Jane Fonda: ‘I'm Very Rarely Afraid. Maybe Emotional Intimacy Scares Me’

When Jane Fonda was arrested in Washington DC last December, days shy of her 82nd birthday, there was an overwhelming sense of history repeating, and not just because this was the fifth time she had been arrested in almost as many weeks. Fonda was taking part in her very public – and ongoing, albeit now online – protest against what she sees as the US government’s criminal inertia over the climate crisis. When he heard about Fonda’s arrests, President Donald Trump crowed to a rally: “They arrested Jane Fonda – nothing changes! I remember 30, 40 years ago they arrested her. She’s always got the handcuffs on, oh man.”

Trump was partially right, although he underestimated the time. Fonda was first arrested in 1970; half a century later she is still protesting, still being arrested and still being mocked by US presidents. On Richard Nixon’s notorious White House tapes, he can be heard discussing Fonda in 1971, dismissing her even more public protests against US involvement in the Vietnam war. “Jane Fonda. What in the world is the matter with Jane Fonda?” he said. “I feel so sorry for Henry Fonda, who’s a nice man. She’s a great actress. She looks pretty. But boy, she’s often on the wrong track.” Less than a year later, Nixon would be taped plotting the Watergate cover-up. Someone should tell Trump that Fonda has an excellent track record of winning the long game, and that her critics don’t.

Still, being derided by the most powerful people on the planet must take some getting used to. Does Fonda ever feel scared?

“The fear part – I don’t know why this is true, but I am very rarely afraid. I’ve been in all kinds of situations: I’ve been shot at, I’ve had bombs dropped on me; but I tend not to be afraid. Maybe emotional intimacy scares me. That’s where my fear lives,” she says from her home in Los Angeles, with a self-mocking laugh. (...)

She has won two Oscars (for Klute and Coming Home), but Fonda’s extraordinary life has, for many, long overshadowed her career. To some, she will for ever be Hanoi Jane; for others, she is the queen of aerobics. To this day, Jane Fonda’s Workout remains one of the biggest-selling home videos ever. But Fonda only made it to raise money for the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), the non-profit organisation she ran with her second husband, the radical left-wing firebrand Tom Hayden. Wealthy housewives doing pelvic thrusts to the Workout had no idea they were contributing to a cause that wasn’t a million miles from socialism, and Fonda raised more than $17m for the CED. (In classic man-of-the-left style, Hayden occasionally made “disparaging remarks” about the Workout. “I would just think, OK, I’m vain. [But] where else would you have got $17m?” Fonda writes in her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far.)

As if to prove how little things change, during lockdown Fonda has been making workout TikToks to raise awareness of her environmental protests, still exercising for activism at 82. “It’s fun and it attracts a younger demographic, doing TikTok,” she says, with the breeziness of one fully fluent in social media. (...)

While it is easy to mock celebrity activism, no one can doubt Fonda’s bona fides; she has been shouting about the environment since the 1960s, after learning that car emissions damaged the atmosphere. But why keep doing it? Why endure prison with its metal slab of a bed (“I’m quite bony, so that was painful,” she admits) instead of enjoying a nice, quiet life in her ninth decade?

“Oh my God, for my own sanity! Last year, I was going insane, I was so depressed, knowing things were falling apart and I wasn’t doing enough. Once I decided what to do, all that dropped away,” she says. (...)

As an adult, Fonda swapped one dominating male figure for three: her husbands. When she was with the film director Roger Vadim, who was previously married to Brigitte Bardot, she became a Bardot-esque sex kitten in Barbarella and engaged in threesomes with him, eventually leaving him after the birth of their daughter, Vanessa. Married to Hayden, she took to the barricades with him. When she married media mogul Ted Turner in 1991, she swapped her off-grid life for that of a billionaire’s wife.

“I always wanted to date someone who was the opposite of my father,” she explains. “I didn’t realise that, in the ways that really mattered, I picked men who were just like him because they all had a hard time with intimacy.” (...)

In the past, Fonda has said that she allied herself to strong men because she felt so unsure of herself. But isn’t it more likely that she needed strong people because she is an extraordinarily strong character herself?

“Oh yeah, whenever I’ve been with men who are not strong I’ve had a really hard time,” she agrees. “I’m now five years older than my dad was when he died and I’ve realised that I am, in fact, stronger than he was. I’m stronger than all the men that I’ve been married to.”

by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Tiffany Nicholson
[ed. I've always been fond of Jane. What a full and interesting life. Also, her show with Lily Tomlin is great - Grace and Frankie]

Alaska’s Special House Race Stunned America. Here’s What November Could Bring.

