Paranoia’s Pleasures

I am a paranoid person, which, if we’re not going to be fussy about clinical definitions, means I feel a constant unreasonable fear, one ruled by no overarching logic or taxonomy. I am paranoid about my relationships and my work. I am paranoid about rising sea levels, air pollutants, tap water, dark parking lots, and the back seat of my car. I am paranoid about whether I’ve locked the door—really, properly locked the door. I experience frequent bouts of paranoia in regards to the men in my life—what do they get up to when I’m not around?—as well as to many men I do not know. I realize I don’t look like the paranoid type, which is culturally coded as someone white and male, so I am also paranoid about other paranoiacs, what they make of my face and my monosyllabic last name.

In other words, I am fixated on what I must regularly confront yet cannot control. It is a very human condition, if not the human condition. Philip K. Dick once said that “the ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you.” Who has not experienced this? It is, in a basic way that has to do with subjectivity and the limits of individual free will, the premise of existence, its inaugural bad deal. We wake up each day to find our environments aligned against us; whatever lies outside our bodies’ jurisdiction is evidence of the world’s ongoing disregard for our inner wishes and designs. We cannot assert our will on life, or move the furniture with our minds; we can only feel unease about the baroque and bewildering prearrangements of both. Why are things like this? And: Who put that chair there?

As Dick noted, everyone recognizes at some point that “objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own.” Paranoia turns this recognition into enmity, soaking the world in malignant animism, turning all the tables—literal and figurative—against us. This is what Thomas Pynchon acknowledges in the opening of his 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, a staple of paranoiac literature. Protagonist Oedipa Maas, a reasonably prosperous housewife who lives among all the comforts of Californian suburbia, has a dark thought about a deceased ex-boyfriend. She’s alone in her house, and the thought makes her laugh out loud: “You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.”

The claustrophobia of “the room that knows” might connect Oedipa to her forebears, the mad wives and mistresses of Gothic fiction, but her paranoia is a product of her political moment—the social collapse of postwar California. It emerges when she’s asked to execute the will of Pierce Inverarity, the aforementioned ex-boyfriend (her dark thought was about his death; it was indeed pretty funny). Because Pierce was a rich and evil man with hearty investments in California’s defense industry, his accumulated estate is considerable. Sifting through it requires Oedipa to take a ranging tour of 1960s California, where she meets the state’s preeminent outcasts and kooks: John Birchers, retired anarchists, a suicidal playwright—all the people stuck, wriggling, to the underside of the rock of respectable society. The novel’s atmosphere strikes the dreamy balance between eccentricity and artifice peculiar to the West Coast. The college campuses heave with youthful radicalism, while the gay bars of San Francisco suffer, even then, from busloads of out-of-towners looking for some pre-authenticated thrills. Traveling through these circles, Oedipa learns of a secret, privatized postal service called WASTE; like a dream or an algorithm, her world auto-populates with symbols and messages in a “malignant, deliberate replication.”

Oedipa is one of the few well-known paranoiacs of literature who is also a woman, and for her, WASTE is not merely an abstract conundrum. Her apophenia begins and ends at the personal terminus of her ex-lover. Every sign of or clue about the network’s existence is connected to Pierce Inverarity, to an industry or investment he once touched. Did Inverarity concoct WASTE to torment Oedipa, as “some grandiose practical joke” from beyond the grave? Paranoia, here, leads not to the government or the World Bank but back to Pierce’s bed. It bears the still-warm imprint of a single human body, which makes it all the more terrifying.

If we’re tempted to say that Oedipa represents a female brand of paranoia, that’s only to emphasize that hers is actually a realistic version of the condition. American culture so often construes paranoia as an intellectual—and thus masculine—problem, rather than an emotional one. The truth is that it’s both. Rather than the dry thought exercises we associate with male conspiracy theorists, Pynchon gives us, in Oedipa, a view of what true paranoia is: a gut response to society’s collapse, to the deadening force of American capitalism—a way, maybe, of thrashing about in one’s loneliness and alienation. Knowledge under paranoia takes on emotional dimensions: it feels bad; it feels addictive. This becomes especially true for paranoiacs who aren’t white men, because for them, conspiracies—if you define a conspiracy as “the targeted wielding of systemic violence by the powerful against the powerless”—are often real, which makes unraveling them all the more imperative. What does it feel like to be constantly educating yourself about your own precarity, your own proximity to violence and death?

The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once wrote that the paranoiac has a facile “faith in exposure”—a belief that revealing the contours of a vast regime of cruelty is the same thing as eradicating it. Non-white and non-male paranoiacs know it’s not that easy. Knowledge can save or kill us; sometimes, over the long slog of trying to outwit a murderous system, it’ll do both. The only way to survive is by seeking out other people who know this truth, and to find solidarity in the shared condition of knowing, intimately, all the problems but none of the solutions.

This is what Oedipa does. Her paranoia pushes her not inward but outward, into America’s tattered public sphere, into whatever social life is possible in a jealously individualistic country. Maybe Oedipa is susceptible to paranoia because of this individualism—its isolating and suburban rhythms—but the sickness, in its full bloom, starts looking like salvation. In searching for and hoarding information, Oedipa swings from one conversation to another; she rides municipal buses all night, talks to strangers in cafés. She meets a drunken sailor and, finding herself “overcome all at once by a need to touch him,” puts him to bed. These small acts of generosity are what remain when the answers don’t come. Paranoia presents an excuse to delve into the social: the people Oedipa speaks to are also suspicious and insane, but they still speak to one another. WASTE, which is ultimately a communications network, could be a ruse. But that network—and, by implication, Oedipa’s search for it—could also be “a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know.”

by Zoe Hu, The Believer |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Social bonding and paranoia seem to co-exist rather easily in many conspiratorial and domestic terrorism groups (and in fact, are probably membership drivers). A good example can be found Richard Power's fictional novel The Overstory.]

Making Music Theory Entertaining

To me, music theory is as foreign a concept as the intricacies of cooking meth, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Sure, I have a basic grasp of scales, and I can read sheet music from my piano lesson days, but as soon as someone mentions the Dorian scale and E-flat-diminished-seventh chords, my eyes start to glaze over. So, when I found myself on the other side of an Adam Neely YouTube wormhole, I was a little surprised. Not only had I just sunk four hours of my life into content discussing those aforementioned topics, but also that I was thoroughly entertained by it. And I’m not alone.

