Taylor Swift

‘Evermore,’ Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Sequel, Is a Journey Deeper Inward (NY Times)

Yes, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” as upbeat and propulsive as this record gets, is a very explicit tribute to Rebekah West Harkness, the eccentric multiple divorceé and Standard Oil heiress/widow who filled her Rhode Island mansion’s pool with champagne and her fish tank with scotch; “stole her neighbor’s dog and dyed it key-lime green,” a splendid detail after Swift’s own master-songwriter heart; and upon her death in 1982, had her ashes placed in a $250,000 urn designed by Salvador Dalí. (This song is also your first opportunity to hear Swift sing the word “bitch.”) Naturally, Harkness has inspired multiple lengthy explainer blog posts in the past 72 hours, because Swift wrote a song about her, because Swift owns her house now. (The refrain “She had a marvelous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”) And wow is it impressive, genuinely impressive, how charming this song is given the fact that it’s a white pop star, in July 2020, singing a song about her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion. (The Ringer)

[ed. A new album out less than five months after her widely acclaimed Folklore. The girl's a music machine. I like Folklore better, especially this song (it's not an easy song to sing with the phrasing but she nails it). See also: the last great american dynasty (the long pond studio sessions) for a stripped-down version; and, for reviews of Evermore Taylor Swift, pop culture workhorse (Vox), and Taylor Swift could use an editor (Atlantic).]

Pandemic Villains: Robinhood

As the world went into lockdown and the global economy into a spiral last spring, one company struck gold. A phone-based trading app called Robinhood began wiping the floor with more celebrated online brokerage rivals like Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and E-Trade. The moment the pandemic began, it seemed, the world started trading stocks on Robinhood.

The numbers were staggering. Robinhood’s average daily trading volume tripled in the first quarter of this year, compared with the last quarter of 2019, and saw a tenfold increase in net deposits as millions were losing their jobs. The New York Times reported that the firm in the first quarter traded nine times as many shares as E-Trade, and an incredible 40 times as many as Schwab. It added 3 million new customer accounts, and by June was doing 4.3 million daily average revenue trades, or DARTS, more than any other online firm and more than Schwab and E-Trade combined.

Backed by a string of venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Google’s VC arm, GV, the firm received four major cash injections. Investors poured $200 million into the firm in April, $320 million more in July, another $200 million in August, and finally in November, another $460 million. Through this brief time, the company’s valuation jumped from $8.2 billion to $11.7 billion, by which time word leaked out that the firm had “asked banks to pitch for roles” for a possible IPO next year.

Analysts saw nothing but conquest ahead. “Competing versus Robinhood will be difficult,” said Larry Tabb, head of market structure research for Bloomberg Intelligence.

Robinhood seemed a new prodigal son of 21st-century capitalism, an awesome hybrid of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The firm combined the pure greed of a Goldman, Sachs or JP Morgan Chase with the cheery, youth-friendly user-engagement strategies of Instagram or TikTok.The firm was founded in 2013 by two perma-smiling Stanford grads named Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, who wore khakis and Monkees haircuts and never seemed more than a moment away from bro-hugging one another.

These harmless-looking eggheads sounded genuinely excited to bring their product to the world, explaining they had a mission to “democratize finance for all.”

The app is perfectly designed for such “democratization.” It’s free, charging no commissions for trades. It also has an alluring, Joe Camel-like marketing campaign, featuring a host of bells and whistles in the form of free sample share giveaways, “scratch-off” rewards, and video confetti to celebrate transactions. “Even the most skeptical investor can be drawn in,” is how Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal just put it, describing how an assignment to learn more about the Robinhood experience led to something like addiction in less than a week.

Small-time customers who can’t afford a whole share of, say, Amazon stock can buy fractional stocks, and can also engage right away in complex options bets, just like the pros! What Bloomberg called “stock trading on a fun gamelike phone app” brings hordes of rookies into the markets: half of Robinhood’s customers this year were first-time traders, and 80% of its assets under management belong to millennials.

The firm is an icon of success in the pandemic age, finance’s answer to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Without sports to bet on, or bars to crawl, a whole new generation of “investors” are making Robinhood the destination for the ultimate new Covid-19 addiction: binge-trading. What could possibly go wrong with bringing more people into the stock market?

A lot, as it turns out. “Every time someone says they want to ‘democratize access,’” says Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading, “I get very scared.” (...)

In what the press accounts describe euphemistically using terms like a “controversial but legal practice,” Robinhood makes the bulk of its money on “payment for order flow.” It sells its data to high-frequency traders like Citadel and Virtu, market makers who ostensibly are paying for the honor of executing trades for Robinhood investors. These firms, using the technology that’s the subject of the celebrated Michael Lewis book Flash Boys, hunt out tiny price differences and gauge market sentiment and supply and demand before other traders, using sophisticated algorithms to jump ahead of the pack.