In August, former Democratic state legislator Mary Peltola beat Republican candidate Sarah Palin in Alaska’s special House election to replace the late Republican Rep. Don Young. The win was a stunning upset and a huge victory for Democrats, who haven’t scored a House seat in the state in 50 years. The victory also highlighted a number of idiosyncrasies in Alaska politics — not just the state’s famous independent streak that made many voters choose Peltola over Palin, but also ranked choice voting, which was adopted in 2020 and which many supporters say encourages the election of moderates over more ideological candidates.

Now, a rematch in November for a full two-year term promises to show whether the August results were a fluke or a feature of Alaskans’ preferences and their voting system.

In Alaska’s ranked choice system, the top four vote-getters in an open primary advance to a general election where voters rank the candidates. The fourth-place finisher is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the second-choice candidate of those voters who preferred the fourth-place candidate. The process continues until one candidate gets 50 percent plus one of the votes. Since the process encourages policies and personalities that might win second or third choice among voters, many argue candidates are more likely to pursue middle-of-the-road platforms and act civilly on the campaign trail under a ranked choice system.

As more and more jurisdictions consider ranked choice voting — and as the discussion over how to temper political polarization nationwide remains unresolved — many political observers have wondered whether Alaska is a state that might point the way to a more moderate, more nuanced way of doing politics. Ivan Moore is a longtime Alaska pollster who is considered one of the foremost experts on the state’s politics. And he has some thoughts about what the rest of the country can learn from Alaska, what to watch for in November and what came first: Alaska’s independence, or the state’s ranked choice experiment that allowed those independents to have more of a say.

Moore said he’s not sure if Alaskans are actually all that different from most other voters on the issues, but in one crucial respect, Alaskans are different. “We are less strictly partisan,” he said. “It allows us to more readily embrace nontraditional ideas like ranked choice voting, because it’s like, we think, ‘Well, what the hell, why not? Let’s give it a shot.’”

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ben Jacobs: What happened in Alaska’s recent special House election, what does it say about ranked choice voting in general and whether it’s responsible for Democrats winning the special election?

Ivan Moore: I think it says a few things. Number one, that ranked choice voting worked well. Pretty flawless performance by the Alaska Division of Elections.

I don’t think everyone agrees with that. I gather that national Republicans have been making critical noises as if ranked choice voting was responsible for what happened. But ranked choice voting was not responsible for what happened. Well, obviously, if it had been done under the old system, with late Republican Rep. Don Young having passed away, the parties would have nominated replacements and there would have been a single special election between those nominees.

But when we consider whether ranked choice voting was responsible for Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola being elected, if you look at a traditional primary, Sarah Palin would, in all likelihood, have run away with the Republican primary. … And then a general election between Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola would have looked very similar to what the final ranked choice result was.

So it isn’t some kind of scurrilous result of ranked choice voting that Alaska has elected a Democrat to federal office for the first time [since 2008.]

And then the second thing that we found out is that Sarah Palin is indeed very unpopular. And that’s why she lost. The interesting thing that came out of our poll results in July, was that while she had a 60 percent negative among all voters, she had a 70 percent negative among [Republican candidate] Nick Begich voters. That’s remarkable. And that just goes to show that it isn’t all about partisanship and issues.

You would imagine, correctly, that the great majority of Begich’s voters are Republican and conservative. I actually remember running the results and finding that just over 60 percent of Begich voters were registered Republicans. Very few of them were Democrats, and the rest were nonpartisan/undeclared, but the majority of them were conservative-leaning. People got the message, without any doubts, that he was a conservative Republican. And yet, Sarah Palin was more unpopular amongst that group of voters than she was overall, which is astounding and just goes to show that it’s not all about politics. It’s also about likability and competence and the respect that people have for the candidate. If she does win second place [in November], she will almost certainly lose again. [Because her negative ratings would seem to indicate that she would not get many second- or third-choice votes.]

The third thing that we’re finding out since the primary is that Palin and Begich can’t seem to stop squabbling. And they don’t seem to understand that this is a very bad thing to do, in the context of ranked choice voting. … Do you think that Palin having repeatedly and continually run Begich down and demanded that he get out of the race and calling him “negative Nick” is the kind of thing that will make his people more likely to put her second? And does it make her voters less likely to put him second? I mean, they just kill themselves with this in both directions. And Mary Peltola is sitting there probably rather enjoying the spectacle.

by Ben Jacobs, Politico |  Read more:

Image: POLITICO illustration/iStock

via: uncredited

The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist

The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist (Politico)
Image: Alexander Heilner

"Gulf American unloaded tens of thousands of low-lying Cape Coral lots on dreamseekers all over the world before the authorities cracked down on its frauds and deceptions. It passed off inaccessible mush as prime real estate, sold the same swampy lots to multiple buyers, and used listening devices to spy on its customers. Its hucksters spun a soggy floodplain between the Caloosahatchee River and the Gulf of Mexico as America’s middle-class boomtown of the future, and suckers bought it.

