"For the People Act" Would Make the U.S. a Democracy

Since the 117th Congress was convened on January 3, over 2,000 bills have been introduced in the House and Senate. But the very first legislation proposed by the Democratic Party majorities in both chambers — making it both H.R.1 and S.1 — is the “For the People Act” of 2021.

This is appropriate, because the For the People Act is plausibly the most important legislation considered by Congress in decades. It would change the basic structure of U.S. politics, making it far more small-d democratic. The bill makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.

The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money.

Make Voting Simple

There’s a popular, weary American aphorism (often attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman, although she apparently did not say it): “If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal.” The meaning is always taken to be that voting is pointless.

However, the past decades of U.S. politics demonstrate that this saying is accurate — but in fact its meaning is exactly the opposite. We can gauge how much voting can change important things by the lengths to which America’s conservatives have gone to make voting difficult for the wrong people.

The For the People Act would require states with voter ID requirements to allow people to vote without identification if they complete a sworn statement attesting that they are who they say they are. It would make it impossible for states to engage in bogus purging of voter rolls. States could no longer stop people with felony convictions from voting after they’ve served their time — and would be required to inform them in writing that they now can vote again.

The act would then create what the U.S. has never had: a functioning, modern voting infrastructure. America is almost alone in its bizarre, two-step process in which citizens must register to vote, and then vote. And only two-thirds of the U.S. voting age population is in fact registered. In comparable countries, voting registration is automatic: You don’t have to do anything first, you just show up and vote. The For the People Act would make voter registration near-automatic here too, and anyone who fell through the cracks would be able to register and vote on Election Day.

The bill would also require states to allow a minimum of two weeks of early voting, for a minimum of 10 hours a day. All eligible voters could vote by mail for any reason. And to ensure voters can be confident that elections are secure and that their votes will count, all states would be required to conduct elections via paper ballot.

Thanks to Republican success at creating gerrymandered congressional districts, Democrats can win the majority of the popular congressional vote in many states while only garnering a minority of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives. With the once-every-10-years redistricting coming, and the GOP’s 2020 success in state legislatures that control redistricting, the situation is set to become even more lopsided and fundamentally unfair. If nothing changes, it’s almost certain that Democrats will lose the House majority in the 2022 midterms, even if they get the most votes.

The For the People Act would head this off at the pass, requiring states to create independent commissions to conduct redistricting.

A New Strategy to Beat Big Money

While it’s forgotten now, Watergate was, among other things, a campaign finance scandal. The bill of particulars supporting President Richard Nixon’s articles of impeachment mentioned the chair of the board of McDonald’s bribing his reelection campaign with $200,000, in return for permission to raise the price of the company’s Quarter Pounder cheeseburger.

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation, Congress passed extensive campaign finance reforms, which placed limits on contributions to campaigns as well as campaign expenditures. The Supreme Court struck down the limits on campaign expenditures in 1976. Then the Citizens United case in 2010 and related decisions made unlimited contributions possible to super PACs, as long as everyone pretended the super PACs and formal campaigns were separate and uncoordinated.

The For the People Act accepts that it will be difficult to reverse these decisions for the immediate future and addresses the problem from the opposite direction. Instead of placing limits on big money, it multiplies the power of small money.

by Jon Schwarz, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[ed. See also: Crucial Voting Reform Measure Just Passed the House. What's Next? (The Intercept). The filibuster.]

A 'Stolen' River

‘The river was stolen from us’: a tribe's battle to retake the Skagit River (The Guardian)

Images: markk

[ed. A functionally important dam, no historical records, not going to happen. But it will elevate a tribe's stakeholder status (if briefly), and probably send a few million dollars in study contracts to a few consultants and tribal programs.]

Senate Clerks Forced to Read Entire 628 Page Bill Aloud

Schumer says Senate will 'power through and finish' coronavirus relief bill

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber would “power through and finish” passing the coronavirus relief bill, no matter how long it takes.

Because of the number of amendments that Republicans are expected to introduce, the final Senate passage of the bill likely won’t happen until sometime this weekend.

“The Senate is going to take a lot of votes. But we are going to power through and finish this bill, however long it takes,” Schumer said. “The American people are counting on us and our nation depends on it.”

