Slow Fade

The End of the Trump Era Will Be Unsatisfying

Since the 2022 midterm elections, the end of the Trump era in American politics has become, at least, a 50-50 proposition. While Ron DeSantis surges in multiple national polls, the former president has busied himself shilling $99 digital trading cards to his most devoted fans. The promised battle royal, in which Trump emerges from Mar-a-Lago to smite his challenger and reclaim his throne, may yet be in the offing. But it’s also possible that Trump 2024 will end up where many people expected Trump 2016 to go, diminishing into an act of self-indulgence that holds on to his true loyalists but can’t win primary-season majorities.

If that’s how Trump goes out, doing a slow fade while DeSantis claims his mantle, the people who have opposed Trump most fiercely, both the Resistance liberals and the Never Trump Republicans, will probably find the ending deeply unsatisfying.

There will be no perp walk where Trump exits the White House in handcuffs (though he could still face indictment; that hope lives), no revelations of Putinist treason forcing the Trumps into a Middle Eastern exile, no Aaron Sorkin-scripted denunciation driving him, in shame, from the public square.

Nor will there be a dramatic repudiation of the Trumpist style. If DeSantis defeats Trump, it will be as an imitator of his pugilism and populism, as a politician who promises to fight Trump’s battles with more effectiveness and guile.

Nor, finally, will there be any accountability for Trump’s soft enablers within the Republican Party. There was a certain political accountability when the “Stop the Steal” devotees lost so many winnable elections last month. But the men and women who held their noses and went along with Trump at every stage except the very worst will continue to lead the Republican Party if he fades away; there will be no Liz Cheney presidential campaign to deliver them all a coup de grâce.

These realities are already yielding some righteous anger, a spirit evident in the headline of a recent essay by Bill Lueders at The Bulwark: “You’re Only Leaving Trump Now?” Never forget, Lueders urges, that if Republicans abandon Trump it won’t be because of his long list of offenses against decency and constitutional government; it will be only because, at last, they’re sure he cannot win.

As an original Never Trumper, I don’t begrudge anyone this reaction. If Trump fades, it will be a victory for places like The Bulwark, but people naturally want something more than a quiet, limited victory after a long existential-seeming campaign. They want vindication. They want to feel as if everyone finally agrees: Never again.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times
[ed. Right. Not political calculation or vindication, just simple justice. If there's no accountability for lawbreaking (by politicians, bankers, technobrats, traders, random billionaires, or any other white-collar connected rich person) what does that say about our system of justice (not that we didn't already know). Probably the only truth Trump ever uttered was, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” (... or be prosecuted).]

Congress Is Considering Financial Help for Parents. Here Are Details.

[ed. Versus $1. 64 trillion (14 percent of the US budget) in financial help for the military, which is a given.]

None of the family policies the Biden administration has wanted — an expanded child allowance, paid family leave or subsidized child care — have come to pass. Now, with less than a month before the new Congress starts, Democrats are trying once more to push through one of them: the expanded child allowance.

The idea had a test run in the second half of 2021, when the administration sent families monthly checks as part of the pandemic relief package. The bill raised the amount of the pre-existing child tax credit, and also included families with very little or no income. The result was a near doubling of government investment in children and a substantial reduction in child poverty. Since that expansion ended, one in four children have received less than the full amount, including about four in 10 Black and Latino children. About 3 percent — children of the lowest-earning parents — get nothing.

In current debates about the child tax credit, the biggest point of contention is who would receive it. Many Democrats again want to expand it to the lowest earners. Some Republicans want to continue to give it only to families who earn a certain amount, to encourage parents to work.

by Claire Cain Miller and Alicia Parlapiano, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
[ed. Pretty much says it all. Regardless of what Republicans think poor people's motives are (mostly surviving, I'd imagine), is there anything more heartless than letting children starve? To make a point? Update: Apparently not - Millions to lose Medicaid coverage under Congress' plan (Yahoo News). But really, it's just because they care and are actually trying to help poor people (for their own good):]

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"Based on the evidence we have now, a permanent child allowance would indeed reduce poverty among those who fall temporarily on hard times. (That is the initial effect, after all, of giving people money.) But among those families with the weakest attachment to stable work and family life, it would be likely to consign them to more entrenched multigenerational poverty by further disconnecting them from those institutions. (...)