A Robinhood investor typing in a trade is just beginning a series of transactions that might result in a string of actors being compensated. Robinhood does not and can not post orders directly to exchanges like the NASDAQ; for a fee, it sends all of its orders to market maker firms like Citadel or Virtu. Those firms in turn have what amounts to a free option on the Robinhood trader’s order. They can execute the trade themselves, or they can offload it to an exchange, which in turn posts the order and compensates the market maker firm in the form of rebates, while earning money itself by charging fees for “data feed” that include information about such retail orders.

The mechanics of all of this are not absolutely necessary for Robinhood customers to understand, but it is worth asking the question of whether all of these actors in between the Robinhood client and his or her trades withdraw more or less value than, say, traditional broker fees. The HFT firms that handle the bulk of Robinhood’s business have always maintained that what they do is socially beneficial, because their trades “add liquidity” and make markets more efficient. Critics say the opposite, that high-speed algorithmic trading is just using advance peeks at market intelligence to turn trading into a low-risk arbitrage-like activity. (...)

The obvious problem is that a lot of these younger customers have no clue what they’re doing. “Retail investors don’t understand stocks, let alone options,” sighs Saluzzi. He compares the service to bringing amateur poker players to Vegas and seating them not at a table with old ladies and tourists, but with the best players in town. “It’s throwing them right in with the sharks,” he says.

by Matt Taibbi, TK |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Stephen Colbert in Lockdown

However you describe Colbert’s role, the show has been more vital than the one before. Maybe that’s because he has more fully realized its mandate. Colbert recalls a talk he had with director Spike Jonze in 2015, when Jonze asked him what he wanted the show to be about. After thinking about it, Colbert remembered a line from e.e. cummings: “What is more important than love, which is ‘the only god who spoke this earth so glad and big’? And I haven’t the slightest fucking idea how to do that, okay?” he says. “How can you make it about love? For the life of me, I did not know how to do it. I just kept on doing it and doing it. What has occurred to me since Trump became president is that what the show is about is loss. And you feel it with such clarity, because you’re losing something you love, which is—however illusory or real, because I’m not going to judge either way—America’s moral authority in the world, that shining city on the hill.”

“Our own national image gets lost,” Colbert continues. “Our own sense of the purpose of America gets lost. And then there’s economic hegemony, then there’s a loss by white Americans thinking that they are the default culture of America. There’s all the loss that the people who’ve been denied their position or their rights in America have always dealt with, that then we have to deal with, which is also another sense of loss and innocence. There’s all this loss going on in America. And on a nightly basis, because there’s no audience, I can talk about loss, but what I’m really talking about is, ‘Look at what we love. It’s on fire.’ ”

by Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Annie Leibovitz

Yes, Facebook Has Become a Menace

It’s about time, even if it’s been a very long 22 years.

It was 1998 when Microsoft finally landed in the cross hairs of the federal government, when the Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general alleged in an antitrust lawsuit that the software giant had abused its market power to crush competition. It was the last time the government took meaningful action against the unfettered rise of a tech behemoth.

The Big Tech companies that have sprouted up since the Microsoft case have been treated by government as if they were the most delicate of flowers, in need of more nurturing than the most finicky of ferns. There have been laughable fines, while one merger after another was allowed to sail on by.

Those charged with regulation have given companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon a very wide berth to grow into some of the most valuable entities in the history of the planet. Their founders are among the richest people ever.

It all came to a halt with the announcement in October that the Justice Department was finally taking aim at Google in an antitrust lawsuit focused on search and advertising. And on Wednesday, in the most potent government action since the Microsoft case, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Guam, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleging that Facebook has employed anticompetitive tactics that allowed it to bully and bury rivals. The filing, after an 18-month investigation, recommends breaking up the company.

“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition,” said the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who led the state group, at a news conference. “By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has squashed or hindered what the company perceived to be potential threats.”

The F.T.C., which is charged with protecting consumers from corporate dominance, has ducked its responsibilities many times over the years when it comes to tech companies. It has finally decided in the waning days of the Trump administration to go for broke.

Facebook will bring its enormous power to bear against the agency, which has only some 1,100 employees and a paltry budget of $330 million. In contrast, Facebook’s revenue rose sharply to $21.5 billion in its most recent quarter, giving it ample resources to add to its already ample resources.

“It will be the lawyer employment act of 2020,” one regulator joked to me about the prospect of Facebook sucking up every hired legal gun in Washington to battle the F.T.C. and the states.

But it’s no joke. And Facebook would be wise to mount the strongest possible defense since the stars are finally aligned for serious antitrust action. In this case, the stars include the feds, the states — and also a bipartisan group of legislators.

For those of us who have been paying attention, the need for this legal action has been obvious for a long time. The unchecked growth of some tech companies has been a challenge to new entrants and ultimately a dampener of innovation. And with unfettered power, Big Tech companies have become bullies, armed with fists full of data, acquired through outsize market share, to keep them at the top of the heap.

Which is why it is amusing that Facebook’s first response to the lawsuit has been to act like a victim. It’s a feint that those of us covering Silicon Valley have had to listen to for years, where those with most weaponry cry most plaintively about being under siege.