Schumer also thanked the Senate clerks for reading the full text of the bill aloud, which took more than 10 hours and concluded early this morning.

The Senate usually skips reading the full text of the bill, but Republican Senator Ron Johnson objected to Schumer’s motion to dispense with the reading, forcing the clerks to read all 628 pages aloud.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you for your efforts yesterday and every day,” Schumer told the clerks today. He added this pointed remark to Johnson: “And, as for our friend from Wisconsin, I hope he enjoyed his Thursday evening.”

Image: Twitter

William Shatner Calls Leonard Nimoy

[ed. See also: William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in 1985 Western Airlines ad (Boing Boing)

Nick Miller
via: Photographer Wanders NYC Streets To Reveal Neo-Noir Stories Hiding in Plain Sight (My Modern Met)

Fortunino Matania [1881-1963] - Paulina in the Temple of Isis
via:

The Police

[ed. See Dolette McDonald post below.]

Backup Singer Dolette McDonald on Her Years With Talking Heads, the Police, and Don Henley

When Dolette McDonald walked into the Talking Heads rehearsal space shortly before the launch of their 1980 Remain in Light world tour, she had no idea that her life was about to change forever. The band had hired her sight unseen as its first backup vocalist even though her main experience was singing in the church and on a handful of disco records. She’d never heard a note of their music and didn’t know who any of them were, but she instantly integrated herself into their world and became an incredible onstage foil for David Byrne, doubling his vocals on songs like “Born Under Punches” and “The Great Curve” and lifting their show to incredible new heights.

Her stint with Talking Heads was the start of an incredible career as a backup singer that included tours with the Police, Sting, Don Henley, and Steve Winwood, and recording sessions with the Rolling Stones, Tears for Fears, Chic, and Laurie Anderson. When it quieted down in the Nineties, McDonald moved to Naples, Florida, and started a whole new life far away from the spotlight. We called her up at her new home in Savannah, Georgia, to hear all about her incredible journey.

How has your pandemic year been?

Considering all that has gone on, it’s been great. It has allowed me to sort of pay attention to me and grow a little bit more and spend more time on me instead of running around doing God knows what. In terms of not being able to see people, that’s been really, really hard. I happen to be an extroverted introvert, so I’m OK with being home a lot. However, the fact that I can’t go out, human nature is like … I’m pissed right now. [Laughs] My cooking skills have also become amazing.

I want to go back here and talk about your life. What are your earliest memories of hearing music as a child?

Whew! My earliest memories would be hearing Dinah Washington. We had a record player, and that was before my mother became very religious and all that was taken away. But I do recall as a little child, Dinah Washington’s voice.

Where did you grow up?

Newark, New Jersey.

How old were you when your mother got very religious and banned most music?

I wasn’t in school yet, so I think I was about five years old. I’m the baby of seven. So my mother didn’t get religious until me. [Laughs] I was fucked. [Laughs] She decided to become this religious fanatic and I was the one that paid for it. (...)

How did your career evolve after your time with Cissy Houston?

When I was with Cissy Houston, I did a recording with [producer] Michael Zager. It was the Afro Cuban band. I sang a song with them called “Black Widow Woman.” That was my first solo endeavor.

That’s when I became interested in recording. And then I started touring with Walter Murphy and the “Fifth of Beethoven” band. I was just doing gig after gig. Eventually, I sang background for a disco group called the Bombers. Through them, I met a man named Busta Jones.

He was so wonderful to me, like a brother. And probably my first cheerleader, really. He realized that I had some kind of talent and asked me to sing on a record of his, and I did. It turned out that, at that time, the Talking Heads were looking to expand their band. Busta recommended me for the job.

Did you know about their music at all?

Hell, no! [Huge laugh] Hell, no! I didn’t know a damn thing! I was like, “What the hell is the Talking Heads?” [Laughs] I don’t know how, but Busta was always in the middle of everything in terms of punk and New Wave. He was a black guy that wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots. I was amazed that he found his way to where everyone knew him. He was just one of those guys.

Tell me about first meeting the Talking Heads. Did they audition you?

No. The funny thing is I met them at rehearsal. How fabulous is that? I didn’t even have to audition. They believed Busta. I was completely unknown.