There would probably be unintended consequences to a child allowance apart from creating an incentive for parents to stop working: Some parents would continue to work but work fewer hours; some parents would choose to divorce or never marry in the first place; some would have a child they would not have had absent the additional benefits. [ed. And lack of abortion options]. All of those behaviors, however warranted they might be in individual cases, lead to greater poverty in general. That would further dampen the effect of a child allowance." - The True Cost of Expanding the Child Tax Credit (NYT).

Argentina Celebrates

Images: Luis Robayo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Tomas Cuesta/AFP

via: here and here

[ed. Argentina loves football. See also: Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe: Thank you for that beautiful madness (The Athletic - here's an option to the paywall). See also: Argentina vs. France Was the Best World Cup I've Ever Seen (New Yorker).]

Neon Jellyfish

[ed. An ambience favorite (as noted in the post below). Shin Sawano's World (more here).]

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers

Wayne Shorter

David Barnes, 1942- 2021

via:

Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon

My wife, Heidi, and I put up a string of Christmas lights early in the pandemic. They were LEDs that slowly flashed different colors, hung along a copper wire that stretched above our windows. As 2020 unfolded and we binged shows like Le Bureau, the lights made for a cheerful horizon. In the small East Village living room that became our world, it was a good trick. Before we stopped having people over, friends would comment on the vibe in our house. In the absence of company, vibe was all we had.

Right before the holidays, I discovered an Instagram account called @jazz_kissa, run by a photographer and music fan named Katsumasa Kusunose. Patrons of jazz kissas (cafés) typically drink coffee or alcohol and keep their voices low, sometimes reading books or comics as they listen. There are around six hundred such cafés in Japan—a number Kusunose and a few other fans carefully tabulated a few years ago, and which he believes has not significantly changed. Kusunose has been photographing these places since 2014, and his pictures became a ballast for me. The average jazz café is small, about the size of our living room, though a few are big enough to accommodate perhaps fifty people. Their audio gear generally looks older, and, even though I knew nothing about it, I decided it all sounded exquisite. A speculative leap, but I needed it.

Dim, atmospheric lights are not uncommon in jazz cafés, though most don’t look like our LED string. Sometimes the aquamarine glow of a McIntosh amp’s front panel is the only accent. There’s generally lots of wood, rarely any chrome or aluminum. If there is ever a human figure in Kusunose’s photographs, it is a man, usually older, laying a phonograph needle on a record or standing behind a pour-over coffee setup. I imagined that the stereos produced an otherworldly sound, and it did not seem unreasonable to think that these small spaces and our East Village safe haven were linked. The proprietors had made decisions about what mattered and what could be done with the limited space. Their choices emphasized an experience that would be both communal and quiet. Silence and sound at the same time appealed to me. What little we could control was right in front of us. We definitely didn’t have any of this gear, though. Our modest stereo would have been no better than a midrange system back in the Nineties, when it was new.

A friend who knew of my obsession told me about another Instagram account, @_listening_room_. Someone was posting photo spreads from what seemed to be mostly Japanese audiophile magazines and translating the accompanying text. “Listening rooms” are essentially residential jazz cafés, though they are agnostic as to genre. You see enormous home stereo setups in these photos, gear from another era piled high in living rooms. The owner of the system is sometimes there, perched on a couch. I didn’t know then what it cost to outfit a listening room, but it was obviously not a budget undertaking. The combined practices of listening and reflecting in this kind of space made me think of the rooms as miniature cathedrals, places where anybody could enter and connect with a larger force through sound. (...)

When I started researching the individual components of these listening rooms, I encountered this language of bedroom expertise, of an axiomatic surety based on an invisible axiom. Certain speakers delivered sound that was “detailed” or “transparent,” whereas others did not. What was the detail being retrieved? Was it not being created in that moment by that machine? What was the referent for something being transparent? Transparent in comparison to what? (...)

Audiophiles often talk about what people will miss if they don’t have a specific kind of gear, as if recorded music were a fragile code requiring elaborate reconstruction. As much as I found myself opening up to the idea of building a good sound system over time, I still felt at odds with most audiophiles, or at least their representatives in the press. (...)

 

I met Jonathan Weiss in April 2021 at his loft in Dumbo, when a glossy magazine I hadn’t heard of asked me to write some copy for a photo spread. Weiss is a bright-eyed man, fifty-eight, with a head of thick white hair and an appealing intensity, but he was not the model. The photographer was coming to shoot the speakers made by his company, Oswalds Mill Audio (OMA). Its Imperia model, over six feet tall, is made up of two massive wooden horns held together by steel frames next to a woofer as big as a stove. These speakers look like a pair of military-grade butter churns, or crowd-control technology from the nineteenth century. I laughed when I saw them. According to a 2019 catalog, the pair costs roughly $452,200. (Weiss, who doesn’t like to discuss the price of his products, declined to confirm whether this was still accurate.) The new OMA turntable, the K3, is a three-hundred-pound hulk cast in iron with a tonearm that looks like a miniature boom crane. It was on the October cover of Stereophile magazine, and the review was positive: Michael Fremer called it a “truly great audio product.” The magazine listed the price at $360,000.

