[ed. My buddy's been waiting three years to hear them in concert (tickets pre-pandemic). Hope he had a good time (even missing Mark Lanegan). See also: Little Sister and Go With the Flow. Update: oops... was actually waiting for My Chemical Romance, not QOTSA.]
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Image: Terry Schmitt/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock
[ed. Because, of course. If you're stupid to begin with why would you stop making your situation worse? And here I thought I couldn't love Bobby Wagner any more than I already did. See also: ‘I helped out security’: the backstory behind Bobby Wagner’s viral NFL hit (Guardian)]
[ed. Because, of course. If you're stupid to begin with why would you stop making your situation worse? And here I thought I couldn't love Bobby Wagner any more than I already did. See also: ‘I helped out security’: the backstory behind Bobby Wagner’s viral NFL hit (Guardian)]
The Resurgence Of Tesla Syndrome
Why has disruption been elevated as a virtue to the point where it’s become orthodox to be heterodox? It’s a symptom of the erosion of trust in institutions.
The notion that successful innovators are remarkable and strong-minded individuals is an old one. Its origins lie in the 19th century, in books such as Samuel Smiles’ “Self-help” or in the improving biographies of men such as Michael Faraday or Thomas Alva Edison. There is more to the idea of disruption, though, than the notion that innovation needs character. It plays instead with the possibility that innovation needs a kind of instability — that disruption isn’t just one of a range of solutions to the problem of progress, but that it’s the only solution.
In fact, the insistence that significant technological change can only take place through disruption upends traditional notions of progress entirely. The 19th-century inventors of the idea of progress imagined that the future would be produced through accumulation. Innovation would build on innovation. Built into the idea of disruption is the sense that successful innovation means abandoning the old entirely for the new.
Instead, what we’re seeing now is the rise of a contemporary form of Tesla Syndrome. Since his death in 1943, the myth that Nikola Tesla wove around himself during his own time has taken on a life of its own, to such a degree that it is now almost impossible to dismantle. (...)
There’s an interesting and revealing contrast in the ways that Tesla and Edison, respectively, presented themselves and their power of invention. Both men were adept at self-promotion and took advantage of every opportunity to put themselves and their inventions in the public eye. The inventive selves that each presented to the public were very different ones, nevertheless, and are revealing of the range of ways in which innovators could be imagined at the beginnings of modernity.
Both were keen to promote themselves as singular men of invention, uniquely gifted and fitted for innovation. But where Tesla and his promoters showed him off as a man apart, living inside his own head and obsessed with invention, Edison’s story was of the self-made man, pursuing — and achieving — his inventions through sheer grit and determination (1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, as he famously suggested). Here was the business inventor, grounded in the world of commerce rather than forever dreaming about the stars.
The ways in which Tesla’s and Edison’s supposed rivalry is re-imagined in contemporary culture shed light on disruption’s appeal for contemporary tech culture, too. Tesla turns up more than once in the popular sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” for example. There he is held up as the epitome of the otherworldly maker of the future, an iconoclastic breaker of rules interested only in innovation for its own sake and doomed to failure because of his single-minded focus on invention.
“You like to think that you’re just like Tesla, but the truth is you’re exactly like Edison,” one protagonist insults another. What they mean is that Tesla stands for uncompromised innovation, while Edison is stuck in the mire of self-interested industrial and corporate innovation. That’s why Tesla makes such a good geek hero. He stands for invention untrammelled by compromise — and in many ways that’s what the allure of disruption is all about, as well. We might sum it up as Tesla replacing Edison as the ideal of innovation.
While Tesla has become the very model of a modern mold-breaker, the myth surrounding him has been here for more than half a century. Why has it — and the notion of disruption it captures — acquired so much resonance now?
by Iwan Rhys Morus, Noema | Read more:
Image: Niki Usagi for Noema Magazine
Pinochet’s Long Shadow
What to make of the rejection of Chile’s new constitution, which would have been the world’s most progressive? The proposed magna carta granted increased autonomy for indigenous nations in Chile, promised gender parity in governmental bodies, and mandated universal health care, access to legal abortion, and ecological rights; its rebuff was a dispiriting result for the Chilean left and allies across the hemisphere. Two years ago, on the heels of an explosive protest movement against inequality and the depredations of a neoliberal state, nearly 80 percent of voters authorized a constitutional convention to draft a new Chilean charter. Yet on September 4, more than 60 percent voted rechazo, rejecting the fruit of that convention. Something went horribly awry.
The passage of the constitution had been championed by Chile’s president Gabriel Boric, elected in December of 2021 over the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, an open admirer of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Boric emerged as a leader of student protests a decade earlier against a privatized education system, a legacy of the Pinochet era. At thirty-six, he became the country’s youngest-ever president. His Social Convergence party forms a piece of the Approve Dignity (Apruebo Dignidad) coalition of left-wing parties and organizations that came together to support the new constitution. But he assumed office during a turbulent time, with Chile experiencing inflation, rising crime rates, and an influx of migration from Venezuela that had inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment. When his popularity dropped, Boric’s visible support of the constitution allowed Chileans unhappy with his administration to express their disapproval by voting to reject. The night of the defeat, he struck a conciliatory tone, granting that the country had made a “strong and clear” choice, but vowing to begin the process anew and to include populations who had felt themselves left out. The mandate from the 2020 plebiscite to create a new charter lived on, even if the means to fulfill it were now hazier.
Lucas Cifuentes, a national director of the Libertarian Left party (Izquierda Libertaria), believes that even the constitution’s opponents recognize that Chilean society remains a “boiling pot,” its crises unresolved, and thus recognize the need for reforms to reduce the pressure. “No matter what,” predicts Cifuentes, “there are going to be changes to health care, to education, to the pension system. But the question is the depth, the real impact, and that’s what we’ll be looking at attentively to see what happens.” Yet if indeed a new convention comes to pass, it will look different from the first. In the October 2020 plebiscite authorizing the new convention, Chileans also voted on the form the convention would take. They opted to sideline federal officials and directly elect the constituents who would write the document. Now, instead, Congress will almost certainly become central participants in the process. “All of the uprising, the process of the constitutional convention was in good measure an anti-elite protest,” says Cifuentes, “and now the elite is going to create the new constitution.”
The Chilean elite had already reinserted themselves into the constitutional process via a national press dominated by right-wing outlets. Many were the worries about the impacts of “fake news” on this plebiscite, which indeed shaped occasionally outlandish fears—that, for instance, the new constitution would change the flag and national anthem, and would enact seizures of private property, from residences to pensions. But an antagonistic press likewise eroded support for the document over the life of the convention and the months of decision afterwards. “A structural problem of our politics is that the agenda, the capacity to impose an agenda and themes that define what’s discussed publicly—the rich have that one hundred percent,” says Cifuentes. “In Chile there was more diversity, more media pluralism during the dictatorship than in democracy. It makes for a managed politics.”
Still, the job of the constitution’s backers was to win even in the face of all that. Instead, rechazo won in every single Chilean region, with poorer populations voting most heavily to reject. The difficulties of the apruebo (approve) campaign are evident in the gnarly case of Petorca, an area in central Chile where the appropriation of the rivers by large avocado growers has dried up the basin and left poor households without water, dependent on water delivered by truck. “The centralization, the privatization of water, have meant that Petorca is a symbol of pain,” ex-constituyente Carolina Vilches Fuenzalida told me. “And it hurts! It hurts because we’re grieving people who have committed suicide, we’re grieving migration, we’ve lost the local economy, gastrointestinal illnesses, allergies. . . . They’ve brought water in plastic tanks to say to the politicians in Santiago, to say ‘look, this is the water that I have to use to bathe, that I have to wash my hands, that I have to cook and to clean my baby’s bottom.’” Yet such water users have found little redress, as say-so over water planning in any basin is tied to the water property rights one owns. Petorca has thus launched a powerful social movement, Modatima, to fight for the right to water. Vilches Fuenzalida and allied constituyentes collaborated to translate that demand into the text of the new constitution, which would have guaranteed water as a human right and a communal good, and prioritized human consumption over all other uses. And then, on September 4, Petorca voted to reject the constitution.
