Bootleg poster for Move D’s album Building Bridges
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Monday, March 22, 2021
Meritocracy is Bad
Something I’ve often found is that arguments that start off promising to offer a critique of meritocracy end up, in fact, simply arguing that today’s existing society fails to live up to meritocratic ideas. So, I was excited when I recently read a Helen Andrews article arguing “our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it.”
That, I thought, is exactly what critics of meritocracy get wrong!
But then midway through the essay, I come to this part, where she does exactly the thing that I thought she was criticizing:
The current system of social hierarchy in the United States is of course not a perfect meritocracy (nothing is ever perfect), but it’s genuinely pretty successful on its own meritocratic terms. The problem is that those terms are bad. American society will not get better if we try to make it more genuinely meritocratic along any dimension of possible understanding of what the term means. What we need to do is relax our level of ideological investment in the idea of meritocracy and be more chill.
Our smart elites
I think the idea that America’s existing elites are somehow “pretty dumb” is itself one of the dumbest lies that people tell themselves. I recently did a virtual event with some Yale students, and the questions were all really good and perceptive. Every time I’ve done an event with Yale students over the past 18 years of my career, the questions have all been really good. Harvard events also get great questions. I’ve also been to Penn twice — great questions. When I’ve been to flagship public university campuses in Ann Arbor and Austin it’s the same — really good. (...)
And if you talk to people with a curious and open mind, you’ll pretty quickly find out that New York Times reporters are really smart. So are McKinsey consultants. So are the people working at successful hedge funds. So are Ivy League professors. Probably the smartest person I know was in a great grad program in the humanities, couldn’t quite get a tenure track job because of timing and the generally lousing job market in academia, and wound up with a job in finance at a firm that is famous for hiring really smart people with unorthodox backgrounds. Our society is great at identifying smart people and giving them important or lucrative jobs.
This just turns out to be an outcome that still has some problems.
Smart people do bad things
If you want a story about the problem with meritocracy, I would read Dylan Scott’s recent article about what researchers have found about the consequences of private equity takeovers of nursing homes: (...)
There’s a lot more you could say about this story looking specifically at the lens of nursing home operations. But I’m interested in meritocracy. And the point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.
The healthcare sector poses these kinds of questions in droves. To become a medical doctor, you generally need to get into a good college, have decent grades there, get a good score on a pretty hard standardized test, and then put in a bunch of time into a challenging graduate education program. So doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honor and offer legitimate medical advice.
But this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle. (...)
Round pegs and square holes
My read on a lot of what’s happening in elite cultural institutions in the United States is that we are currently living through a desperate scramble to make certain kinds of social justice goals and egalitarian commitments fit into a fundamentally unsound meritocratic framework.
What you need to do is actually change the framework — have a society that’s less based on sorting and ranking, and more based on equality.
In his meritocracy book, the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests that the most exclusive colleges should move away from tournament-style admissions. Instead, he’d like to see them set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold. That seems like a fine idea to me. What I’d like to see even more is for Michael Sandel to teach at a community college. Or for it to become stigmatized for rich people to donate money to already-rich universities. The really “in” thing to do could be to found new research centers in struggling communities, or to financially support educational institutions that serve low-income people.
In the political realm, I’d like to see less emphasis on taking the tech bros down a notch and more on just making the welfare state better, more generous, and more user-friendly.
But then, I would really like us to rethink Milton Friedman’s idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” and that everything to do with human welfare can be addressed through regulation. Friedman was a libertarian. He should know better than anyone how utopian it is to think that bureaucratic processes are going to successfully align everyone’s incentives.
I think he, the product of a more ethical period in American life, just underestimated the extent to which scams and shady dealings can be made to pay off. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to tell you a story about how changing up your nursing home management practices in a way that gets tons of your clients killed is going to be bad for business. And I could very easily tell you a story in which developing a reputation for not paying your contractors leads to your demise as a businessman.
The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded. To have a healthier society, we need more emphasis on fair play, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” and creating an atmosphere in which people would be ashamed to tell their parents that their well-paid finance job involves identifying ways to make patient care worse. That’s not a simple switch we can flip. And while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.
by Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring | Read more:
Image: William Thomas Kane/Getty
That, I thought, is exactly what critics of meritocracy get wrong!
But then midway through the essay, I come to this part, where she does exactly the thing that I thought she was criticizing:
Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb.So I want to actually make the argument that I merely thought Andrews was making.
The current system of social hierarchy in the United States is of course not a perfect meritocracy (nothing is ever perfect), but it’s genuinely pretty successful on its own meritocratic terms. The problem is that those terms are bad. American society will not get better if we try to make it more genuinely meritocratic along any dimension of possible understanding of what the term means. What we need to do is relax our level of ideological investment in the idea of meritocracy and be more chill.
Our smart elites
And if you talk to people with a curious and open mind, you’ll pretty quickly find out that New York Times reporters are really smart. So are McKinsey consultants. So are the people working at successful hedge funds. So are Ivy League professors. Probably the smartest person I know was in a great grad program in the humanities, couldn’t quite get a tenure track job because of timing and the generally lousing job market in academia, and wound up with a job in finance at a firm that is famous for hiring really smart people with unorthodox backgrounds. Our society is great at identifying smart people and giving them important or lucrative jobs.
This just turns out to be an outcome that still has some problems.
Smart people do bad things
If you want a story about the problem with meritocracy, I would read Dylan Scott’s recent article about what researchers have found about the consequences of private equity takeovers of nursing homes: (...)
There’s a lot more you could say about this story looking specifically at the lens of nursing home operations. But I’m interested in meritocracy. And the point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.
The healthcare sector poses these kinds of questions in droves. To become a medical doctor, you generally need to get into a good college, have decent grades there, get a good score on a pretty hard standardized test, and then put in a bunch of time into a challenging graduate education program. So doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honor and offer legitimate medical advice.
But this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle. (...)
Round pegs and square holes
My read on a lot of what’s happening in elite cultural institutions in the United States is that we are currently living through a desperate scramble to make certain kinds of social justice goals and egalitarian commitments fit into a fundamentally unsound meritocratic framework.
What you need to do is actually change the framework — have a society that’s less based on sorting and ranking, and more based on equality.
In his meritocracy book, the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests that the most exclusive colleges should move away from tournament-style admissions. Instead, he’d like to see them set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold. That seems like a fine idea to me. What I’d like to see even more is for Michael Sandel to teach at a community college. Or for it to become stigmatized for rich people to donate money to already-rich universities. The really “in” thing to do could be to found new research centers in struggling communities, or to financially support educational institutions that serve low-income people.
In the political realm, I’d like to see less emphasis on taking the tech bros down a notch and more on just making the welfare state better, more generous, and more user-friendly.
But then, I would really like us to rethink Milton Friedman’s idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” and that everything to do with human welfare can be addressed through regulation. Friedman was a libertarian. He should know better than anyone how utopian it is to think that bureaucratic processes are going to successfully align everyone’s incentives.
I think he, the product of a more ethical period in American life, just underestimated the extent to which scams and shady dealings can be made to pay off. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to tell you a story about how changing up your nursing home management practices in a way that gets tons of your clients killed is going to be bad for business. And I could very easily tell you a story in which developing a reputation for not paying your contractors leads to your demise as a businessman.
The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded. To have a healthier society, we need more emphasis on fair play, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” and creating an atmosphere in which people would be ashamed to tell their parents that their well-paid finance job involves identifying ways to make patient care worse. That’s not a simple switch we can flip. And while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.
by Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring | Read more:
Image: William Thomas Kane/Getty
[ed. See also: The Banality of Merit: Unlearning Obama (Current Affairs)]
A Philosopher in the Kitchen
John McPhee, who turned ninety earlier this month, began his career at The New Yorker, in 1963, with an account of his time at Cambridge University. For his second piece, he profiled Bill Bradley, then a college athlete whose rigorous, precise approach to the game of basketball has always reminded me of McPhee’s mode of reporting. At the time, Bradley, a banker’s son from Missouri, was scoring points for Princeton game after game, from every possible angle. He would often make blind passes or shoot without any conceivable view of the hoop—something unusual in those days. When McPhee asked how he accomplished these feats, Bradley replied that you need to have “a sense of where you are,” an instinct born of work, of constant practice.
This month, on the occasion of John’s birthday, we celebrate his extraordinary and ongoing career at The New Yorker, beginning with the Bradley Profile. Food is occasionally at the delicious center of a McPhee piece, and, in 1979, he wrote “A Philosopher in the Kitchen,” about a cook in an obscure restaurant who had thoroughly dazzled him. Known for his books on the natural world, including “Coming into the Country,” his masterpiece about Alaska, McPhee also wrote for the magazine, in 1988, about society’s attempt to “control” nature, in “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.” For a peek at John’s relationship with his editors over the years, enjoy his short, hilarious “Editors & Publisher.” These four pieces provide only a hint of John’s astonishing collection of work, his range and his passions, but they do give a taste of his inimitable prose. And we bet that after reading, or re-reading, them, you will go on reading from there. For a peek at John’s relationship with his editors over the years, enjoy his short, hilarious “Editors & Publisher.” These four pieces provide only a hint of John’s astonishing collection of work, his range and his passions, but they do give a taste of his inimitable prose. And we bet that after reading, or re-reading, them, you will go on reading from there.
