Media and Politics: Ezra Klein Interviews Nicole Hemmer

Let me state the question of this episode clearly. What the hell has happened to the Republican Party? When I began covering politics 20-ish years ago, the cliche was that Democrats were this barely organized collection of squabbling interest groups — barely a party. But Republicans — Republicans were this disciplined, ideological, unified political force. Their majority leader at the time, Tom DeLay, he had the nickname “The Hammer.” If that was ever true, it’s not now. (...)

Republicans aren’t a party anymore. They’re a riot, a movement. But they’re one that is often at war with itself. And that’s not normal. All political parties — they have internal dissent and conflict. What is distinctive about Republicans in this era is they have lost control. I date that to around 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party. But that’s just a moment the dynamics of the party tipped out of balance. It’s not the moment those dynamics began. So when did it begin and why? Who profits from this version of the Republican Party? Who perpetuates it?

Nicole Hemmer is a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the Republican Party, and she studies it particularly through the lens of its media. She’s the author of two great books about the conservative movement: “Messengers of the Right” and her new one, “Partisans,” which I highly recommend. And she’s a perfect person for this conversation. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Nicole Hemmer, welcome to the show.

NICOLE HEMMER: Thanks for having me, Ezra. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: 1992 is so extraordinary to me. It’s one of these moments where the entire egg that is the Republican Party just seems to me to be hatching.

NICOLE HEMMER: Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: Because you have Buchanan, you have Limbaugh, you have Newt, you have Perot. But I want to go back to something you mentioned, which is this moment where Rush Limbaugh endorses Pat Buchanan. And the George H.W. Bush White House has a, I think, a fairly extraordinary response to that. Can you talk through that story?

NICOLE HEMMER: Absolutely. So the Bush administration is looking out over the political landscape in 1992. The threat from Pat Buchanan is much larger than they thought that it would be. Buchanan, even though he loses the New Hampshire primary to Bush by 16 points, he got a lot closer than any of the people in the Bush White House were comfortable with.

And as they were surveying the sources of Buchanan’s popularity, they lit upon Rush Limbaugh, who by 1991, ’92, was a juggernaut in right wing media. He was something that no one had ever seen before. He was making millions of dollars. He had millions of listeners. He was about to launch a new television show. He had best-selling books.

He was this very singular figure. And nobody knew how much influence he might have on the conservative base. But what the Bush administration knew was that Limbaugh liked Buchanan, and Buchanan was doing better than expected. And so they needed to harness some of that Limbaugh energy.

And so in order to do that, they tap the person who is going to be Limbaugh’s television producer and who has been a consultant to the Republican Party and to several Republican presidents — Roger Ailes. And they invite Roger Ailes, who would later become one of the founders of Fox News — they invite Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh to the White House to have a night at the Kennedy Center with George and Barbara Bush, to stay over at the Lincoln bedroom and really to court him.

And there is this one moment that Rush Limbaugh will talk about for the next 30 years where President Bush picks up his bag and carries it in. And in many ways, Limbaugh latches onto that moment not as Bush being this generous blue-blooded WASP from New England, but as the president carried my bags. I have the power in this situation. The president waits on me.

And that dynamic is going to define a lot of Limbaugh’s career, but also is pointing to some things that are shifting within the conservative movement and the Republican Party where candidates and presidents are becoming more reliant on the conservative media systems that people like Rush Limbaugh are building. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: I want to spend some real time here on the asymmetry in media structures because obviously it’s something that I’ve experienced to some degree. And I want to give some credit to the right-wing view that there is — I don’t exactly want to call it a bias, but there’s a liberal culturation in a lot of the media, that the people in major newsrooms are themselves much more liberal than they are conservative.

And there’s an integration, in a funny way, between what you might think of as liberal media, an MSNBC, or an “American Prospect,” which is a small magazine I started out at, and mainstream media. MSNBC is part of NBC. And I know, from having worked there, that if MSNBC is getting liberal in a way that NBC feels reflects badly on it, that the hammer comes down and people get very upset and it becomes a big internal political problem.