What was your first impression of David Byrne?

I was so nervous that I don’t even know if I had an impression. I thought they were kind of weird. However, Chris Frantz, the drummer, was so normal. Everyone, except for David, turned out to be so normal. David was quirky and weird, but on the other hand, there was [keyboardist] Bernie Worrell, who was equally as weird. [Laughs]

What was it like to first hear their music? Hearing Remain in Light must have blown your mind.

Funnily enough, my first reaction was, “What is this?” You’re talking about a girl from Newark, New Jersey who was used to singing in bars and singing soul music. I had never been introduced to punk or New Wave. I had no idea what that type of music was. Although, as I became more educated, I realized they really weren’t doing punk or New Wave. They had their own thing that they were doing. It was almost like dance music, actually, but more sophisticated.

by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Paul Natkin/Getty Images

[ed. Some great videos accompanying this article.]

The Cancel Culture Checklist

Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States. According to a recent poll by the Cato Institute, a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions. Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired.

But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”

So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?

At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade. Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents. It is about shaping the information battlefield, not seeking truth; and its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.

In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others. That is why it is probably impossible to devise a simple bright-line test of what should count as a harmful instance of cancelation.

A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attributes. Rather than issuing a single litmus test, the diagnostic approach allows us to draw up a checklist of warning signs. The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.

Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.

Punitiveness

Are people denouncing you to your employer, your professional groups or your social connections? Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities? Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood or isolating you socially?

A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument. Even the phenomenon of retracting papers is new and deservedly controversial, because the usual—and very effective—method has been for science to simply discard mistakes and move on. Wrong answers and bad science die on the vine and disappear. Incentives are mostly positive, not punitive: for being right, you win citations, promotions, fame and fancy prizes. Taking a punitive attitude toward mistakes undermines the scientific process because knowledge advances by trial and error.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure. A professor swears to “ruin [a graduate student’s] reputation permanently and deservedly.” Campaigners against an art curator declare he “must be removed from his job, effective immediately.”

The point is to make the errant suffer. (...)

Moral Grandstanding

Is the tone of the discourse ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged? Are people flattening distinctions, demonizing you, slinging inflammatory labels and engaging in moral one-upmanship? Are people ignoring what you actually say—talking about but not to you?

Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.

Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both. Grandstanders who condemn someone are not interested in persuading or correcting her; in fact, they are not really talking to her at all. Rather, they are using her as a convenient object in a campaign to elevate their own status. Pile-ons, personal attacks and bidding wars to show the most outrage are all ways of engaging in moral grandstanding.

by Jonathan Rauch, Persuasion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Deep Nostalgia

AI uses deep learning technique to automatically animate faces

Deep Nostalgia, a new service from the genealogy site MyHeritage that animates old family photos, has gone viral on social media, in another example of how AI-based image manipulation is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Launched in late February, the service uses an AI technique called deep learning to automatically animate faces in photos uploaded to the system. Because of its ease of use, and free trial, it soon took off on Twitter, where users uploading animated versions of old family photos, celebrity pictures, and even drawings and illustrations.

Like most “deepfakes” – the name for the popular use of this technology to map one person’s face on to footage of another – the service is exceptionally good at smoothly animating features and expressions. But it can also struggle to generate data to fill in the “gaps” in what it can see from the source photos, causing a sense of the uncanny. 

by Alex Hern, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: MyHeritage.com

[ed. Videos at the link.]

Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain

Like many readers of The Times, I was riveted by Michael Powell’s account last week of a 2018 incident at Smith College that illustrated the tension between issues of race and class. It’s a striking — and increasingly familiar — tale of the battle the Woke left is now waging on well-meaning liberals who don’t seem to understand the illiberal nature of what they are facing.

For those who missed it, the story begins in the summer of 2018, when Oumou Kanoute, a student at Smith, recounted that she had just been confronted by a campus police officer while she was eating lunch in a dorm lounge.

“All I did was be Black,” she wrote on Facebook. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman.” She added that the officer might have been carrying “a lethal weapon.”