The poor-little-me act is tiresome enough, but Facebook is doubling down on the whine by claiming that the F.T.C. cannot re-evaluate deals from years past.

“The most important fact in this case, which the commission does not mention in its 53-page complaint, is that it cleared these acquisitions years ago,” Jennifer Newstead, Facebook’s canny general counsel, said in a statement. “The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final.”

That’s laughable and disingenuous. The agency never actually approved the deals in question, specifically Facebook’s purchase of the Instagram social photo service in 2012 for $1 billion and the WhatsApp messaging service acquisition in 2014 for $19 billion. Rather, the government simply did not step in to stop the acquisitions.

Think of it more like regrets that are now being resolved, using proof — and an unearthed spate of mine-mine-mine emails from the Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. His missives make it clearer than it was possible back then that Facebook sucked up possible competitors in order to eliminate challenges to its hegemony. And so, in hindsight, it’s time to rewind to unwind.

by Kara Swisher, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock

B.B. King

via:
[ed. Vaccines! omg let's see how long this will take to get politicized. See also: Supply Is Limited and Distribution Uncertain as COVID Vaccine Rolls Out (KHN)]

2020: The Year in Pictures

A Year Like No Other (NY Times)
Image: Lam Yik Fei

On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

Among the other problems with the LA Times’s editor’s statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). The Hill just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo (or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them, and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national marriage.

by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Universal’s Bob Dylan Catalog Buy Is About Survival

In the 24 hours since Bob Dylan sold his peerless songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group for a nine-figure sum, discussion has, understandably, centered on Dylan himself.

I keep hearing the same two questions: Will this affect the way fans digest his music? (No, but expect to hear his hits in more perfume commercials.) And what might have been Dylan’s motivation for selling his crown jewels now? (Music catalogs are fetching all-time-high prices, he’s nearly 80 years old, and Joe Biden may significantly hike taxes on big U.S. asset sales when he becomes president.)

What hasn’t drawn as much attention is the motivation of the buyer, Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), which my sources indicate paid closer to $400 million than $300 million to get Dylan’s 600 songs. Obviously, Dylan’s catalog is one of the most evergreen collections of music to ever be committed to notation. As Universal boss Sir Lucian Grainge said in an internal email yesterday: “In an instant, we have forever transformed the legacy of this company.” He hinted that UMPG won the deal against stiff industry competition because of its historical pedigree: “That this opportunity came to us was no accident,” he wrote. “When you put songwriters first, when you achieve unparalleled value for the art they create, when your track record is clear and consistent then the best of the best come to you.”

Grainge’s choice of words here is very deliberate. The “clear and consistent track record” comment is an obvious slight against newer companies — like Hipgnosis Songs Fund and Primary Wave — which have recently been nibbling into Universal’s market share. These firms have quickly acquired triple-A publishing catalogs from the likes of Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, Stevie Nicks, and Mark Ronson, using institutional investor money to pay more than traditional music companies like Universal are willing to.

Universal’s Dylan acquisition, then, is a landmark statement from the world’s biggest music rights company: We’re not going to sit back and just let the greatest music in history be auctioned off to Wall Street under our nose.

Which raises the question: Who’s this statement for? To a degree, it’s for the current investors of Universal’s publicly-traded French parent Vivendi. But here’s the thing: Vivendi has confirmed Universal Music Group will be spun out for an IPO in 2022. In doing so, it’s deliberately seeded excitement amongst new would-be investors, who have seen music rights become one of the most reliable growth assets of the pandemic era.

The bear-case counterargument on Universal is that it has allowed cash-rich industry upstarts to reduce its commercial leverage; maybe, critics have said, Universal doesn’t have the fight or the funds to buy triple-A catalogs in the modern era. So — as its two-fingers to the financial naysayers — Universal went out and snatched up 600 Bob Dylan songs.

The Dylan buy is Universal putting a flag in the ground that reads, “We’re still Number One, and we’re staying that way.” The company wants to demonstrate its ability to survive, long-term, as king of the jungle — and, of course, to drive that future IPO price through the roof.

This is a trend amongst the major music companies, by the way — a public fightback against existential threats to their dominant position — that has really come to the fore during the pandemic. In October, Warner Music Group took the unusual step of raising $250 million in debt with the express intention of spending it on two acquisitions, at a combined cost of $338 million. My sources suggest that one of these deal, which took up the majority of the $338 million, saw Warner quietly acquire the publishing catalog of an all-time giant of music.

by Tim Ingram, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Gianni Schicchi/AP

Arnold Hagström, The Flower 2015
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We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .

To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that Moderna should have been allowed to roll out its vaccine in February or even in May, when interim results from its Phase I trial demonstrated its basic safety. “That would be like saying we put a man on the moon and then asking the very same day, ‘What about going to Mars?’ ” says Nicholas Christakis, who directs Yale’s Human Nature Lab and whose new book, Apollo’s Arrow, sketches the way COVID-19 may shape our near-term future. Moderna’s speed was “astonishing,” Christakis says, though the design of other vaccines was nearly as fast: BioNTech with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca.