The fifth-best meal I have ever sat down to was at a sort of farmhouse-inn that is neither farm nor inn, in the region of New York City. The fourth-best was at the same place—on a winter evening when the Eiswein afterward was good by the fire and the snow had not stopped falling for the day. The third-best meal I’ve ever had was centered upon some smoked whiting and pale mustard sauce followed by a saltimbocca, at the same place, on a night when the air of summer was oppressive with humidity but the interior of the old building was cool and musty under a slowly turning paddle fan. When things come up so well, culinary superlatives are hard to resist, and the best and second-best meals I have ever had anywhere (including the starry citadels of rural and metropolitan France) were also under that roof—emanations of flavor expressed in pork and coriander, hazelnut breadings, smoked-roe mousses, and aïoli. The list of occasions could go deeper, and if it were complete enough it might number twenty or thirty before the scene would shift—perhaps to the fields of Les Baux or the streets of Lyons. The cook who has been responsible for such pleasure on this side of the Atlantic was trained on the other side, in kitchens in various places on the Continent, notably in Switzerland, and including Spain, where he grew up in a lavish and celebrated Andalusian hotel that was managed by his father. His father was Austrian, but his mother was English, and so, from the age of eight, he was sent to be educated in Great Britain. As a result, he is in manner, speech, and appearance irremediably English. He has an Oxbridge accent and a Debrettian flourish of names—not one of which he will allow me to divulge. His customers tend to become his friends, and I had been a friend of his for something like five years before I thought to ask him if I could sit in his kitchen and take notes. He said it would be all right, but with the condition that I not—in any piece of writing—use the name of the restaurant, or his name, or the nickname of his wife, Anne, who is not known as Anne and is always called by her nickname. We further agreed that I would not even mention the state in which they live and work, or describe in much detail the land and waterscapes around them, let alone record what is written over the door of the nearest post office, which is, as it happens, more than five miles and less than a hundred from the triangle formed by La Grenouille, Lutèce, and Le Cygne.
The man’s right knee is callused from kneeling before his stove. He would like to see his work described. He would like to be known for what he does, but in this time, in this country, his position is awkward, for he prefers being a person to becoming a personality; his wish to be acknowledged is exceeded by his wish not to be celebrated, and he could savor recognition only if he could have it without publicity. He works alone, with Anne (who makes desserts and serves as hostess, bartender, sommelière). In a great restaurant of Europe, the team in the kitchen will be led by the gros bonnet, and under him a saucier, an entremettier, a potagiste, a rôtisseur, a grillardin, a friturier, a garde-manger, and any number of commis running around with important missions, urgent things to do. Here—with Anne excepted, as la pátissière-en-chef—this one man is in himself the entire brigade de cuisine. It is his nature not just to prefer but to need to work alone, and he knows that if his property were invaded and his doors were crowded up with people who had read of him in some enamelled magazine he could not properly feed them all. “There is no way to get qualified help,” he explains. “You’d have to import kids from Switzerland. If you did, you’d lose control. The quality would go down the drain.” In the haute cuisine restaurants of New York, kitchens are often small, and, typically, “five ill-educated people will be working there under extreme pressure, and they don’t get along,” he says. “Working alone, you don’t have interaction with other people. This is a form of luxury.”
Sometimes, at the height of an evening there are two customers in his dining room. His capacity is fifty-five, and he draws that number from time to time, but more often he will cook for less than forty. His work is never static. Shopping locally to see what is available today, reading, testing, adding to or subtracting from a basic repertory of roughly six hundred appetizers and entrées, he waits until three in the afternoon to write out what he will offer at night—three because he needs a little time to run to the store for whatever he may have forgotten. He has never stuffed a mushroom the same way twice. Like a pot-au-feu, his salad dressing alters slightly from day to day. There is a couple who have routinely come to his dining room twice a week for many years—they have spent more than fifteen thousand dollars there—and in all that time he has never failed to have on his menu at least one dish they have not been offered before. “I don’t know if they’re aware of this,” he has told me. “We owe it to them, because of the frequency of their visits. They keep us on our toes.”
In the evening, when his dining room is filling and he is busy in the rhythm of his work, he will (apparently unconsciously) say aloud over the food, and repeat, the names of the people for whom he is cooking. A bridge-toll collector. A plumber. A city school-teacher. A state senator—who comes from another state. With light-edged contempt, he refers to his neighborhood as Daily News country. There are two or three mobsters among his clientele. They are fat, he reports, and they order their vegetables “family style.” There is a couple who regularly drive a hundred and twenty miles for dinner and drive home again the same night. There is a nurse from Bellevue who goes berserk in the presence of Anne’s meringue tortes and ultra-chocolate steamed mousse cakes, orders every dessert available, and has to be carted back to Bellevue. There is an international tennis star who parks his car so close against the front door that everyone else has to sidle around it. Inside, only the proprietors seem to know who the tennis star is. The center of attention, and the subject of a good deal of table talk, is the unseen man in the kitchen. (...)
In part, the philosophy of this kitchen rests on deep resources of eggs, cream, and butter, shinbone marrow, boiled pig skins, and polysaturated pâtés of rich country meat. “Deny yourself nothing!” is the motto of one of the regulars of the dining room, who is trim and fit and—although he is executive vice-president in charge of public information at one of the modern giants of the so-called media—regards his relationship with the chef as a deep and sacred secret. “The place is not chic,” he goes on. “It is no Southampton-type oasis. The people there are nondescript. In fact, that place is the only realizable fantasy I have ever had. The fantasy is that there exists a small restaurant in the sticks, with marvellous food, run by civilized, funny, delightful people who have read every book and seen every movie and become your good friends—and almost no one else knows about them. I used to fantasize such people. Now I know them. They exist. And the last thing in the world they would want is fame that is associated with hype and overpublicity. They are educated, sensitive, intelligent. Their art is what comes out of the kitchen. I’m sure he wants his work appreciated, but he doesn’t want visitors coming to his hideaway for purposes of seeing the freak—the guy out in the woods who is making three-star meals. He would like to be appreciated for the right reasons—like an author who wants to be writing instead of going on TV talk shows. He is delighted when someone finds him, but wary, too. I think one proof of his sincerity is that he could raise his prices but he doesn’t. He could advertise, but he doesn’t. Somehow, that would be making too much of a commercial venture out of his work. It is inconceivable to imagine how his business could be run to make less money.”
The chef is an athletically proportioned man of middle height—a swimmer, a spear fisherman. One day when he was thirteen he was picking apples in a tree between North Oxford and St. Giles and he fell out of the tree onto a bamboo garden stake. It impaled his cheek at the left corner of his mouth. His good looks are enhanced, if anything, by the scar that remains from this accident. He has dark hair, quick brown eyes, and a swiftly rising laugh. Anne is tall, finely featured, attractive, and blond. Each has eaten a little too well, but neither is falling-down fat. They work too hard. She works in a long ponytail, a cotton plaid shirt, unfaded dungarees, he in old shirts with the sleeves rolled up, rips and holes across the chest. His trousers are generally worn through at the knees. There are patches, sutures of heavy thread. His Herman boots are old and furred and breaking down. He pulls out a handkerchief and it is full of holes. “I don’t mind spending money on something that is going to be eventually refundable,” he explains. “A house, for example. But not a handkerchief.” Most of the time, he cooks under a blue terry-cloth sailor hat, the brim of which is drawn down, like his hair, over his ears.
He was working with a Fulton Market octopus one morning, removing its beak, when he happened to remark on his affection for the name Otto.
“I like Otto,” he said. “I think Otto is a sensational name. It’s a name you would have to live up to, a challenging name. It suggests aloneness. It suggests bullheaded, Prussian, inflexible pomposity. Someone called Otto would be at least slightly pompous. Intolerant. Impatient. Otto.”
Anne said, “He has written his autobiography in that name.”
“I like Otto,” he said again. “Why don’t you call me Otto?”
I said, “Fine, Otto. I’ll call you Otto.”
~ David Remnick, New Yorker | Sunday Reading: The World of John McPhee
***
A Philosopher in the Kitchen - Brigade de Cuisine
The fifth-best meal I have ever sat down to was at a sort of farmhouse-inn that is neither farm nor inn, in the region of New York City. The fourth-best was at the same place—on a winter evening when the Eiswein afterward was good by the fire and the snow had not stopped falling for the day. The third-best meal I’ve ever had was centered upon some smoked whiting and pale mustard sauce followed by a saltimbocca, at the same place, on a night when the air of summer was oppressive with humidity but the interior of the old building was cool and musty under a slowly turning paddle fan. When things come up so well, culinary superlatives are hard to resist, and the best and second-best meals I have ever had anywhere (including the starry citadels of rural and metropolitan France) were also under that roof—emanations of flavor expressed in pork and coriander, hazelnut breadings, smoked-roe mousses, and aïoli. The list of occasions could go deeper, and if it were complete enough it might number twenty or thirty before the scene would shift—perhaps to the fields of Les Baux or the streets of Lyons. The cook who has been responsible for such pleasure on this side of the Atlantic was trained on the other side, in kitchens in various places on the Continent, notably in Switzerland, and including Spain, where he grew up in a lavish and celebrated Andalusian hotel that was managed by his father. His father was Austrian, but his mother was English, and so, from the age of eight, he was sent to be educated in Great Britain. As a result, he is in manner, speech, and appearance irremediably English. He has an Oxbridge accent and a Debrettian flourish of names—not one of which he will allow me to divulge. His customers tend to become his friends, and I had been a friend of his for something like five years before I thought to ask him if I could sit in his kitchen and take notes. He said it would be all right, but with the condition that I not—in any piece of writing—use the name of the restaurant, or his name, or the nickname of his wife, Anne, who is not known as Anne and is always called by her nickname. We further agreed that I would not even mention the state in which they live and work, or describe in much detail the land and waterscapes around them, let alone record what is written over the door of the nearest post office, which is, as it happens, more than five miles and less than a hundred from the triangle formed by La Grenouille, Lutèce, and Le Cygne.