Unlike the tech bros burning through money both real and imagined, Weiss and the rest of the high-end audio cohort could at the very least drag their wares into the street and be of service, even though they are rarely thinking of the greater good. Gordon Gow of McIntosh Laboratory called this type of equipment “toys for insecure adults.” It’s not gear for the general population, and I would have left it alone if something hadn’t rearranged me. I had a feeling that the jazz kissa might be hovering around us.

The Imperia speakers made a sound that was wide and vivid and full of dirty weight, the breath of an organism. When the audio critic Herb Reichert hears this quality in good speakers, he calls it “believable corporeality,” which he says “has largely been missing from the experience of recordings since digital arrived.” OMA has a less expensive division called Fleetwood Sound, and Reichert calls its DeVille model, listed at around $15,600, “one of the best small speakers” he has ever heard.

There are real physical differences between this older technology and the audio devices you can find in a Best Buy. Cheap new stuff is likely powered by a clutch of transistors driving small diaphragms that move a lot. By comparison, the older horn designs are very good at throwing sound while barely moving, partly because the music is being amplified by something called a compression driver—a thin metal diaphragm agitated by a magnet. The supersensitive horn-loaded speakers are driven by low-wattage amplifiers outfitted with single-ended triode vacuum tubes, the oldest and simplest of their kind.

The idea here is not complex: a signal moves from the source—a phonograph or CD player, say—to an efficient speaker, and along the way it experiences the fewest possible augmentations, the least amount of stress. The word “excursion” refers to how much a diaphragm has to move in order to produce sound. Those small speakers you find in Best Buy? They experience excursions up to a quarter of an inch, a violent amount of back and forth. By contrast, the diaphragms of compression drivers found in horn speakers move only a few micrometers. The horn is the most ancient amplifier, a physical sound-thrower that can transport a large air mass. Small movements excite its narrow end and large movements come out its wide end.

“These big horn systems—they’re asleep,” Reichert tells me. “The system is barely operating. It’s adding energy in a relaxed and unstressed way.” The sound feels like a physical emancipation, the music suddenly rising up and walking toward you. It is not a coincidence that horn-loaded speakers are sometimes the size of people. Weiss’s loft is not a jazz café, but it is a kind of cathedral.

by Sasha Frere-Jones, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Adam Simpson. Source photograph of a jazz kissa in Okayama, Japan, taken by Katsumasa Kusunose and included in his book Jazz Kissa 2015–2019.

Noema: Italy; China; Maintenance; and Concrete

Italy is full of places like Arquà Petrarca. Microclimates and artisanal techniques become the basis for obscure local specialties celebrated in elaborate festivals from Trapani to Trieste. (...)

All these specialties are encouraged by local cooperatives, protected by local designations, elevated by local chefs and celebrated in local festivals, all lucrative outcomes for their local, often small-scale producers. It’s not so much a reflection of capitalismo as campanilismo — a uniquely Italian concept derived from the word for belltower. “It means, if you were born in the shade of the belltower, you were from that community,” explains Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of “Gastronativism,” a new book exploring the intersection of food and politics. “That has translated into food.” (...)

All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine. (...)

The Romans were really the first Italian culinary borrowers. In addition to the jujube, they brought home cherries, apricots and peaches from the corners of their vast empire, Parasecoli tells me. But in the broad sweep of Italian history, it was Arabs, not Romans, who have left the more lasting mark on Italian cuisine.

During some 200 years of rule in Sicily and southern Italy, and the centuries of horticultural experimentation and trade that followed, Arabs greatly expanded the range of ingredients and flavors in the Italian diet. A dizzying array of modern staples can be credited to their influence, including almonds, spinach, artichokes, chickpeas, pistachios, rice and eggplants.

