Deconstructing That $69 Million NFT

“NFTs” have hit the mainstream news with the sale of an NFT based digital artwork for $69 million. I thought I’d write up an explainer. Specifically, I deconstruct that huge purchase and show what actually was exchanged, down to the raw code. (The answer: almost nothing).

The reason for this post is that every other description of NFTs describe what they pretend to be. In this blogpost, I drill down on what they actually are.

Note that this example is about “NFT artwork”, the thing that’s been in the news. There are other uses of NFTs, which work very differently than what’s shown here.

tl;dr

I have long bit of text explaining things. Here is the short form that allows you to drill down to the individual pieces.

• Beeple created a piece of art in a file
• He created a hash that uniquely, and unhackably, identified that file
• He created a metadata file that included the hash to the artwork
• He created a hash to the metadata file
• He uploaded both files (metadata and artwork) to the IPFS darknet decentralized file sharing service
• He created, or minted a token governed by the MakersTokenV2 smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain
• Christies created an auction for this token
• The auction was concluded with a payment of $69 million worth of Ether cryptocurrency. However, nobody has been able to find this payment on the Ethereum blockchain, the money was probably transferred through some private means.
• Beeple transferred the token to the winner, who transferred it again to this final Metakovan account

Each of the link above allows you to drill down to exactly what’s happening on the blockchain. The rest of this post discusses things in long form.

Why do I care?

Well, you don’t. It makes you feel stupid that you haven’t heard about it, when everyone is suddenly talking about it as if it’s been a thing for a long time. But the reality, they didn’t know what it was a month ago, either. Here is the Google Trends graph to prove this point — interest has only exploded in the last couple months:

The same applies to me. I’ve been aware of them (since the CryptoKitties craze from a couple years ago) but haven’t invested time reading source code until now. Much of this blogpost is written as notes as I discover for myself exactly what was purchased for $69 million, reading the actual transactions.

So what is it?

My definition: “Something new that can be traded on a blockchain that isn’t a fungible cryptocurrency”.

In this post, I’m going to explain in technical details. Before this, you might want to pause and see what everyone else is saying about it. You can look on Wikipedia to answer that question, or look at the following definition from CNN (the first result when I google it):

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are pieces of digital content linked to the blockchain, the digital database underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. Unlike NFTs, those assets are fungible, meaning they can be replaced or exchanged with another identical one of the same value, much like a dollar bill.

You can also get a list of common NFT systems here. While this list of NFT systems contains a lot of things related to artwork (as described in this blogpost), a lot aren’t. For example, CryptoKiddies is an online game, not artwork (though it too allows ties to pictures of the kitties).

What is fungible?

Let’s define the word fungible first. The word refers to goods you purchase that can be replaced by an identical good, like a pound of sugar, an ounce of gold, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil. When you buy one, you don’t care which one you get.

In contrast, an automobile is a non-fungible good — if you order a Tesla Model 3, you won’t be satisfied with just any car that comes out of the factory, but one that matches the color and trim that you ordered. Art work is a well known non-fungible asset — there’s only one Mona Lisa painting in the world, for example.

Dollar bills and coins are fungible tokens — they represent the value printed on the currency. You can pay your bar bill with any dollars.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, ZCash, and Ethereum are also “fungible tokens”. That’s where they get their value, from their fungibility.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is the idea of trading something unique (non-fungible, not the same as anything else) on the blockchain. You can trade them, but each is unique, like a painting, a trading card, a rare coin, and so on.

This is a token — it represents a thing. You aren’t trading an artwork itself on the blockchain, but a token that represents the artwork. I mention this because most descriptions about NFTs are that you are buying artwork — you aren’t. Instead, you are buying a token that points to the artwork.

The best real world example is a receipt for purchase. Let’s say you go to the Louvre and buy the Mona Lisa painting, and they give you a receipt attesting to the authenticity of the transaction. The receipt is not the artwork itself, but something that represents the artwork. It’s proof you legitimately purchased it — that you didn’t steal it. If you ever resell the painting, you’ll probably need something like this proving the provenance of the piece.

Show me an example!

So let’s look an at an example NFT, the technical details, to see how it works. We might as well use this massive $69 million purchase as our example. Some news reports describing the purchase are here: [1] [2] [3].

None of these stories say what actually happened. They say the “artwork was purchased”, but what does that actually mean? We are going to deconstruct that here. (The answer is: the artwork wasn’t actually purchased).

by Robert Graham, Security Boulevard |  Read more:

Image: Security Boulevard

[ed. FYI: the cryptographic hash for the Beeple painting is (apparently): 6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017]

Shameless

In an episode of the 11th season of Shameless, Ian Gallagher (played by Cameron Monaghan) experiences wage theft at his new “shitty ass minimum wage job hauling boxes around a warehouse.” He discovers that management has paid him for 39 hours when he worked for 45, deducting money for locker fees, safety vests, and bathroom breaks. “Welcome to the working man’s America,” a co-worker tells him. Two episodes later, Ian quits the job to run drug money instead.

Shameless, Showtime’s tragicomic study of the ever-expanding American lumpenproletariat, ends this year after over a decade of being the only series of its kind on television, an anti-Horatio Alger tale that lays bare the gaping maw where our social safety net should be. The Gallaghers, a dysfunctional South Side Chicago family, are different from other working-class TV families like the Bunkers from All in the Family, or the Connors from Roseanne. As show creator Paul Abbot told the New York Times, “it’s not blue collar, it’s no collar.”

The show’s characters are driven by their basic material needs—nobody has the luxury of becoming self-actualized. They rotate between manual labor and food service jobs, prisons and homeless shelters, supplementing minimum wage or government aid—both insufficient—with mooching, begging, theft, fraud, and several varieties of sex work. Shameless is uncouth, grotesque, and abject where other premium cable hits of the past 10 years have been slick, aspirational fantasias populated by the wealthy. The series is an indictment of a system in which both political parties have abandoned a desperate underclass. When it ends, we’ll lose a realistic reflection of the ways that a growing number of Americans get by.