Sometimes, at the height of an evening there are two customers in his dining room. His capacity is fifty-five, and he draws that number from time to time, but more often he will cook for less than forty. His work is never static. Shopping locally to see what is available today, reading, testing, adding to or subtracting from a basic repertory of roughly six hundred appetizers and entrées, he waits until three in the afternoon to write out what he will offer at night—three because he needs a little time to run to the store for whatever he may have forgotten. He has never stuffed a mushroom the same way twice. Like a pot-au-feu, his salad dressing alters slightly from day to day. There is a couple who have routinely come to his dining room twice a week for many years—they have spent more than fifteen thousand dollars there—and in all that time he has never failed to have on his menu at least one dish they have not been offered before. “I don’t know if they’re aware of this,” he has told me. “We owe it to them, because of the frequency of their visits. They keep us on our toes.”
In the evening, when his dining room is filling and he is busy in the rhythm of his work, he will (apparently unconsciously) say aloud over the food, and repeat, the names of the people for whom he is cooking. A bridge-toll collector. A plumber. A city school-teacher. A state senator—who comes from another state. With light-edged contempt, he refers to his neighborhood as Daily News country. There are two or three mobsters among his clientele. They are fat, he reports, and they order their vegetables “family style.” There is a couple who regularly drive a hundred and twenty miles for dinner and drive home again the same night. There is a nurse from Bellevue who goes berserk in the presence of Anne’s meringue tortes and ultra-chocolate steamed mousse cakes, orders every dessert available, and has to be carted back to Bellevue. There is an international tennis star who parks his car so close against the front door that everyone else has to sidle around it. Inside, only the proprietors seem to know who the tennis star is. The center of attention, and the subject of a good deal of table talk, is the unseen man in the kitchen. (...)
In part, the philosophy of this kitchen rests on deep resources of eggs, cream, and butter, shinbone marrow, boiled pig skins, and polysaturated pâtés of rich country meat. “Deny yourself nothing!” is the motto of one of the regulars of the dining room, who is trim and fit and—although he is executive vice-president in charge of public information at one of the modern giants of the so-called media—regards his relationship with the chef as a deep and sacred secret. “The place is not chic,” he goes on. “It is no Southampton-type oasis. The people there are nondescript. In fact, that place is the only realizable fantasy I have ever had. The fantasy is that there exists a small restaurant in the sticks, with marvellous food, run by civilized, funny, delightful people who have read every book and seen every movie and become your good friends—and almost no one else knows about them. I used to fantasize such people. Now I know them. They exist. And the last thing in the world they would want is fame that is associated with hype and overpublicity. They are educated, sensitive, intelligent. Their art is what comes out of the kitchen. I’m sure he wants his work appreciated, but he doesn’t want visitors coming to his hideaway for purposes of seeing the freak—the guy out in the woods who is making three-star meals. He would like to be appreciated for the right reasons—like an author who wants to be writing instead of going on TV talk shows. He is delighted when someone finds him, but wary, too. I think one proof of his sincerity is that he could raise his prices but he doesn’t. He could advertise, but he doesn’t. Somehow, that would be making too much of a commercial venture out of his work. It is inconceivable to imagine how his business could be run to make less money.”
The chef is an athletically proportioned man of middle height—a swimmer, a spear fisherman. One day when he was thirteen he was picking apples in a tree between North Oxford and St. Giles and he fell out of the tree onto a bamboo garden stake. It impaled his cheek at the left corner of his mouth. His good looks are enhanced, if anything, by the scar that remains from this accident. He has dark hair, quick brown eyes, and a swiftly rising laugh. Anne is tall, finely featured, attractive, and blond. Each has eaten a little too well, but neither is falling-down fat. They work too hard. She works in a long ponytail, a cotton plaid shirt, unfaded dungarees, he in old shirts with the sleeves rolled up, rips and holes across the chest. His trousers are generally worn through at the knees. There are patches, sutures of heavy thread. His Herman boots are old and furred and breaking down. He pulls out a handkerchief and it is full of holes. “I don’t mind spending money on something that is going to be eventually refundable,” he explains. “A house, for example. But not a handkerchief.” Most of the time, he cooks under a blue terry-cloth sailor hat, the brim of which is drawn down, like his hair, over his ears.
He was working with a Fulton Market octopus one morning, removing its beak, when he happened to remark on his affection for the name Otto.
“I like Otto,” he said. “I think Otto is a sensational name. It’s a name you would have to live up to, a challenging name. It suggests aloneness. It suggests bullheaded, Prussian, inflexible pomposity. Someone called Otto would be at least slightly pompous. Intolerant. Impatient. Otto.”
Anne said, “He has written his autobiography in that name.”
“I like Otto,” he said again. “Why don’t you call me Otto?”
I said, “Fine, Otto. I’ll call you Otto.”
by John McPhee, New Yorker | Read more:
Images: Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1979 and Bryan Anselm / Redux
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.” So goes Virginia Woolf’s well-known complaint about “Ulysses,” scribbled into her diary before she had finished reading it. Her disparagement is catnip to those many critics who like to view “Mrs. Dalloway” — that other uber-famous, if more lapidary, modernist novel that spans the course of a single day — as Woolf’s rejoinder to Joyce. More than that, though, it tells us something important about our literary history. Nineteen twenty-two, the year of “Ulysses,” may well be ground zero for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is better captured by another year: 1925, that of “Mrs. Dalloway” and several other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as they emerge from under copyright.
If many an English-majored ear perks up at the sound of “1922,” it’s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” are taught everywhere and almost without exception as “signifying a definitive break in literary history,” to quote the critic Michael North from his book “Reading 1922.” Both the novel and the poem are notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one’s mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new.
Yet 1925 is arguably the more important date in modernism’s development, the year that it went mainstream, as embodied by four books whose influence continues to shape fiction today: Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection, “In Our Time,” John Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Compared with the masterpieces of 1922, these books — all slated for reissue in new editions this year — entered our culture in relatively unspectacular fashion. But it’s precisely their unassuming guise that allowed them, by osmosis rather than disruption, to diffuse their modernist conceits throughout the literary field, ensuring their widespread adoption. (...)
It’s commonplace to call Woolf an impressionist in this peculiar sense, and yet it nails her novelistic craft. She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in “Mrs. Dalloway” and later, in a more extreme sense, in “The Waves” (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo. As the critic J. Hillis Miller once put it, the reader most often finds that she is “plunged within an individual mind which is being understood from inside by an ubiquitous, all-knowing mind.”
This is evident to us not from the novel’s immortal opening line — “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” — but from the one immediately following, which serves as a kind of mirror to the first, tipping us off that we must reread it as something other than objective assertion: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” Suddenly, with the lightly colloquial “cut out for her,” we are in the mind not of an omniscient narrator but of a character — Clarissa Dalloway, as the succeeding lines make clear. The reader ceases to think that she is being told what Mrs. Dalloway said about getting the flowers, and begins to think instead that Mrs. Dalloway is just remarking on that fact, as if to herself. And that changes everything.
This narrative technique, known as free-indirect speech, was part of Woolf’s quiet revolution. Though she did not invent it — arguably Austen, Flaubert and Edith Wharton got there first — Woolf perfected this mode, coloring it with the anxiety of modern subjectivity. Open any novel of the past 50 years, and you will find the narrator reporting thoughts that, for reasons of diction and tense, can only be those of a character. With varying degrees of indebtedness, each of these is an heir to Woolf and her narrators, who enter the world of their fictions as Clarissa Dalloway enters the world of her relations, “being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.” That a narrator need not fiddle with chess pieces from on high but might linger like a cloud among foggy minds is a feature of modernism that has, as it were, contaminated literature ever since.
Opposed to the singularity of a work like “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land,” we have in “Mrs. Dalloway” the innovation of an enduring, deep structure — something like geometric perspective in painting, that contributes to the development of technique, rather than driving it up a dead end. So it is with “In Our Time,” “Manhattan Transfer” and “The Great Gatsby.” With “Big Two-Hearted River,” the last story in Hemingway’s collection, writers on either side of the Atlantic learned about the power of economy in writing. As if by revelation, it became clear that the solution to the problem of representing a collective trauma like World War I was not blabbering effusion, but its opposite.