The post drew national media attention. A janitor fingered as having started the episode was put on paid leave. The American Civil Liberties Union got involved. The college rolled out anti-bias training for its staff and set aside separate dormitories for students of color. Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s president, offered Kanoute an effusive public apology, saying, “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

But the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.

“A law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias,” Powell writes. “Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.”

In fact, the real victims of the event lay elsewhere. Kanoute publicly accused a janitor named Mark Patenaude and a cafeteria worker named Jackie Blair of “racist cowardly acts.” But neither of them was involved in calling campus security. Kanoute also posted their photographs and email addresses. The stress triggered flare-ups of lupus for Blair and anxiety attacks for Patenaude, who has since left his job. (Kanoute later apologized for misidentifying him.) One person called Blair at home to tell her, “You don’t deserve to live.”

As for the anti-bias training, Powell reports that cafeteria and grounds workers “found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive.” One courageous school administrator, Jodi Shaw, resigned from Smith in February on the grounds that it had become a “racially hostile environment.” 

Some of us who have undergone increasingly fashionable “unconscious bias” training sessions understand what Shaw means: In their sugary tone and invidious assumptions, they can feel like a Cultural Revolution struggle session led by a preschool teacher. (...)

Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?

One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see.

Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported.

The deeper answer, I suspect, is that the Woke left has the liberal left’s number. It’s called guilt. (...)

In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.

by Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Christopher Capozziello

[ed. It's really too much. See this previous post: The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness (Duck Soup). Also, Michelle Goldberg's column today about Why Democrats Aren’t Asking Cuomo to Resign (NYT):

Meanwhile, many Democrats are sick of holding themselves to a set of standards that Republicans feel no need to try to meet. Twitter is full of people demanding that the party not “Franken” Cuomo, and pointing out that Republicans are taking no steps to investigate alleged sexual harassers in their own ranks, including the freshman congressman Madison Cawthorn. At a certain point, making sacrifices to demonstrate virtue, in the face of an opposition that has none, makes a lot of Democrats feel like suckers.

It's even filtered down into this kind of disordered thinking as typified in a recent Letter to the Editor in my small town:

In light of the recent events surrounding social justice, I wanted to give our city leaders an opportunity to start bridging the social inequity gap. The issue I want to highlight is accessibility, specifically, governmental complexity in construction/permitting that deters social cooperation.

The laws and statutes that form our national, state and local government has evolved into complexity that is largely inaccessible to our community’s diversity. I am disabled and have a low IQ, I struggle with interpreting and advocating access in regards to property rights.

I am asking that the [redacted] Council forgive all the residents that did necessary structural renovations/additions during the pandemic. I have to add on to my house because of family needs stemming from the pandemic, and do not have the money or time or intelligence to navigate this horrible complexity.

Yikes.

via:

Toma Vagner, Modular Synth Expo

via:

What is Opinion Journalism?

Two years ago one of my oldest daughter's friends asked what her father did for a living. "He listens to records in his office," she confidently replied.

This was not quite an exhaustive description of my duties. From her vantage point as a toddler, she could not distinguish between the physical space and the job usually performed in it. She might just as easily have gotten the impression that I am a professional viewer of Skip and Shannon Undisputed.

How do I make my living, though? If I were asked to give a succinct description of my work (for that, believe it or not, is what writing four or five days a week is) I would say that I am an entertainer and that journalism is simply a form of mass entertainment, like Hollywood or Major League Baseball, albeit one with somewhat lower average earnings potential. My job is to write things that please readers, to amuse, to clarify an inchoate feeling, to elucidate a vexed question, and at least occasionally, I hope, to inspire laughter with 800 or so words. Broadway it ain't. But odder things have been called fun.

I offer this definition in deliberate contrast to the prevailing one, which involves a kind of hypothetical constitutional role for the free press in helping some equally imaginary informed citizenry to think through the great prudential questions of our age. If I believed that this is how journalism, especially opinion journalism, really works, I would have resigned years ago in horror at the idea that I had been assigned any role, even an impossibly benighted one, in shaping the destiny of the American republic.