Such reflections have always been hard to find in mainstream mass media. Early Hollywood’s system of self-censorship, known as the Motion Picture Production Code, forbade depictions of crime on film, unless the criminals were unsympathetic characters who suffered for their sins. Code rules also discouraged portrayals of illicit drugs and the “selling of a woman’s virtue.” While the code officially ended in 1968 and didn’t apply to television, its spirit haunted the small screen for decades, clashing with audience appetites for stories about drugs, prostitution, and other types of crime—the vicarious experience of watching characters violate social norms. The challenge for TV writers has been to give viewers what they want, while simultaneously reinforcing the traditional middle-class values that have undergirded the genre since the 1950s. How to do this? Make crime ubiquitous, but poverty invisible.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a study revealed that one-third of all prime-time TV shows revolved around crime. Curiously, it also found that TV writers gave the majority of criminal characters professional or managerial jobs, or else left unknown the matter of their work and socioeconomic status. The same holds true today. The fictional criminals we watch on shows like Billions or various “copaganda” programs are frequently white collar, or they’re rendered somehow class-less. The narratives focus much more on individual pathology than on material conditions. Television is also more likely to portray violent crime—e.g., rape and murder—over the more quotidian crimes of survival, like shoplifting, petty drug dealing, or offering the occasional hand job for cash, the small informal ways of making ends meet in an era of suppressed wages and skyrocketing rents. Few television programs have engaged, politically and ideologically, with issues of class and labor. Fewer still have explored how (and why) poor people are pushed into criminalized underground economies.

Enter Shameless, which debuted in 2011, adapted from a British series of the same name. When showrunner John Wells pitched network executives, he had to fight suggestions to set the series in the American South or in a trailer park, those well-worn tropes used to telegraph deprivation in pop culture. Instead, Shameless takes place in a multi-racial city whose denizens have been left behind by gentrification but who see survival—against all odds and by any means necessary—as a point of familial pride. The Gallagher offspring are neglected by their chaotic parents, a mother with bipolar disorder and a father with chronic alcoholism, and so must fend for themselves in a crowded ramshackle home. Nearly every move they make in hopes of bettering their lot is thwarted by a byzantine public welfare system and an indifferent neoliberal state. They have no bootstraps, no boots, and for one character who suffers a workplace accident followed by a DIY amputation, not even a full set of toes.

You couldn’t find a better illustration of the concept, theorized by Marx and Engels, of the lumpenproletariat, the prefix of which translates to “ragged” or “rabble.” In 19th century Europe, the lumpen were those with “questionable means of support and of dubious origin,” like beggars, gamblers, pickpockets, and prostitutes, who inhabited the streets or urban slums. This so-called “surplus population” lived on the “crumbs of society” in part because their drug and alcohol dependencies made them unsuitable for traditional labor. In contemporary America, members of the lumpen fall through the cracks of a system that happily starves people with disabilities and deprives the poor of mental health and drug treatment services, leaving them cycling in and out of formal employment and underfunded institutions. They’re depraved, as the Sondheim lyric goes, on account of they’re deprived.

by Sascha Cohen, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Big Chunks of Corporate Tax Cuts End Up in Executive's Pockets

"This new law will provide tax incentives for companies to expand and create jobs by investing in plants and equipment,” proclaimed President George W. Bush in 2002 as he signed the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act. “This measure will mean more job opportunities for workers in every part of our country.”

As Bush promised, the bill included significant corporate tax cuts. Further reductions in corporate taxes would follow with the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The rhetoric in each instance was the same: Purportedly, these tax cuts were not for the sake of enriching corporate management but for employing American workers — hence the word “jobs” in all three titles. These companies would take the extra money and invest it in the workforce, creating new and better opportunities for regular people.

That is not what happened. In reality, a new academic study finds, a significant fraction of recent corporate tax breaks simply went to increased pay for top corporate executives. The paper, currently undergoing peer review before publication, is the first comprehensive academic examination of its kind. Its author, Grinnell College assistant professor of economics Eric Ohrn, used a database of top-level compensation at publicly traded U.S. firms to analyze the tax cuts’ impact on executive pay.

If Ohrn is correct, the reductions in the corporate income tax over the past two decades will reward America’s corporate royalty with hundreds of billions of dollars between now and 2030. Ohrn attributes this extraordinary payday to executives’ successful use of “rent-seeking,” an economic concept that describes individual and corporate use of power to capture wealth without adding any new value themselves.

Ohrn examined the pay of 31,879 executives at 2,794 publicly traded companies from 1998 to 2012. His results showed that for every dollar in reduced corporate taxes from two types of tax cuts, compensation for the top five executives at the companies increased by 15 to 19 cents.

Though there is little data readily available on lower-ranking executive pay, higher pay at the top almost certainly pulls up executive compensation on the corporate rungs just underneath. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., points out that if the next 20 executives at each company in Ohrn’s study received in aggregate half the increased pay of the top five executives, it would mean that “between 22% and 37% of the money gained from a tax break went to 25 of the highest-paid people in the corporate hierarchy.”

The amount of money at stake is gigantic.

American business has for decades been conducting a war against corporate taxation. The rationale for cuts is always the same: Companies and their favored politicians claim that they have opportunities to make investments in new technologies and plants that would lead to better jobs and higher pay for workers. Unfortunately, thanks to overbearing corporate taxes, they simply can’t afford to do it.

Neither part of this story is true. There is no discernible connection between levels of corporate profits and investment. Moreover, even if there were, it would likely make little difference for average workers: Higher productivity led to higher median wages for regular people during the three decades after World War II, but that link was broken in the 1970s. Since then, productivity has continually increased but has barely shown up in the paychecks of regular people. Instead, the greater wealth has gone to those at the top of the pay scale, such as corporate executives.