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Hemingway told The Paris Review in 1958. The “iceberg” technique became the calling card not only of postwar American writers like Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy, but also of the influential cadre of French existentialist novelists, including Céline, Malraux, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Most important, though, Hemingway became an exemplary stylist for the M.F.A. programs that sprang up across America after the war, and through which many of our canonized poets and novelists have since passed. As the scholar Mark McGurl puts it in his book “The Program Era,” “It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Hemingway on postwar writers, and … too easy to forget that the medium of his influence has been the school.”
by Ben Libman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
If many an English-majored ear perks up at the sound of “1922,” it’s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” are taught everywhere and almost without exception as “signifying a definitive break in literary history,” to quote the critic Michael North from his book “Reading 1922.” Both the novel and the poem are notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one’s mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new.
It’s commonplace to call Woolf an impressionist in this peculiar sense, and yet it nails her novelistic craft. She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in “Mrs. Dalloway” and later, in a more extreme sense, in “The Waves” (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo. As the critic J. Hillis Miller once put it, the reader most often finds that she is “plunged within an individual mind which is being understood from inside by an ubiquitous, all-knowing mind.”
This is evident to us not from the novel’s immortal opening line — “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” — but from the one immediately following, which serves as a kind of mirror to the first, tipping us off that we must reread it as something other than objective assertion: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” Suddenly, with the lightly colloquial “cut out for her,” we are in the mind not of an omniscient narrator but of a character — Clarissa Dalloway, as the succeeding lines make clear. The reader ceases to think that she is being told what Mrs. Dalloway said about getting the flowers, and begins to think instead that Mrs. Dalloway is just remarking on that fact, as if to herself. And that changes everything.
This narrative technique, known as free-indirect speech, was part of Woolf’s quiet revolution. Though she did not invent it — arguably Austen, Flaubert and Edith Wharton got there first — Woolf perfected this mode, coloring it with the anxiety of modern subjectivity. Open any novel of the past 50 years, and you will find the narrator reporting thoughts that, for reasons of diction and tense, can only be those of a character. With varying degrees of indebtedness, each of these is an heir to Woolf and her narrators, who enter the world of their fictions as Clarissa Dalloway enters the world of her relations, “being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.” That a narrator need not fiddle with chess pieces from on high but might linger like a cloud among foggy minds is a feature of modernism that has, as it were, contaminated literature ever since.
Opposed to the singularity of a work like “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land,” we have in “Mrs. Dalloway” the innovation of an enduring, deep structure — something like geometric perspective in painting, that contributes to the development of technique, rather than driving it up a dead end. So it is with “In Our Time,” “Manhattan Transfer” and “The Great Gatsby.” With “Big Two-Hearted River,” the last story in Hemingway’s collection, writers on either side of the Atlantic learned about the power of economy in writing. As if by revelation, it became clear that the solution to the problem of representing a collective trauma like World War I was not blabbering effusion, but its opposite.
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Hemingway told The Paris Review in 1958. The “iceberg” technique became the calling card not only of postwar American writers like Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy, but also of the influential cadre of French existentialist novelists, including Céline, Malraux, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Most important, though, Hemingway became an exemplary stylist for the M.F.A. programs that sprang up across America after the war, and through which many of our canonized poets and novelists have since passed. As the scholar Mark McGurl puts it in his book “The Program Era,” “It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Hemingway on postwar writers, and … too easy to forget that the medium of his influence has been the school.”
Image: uncredited
The Doctor Will Sniff You Now
It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in your vein, and a week of waiting for your blood test results. Instead, the nurse welcomes you with, “The doctor will sniff you now,” and takes you into an airtight chamber wired up to a massive computer. As you rest, the volatile molecules you exhale or emit from your body and skin slowly drift into the complex artificial intelligence apparatus, colloquially known as Deep Nose. Behind the scene, Deep Nose’s massive electronic brain starts crunching through the molecules, comparing them to its enormous olfactory database. Once it’s got a noseful, the AI matches your odors to the medical conditions that cause them and generates a printout of your health. Your human doctor goes over the results with you and plans your treatment or adjusts your meds.
That’s how Alexei Koulakov, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies how the human olfactory system works, envisions one possible future of our healthcare. A physicist turned neuroscientist, Koulakov is working to understand how humans perceive odors and to classify millions of volatile molecules by their “smellable” properties. He plans to catalogue the existing smells into a comprehensive artificial intelligence network. Once built, Deep Nose will be able to identify the odors of a person or any other olfactory bouquet of interest—for medical or other reasons. “It will be a chip that can diagnose or identify you,” Koulakov says. Scent uniquely identifies a person or merchandise, so Deep Nose can also help at the border patrol, sniffing travelers, cargo, or explosives. “Instead of presenting passports at the airport, you would just present yourself.” And doctor’s visits would become a breeze—literally.
What can one’s odor tell about one’s health? Apparently, a lot. “The information that can be picked up from the airborne molecules is amazingly rich,” says Dmitry Rinberg, also a former physicist and now a neurobiologist at New York University who collaborates with Koulakov on olfactory research. “It’s so informative that you can tell what kind of beer people drank at a bar last night.” Odor can reveal other things happening with the body, he adds. “So we are trying to use this information for odor-based diagnostic approaches.”
Recent research finds that many diseases, including cancer, tuberculosis, and Parkinson’s, can manifest themselves through volatile compounds that change the person’s scent. Our bodies release certain metabolites—products of our metabolic activities. Some of these molecules are volatiles and become part of our scent, or “odorprint.” When we become sick or start developing a disease, our metabolic processes start functioning differently, emitting different volatile molecules or mixtures of them, so our odorprint changes too. “These molecules carry information about our state of health,” Koulakov says. For example, patients with Parkinson disease produce an unusually high amount of sebum,1 a waxy lipid-rich biofluid excreted by the sebaceous glands of the skin, which sensitive noses can detect. Deep Nose could grab this information from the thin air. That could allow physicians to detect disease sooner, easier, and perhaps avoid some invasive diagnostic procedures. “It would essentially revolutionize the diagnostics system,” Koulakov says.
by Lina Zeldovich, Nautilus | Read more:
What can one’s odor tell about one’s health? Apparently, a lot. “The information that can be picked up from the airborne molecules is amazingly rich,” says Dmitry Rinberg, also a former physicist and now a neurobiologist at New York University who collaborates with Koulakov on olfactory research. “It’s so informative that you can tell what kind of beer people drank at a bar last night.” Odor can reveal other things happening with the body, he adds. “So we are trying to use this information for odor-based diagnostic approaches.”
Recent research finds that many diseases, including cancer, tuberculosis, and Parkinson’s, can manifest themselves through volatile compounds that change the person’s scent. Our bodies release certain metabolites—products of our metabolic activities. Some of these molecules are volatiles and become part of our scent, or “odorprint.” When we become sick or start developing a disease, our metabolic processes start functioning differently, emitting different volatile molecules or mixtures of them, so our odorprint changes too. “These molecules carry information about our state of health,” Koulakov says. For example, patients with Parkinson disease produce an unusually high amount of sebum,1 a waxy lipid-rich biofluid excreted by the sebaceous glands of the skin, which sensitive noses can detect. Deep Nose could grab this information from the thin air. That could allow physicians to detect disease sooner, easier, and perhaps avoid some invasive diagnostic procedures. “It would essentially revolutionize the diagnostics system,” Koulakov says.
by Lina Zeldovich, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Dr. Hiro Nalkayama, Rinberg Lab, NYU Neuroscience Institute
Saturday, March 20, 2021
Frank Thomas, USGA Technical Director, Dies at 81
Frank Thomas, the long-time senior technical director of the United States Golf Association whose carefully measured influence over the game’s equipment stretched across half a century, has died. He was 81.
Thomas led the USGA’s equipment rules-making efforts from 1974 to 2000 and contributed mightily to the way the game is enjoyed today by developing the graphite shaft in 1969, a component that is part of clubs in the bag of nearly every golfer. Its lighter weight enabled golfers to start the game earlier, play the game longer and swing the club faster than they ever had before.
Prior to coming to the USGA, Thomas earned an engineering degree from Western Michigan University and was working for Shakespeare Sporting Goods. He developed the filament winding technique for graphite fibers around a mandrel to control the demanding torsional bending properties of a golf shaft.
But it was at the USGA where Thomas’ influence defined the limits of equipment performance for a generation. It was an era of more equipment upheaval than is likely appreciated today, yet Thomas maintained a respect for tradition with a concerted focus on science for solutions. Under his guidance, there were new methodologies for testing golf-ball flight that came to be the Overall Distance Standard, and he developed the concept that limited the spring-like effect in driver faces. He also wrote rules about the shape of grips, holes in the heads of irons, woods and wedges and made clear the “plain in shape” rule, an interpretation that added broad but clearer limits on what equipment should look like in the interest of keeping the implements of the game of tomorrow recognizable with those of yesterday.
He also helped to conceive the USGA’s Slope system for rating golf courses so handicaps were tied more directly to the relative difficulty of the course.