The thing is, the hucksters were right, and so were the suckers. Cape Coral is now the largest city in America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area. Its population has soared from fewer than 200 when the Rasos arrived to 180,000 today. Its low-lying swamps have been drained, thanks to an astonishing 400 miles of canals—the most of any city on earth—that serve not only as the city’s stormwater management system but also its defining real estate amenity. Those ditches were an ecological disaster, ravaging wetlands, estuaries and aquifers. Cape Coral was a planning disaster, too, designed without water or sewer pipes, shops or offices, or almost anything but pre-platted residential lots. But people flocked here anyway. The title of a memoir by a Gulf American secretary captured the essence of Cape Coral: Lies That Came True." (...)

The Rosens’ real innovation was selling Cape Coral as frenetically as they sold their magic hair products. They gave away homes on game shows like “The Price Is Right.” They brought celebrities like Bob Hope and Anita Bryant to promote the dream. They had telemarketers hawking lots with Glengarry Glen Ross-style blarney. They sent sales reps across the ocean—Gloria Raso Tate’s dad pitched paradise in London and Rome—and planted touts at Florida hotels and attractions, luring tourists to free steak dinners interrupted by salesmen shouting, “Lot No. 18 is sold!” and paid ringers, yelling, “I just bought one!” Prospective buyers were offered free stays at the company motel—where rooms were bugged to help salesmen customize their pitches—and taken on company Cessnas for “fly-and-buys” to see lots the pilots reserved by dropping sacks of flour from the sky. Sometimes the fly-and-buyers ended up with marshy lots nowhere near the drained ones where the sacks landed, but for all the fibs and propaganda, Cape Coral really did boom.

“Cape Coral was brilliantly orchestrated and terribly planned,” says Florida historian Gary Mormino, author of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams. “They built an instant city on steroids—with none of the stuff you need to make a city work.”

[ed. See also: Ian will 'financially ruin' homeowners and insurers (Politico)]

MLB: Mariners in Playoffs and a Superstar is Born

Julio Rodriguez’s star power knows no bounds. Now he’s ready to shine in the playoffs. (Seattle Times).

Image: Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
[ed. Go Mariners! First playoff appearance in 21 years. Update: They did it!]

House Prices: 7 Years in Purgatory

Earlier this year, I argued the most likely path for house prices was for nominal prices to “stall”, and for real prices (inflation adjusted) to decline over several years. The arguments for a stall included historically low inventory levels, mostly solid lending over the last decade, and that house prices tend to be sticky downwards.

As I noted, homeowners resist selling for less than the recent sale prices of similar homes in their neighborhood. However, there are always the homeowners that need to sell (death, divorce, moving for employment, etc.), and sometimes these homes will sell for less than previous sales. Note that house prices were not sticky downwards during the housing bust due to the all the forced sales. (...)

10%+ Nominal Price Declines Now Seem Likely

Since national house prices increased very quickly during the pandemic - up over 40% - it seems likely that some of the usual “stickiness” will not apply. I think the most likely scenario now is nominal house prices declining 10% or more from the peak, and real house prices declining 25% or so over the next 5 to 7 years.

by Bill McBride, Calculated Risk |  Read more:

Image: www.calculatedriskblog.com
[ed. See also: Office Markets Are the Real Estate Crash We Need to Worry About (Bloomberg).]

Manufacturing Nostalgia

For much of my childhood in the early 2000s, my parents would drive me to the local sports card shop to pick a pack or two from the ever-rotating boxes of licensed card products. Like top shelf liquor, their names emphasized swank: Topps Finest, Bowman’s Best, Skybox Premium, Donruss Elite, Playoff National Treasures, Leaf Limited, Pacific Crown Royale, Upper Deck Black Diamond. The cards and foil wrappers alike conformed to a simple visual grammar, with action shots of professional athletes printed on the fronts and rows of statistics printed on the backs. In place of seasonal batting averages or shooting percentages, the foil wrapper versos instead reported statistical probabilities concerning the manufacturer: the odds of “pulling” an autographed card, a holographic card, or a card containing a clipped swatch of a game-worn jersey. Accompanying the mathematical ratios were instructions for entering “No Purchase Necessary” promotions for a chance to obtain free cards by mailing in a 3×5 index card with one’s name and address. Initially codified in response to a prevalence of contest scams, North American sweepstakes laws compelled trading card companies—purveyors of chance—to run these NPN promotions, as they were called, in order to put their products on shelves. Legally speaking, the NPNs were all that separated opening the foil packs from buying scratch-offs, or betting on horses.