But the fact that the case for corporate tax cuts makes no sense has not impeded its success. During the 1960s, the federal government took in an average of about 3.7 percent of the gross domestic product via corporate income taxes. By the late 1990s, it had fallen to 2.1 percent. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that it will average 1.3 percent from 2021-2030 — that is, 0.8 percentage points of GDP less than 20 years ago.

The decrease may not seem like much on its face, but the CBO projects that the total U.S. GDP over the next 10 years will be $273 trillion. If the corporate income tax were still at the 2.1 percent of GDP level of the late 1990s, it would bring in $5.73 trillion. At the current projected rate of 1.3 percent, it will be $3.55 trillion. Corporations will save $2.18 trillion. 

by Jon Schwarz, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

[ed. No surprise here. And, since Biden's infrastructure bill is supposed to be paid for with higher corporate taxes, we're already seeing expected pushback (obviously from Republicans, but also from at least one Dem). Here's Joe Manchin today:  "In a radio interview with West Virginia's MetroNews, Manchin said raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, as envisioned in the plan, is just too high, though he did say he could get behind a hike to 25 percent.

The senator claimed he wasn't alone, either. "There's six or seven other Democrats who feel very strongly about this," he said. "We have to be competitive, and we're not going to throw caution to the wind."]

Jane Cornwell
via:

Biden’s Child Tax Credit as Universal Basic Income

For several decades, child advocates have tried to bring more public indignation to the scandal of extreme child poverty, and have pushed for the expansion of the Child Tax Credit. In recent years, some progressives have called for something that seemed even more utopian, a universal basic income.

Well, gentle reader, we just got both. And the brilliance is in the details.

The credit, which is really a family allowance run through the IRS, provides $3,000 a year for each child under 18, topped up to $3,600 for kids under six. So a family with three kids gets almost $10,000. As a point of reference, the average income of the bottom 20 percent of American households is about $14,000.

The new Child Tax Credit will cut the rate of child poverty in half, and will raise the total incomes of the bottom fifth of American families by 33 percent. I never expected to see something like this in my lifetime. (...)

If you compare the new tax credit with the Earned Income Tax Credit and the existing Child Tax Credit, there is one key difference beyond the expanded benefits. The existing tax credits leave out the poorest of the poor, because you have to have some taxable income in order to get them.

The new credit is for everyone, except the very richest. If you have some existing contact with the IRS, checks will come automatically. If you don’t, all you need to do in order to apply is to state your income, the Social Security numbers of you and your kids, and that’s it.

There is no hassle establishing income eligibility, because eligibility is automatic. There will be no abusive audits of the kind that the IRS has imposed on so many EITC recipients for technical mistakes.

Even better, the legislation authorizes the Treasury to send checks monthly. Under the current system, EITC and CTC recipients get their refunds at tax time.

People in poverty often borrow against their anticipated annual tax refund, paying usurious interest rates to tax preparation companies, for whom these refund loans are a major profit center. When the check comes, it’s experienced as coming from H&R Block rather than from Uncle Sam.

This new policy eliminates the middleman. The recipient gets either a check, a direct deposit, or a debit card from the Treasury, and gets 100 cents on the dollar with no rake-off by the tax preparer.

by Robert Kuttner, American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The Moment When Democrats Recovered Their Soul; and, McConnell: From Moscow Mitch to Beijing’s Bozo (American Prospect).]

Building a Lunar Ark

A "lunar ark" hidden inside the moon's lava tubes could preserve the sperm, eggs and seeds of millions of Earth's species, a group of scientists has proposed.

The ark, or gene bank, would be safely hidden in these hollowed-out tunnels and caves sculpted by lava more than 3 billion years ago and would be powered by solar panels above. It would hold the cryogenically preserved genetic material of all 6.7 million known species of plants, animals and fungi on Earth, which would require at least 250 rocket launches to transport to the moon, according to the researchers.

Scientists believe the endeavor could safeguard our planet's wildlife against both natural and human-caused apocalyptic scenarios, such as a supervolcano eruption or a nuclear war, and ensure the survival of their genes.

The scientists presented their lunar ark plans on Sunday (March 7) at the IEEE Aerospace Conference, which was held virtually this year due the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There's this strong interconnectedness between us and nature," lead author Jekan Thanga, head of the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at the University of Arizona, told Live Science. "We have a responsibility to be guardians of biodiversity and the means to preserve it."

Not all the technology needed for this ambitious project exists yet, but the researchers think that it could realistically be built within the next 30 years, Thanga said.

Existential threats

The main motivation behind the lunar ark is to create a secure off-world storage facility for biodiversity.

"I like to use the data analogy," Thanga said. "It's like copying your photos and documents from your computer onto a separate hard drive, so you have a backup if anything goes wrong."

Therefore, if an apocalyptic event destroyed the natural world or wiped out most of humanity, there would be a chance to "hit a reset button," Thanga said.

In their presentation, the researchers listed the following as potential existential threats to biodiversity on Earth: Supervolcanic eruption, global nuclear war, asteroid impact, pandemic, climate change acceleration, global solar storm and global drought.

"The environment and human civilization are both very fragile," Thanga said. "There are many of these really tragic circumstances that could happen."

Creating genetic back-ups to preserve biodiversity is not a new concept. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located within the Arctic Circle in Norway, holds the genetic samples of plant species from around the world and has already been used to reintroduce certain plants back into the wild. However, that vault is still at risk of being destroyed by rising sea levels or an asteroid strike.

Only by storing the genetic information somewhere else in the solar system can we ensure it survives any existential threats to Earth, the researchers said.

Lava tubes

The moon was the obvious choice for an off-world ark for one main reason: It is only a four-day journey from Earth, which means transporting the samples is much easier than taking them to Mars. Building an ark in orbit around Earth is also not secure enough due to the instability of orbit, Thanga said.