Neely, 33, has garnered 1.25 million subscribers with his music theory-drenched video content. It’s all highly polished, cleverly edited and consistently funny. Some of his videos are simple Q&As or tongue-in-cheek deep dives into viral moments like the TikTok sea shanty fad, but Adam really shines in his on-camera essays. The wit and editing is still there and it’s accompanied by lush original backing tracks composed by Adam and his colleagues.

I asked his friend and collaborator, Ben Levin, what he thought had garnered Adam such a big following. “I think the key to Adam’s work, and it’s something maybe he takes for granted and can’t put his finger on, but he loves music in a very special way. I don’t think he realizes how contagious that is. Everything he does comes off as incredibly genuine, and I think it makes people realize, ‘dang, music is just so much bigger than I thought it was.’” (...)

Student becomes the teacher

Neely grew up with music. His mother is a singer who performed avant-garde contemporary classical music and taught students in her house. Yet, it wasn’t until high school that Adam became enthralled with it.

“I did the thing that almost every other bassist does which is, ‘I want to join a band. Oh, they already have a guitarist, I guess I’ll play bass.’”

He soon found it wasn’t the short straw he thought it was. His mother brought him to a performance by the late Dave Brubeck and jazz bassist Christian McBride at the Library of Congress. “I knew about jazz. I thought it was fun, but this was the first time I realized that it was really fun. Just watching these two masters going back and forth laughing like there was some sort of inside joke I wasn’t a part of. I didn’t realize until then how life affirming music could be.”(...)

“The plan was to play ‘cool’ jazz music, whatever that is, and teach,” he says. And for Adam, that was teaching at a university. “I was very much ready to be in academia. I knew what it meant to be a working musician from my family, it’s a grind, and they were able to support themselves through teaching, so I had my plan set. Stuff turned out a little differently, but I am teaching jazz and playing it.”

After a stint of playing gigs ranging from weddings to musical theater, Adam was beginning to burn out, and then suddenly a big portion of his paying work fell through. He was unsure what to do with all of his newly found free time, or where he’d find the next check to pay his rent. YouTube didn’t occur to him until a friend recommended it to him.

Neely knew a bit of the video editing program Final Cut, bought himself a DSLR camera, and in the same way, he threw himself into bass, he began producing videos. “I would categorize it as edutainment, or curiosity content, letting people discover things they don’t know,” he says, being sure to distinguish himself from other musical education channels that teach theory fundamentals like keys, notation, or the circle of fifths. Neely is too modest to make this comparison, but as Neil DeGrasse Tyson is to astrophysics, Neely is to music theory. He’s a communicator. (...)

This quality of production is consistent throughout much of Neely’s content. It’s all supremely edited and cohesively plotted for a one-man army. “There are very few music YouTubers that work with editors because you want someone who’s adept at editing, but also has an understanding of music theory. There is a very specific timing to how the edit should reflect the music that is in the video.”

You can feel that in his video on “The Girl From Ipanema” where he needs to cut between multiple arrangements of the storied bossa nova track. “Editing is very musical, working in Final Cut reminds me of working in Ableton Live (a digital audio workstation popular with electronic music producers) — it’s about creating a rhythmic flow. One cut of video should flow into the next just as one section of music should lead into the next.” Instead of bleeping curses, Neely plays a characteristic clip of a man yelling “bass,” which feels much like a little flair that an improvising trumpist might play over a jazz arrangement.

In this video Neely again shares a narrative that isn’t taught in music school. He points out in the beginning of the video that the version of “The Girl from Ipanema” that’s taught in The Real Book, the veritable jazz standards Bible, is a watered-down and white-washed version of the song. Through an in-depth dive into the context and history of bossa nova and the song itself, Neely shows that the original track from Brazil is actually more ambiguous and interesting than the Americanized version that would later be adopted into textbooks.

When asked about these videos, Neely says with a smirk, “I’ve always had kind of a shit-stirrer persona. I’m just doing my best to use that for good.”

by Lukas Harnisch, Spin | Read more:

Image:Liz Maney

Yamaha XSR 155 Scrambler
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Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden

Joe Biden didn’t wake up one day and realize he’d been wrong for 30 years.

I covered him in the Senate, in the Obama White House, in the Democratic Party’s post-Trump reckoning. Biden was rarely, if ever, the voice calling for transformational change or go-it-alone ambition.

But you’d never know it from his presidency. The standard explanation for all this is the advent of the coronavirus. The country is in crisis, and Biden is rising to meet the moment. But I don’t buy it. That may explain the American Rescue Plan. But the American Jobs Plan, and the forthcoming American Family Plan, go far beyond the virus. Put together, they are a sweeping indictment of the prepandemic status quo as a disaster for both people and the planet — a status quo that in many cases Biden helped build and certainly never seemed eager to upend.

Over the past few months, I’ve been talking to White House staff members, to congressional Democrats, to policy experts and to the Biden administration’s critics to better understand why President Biden is making such a sharp break with Joe Biden. Here are a few of them, though this is by no means a complete list.

The collapse of the Republican Party as a negotiating partner. Most discussions of the renewed ambitions of the Democratic Party focus on ideological trends on the left. The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right. Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts. Both as a senator and a vice president, Biden backed this approach. He always thought a bipartisan deal could be made and usually believed he was the guy who could make it.

But over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here, but so too was then-Speaker John Boehner’s inability to sell his members on the budget bargain he’d negotiated with President Barack Obama, followed by his refusal to allow so much as a vote in the House on the 2013 immigration bill. And it’s impossible to overstate the damage that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of Merrick Garland, followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.

The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills. They listened to McConnell when he said that “the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.” And so Democrats stopped devising compromised bills in a bid to win Republican votes.

This has transformed policy design: These are now negotiations among Democrats, done with the intention of finding policies popular enough that Republican voters will back them, even if Republican politicians will not. Biden still talks like he believes bipartisanship is possible in Congress, but his administration has put the onus on Republicans to prove it, and to do so on the administration’s terms. That, more than any other single factor, has unleashed Democrats’ legislative ambitions.

A new generation of crises created a new generation of staffers. I’ve been struck by the generational divide within the Democratic Party. Washington is run by 20- and 30-somethings who run the numbers, draft the bills, brief the principals. And there is a marked difference between the staffers and even the politicians whose formative years were defined by stagflation, the rise of Reaganism and the relief of the Clinton boom, and those who came of age during financial crises, skyrocketing personal debt, racial reckonings and the climate emergency. There are exceptions to every rule, of course — see Sanders, Bernie — but in general, the younger generation has sharply different views on the role of government, the worth of markets and the risks worth taking seriously.