Arabs also brought with them durum wheat — since 1967, the only legal grain for the production of pasta in Italy. They introduced sugar cane and citrus fruit, laying the groundwork for dozens of local delicacies in the Italian south and inspiring the region’s iconic sweet-and-sour agrodolce flavors. Food writers Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari argue that Arabs’ effect on the Italian palate was as profound as it was in science or medicine — reintroducing lost recipes from antiquity, elevated by novel ingredients and techniques refined in the intervening centuries. In science, this kind of exchange sparked the Renaissance; in food, they argue, one of the world’s great cuisines.

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema; Image: Roman Bratschi)

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Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken. Maintenance is about making something last. (...)

The industrial world is aging, and the sheer quantity and geographic extent of transportation, water and energy infrastructure presents an unprecedented challenge at the exact moment that climate change forces us to rethink material use. More robust maintenance practices could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids to insulated homes. But first maintenance has to be valued outside of austerity, and right now it’s unclear if our current economic system is capable of that. (...)

It’s hard to imagine a modern ritual that would be equal to the task of perpetually renewing steel bridges, concrete highways and cement buildings. It would require an entirely new industrial paradigm. One label for such a system is “circular economy,” which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which funds research on the topic, defines as “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design.” (...)

Sustainability, and the climate discourse in general, fails to disentangle the built environment in this way. The built and unbuilt environment are treated as totalities caught in a zero-sum conflict. One barrages the other with smokestacks and landfills, the other retaliates with forest fires and flooding. Climate change becomes a hyperobject, bearing down on all of humanity at once, condemning and forbidding it.

Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to material systems and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution. (...)

The incentives get even more distorted when stretched across industries and use cases. Here, again, maintenance distinguishes itself rhetorically from sustainability. Sustainability is a state; maintenance is a process. It requires work, and work of a certain type. Whatever its ultimate goal — safety, material efficiency, reducing carbon emissions — practical know-how and repetitive labor come first. This kind of pragmatism is sorely needed in the climate debate, which is so often preoccupied with end-states that it has no earthly or humanly way of achieving.

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance (Alex Vuocolo, Noema; Image: Scott Balmer)

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As Thomas Piketty and several others have observed, America is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology. Globalization did not deliver on its promise of prosperity for all Americans; instead, the outsourcing of production to countries like China profited multinational companies while hollowing out industrial towns. During the 2008 financial crisis, elites on Wall Street received bailouts from the government, while people on Main Street lost their jobs and savings. Exploiting popular discontent, Trump parachuted into the presidential race in 2016 with rallying cries to “bring jobs back home” and “drain the swamp” — and to everyone’s surprise, he won.

Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations.” Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system. Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners. Whereas Biden pledges to “build back better,” Xi dubs his campaign “common prosperity.

To say that the U.S. and China are similar, however, does not mean that they are identical. America is a democracy with constitutional protections of individual freedoms, whereas China is a top-down political system ruled by one party. Thus, the two countries are pursuing progressive reforms very differently. At the turn of the 20th century, when America was an emerging industrial power, its society fought graft and inequality through political activism, civil service reforms, new regulations and by voting corrupt politicians out of office. Today, facing a deindustrialized economy and outdated infrastructure, Biden’s agenda is focused on passing legislation on large public investment and raising taxes on corporations. Xi, on the other hand, is trying to stamp out capitalist excesses through commands and campaigns to punish graft, eliminate poverty and rein in the “chaotic expansion of capital.” Like Biden, Xi aspires for fairer development — but with the CCP firmly in control.

The narratives we choose shape the realities we experience. The “clash of civilizations” implies that the U.S. and China are culturally — or worse, racially — destined to fight each other, and everyone else must choose one side. If you buy this narrative, a new Cold War can be the only outcome. By contrast, the “clash of two Gilded Ages” reminds us that the U.S. and China are rivals who share similar woes at home. Their competition should not be over who trips and outruns the other, but rather who fixes their own problems first. Competition can be a force for self-renewal instead of mutual destruction.

The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages (Yuen Yuen Ang, Noema; Image: Xinmei Liu)

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To make concrete, you need cement. To make cement nowadays, kilns are heated to more than 1,400 degrees Celsius — similar to the temperature inside a volcano. Into the kilns goes a combination of crushed raw materials (mainly limestone and clay). The heat causes a chemical reaction that creates a new product, clinker, which is then ground down to create the grey powder you see in cement bags. This is then mixed with sand, gravel and water to create concrete.

Concrete is now the second-most consumed substance on Earth behind only water. Thirty-three billion tons of it are used each year, making it by far the most abundant human-made material in history. To make all that, we now devour around 4 billion tons of cement each year — more than in the entire first half of the 20th century, and over a billion tons more than the food we eat annually.