However, another benefit of building an ark on the moon is that it can be safely hidden away in lava tubes. These hollowed-out caverns and tunnels under the surface were formed during the moon's fiery infancy, and they have remained untouched ever since. Lava tubes would protect the ark from meteor strikes and DNA-damaging radiation. The lava tubes have also been suggested as excellent places to build lunar cities for a human civilization on the moon as well, as previously reported by Live Science.

by Harry Baker, Live Science |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

[ed. The post following this one mentions this (the first time I've heard of it). Seems like a great idea (along with DNA sequencing of all stored items).] 

If UFOs Are Alien Beings, Are They Just Doing Mood Affiliation?

Robin Hanson has a long and very interesting blog post on that question. The point is not to argue that the UFOS are alien beings of some kind, but rather if they were which kinds of theories might help us understand them? Here is just part of Robin’s much longer take:

If the main block to believing in UFOs as aliens is a lack of a plausible enough social theory of aliens, then it seems a shame that almost no one who studies UFOs is a social science theorist. So as such a person, why don’t I step in and try to help? If we can find a more plausible social theory, we could become more willing to believe that UFOs are aliens…

Stylized fact #2: Aliens are rare and self-limited, and yet are here now.

Indirection – We can think of a number of plausible motives for rare limited aliens to make an exception to visit us. First, they may fear us as rivals, and so want to track us and stand ready to defend against us. Second, if their limitation policies are intentional, then they’d anticipate our possibly violating them, and so want to stand ready nearby to enforce their limitation policies on us.

In either of these two cases, aliens might want to show us their power, and even make explicit threats, to deter us from causing problems. And there’s the question of why they don’t just destroy us, instead of waiting around. Third, independent alien origins could be a rare valuable datapoint about far-more-capable aliens who they may fear eventually meeting. In this case they’d probably want to stay hidden longer.

My best bet is this. The vehicles would be “unmanned” drone probes, if only because the stresses of long trips through space would keep the actual alien beings close to home. So the relevant social science question is what kind of highly generalized software instructions you would give such drones. “Seek out major power sources, including nuclear, and seek out rapid flying objects, and then send information back home” would be one such set of instructions roughly compatible with the stylized facts on the ground (or in the air). Of course the information sent back to alien worlds will not be arriving for a very, very long time, so long that the concrete motives of the aliens may not be the major consideration. Collecting the information about other planets across some very long time frame might simply seem worthwhile, relative to the cheap cost of the drone probes. It reminds me a bit of that “put the DNA of all the species on the moon” project we have started, or those seed banks up in the Arctic. Why exactly did we do it? Why not I say!? And yet most humans do not even know those projects are going on.

A further generalized software instruction would be “if approached or confronted, run away fast.” Indeed that is what those flying vehicles seem to do.

The drone probes do not destroy us, because of Star Trek-like reasons: highly destructive species already have blown themselves up, leaving the relatively peaceful ones to send drones around. The drones probably are everywhere, in the galactic sense that is. Yet given the constraints imposed by the speed of light, it is difficult to do much with them that is very useful to the decision-makers that send (sent?) them out. So the relevant theory is one of how advanced civilizations allocate their surplus when there is a lot of discretion and not much in the way of within-lifetime costs and benefits to determine a very particular set of plans and goals. Not even for the grandkids.

In this hypothesis, of course, you have to be short immortality. And short usable wormholes.

By the way, don’t those photos of the drone probes make them look a bit like cheap crap? No tail fins, no “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” music signature, no 3-D holograms, just a superfast vehicle. Like something a second-rate alien non-profit picked up at the local Walmart and sent off into space en masse with solar-powered self-replication. Which is consistent with the view of them being a discretionary resource allocation stemming from projects with fairly fuzzy goals.

A problematic question for any theory is whether competing drone navies have come to visit us, and if so are they fighting over the spoils? Colluding? Hiding from each other? Or what? If aliens are afoot, why should it be only one group of them? That would seem strange, as in most things there are multitudes, at least speaking in Bayesian terms. Aren’t there at least both Klingon probes and Romulan probes, maybe Federation probes too.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: U.S. Department of Defense/Navy Times via:

[ed. Similar to Cixin Liu's perspective (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest) that alien probes could be out searching for energy or life-sustaining resources (as backups?), and if there's the possibility of competition from other advanced or hostile alien civilizations it might be better to just keep quiet about your discoveries and intentions. See also (in addition to the link above): Robin Hanson's Explaining Stylized UFO Facts; and Meta-Comments On UFO Talk (Overcoming Bias).]

Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.” (...)

Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”

Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”

The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as “the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.

by Jane Mayer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Axios on HBO / ZUMA / Alamy

[ed. What a shame.]

The Blaze

[ed. See also: The Blaze live at Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, France for Cercle.]

Max Kuiper, Blackened Views# 11
via:

Masao Yamamoto, Bonsai
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How To Set Up Your First Pedalboard

Making sure that you have everything you need to set up a solid, functional and low-noise pedalboard is important before you start wiring things together. That’s why we’ve created this insightful guide, giving you a step-by-step set of instructions, loads of tips and all the requirements.

How To Build A Pedalboard: Step-By-Step

Later in the article, we go into far more detail about the points below. However, if you want to cut to the chase then follow these concise steps to form your pedalboard!

1. Choose a versatile set of pedals – Tuner, overdrive, distortion, wah, delay and reverb pedals are great effects to begin with.
2. Find the right-sized board – Make sure that you find a pedalboard that has enough space to accommodate the effects that you have.
3. Purchase a pedal power supply – Keep your pedals powered quietly with a high-quality isolated pedal PSU. It’ll make a difference, trust us!
4. Order and connect your pedals – Route and position your pedals in a logical way, to ensure that you’re getting the most out of them.
5. Mount your stompboxes to your pedalboard – After you’ve established your layout, apply velcro to your pedalboard/stompboxes and mount them. Job done!