Which of these is closer to the truth? My instinct is that to say that while there is something to both definitions, the conditions under which the latter obtain are rare even for the most talented writers. (Did H.L. Mencken change the public's mind about a single question?) But even if they were combined, in full knowledge that aiming high is no guarantee of even hitting the rim, they would form only a partial interpretation at best — an attempt to prescribe what, under something like ideal conditions, a columnist's job might involve. If I were asked instead to give a descriptive rather than a prescriptive account of the opinion-having business, to say what it looks like in practice as opposed to what it ought to be, my response would be that I am here to elicit your outrage.

This admittedly rather sordid activity can take two basic forms. The first involves writing things that call attention to real or perceived injustices, which gives rise to what readers will fondly suppose is righteous anger. The second requires me to write more or less the same piece and wait for it to reach a very different set of readers, who become indignant because they are as convinced of my fecklessness and ignorance as the others are of my sagacity. Because I write on the internet, both kinds of readers share what I have said with others on social media, who either agree or disagree with their implicit assessment of my mental (and no doubt spiritual) capabilities, which in turn gives rise to another round of recriminations. Rinse and repeat.

I am happy to admit that the first two accounts of opinion writing are somewhat pollyannish. But I think that the third one, which best describes the actual opinion journalism that exists in this country right now and the means by which we are conditioned to respond to it, is actively dangerous, so dangerous that it is ultimately incompatible with the ends presupposed by either of the former accounts and, in the long run, with democratic self-government itself, and the various accounts of "the good life" apparently guaranteed by such a system.

This is true for two related reasons. The first is that a society that has made outrage its primary mode of communication is incapable of being entertained, moved, or, perhaps worst of all, teased. (This reality is not immediately obvious, least of all to the outraged themselves, who mistake the dopamine hit of a fave for all of the aforementioned feelings.) The second is that those questions — about taxation, infrastructure, the provision of medical care, the environment, foreign policy — that a free press is meant to help adjudicate have a tendency to disappear from view, unmissed, while I issue my fourth superlative in as many hundred words about a politician's unimportant speech and you and your former coworker argue about whose basic fitness for the human race is called into question by his attitude toward what I have written (and will forget about tomorrow).

by Matthew Walther, The Week |  Read more:

Image: Illustrated iStock

Seatbelt Now or Wait for Airbag?

Should you take a less efficacious vaccine or wait for a more efficacious vaccine? The individual and social incentives are in conflict. For society as a whole it’s typically much better if everyone takes the less efficacious vaccine sooner. We show one example of this in the supplementary material to the Science Paper with details under different scenarios in a forthcoming paper but the intuition is clear. Herd immunity is herd immunity. In the final analysis what you care about is not your chances of overcoming the disease if challenged (the vaccine efficacy) but your chances of overcoming the disease if challenged times the probability of being challenged. Herd immunity means pushing the latter number close to zero which is more important than modest differences in efficacy rates.

What about at the individual level? If you have a choice, it’s clearly better to get the more efficacious vaccine, especially since both vaccines are free (the price system has its advantages in clearing markets). But if you have to wait for the more efficacious vaccine, the choice isn’t obvious. Many people in Europe aren’t taking the AstraZeneca vaccine in the hopes of getting an mRNA vaccine later but I think that is a mistake. Don’t fail to wear your seatbelt today because your next car may have airbags. I’d be happy to take the AstraZeneca vaccine today, if only the government would let me.

Moreover, there is little reason to believe that you can’t follow-up the J&J or AstraZeneca vaccine with a mRNA vaccine at a later date.* If we will be taking multiple SARS-COV-2 vaccines over the next 10 years, as seems likely, it really doesn’t matter much which one we get first.

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: WSJ 

What I Will Miss About My Pandemic Existence

With vaccines on the way, it’s likely that 2021 will be much better, or at least more normal, than 2020. But a question remains: Which parts of our pandemic existence will we find most difficult to give up?

I’m not talking here about major social trends, such as working more from home, nor do I mean to minimize the suffering and disruption caused by Covid-19, which will reverberate for years if not decades. I’m referring to the habits and routines we developed as individuals.