I put this observation to Brian Deese, the 43-year-old head of the National Economic Council. Deese was a young economic policy prodigy in the Obama administration. Now he’s the guy running the N.E.C., and he agreed that the new generation of staff members see the world very differently. “There has been a lot more work done to try to understand what the roots of economic inequality are over the course of the last decade, and openness to thinking about power and power dynamics,” he told me. (...)

Biden has less trust in economists, and so does everyone else. Obama’s constant frustration was that politicians didn’t understand economics. Biden’s constant frustration is that economists don’t understand politics.

Multiple economists, both inside and outside the Biden administration, told me that this is an administration in which economists and financiers are simply far less influential than they were in past administrations. Some were frustrated by the change, others thought it a proper rebalancing of roles. But there is nothing like the axis of influence held by Summers, Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag at the dawn of the Obama administration, or that Robert Rubin and Summers held in the Clinton administration. Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, holds real weight in internal discussions, and so do some others, but economists are one of many voices at the table, not the dominant voices. This partly reflects Biden himself: he’s less academically minded, and more naturally skeptical of the way economists view the world and human behavior, than either Obama or Clinton. But it goes deeper than that.

The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise. But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.” (...)

Economists have their ideas for solving climate change — a hefty carbon tax chief among them — but Biden and his team see this as fundamentally a political problem. They view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous. Deese gets animated on this point. “I want to double down on that and say, it’s not just a messaging and narrative imperative,” he told me. “It has to be that Americans see and experience that the investments in building out a more resilient power grid actually improve their lives and create job opportunities for them, or their neighbors.”

Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years. The Obama team had real policy successes: They prevented another Great Depression, they re-regulated the financial sector, they expanded health insurance to more than 20 million people. But Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.

Many who served under Obama, and who now serve under Biden, believe that they were so focused on economic risks that they missed the political risks — and you can’t make good economic policy if you lose political power. The Biden team is haunted by the fear that if they fail, a Trump-like strongman could recapture power. This helps explain why, for instance, they’re unmoved by arguments that the $1,400 stimulus checks, though wildly popular, were poorly targeted. As one of Biden’s economic advisers put it to me, “if we don’t show people we’re helping the dickens out of them, this country could be back to Trump way too quickly,” only he used an earthier word than “dickens.”

Biden is a politician, in the truest sense of the word. Biden sees his role, in part, as sensing what the country wants, intuiting what people will and won’t accept, and then working within those boundaries. In America, that’s often treated as a dirty business. We like the aesthetics of conviction, we believe leaders should follow their own counsel, we use “politician” as an epithet.

But Biden’s more traditional understanding of the politician’s job has given him the flexibility to change alongside the country. When the mood was more conservative, when the idea of big government frightened people and the virtues of private enterprise gleamed, Biden reflected those politics, calling for balanced budget amendments and warning of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars.” Then the country changed, and so did he.

A younger generation revived the American left, and Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns proved the potency of its politics. Republicans abandoned any pretense of fiscal conservatism, and Trump raised — but did not follow through on — the fearful possibility of a populist conservatism, one that would combine xenophobia and resentment with popular economic policies. Stagnating wages and a warming world and Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic virus proved that there were scarier words in the English language than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it.

Even when Biden was running as the moderate in the Democratic primary, his agenda had moved well to the left of anything he’d supported before. But then he did something unusual: Rather than swinging to the center in the general election, he went further left. And the same happened after winning the election. He’s moved away from work requirements and complex targeting in policy design. He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much. 

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

[ed. Exactly.]

Bruce Wrighton, Basement, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, 1986
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Isaiah Gulino, Rose Gold, 2020
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Mass Incarceration Was Always Designed to Work This Way

As of 2019, the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population.

In 2019, 2.2 million people were locked in the country’s (adult) jails and prisons. If you add in people locked in juvenile detention, immigrant detention, and military prisons, that number rises to approximately 2.3 million people locked behind bars.

Then there are the people under correctional supervision, which means they’re under some form of surveillance and restriction either instead of or in addition to a jail or prison sentence. These forms of supervision include house arrest, electronic monitoring, parole, and probation. Individuals are not locked behind bars, but their movements are narrowly circumscribed and any violation of the myriad rules can result in jail or prison. If you count them, the total number of people under some form of correctional control rises to 6.7 million.

At least 4.9 million people cycle through the nation’s 3,163 jails each year. The majority of people in jail have not been convicted.

Some will spend a day or two in jail before being released either on bail, meaning that someone paid money for their release pending trial, or on their own recognizance, meaning that a judge allowed them to go home so long as they promise to return to court. Others remain in jail because they cannot afford to post bail.

How did we get to this point? Some might assume it’s because our criminal legal system is broken and in need of repair. But if we look at the history of prisons in the United States, we can see that the system of mass incarceration isn’t merely flawed or broken but is operating as it was designed: to sweep society’s problems (and people seen as problematic) behind gates and walls where few have to see them.

The modern-day prison is a relatively new phenomenon. Before 1773, people were typically jailed while awaiting judgment; their punishments were generally physical and vicious—floggings, time in the stocks, and executions. In the United States, imprisonment as punishment began with the opening of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail in 1773.

by Victoria Law, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. We should also discuss widespread privatization and the economic incentives (to corporations, communities, etc.) that perpetuate the problem.]

Alone, Together

In a nondescript building on West 26th Street in New York City, you’ll find Paddles, “the friendly S&M club.” It’s an after-hours space that bills itself as “a playground for sane people who are into: whipping, spanking, bondage, domination, submission, foot fetishes, cross dressing, and all other fetishes,” where once a month, closer to happy hour than last call, the fetish du jour is mutual masturbation.

The event is organized by New York Jacks, a group that hosts regular meetings for men to gather in relative public to do something nearly every man does in relative private. They take over Paddles on Tuesdays, and on Sundays host a meeting on the third floor of a building on West 38th Street.

I first attended a New York Jacks meeting with a friend on a Tuesday a few weeks ago. After fortifying ourselves with a beer around the corner and waiting until what felt like a New York–appropriate hour after the event’s official start time, we walked through the open door and down a twisting concrete staircase, listening for any indication of a meeting in progress. We passed a few men coming the other way, looking flushed and conspiratorial, and opened a door into a short hallway with a ticket window, where a young, fully clothed man asked languorously, “Here for Jacks?”