When Should I Start Buying Guitar Pedals?

Welcome to the world of stompboxes and pedalboards! We assume that you’ve reached a point where you feel limited by the tones offered by your amp, and that you’re keen to expand your sonic horizons.

It is when you come to that realisation that you should start investing in guitar pedals. Coming in all shapes and sizes, the amount of pedal options is vast. From the wave of overdrives out there to more niche effects like ring modulators, the sheer level of choice might seem slightly overwhelming at first.

However, setting up your first pedalboard should not be a daunting prospect! In this next section, we’ve identified essential pedals that you should choose before putting together your very own board.

Which Guitar Pedals Should I Start With?

While unique and experimental effects can be cool (especially if you’re a hipster), to most players they may seem a little bit far-fetched. That’s why we’ve picked out some super-popular pedalboard staples; the usual suspects if you will. You’ll see the following pedals gracing the boards of anyone from pub giggers all the way to seasoned pros.

But before we look at all of the key stompboxes you should have, you may already be thinking ‘which guitar pedal should be my first?’. Well, that’s an easy one – a tuner pedal!

by Elliot Stent, Anderton's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Brian Calvin, Duet (with Chorus), 2018
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Runaway American Dreams

Bruce Springsteen is one of this country’s greatest living artists, one who built his success by enshrining the stories of the working-class lives of the people he grew up with in songs that have become foundational parts of the popular music canon. His commitment to seeking justice in the real world has made Springsteen a liberal hero and a cult figure to many on the left. What to make then of the recent news that he was releasing a podcast with Barack Obama, just weeks after appearing in a Super Bowl commercial urging Americans to find “the middle”?

The announcement was not entirely without precedent: Springsteen has long supported Democratic presidential candidates. He endorsed John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden; he stumped for Obama on the campaign trail and performed “This Land is Your Land” with Pete Seeger at the 2009 inauguration, including even the more political verses decrying private property, at Seeger’s request. Springsteen bought what Obama was selling in 2008, but then again, so did almost everyone to the left of John McCain. That 2009 Lincoln Memorial concert was supposed to be a moment of anointing, Seeger passing a torch to Springsteen even as the old Civil Rights veterans passed the torch to Obama. Twelve years later, Seeger is dead, the Civil Rights project remains as incomplete as ever, and Springsteen and Obama have joined forces with Spotify, Comcast, and Dollar Shave Club to bring you a podcast.

Obama offered Springsteen his entrée into Democratic Party power politics as their relationship grew into a close friendship. In turn, Springsteen has stepped into the role of Obama’s white sidekick, Joe Biden’s election having left a sizable opening that only a car-loving boomer from a deindustrialized Mid-Atlantic town could fill. The story the men tell of bonding over drinks and music at White House parties gives the lie to even the title of the show, Renegades: Born in the USA. By now, both have made cottage industries of rehearsing their origin stories. Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, chronicled his cosmopolitan upbringing, his coming to embrace his Black Americanness, and his decision to pursue politics. Springsteen, meanwhile, has recently taken to recounting his own journey to self-acceptance, weaving together the tall tales that have long animated his concerts with more honest accounts of his struggles and insecurities even during his periods of greatest success.

Now, safe inside Springsteen’s own mansion on a hill, both men again dust off the memory machine to take stock of where they have been. But they do not answer the question of how Bruce Springsteen, draft dodger, hero of the steelworkers of the 1980s, former punching bag of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, came to enthusiastically embrace liberalism. Was Bruce always a liberal, or has he changed? (...)

The overwhelming political orientation of Renegades, from both hosts, is one of liberal faith in the possibility of the nation as redeemable (like any good Catholic, especially a lapsed one, Springsteen loves a redemption story). Yet the topics of racism and white supremacy put a momentary crack in that certainty: Springsteen admits to losing some of his faith in his neighbors after the 2016 election, and both men have read their Ta-Nehisi Coates. In one of the podcast’s few explicitly political exchanges, Springsteen presses Obama on the question of reparations for Black people in this country: Obama admits that they sound like a good idea, but not one that is politically possible. Again, they scratch their heads and retreat into the safe redoubt of the arc of history and its well-known propensity to bend toward justice.

The moment is one of multiple missed opportunities. At another point in the episode, Obama recalls Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, describing the scene in which Mookie, played by Lee, confronts Pino, the racist older son of the owner of the pizza shop where he works. Mookie’s point is that while Pino treats Black people he knows with hatred, he idolizes Black athletes, comedians, and performers. Pino cops to loving Magic Johnson and Eddie Murphy, but when Mookie asserts that Pino’s favorite rock star is Prince, he counters: “Bruce. The Boss.” I’d wondered what Springsteen thought of this moment in one of the film’s most famous scenes. Yet the podcast skips right over it: Obama describes the scene without mentioning the Springsteen reference. He uses the film to illustrate white Americans’ long history of loving Black culture without loving Black people, and Bruce happily picks up the thread. But they avoid the harder question of why Pino, or Spike Lee who wrote the screenplay, could see Bruce as a great white hope. Once more, the men return to the comfortable world of liberal platitude.

This newly zen attitude would have been foreign to the 2012 Bruce Springsteen, who wrote and released Wrecking Ball during Obama’s presidency. He intended it as a return to social critique; he wanted to write a statement on the financial crisis that would match the success of his post-9/11 The Rising (2002). The songs on Wrecking Ball celebrate resilience, but they also indict the plutocrats who turned the markets into casinos and threw billions of lives into chaos. Introducing the album in 2012, Springsteen praised Occupy Wall Street. He confirmed that while he’d campaigned for Obama in 2008, he wasn’t planning to do so in 2012. The President’s record was a mixed bag. Why, Springsteen asks throughout the record, did these bastards get bailed out? Wasn’t someone going to make them pay? Despite his protestation, he ultimately did campaign for Obama in 2012. Perhaps he got nervous after watching the debates. Perhaps, as a Guardian article from 2012 suggests, he was just scared of blowing his political capital too early.