For an adolescent, the local card shop was a crash course in the economics of nostalgia. Sports card enthusiasts waxed poetic about their youths spent collecting and cards that their mothers had thrown away, while speculating on the futures of rookies and stars and speaking of “investments.” Glass display cases housed rows of rare cards for sale or trade. Dollar bins held countless others strewn about, the mass-produced cards from the late ’80s and cards of forgotten draft picks. Always within the line of sight was a Beckett Sports Card Monthly price guide, which standardized card values across the country based on an inscrutable combination of variables such as upcoming Hall of Fame inductions, recent Super Bowl victories, previous sales, and card condition. And so the price stickers in the card shop’s display cases bore the markings of grades and other signifiers: “gem mint,” “3x MVP,” “#/100.” Within the brick and mortar confines of the suburban Maryland strip mall, the local card shop was a veritable marketplace with liquid assets, commodities forecasting, and market making.

Like many other card shops across the country, my local card shop had sprung up in the 1990s to capitalize on the demands of a growing hobby. To increase profit margins with this cardboard craze, trading card companies began releasing hobby-only versions of products, distinguished from retail products by exclusivity—they couldn’t be found at the local drugstore or K-Mart—and named accordingly as luxury brands. With these hobby products, the card companies followed a simple economic calculus: a higher price tag meant more favorable probabilities on the foil wrappers, as well as exclusive, “hobby-only” cards. The mark-ups were lucrative. By the time I had started collecting in the early 2000s, hobby products were already reaching unconscionable prices ($100 for a sealed box of sports cards was a common sight). But 2003 saw the release of a new tier of product: Upper Deck’s Exquisite Collection. Replacing the foil wrappers, each etched wooden box housed just five cards and retailed for $500. Exquisite Collection was seemingly a reductio ad absurdum of manufactured scarcity. Each card on the checklist was individually serial numbered to no more than 225 copies. The basketball card release built on an already exciting year for the hobby, the rookie season of budding phenom LeBron James. The product sold like wildfire. Fifteen years later, an unopened box would sell for $43,200 at auction.

Today, the situation is, astonishingly, even worse. The $5,000 padlocked metal suitcases of Panini Flawless have replaced the $500 wooden boxes of Upper Deck Exquisite. A secondary industry of live-streamed “box breaks” has cropped up, enticing collectors to bid on the right to receive all cards of a specific team or player in a box opened via livestream by professional “breakers,” viewed on Twitch with masturbatory anticipation. Opportunistic middlemen waited for hours in lines at Target during COVID in order to clear the shelves of boxes and packs ostensibly intended for children. Card grading companies are backlogged by months due to the paucity of staff trained to numerically evaluate card condition, including corner sharpness and centering. Condition is so critical that card companies have started releasing cards that are already encased in thick plastic holders in boxes. (...)

The sheer complexity emerging from the marketization of the sports card hobby begs a simple question: what happened to the days of baseball cards in shoeboxes or dime-store wax packs with slabs of bubble gum? And what does this tell us about nostalgia?

***

The history of trading cards is a 140 year history of targeted marketing to children. Though “trade” cards were packaged with tobacco products throughout much of the 19th century as a form of advertising promotion, the 1880s saw the first collecting craze in the United States. Tobacco companies such as Allen & Ginter and W. Duke, Sons & Co. produced cards depicting actresses, athletes, tropical birds, race horses, coat of arms, flags of nations, Native Americans, and generals of the Civil War with the explicit intent of enticing children either to purchase tobacco products themselves or harass their parents into doing so. As described by Dave Jamieson in Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession:

“The cigarette ‘would lie down and die tomorrow’ if it weren’t for the high volume of sales to ‘small boys,’ one tobacco man told the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1888 … [S]ome tobacco salesmen grew convinced that the pictures were instrumental in turning a generation of city boys into cigarette ‘fiends’ in the 1880s. One dealer told the Tribune that, ‘It would do away with half this boys’ trade, I think, if there was a law prohibiting the giving away of pictures in packages of cigarettes.’ Politicians in several cities around the country tried to put just such laws on the books. Charleston, South Carolina, effected an ordinance in 1887 prohibiting the sale of cigarettes with baseball cards.”