Thomas earned the respect of both those who worked with him at the USGA and those whose products he ruled on sometimes negatively. “Frank was such an important part of the USGA and the game,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “He was an innovator who created golf’s first graphite shaft and played an integral role in creating the Slope System for golf course rating, among many of his incredible achievements. Most importantly, he was a friend of so many in our game. He will be sorely missed.” (...)
Thomas, who with his counterpart and friend R&A technical expert Alastair Cochran kept an academic's focus on equipment guidelines, confessed that while he oversaw more than 6,000 equipment decisions in his time at the USGA, he enjoyed it very little because each one involved nettlesome record-keeping, paperwork and occasionally lawyers.
“Fortunately I had good people working with me, which made the task bearable,” he wrote in his memoir Just Hit It, “but I knew I had to be excruciatingly thorough because I did not want to do something wrong or make a decision that I couldn’t defend later.”
There were notable vexing moments in Thomas’s quarter-century steering the equipment ship. Among them was a decision outlawing the Polara ball, which was designed to self-correct hooks and slices with its pattern of six rows of full dimples around the equator of the ball and extremely shallow ones on either end. Thomas disallowed the ball under a broad interpretation of the rules prohibiting artificial devices that might assist the player making a stroke. Thomas also employed a stipulation that reserved the right of the USGA to change club and ball rules at any time, left the Polara off the list of conforming balls and then added a rule about golf ball symmetry. But the USGA later had to settle out of court with the maker for a reported $1.375 million.
Thomas wanted to stay ahead of a future in equipment in innovation he couldn't always clearly see by defending the game's enduring challenge, said Jerry Tarde, Editor-in-Chief of Golf Digest and global head of strategy & content for Discovery Golf/Golf Digest. “Frank symbolized golf equipment innovation for 30 years and gave terms like 'coefficient of restitution' a popular following to the extent that he became known as ‘Dr. Strangeclub,’ ” Tarde said. “The words that I always associate with him are ‘We don’t want to put a ladder up the Matterhorn,’ which perfectly encapsulated his goal to preserve the challenge while promoting the mountain-climbing spirit of the game.”
But it was the USGA’s knockdown-drag-out fight with Ping and its founder Karsten Solheim over the “square grooves” in his Eye2 irons that was a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis event for equipment rulemaking. It led to a $300 million antitrust lawsuit in 1985 that named Thomas personally and hinged on the interpretation of the measurement of a groove, a measurement that for all intents and purposes constituted the width of a human hair. Thomas initiated a change in the rules that provided updated and practical guidelines that in essence prevented more than half the irons on the market at the time from being ruled non-conforming. But the new specifics on groove width and spacing ran into measurement challenges, and the ruling bodies eventually blinked—albeit with no money changing hands and, perhaps most importantly, the USGA’s authority to make equipment rules was upheld.
Thomas called Solheim a friend, writing, “His tenacity and stubbornness impressed me and made Karsten one of the most successful innovators in the game,” Thomas wrote, remembering fondly how Solheim bought a Thomas self-portrait as part of a Golf Digest charity auction. “I shed more than a few tears at his posthumous—and belated—induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.”
Karsten’s son, John A. Solheim, who took over the reins for his father, remembered Thomas fondly.
“I’m very saddened to hear of Frank’s passing,” said Solheim, Ping chairman and CEO. “He was a respected friend to both myself and my father. We were on opposite sides of the table with Frank during the ‘square groove’ era and a few other issues over the years, which led to countless disagreements and spirited debates, but in the end, we walked away as friends. We remained close over the years as he continued his passion for golf research and product design. He will be missed.”
Of course, for a time, the grooves controversy may have tempered the ruling bodies’ willingness to aggressively limit equipment companies and their innovations. At least that’s how Thomas saw it. In the mid-1990s, Thomas saw the approach of thin-faced titanium drivers and realized the game was at a kind of crossroads. The thinner faces, Thomas believed, violated the earlier rule he had written to prevent metal drivers from having a spring-like effect. While he said he privately advocated the drivers be disallowed after demonstrating the spring-like effect existed, he helped develop a limit on “coefficient of restitution” in 1998 that was in line with where drivers were at the time. He wrote in Just Hit It, “I was a little upset at being asked to compromise the enforcement of a rule I had written, and especially at being told that I was not really interpreting it correctly. Perhaps I should have just accepted it and kept my mouth shut. This is not my nature.”
The new enforcement procedure for the rule required a limit on spring-like effect involved a somewhat complicated air cannon test and a numerical average for coefficient of restitution that carried to the third decimal. He later wrote, “I came to realize that the rules should in most cases express principles that cover intents and purposes rather than trying to anticipate every innovation that may arise someday and specify it out of existence. The rules that do this are effective and tend to remain so; the ones that are overly specific often have unintended consequences.”
by Mike Stachura and E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: John B. Carnett[ed. See also: The Great Square Groove Controversy (Dave Tutelman)]
Thomas led the USGA’s equipment rules-making efforts from 1974 to 2000 and contributed mightily to the way the game is enjoyed today by developing the graphite shaft in 1969, a component that is part of clubs in the bag of nearly every golfer. Its lighter weight enabled golfers to start the game earlier, play the game longer and swing the club faster than they ever had before.
Prior to coming to the USGA, Thomas earned an engineering degree from Western Michigan University and was working for Shakespeare Sporting Goods. He developed the filament winding technique for graphite fibers around a mandrel to control the demanding torsional bending properties of a golf shaft.
He also helped to conceive the USGA’s Slope system for rating golf courses so handicaps were tied more directly to the relative difficulty of the course.
Thomas earned the respect of both those who worked with him at the USGA and those whose products he ruled on sometimes negatively. “Frank was such an important part of the USGA and the game,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “He was an innovator who created golf’s first graphite shaft and played an integral role in creating the Slope System for golf course rating, among many of his incredible achievements. Most importantly, he was a friend of so many in our game. He will be sorely missed.” (...)
Thomas, who with his counterpart and friend R&A technical expert Alastair Cochran kept an academic's focus on equipment guidelines, confessed that while he oversaw more than 6,000 equipment decisions in his time at the USGA, he enjoyed it very little because each one involved nettlesome record-keeping, paperwork and occasionally lawyers.
“Fortunately I had good people working with me, which made the task bearable,” he wrote in his memoir Just Hit It, “but I knew I had to be excruciatingly thorough because I did not want to do something wrong or make a decision that I couldn’t defend later.”
There were notable vexing moments in Thomas’s quarter-century steering the equipment ship. Among them was a decision outlawing the Polara ball, which was designed to self-correct hooks and slices with its pattern of six rows of full dimples around the equator of the ball and extremely shallow ones on either end. Thomas disallowed the ball under a broad interpretation of the rules prohibiting artificial devices that might assist the player making a stroke. Thomas also employed a stipulation that reserved the right of the USGA to change club and ball rules at any time, left the Polara off the list of conforming balls and then added a rule about golf ball symmetry. But the USGA later had to settle out of court with the maker for a reported $1.375 million.
Thomas wanted to stay ahead of a future in equipment in innovation he couldn't always clearly see by defending the game's enduring challenge, said Jerry Tarde, Editor-in-Chief of Golf Digest and global head of strategy & content for Discovery Golf/Golf Digest. “Frank symbolized golf equipment innovation for 30 years and gave terms like 'coefficient of restitution' a popular following to the extent that he became known as ‘Dr. Strangeclub,’ ” Tarde said. “The words that I always associate with him are ‘We don’t want to put a ladder up the Matterhorn,’ which perfectly encapsulated his goal to preserve the challenge while promoting the mountain-climbing spirit of the game.”
But it was the USGA’s knockdown-drag-out fight with Ping and its founder Karsten Solheim over the “square grooves” in his Eye2 irons that was a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis event for equipment rulemaking. It led to a $300 million antitrust lawsuit in 1985 that named Thomas personally and hinged on the interpretation of the measurement of a groove, a measurement that for all intents and purposes constituted the width of a human hair. Thomas initiated a change in the rules that provided updated and practical guidelines that in essence prevented more than half the irons on the market at the time from being ruled non-conforming. But the new specifics on groove width and spacing ran into measurement challenges, and the ruling bodies eventually blinked—albeit with no money changing hands and, perhaps most importantly, the USGA’s authority to make equipment rules was upheld.
Thomas called Solheim a friend, writing, “His tenacity and stubbornness impressed me and made Karsten one of the most successful innovators in the game,” Thomas wrote, remembering fondly how Solheim bought a Thomas self-portrait as part of a Golf Digest charity auction. “I shed more than a few tears at his posthumous—and belated—induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.”
Karsten’s son, John A. Solheim, who took over the reins for his father, remembered Thomas fondly.
“I’m very saddened to hear of Frank’s passing,” said Solheim, Ping chairman and CEO. “He was a respected friend to both myself and my father. We were on opposite sides of the table with Frank during the ‘square groove’ era and a few other issues over the years, which led to countless disagreements and spirited debates, but in the end, we walked away as friends. We remained close over the years as he continued his passion for golf research and product design. He will be missed.”