I for one will miss the Saturday evening Zoom meeting. Since the pandemic started, I have found it easy to schedule calls at 5:30 or 6:30, even when more than one person is involved. Everyone just says yes. Why not? You’re not going out to the movies or dinner. Even if you think Zoom calls are oppressive — especially if you think Zoom calls are oppressive — it is better to have somewhere to put your marginal Zoom call other than 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

For a lot of people, the blurring of work and private time has been a burden. But I’ve been living that way most of my life. For the last year, the rest of the world has been forced to adopt my work habits, and I am going to miss it when they return to traditional socializing. I’ll still be offering you that Saturday night slot. We’ll see how many takers I get.

I also will miss early lunch, a practice also noticed by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Like a lot of people, I miss eating in a variety of settings — not just restaurants or coffee shops, but cafeterias or my desk — so I look for that variety temporally. The early cooking of a hamburger does indeed provide that break in routine, and with lunch at 11, why do I need breakfast anyway?

Have I mentioned that, like many Americans, I have been sleeping longer during the pandemic? In my case it is only about 15 minutes longer, but it’s enough reason to accelerate lunch and minimize breakfast. I get less done with that extra sleep, but at this point I am not inclined to give it back, no matter how well those vaccines work.

Restaurant norms are yet another reason for the 11 a.m. lunch — or, for that matter, the 4:30 p.m. dinner. There is one spacious, well-ventilated restaurant where I have been willing to dine inside. But I eat there only when I can start before others have arrived — in this case, 11 or 4:30. As the months have passed, I have noticed more people showing up early, typically walking in as I am leaving. Even as the pandemic recedes, I intend to keep having an early lunch. I wonder if they will, too.

Meanwhile, I am accumulating messes of various kinds and sizes. I no longer clean out my car, for example. Other than immediate family, who is riding with me anyway? I hesitate to make a prediction about how this habit will evolve as people get vaccinated, but right now if my car breaks down I will have a multitude of good books to read. The pile of books and papers on my sofa is also larger than it used to be, as I have had no company and thus no incentive to clean up.

Is my experience unique? Or, once the pandemic is over, might we all move to laxer norms of dress and orderliness? It could be like one of those companies where senior management stops wearing ties and the rest of the office follows suit. (...)

Most of all, I wonder how much I have internalized the icky feelings I have developed about certain public events and spaces. I wouldn’t think of entering a crowded indoor bar — in fact, the very thought repulses me, as the thought of a steak dinner might disgust a vegetarian. How long will it take for those feelings to go away in a well-vaccinated America?

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: WSJ

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021

This list marks 20 years since we began compiling an annual selection of the year’s most important technologies. Some, such as mRNA vaccines, are already changing our lives, while others are still a few years off. Below, you’ll find a brief description along with a link to a feature article that probes each technology in detail. We hope you’ll enjoy and explore—taken together, we believe this list represents a glimpse into our collective future.

Messenger RNA vaccines

We got very lucky. The two most effective vaccines against the coronavirus are based on messenger RNA, a technology that has been in the works for 20 years. When the covid-19 pandemic began last January, scientists at several biotech companies were quick to turn to mRNA as a way to create potential vaccines; in late December 2020, at a time when more than 1.5 million had died from covid-19 worldwide, the vaccines were approved in the US, marking the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

The new covid vaccines are based on a technology never before used in therapeutics, and it could transform medicine, leading to vaccines against various infectious diseases, including malaria. And if this coronavirus keeps mutating, mRNA vaccines can be easily and quickly modified. Messenger RNA also holds great promise as the basis for cheap gene fixes to sickle-cell disease and HIV. Also in the works: using mRNA to help the body fight off cancers. Antonio Regalado explains the history and medical potential of the exciting new science of messenger RNA.

GPT-3

Large natural-language computer models that learn to write and speak are a big step toward AI that can better understand and interact with the world. GPT-3 is by far the largest—and most literate—to date. Trained on the text of thousands of books and most of the internet, GPT-3 can mimic human-written text with uncanny—and at times bizarre—realism, making it the most impressive language model yet produced using machine learning.

But GPT-3 doesn’t understand what it’s writing, so sometimes the results are garbled and nonsensical. It takes an enormous amount of computation power, data, and money to train, creating a large carbon footprint and restricting the development of similar models to those labs with extraordinary resources. And since it is trained on text from the internet, which is filled with misinformation and prejudice, it often produces similarly biased passages. Will Douglas Heaven shows off a sample of GPT-3’s clever writing and explains why some are ambivalent about its achievements.