Could things have moved faster from design to deployment? Given the grim prospects for winter, it is tempting to wonder. Perhaps, in the future, we will. But given existing vaccine infrastructure, probably not. Already, as Baylor’s Peter Hotez pointed out to me, “Operation Warp Speed” meant running clinical trials simultaneously rather than sequentially, manufacturing the vaccine at the same time, and authorizing the vaccine under “emergency use” in December based only on preliminary data that doesn’t track the long-term durability of protection or even measure the vaccine’s effect on transmission (only how much it protects against disease). And as Georgetown virologist Angela Rasmussen told me, the name itself may have needlessly risked the trust of Americans already concerned about the safety of this, or any, vaccine. Indeed, it would have been difficult in May to find a single credentialed epidemiologist, vaccine researcher, or public-health official recommending a rapid vaccine rollout — though, it’s worth noting, as early as July the MIT Technology Review reported that a group of 70 scientists in the orbit of Harvard and MIT, including “celebrity geneticist” George Church, were taking a totally DIY nasal-spray vaccine, never even intended to be tested, and developed by a personal genomics entrepreneur named Preston Estep (also the author of a self-help-slash-life-extension book called The Mindspan Diet). China began administering a vaccine to its military in June. Russia approved its version in August. And while most American scientists worried about the speed of those rollouts, and the risks they implied, our approach to the pandemic here raises questions, too, about the strange, complicated, often contradictory ways we approach matters of risk and uncertainty during a pandemic — and how, perhaps, we might think about doing things differently next time. That a vaccine was available for the entire brutal duration may be, to future generations trying to draw lessons from our death and suffering, the most tragic, and ironic, feature of this plague.

For all of modern medical history, Christakis writes in Apollo’s Arrow, vaccines and cures for infectious disease have typically arrived, if they arrive, only in the end stage of the disease, once most of the damage had already been done and the death rate had dramatically declined. For measles, for scarlet fever, for tuberculosis, for typhoid, the miracle drugs didn’t bring rampant disease to a sudden end — they shut the door for good on outbreaks that had largely died out already. This phenomenon is called the McKeown hypothesis — that medical interventions tend to play only a small role compared to public-health measures, socioeconomic advances, and the natural dynamics of the disease as it spreads through a population. The new coronavirus vaccines have arrived at what counts as warp speed, but not in time to prevent what CDC director Robert Redfield predicts will be “the most difficult time in the public-health history of this nation,” and do not necessarily represent a reversal of the McKeown hypothesis: The country may still reach herd immunity through natural disease spread, Christakis says, at roughly the same time as the rollout of vaccines is completed. Redfield believes there may be 200,000 more American deaths to come. This would mean what Christakis calls a “once-in-a-century calamity” had unfolded start-to-finish between the time the solution had been found and the time we felt comfortable administering it. A half a million American lives would have been lost in the interim. Around the world, considerably more. (...)

The treatment dilemmas facing physicians and patients in the early stages of a novel pandemic are, of course, not the same as the dilemma of rushing a new vaccine to a still-healthy population — we defer to the judgment of desperate patients, with physicians inclined to try to help them, but not to the desires of vaccine candidates, no matter how desperate. An unsafe vaccine, like the one for polio that killed ten and paralyzed 200 in 1955, could cause medical disaster and public-health backlash — though, as Balloux points out, since none of the new coronavirus vaccines use real viral material, that kind of accident, which affected one in a thousand recipients, would be impossible. (These days, one adverse impact in a million is the rule-of-thumb threshold of acceptability.) An ineffective vaccine could also give false security to those receiving it, thereby helping spread the disease by providing population-scale license to irresponsible behavior (indoor parties, say, or masklessness). But on other matters of population-level guidance, our messaging about risk has been erratic all year, too. In February and March, we were warned against the use of masks, in part on the grounds that a false sense of security would lead to irresponsible behavior — on balance, perhaps the most consequential public-health mistake in the whole horrid pandemic. In April, with schools already shut, we closed playgrounds. In May, beaches — unable or unwilling to live with even the very-close-to-zero risk of socializing outside (often shaming those who gathered there anyway). But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall. The whole time, we also knew that the Moderna vaccine was essentially safe. We were just waiting to know for sure that it worked, too.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

“We do this every year for influenza,” Rasmussen says. “We don’t know which influenza viruses are going to be circulating, so we make our best guess. And then we formulate that into a vaccine using essentially the same technology platform that all the other influenza vaccines are based on.” The whole process takes a few months, and utilizes a “platform” that we already know is basically safe. With enough funding, you could do the same for viral pandemics, and indeed conduct Phase I trials for the entire set of possible future outbreaks before any of them made themselves known to the public. In the case of a pandemic produced by a new strain in these families, you might want to do some limited additional safety testing, but because the most consequential adverse effects take place in the days right after the vaccine is given, that additional diligence could be almost immediate.

by David Wallace-Wells, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/AP2009

The Problem With Hashtag Activism

In the thirteen years since Twitter’s inception, users from every political stripe have launched countless campaigns, many of which have subsequently been covered or even adopted by traditional media and become household names. In #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, authors Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles propose that Twitter has become an important tool for activists to “advocate, mobilize and communicate.” They say the platform itself has become a powerful counterpublic for marginalized groups, who use Twitter’s hashtag function to facilitate political coalitions and networks. More specifically, the book investigates one particular corner of Twitter activism, defined by a distinct political culture that is liberal, social-justice oriented, consciousness focused, identitarian, intersectionalist, minoritarian, and moralist.