Of course, for a time, the grooves controversy may have tempered the ruling bodies’ willingness to aggressively limit equipment companies and their innovations. At least that’s how Thomas saw it. In the mid-1990s, Thomas saw the approach of thin-faced titanium drivers and realized the game was at a kind of crossroads. The thinner faces, Thomas believed, violated the earlier rule he had written to prevent metal drivers from having a spring-like effect. While he said he privately advocated the drivers be disallowed after demonstrating the spring-like effect existed, he helped develop a limit on “coefficient of restitution” in 1998 that was in line with where drivers were at the time. He wrote in Just Hit It, “I was a little upset at being asked to compromise the enforcement of a rule I had written, and especially at being told that I was not really interpreting it correctly. Perhaps I should have just accepted it and kept my mouth shut. This is not my nature.”
The new enforcement procedure for the rule required a limit on spring-like effect involved a somewhat complicated air cannon test and a numerical average for coefficient of restitution that carried to the third decimal. He later wrote, “I came to realize that the rules should in most cases express principles that cover intents and purposes rather than trying to anticipate every innovation that may arise someday and specify it out of existence. The rules that do this are effective and tend to remain so; the ones that are overly specific often have unintended consequences.”
by Mike Stachura and E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: John B. Carnett
Our Strange Addiction
The 1610s were a key decade in tobacco’s transformation into a new global obsession. Before long, the gift (or curse) of smoking had given rise to one of the world’s most lucrative industries, emerged as a key driver of the Atlantic slave trade, and initiated a global bad habit that humanity still hasn’t kicked more than four hundred years later.
by Benjamin Breen, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Monkey Trick, by David Teniers the Younger, c. 1670
... The story of smoking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is capacious enough to include the distillation apparatus of the alchemist, the water pipe of the cannabis smoker, and even medicinal smoke enemas.
This diversity is not what we would expect from the standard history of smoking, which goes something like this.
Before 1492 smoking was widespread among the tobacco-loving peoples of the Americas but unknown across the Atlantic. Then Christopher Columbus witnessed Taíno men in Cuba puffing on “certain herbs...by which they become benumbed and almost drunk” and, upon further investigation, learned that “they call this tabaco” (this, at least, is what Bartolomé de Las Casas claimed Columbus had recorded in his now-lost journal of his 1492 voyage). By the 1560s a growing number of Spanish authorities began advocating that Europeans take up the practice—particularly the Seville physician Nicolás Monardes, who hailed smoking as a “miraculous” cure for over twenty diseases. And by century’s end tobacco was being grown domestically in areas stretching from Spain to Turkey to Gujarat. Meanwhile, tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil were emerging as hubs of the Atlantic slave trade. All were in the service of an enormous growth in consumer demand for tobacco that stretched beyond Europe and into Asia and Africa. (...)
By the 1650s the tobacco pipe was perhaps the most widespread emblem of globalization and European empire. Smoking had gone global.
Versions of this account of the globalization of smoking have been told countless times. Broadly speaking, they’re true. But they can also be misleading.
Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.
While tobacco was becoming a global drug, cannabis was, too—just in a stealthier and far less heralded fashion. Archaeological evidence points to cannabis smoking in Central and South Asia since at least 1000 bc, probably linked to the migrations of proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. One apparent offshoot of this ancient practice attracted the notice of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that Scythian nomads inhaled cannabis smoke inside their woolen tents: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” By circa 800 cannabis use had also crossed the Indian Ocean and become part of daily life in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
As European slave traders and merchants reached the cannabis-smoking regions of both South Asia and East and west central Africa, the phenomenon of “intoxicating” cannabis again attracted notice. The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, living in 1550s India, admitted that cannabis could be “pleasantly intoxicating” but also saw it as a source of “nausea” and “melancholy.” By the seventeenth centuries, however, some European merchants in the Indian Ocean region had become users of the drug themselves, and at least one brought back samples of the drug to Europe with an eye toward growing the plant locally as a new cash crop, following the model of tobacco.
In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
Hooke also never specified if the anonymous “patient” of his report was, in fact, himself. But he did end his address on a decidedly upbeat note. “Here are diverse of the seeds,” Hooke said, presenting them to the Royal Society at their final weekly meeting before Christmas, “which I intend to try this spring, to see if the plant can be here produced.” If he succeeded in this labor, Hooke believed the drug could prove to be “of considerable use for lunatics.” He concluded: “There is no cause of fear, tho’ possibly there may be of laughter.”
This diversity is not what we would expect from the standard history of smoking, which goes something like this.
By the 1650s the tobacco pipe was perhaps the most widespread emblem of globalization and European empire. Smoking had gone global.
Versions of this account of the globalization of smoking have been told countless times. Broadly speaking, they’re true. But they can also be misleading.
Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.
While tobacco was becoming a global drug, cannabis was, too—just in a stealthier and far less heralded fashion. Archaeological evidence points to cannabis smoking in Central and South Asia since at least 1000 bc, probably linked to the migrations of proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. One apparent offshoot of this ancient practice attracted the notice of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that Scythian nomads inhaled cannabis smoke inside their woolen tents: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” By circa 800 cannabis use had also crossed the Indian Ocean and become part of daily life in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
As European slave traders and merchants reached the cannabis-smoking regions of both South Asia and East and west central Africa, the phenomenon of “intoxicating” cannabis again attracted notice. The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, living in 1550s India, admitted that cannabis could be “pleasantly intoxicating” but also saw it as a source of “nausea” and “melancholy.” By the seventeenth centuries, however, some European merchants in the Indian Ocean region had become users of the drug themselves, and at least one brought back samples of the drug to Europe with an eye toward growing the plant locally as a new cash crop, following the model of tobacco.
In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
Hooke also never specified if the anonymous “patient” of his report was, in fact, himself. But he did end his address on a decidedly upbeat note. “Here are diverse of the seeds,” Hooke said, presenting them to the Royal Society at their final weekly meeting before Christmas, “which I intend to try this spring, to see if the plant can be here produced.” If he succeeded in this labor, Hooke believed the drug could prove to be “of considerable use for lunatics.” He concluded: “There is no cause of fear, tho’ possibly there may be of laughter.”
Image: Monkey Trick, by David Teniers the Younger, c. 1670
Stock Market Leverage Spikes
In the current craze that encompasses everything from sneakers and NFTs to stocks, where valuations don’t matter because of widespread certainty that valuations will be even greater in a few days, and where folks are chasing lottery-type returns, supported by the Fed’s interest rate repression and $3 trillion in asset purchases, and by the government’s trillions of dollars of handouts and bailouts – well, in this perfect world, there is a fly in the ointment: Vast amounts of leverage, including stock market leverage.
Margin debt – the amount that individuals and institutions borrow against their stock holdings as tracked by FINRA at its member brokerage firms – is just one indication of stock market leverage. But FINRA reports it monthly. Other types of stock market leverage are not reported at all, or are disclosed only piecemeal in SEC filings by brokers and banks that lend to their clients against their portfolios, such as Securities-Based Loans (SBLs). No one knows how much total stock market leverage there is. But margin debt shows the trend.
In February, margin debt jumped by another $15 billion to $813 billion, according to FINRA. Over the past four months, margin debt has soared by $154 billion, a historic surge to historic highs. Compared to February last year, margin debt has skyrocketed by $269 billion, or by nearly 50%, for another WTF sign that the zoo has gone nuts:
But margin debt is not cheap, especially smaller amounts. For example, Fidelity charges 8.325% on margin balances of less than $25,000 – in an environment where banks, money market accounts, and Treasury bills pay near 0%. Margin debt gets cheaper for larger balances, an encouragement to borrow more. For margin debt of $1 million or more, the interest rate at Fidelity drops to 4.0%
“Whether you need extra money for a short-term financing need or buying more securities, a margin loan may help you get the money you need,” Fidelity says on its website. In other words, take out a margin loan to buy a car or much needed bitcoin or NFTs.
Every broker has its own margin interest rate schedule. Morgan Stanley charges 7.75% for margin balances below $100,000, compared to Fidelity’s 6.875% for balances between $50,000 and $99,999. For margin balances over $50 million, Morgan Stanley charges 3.375%.
And it’s risky leverage for the borrower. It seems like risk-free leverage when stocks go up, but when your stocks do the unheard-of and tank below a certain level, your broker will ask you to put more cash into your account or sell stocks into the tanking market, whereby you then join the legions of forced sellers.
In the past, a big surge in margin balances tended to precede history-making stock market declines:
Over the two-decade period of the chart, the long-term changes in the dollar amounts are less important since the purchasing power of the dollar with regards to stocks has dropped.
But short-term, the changes show what is happening to margin debt in the run-up before the sell-off, and what is happening during the sell-off when margin requirements turn investors into legions of forced sellers. (...)
The historic surge in margin balances in recent months is another indicator of how hyper-speculative and blindly courageous the mega-bubble has become. All kinds of new theories are being proffered why fundamentals and valuations are meaningless, and why prices of all assets will shoot to the moon, no matter what.
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street | Read more:
Margin debt – the amount that individuals and institutions borrow against their stock holdings as tracked by FINRA at its member brokerage firms – is just one indication of stock market leverage. But FINRA reports it monthly. Other types of stock market leverage are not reported at all, or are disclosed only piecemeal in SEC filings by brokers and banks that lend to their clients against their portfolios, such as Securities-Based Loans (SBLs). No one knows how much total stock market leverage there is. But margin debt shows the trend.