Before arriving, we’d discussed our apprehensions. What if it’s empty? What if we see someone we know? Based on stories from friends, this is a not-uncommon occurrence at some other gay sex events in the city, and the fear amounts to one of being exposed somehow — not just physically, but, in the case of New York Jacks, as a “bator”: someone who seeks out mutual masturbation as a discrete sexual experience. But as with being seen on Grindr, or in the backyard of a gay bar in Brooklyn, the “exposure” would be mutual.

As in every fetish community, the fear of being outed as a participant in something deemed weird or pervy keeps many people, including bators, in the closet about their interests. All things considered, mutual masturbation is pretty tame — masturbation is something most people already do, albeit alone — but the popular notion of masturbation as somehow being failed sex, the purview of lonely internet trolls, leads many would-be avid mutual masturbators to keep their sexual cards close to their chests.

Among men who have sex with men, mutual masturbation is often seen as sex-adjacent, rather than a sex act in its own right. In some cases, this is a heterosexual fig leaf (“It’s not sex, we’re just being dudes”); in others, it’s treated as an hors d’oeuvre. More than one friend has told me about engaging in mutual masturbation as a sort of compromise in a disappointing hookup situation, as in, “I went home with him but I was tired, so we just jerked off.” But for many men, myself included, mutual masturbation is not merely the “I’m not really hungry; I’ll just have a salad” of sex; rather, it’s an experience to be sought for its own sake. (...)

In an effort to better understand the appeal of mutual masturbation and the community that seeks it, I went looking for other men for whom jerking off together is not merely sex-adjacent, but an important part of a balanced sex life. I found these men among my friends, on social media, as well as in pockets of the internet I hadn’t yet reached into: notably Kik, a text-messaging app, and BateWorld, a global social network for masturbators that functions as a kind of Grindr–Facebook hybrid, with all the HTML sparkle of classic MySpace. I talked to men who associated their attraction to mutual masturbation with some of their earliest memories of queer desire; men who started seeking j/o buds in an effort to hook up with “straight” guys; men who simply consider it a safer, simpler alternative to other kinds of sex. Entering these spaces opened them up for me personally in a way I hadn’t thought I needed.

by John Sherman, BuzzFeed News |  Read more:

Image:John Taggart for BuzzFeed News

[ed. Seems like a good safe sex alternative. See also: Why Straight Men Are Joining Masturbation Clubs (GQ).]

Paul Simon

Golf's Surge in Popularity in 2020: Even Better Than Predicted

The National Golf Foundation hinted throughout the summer and fall that 2020 was showing a remarkable surge in both participation and rounds played despite the shutdowns and uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its final report for the year might actually be more positive than even predicted, what the golf industry group called “a year of resurgence.”

How good was 2020 historically? Tiger Woods good.

Specifically, the growth numbers in many cases set all-time records in many categories, and the number of golfers coming to the game in 2020 were only benchmarked against some of the greatest moments in Woods’ career, including his debut major title in 1997 and his epic U.S. Open win on a broken leg in 2008.

“There hasn’t been this much optimism and new activity in the golf business since the turn of the century,” said Joe Beditz, NGF president and CEO, in a recent email to the golf industry group, noting “spring shutdowns gave way to an unprecedented summer and fall in terms of play, golfer introductions and reintroductions, and robust, late-season spending.”

The NGF count showed 24.8 million golfers in the U.S. in 2020, an increase of 500,000 and 2 percent over 2019. It is the largest net increase in 17 years. New players (both beginners playing their first round and lapsed golfers coming back to the game for the first time in years) numbered 6.2 million, the highest that number has ever been. Last year also saw the largest percentage increase in beginning golfers and the biggest gain in youth golfers coming to the game since Tiger’s 1997 Masters win.

Women golfers also were part of the 2020 surge, jumping 450,000 or 8 percent year over year and making up nearly a quarter of all golfers with a count of some six million. That is the highest number over the last five years.

The NGF also counts total golf participants by factoring in off-course experiences as well, and that number swelled the overall count to 36.9 million, up 8 percent year-over-year and a near 20 percent gain in the last five years.

Of course, the pandemic’s challenges still took a toll with a larger-than-usual volume of players who opted out of the game for concerns over the pandemic or economic challenges. Still, 2020 marked the third straight year more golfers came to the game than left it, and the NGF’s study of those who opted out of golf in 2020 suggests they’re more eager than ever to opt back in. The number of what the NGF survey calls “very interested non-golfers” reached 17 million, a 1.5 million increase compared to 2019 and 4.2 million more than in 2016.

The net gain in golfers also contributed to a healthy boost in rounds played, despite many states restricting or even banning play for weeks or months. The NGF estimated a loss of 20 million rounds in the spring with course closures and restrictions, but by year’s end, 502 million rounds were recorded. That was 61 million more than in 2019, nearly a 14 percent increase and the largest one-year gain other than in 1997 when Tiger’s booming popularity saw a 63-million-round increase.

The NGF research indicates that the biggest driver of the rounds played surge wasn’t exclusively new golfers. Rather, it was the “core golfers” (more than eight rounds a year) who really upped their games. The report cites “a passionate cohort of existing players (roughly 20 percent of the core-golfer population)” who fueled the boost in the average rounds played per golfer to 20.2. It marked an all-time high since the statistic started being tracked in 1998. Despite being the age groups most at risk during the pandemic, older players still played the most golf. Those aged 60-69 logged an average of 29 rounds in 2020, while those golfers 70 and over played an average of 40 times last year. However, millennials (those aged 18-34) increased their rounds played by 13 percent compared to 2019, and 44 percent of all those who played golf at least once on a golf course in 2020 were under the age of 40—with as many under the age of 30 as over the age of 60. (...)

There was undeniable but measured enthusiasm across the golf equipment industry, too. Equipment sales mirrored the energy in rounds played, recovering from a negative trendline in March and April that saw dollars dip by 31 percent. By year’s end, fueled by the biggest July in history and the second highest quarter ever (behind only the quarter after Tiger’s riveting 2008 U.S. Open win), total sales of clubs and balls were at $2.9 billion in 2020, matching 2019’s numbers. David Maher, president and CEO of Acushnet, the parent company of the Titleist and FootJoy brands, noted in his recent summary of the company’s full-year earnings that the extraordinary gains might be an unrealistic standard for 2021, but the general direction is telling.