Such a monstrous scale of production has monstrous consequences. Concrete has been like a nuclear bomb in man’s conquest of nature: redirecting great rivers (often away from the communities that had come to rely on them), reducing quarried mountains to mere hills, and contributing to biodiversity loss and mass flooding by effectively sealing large swathes of land in an impermeable grey crust. The other key ingredients all bring their own separate crises, from the destructive sand mining of riverbeds and beaches to the use of almost 2% of the world’s water.

But most significantly, the carbon-intensive nature of cement has been catastrophic for the atmosphere. The kilns used to heat limestone are commonly run on fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gases, and as it heats up, the limestone itself releases more CO2. Every kilogram of cement created produces more than half a kilogram of CO2. The greenhouse gas emissions of the global aviation industry (2-3%) are dwarfed by those of the cement industry (around 8%). If concrete was a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter, behind only the U.S. and China. In Chile, the region that houses most of the cement plants, Quintero, has become so polluted that it was nicknamed “the sacrifice zone.”

Sacrifice is a fitting word for this paradox: On the one hand, we have the destruction wrought by concrete, and on the other is our desperate need for it to exist. It’s been estimated that to keep up with global population growth, we need to build the urban equivalent of another Paris each week, another New York each month.

Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. (Joe Zadeh, Noema; Image: Newnome Beauton)

via:

Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya, Pink

[ed. Love this song, and performances.]

‘Unexpected Item’

How Self-Checkouts Failed to Live Up to Their Promise

When the first self-checkout kiosks were rolled out in American stores more than three decades ago, they were presented as technology that could help stores cut costs, save customers time, and even prevent theft.

Businesses still fret over these issues, and against a tight labor market, more companies are making self-checkouts the norm. But the machines failed to live up to their promises. This week, Walmart’s CEO said that thefts “are higher than what they’ve historically been”, which many staff and customers link to self-checkouts. On top of that, the machines have made things harder for the workers who they were supposed to replace. (...)

In 2018, just 18% of all grocery store transactions went through a self-checkout, rising to 30% last year. Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Albertson’s are now among retail chains testing out full self-checkout stores.

That’s not something we should get excited about, says Christopher Andrews, a sociologist who examined the kiosks in his 2018 book, The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. Despite what grocery stores and kiosk manufacturers claim, research shows self-checkouts aren’t actually any faster than a regular checkout line, Andrews says. “It only feels like it because your time is occupied doing tasks, rather than paying attention to each second ticking away.”

Neither have they reduced the need for workers: despite the increase in self-checkouts, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the number of cashiers employed in the US has remained virtually the same over the last 10 years. And any reduction in low-wage workers has been offset by the need to pay technicians to maintain the kiosks, Andrews says – and the kiosks can cost as much as $150,000 for a single row.

So if self-checkouts are so ineffective, why do we have them at all?

The self-service policies of modern supermarkets have largely been “imposed by the companies, not because of customers asking for it”, says Andrews. Before the 20th century, shoppers typically purchased goods directly from clerks standing behind counters. That changed in 1916, when Clarence Saunders opened the first modern supermarket: a Piggly Wiggly in Texas where customers were asked to take items off of the shelves themselves – and received a discount for doing so.

Andrews says his research has found that the majority of people don’t actually want self-checkouts. The real reason stores use them, he says, is because their competitors do. “It’s not working great for anybody, but everybody feels like they have to have it. The companies think: ‘If we can just convince more people to do this, maybe we can start to reduce some overhead.’”

Meanwhile, self-checkouts have become a prime target for fraudsters, who use a variety of tactics to beat anti-theft measures. Weight sensors can be defeated by ringing up expensive items – like king crab legs – as cheap items like apples. James, the cashier in Washington, says he saw a customer trying to buy a $1,600 grill for $5 by hiding one item inside another and switching the barcodes.

That has led to an arms race of sorts as some retailers have responded with increasingly strong measures. Walmart is known for aggressively prosecuting shoplifters and has installed AI-powered cameras near its self-checkout areas with a “missed scan detection” feature. “It turns what’s supposed to be a leisurely activity of shopping into a quasi-TSA, airport-style security check,” says Andrews.

by Wilfred Chan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Mike Blake/Reuters

This Was the Perfect World Cup for Our Strange Era

Whatever happens in the World Cup final this Sunday, Europe will remain the dominant power of global football. An Argentinean victory over France will not change the facts of economic globalization. The English Premier League alone usually turns over more money every season than the quadrennial World Cup, and European football towers over the rest of the world, which is why half of the players at the tournament play in just five big European leagues. Yet something will have changed, too.