Even reducing the scope of their study to this particular online culture, it would be impossible for the authors to cover their subject in thorough detail. To their credit, the book is focused and provides an honest and dutiful record of the major campaigns of social justice hashtag activism, outlining a history, a trajectory, and a digital landscape. Curiously, though, the authors’ accounts of these campaigns only serve to thoroughly — almost relentlessly — contradict the book’s techno-optimist thesis, page after page, from the very beginning. (...)

In the larger world, it is difficult to spot a victory or any lasting legacy of power among even hugely popular campaigns like #OccupyWallStreet, #ArabSpring, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo. Occupy Wall Street fizzled, the Arab Spring flopped, George Zimmerman walks free, and police murders of black people have not decreased. While it’s true that a few of the high-profile voices of #MeToo managed to punish and even lock up a few of their higher-profile predators (and publicly censure a few more harmless perverts), no meaningful legislation has been passed to protect or empower ordinary women in the workplace. The campaigns featured in #HashtagActivism have given us little more than the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, the cancellation of a TV cooking show, and the forestalling of a few tawdry book deals.

Who Runs Twitter Town?

In the introduction to #HashtagActivism, the authors are quick to reference academic and “techno-sociologist” Zeynep Tufekci, who observes that Twitter activism “looks very different from traditional, institutional-based politics — a kind of democratic participation that is inclined toward a horizontal, identity-based movement-building that arrives out of grievances and claims.” Like the authors, I would agree with Tufekci’s characterization.

It comes as no surprise, however, that they don’t engage further with Tufekci’s work, or even mention the title of her 2017 book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. As one of the first academics writing on technology and movement-building, Tufekci has been openly and consistently skeptical of social media’s “transformative” potential since at least 2014. Unlike Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, she engages with the history of progressive online activism as a series of failures that she subjects to critical analysis and comparative-historical investigation.

Tufekci does not regard social media as a poison tree capable of bearing only poison fruit, per se, but she is not naive about the digital means of production. In talks and in print, she has illustrated that governments and capital have far more power than the masses over social media, which they often use to spy, censor, and misinform with impunity. (...)

The free and easy voluntarism of posting and content creation obscures an essential fact: the internet is deceptively vulnerable to corporate manipulation — in many ways, far more so than print, radio, or television. Consider TV: the owners create content, the audience consumes it and judges its value, and the government regulates programming, sometimes ever so slightly, even if only under massive public pressure. With the internet, the audience is invited to create their own content (generally for free), and the owners are largely rentiers or digital landlords that remain totally unaccountable for anything that happens on their preserve. Meanwhile, in the United States, the government and its attendant regulatory bodies are either in bed with big tech or can’t even remember their email passwords.

It is difficult to determine whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is uninterested in or merely incapable of regulating the internet, and while advocates of free speech or even basic democracy should regard any attempt to do so with a healthy skepticism, it is significant that you can’t sue a tech company for abuse, harassment, stalking, libel, slander, or defamation that occurs on their platform. What little regulation is adopted is largely designed by the tech companies themselves, and it’s easily sidestepped when convenient. In the United States, the internet operates unlike any other form of media in that it is not subject to the rules that are, at least theoretically, imposed by representatives of the people. With all this in mind, it is difficult to imagine online activity as a revolutionary home base. The omnipotent rulers of these companies yield no transparency, accountability, or democratic control to users, the majority of whom do not display the dedicated platform loyalty of the activists in #HashtagActivism.

Twitter Is on Its Way Out

Even if the public gained some sort of democratic control over Twitter, we would be extremely late to the party. Internet users tend to cycle through social media platforms as they emerge, particularly as new platforms target youth markets with the promise of a parent-free online experience. At this point, Twitter is distinctly millennial, with younger users initially defecting to Instagram, then Snapchat, and now TikTok. Social media platforms also produce their own self-selecting demographics, which are never a particularly representative cross-section of anything. Since online activism is entirely voluntarist, and therefore siloed (“networks” work for the Right as well), mediums for communication will always be a moving target. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok — as our options expand, the crowds disperse.