“We are still in a massive transition,” he said. “2020 was a massive transition year, 2021 will be a massive transition year. When the dust settles, hopefully sooner versus later, [the way] I tend to look at it is, ‘Okay, what's the world going to look like, 2022 versus 2019?’ And I think the golf landscape is going to have more energy, more momentum, more golfers.”

by Mike Stachura, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Chris Sattlberger

[ed. As a regular golfer (just trying to get a tee time, and get around in a reasonable time) this is not good news.]

Lexington Lab Band

[ed. See also: here for a bunch of other great LLB covers. Plus, forgot this this one.]

How mRNA Technology Could Change the World

Synthetic mRNA, the ingenious technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, might seem like a sudden breakthrough, or a new discovery. One year ago, almost nobody in the world knew what an mRNA vaccine was, for the good reason that no country in the world had ever approved one. Months later, the same technology powered the two fastest vaccine trials in the history of science.

Like so many breakthroughs, this apparent overnight success was many decades in the making. More than 40 years had passed between the 1970s, when a Hungarian scientist pioneered early mRNA research, and the day the first authorized mRNA vaccine was administered in the United States, on December 14, 2020. In the interim, the idea’s long road to viability nearly destroyed several careers and almost bankrupted several companies.

The dream of mRNA persevered in part because its core principle was tantalizingly simple, even beautiful: The world’s most powerful drug factory might be inside all of us.

People rely on proteins for just about every bodily function; mRNA—which stands for messenger ribonucleic acid—tells our cells which proteins to make. With human-edited mRNA, we could theoretically commandeer our cellular machinery to make just about any protein under the sun. You could mass-produce molecules that occur naturally in the body to repair organs or improve blood flow. Or you could request our cells to cook up an off-menu protein, which our immune system would learn to identify as an invader and destroy.

In the case of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, mRNA vaccines send detailed instructions to our cells to make its distinctive “spike protein.” Our immune system, seeing the foreign intruder, targets these proteins for destruction without disabling the mRNA. Later, if we confront the full virus, our bodies recognize the spike protein again and attack it with the precision of a well-trained military, reducing the risk of infection and blocking severe illness.

But mRNA’s story likely will not end with COVID-19: Its potential stretches far beyond this pandemic. This year, a team at Yale patented a similar RNA-based technology to vaccinate against malaria, perhaps the world’s most devastating disease. Because mRNA is so easy to edit, Pfizer says that it is planning to use it against seasonal flu, which mutates constantly and kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. The company that partnered with Pfizer last year, BioNTech, is developing individualized therapies that would create on-demand proteins associated with specific tumors to teach the body to fight off advanced cancer. In mouse trials, synthetic-mRNA therapies have been shown to slow and reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis. “I’m fully convinced now even more than before that mRNA can be broadly transformational,” Özlem Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, told me. “In principle, everything you can do with protein can be substituted by mRNA.”

In principle is the billion-dollar asterisk. mRNA’s promise ranges from the expensive-yet-experimental to the glorious-yet-speculative. But the past year was a reminder that scientific progress may happen suddenly, after long periods of gestation. “This has been a coming-out party for mRNA, for sure,” says John Mascola, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “In the world of science, RNA technology could be the biggest story of the year. We didn’t know if it worked. And now we do.”

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Adam Maida/The Atlantic

Joaquim Sunyer - Paisaje de Ceret, 1911
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Chris Austin
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Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie

One of the strengths of the Republican Party is its message discipline. When it finds an issue that works, it beats that issue to death, flogging it long after it stops working. Thus after the Civil War, the party waved the “bloody shirt” by attacking Democrats for opposing the war, which created a continuous run of Republican presidents between 1868 and 1912, punctuated only by a single Democrat, Grover Cleveland.

Another bloody shirt that Republicans have waved forever and plan to wave again this election cycle is “socialism.” I put the term in quotation marks because to hear Republicans tell it, virtually everything government does is socialism; it is utterly foreign to the United States, and it cannot be implemented without imposing tyranny on the American people, along with poverty and deprivation such as we see today in Venezuela, where socialism allegedly destroyed the country.

On July 17, Vice President Mike Pence gave a preview of the coming socialism-addled Republican strategy rather than the actual policies of Joe Biden. Said Pence (emphasis added):

Before us are two paths: one based on the dignity of every individual, and the other on the growing control of the state. Our road leads to greater freedom and opportunity. Their road leads to socialism and decline. (...)

The plan to run against some mythical threat of socialism has been underway for some time. As early as October 2018, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report attacking it, with a follow-up chapter in the 2019 Economic Report of the President. More recently, well-known right-wing crackpot Dinesh D’Souza published a screed on the subject, the gist of which is that all liberals, progressives, and Democrats are socialists, as were the Nazis. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has also published The Case Against Socialism, which one reviewer said “does not make a case against socialism, but it does make a convincing case against nepotism.” (Senator Paul is the son of former Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, for whom I worked in the 1970s.)

The essence of the Republican attack is to lie about the nature of socialism, grossly exaggerating its negative excesses while completely ignoring its positive effects. When they are forced to concede that some socialistic government programs–such as disease prevention or temporarily higher unemployment benefits–may be valuable, they will nevertheless insist that it must be resisted because it’s the first step on the slippery slope to totalitarianism. As Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican who represents the Confederate state of Arkansas, put it in a tweet: “Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the Gestapo.”

Republicans assert, endlessly, that the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek proved that the welfare state leads inevitably to socialism and tyranny in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek’s theory may have been plausible in the midst of World War II, all the evidence since then thoroughly contradicts it. There is no evidence whatsoever that welfare states morph into total state control of the economy and produce a concomitant loss of freedom and prosperity. There is not a single case of this happening anywhere. Nor is there anything in Hayek’s theory to explain why socialism collapsed in the Soviet Union or why privatization rolled it back in places like Britain. (Ironically, Hayek’s relatively expansive view of government’s legitimate functions make him a virtual socialist to some of today’s right-wingers.) (...)

Like Smith, the Founding Fathers understood that government has functions that go far beyond the night watchman state favored by those on the right today. Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense underpinned the ideology of the American Revolution, was a virtual socialist. His most radical work, Agrarian Justice, proposed the revolutionary idea of a wealth tax to fund payments to citizens reaching maturity, a precursor to today’s idea of a basic income.

