They also manually check several high-profile journals, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
“It’s a very distilled version,” said Brandon Guthrie, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology and co-leader of the effort. “What are the most important things (we) need to know that are coming out today?” (...)
The average haul is about 400 papers a day but can range between 200 and 1,000, said Lorenzo Tolentino, who just finished his master’s degree at the UW Department of Global Health and was one of the first students to sign on for the project.
by Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times
The wall-to-wall coverage has eased since then, but the pace of discovery hasn’t. Every day, hundreds of new research papers are published or posted about the virus and pandemic, ranging from case studies of single patients to randomized, controlled trials of potential treatments.
It’s a fire hose of information that overwhelms even the most fervent COVID-19 science junkies.
It’s a quick read and mostly jargon-free in keeping with a target audience that includes not only public health officials, but also politicians, community leaders and the general public. The group also prepares occasional in-depth reports about issues of pressing interest, like the long-term health effects of COVID-19.
The project started as an effort by staff at the Washington Department of Health (DOH) to keep up with rapid-fire developments early in the outbreak. But the agency was stretched too thin and contracted with Guthrie and his colleagues to continue and expand the work.
Their initial distribution list was 40 people. Today, about 1,600 subscribers get the email newsletter, many of whom share it via other websites and online bulletin boards. Guthrie has heard from readers at the CDC and top universities around the country. Members of Gov. Jay Inslee’s staff are on the distribution list.
Producing what the team calls the “LitRep” is a daily deadline dance that starts at 6 a.m. and doesn’t end until Guthrie or his co-leader Dr. Jennifer Ross, an infectious disease specialist at UW Medicine, hit the “send” button about 12 hours later.
Much of the work is done by a rotating group of five students — mostly doctoral candidates in global health or epidemiology — who work in shifts on a kind of virtual assembly line.
The early birds gather the raw materials, using standard search terms to pull all the new studies posted on PubMed, a free government search engine, and medRxiv and bioRxiv, which posts preprints before peer review. They also manually check several high-profile journals, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
“It’s a very distilled version,” said Brandon Guthrie, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology and co-leader of the effort. “What are the most important things (we) need to know that are coming out today?” (...)
The average haul is about 400 papers a day but can range between 200 and 1,000, said Lorenzo Tolentino, who just finished his master’s degree at the UW Department of Global Health and was one of the first students to sign on for the project.
Image: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times
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