It is now 16 years since a World Cup final was played in Europe, as some of the rising powers of the Global South — South Africa, Brazil and now Qatar — have taken their turn. South Africa 2010 carried Pan-African aspirations that for a moment seemed to become reality, with Ghana poised to make a semifinal. Brazil 2014 was a celebration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil, and by association the leftist governments that had transformed the continent, though it ended up as more of a wake.

Qatar 2022, by contrast, was always about Qatar — its visibility, its reputation and its strategic survival. Despite criticisms of the country’s treatment of migrant workers and disregard for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, it has achieved much of what was intended. After four weeks of near-constant football, and the sometimes bitter off-field conversations that accompanied it, Qatar’s position in the world is palpably stronger.

Yet as the first World Cup in an Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, it also aspired to stand for something more. In its timing, its crowds and its narratives, the tournament offered a version of the world in which the Global South, in all its myriad complexities, is more present and more powerful. This, truly, was a World Cup for our era.

The Southern Hemisphere is used to a winter World Cup, but in the North, especially in Europe, watching the tournament is a monthlong summer fiesta of outdoor revelry in public spaces and beer gardens. Even FIFA, though, couldn’t face the prospect of playing in the heat of a Gulf summer, air-conditioned stadiums or not, and rearranged the entire world football calendar around Qatar’s climate. The upshot is that Europe right now is cold and indoors; although viewing figures are good, there is much less sense of the World Cup as a collective ritual. The considerably warmer streets and squares of Dakar, Rabat, Rosario and Riyadh, by contrast, have been flooded by celebrations.

The crowds in Doha, inside and outside the stadiums, reflect this global recalibration. Of course, what we see of them on the screen has been carefully curated. Qatar recruited its own “ultras” — highly organized soccer fans who can be found across the globe — from Lebanon and from among Arab migrants to Doha, and paid for groups of fans to travel from every qualifying nation. But we have still seen enough to know that these are the most diverse World Cup crowds on record — and despite the earsplitting volume of the stadiums’ public-address systems and the relentless music they emit, it is still the crowd, its voices and energies, that is the living heart of the spectacle. (...)

If France wins, we’ll be heralding the first back-to-back winners in 60 years; if Argentina prevails, it will be Lionel Messi’s ascent to divinity that concerns us. Either way, this has been the most closely scrutinized and culturally contested World Cup ever, and that is a good thing. The personal, cultural and political presence of the Global South has been made tangible and that, too, is important. Perhaps the tournament’s biggest legacy will be a global media and public more critically sensitized to the political and cultural meaning of spectacle? 

by David Goldblatt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Meissner/Associated Press via

[ed. The crowds watching worldwide are amazing. Must be in the billions. Truly a global phenomenon. See also: Qatar Gets the World Cup Final It Paid For. And, The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around. (New Yorker):]

"On Sunday, a global audience of a billion plus will tune into the World Cup final to behold the most transfixing spectacle in sport: a small man walking back and forth. The Argentina-France match, at Lusail Stadium, in Lusail, Qatar, will be a showdown between two of the world’s great footballing powers that holds the potential for all sorts of thrilling action and endeavor. (...)

Yet the telling difference may be found in the least dramatic, least kinetic activity on the field. Sunday’s result might well turn, as so many games have before, on the meandering movements of Lionel Messi, who will spend much of the ninety minutes simply walking around—drifting here and there, wandering the field at the pace, and with the apparent dreamy purposelessness, of a flâneur on a psychogeographic dérive.

Messi is soccer’s great ambler. To keep your eyes fixed on him throughout a match is both spellbinding and deadly dull. It is also a lesson in the art and science of watching a soccer match."

UPDATE: Argentina wins it in what some are calling the greatest World Cup Final of all time.

The Next Time Wikipedia Asks for a Donation, Ignore It

No one wants to be a bad person, and you probably felt pretty bad when you saw the heart-breaking appeal and just carried on clicking. Wikipedia is midway through a six-week fund-raising drive in Anglophone regions including the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. The banner ads beg for “just £2”, which doesn’t sound like much, for all that free information. But before you start feeling too guilty, it’s worth considering some facts.

These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money — the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. It created an endowment, managed by the Tides Foundation, which now holds well over $100 million of that. The Foundation wanted to hit that figure in ten years, but found it had sailed past it in just five. In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase. Yet the running costs of Wikipedia are a tiny fraction of the amount raised each year.

Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.

“WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,” acknowledged the Foundation’s then VP of engineering, Erik Möller, in 2013. He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years. So where does the money go?

Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course. Wikipedia’s Administrators and maintainers, who tweak the entries and correct the perpetual vandalism, don’t get paid a penny — they’re all volunteers. What has happened is that the formerly ramshackle Foundation, which not so long ago consisted of fewer than a dozen staff run out of a back room, has professionalised itself. It has followed the now well-trodden NGO path to respectability and riches. The Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising.

by Andrew Orlawski, Unherd |  Read more:

Image: aslysun/Shutterstock (Licensed) Remix by Jason Reed

[ed. This story's been going around for a while now (and the banner ads continue). See also: Wikipedia is swimming in money—why is it begging people to donate? (Daily Dot); also these Twitter and Hacker News/ycombinator threads.]

Ambience

Images: YouTube
[ed. Winter driving you crazy? I've been cycling through ambience videos lately on YouTube (some up to 12 hours long, or longer). I knew about coffee shops, fireplaces, beaches, streams, forests (snowy, lush, otherwise), etc. but really, there's an unbelievable selection of just about anything you can imagine (thousands): acquariums, oceans (above and below), starship screens/spaceship windows, planets, various unfathonable machines, even (above) a Blade Runner loop (there may be more). And this doesn't include travel videos. A great distraction and calming sleep aid if you need it. My current favorite: jellyfish in space.]

How to Negotiate Lower Medical Bills

Here’s how you can navigate high medical costs.

Get an itemized bill

Ask for an itemized bill, so that you can review it and make sure the charges are correct, suggested McClanahan, a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

There can be errors, such as incorrect patient, provider or insurance information, as well as incorrect codes for the procedures and duplicate billing.

For instance, Medliminal, a company that identifies medical billing errors, generally finds that 25% of the charges on the bills it has reviewed are not billable.

Look for other sources of payment

You may have overlooked ways to cover your bills.

“I often had people eligible for Medicaid or subsidized insurance that they were able to get,” said Jenifer Bosco, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

“In some states, when you qualify for Medicaid, there is retroactive eligibility.”

If you have no insurance, check with your providers to see if they offer a discount to uninsured patients.

There are also federal requirements for nonprofit hospitals to provide financial assistance programs for low-income patients. The aid varies depending on the state and the institution.

However, 45% of nonprofit hospital organizations routinely send out bills to patients who have income low enough to qualify for charity care, according to an analysis by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation

Ask to lower the bill

Once you have explored all the options for payment, it’s time to see if you can get your bill lowered.

“Consumers may not realize that you can contact the health-care provider or the hospital and ask to negotiate,” Bosco said.

Reach out, be nice, and tell the provider that you can’t afford to pay the bill. Then, ask for a reduction.

Uninsured patients are usually charged the master rate, or the maximum that the hospital would charge for a particular procedure, Bosco noted.

She suggests asking to pay the Medicare rate, which health-care providers are generally very familiar with.

You can also check out the estimated costs of the procedure in your area on Healthcare Bluebook.

Remember, it’s not the doctor you’ll be dealing with but the billing department.

“The billing people have gotten so used to negotiating that they expect it,” McClanahan said.

Don’t expect to be successful at first, she noted.

Harness was able to get his bill down after filing a grievance with the hospital. In November, he was given a 30% discount for both surgeries, bringing the cost down to $56,152.40, he said.

He and Novick-Smith continued to follow up with the hospital to try to lower the bill. They argued he shouldn’t have to pay for the second surgery since it was most likely a complication from the clipping and stapling of the appendix tissue during the first surgery.

In May, the hospital reduced the bill to $25,143.20. Harness responded by offering $12,000, based on what Healthcare Bluebook noted was a fair price for an appendectomy The couple then got their bill knocked down to $22,304.17.

After Harness and Novick-Smith brought their story to Kaiser Health News, the hospital came back with their final offer: $19,335.

Request a payment plan

Once you have your final, negotiated bill you can still request to go on a payment plan.

Be very careful and make sure that the monthly payments are ones you can afford, Bosco advised.

“Try to come up with a realistic payment plan,” she said.

Harness is now on a plan to pay off his final bill. It is still a big chunk of his monthly income, but fortunately some friends set up a GoFundMe account to help him out.

“It felt really great that people cared to give a portion of what little they had to help me out in this situation,” he said.