The cards were an exploitative marketing tool intended to grow brand loyalty, printed by the tens of millions. (...)

Though people often associate baseball cards with bubblegum, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the two were sold together, an innovation widely credited to the Goudey Gum Company.

by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: C.M. Duffy

[ed. Milk caps, pogs, beanie babies, (tulips...) cards are the undisputed kings.]

Why is China so Obsessed With Food Security?

China is obsessed with food security. You might not realize just how obsessed: stockpiling rapidly, by the end of the year China – with its 20% of the world’s population – is projected to have accumulated and stashed away some 65% of the world's corn and 53% of the world's wheat. (...)

And they’re still at it this summer and fall. But what prompted all this, exactly?

Well one clue is a report prepared by China's intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security, that according to the sources of Japan’s Nikkei, “sent shock waves through the State Council, China's cabinet, in April.” The report, analyzing sanctions, blockades, and other measures the United States and its allies might take in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, concluded that China faced at least one critical national weak point: “There is a high risk of facing a food crisis,” it warned.

You see, China may be home to one-fifth of the world’s population, but it contains only about 7% of the world’s arable land. And the percentage of land in China suitable for cultivation shrank from 19% in 2010 to only 13% in 2020, amid urbanization and widespread pollution of soil and water. Remarkably, China still manages to produce 95% of its primary grain (wheat and rice) needs, in part through efficient production. China’s wheat production per hectare is almost 50% higher than the United States (though almost half that of the world’s most efficient, the Netherlands).

Nonetheless, China has steadily been driven to rely more and more heavily on imports to meet food demand. That 5% shortfall still makes China one of the world’s largest wheat importers. And while China only imports 10% of its corn, that still makes it the world’s largest corn importer, and it is the largest barley and oilseed importer as well (importing 100 million tons of the latter annually). Most importantly, China consumes nearly 120 million tons of soybeans a year – nearly the size of the entire U.S. soybean crop – but must import more than 100 million tons of that annually, or about 62% of all the soybeans traded internationally. About 30% of those imports come from the United States, much of the rest from Brazil. Without soy (itself important in the Chinese diet), much of China’s key protein source, its huge pork industry (by far the largest in the world), would collapse.

The vast majority of these food imports (like 80% of China’s oil and much of its other resources) arrive in China by sea after traversing lengthy supply routes across the Pacific or through the Indian Ocean. This would make them exceptionally easy to blockade or otherwise interrupt. None of China’s efforts over the last decade to buy up resources around the world, including farmland, have helped solve this conundrum.

The truth is that China is in a sense the opposite of Russia: it’s a vast importer of energy, food, and other commodities, taking all of these resources in and pumping out much of the world’s industrial product. This makes it far less self-sufficient (though also hugely more important to the global economy). And in short, as things stand, if China went to war with the U.S. over Taiwan or some other issue, millions of Chinese people would very quickly face a real risk of starvation, no matter the damage cutting off China from the global economy would also do to its enemies. Beijing must solve this problem before it can attempt any such adventures.

But, again, China has been obsessed with food security for years, so this one report from early this year can’t be the only cause. China’s leaders have of course been aware of this problem for decades. Nor is the risk of a specific major conflict the only issue, in my view. The real problem is significantly broader and deeper than that.

The reality, which China’s leaders appear to have grasped at least since the outbreak of the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, is that the golden age of globalization is now over. That era, defined by a truly global marketplace, and by globe-spanning supply chains, was built on the transient peace of a global order produced by hegemonic post-Cold War American power. Now that global order is falling apart, and the world and its once-global market is fragmenting into blocs and spheres of influence. Despite the ambitious efforts of the globalists, it is nationalism and regionalism that is everywhere succeeding in reasserting itself. In this environment, complex, world-spanning supply chains may soon no longer be sustainable given the growing (and already demonstrable) risks involved. We instead seem to be moving quickly toward a future of regional and separated supply chains, shorter shipping routes, built-in redundancies, and greater national protectionism and self-sufficiency. Necessary as this may be, it will have serious consequences for a world economy based on shipping everything from one corner of the planet to another.

by N.S. Lyons, The Upheaval |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Queens of the Stone Age

[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.]

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Protestor files police complaint after being tackled by NFL’s Wagner (The Guardian)

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)]

The Resurgence Of Tesla Syndrome

The Resurgence Of Tesla Syndrome (Noema)

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. 

by Sammy Feldblum, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Protests in Chile, 2019. | cameramemories

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.

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: 

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.”

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).]

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.” (...)

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.”

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’.”

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Naashon Zalk/AP

Erica Schultz, Seattle Times
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Marina Weishaupt
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