Lucas Cifuentes, a national director of the Libertarian Left party (Izquierda Libertaria), believes that even the constitution’s opponents recognize that Chilean society remains a “boiling pot,” its crises unresolved, and thus recognize the need for reforms to reduce the pressure. “No matter what,” predicts Cifuentes, “there are going to be changes to health care, to education, to the pension system. But the question is the depth, the real impact, and that’s what we’ll be looking at attentively to see what happens.” Yet if indeed a new convention comes to pass, it will look different from the first. In the October 2020 plebiscite authorizing the new convention, Chileans also voted on the form the convention would take. They opted to sideline federal officials and directly elect the constituents who would write the document. Now, instead, Congress will almost certainly become central participants in the process. “All of the uprising, the process of the constitutional convention was in good measure an anti-elite protest,” says Cifuentes, “and now the elite is going to create the new constitution.”
The Chilean elite had already reinserted themselves into the constitutional process via a national press dominated by right-wing outlets. Many were the worries about the impacts of “fake news” on this plebiscite, which indeed shaped occasionally outlandish fears—that, for instance, the new constitution would change the flag and national anthem, and would enact seizures of private property, from residences to pensions. But an antagonistic press likewise eroded support for the document over the life of the convention and the months of decision afterwards. “A structural problem of our politics is that the agenda, the capacity to impose an agenda and themes that define what’s discussed publicly—the rich have that one hundred percent,” says Cifuentes. “In Chile there was more diversity, more media pluralism during the dictatorship than in democracy. It makes for a managed politics.”
Still, the job of the constitution’s backers was to win even in the face of all that. Instead, rechazo won in every single Chilean region, with poorer populations voting most heavily to reject. The difficulties of the apruebo (approve) campaign are evident in the gnarly case of Petorca, an area in central Chile where the appropriation of the rivers by large avocado growers has dried up the basin and left poor households without water, dependent on water delivered by truck. “The centralization, the privatization of water, have meant that Petorca is a symbol of pain,” ex-constituyente Carolina Vilches Fuenzalida told me. “And it hurts! It hurts because we’re grieving people who have committed suicide, we’re grieving migration, we’ve lost the local economy, gastrointestinal illnesses, allergies. . . . They’ve brought water in plastic tanks to say to the politicians in Santiago, to say ‘look, this is the water that I have to use to bathe, that I have to wash my hands, that I have to cook and to clean my baby’s bottom.’” Yet such water users have found little redress, as say-so over water planning in any basin is tied to the water property rights one owns. Petorca has thus launched a powerful social movement, Modatima, to fight for the right to water. Vilches Fuenzalida and allied constituyentes collaborated to translate that demand into the text of the new constitution, which would have guaranteed water as a human right and a communal good, and prioritized human consumption over all other uses. And then, on September 4, Petorca voted to reject the constitution.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
How to Recover from a Happy Childhood
Recovering from a happy childhood can take a long time. It’s not often that I’m suspected of having had one. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, a daughter of immigrants. When I showed up at college and caught sight of other childhoods, I did pause and think: Why didn’t we grow our own tomatoes? Why did I watch so many episodes of “I Dream of Jeannie”? Who is Hermes? What is lacrosse? Was my childhood a dud? An American self-inspection was set in motion. Having lived for more than forty-five years, I finally understand how happy my childhood was.
One might assume that my mother is to blame for this happiness, but I think my father has the stronger portion to answer for, though I only had the chance to know him for seventeen years before he died unexpectedly. He was an extoller of childhood, generally. I recall his saying to me once that the first eighteen years of life are the most meaningful and eventful, and that the years after that, even considered all together, can’t really compare.
The odd corollary was that he spoke very rarely of his own childhood. Maybe he didn’t want to brag. Even if he had told me more, I most likely wouldn’t have listened properly or understood much, because, like many children, I spent my childhood not really understanding who my parents were or what they were like. Though I collected clues. Century plants sometimes bloom after a decade, sometimes after two or three decades. I saw one in bloom recently, when my eight-year-old daughter pointed it out to me. I’m forty-six now, and much that my father used to say and embody has, after years of dormancy, begun to reveal itself in flower.
Growing up, I considered my father to be intelligent and incapable. Intelligent, because he had things to say about the Bosporus and the straits of Dardanelles. Incapable, because he ate ice cream from the container with a fork, and also he never sliced cheese, or used a knife in any way—instead, he tore things, like a caveman. Interestingly, he once observed that he didn’t think he would have lasted long as a caveman. This was apropos of nothing I could follow. He often seemed to assume that others were aware of the unspoken thoughts in his head which preceded speech. Maybe because his hearing was poor. He sat about two feet away from the television, with the volume on high. He also wore thick bifocal glasses. (In the seventies and early eighties, he wore tinted thick bifocal glasses.) The reason he wouldn’t have lasted long as a caveman, he said, was that his vision and his hearing meant that he would have been a poor hunter. “Either I would have died early on or maybe I would never have been born at all,” he said. The insight made him wistful.
If I had met my father as a stranger, I would have guessed him to be Siberian, or maybe Mongolian. He was more than six feet tall. His head was large and wide. His eyes seemed small behind his glasses. His wrists were delicate. I could encircle them, even with my child hands. His hair was silky, black, and wavy. He and my mother argued regularly about cutting his hair: she wanted to cut it; he wanted it to stay as it was. He was heavy the whole time I knew him, but he didn’t seem heavy to me. He seemed correctly sized. When he placed his hand atop my head, I felt safe, but also slightly squashed. He once asked me to punch his abdomen and tell him if it was muscular or soft. That was my only encounter with any vanity in him.
It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did. (...)
My dad loved arguments. If he had been a different kind of man—more of an Esau—he probably would have loved a brawl, too. He sought out arguments, especially at work, where arguing was socially acceptable, since it was considered good science, and my father was a scientist. Fighting was a big pastime in my family, more broadly. Our motto for our road-trip vacations was: We pay money to fight. I remember once breaking down in tears and complaining that my mom, my dad, my brother—they all fought with one another. But no one ever wanted to fight with me. I was the youngest by six years. (...)
My father had a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, though it had been obtained in a school of geosciences, and so he had been required at some point to acquire competence in geology and maybe something else. He had grown up in a moshav, a collective-farming village, in Israel. The few photographs of him as a child are of him feeding chickens; of him proud alongside a large dog; of him seated in front of an open book with his parents beside him. His mother’s name was Rivka, and she died before I was born. When one of my partner’s sons saw a photo of her, in black-and-white, he thought that it was a picture of me.
Although my dad didn’t say much about his childhood, he did speak, more than once and with admiration, about a donkey from his childhood, named Chamornicus, that was very stubborn. The name, which is old-fashioned slang, translates, approximately, to “my beloved donkey,” but my dad used it when someone was being intransigent. My dad admired stubbornness, especially of the unproductive kind. He once took my brother on a four-week trip to China and Japan. My dad had work conferences to attend. My brother was sixteen or so at the time. My dad took my brother to a bridge that Marco Polo had crossed and said something to the effect of “Isn’t it amazing to think that Marco Polo crossed this same bridge?” And my brother said, “What do I care?” My dad was amused and impressed. My dad also cited with great pride my brother’s insistence on eating at McDonald’s or Shakey’s Pizza while they were in Japan. “He stuck with his guns,” he said, with his characteristic mild mangling of cliché. My dad had a gift for being amused, and for liking people.
One might assume that my mother is to blame for this happiness, but I think my father has the stronger portion to answer for, though I only had the chance to know him for seventeen years before he died unexpectedly. He was an extoller of childhood, generally. I recall his saying to me once that the first eighteen years of life are the most meaningful and eventful, and that the years after that, even considered all together, can’t really compare.