Twitter users are not only more insular and itinerant than the authors seem to imagine, there are actually very few of them, relatively speaking. A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that only about 22 percent of American adults use Twitter, and they tend to be younger and more progressive than the average American. Moreover, about 80 percent of tweets are produced by 20 percent of accounts, meaning the majority of activity on Twitter comes from a very small (and ever shrinking) number of highly active users. In February 2019, Twitter publicly announced their active user numbers for the first time; previously, the company only publicized their user “growth,” a percentage that was said to be padded with bots and dead accounts. After their grand reveal indicated a much smaller and still shrinking user base, they decided to no longer inform the public about their platform’s numbers.

Even without an accurate inventory of users, the material account of hashtag activism’s record to date exposes it as a midwife to impotent movements that grow and die far too quickly on undemocratic platforms that are corporate-controlled and fleetingly faddish. But what if we could fix all of that? What if we had a social media platform of our very own, one that corrected the aforementioned flaws? Could there be a platform of the people, a publicly controlled fixture that would attract a critical mass of users, with an architecture that patiently fosters the specialization of talents and skills that would herd all the cats of social justice, laying the groundwork for a deft, unified, and democratic organization? Assuming for a moment that such a thing is possible, would it even be desirable?

Can Social Media Be Social?

Once again in clear opposition to the conclusions of #HashtagActivism, Tufekci argues that the rapidity of the growth and spread of online-borne movements may be a potentially intractable obstacle, rather than an advantage, as the speed of horizontalism only seems to foster a specific kind of social formation: the undifferentiated mass. She observes the “tactical freeze” these sprawling movements are inevitably saddled with, as they expand into erratic, unwieldy, unstable blobs, incapable of specialization or coordination. Eventually, they become movements that are unable to move, so they stall out, then dissolve. Tufekci contrasts this life cycle with the slow, heavily coordinated, and decidedly very unspontaneous activism of the civil rights movement, concluding that the March on Washington succeeded as a result of these traditional organizing strategies, while Occupy Wall Street (along with so many other gods that failed) always crumble for lack of them.

Herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of movement-building in #HashtagActivism. It’s true that political sentiments irradiated by the internet do experience remarkably rapid growth — but so does a tumor. The impressive speed and size of online movements are too often mistaken for viability and maturity, when, in fact, the accelerated development of online activism belies a deadly progeria: it burns hotly, brightly, and briefly, often with nothing to show in the end but a glut of forgettable, disposable content and the emotional exhaustion of participants (and perhaps a monograph or two).

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: David McNew/Getty Images

Student Loan Horror Stories

Whether it’s CNBC telling us what issues mattered to the young in the presidential election, or Yahoo! Finance telling us the big winners in the 2020 election were “young people and student voters,” or Forbes telling us “young people with student loan debt have a harder time reaching financial milestones,” the student loan controversy is almost universally presented as a “youth” issue.

This is the first of many deceptions baked into coverage of one of the more misunderstood and misreported issues of our time. Student loans matter to older people, too. In fact, that’s the problem. They matter far too much, to too many older people.

“People that are 45 years and older, that's where the student loan problem is a real issue,” says “Chris,” who took out his first loan in 1981. “Because those are the people that normally would have the highest balances.”

Now 59, Chris asks to tell his story under a pseudonym, to protect the service industry career he’s built in part with the hope of someday escaping his student debt.

“In the realm I'm in now, I don't really advertise the fact that I owe $236,000,” he sighs.

It’s often argued that forgiving student debt would unfairly punish other groups, particularly those who “did the right thing” and paid off their loans. In truth, political changes have already punished plenty of student loan holders. Chris is a prime example.

He grew up in the Midwest, and began studying philosophy and political science at Southwest Missouri State (now called Missouri State) in 1980. He began paying for his undergrad studies upfront, a decision that would have fateful consequences. He entered school just as Americans were electing Ronald Reagan, who wanted to dramatically re-order federal spending priorities. Among his first acts: raising the interest rates for some federally-guaranteed student loans from 7% to 9%.

“What’s really ironic,” Chris says, “is that if I hadn't paid cash the first year and a half that I was in college, my loans would have gotten locked in at a much lower rate.”

Paying the Reagan rate instead of the pre-Reagan rate was Chris’s first political misfortune. The second kicked in years later, in the mid-eighties, by which time he’d transferred to the University of Missouri-Columbia, graduated with a B.A., entered and completed a grad program there, and moved on to Joe Biden’s Alma Mater at Syracuse law. He left graduate school owing $14,000, and left law school with a total balance of $79,000.

He thought he’d be graduating with a law degree, and expected to be able to make his payments. Part of his calculation involved the fact that student loan interest was once tax-deductible, much like mortgage interest. But the Tax Reform Act of 1986 began a see-sawing journey for the student loan deduction, essentially eliminating it as a personal deduction for a time.

“I looked at education as a capital expenditure,” Chris says. “Part of my strategy was, is that the interest would always be tax-deductible. So that would at least give me a little bit of a [cushion] in making my payments, because, I would have that tax deduction.”

After they changed the law, “It was like, ‘Wow, this is going to be difficult, this is going to be interesting.’” (...)