In February, margin debt jumped by another $15 billion to $813 billion, according to FINRA. Over the past four months, margin debt has soared by $154 billion, a historic surge to historic highs. Compared to February last year, margin debt has skyrocketed by $269 billion, or by nearly 50%, for another WTF sign that the zoo has gone nuts:
But margin debt is not cheap, especially smaller amounts. For example, Fidelity charges 8.325% on margin balances of less than $25,000 – in an environment where banks, money market accounts, and Treasury bills pay near 0%. Margin debt gets cheaper for larger balances, an encouragement to borrow more. For margin debt of $1 million or more, the interest rate at Fidelity drops to 4.0%
“Whether you need extra money for a short-term financing need or buying more securities, a margin loan may help you get the money you need,” Fidelity says on its website. In other words, take out a margin loan to buy a car or much needed bitcoin or NFTs.
Every broker has its own margin interest rate schedule. Morgan Stanley charges 7.75% for margin balances below $100,000, compared to Fidelity’s 6.875% for balances between $50,000 and $99,999. For margin balances over $50 million, Morgan Stanley charges 3.375%.
And it’s risky leverage for the borrower. It seems like risk-free leverage when stocks go up, but when your stocks do the unheard-of and tank below a certain level, your broker will ask you to put more cash into your account or sell stocks into the tanking market, whereby you then join the legions of forced sellers.
In the past, a big surge in margin balances tended to precede history-making stock market declines:
Over the two-decade period of the chart, the long-term changes in the dollar amounts are less important since the purchasing power of the dollar with regards to stocks has dropped.
But short-term, the changes show what is happening to margin debt in the run-up before the sell-off, and what is happening during the sell-off when margin requirements turn investors into legions of forced sellers. (...)
The historic surge in margin balances in recent months is another indicator of how hyper-speculative and blindly courageous the mega-bubble has become. All kinds of new theories are being proffered why fundamentals and valuations are meaningless, and why prices of all assets will shoot to the moon, no matter what.
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street | Read more:
Images: Wolf Street
Friday, March 19, 2021
Americans About to Binge on 'Revenge Spending'
Shoppers are out for vengeance.
A year into a pandemic that’s devastated lives, jobs and the economy, those who are lucky enough to have disposable income are ready to go out and splurge — even if they still have nowhere to go in that stunning dress or those brand new sneakers. Some are calling this “revenge spending.”
U.S. retail sales are near record highs and employment and vaccinations are on the rise. Americans have amassed a massive stockpile of excess savings — Bloomberg Economics estimates it to be about $1.7 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic through January. And that’s about to be bolstered by a new round of stimulus payments. As the economy reopens, consumer spending over the next two quarters is likely to be the strongest such period in at least 70 years with a rebound in services leading the way, according to economists at Wells Fargo & Co.
“A lot of the snapback in spending will come from those more leisure expenditures — your discretionary expenditures,” said Shannon Seery, an economist at Wells Fargo. Those are the areas that “we really expect to bounce back once the economy returns to some semblance of normal."
Revenge spending was seen as early as last April in China after the government began easing back to normalcy after the nation was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. The impact on companies was clear: U.S. jeweler Tiffany & Co.’s China sales surged 90% in May from the year prior, while Hermes, the French luxury label known for its $10,000 handbags, raked in $2.7 million in one day from a store reopening in Guangzhou.
China has been recovering ever since, even as the virus continues to rage across Europe and North America. The reopening of the nation’s domestic travel corridors sparked a tourism revival, with locals visiting destinations like Macau and Hainan. They’ve been spending so much there that brands like Ralph Lauren Corp., Estee Lauder Cos. and Coach are all scrambling to open more stores. There’s universal hope that there’ll be a similar fervor in the U.S. too.
While the U.S. economy will likely reopen gradually over the course of 2021, the federal government is already starting to distribute stimulus checks. Research suggests one-time payments boost spending more than steady payments that lead to a higher income.
“This round of stimulus is coming at the same time that the economy is properly reopening," said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Corp. “If you have a lot in your bank account already, you don't have very much debt to pay off, you probably do feel more comfortable spending the stimulus check.” (...)
It may take slightly longer for the wealthiest to shell out cash like they once did. The top 10% of earners account for nearly half of personal outlays in the U.S., according to calculations by Wells Fargo. These consumers, who have been forced into saving because of social distancing, are likely to come out in full force as the health crisis subsides and herd immunity is reached, Meyer said. Almost half of U.S. consumers, meanwhile, said they’d buy little luxuries in the next six months. Over a third said they’d go in on even bigger, more expensive products, according to a survey from Accenture.
A year into a pandemic that’s devastated lives, jobs and the economy, those who are lucky enough to have disposable income are ready to go out and splurge — even if they still have nowhere to go in that stunning dress or those brand new sneakers. Some are calling this “revenge spending.”
U.S. retail sales are near record highs and employment and vaccinations are on the rise. Americans have amassed a massive stockpile of excess savings — Bloomberg Economics estimates it to be about $1.7 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic through January. And that’s about to be bolstered by a new round of stimulus payments. As the economy reopens, consumer spending over the next two quarters is likely to be the strongest such period in at least 70 years with a rebound in services leading the way, according to economists at Wells Fargo & Co.
Revenge spending was seen as early as last April in China after the government began easing back to normalcy after the nation was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. The impact on companies was clear: U.S. jeweler Tiffany & Co.’s China sales surged 90% in May from the year prior, while Hermes, the French luxury label known for its $10,000 handbags, raked in $2.7 million in one day from a store reopening in Guangzhou.
China has been recovering ever since, even as the virus continues to rage across Europe and North America. The reopening of the nation’s domestic travel corridors sparked a tourism revival, with locals visiting destinations like Macau and Hainan. They’ve been spending so much there that brands like Ralph Lauren Corp., Estee Lauder Cos. and Coach are all scrambling to open more stores. There’s universal hope that there’ll be a similar fervor in the U.S. too.
While the U.S. economy will likely reopen gradually over the course of 2021, the federal government is already starting to distribute stimulus checks. Research suggests one-time payments boost spending more than steady payments that lead to a higher income.
“This round of stimulus is coming at the same time that the economy is properly reopening," said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Corp. “If you have a lot in your bank account already, you don't have very much debt to pay off, you probably do feel more comfortable spending the stimulus check.” (...)
It may take slightly longer for the wealthiest to shell out cash like they once did. The top 10% of earners account for nearly half of personal outlays in the U.S., according to calculations by Wells Fargo. These consumers, who have been forced into saving because of social distancing, are likely to come out in full force as the health crisis subsides and herd immunity is reached, Meyer said. Almost half of U.S. consumers, meanwhile, said they’d buy little luxuries in the next six months. Over a third said they’d go in on even bigger, more expensive products, according to a survey from Accenture.
by Kim Bhasin, Reade Pickert, and Gerald Porter Jr., Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Noam Galai/Getty Images
Tax Evasion and Money Laundering in the Art Market
Governments in advanced economies are getting more serious about chipping away at hidden wealth. Admittedly, they have a long way to go. Gabriel Zucman, in his The Hidden Wealth of Nations, estimated that 8% of household wealth, which was $7.6 trillion when he published his book in 2013, was in tax havens. Sometimes people with lots of dough hidden in these lockboxes want to use it, hence the use of shell companies and other devices to make use of the funds without tipping off the tax man. Although real estate has been a big fave for stashing foreign, and sometimes secret, funds in nice safe places like London and New York, art has been another vehicle.
As we’ll soon explain, the UK looks like it is about to crack down on anonymous purchases of art beyond a fairly low threshold amount. The US hasn’t yet joined but as we’ll explain below, the US has recently implemented measures ending hidden ownership of companies so it may not need to do much more with respect to art.
For instance, the last time I was in Paris, I attended a art show at a museum with a top tax maven friend. She recognized quite a few of the paintings, to the degree that she knew which “anonymous owner” pieces never went to the US because the US did have a pretty good idea as to who the owner actually was and would impound them.
The US started down this path with post 9/11 anti-money-laundering and “terrorist finance” reforms, and was able to crack open Switzerland’s bank secrecy. Americans who held Swiss bank accounts were given an amnesty: confess, and pay the taxes and interest due and you won’t be subject to penalties and prosecution. Experts speculate the reason Mitch Romney showed only one year of tax returns was that individuals who had held Swiss bank accounts were require to refile past returns, with the front page of the return “stapled,” making the changes obvious. Had Romney or his wife held a Swiss bank account and filed amended returns, the last year filed would have been the one for the year prior to the one he did publish.
Another click of the ratchet has come with the effective end of anonymously-owned shell companies in the US at the start of 2021. A big impetus for this change came with the publication in 2018 of a New York Times series, Towers of Secrecy, by Louise Story and Stephanie Saul, on condos owned by shell companies in the super luxury development, the Time Warner Center, at the old Coliseum site at the southwest corner of Central Park South. Lloyd Blankfein lived there, for instance. The reporters found quite a few shell-company owned units and for most of them, as intended, they could not find who the actual owners were. But they were successful more often than I would have anticipated, and in every case, the person behind the shell looked pretty unsavory.