Growing up, I considered my father to be intelligent and incapable. Intelligent, because he had things to say about the Bosporus and the straits of Dardanelles. Incapable, because he ate ice cream from the container with a fork, and also he never sliced cheese, or used a knife in any way—instead, he tore things, like a caveman. Interestingly, he once observed that he didn’t think he would have lasted long as a caveman. This was apropos of nothing I could follow. He often seemed to assume that others were aware of the unspoken thoughts in his head which preceded speech. Maybe because his hearing was poor. He sat about two feet away from the television, with the volume on high. He also wore thick bifocal glasses. (In the seventies and early eighties, he wore tinted thick bifocal glasses.) The reason he wouldn’t have lasted long as a caveman, he said, was that his vision and his hearing meant that he would have been a poor hunter. “Either I would have died early on or maybe I would never have been born at all,” he said. The insight made him wistful.
If I had met my father as a stranger, I would have guessed him to be Siberian, or maybe Mongolian. He was more than six feet tall. His head was large and wide. His eyes seemed small behind his glasses. His wrists were delicate. I could encircle them, even with my child hands. His hair was silky, black, and wavy. He and my mother argued regularly about cutting his hair: she wanted to cut it; he wanted it to stay as it was. He was heavy the whole time I knew him, but he didn’t seem heavy to me. He seemed correctly sized. When he placed his hand atop my head, I felt safe, but also slightly squashed. He once asked me to punch his abdomen and tell him if it was muscular or soft. That was my only encounter with any vanity in him.
It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did. (...)
My dad loved arguments. If he had been a different kind of man—more of an Esau—he probably would have loved a brawl, too. He sought out arguments, especially at work, where arguing was socially acceptable, since it was considered good science, and my father was a scientist. Fighting was a big pastime in my family, more broadly. Our motto for our road-trip vacations was: We pay money to fight. I remember once breaking down in tears and complaining that my mom, my dad, my brother—they all fought with one another. But no one ever wanted to fight with me. I was the youngest by six years. (...)
My father had a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, though it had been obtained in a school of geosciences, and so he had been required at some point to acquire competence in geology and maybe something else. He had grown up in a moshav, a collective-farming village, in Israel. The few photographs of him as a child are of him feeding chickens; of him proud alongside a large dog; of him seated in front of an open book with his parents beside him. His mother’s name was Rivka, and she died before I was born. When one of my partner’s sons saw a photo of her, in black-and-white, he thought that it was a picture of me.
Although my dad didn’t say much about his childhood, he did speak, more than once and with admiration, about a donkey from his childhood, named Chamornicus, that was very stubborn. The name, which is old-fashioned slang, translates, approximately, to “my beloved donkey,” but my dad used it when someone was being intransigent. My dad admired stubbornness, especially of the unproductive kind. He once took my brother on a four-week trip to China and Japan. My dad had work conferences to attend. My brother was sixteen or so at the time. My dad took my brother to a bridge that Marco Polo had crossed and said something to the effect of “Isn’t it amazing to think that Marco Polo crossed this same bridge?” And my brother said, “What do I care?” My dad was amused and impressed. My dad also cited with great pride my brother’s insistence on eating at McDonald’s or Shakey’s Pizza while they were in Japan. “He stuck with his guns,” he said, with his characteristic mild mangling of cliché. My dad had a gift for being amused, and for liking people.
by Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker | Read more:
Image: courtesy of the author
How To Butcher An Entire Cow: Every Cut Of Meat Explained
[ed. Strangely fascinating.]
Jason Yang, butcher at Fleishers Craft Butchery, breaks down half a cow into all the cuts you would see at your local butcher shop. There are four sections Yang moves through:
Jason Yang, butcher at Fleishers Craft Butchery, breaks down half a cow into all the cuts you would see at your local butcher shop. There are four sections Yang moves through:
1. ROUND: bottom round roast beef, eye round roast beef, sirloin tip steak, london broil steak, shank (osso buco)
2. LOIN: sirloin steak, tenderloin steak, flank steak, filet mignon, New York strip steak
3. RIB: skirt steak, ribeye steak
4. CHUCK : brisket, ranch steak, denver steak, chuck steak or roast, flat iron steak ~ Bon Appétit
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. (...)
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.
Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.
Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:
The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
by Jonathan Haight, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679[ed. See also: No one wants a pizzaburger (The Atlantic):]
In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, had been founded in 2013 as an industrial troll farm, where workers were paid to write blog posts, comments on news sites, and social-media messages.
Hundreds of workers toiled in 12-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. Each had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message—reportedly three posts a day per account if Facebook was their medium, or 50 on Twitter. Managers issued detailed instructions about content and obsessed over page views, likes, and retweets.
In the years ahead, the agency would write more than 6 million tweets, and its posts would attract 76 million engagements on Facebook and 183 million on Instagram. Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. But their common aim was to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.
In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, had been founded in 2013 as an industrial troll farm, where workers were paid to write blog posts, comments on news sites, and social-media messages.
Hundreds of workers toiled in 12-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. Each had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message—reportedly three posts a day per account if Facebook was their medium, or 50 on Twitter. Managers issued detailed instructions about content and obsessed over page views, likes, and retweets.
In the years ahead, the agency would write more than 6 million tweets, and its posts would attract 76 million engagements on Facebook and 183 million on Instagram. Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. But their common aim was to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.
Three Scientists Share Physics Nobel Prize for Quantum Mechanics Work
The 2022 Nobel prize in physics has been won by three researchers for their work on quantum mechanics.
Alain Aspect, John F Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 10m Swedish kronor (£802,000) prize announced on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. All three will receive an equal share of the prize.
According to the official citation for the award, the prize was given “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.
The three physicists’ work has focused on exploring how two particles interact, behaving like a single unit, even when they are far apart. The phenomenon, known as quantum entanglement, was dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein, and is expected to play an important role in quantum computing.
Quantum entanglement, in a nutshell, means that the properties of one particle can be deduced by examining the properties of a second particle – even if they are separated by a distance. An easy way to imagine this is to think about being given one of two balls – one of which is white and the other is black. If you receive a white ball, you know the ball that remains is black.
Importantly, however, the properties of each particle are not fixed until they are examined – in the ball scenario this would mean that both balls are grey until looked at, where upon one turns white and the other black.
This lies at the heart of the “spookiness” – the two particles, or balls, appear to be connected, without the need for any signal to be sent between them.
One possibility mooted by physicists was that the particles, or balls in the case above, might contain some secret information or “hidden variables”, that determine their properties and, in the early 1960s, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proposed that it would be possible to test this by carrying out multiple runs of a particular type of experiment and looking at the way the results are correlated, a theory that gave rise to what is known as Bell’s inequality.
Inspired by Bell’s work, American physicist John Clauser and his colleagues conducted elegant experiments involving polarised light to show that particles do not contain secret information. In other words, the balls in the scenario above do not contain hidden instructions about which colour to turn. Instead, as predicted by quantum mechanics, which one turns black is down to chance.
Alain Aspect developed this work, refining the experiments to close loopholes that might still have allowed the hidden variables theory to hold, while Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues built on the principles to explore entangled systems involving more than two particles.
Prof Jeff Forshaw, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester, said the award of the prize was terrific news.
“This is richly deserved because these are the pioneers of modern quantum physics,” he told the Guardian. “Their experiments confirmed the most bizarre and possibly most important aspect of quantum theory – entanglement.”
Alain Aspect, John F Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 10m Swedish kronor (£802,000) prize announced on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. All three will receive an equal share of the prize.
According to the official citation for the award, the prize was given “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.
Quantum entanglement, in a nutshell, means that the properties of one particle can be deduced by examining the properties of a second particle – even if they are separated by a distance. An easy way to imagine this is to think about being given one of two balls – one of which is white and the other is black. If you receive a white ball, you know the ball that remains is black.