While listening to the podcast, I hoped Springsteen would have the courage to disagree with Obama as he had done even as recently as 2017, in conversation with David Remnick (himself an Obama biographer). It never happens. Discussing Springsteen’s draft dodging, Obama agrees that the draft was bad, but he will not condemn the war. He asserts that the country matured after Vietnam, but not because people developed skepticism toward military intervention. Rather, it’s because they started performing troop worship: “I think something very valuable had happened and I think this was a hard learned lesson from Vietnam. The American public had come to recognize and revere the service of our troops, even those who were critical of certain aspects of U.S. Military interventions.” Springsteen offers only a weak “Mhm.” A later episode about class, money, and income inequality performs exactly the move that Eriksen wrongly accused The River of making: Obama and Springsteen rehearse the death of the class compromise, focusing on the ’70s and ’80s. Yes, there are some structural problems: plant closures, skyrocketing CEO pay, the decline of unions. Yes, Reagan is to blame. Both men see the situation as primarily cultural, however: we’ve lost our way amid the greed and the striving for what Obama calls “the almighty dollar.”

Despite its limitations, the podcast does achieve moments of real poignancy: After discussing the riots in Freehold, Springsteen plays an acoustic version of “My Hometown.” “There was a lot of fights between black and white / there was nothing you could do. / Two cars at a light, on a Saturday night / In the backseat there was a gun. / Words were passed, a shotgun blast. Troubled times had come.” Springsteen’s performance and presence, even in this impromptu rendition, are magnificent. In a later episode, the two relive Obama’s “Amazing Grace” speech, delivered as the eulogy for the parishioners of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after their murder by a white supremacist. Describing his drafting process, his correspondence with the author Marilynne Robinson, his anger, sadness, and frustration at a country that would not, will not, stop murdering innocent people, and his own powerlessness to change it, you can sense the mask slipping. This is the tragedy of Obama-style liberalism, whether he knows it or not. The world’s most powerful man is not so powerful after all. It’s almost the stuff of a Springsteen song.

by Dennis M. Hogan, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza
[ed. See also: Disgraceland: Steve Van Zant (from Bruce's E Street Band) Rips on Paul Simon (Dangerous Minds).]

Why We Travel: On America’s Wide-Eyed Tourist Gaze

As a sociocultural and material force, tourism is so large as to be incomprehensible. The difficulty of understanding it in full requires us to break it down into parts, an exercise not unlike the act of travel itself: We can’t fully take in the places we visit, so we instead form impressions from bits and pieces.

These intangible souvenirs are fallible and prone to fade, though; when someone asks to see them, there’s nothing to show. Photography provides a solution, enabling us to shore up memory and capture passing moments. While the act of taking a picture has long been second nature for many of us, examining its origins provides an interesting link to our current moment. Although we can trace our archival imperative to the early days of leisure travel, armed conflict and a global pandemic truly solidified photography’s place in mass culture. The First World War along with the 1918 Spanish flu resulted in what the historian Tammy S. Gordon refers to as “a memory emergency.” Confronted with death, the need to create a visual archive of life increased. A need, it seems, we’ve carried with us since. (...)

As far back as the Grand Tour—the antiquated practice, instituted in the 16th-century, of young, upper-class European men taking extended trips abroad in service of their education—self-documentation has been an important part of the tourist experience. The oil painting of the young aristocrat posed in front of an ancient ruin was the precursor to the shirtless millennial standing on top of a mountain in his dating profile picture. These images gesture at self-worth, reinforcing associations between mobility and conquest. To have been there is one thing, they tell us; to have proof, another.

Just as modernity has democratized the tourist portrait, it has also made travel available to the general populace. In the second half of the 20th century, cheap flights and paid vacations helped international travel become part of mass culture and a cornerstone of the world’s economy. In 1950, there were around 25 million international tourist arrivals; in 2019, there were 1.5 billion. Tourism now generates ten percent of the global GDP and employs one in ten of the world’s workers.

Or at least it did, before the world changed. This past December, the World Tourism Organization reported that 2020 was “the worst year on record in the history of tourism.” International travel fell by over 70 percent, setting tourism back to 1990 levels. In terms of economic losses, the pandemic has been ten times worse than the global financial crisis of 2009.

“The pandemic has proved the centrality of tourism through tourism’s omission,” writes the Italian journalist and social theorist Marco d’Eramo. “Once this industry ceased, not only airlines and shipping companies but aircraft manufacturers and shipyards found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy.”

D’Eramo’s newly-translated book The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry Into the Tourist Age is a sprawling assessment of what he refers to as “the heaviest, most polluting and most important industry of the 21st century.” Along with parsing tourism’s social and environmental impacts, d’Eramo stresses the immense size of its economic footprint. Airlines, cruise lines, hotels, restaurants, casinos, travel agencies, guidebook publishers, souvenir manufacturers, and gift shops are just a few of the enterprises in tourism’s massive network of commercial operations. Propping up the whole affair is an unorganized labor force composed of tour guides, street performers, transit operators, trash collectors, sex workers, musicians, cashiers, desk clerks, maids, cooks, waitstaff, bartenders, and dishwashers, to name only a handful of the often underpaid, non-benefitted employees of the tourism industry.

The toll has yet to be fully calculated, but estimates suggest that between 100 to 120 million direct tourism jobs could disappear as a result of the pandemic. The travel industry’s collapse has produced an unusual reality in which stranded tourists, flights to nowhere, and deconstructed cruise ships all exist in the same blurry timeline. While it’s likely that COVID-19 will fundamentally change how we think of travel, this moment of staying in place could be useful for reflecting on why we go anywhere at all. (...)