James Madison, principal author of the Constitution, agreed that providing income to the indigent was a core government function. He wrote in an 1820 letter:

To provide employment for the poor and support for the indigent is among the primary, & at the same time not least difficult cares of the public authority. In very populous Countries the task is particularly arduous. In our favored Country where employment & food are much less subject to failures or deficiencies the interposition of the public guardianship is required in a far more limited degree. Some degree of interposition nevertheless, is at all times and everywhere called for. (...)

Since they’re unable to run against the actual expansion of the American welfare state, GOP propagandists retreat into fantasy. Always missing from the Republican critique is any clear definition of socialism. This is intentional. Republicans know that the term “socialism” is unpopular with many Americans—although a growing percentage embrace it. Republicans also know that numerous programs they view as socialistic are nevertheless very popular with voters. President Harry Truman often made this point in his speeches. He said in 1952:

Socialism is a scare word [Republicans] have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

Conversely, Republicans never call their many tax giveaways to favored industrialists like Elon Musk “socialism.” In her brilliant book, The Entrepreneurial State, the economist Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated that the entire tech sector rests on a foundation of government-funded research and development that is almost never acknowledged.

In truth, Republicans aren’t opposed to socialism per se but only socialism that benefits poor people and minorities. Socialism for farmers and industrialists is just fine as far as they are concerned.

by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Mr. Bartlett is a former Republican who served as a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush.]

Did the Boomers Ruin America? A Debate

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” (...)

I’ve been fascinated by the fight over the baby boomers. You maybe remember OK, boomer, this dismissal of boomer politics that got popular on the internet for a minute and drove boomers totally crazy. That came, of course, during Donald Trump’s presidency. And it reflected frustration in having our fourth boomer president.

And then it’s not like there was — well, there was a bit of a generational handover, actually. Joe Biden — he’s not a boomer. He’s born a few years before the boomers. But I don’t think that’s the kind of generational handover a lot of young people were looking for, which I think gets to the point of this generational frustration. There is a sense — and not just a sense, a reality — that America’s elder generations have kept a hammerlock on power. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: So I’ve been wanting to do a show on this. First, is it useful to talk about this at all? Generations are big and diverse. What’s the point in talking in categories of that size? But then also, what is the critique at its core? I mean, you don’t get a lot out of OK boomer. Whenever there’s this much anger, though, lasting for this much time and emerging in this many cultural forms, you got to assume there’s something real there, something worth trying to understand on its own terms.

But one thing about it is, it’s not just one critique of the boomers. There’s a left critique that’s more about economics and power, and then a right critique that, at least usually, is more about cultural libertinism and individualism and institutional decay. So I wanted to put these critiques together to see if they added up to something coherent. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of carping millennials. And I say that as an often carping millennial.

Jill Filipovic is a writer, commentator, a lawyer, and she’s the author of the book “OK, Boomer, Let’s Talk How My Generation Got Left Behind,” which is a very nice encapsulation of the economic case for millennial rage. Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of “Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” which is a pretty searing critique from the right. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here we go.

So welcome, both of you, to the show. Helen, I want to begin with you. Why is generational analysis valuable? I mean, we’re dealing with pretty arbitrary time periods. Generations, they contain multitudes. So why are boomers or any other age cohort a useful descriptive category for understanding American society?

HELEN ANDREWS: The clue that first got me thinking that the boomers might be worth analyzing as a generation rather than through historical events that they happened to be around for was that the 1960s was a global phenomenon. A lot of people attribute ’60s protests in the United States to the various issues that they centered around, things like the anti-war movement. But you saw the same kinds of student protests in countries that didn’t have a draft or in countries where they had completely different records in World War II. And the parent-child dynamic was just totally alien to what it was in the United States.

So that got me thinking that the ’60s might have been a product just of the youth generation having such demographic heft, there being just so many more young people around. And that was the reason the ’60s protests took the form they did and were so universal across the civilized world. And then I started following the boomers through their political career. And you saw the same kinds of coincidences across the globe as they came into power in the 1990s. You saw neoliberal triangulators, who were trying to reconcile the left and capitalism, and the same types of leaders like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in different places.

So any phenomenon that is happening in countries that have very different histories and issues sets, but similar demographic bulges, I thought was an indication that generations were worth looking at as generations.

EZRA KLEIN: So I can buy that. So then, Jill, let’s say I’m a boomer who thinks my generation wasn’t really that bad. And I’m tired of everybody yelling at me. I mean, sure, every generation, we make a few mistakes. But ultimately, we boomers, we left the world better than we found it. And the problem is that millennials are just particularly self-pitying, and they just want to blame the fact that life is hard on everyone else. Convince me I’m wrong.

JILL FILIPOVIC: Well, that’s pretty much the same thing that people said about the boomers when they were young, right? There is a whole book written about them called “The Culture of Narcissism.” If you read Helen’s book, it certainly draws on a lot of the descriptions of boomers when they were young people. I think one thing that’s very poorly understood about the boomer generation — and perhaps this is me being slightly defensive of them — is that they’re an incredibly politically polarized generation.

So boomers, much more so than millennials, much more so than the silent generation, more so even than Gen Xers, are really split politically down the middle between liberals and conservatives. And I think what we’ve actually seen and what I hear, especially from liberal boomers, is the sense of, well, wait a minute. We were trying to make the world a better place. And then there were political forces who we didn’t vote for who may have been part of our cohort, who now you’re using to blame our entire generation.

There’s some fairness to that defensiveness. That said, I would say, liberal boomers kind of won the culture. Conservative and more moderate boomers won American politics. And so the generation wide legacy, yes, does have some positives. But overwhelmingly, we’re now living on a planet that’s flooding and burning. So I think it’s a little hard to say that boomers left it better than they found it.

EZRA KLEIN: On the flooding and burning point — and I guess I’ll send this one to Helen, but it’s really for both — one thing I thought about, reading both of your books, is how much the boomers are actually a stand-in for technological change, some of which they generate and some of which they didn’t. I mean, the planet is burning. But the driving of fossil fuels as the way you power economies, I mean, that predates the boomers. And then, obviously, it grows during their heyday.

But a lot of the things that I think they get tagged for come from scientific advances that they weren’t even the ones to necessarily create. I mean, a lot of the sexual politics changes come from the pill. A lot of — and this is a theme of your book, Helen — a lot of social changes come from television. I mean, how much are boomers, Helen, simply the generation that happened to be largest and then in power when a lot of the electricity revolutions innovations came into full flower?