Importantly, however, the properties of each particle are not fixed until they are examined – in the ball scenario this would mean that both balls are grey until looked at, where upon one turns white and the other black.
This lies at the heart of the “spookiness” – the two particles, or balls, appear to be connected, without the need for any signal to be sent between them.
One possibility mooted by physicists was that the particles, or balls in the case above, might contain some secret information or “hidden variables”, that determine their properties and, in the early 1960s, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proposed that it would be possible to test this by carrying out multiple runs of a particular type of experiment and looking at the way the results are correlated, a theory that gave rise to what is known as Bell’s inequality.
Inspired by Bell’s work, American physicist John Clauser and his colleagues conducted elegant experiments involving polarised light to show that particles do not contain secret information. In other words, the balls in the scenario above do not contain hidden instructions about which colour to turn. Instead, as predicted by quantum mechanics, which one turns black is down to chance.
Alain Aspect developed this work, refining the experiments to close loopholes that might still have allowed the hidden variables theory to hold, while Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues built on the principles to explore entangled systems involving more than two particles.
Prof Jeff Forshaw, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester, said the award of the prize was terrific news.
“This is richly deserved because these are the pioneers of modern quantum physics,” he told the Guardian. “Their experiments confirmed the most bizarre and possibly most important aspect of quantum theory – entanglement.”
by Nicola Davis, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Tt News Agency/Reuters
[ed. See also: The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence (Guardian).]
[ed. See also: The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence (Guardian).]
Monday, October 3, 2022
Tony Bourdain: 'Lonely and Living in Constant Uncertainty'
God gives us meat, but the devil sends us cooks,” Anthony Bourdain told the Observer two decades ago. He viewed the phrase as a compliment, and considered kitchens second homes for damned souls and “the degraded and the debauched”.
At that moment, he was already well-known in New York, as author of the scandalous bestseller Kitchen Confidential and as chef and co-owner of Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Avenue that for a time became the favored spot for the creative demimonde.
His notoriety was soon to soar: he refashioned the job of the celebrity chef, puncturing the self-importance of the species; he infused the job with sex appeal and with intensity. He produced three seasons of globe-trotting food adventure, a run that made him a global star.
Yet 17 years later, Bourdain met his end in a provincial hotel in Kaysersberg, France, killing himself at the tail end of doomed relationship with Asia Argento, the actor and daughter of an Italian horror film director.
Bourdain’s charismatic approach to cooking and to life, and his spiral down, will be revived four years after his death on publication next week of Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain.
The book is already setting off a wave of controversy among Bourdain’s huge fanbase, as well as his friends and relatives, who claim that journalist Charles Leerhsen’s account of Bourdain’s life is a slur on his memory. But it has also been praised as a frank retelling of a complex man’s life.
Either way, it will still keep Bourdain firmly in the spotlight – something that he perhaps once sought but came to hate.
Some are in uproar about the book “as if it was their job now to protect him and remember him in an artificial way”, Leerhsen says. “There’s a self-righteousness about that, but if you’re curious about Anthony Bourdain, here’s a book.” (...)
At that moment, he was already well-known in New York, as author of the scandalous bestseller Kitchen Confidential and as chef and co-owner of Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Avenue that for a time became the favored spot for the creative demimonde.
His notoriety was soon to soar: he refashioned the job of the celebrity chef, puncturing the self-importance of the species; he infused the job with sex appeal and with intensity. He produced three seasons of globe-trotting food adventure, a run that made him a global star.
Bourdain’s charismatic approach to cooking and to life, and his spiral down, will be revived four years after his death on publication next week of Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain.
The book is already setting off a wave of controversy among Bourdain’s huge fanbase, as well as his friends and relatives, who claim that journalist Charles Leerhsen’s account of Bourdain’s life is a slur on his memory. But it has also been praised as a frank retelling of a complex man’s life.
Either way, it will still keep Bourdain firmly in the spotlight – something that he perhaps once sought but came to hate.
Some are in uproar about the book “as if it was their job now to protect him and remember him in an artificial way”, Leerhsen says. “There’s a self-righteousness about that, but if you’re curious about Anthony Bourdain, here’s a book.” (...)
The objections center around the publication of intimate details, text messages and last words that offer harrowing insights into Bourdain’s final days in which a collision occurred between conflicting interior and exterior lives that, at 62, he no longer had strength to address.
“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Bourdain wrote to his estranged wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, with whom he remained close, shortly before he took his life. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”
“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Bourdain wrote to his estranged wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, with whom he remained close, shortly before he took his life. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”
In the prelude to Down and Out, Leerhsen writes that Bourdain knew when he started out in television that he didn’t want to become a creature of it. “Here’s my pitch,” he said to a cable executive. “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”
“That turned out to be a winning formula, and it left Tony with the distinct impression that, as he more than once said, ‘not giving a shit is a really fantastic business model for television’,” Leerhsen writes.
At the height of his career, Bourdain was traveling 250 days a year, visiting far-off lands, meeting folks, and eating all manner of unusual food. His screen presence was compelling: Bourdain became an unconventional TV star traversing the world in a quest for adventure that, at its core, was as old as the Odyssey.
“It’s an age-old story of being careful what you wish for, of dealing with success and love in oceanic proportions,” Leerhsen says.
When success came, he says, Bourdain was considered about it. “But he became someone that he hated. By the time he realized that, he was too physically exhausted to straighten things out. He thought it simpler to seek what is famously called ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem’.”
“That turned out to be a winning formula, and it left Tony with the distinct impression that, as he more than once said, ‘not giving a shit is a really fantastic business model for television’,” Leerhsen writes.
At the height of his career, Bourdain was traveling 250 days a year, visiting far-off lands, meeting folks, and eating all manner of unusual food. His screen presence was compelling: Bourdain became an unconventional TV star traversing the world in a quest for adventure that, at its core, was as old as the Odyssey.
“It’s an age-old story of being careful what you wish for, of dealing with success and love in oceanic proportions,” Leerhsen says.
When success came, he says, Bourdain was considered about it. “But he became someone that he hated. By the time he realized that, he was too physically exhausted to straighten things out. He thought it simpler to seek what is famously called ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem’.”
by Edward Helmore, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Naashon Zalk/AP
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Dr. James Giordano: The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future
[ed. Sounds creepily sociopathic to me, but you decide. I couldn't watch this for long. If this is what we're teaching our military these days we're (and they're) in deep trouble.
"... the more we know about the brain, the more you can develop ever more selective agents to affect the structures and functions of the brain in cognition, emotions, and actions, and the more we can do so in a way that's more like sharpshooting, rather than buckshot...But unless we're able to deliver the drugs to a particular site in the body or the nervous system they can have heterogenaity of effects throughout the body, and that can lead us to some undesirable outcomes. But we don't have to be limited to drugs...no no no... we can also use a variety of computational brain machine interfaces that are both closed and openloop and these include things like transcranial magnetic and electrical stimulation, stimulating the vagus nerve transdermally, or if you wanted to get somewhat more invasive, but certainly more specific, brain machine interfaces by virtue of deep brain and superficial brain implants." (25:50 - 26:45)]
Facebook Scrambles to Escape Stock’s Death Spiral
As users flee, sales drop
A year ago, before Facebook had turned Meta, the social media company was sporting a market cap of $1 trillion, putting it in rarefied territory with a handful of U.S. technology giants.
Today the view looks much different. Meta has lost about two-thirds of its value since peaking in September 2021. The stock is trading at its lowest since January 2019 and is about to close out its third straight quarter of double-digit percentage losses. Only four stocks in the S&P 500 are having a worse year.
Facebook's business was built on network effects — users brought their friends and family members, who told their colleagues, who invited their buddies. Suddenly everyone was convening in one place. Advertisers followed, and the company's ensuing profits — and they were plentiful — provided the capital to recruit the best and brightest engineers to keep the cycle going.