In 2002, Chris got a middle-level job with one of the world’s larger service-industry companies. His first position paid him $28,000 a year, but he didn’t see much of that money. In 2004, his wages began to be garnished. A single federal lender can garnish up to 15% of “disposable” pay, i.e. what’s left over after mandatory withholdings. If there is more than one lender, they may garnish a maximum of 25% of wages.

Chris’s pay was garnished at 15% from 2004-2011, and at 25% from 2011 on. He paid, but didn’t gain ground, thanks to another painful quirk of the system, involving the order of obligation.

“They apply your penalties first, then your interest, then your principal,” he says. “So really they're guaranteeing that you're never going to pay down your loans.”

Into his second decade of garnishment, Chris was paying pure penalties, fees, and interest, not touching a dollar of principal. Although the government had since re-introduced some student loan interest deductions, these were capped at $2500 per year. “At the height of my garnishment, I was paying $900 every two weeks,” he says.

by Matt Taibbi, TK News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Life and Death in a Covid-19 Epicenter

Life and Death in a Covid-19 Epicenter (NY Times)

Image: uncredited

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Kenneth Josephson, Chicago (under the el), 1961
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Living in the Present is Overrated

I’d been looking forward to the meal for weeks. I already knew what I was going to eat: the rosemary crostini starter, then the lamb with courgette fries. Or maybe the cod. I planned to arrive early and sit in the window at the cool marble counter and watch London go by. In the warm bustle of the restaurant, the condensation would mist the pane. As a treat, I would order myself a glass of white wine while I waited for my friend.

It won’t surprise you to hear that the meal never happened. Coronavirus cases started rising exponentially and eating out felt less like indulgence and more like lunacy. Then it became illegal to eat together at all. Soon it became illegal even to eat at a restaurant by yourself. Then everything shut.

The cost of these lost lunches has been totted up many times: the trains not taken, the taxis not flagged down, the desserts not eaten, the waiters not tipped. Then there is the emotional toll, too. Spirits are flagging, the lonely are getting lonelier, the world is wilting. Covid has already disrupted so much of how we live. It has altered something else, as well – time itself.

Not so long ago, we had merely months and years. Things happened in November or in December, last year or this. Some events are so big that they divide the world into before and after, into the present and an increasingly alien past. Wars do this, and the pandemic has, too. Coronavirus has cut a trench through time.

The very recent past is suddenly another country. Now, amateur archaeologists of our own existence, we sort through our possessions and stumble on small relics from “then”, that strange place we used to live: a bus pass, a lipstick, a smart watch, a pair of shoes with the heels worn down, work clothes that, after just six months in stretchy active-wear, feel as stiff and preposterous as whalebone.

News of vaccines fills us with hope. But the timing, the take-up, the roll-out to ordinary souls remain unresolved. The actual future still lies drearily in front of us, with the prospect of further lockdowns, overcrowded hospitals and ever greater financial losses. Days stretch on, each much the same as the last. One week blends into the next.

Amid these cancellations something else has also been lost. It won’t appear on any spreadsheet because it is not quantifiable. But it matters. So much of life, big and small, is about fleeting moments filled with hope. The prospect of an exciting Friday evening or Saturday afternoon used to make a dismal Tuesday morning bearable. So, too, did browsing online for your future self: the top that you’d always feel good in, the bag that would take both your laptop and book.

Hope hung everywhere in the old world, hovering in our peripheral vision – on the billboard that made us ponder our next holiday or reminded us to dig out dark glasses and sun cream; among the spices in the supermarket that conjured a conversation over curry with friends, chatting about things that didn’t feel like life and death.

Many moments of happiness are about anticipation, the joy of the imagined future – and distracting ourselves from the tedious, exhausting or difficult present. Yet even our small consumer choices or our musings about what to do this weekend now bring us back to the big, overpowering reality of the pandemic. We cannot escape it. Our daydreams have come crashing back to earth: 2020 is the year that the future was cancelled.

In recent decades the present has become rather more fashionable than the future. Living in the moment, being present in our present, is the desired mind-state of our age. There’s nothing new about the idea, of course – it forms the basis of Buddhism and there are elements of it in many religions. Long ago Horace commanded us to “carpe diem” and Seneca exhorted that the present is all we have: “All the rest of existence is not living but merely time.”

Over the past ten years the once-niche idea of “mindfulness” has gone mainstream. It has become an aspiration, an advertising opportunity and an overused adjective. You can practise not only mindful meditation but mindful breathing, mindful eating, mindful drinking, mindful walking, mindful parenting, even mindful birth. (As if childbirth were something that you might miss if you weren’t paying close enough attention.)

It isn’t always clear quite what mindfulness is. Despite its promise of mental clarity, its own origins are decidedly foggy. It seems to be a translation of a Buddhist term, sati, which itself is tricky to define – its meaning lies somewhere between memory and consciousness. The English version is neither a very good translation nor a particularly helpful word. The longer you think about it, the stranger the word “mindful” seems: that puzzling “-ful” feels odd when talking about emptying your thoughts. (And is its opposite “mindlessness”?)