HELEN ANDREWS: I don’t think you can blame technology for the way the world is today and the wreckage that the boomers left us. For example, when we talk about the world today being a lot tougher for millennials than it was for the boomers, one of the things we’re talking about is the loss of power on the part of the working class. Their wages are not growing the way that they used to in the days of the boomers. A one-income family can’t make it the way that they could in the time of the boomers.

Some of that is attributable to technology, but a lot of that is due to changes in what the boomers did to the left. That is, the boomers were the generation of the new left. And the reason they called themselves that is because they were rebelling against the old left. They deliberately wanted the left-wing party in the western democracies not to stand for working class people and unions, but rather to stand for identity politics type interests. The hinge moment in America for that is the reforms to the Democratic National Convention in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.

The way that delegates were chosen was then tilted toward or to favor identity politics. So the boomers made a choice to have their left-wing party champion identity politics, rather than working class people and unions. And so that’s the reason why the working class was then so vulnerable to these technological changes. The technological changes would have happened either way. But I think they would have had better defenders in the left-wing parties if the boomers hadn’t replaced the old left with their new left.

EZRA KLEIN: Is this what you think they did wrong? I mean, my understanding of your take on the boomers is that they unleashed a kind of cultural reckoning on America. And you do talk about the new left questions in the book, but you’re a Trump supporter. He’s not a huge fan of unions himself. Or is it your view that we should go back to a much stronger union and redistribution style politics? Is that the politics you want to see return?

HELEN ANDREWS: No, I would like to see the Republicans become the working class party of the future. Because I don’t think the Democratic Party as currently constituted is going to turn around and start championing their interests. And so I think there’s room for Republicans to be a little bit nicer to labor and to unions as a part of that realignment.

But realistically, Republicans protecting working class interests may have a different issue set than it did when the old left was championing unions in the 1940s and ’50s. It may look like having different positions on things like trade and immigration, which are actually areas where Trump and the working class were quite together.

EZRA KLEIN: Jill, give me your economic critique of the boomer legacy.

JILL FILIPOVIC: Yeah, so it’s interesting hearing what Helen says because it just strikes me as entirely ahistorical and the kind of polar opposite conclusion that I came to in researching my book. If you look at the political decisions that were made that really did gut the American middle class and working class, yes, Democrats are certainly not innocent parties here. But many of those decisions and many of those huge changes came about when boomers field the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and then again in 1984.

So you had Reagan who came in, increased tax havens for corporations, refused to increase the federal minimum wage, which we’re still arguing about, which has certainly damaged working class earning power, gutted union power and union membership. When you look at the ways in which the American economic landscape has changed, comparing boomers to millennials, one of the biggest differences is that when boomers were young, they saw their future as invested in.

So, when boomers were young adults, the federal government was spending $3 in investments into the future, things like infrastructure, education, research for every dollar it spent on entitlements. Now that’s flipped. So the federal government is spending $3, and as soon as boomers all are retired, that number will have ticked up to closer to $5 for every dollar it spends on future investments. So as boomers have gone through the course of their lives, they’ve seen the government work for them. Millennials really haven’t. We’ve been the ones stuck footing the bill.

And when it comes to this gap between the middle class and the working class and the degree to which working class earnings have really seen the bottom fall out, which is what’s happened over the past several decades, that’s been a pretty direct result of a systemic dismantlement of the kind of L.B.J. Great Society policies, of F.D.R.’s social welfare policies, of strong protections for unions. I mean, a tax on union memberships and right to work laws are not Democratic inventions. Those were coming from Republicans, and often boomer Republicans.

So, from my view, it really is this shift to conservatism among baby boomers, and sort of Reagan conservatism in particular, that was then bolstered by this kind of ’90s Clinton era centrist Democratic Party that really saw it, I think, to compete on the cultural issues that Republicans made salient and did kind of cede ground on a lot of the most important economic issues that Americans needed to thrive.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times (Transcript - Ezra Klein Show Podcast) |  Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein Show

Chi Chi Rodriguez at the Masters - 70′s

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[ed. It's Masters week.]

Predicting the Future of Prediction Markets

Sometimes economists are just flat-out wrong. According to economic theory, annuities and reverse mortgages should be very popular for managing risk and liquidity — yet both products struggle for mainstream acceptance. Another favorite of economists is prediction markets: contracts with payoffs contingent on some real-world event. Their future is also highly uncertain.

In essence, prediction markets let people “bet” on some feature of the economy, thereby creating a new financial derivative. A prediction market in gross domestic product, or perhaps in local rates of unemployment, could be a useful means of hedging risk. If you are afraid that GDP will fall, you could “short” GDP in a prediction market and thus protect your overall economic position, because your bet would pay out if GDP came in lower than expected.

Prediction markets are also a useful means of discovering information about what is likely to happen next. If you want to know who is likely to win the Super Bowl, is there any better place to look than the published betting odds? By the same reasoning, various interest rate futures markets offer clues about what the Federal Reserve might be planning. The value of having more and better public information is another reason to encourage prediction markets.

The big puzzle is why prediction markets haven’t taken off, at least not since the earlier 19th-century history of “bucket shops.” Part of the reason is regulatory constraints, but prediction markets have not succeeded in some other parts of the world without such constraints. Intrade.com, now defunct, was based in Ireland and created active and successful markets in sporting events and presidential elections. But most of their prediction markets remained fairly illiquid, due to lack of customer interest. (...)

A skeptic might say that demand is limited because there are already so many good and highly informative markets in other assets. In 2009, for instance, was a market necessary to predict how well the iPhone was going to do? The share price of Apple might have served to perform a broadly similar function.

The question, then, is which prediction markets might prove most useful. Nobel Laureate economist Robert J. Shiller has promoted the idea of prediction markets in GDP, but most people face major risks at a more local, less aggregated level. One of the risks I face, for example, concerns the revenue of the university where I teach. This year enrollments rose slightly even though U.S. GDP fell sharply. So a GDP-based hedge probably is not very useful to me.

How about a prediction market in local real-estate prices, so that home buyers and real-estate magnates may hedge their purchases? Maybe, but then the question is whether enough professional traders would be attracted to such markets to keep them liquid. So-called binary options, particularly when the bet is on the price of a financial asset, often have remained unfairly priced or manipulated, and are viewed poorly by regulators.

For a prediction market to take off, it probably has to satisfy a few criteria: general enough to attract widespread interest; important enough to matter; and unusual enough not to be replicable by trading in existing assets. The outcomes also need to be sufficiently well-defined that contract settlement is not in dispute. (...)