But in 2022, the cycle has reversed. Users are jumping ship and advertisers are reducing their spending, leaving Meta poised to report its second straight drop in quarterly revenue. Businesses are removing Facebook's once-ubiquitous social login button from their websites. Recruiting is an emerging challenge, especially as founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spends much of his time proselytizing the metaverse, which may be the company's future but accounts for virtually none of its near-term revenue and is costing billions of dollars a year to build.
Zuckerberg said he hopes that within the next decade, the metaverse "will reach a billion people" and "host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce." He told CNBC's Jim Cramer in June that the "North Star" is to reach those sorts of figures by the end of the decade and create a "massive economy" around digital goods.
Investors aren't enthusiastic about it, and the way they're dumping the stock has some observers questioning if the downward pressure is actually a death spiral from which Meta can't recover.
"I'm not sure there's a core business that works anymore at Facebook," said Laura Martin of Needham, the only analyst among the 45 tracked by FactSet with a sell rating on the stock.
Nobody is suggesting that Facebook is at risk of going out of business. The company still has a dominant position in mobile advertising and has one of the most profitable business models on the planet. Even with a 36% drop in net income in the latest quarter from the prior year, Meta generated $6.7 billion in profit and ended the period with over $40 billion in cash and marketable securities.
The Wall Street problem for Facebook is that it's no longer a growth story. Up until this year, that's the only thing it's known. The company's slowest year for revenue growth was the pandemic year of 2020, when it still expanded 22%. Analysts this year are predicting a revenue drop. (...)
Sales growth is expected to hover in the single digits for the first half of 2023, before ticking back up. But even that bet carries risks. The next generation, as Bondy describes it, is now moving over to TikTok, where users can create and view short, viral videos rather than scrolling past political rants from distant relatives with whom they mistakenly connected on Facebook.
Meta has been trying to mimic TikTok's success with its short video offering called Reels, which has been a major focus across Facebook and Instagram. Meta plans to increase the amount of algorithmically recommended short videos in users' Instagram feeds from 15% to 30%, and Bondy speculates the company will likely "get tremendous revenue flow from that" algorithmic shift.
However, Facebook acknowledges it's early days for monetizing Reels, and it's not yet clear how well the format works for advertisers. TikTok's business remains opaque because the company is privately held and owned by China's ByteDance. (...)
Skeptics such as Martin see Facebook pushing users away from the core news feed, where it makes tons of cash, and toward Reels, where the model is unproven. Martin says Zuckerberg must know something important about where the business is headed.
"He wouldn't be hurting its revenue at the same time he needs more money, unless he felt like the core business wasn't strong enough to stand alone," Martin said. "He must feel he has to try to move his viewership to Reels to compete with TikTok."
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
Zuckerberg has at least one major reason for concern beyond just stalled user growth and a slowing economy: Apple.
by Jonathan Vanian, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
Today the view looks much different. Meta has lost about two-thirds of its value since peaking in September 2021. The stock is trading at its lowest since January 2019 and is about to close out its third straight quarter of double-digit percentage losses. Only four stocks in the S&P 500 are having a worse year.
Facebook's business was built on network effects — users brought their friends and family members, who told their colleagues, who invited their buddies. Suddenly everyone was convening in one place. Advertisers followed, and the company's ensuing profits — and they were plentiful — provided the capital to recruit the best and brightest engineers to keep the cycle going.
Zuckerberg said he hopes that within the next decade, the metaverse "will reach a billion people" and "host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce." He told CNBC's Jim Cramer in June that the "North Star" is to reach those sorts of figures by the end of the decade and create a "massive economy" around digital goods.
Investors aren't enthusiastic about it, and the way they're dumping the stock has some observers questioning if the downward pressure is actually a death spiral from which Meta can't recover.
"I'm not sure there's a core business that works anymore at Facebook," said Laura Martin of Needham, the only analyst among the 45 tracked by FactSet with a sell rating on the stock.
Nobody is suggesting that Facebook is at risk of going out of business. The company still has a dominant position in mobile advertising and has one of the most profitable business models on the planet. Even with a 36% drop in net income in the latest quarter from the prior year, Meta generated $6.7 billion in profit and ended the period with over $40 billion in cash and marketable securities.
The Wall Street problem for Facebook is that it's no longer a growth story. Up until this year, that's the only thing it's known. The company's slowest year for revenue growth was the pandemic year of 2020, when it still expanded 22%. Analysts this year are predicting a revenue drop. (...)
Sales growth is expected to hover in the single digits for the first half of 2023, before ticking back up. But even that bet carries risks. The next generation, as Bondy describes it, is now moving over to TikTok, where users can create and view short, viral videos rather than scrolling past political rants from distant relatives with whom they mistakenly connected on Facebook.
Meta has been trying to mimic TikTok's success with its short video offering called Reels, which has been a major focus across Facebook and Instagram. Meta plans to increase the amount of algorithmically recommended short videos in users' Instagram feeds from 15% to 30%, and Bondy speculates the company will likely "get tremendous revenue flow from that" algorithmic shift.
However, Facebook acknowledges it's early days for monetizing Reels, and it's not yet clear how well the format works for advertisers. TikTok's business remains opaque because the company is privately held and owned by China's ByteDance. (...)
Skeptics such as Martin see Facebook pushing users away from the core news feed, where it makes tons of cash, and toward Reels, where the model is unproven. Martin says Zuckerberg must know something important about where the business is headed.
"He wouldn't be hurting its revenue at the same time he needs more money, unless he felt like the core business wasn't strong enough to stand alone," Martin said. "He must feel he has to try to move his viewership to Reels to compete with TikTok."
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
Zuckerberg has at least one major reason for concern beyond just stalled user growth and a slowing economy: Apple.
by Jonathan Vanian, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
[ed. Let's all help FB spiral into insignificance sooner rather than later. See also: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (The Atlantic).]
Johnson & Johnson and a New War on Consumer Protection
Johnson & Johnson is one of America’s most trusted companies, and as Berg moved through her cycles of chemotherapy she kept thinking about a slogan for its body powder: “A sprinkle a day helps keep odor away.” For more than thirty years, she had taken that advice, applying the powder between her legs to prevent chafing. But that powder wasn’t like her chemo drugs: their side effects were awful, but they were keeping her alive. The powder felt, instead, like an unnecessary gamble, one she thought other people should be warned about.
All along, Berg had worried about her daughters—not only how they’d fare if she died but whether her diagnosis meant they had a greater inherited risk of cancer. In 2007, to find out, she underwent genetic testing and learned that she had neither of the two main mutations that increase the odds of developing reproductive cancers. Two years later, she had her ovarian tissue tested, and the pathologist found talc in one ovary. Shortly afterward, with her cancer in remission, she decided to sue, in what became the first baby-powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson to ever make it to trial.
Almost every American, from nursery to deathbed, uses Johnson & Johnson products: baby shampoo, Band-Aids, Neosporin, Rogaine, and O.B. tampons; Tylenol, Imodium, Motrin, and Zyrtec; Listerine mouthwash and Nicorette gum; Aveeno lotion and Neutrogena cleanser; catheters and stents for the heart; balloons for dilating the ear, nose, and throat; hemostats and staples; ankle, hip, shoulder, and knee replacements; breast implants; Acuvue contact lenses. But what few of those consumers grasped until a series of baby-powder cases began to go to trial was that, for decades, the company had known that its powders could contain asbestos, among the world’s deadliest carcinogens.
Slippery to the touch and soft enough to flake with your fingernail, the mineral talc is found all around the world, in deposits that can be more than a billion years old. Such deposits are sometimes laced with actinolite, anthophyllite, chrysotile, and tremolite. These accessory minerals, better known in their fibrous form as asbestos, grow alongside talc like weeds in a geological garden. As early as 1971, Johnson & Johnson scientists had become aware of reports about asbestos in talc. They and others also worried about a connection between cancer and talc itself, whether or not it contained asbestos. By the time of Berg’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had designated talc containing fibrous particles a carcinogen and the genital application of any talc powder possibly carcinogenic. The F.D.A. had safety concerns, too, but its authority over products like baby powder was and remains, in the words of Ann Witt, a former senior official at the agency, “so minimal it’s laughable.”
Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 investigation by Bloomberg and subsequent revelations by Reuters and the New York Times, based in part on documents that surfaced because of discovery in suits like Berg’s, exposed the possible health risk related to its powders. Following those reports, tens of thousands of people filed suits against the company, alleging that its products had caused their cancers. In 2020, after juries awarded some of those plaintiffs damages that collectively exceeded billions of dollars, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would no longer supply the talc-based version of its product to American stores.
And then, quietly, the company embraced a strategy to circumvent juries entirely. Deploying a legal maneuver first used by Koch Industries, Johnson & Johnson, a company valued at nearly half a trillion dollars, with a credit rating higher than that of the United States government, declared bankruptcy. Because of that move, the fate of forty thousand current lawsuits and the possibility of future claims by cancer victims or their survivors now rests with a single bankruptcy judge in the company’s home state, New Jersey. If Johnson & Johnson prevails and, as Berg puts it, “weasels its way out of everything,” the case could usher in a new era in which the government has diminished power to enforce consumer-protection laws, citizens don’t get to make their case before a jury of their peers when those laws fail, and even corporations with long histories of documented harm will get to decide how much, if anything, they owe their victims.
All along, Berg had worried about her daughters—not only how they’d fare if she died but whether her diagnosis meant they had a greater inherited risk of cancer. In 2007, to find out, she underwent genetic testing and learned that she had neither of the two main mutations that increase the odds of developing reproductive cancers. Two years later, she had her ovarian tissue tested, and the pathologist found talc in one ovary. Shortly afterward, with her cancer in remission, she decided to sue, in what became the first baby-powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson to ever make it to trial.
Slippery to the touch and soft enough to flake with your fingernail, the mineral talc is found all around the world, in deposits that can be more than a billion years old. Such deposits are sometimes laced with actinolite, anthophyllite, chrysotile, and tremolite. These accessory minerals, better known in their fibrous form as asbestos, grow alongside talc like weeds in a geological garden. As early as 1971, Johnson & Johnson scientists had become aware of reports about asbestos in talc. They and others also worried about a connection between cancer and talc itself, whether or not it contained asbestos. By the time of Berg’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had designated talc containing fibrous particles a carcinogen and the genital application of any talc powder possibly carcinogenic. The F.D.A. had safety concerns, too, but its authority over products like baby powder was and remains, in the words of Ann Witt, a former senior official at the agency, “so minimal it’s laughable.”
Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 investigation by Bloomberg and subsequent revelations by Reuters and the New York Times, based in part on documents that surfaced because of discovery in suits like Berg’s, exposed the possible health risk related to its powders. Following those reports, tens of thousands of people filed suits against the company, alleging that its products had caused their cancers. In 2020, after juries awarded some of those plaintiffs damages that collectively exceeded billions of dollars, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would no longer supply the talc-based version of its product to American stores.
And then, quietly, the company embraced a strategy to circumvent juries entirely. Deploying a legal maneuver first used by Koch Industries, Johnson & Johnson, a company valued at nearly half a trillion dollars, with a credit rating higher than that of the United States government, declared bankruptcy. Because of that move, the fate of forty thousand current lawsuits and the possibility of future claims by cancer victims or their survivors now rests with a single bankruptcy judge in the company’s home state, New Jersey. If Johnson & Johnson prevails and, as Berg puts it, “weasels its way out of everything,” the case could usher in a new era in which the government has diminished power to enforce consumer-protection laws, citizens don’t get to make their case before a jury of their peers when those laws fail, and even corporations with long histories of documented harm will get to decide how much, if anything, they owe their victims.
by Casey Cep, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Na Kim
Thursday, September 29, 2022
In the Ocean’s Twilight Zone, a Fish That Could Feed the World – or Destroy It
They are lanternfish: there are about 250 species and they are not only the most common fish in the oceans’ twilight zone but the most abundant vertebrates on the planet. Huge numbers were first noticed during the second world war, when naval sonar operators saw echoes from what appeared to be a solid seabed, one that rose to the surface at night and fell back down at daybreak. In fact, the pulses of sound were echoing off the swim bladders – the internal gas-filled bubbles – of billions of lanternfish, as they congregated in dense layers hiding in the deep, then at sunset swam up thousands of metres to feed at the surface. Every night, along with other animals, such as the squid that prey on them, lanternfish undergo the greatest animal migration on the planet.
Before the 2010 Malaspina expedition, studies based on trawl surveys estimated that the twilight zone contains about a gigatonne (1bn tonnes) of fish. But this was most likely an underestimate, it turns out, because lanternfish avoid being caught by swimming away from the open nets. The Malaspina acoustic survey did not rely on nets, and in 2014 its research led to new estimates of the abundance of twilight-zone fish, ranging between 10 and 20 gigatonnes.
The prospect of such a colossal harvest raised an old question: could fish from the twilight zone help to feed a growing human population? (...)
Climate consequences
In contrast to extremely slow-growing deep-sea species such as orange roughy, lanternfish are more likely to withstand substantial hunting pressure; they are much faster growing, and their lives are measured in months, some living for less than two years. Nevertheless, fishing in the twilight zone could trigger a different kind of catastrophe by disrupting the way lanternfish and similar species help regulate the climate.
Their daily routine of swimming up and down forms vital connections between the surface and the deep by boosting the “particle injection pumps”. This is the process of little fish feeding in the shallows, then plunging downwards, where they are eaten by bigger fish that remain in the deep, thereby “pumping” carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the deep ocean where it can be stored. If particles sink below 1,000 metres their carbon can be stored for up to 1,000 years before returning to the surface. A study of the continental slope off western Ireland estimated that deep-dwelling fish capture and store the equivalent of 1m tonnes of CO2 a year.
by Helen Scales, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Morgan Trimble/Alamy
Librium Liz
First, an apology. I should never have christened Theresa May “the Maybot”. With hindsight, she appears positively emotionally present. Touchy-feely. Almost functional. If not entirely competent. Certainly not the 1980s piece of Amstrad junk she always seemed when she was running the country. If you can call it that.
But the Tories are just playing with us. It’s as if the members said: “So you think David Cameron is useless? Just wait until we give you Theresa.” And once we’d all had about enough of May, they gave us a narcissistic, sociopathic liar instead.
Now, to top it all – at least we hope so; surely there can’t be another one who is even worse? – we’ve been landed with Liz Truss. Someone who is not just half-witted and robotic, but reckless enough to bankrupt the country. The ideologue with only a tenuous grasp on reality. There’s always a job waiting for Truss in an automated call centre: a deathless loop that sucks the life out of you.
I’m not sure who was stupid enough to suggest starting the reclusive prime minister’s media rehabilitation with a tour of the BBC regional radio studios, but they won’t be doing it again in a hurry. If they thought they were going to ease Librium Liz out of her week-long hibernation with a series of short, “lifestyle” interviews – think author flogging new book on PR junket – that would reach a smallish, local audience and fly beneath the national media, then they badly miscalculated. Local radio presenters are no mugs and they weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Inevitably, they all mainly asked the same questions. After all, there really is only one game in town. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Didn’t it occur to you that your mindless mini-budget could wipe £500bn off the markets, putting pensions at risk and increasing the cost of borrowing? Thanks very much for the £100 or so tax cut that the least well-off will be getting, but did you know that you’ve just made most people even more broke?
But there was a virtue in hearing the same question asked on eight separate occasions. Because it reinforced the key message that Librium Liz doesn’t have any coherent answers. She really didn’t seem to have any idea of the scale of the damage she had done. She was in total denial. Like an arsonist caught with a can of petrol.
It also said much about Truss’s limited capacity for rational thinking. Most artificial intelligence is programmed to learn from its mistakes. So you’d have thought she would have got better and better as the hour went on – that she might even have sounded half human and half intelligent by the time she came off air.