“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere,” writes Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place. Published in 1988, the book-length essay is an unsparing critique of tourism, colonialism, and government corruption in the author’s home country of Antigua. Just as every native is a potential tourist, Kincaid posits, “Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere.” Tourism is a luxury typically reserved for people with money, dividing privileged travelers from those with no choice but to remain in place. It’s here, where people are “too poor to escape the reality of their lives,” that tourists seek to visit.

Rather than creating a shared understanding of the world, tourism often widens the chasm between the visitor and the visited, the viewer and the viewed. “When the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you,” Kindcaid writes, “they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”

If viewing tourism through a critical lens causes discomfort, it’s likely due to how the process leads to self-examination. As d’Eramo notes, tourism is a “mirror or magnifying glass for society.” He draws on the work of Erving Goffman, one of the most significant American sociologists of the previous century. Theorizing on the role-playing of everyday life, Goffman maintained that our presentations of self are fluid. In our attempts to influence perceptions of our own image, we change according to context. Elaborating on this behavior—which is by turns deliberate and unconscious—Goffman differentiated between front stage and back stage behavior: in the front stage we are performers, while back stage we are closer to our true selves.

“For Goffman the theatrical dimension of the relationship of the self to others is not an accessory,” writes d’Eramo. “In any interaction it will always be present; there is no opting out.”

Extending Goffman’s theory, d’Eramo connects the concept of the front stage and back stage to the “unmistakable theatricality” of the tourist city, in which workers underpin the sightseeing industry while also functioning as sights to be seen. By the same token, “every city must ‘play’ itself.” If this performance is, as d’Eramo argues, one that is reproduced throughout the world, an earnest appraisal of tourism will eventually lead to seeing past its facade. Every tourist a native, and every native an actor.

by Andru Okun, LitHub | Read more:
Image: Duane Hanson, “Tourists.” Photo by Antonia Reeve. © Estate of Duane Hanson / ARS, New York / DACS, London 2018. (National Galleries Scotland

Podcast: ‘Mainstreaming’ Psychedelic Drugs

David Nutt: In a space of 10 years, we’ve gone from pictures in a brain image to kind of revolution in psychiatry. And that is a, that is a powerful example of how medicine and science should work together.

Bradley van Paridon: That’s David Nutt, a psychiatrist and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He and his colleagues at The Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College are among a growing number of therapists and academics who believe that psychedelic drugs are a potential new treatment option for mental health conditions like depression.

David Nutt: The big challenge now is to roll it out so that all the millions of patients around the world who might benefit will get it.

Bradley van Paridon: The details however, of exactly if, when, where, and how this roll out will take place remain to be seen.

Lydia Chain: This is the Undark Podcast, I’m Lydia Chain.

Research into using psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin to treat mental health conditions is rapidly advancing, with a dozen clinical trials in 2021 alone. Paired with the movement to decriminalize or legalize these substances in many places, most recently in Oregon, the idea of bringing psychedelic drugs into the therapist’s office is becoming more mainstream.

But there’s still a lot for researchers and mental health practitioners to figure out, from finding the most effective ways to run a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, to navigating regulatory approval and insurance barriers, to actually recruiting and training therapists in the new methods. Bradley van Paridon has the story.

Nicolas Langlitz: There was a pretty significant amount of psychedelic research in the 1950s, which were also known as the golden age of psychopharmacology.

Bradley van Paridon: That’s Nicolas Langlitz. He studies the anthropology of science and medicine at the New School for Social Research in New York, including the history of research with psychedelic drugs. He says back in the early 60s that research was drastically curbed by new regulations surrounding the use of experimental drugs.

Nicolas Langlitz: The first step towards a more strict regulation had a lot to do with, in my eyes, very legitimate concerns about the way in which drugs, all sorts of drugs, were used by doctors and pharmaceutical industry.

Bradley van Paridon: This led to countries establishing frameworks whereby drug manufacturers are required to prove scientifically that medications are both safe and effective.

Nicolas Langlitz: And then at the end of the 1960s, there was a second more severe crackdown on psychedelic research associated with the prohibition of psychedelics. That really killed off work on human subjects.

Bradley van Paridon: But since the 90s, he says a combination of factors have reopened the conversation. One of them is a leap in basic neuroscience research about the brain and consciousness.

Nicolas Langlitz: The neurosciences are making a lot of headway now. So here are these drugs and we can use them to better understand the brain. And you know, there, there was some red tape of course, but by and large, regulators were willing to listen.

Bradley van Paridon: Decreases in social stigma helped, too. There’s also been a rise in mental health conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and new conversations about the limitations of conventional treatment.

Andrea Jungaberle: We really have a worldwide mental health emergency and blunt tools. What we’re working with in psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy is not working for everybody. So, we need new therapies.

Bradley van Paridon: That’s Andrea Jungaberle, the medical director of OVID Health Systems, a clinic in Berlin offering medical training and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. It’s also part of a network of academics and doctors performing research and clinical trials in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Many experts agree traditional therapy doesn’t work for everyone. Plus, the discovery of new pharmaceuticals to treat conditions like depression has stalled.

Nicolas Langlitz: You know, if you look at the substances that have come out since the 1980s or even 1970s, most of them were me-too drugs. There were no major breakthroughs.

Bradley van Paridon: Me-too drugs are copies of existing drugs that are slightly altered chemically but still achieve the same effect. Today, there are many versions of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, and they are the main class of drug prescribed to treat depression. These, like other anti-depressants or anti-psychotic medications, work via their chemical interaction with the brain. To relieve symptoms, a patient takes it routinely.

Nicolas Langlitz: So, if you have a depression, you take an antidepressant and you take it every day. Uh, if you suffer from schizophrenia, you take an anti-psychotic and you take it every day over a very long period, potentially over your lifetime. So, so these are really drugs for life.