The article kicked off a call for reforms, with first New York City and eventually New York State too requiring all real estate purchases by LLCs report who the beneficial owners are (if press accounts are correct, the info is only kinda hidden, it’s not public but can be obtained by FOIL, New York’s version of FOIA).
And now….drumroll…the Feds get in on the act. From Gothamist in January:
Now to the UK art market wrinkle, from the Financial Times’ John Dizard:
As we’ll soon explain, the UK looks like it is about to crack down on anonymous purchases of art beyond a fairly low threshold amount. The US hasn’t yet joined but as we’ll explain below, the US has recently implemented measures ending hidden ownership of companies so it may not need to do much more with respect to art.
For instance, the last time I was in Paris, I attended a art show at a museum with a top tax maven friend. She recognized quite a few of the paintings, to the degree that she knew which “anonymous owner” pieces never went to the US because the US did have a pretty good idea as to who the owner actually was and would impound them.
The US started down this path with post 9/11 anti-money-laundering and “terrorist finance” reforms, and was able to crack open Switzerland’s bank secrecy. Americans who held Swiss bank accounts were given an amnesty: confess, and pay the taxes and interest due and you won’t be subject to penalties and prosecution. Experts speculate the reason Mitch Romney showed only one year of tax returns was that individuals who had held Swiss bank accounts were require to refile past returns, with the front page of the return “stapled,” making the changes obvious. Had Romney or his wife held a Swiss bank account and filed amended returns, the last year filed would have been the one for the year prior to the one he did publish.
Another click of the ratchet has come with the effective end of anonymously-owned shell companies in the US at the start of 2021. A big impetus for this change came with the publication in 2018 of a New York Times series, Towers of Secrecy, by Louise Story and Stephanie Saul, on condos owned by shell companies in the super luxury development, the Time Warner Center, at the old Coliseum site at the southwest corner of Central Park South. Lloyd Blankfein lived there, for instance. The reporters found quite a few shell-company owned units and for most of them, as intended, they could not find who the actual owners were. But they were successful more often than I would have anticipated, and in every case, the person behind the shell looked pretty unsavory.
The article kicked off a call for reforms, with first New York City and eventually New York State too requiring all real estate purchases by LLCs report who the beneficial owners are (if press accounts are correct, the info is only kinda hidden, it’s not public but can be obtained by FOIL, New York’s version of FOIA).
And now….drumroll…the Feds get in on the act. From Gothamist in January:
On January 1st, Congress passed a measure to end the secrecy around shell companies that has fueled a boom in high-priced New York condominiums. The new law could discourage the flow of international capital into Manhattan real estate, while giving investigators powerful new tools to detect money laundering and other financial crimes.Note that we have repeatedly and energetically stressed that the real estate seller is not responsible for ascertaining if the payment he is getting for his property comes from dirty money or not if it comes via the banking system. Cash in paper bags are another kettle of fish. But I am nevertheless surprised to learn that all cash payments weren’t considered to be covered by “know your customer” rules. This is clearly a regulatory matter and I’m surprised this wasn’t addressed via the Treasury’s new rules. But foreign banks typically have a New York branch, which puts them under the New York state banking regulator. (...)
The National Defense Authorization Act, passed over a veto by President Donald Trump, empowers the Treasury Department to create and maintain a registry of the “beneficial” or true owners of most businesses created in the United States, including limited liability companies. LLCs are a popular vehicle for purchasing real estate, in part due to the secrecy they confer…. (...)
Now to the UK art market wrinkle, from the Financial Times’ John Dizard:
The art market’s high rollers have created a serious image problem for themselves. Over the past 30 years, and particularly at the beginning of this century, they sold the story of mystery international billionaire buyers and their glamorous hangers-on at flashy evening auctions. Answering slight nods in packed sale rooms, mellifluous auctioneers would post gasp-inducing record prices for works by artists most middle-class people only ever see in museums…
Now the auction houses, art dealers and private advisers face the prospect of emerging from Covid-19 lockdowns only to be enlisted as enforcers of anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations as strict as those in the banking industry. They are not entirely ready for this. They signed up to be courtiers, not investigators.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Zoom Escaper Lets You Sabotage Your Own Meetings
via: The Verge
Image: Zoom Escaper
Thursday, March 18, 2021
Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma
President Joe Biden wants all adults to be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine by May 1. In a speech last week, he suggested that Americans should be able to celebrate July 4 with (smallish) barbecues. For many people, this was the first hopeful vision in a while. We still have a ways to go, but the speed of the vaccination process in recent days makes quasi-normalcy by July seem not completely out of reach.
At least one group feels left adrift, however, and potentially behind: parents. Vaccines for children under 16 are not yet available. Trials have begun, but realistically, children won’t receive a shot in the arm until the fall or winter. Parents are wondering if, after a year of remote school, no playdates, and a lack of grandparent visits, they’ll still have to socially isolate while everyone else enjoys their BBQ.
But the best available research indicates that families with young children don’t, in fact, have to live like it’s 2020 until 2022. Parents can go ahead and plan on barbecues and even vacations. The explanation for why lies in the resilience of kids to COVID-19, and in herd immunity.
Children are not at high risk for COVID-19. We’ve known since early in the pandemic that they are much less likely to fall ill, especially seriously ill. Although scientists don’t quite understand why, kids seem to be naturally protected. As a result, you can think of your son or daughter as an already vaccinated grandparent.
Hear me out.
Think about a grandmother who’s received, say, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Trial research indicates that the second shot reduces her risk of serious illness by about 95 percent. Her risk of death goes way down too, although the trials were not geared toward reaching a conclusion on that point. (The Pfizer control group recorded zero deaths.)
Different vaccines yield different results, but all of the vaccines approved by the FDA (Pfizer-BioNTech’s, Moderna’s, and Johnson & Johnson’s) are very effective, which is why the CDC has indicated that vaccinated individuals can interact unmasked with other vaccinated individuals. It hasn’t yet commented on flying, but I’m guessing the CDC will relax its flying advisories for vaccinated individuals in the next few weeks. It will continue to recommend masks, for the sake of protecting the unvaccinated population, because the science on transmission by the vaccinated is still hazy.
Now think about your child. The CDC has published some risk assessments by age. For comparison’s sake, I’ll phrase the findings the way I would the results of a vaccine trial: Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent protective against hospitalization. For children 0 to 4, these numbers are 99.9 percent (death) and 96 percent (hospitalization).
The central goal of vaccination is preventing serious illness and death. From this standpoint, being a child is a really great vaccine. Your unvaccinated first grader appears to have about as much protection from serious illness as a vaccinated grandmother.
At least one group feels left adrift, however, and potentially behind: parents. Vaccines for children under 16 are not yet available. Trials have begun, but realistically, children won’t receive a shot in the arm until the fall or winter. Parents are wondering if, after a year of remote school, no playdates, and a lack of grandparent visits, they’ll still have to socially isolate while everyone else enjoys their BBQ.
Children are not at high risk for COVID-19. We’ve known since early in the pandemic that they are much less likely to fall ill, especially seriously ill. Although scientists don’t quite understand why, kids seem to be naturally protected. As a result, you can think of your son or daughter as an already vaccinated grandparent.
Hear me out.
Think about a grandmother who’s received, say, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Trial research indicates that the second shot reduces her risk of serious illness by about 95 percent. Her risk of death goes way down too, although the trials were not geared toward reaching a conclusion on that point. (The Pfizer control group recorded zero deaths.)
Different vaccines yield different results, but all of the vaccines approved by the FDA (Pfizer-BioNTech’s, Moderna’s, and Johnson & Johnson’s) are very effective, which is why the CDC has indicated that vaccinated individuals can interact unmasked with other vaccinated individuals. It hasn’t yet commented on flying, but I’m guessing the CDC will relax its flying advisories for vaccinated individuals in the next few weeks. It will continue to recommend masks, for the sake of protecting the unvaccinated population, because the science on transmission by the vaccinated is still hazy.
Now think about your child. The CDC has published some risk assessments by age. For comparison’s sake, I’ll phrase the findings the way I would the results of a vaccine trial: Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent protective against hospitalization. For children 0 to 4, these numbers are 99.9 percent (death) and 96 percent (hospitalization).
The central goal of vaccination is preventing serious illness and death. From this standpoint, being a child is a really great vaccine. Your unvaccinated first grader appears to have about as much protection from serious illness as a vaccinated grandmother.
by Emily Oster, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Annice Lyn/Getty[ed. I don't care. Please vaccinate parents and children -families- as soon as possible. It's the biggest step we can make toward getting life back to normal. We shouldn't be waiting for (and trying to convince) every age cohort to finally feel comfortable before moving forward.]
Cloudbusting
Eight States Are Seeding Clouds to Overcome Megadrought (Scientific American)
[ed. See also: The Dimming, Full Length Climate Engineering Documentary ( Geoengineering Watch- YouTube )]
[ed. See also: The Dimming, Full Length Climate Engineering Documentary ( Geoengineering Watch- YouTube )]
Video: Kate Bush, Cloudbusting, with Donald Sutherland
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