Only she didn’t. She got worse and worse. Out came the same absurd answers, and the pauses as she tried to think of something credible got longer and longer. She is the embodiment of the circle of doom on a laptop that’s crashing. She is not AI. She is Artificial Stupidity, programmed to carry on repeating more and more errors until she collapses in on herself. A dead cert to win this year’s Darwin awards for those who have contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Wire Truss up to an ECG and you’d find no activity. Just a flat line. (...)
Detached, emotionally dead, intellectually wanting. Careless with other people’s lives. Not even curious to find out how people were experiencing her calamity economics. The dead-air silences became so long I presumed she was trying to communicate by telepathy.
[ed. I know next to nothing about British politics, but this seems bad indeed. See also: Liz Truss to hold emergency talks with OBR after failing to calm markets (The Guardian). Update: Kamikwasi Kwarteng delivers his excruciating career suicide note (John Crace -The Guardian.]
But the Tories are just playing with us. It’s as if the members said: “So you think David Cameron is useless? Just wait until we give you Theresa.” And once we’d all had about enough of May, they gave us a narcissistic, sociopathic liar instead.
Now, to top it all – at least we hope so; surely there can’t be another one who is even worse? – we’ve been landed with Liz Truss. Someone who is not just half-witted and robotic, but reckless enough to bankrupt the country. The ideologue with only a tenuous grasp on reality. There’s always a job waiting for Truss in an automated call centre: a deathless loop that sucks the life out of you.
Inevitably, they all mainly asked the same questions. After all, there really is only one game in town. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Didn’t it occur to you that your mindless mini-budget could wipe £500bn off the markets, putting pensions at risk and increasing the cost of borrowing? Thanks very much for the £100 or so tax cut that the least well-off will be getting, but did you know that you’ve just made most people even more broke?
But there was a virtue in hearing the same question asked on eight separate occasions. Because it reinforced the key message that Librium Liz doesn’t have any coherent answers. She really didn’t seem to have any idea of the scale of the damage she had done. She was in total denial. Like an arsonist caught with a can of petrol.
It also said much about Truss’s limited capacity for rational thinking. Most artificial intelligence is programmed to learn from its mistakes. So you’d have thought she would have got better and better as the hour went on – that she might even have sounded half human and half intelligent by the time she came off air.
Only she didn’t. She got worse and worse. Out came the same absurd answers, and the pauses as she tried to think of something credible got longer and longer. She is the embodiment of the circle of doom on a laptop that’s crashing. She is not AI. She is Artificial Stupidity, programmed to carry on repeating more and more errors until she collapses in on herself. A dead cert to win this year’s Darwin awards for those who have contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Wire Truss up to an ECG and you’d find no activity. Just a flat line. (...)
Detached, emotionally dead, intellectually wanting. Careless with other people’s lives. Not even curious to find out how people were experiencing her calamity economics. The dead-air silences became so long I presumed she was trying to communicate by telepathy.
by John Crace, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Hannah McKay/Reuters[ed. I know next to nothing about British politics, but this seems bad indeed. See also: Liz Truss to hold emergency talks with OBR after failing to calm markets (The Guardian). Update: Kamikwasi Kwarteng delivers his excruciating career suicide note (John Crace -The Guardian.]
Who Gave The Battery Such Power?
In December, Serbian citizens took to the streets against a planned mine in the farming hills of the country’s west — their biggest protest since the toppling of the country’s genocidal dictator more than 20 years before. Across the country, protesters held banners reading “Serbia is not for sale” and chanted against the reigning political party.
But there was a green veneer to this project: The company developing the mine, Rio Tinto, declared that it could supply enough lithium to Europe to build one million electric vehicles a year. Australia and Chile held tight control of the majority of the market, but if this project got underway, it could spread the benefits of mining for a crucial element in the clean energy revolution to a country lambasted for its horrendous air pollution. Lithium would end up in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy grid storage. Serbian citizens, this narrative held, were sitting aimlessly on the poster mineral for the energy transition. The citizen protest grew over the course of more than a year, until the prime minister suspended the project, awaiting the results of a national election.
News media quickly distilled this as a conflict between the benefits of clean batteries and the rights of people who live on top of the materials needed to create them. The paradox is tempting, offering intractability and sensation, cannon fodder for all forms of environmentalists and their opponents. This summer, the conversation matured into three new books that, read together and against the grain, reveal that the more important question is: How did we get here?
This mining-climate tension has been showing up on ballots all over the world. In Peru and Ecuador, which have been called copper’s final frontier, mining was a central topic in national elections. In Chile, the top producer of copper, citizens voted to transform the country with a socialist government which is overseeing a convention to rewrite the entire constitution, the first in the context of the climate crisis (voters recently rejected the first draft). In Greenland, a tale of two mining companies shaped an election that saw anti-uranium voters triumph. In Bolivia, voters twice re-elected the incumbent party, which accused foreign powers of meddling with its lithium.
As was the case with those other votes, the Serbian protests were about much more than a mine. They were about the rule of law, and citizens’ ability to decide what happened on their land. Experts described contaminated water sources across the Balkan region. Farmers had been pressured into selling off their land. Regulations were sidestepped behind closed doors. The reigning political party had sealed off access to many news channels, and citizens were frustrated with hearing monotonous political rhetoric from a powerful minority.
Savo Manojlovic, a lawyer who had become an outspoken organizer in the protests, didn’t know much about environmentalism when he started. The year before, he was leading legal challenges to the destruction of a city park. Citizens wanted the park, he told me, and why shouldn’t they decide what happens next to their own front doors?
But what happens when the world also has something at stake? Should a mine be built upstream from your water source if it means preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperatures? And, more importantly, who is allowed to answer that question?
For better or worse, the World Bank Group had already begun answering it in 2017. In order to provide for a clean energy future, lithium companies would need to churn out roughly ten times normal production every year until 2050. In 2020, the estimate was reduced, but it still saw that meeting the most ambitious climate goals would require 3.5 billion tons of metal, or roughly the total production of all metals for all uses in 2020. That budget includes the materials needed to create renewable energy plants and batteries to store that energy. They don’t include the associated infrastructure, like roads, power lines, or car frames. They don’t include construction materials like cement. They don’t include mine waste, which comprises the majority of a mine’s product, because metals are just a small portion of ore.
Wielding reports like this from financial institutions and business consultancies, mining companies declared their time had come. Mining billionaire Robert Friedland — who once earned the nickname “Toxic Bob” after a waste spill at one of his mines — joked to potential investors that the energy transition was the “Revenge of the Miners.” Though Green New Deal activists who paint them as the bad guys might not admit it, mining companies would now be the ones to save the day — and, he added, they would need a lot of money to do it.
James Morton Turner, author of “Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future,” comes to a similar conclusion: Environmentalists, the very same who have championed a clean, just future for the U.S., haven’t really considered that their beloved world-saving technologies will need to begin as rocks in the ground somewhere, and likely not in an area with the same level of wealth as they have. Mining is necessary, Turner argues, and we need to find ways to support it, whether by subsidizing mining companies or creating regulatory incentives that encourage mining.
Turner, an environmental historian at Wellesley College, builds his argument by assessing the journey that batteries — lead-acid, AA, and lithium-ion — took to arrive in the present. He finds, counterintuitively, that the battery-powered future contains much more “past” than it does “future.”
[ed. Good intentions gone bad.]
But there was a green veneer to this project: The company developing the mine, Rio Tinto, declared that it could supply enough lithium to Europe to build one million electric vehicles a year. Australia and Chile held tight control of the majority of the market, but if this project got underway, it could spread the benefits of mining for a crucial element in the clean energy revolution to a country lambasted for its horrendous air pollution. Lithium would end up in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy grid storage. Serbian citizens, this narrative held, were sitting aimlessly on the poster mineral for the energy transition. The citizen protest grew over the course of more than a year, until the prime minister suspended the project, awaiting the results of a national election.