If the definition of mindfulness is elusive, the practice is even more so. Its aim is to empty your mind by using your mind; to liberate it by restraining it. It is a puzzling and paradoxical thing, the mental equivalent of climbing up a ladder and removing it at the same time.

by Catherine Nixey, The Economist |  Read more:
Image: Anna+Elena Balbusso

[ed. See also: anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure/anticipation); a classic feature of depression.]

California Plans Sweeping Stay-at-Home Orders

California plans sweeping stay-at-home order as Covid cases surge (The Guardian)

Image: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Ivan Kenneth Eyre, (Canadian, b.1935) Mountain Lines 1987 
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Weekend Warriors: Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses

Wandering around Northwest Pasadena, I pressed my face against the window of a dingy pink stucco house at 265 Robinson Road. It was April, 2019, and in two blocks I had passed thirteen bungalows, duplexes, and multifamily homes that had gone through foreclosure in the past fifteen years. Twelve of them were still unoccupied. No. 265 had been in foreclosure for a year and a half, and the two small houses on the property had long sat empty. But now, inside the rear house, there was a gallon jug of water and a bag of peanuts on a Formica kitchen counter. The walls were a mangy taupe, but African-print sheets hung over the windows. As I walked away, I heard a genteel Southern accent from behind me: “Can I help you?” A Black man with perfect posture, wearing loafers and a black T-shirt tucked into belted trousers, introduced himself as Augustus Evans.

I wasn’t the first person to wonder what Evans was doing there. A few weeks earlier, two sheriffs had knocked on the door around 11 p.m. and handcuffed him. In his car’s glove compartment, they found a letter of employment and the cell-phone number of a woman named Diane Montano, who runs Weekend Warriors, a company that provides security for vacant houses. Like many of Montano’s employees, Evans was homeless when he was hired. Now he lives in properties that are being flipped, guarding them through the renovation, staging, open-house, and inspection periods. In the past seven years, he has protected more than twenty-two homes, in thirteen neighborhoods around Los Angeles, almost all historically Black and Latino communities. A McMansion in Fontana; a four-unit apartment complex in Compton; a “baby mansion on the peak of the mountain” in East L.A., which had been left to a son who, according to the neighbors, borrowed so much against the equity of the house that he lost it to foreclosure. Before leaving, he poured liquid cement down the drains. Evans guarded the property as the plumbing system was replaced.

Empty houses are a strange sight in an area that has one of the most severe housing shortages in the United States. L.A. has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn’t any easier. The area has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, and the average rent is twenty-two hundred dollars a month. On any night, some sixty-six thousand people there sleep in cars, in shelters, or on the street, an increase of thirteen per cent since last year.

The housing shortage was caused, in part, by restrictive zoning, rampant nimbyism, and the use of California’s environmental laws to thwart urban development. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to house some ten million people. By 1990, decades of downzoning had reduced that number to 3.9 million, roughly the city’s current population. Then, in 2008, the subprime-mortgage crisis struck, and in the years that followed thousands of foreclosed homes were sold at auction. Because they had to be purchased in cash, many of them were bought by wealthy investors, private-equity-backed real-estate funds, and countless other real-estate companies, leaving less inventory for individual buyers. In the end, the 2008 crash made housing in California even more expensive.

No. 265, along with thousands of other homes in L.A., was acquired by Wedgewood, a real-estate company, founded in 1983, that specializes in flipping homes, managing everything from lockouts and financing to renovation and staging. In gentrifying neighborhoods, empty houses are sitting ducks, so companies like Wedgewood hire Weekend Warriors and other house-sitting services for cheap security. (...)

One morning, a customer told Evans that he supplemented his Social Security income by house-sitting for Weekend Warriors. There were two types of gigs, he explained: 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., which paid five hundred dollars a month, and 24/7, which paid eight hundred dollars. All you needed was an I.D. Evans called Diane Montano at around 10 a.m., and at 2 p.m. a van picked him up and took him to a house in Riverside.

The rules were simple: don’t leave, don’t host guests, and don’t talk to anyone—not contractors, property managers, real-estate agents, or prospective buyers. If you were working a 24/7, only short trips to the market or the laundromat were allowed. The premises had to be kept clean at all times, or pay would be docked. The driver supplied Evans with a mini-fridge, a small microwave, an inflatable mattress, and plastic floor coverings to protect the carpet.

The driver came by to check on Evans occasionally, always unannounced, photographing each room and sending the pictures to Montano, so that she could monitor Evans’s cleanliness and track the progress of the renovations. By the time Evans was living at No. 265, he had learned the rhythms of the gig. He knew that the driver wouldn’t come by at night or on Sundays. When he could, he’d steal out to Moreno Valley, an hour and twenty minutes away, to visit his sons. He kept loose change in a coffee cup in his car, and he’d give his youngest son all the coins he’d collected since his last visit. “They know Daddy has to work away from the house,” he told me. “They’re big boys now.”

by Francesca Mari, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ricardo Nagaoka for The New Yorker