Bradley van Paridon: He says this is quite different from how psychedelics are used. Instead, patients take the psychedelic in order to open them up to other types of psychological therapy. Here again is David Nutt.

David Nutt: It’s not just therapy and it’s not just the drug. We think it’s the two together produce that sort of optimal cocktail of, um, of change and facilitation of insights, which lead to improvements in the long-term. 

by Bradley van Paridon and Lydia Chain, Undark |  Read more:

Image: Photo by Cole Burston / Getty Images. Microscope image of neurons by MR McGill / Flickr. Illustration by Undark

[ed. For a good understanding of current depression treatments (via SSRIs), see: SSRIs: Much more than you wanted to know (SSC); Which SSRI is the best? (Lorien); and, Oh, The Places You'll Go When Trying To Figure Out The Right Dose Of Escitalopram (Astral Codex).]

Raging Fyah

Goro Shimaoka, 1981
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The Politics of Bad Sex

When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the early nineteen-nineties, I went to the university’s gymnasium one evening each week for a women’s self-defense class. We were instructed on how to fight off would-be rapists with physical force, using our knees, elbows, fingernails, and keys, being sure to mark an attacker’s face for police identification. Walking to my dorm in the dark, I was alert to not being a victim. It was part of the informal feminist curriculum that also included Take Back the Night marches and the slogan “No Means No,” one that dates me to an era when women were trying to defy vulnerability.

As a rape counsellor in those days, I remember chuckling with feminist peers when we heard about a new Sexual Offense Prevention Policy at Antioch College. The rules said that consent had to be asked for and given at each new level of sexual activity, with silence conveying a lack of consent. Saturday Night Live mocked the policy: “May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks?” “Yes, you have my permission.” This stilted picture of how sex should proceed seemed absurdly unrealistic and made a small college’s policy a national punch line, despite its serious and understandable aim to prevent rape. At the time, even the category of “date rape,” on which I was trained to educate others, mostly envisioned a forcible act or one imposed on an incapacitated person.

But, three decades later, Antioch’s vision has more than stood the test of time, as evidenced by many young people and their schools’ views about how sexual interactions should be governed. The aspiration of affirmative consent is no joke; it is now mainstream and considered common sense among college students and recent graduates. So, in a typical example, today, Yale’s standard is one of affirmative consent, which it defines as “positive, unambiguous, and voluntary agreement to engage in specific sexual activity throughout a sexual encounter.” The policy goes on: “Consent cannot be inferred merely from the absence of a ‘no.’ A clear ‘yes,’ verbal or otherwise, is necessary. Consent to some sexual acts does not constitute consent to others, nor does past consent to a given act constitute present or future consent. Consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual encounter and can be revoked by any participant at any time.” Whether or not it is actually honored in the breach, affirmative consent is now used for purposes of investigations and penalties.

I’ve seen what enforcement of these standards looks like, as a lawyer representing students complaining of or accused of sexual misconduct. Today, schools that have affirmative-consent policies treat violations as sexual assault. In hundreds of cases, colleges have determined that men and women failed to obtain affirmative consent in a particular instance and have disciplined them, often with suspension or expulsion. In many other cases, students have felt deeply violated even when their partner followed affirmative-consent rules—asking for and receiving a “yes”—because aspects of the situation made them feel that what occurred was not what they wanted. Sometimes the explicit request for permission might have induced them to do something they were conflicted about. Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than “enthusiastic” agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.”

The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of “yes” and “no” do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired.

In a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst who sought treatment for what she described as “frigidity,” Sigmund Freud wrote, in the nineteen-twenties, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” This unanswerable question seems to drive Katherine Angel’s “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent” (Verso), which welcomes us to experience a twenty-first-century feminist version of Freud’s aporia. We might have supposed that the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies would have liberated women and men to say what it is that they want and to get those wants satisfied. But Angel—whose book takes its title from Michel Foucault’s sardonic declaration, in the 1976 book “The Will to Knowledge,” that, in the wake of the emancipatory movements of the day, “Tomorrow sex will be good again”—deflates any delusions that the goodness of sex hinges on positive affirmation of our true desires. Foucault wrote, “We must not think that by saying yes to sex one says no to power.” Speaking truth to power simply doesn’t cut it, because the truth about our desires is . . . ambivalence, all the way down. The dominant socio-legal rubric that purports to divide permitted acts from prohibited ones—consent—is an on-off switch, not a dimmer. That doesn’t accommodate what, to Angel, is at the heart of desire and pleasure: the mixed feelings, the indeterminacy, the pulling in different directions, the balancing of conflicting considerations, the imbalanced negotiations, the paralysis by uncertainty. All of it is universal, she suggests, and also particular to “the double bind in which women exist: that saying no may be difficult, but so too is saying yes.” 

by Jeannie Suk Gersen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Torres / EyeEm / Getty

FDA Approves 2 Rapid, At-Home COVID Tests

More consumers will soon be able to test themselves for COVID-19 from the comfort of their own home. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved two rapid antigen home tests for use in the U.S.

Americans will soon be able to purchase Abbott's BinaxNOW and Quidel Quickvue tests at drug stores. The two options join a test made by Ellume, which received FDA approval in December, in the market. The two, newly-approved swab tests will be sold at a lower price point.

The BinaxNOW and Quickvue tests are expected to be sold in two-packs for around $15-20; Ellume costs $30.

Experts believe the availability of at-home coronavirus tests could help slow the continued spread of the virus, which is contagious even when people are asymptomatic.

"Screening testing, especially with the over-the-counter tests authorized today, is an important part of the country's pandemic response—many schools, workplaces, communities, and other entities are setting up testing programs to quickly screen for COVID-19," said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

by Jaclyn Diaz, NPR |  Read more:

Image: virus, misplaced