News media quickly distilled this as a conflict between the benefits of clean batteries and the rights of people who live on top of the materials needed to create them. The paradox is tempting, offering intractability and sensation, cannon fodder for all forms of environmentalists and their opponents. This summer, the conversation matured into three new books that, read together and against the grain, reveal that the more important question is: How did we get here?
As was the case with those other votes, the Serbian protests were about much more than a mine. They were about the rule of law, and citizens’ ability to decide what happened on their land. Experts described contaminated water sources across the Balkan region. Farmers had been pressured into selling off their land. Regulations were sidestepped behind closed doors. The reigning political party had sealed off access to many news channels, and citizens were frustrated with hearing monotonous political rhetoric from a powerful minority.
Savo Manojlovic, a lawyer who had become an outspoken organizer in the protests, didn’t know much about environmentalism when he started. The year before, he was leading legal challenges to the destruction of a city park. Citizens wanted the park, he told me, and why shouldn’t they decide what happens next to their own front doors?
But what happens when the world also has something at stake? Should a mine be built upstream from your water source if it means preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperatures? And, more importantly, who is allowed to answer that question?
For better or worse, the World Bank Group had already begun answering it in 2017. In order to provide for a clean energy future, lithium companies would need to churn out roughly ten times normal production every year until 2050. In 2020, the estimate was reduced, but it still saw that meeting the most ambitious climate goals would require 3.5 billion tons of metal, or roughly the total production of all metals for all uses in 2020. That budget includes the materials needed to create renewable energy plants and batteries to store that energy. They don’t include the associated infrastructure, like roads, power lines, or car frames. They don’t include construction materials like cement. They don’t include mine waste, which comprises the majority of a mine’s product, because metals are just a small portion of ore.
Wielding reports like this from financial institutions and business consultancies, mining companies declared their time had come. Mining billionaire Robert Friedland — who once earned the nickname “Toxic Bob” after a waste spill at one of his mines — joked to potential investors that the energy transition was the “Revenge of the Miners.” Though Green New Deal activists who paint them as the bad guys might not admit it, mining companies would now be the ones to save the day — and, he added, they would need a lot of money to do it.
James Morton Turner, author of “Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future,” comes to a similar conclusion: Environmentalists, the very same who have championed a clean, just future for the U.S., haven’t really considered that their beloved world-saving technologies will need to begin as rocks in the ground somewhere, and likely not in an area with the same level of wealth as they have. Mining is necessary, Turner argues, and we need to find ways to support it, whether by subsidizing mining companies or creating regulatory incentives that encourage mining.
Turner, an environmental historian at Wellesley College, builds his argument by assessing the journey that batteries — lead-acid, AA, and lithium-ion — took to arrive in the present. He finds, counterintuitively, that the battery-powered future contains much more “past” than it does “future.”
by Ian Morse, Noema | Read more:
Image: Valentin Tkach for Noema Magazine
The Most Important Question About Addiction
Despite rising overdose deaths, there’s some important good news regarding opioid misuse. Rates of nonmedical use by high school seniors have fallen by nearly 83 percent since 2002, when 14 percent reported having ever tried using prescription pain pills to get high. By 2021, that proportion was down to just 2 percent. Heroin use also shows a precipitous drop, with only 0.4 percent of 12th graders reporting trying it as of 2021.
This is especially welcome news because teen use is an excellent predictor of the course of drug epidemics: The vast majority of addictions start in late adolescence or early adulthood. Since the deadliest opioids like fentanyl are most often sold in the guise of prescription pain pills or heroin, this bodes well for reductions in overdose deaths.
But to translate this positive change into lasting reductions in addiction and overdoses, it’s important to understand how drug use patterns change over time and not view them solely as isolated crises related to specific substances.
The story of crack cocaine shows what can happen when the underlying causes of a drug crisis are ignored. (...)
Today, with youth opioid use falling, America may be at another inflection point. “Quite often, drug epidemics follow a classic curve,” said Samuel K. Roberts, an associate professor of history and of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, describing how they seem to start slowly, spike and then fall.
One reason for this pattern may be the rising visibility of harm associated with use, both in the media and, probably more important, among family and friends. “What makes it subside is usually a number of things,” said Dr. Roberts, “but one of them is often that the negative perception of a particular drug will take off.”
That seems to be happening with opioids now, given the extraordinarily high death rate. There is no fentanyl chic; the drug is publicly associated with sudden death, homelessness and skin infections, not fun. (...)
Just like youths in the crack era, however, this doesn’t mean young people aren’t doing other drugs. There’s a phenomenon known as generational forgetting, originally identified by Lloyd Johnston, who led the largest national survey on drug use among youths for the past 43 years. The idea is that young people often avoid the drug that is currently the most feared. But since they have little experience with those that were popular earlier, they are less aware of their potential dangers.
This results in a broadly defined cycle in which, roughly every 10 to 15 years, a different drug epidemic appears. Heroin, for example, was the demon drug of the 1970s, crack in the 1980s, heroin again in the 1990s, methamphetamine in the 2000s, prescription opioids in the 2010s and now fentanyl and other opioids that are being sold as heroin. By seeing and covering each crisis as being caused by a particular substance — without understanding why addiction persists — we miss the opportunity to use policy to reduce related harm.
by Maia Szalavitz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Teun Voeten/Panos Pictures, via Redux[ed. See also: Principles of Harm Reduction (Nat. Harm Reduction Coalition), and these articles about Ms Szalavit's efforts to change current drug policy: “Undoing Drugs”—Maia Szalavitz’s Profound History of Harm Reduction (Filter); and, "On Drugs and Harm Reduction with Maia Szalavitz" (JSTOR Daily).]
This is especially welcome news because teen use is an excellent predictor of the course of drug epidemics: The vast majority of addictions start in late adolescence or early adulthood. Since the deadliest opioids like fentanyl are most often sold in the guise of prescription pain pills or heroin, this bodes well for reductions in overdose deaths.
The story of crack cocaine shows what can happen when the underlying causes of a drug crisis are ignored. (...)
Today, with youth opioid use falling, America may be at another inflection point. “Quite often, drug epidemics follow a classic curve,” said Samuel K. Roberts, an associate professor of history and of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, describing how they seem to start slowly, spike and then fall.
One reason for this pattern may be the rising visibility of harm associated with use, both in the media and, probably more important, among family and friends. “What makes it subside is usually a number of things,” said Dr. Roberts, “but one of them is often that the negative perception of a particular drug will take off.”
That seems to be happening with opioids now, given the extraordinarily high death rate. There is no fentanyl chic; the drug is publicly associated with sudden death, homelessness and skin infections, not fun. (...)
Just like youths in the crack era, however, this doesn’t mean young people aren’t doing other drugs. There’s a phenomenon known as generational forgetting, originally identified by Lloyd Johnston, who led the largest national survey on drug use among youths for the past 43 years. The idea is that young people often avoid the drug that is currently the most feared. But since they have little experience with those that were popular earlier, they are less aware of their potential dangers.
This results in a broadly defined cycle in which, roughly every 10 to 15 years, a different drug epidemic appears. Heroin, for example, was the demon drug of the 1970s, crack in the 1980s, heroin again in the 1990s, methamphetamine in the 2000s, prescription opioids in the 2010s and now fentanyl and other opioids that are being sold as heroin. By seeing and covering each crisis as being caused by a particular substance — without understanding why addiction persists — we miss the opportunity to use policy to reduce related harm.
by Maia Szalavitz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Teun Voeten/Panos Pictures, via Redux
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Beck
[ed. Nice guitar work. See also: Neil Young Appears to Rebuke Beck’s NFL-Sponsored “Old Man” Cover (Pitchfork). Too bad old man, you sold your catalog (for big bucks). But, maybe he's just stoking controversy to gin up royalty payments (which he still might receive). Everybody has an angle these days.]
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