For all the obstacles facing prediction markets, there is cause for optimism about their long-run viability. There are many more financial assets and contracts today than a few decades ago, and such markets can be expected to increase. The internet lowers trading and monitoring costs, and that should make prediction markets easier to create.

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Sébastien Thibault via Nature

[ed. See also: Tales from Prediction Markets (Misinformation Underload); and, The Power of Prediction Markets (Nature).]

The Therapy-App Fantasy

Talkspace is part of a growing field of services that promise mental-health care via smartphone. And unlike many of the problems tech start-ups have set out to solve, this one actually exists: It’s hard to find a therapist. Maybe you have insurance, so you look up a list of in-network providers, start cold-calling, and hope to reach someone with an opening. Maybe you ask for recommendations from friends and hope someone they know takes your insurance or has out-of-pocket rates you can afford. Maybe you don’t know anybody with a therapist and the prospect of getting one yourself seems risky or shameful. Maybe you don’t know anyone with a therapist because there aren’t any therapists around to see — approximately 33 percent of counties have no records of licensed psychologists.

Geographic distribution is just one of the ways the mental-health profession fails to match the people in need of care: Doing so would also require more therapists who speak Spanish, more therapists of color, more therapists with LGBTQ expertise. Even in a therapist-rich environment like New York City, intangibles intervene. How do you find someone to whom you feel comfortable saying things you may feel uncomfortable saying at all? People seeking therapy face all these challenges even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. According to a CDC report released last summer, 40 percent of American adults were dealing with mental-health or substance-abuse issues in late June, with younger adults, people of color, essential workers, and unpaid caregivers disproportionately hard-hit.

Therapists have long faced the question of how to provide their care to more people without diminishing its quality. In 1918, amid the catastrophe of the First World War, Sigmund Freud gave a lecture in which he proposed using free clinics for mass mental-health care — even as he acknowledged that doing so might require his fellow psychoanalysts to “alloy the pure gold” of their usual methods. “We’ve been in a crisis of access to mental-health care really since mental-health care professionalized,” said Hannah Zeavin, a professor at UC Berkeley whose forthcoming book, The Distance Cure, traces the history of remote therapy from Freud’s letters to crisis hotlines and up through today’s apps.

Accelerated by the pandemic, Zeavin’s subject has gone from an academic curiosity to a growth sector. Businesses in the “digital behavioral health” space raised $1.8 billion in venture-capital funding last year, compared to $609 million in 2019. In January, Talkspace announced plans to go public this year in a $1.4 billion SPAC deal. A presentation for investors managed to be simultaneously grim and upbeat in outlining the “enormous” market for its services: More than 70 million Americans suffer from mental illness, according to Talkspace, and the country has seen a 30 percent increase in the annual suicide rate since 2001. Talkspace says 60 percent of its users are in therapy for the first time. (...)

Much of what appears if you search “therapy” in the App Store does not provide the services of a human therapist. Some of it does not address mental health at all, in the strict sense: It is the digital equivalent of a scented candle, wafting off into coloring apps and relaxation games. Many services occupy an area somewhere in between professional care and smartphone self-soothing. Reflectly, for example, bills itself as “the World’s First Intelligent Journal” and promises to use the principles of positive psychology, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy to help users track their moods and “invest in” self-care. “Just like a therapist!! But free!!” reads one review. (Reflectly costs $9.99 a month.) Sayana, an AI chatbot, is personified as a pastel illustration with a dark bob and cutoff jeans; she also tracks the user’s mood and offers tips (“Observe your thoughts as they flow, just like the river”) to guide users on a journey through “the world of you.” “This is like your own little therapist and I love it!” reads one five-star review. Youper (mood tracking, chatbot, lessons) sells “Self-Guided Therapy”; Bloom (mood tracking, chatbot, lessons) is “the world’s first digital therapist.”

But chatbots and mood scores aren’t generally what people are imagining when they say, for example, that their ex needs therapy. “Therapy” here conjures an intervention to fix the personality and save the soul. Different people want different things from therapy. They want to break bad habits, work through trauma, vent about their boss, their boyfriend, their mom. They want to feel better (always easier said than done). They want someone to talk to, and they want some tools. When I resumed seeing my longtime therapist over video, I wanted her to tell me whether the problem was my brain or the pandemic — I needed someone I trusted to judge the situation. That is to say, I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I wanted the help of someone who knew better. And this — expert counsel in the palm of your hand — is what the high end of an emerging class of therapy apps claims to deliver.

“In 2021, mental health is finally cool,” declares a podcast ad for BetterHelp, one of the apps promising access to trained therapists that has promoted itself to consumers most aggressively. “But therapy doesn’t have to be just sitting around talking about feelings. Therapy can be whatever you want it to be.”

With a therapy app, more blatantly than in most health-care transactions, the patient is a customer, and the customer is always right. But this assumes patients know what they want and need and that getting it will make them feel better. These are not expectations most therapists would necessarily share — nor are they ones therapy apps are reliably prepared to fulfill.

A D.C.-area Talkspace user named Cait remembered getting off to a more auspicious start. “I was so excited because they give you all these therapists,” she said. “It was almost like a dating app.” Cait had signed up for the service after talking to a satisfied friend with a supportive Talkspace therapist who texted her all the time. Cait had recently started medication for depression; it helped, but she wanted to speak with someone regularly, and even with her insurance, she was worried about cost. She saw that Talkspace was offering a New Year’s deal at the beginning of 2021. If she used that and paid for six months up front, she could get half a year of therapy for $700. This seemed to her like quite a deal — far cheaper than paying out of pocket for conventional therapy but also far cheaper than what Talkspace might otherwise have been. While mood trackers and mindfulness apps can cost $10 or $15 a month, therapy apps like Talkspace, BetterHelp, Brightside, and Calmerry — ones that connect users to an actual licensed human therapist — cost hundreds of dollars. Without discounts (or subscribing for months at a time), a one-month Talkspace plan that includes weekly video sessions runs nearly $400. Particularly because the standard length of these visits is just 30 minutes, users are paying hourly rates that can approach those of in-person care.

Of course, many users aren’t paying out of pocket because, for many apps, users aren’t the customer at all. These apps, like Ginger and Lyra, focus on selling their services to employers or insurance companies.

by Molly Fischer, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Pablo Rochat

Kurt Otto-Wasow, Ile de la Cité, Paris 1950s
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