Harness now has insurance through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he has also been approved for VA disability benefits for his hearing loss and has applied for benefits for spinal and knee issues due to his time in service.

by Michelle Fox, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Brian A. Jackson|Getty Images
[ed. We'll all have this experience at some point (maybe mulitple times). What a scam system - having to negotiate for your life or life savings. Referred here from: The hospital wants $83,135 for saving my wife. She’s worth it – but where did that figure come from? (The Guardian).]

Neon Nights

Liam Wong, HK Mansions; Still Life, Chongqing

via:

Imagine a Different History for Alaska

Imagine a different history for Alaska. These long-ago visionaries did. (Charles Wohlforth - Anchorage Daily News)

Image: Loren Holmes

[ed. From the three-part series: How to turn Alaska around (Charles Wohlforth - ADN). I got to know Charles ("don't call me Charlie") starting way back in 1989 during the Exxon Valdez oil spill when he was a young reporter just beginning his career (I was supervising the cleanup). This is an excellent sketch of Alaska from 1969 - present. And to be clear, it wasn't like people didn't forsee this result decades ago, especially after the state terminated its income tax. Crazy. It's a different place now.]

Les Paul & Steve Miller (and Mary Ford)

[ed. Most people know Les Paul simply as the inventor of a pretty good electric guitar. But he was also an amazing player in his days along with his fabulous partner Mary Ford. See here and here. Steve Miller also had some success with his band.]

The Best Margarita Mixes, Ranked

Backyard parties, Taco Tuesdays, Friday night drinks—few cocktails fit a celebratory occasion as well as the margarita. You don’t need a store-bought mix to make a good margarita at home, but if you’re having a big gathering and preparing your own is too time consuming, or you like the convenience or sweeter taste of a premade mix, it’s a quick and easy option.

We tested 12 margarita mixes to find our favorites, focusing on options with widespread availability throughout the country. A store-bought mix will never taste as natural or fresh as a margarita you can make from scratch, and many of the mixes we tried exuded artificial flavors ranging from lime candy to lemon Pledge. But a few tasted natural enough to pass as real margaritas, and our top recommendations also provide the best value of price to serving. (...)

[ed. Recommendations follow]

How to make a margarita from scratch

A good tequila, a bottle of triple sec, and a couple of ripe limes are all you need to make a classic margarita that tastes more natural than any store-bought mix ever will. Some people may prefer the sweeter taste and thicker texture of a premade margarita mix, but all of them lack the zest of a fresh-squeezed lime. If you’re making a margarita for your own enjoyment, the process is simple enough for home bartenders of all experience levels. If you have the time to batch margaritas before a big party, you and your guests will likely be happier with the results.

There are two prevalent margaritas recipes: the classic margarita and the Tommy’s margarita. Both are prepared the same way (shaken with ice, strained, and served on the rocks with or without a salt rim), but the classic version uses triple sec while the Tommy’s recipe calls for agave nectar instead. It’s completely up to you which recipe you use; some people think the Tommy’s has a cleaner taste that spotlights the tequila, and others like how the triple sec rounds out the cocktail. You can use any triple sec or curaçao you like in a margarita, but we recommend Cointreau because it has an aromatic orange-peel flavor and a dry finish, and it’s a higher quality than some cheaper triple secs you can find. Additionally, it’s most common to see blanco tequila used in a margarita, but you can use any reposado or añejo you’re partial to.

For a classic margarita, we like the version from renowned cocktail bar Death & Co, which uses both triple sec and agave nectar. If you don’t have agave on hand, it’s okay to omit it for a slightly tarter margarita (which is the recipe that we used in our testing):

• 2 ounces tequila
• ¾ ounce triple sec, preferably Cointreau
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• ¼ ounce agave nectar

To make a Tommy’s margarita, the recipe is as follows:

• 2 ounces tequila
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• ½ ounce agave nectar

To batch from-scratch margaritas, multiply either recipe by as many drinks as you want to make, combine all of the ingredients in a container, stir without ice, and refrigerate until you’re ready to serve. For the best result, shake the cocktails with ice and strain into a glass to remove any citrus pulp or ice chips. If that’s not possible, serving it straight over ice does the job. We don’t recommend adding ice to batches ahead of time, as you run the risk of overdiluting your drinks.

by Haley Perry, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Images: Connie Park

[ed. Also on topic (sort of): Pouring Through a Crisis: How Budweiser Salvaged Its World Cup. Taken by surprise by Qatar’s decision to ban beer at stadiums, the company remade its marketing strategy in real time (NYT).]