TikTok recommendation algorithms

Since its launch in China in 2016, TikTok has become one of the world’s fastest-growing social networks. It’s been downloaded billions of times and attracted hundreds of millions of users. Why? Because the algorithms that power TikTok’s “For You” feed have changed the way people become famous online.

While other platforms are geared more toward highlighting content with mass appeal, TikTok’s algorithms seem just as likely to pluck a new creator out of obscurity as they are to feature a known star. And they’re particularly adept at feeding relevant content to niche communities of users who share a particular interest or identity.

The ability of new creators to get a lot of views very quickly—and the ease with which users can discover so many kinds of content—have contributed to the app’s stunning growth. Other social media companies are now scrambling to reproduce these features on their own apps. Abby Ohlheiser profiles a TikTok creator who was surprised by her own success on the platform.

by The Editors MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: Sierra&Lenny, Selman Designs, Franziska Barcyzyk

SPACs

SPAC (n) acronym for Special Purpose Acquisition Company: a way to pay millions today, for the exciting investment idea someone promises to have tomorrow.

After the dot-com bubble exploded, Americans were forced to take a master class in the initial public offering, or IPO. When Enron blew up, we sifted through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) found in the wreckage. With the 2008 crash, the job was finding ways to explain Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, and other acronymic nightmares, under cover of which a fair portion of the world’s wealth vanished.

In the Fed-fueled Covid-19 economy, there’s one acronym worth knowing now, in case of bust later: the SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Company.

The SPAC is an IPO-for-IPOs. In essence, it’s a shell company, put together for the express purpose of raising money to acquire private companies that will eventually be taken public. Pick any absurd empty-package metaphor, and it’ll probably fit: investing in the plate one picks up on the way to a salad bar, in the tortilla you’ve been told will eventually contain the world’s best burrito, in the plain white paper and finger-paints you hope to dump in the crib of the next Rembrandt, etc.

Often called “Blank Check Companies,” the SPAC isn’t all new, but the mania has reached once-unimaginable heights. In 2021 already, 160 SPACs have raised over $50 billion, nearly matching last year’s record of $83.4 billion. An increasingly common element in SPAC announcements is the name of a celebrity, who’s enlisted to join a group that announces a plan to raise a massive sum of money for… something. It could be anyone, from A-Rod (asking for $540 million), Shaq (twice asked for $300 million), Grammy winner Ciara ($200 million), etc., etc.

The SPAC’s cash requests are often wrapped in altruistic verbiage, an example being former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick joining Phoenix Suns part-owner Jahm Najafi to form Mission Advancement. The group believes “purchasing decisions can act as instruments of change,” and therefore wants to build brands to create “meaningful financial and societal value.” In their SEC filing, they figure this will only cost $287 million:

On the opposite political end lay former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Executive Network Partnering Corporation, launched last August. Reports humorously noted that Ryan and his partner, Solamere Capital founder Alex Dunn, had “not selected a target industry” for their SPAC, which essentially meant they were asking for $300 million without knowing what for yet. The SEC filing for ENPC was inspired vagueness:

We have not selected any company to partner with and we have not, nor has anyone on our behalf, engaged in any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any company to partner with regarding a partnering transaction. We may pursue a partnering transaction with any company in any industry.

If you invest in a SPAC, your money goes in an interest-bearing account that can only be used to acquire properties or be returned to you, should the SPAC management team (called “sponsors”) fail to acquire properties in the allotted time, usually 18 to 24 months. Sponsors are paid in “founder shares,” bought at a discount and usually amounting to 20% of the common stock of the future company, a nice relatively risk-free chunk of change framed as the sponsors’ reward for not paying themselves exorbitant salaries during the brief shopping period.

The SPAC boom takes the last IPO bubble and moves the speculative mania back a regulatory step or two, allowing money to be raised before any irritating disclosures have to be made about any concrete business plans. After all, the businesses don’t exist yet. When you invest in a SPAC, you’re investing in the reputations of its sponsors, i.e. names, not businesses.

by Matt Taibbi, TK Finance |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: A Look Inside VC Firms Joining The SPAC Rush (Crunchbase).]

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