And there’s a way in which, of course, there is a liberalism, particularly a cultural liberalism in the mainstream media, but there’s also a restraint built around these business models and these organizations that at least have this self-conception of themselves as for everybody. The New York Times desperately wants to be a paper for everybody. NBC wants to be for everybody.

And they have business models, traditionally, from these local geographic monopolies and airwave monopolies, all the way up to these mass subscription operations, that put this pressure to try to be palatable to virtually every kind of consumer. And that’s become harder and harder and harder in recent years, but it is still a very, very present intention. And then as you go into the further reaches of liberal or left media, people who want to work at these organizations are somewhat restrained by knowing what it looks like to be in these organizations.

And I say all that to serve up to you the counterquestion, which is conservative media, because it isn’t intertwined, with the exception of maybe The Wall Street Journal, with these mainstream more establishment organizations that have these business models that are about appealing to everybody, develops a very different business model that I think helps create a different ideology instead of practices. How would you describe the business incentives of conservative media?

NICOLE HEMMER: I think that’s right. There’s both a difference in terms of the professional practices — ideas like objectivity are professional practices that have continued on at places like NBC News or at The New York Times, since the 1920s and 30s and 40s, that are not necessarily the same constraints on conservative media. But the economic question is really important, because in some ways, conservative media figured out the media landscape and the shifts that were happening in the business of media much better than some of these more mainstream institutions.

And that idea that if you have a devoted fraction of the potential viewing or listening audience, that that devotion means people are going to keep coming back, that they are going to trust the people who are speaking to them — so they’re going to trust somebody like Rush Limbaugh, they’re going to buy the products that are sold during the advertisements. And so you have this different conception of what it takes to make profitable media.

And Rush Limbaugh is really an innovator in this front. The conservative media that I was talking about earlier, like National Review, like the “Smoot Report,” they had not cracked the business code. So it’s not just about messaging to conservatives, but it is about offering a political message that seems like it is going to have a real effect on how elections turn out and how people govern while they are in office, and that triggers a set of emotions and attachments that make people fervent fans. (...)

So that idea of microtargeting or understanding narrowcasting, that you want a small devoted audience and you can make a lot of money that way, the right figure that out much more quickly, in part, as you noted, because they weren’t necessarily constrained by those professional practices that a place like CBS News would have.

EZRA KLEIN: I think part of it is that they figured it out. And I wonder how much they were forced into it. And something I think about here is about what attracts people to a media organization. When they come to you, what are they coming for? And in a lot of conservative media and some liberal media, they’re really coming for the politics. If you watch Fox News, if you listen to, back in the day, Rush Limbaugh, maybe today Ben Shapiro, if you watch MSNBC, you’re coming for the politics.

And so if that politics is conservative, that’s really, really important. If it’s liberal, it’s really important. A lot of other kinds of media organizations, more mainstream organizations, I think something that often gets missed and is really important is that politics is one of the things they do, often not the main one, often definitely not the one that keeps people coming back.

In local newspapers, the sports section and the classifieds were really, really important. At “The New York Times,” how do you feel about our cooking content or recipes? What do you think of Wordle? It really matters. That’s a big part of the business. It’s not the only thing. The Styles section is important. The Book Review is important. These things that are really not in that way political.

It’s a reason, I think, The Wall Street Journal has always been a different kind of institution than a lot of what we think of as conservative media. It is conservative in the sense that it is a place where you have more conservatives working. It’s owned now by Rupert Murdoch.

But it’s a business newspaper first. And so it has this other set of things it is doing before it gets into the question of its own politics. NPR is another good example of this where culturally, I think it’s fair to say, it is a liberal. But is what NPR is doing, is it first politics? No. They’re trying to be a news organization and have these local affiliates. It’s a bunch of other things.

So I wonder how much one of the things that has also happened here is that a lot of the space of these organizations that are crosspressured in their missions, crosspressured in their offerings, and so a little held back from going all in on politics — those organizations had taken up a lot of that room. And so as conservative media emerges, it is more explicitly conservative. The market niche it is filling is not a counternews or media establishment, but an unfilled political conservative niche.

NICOLE HEMMER: It’s such a smart observation, Ezra, because that’s exactly right. The kinds of stories that make their way into conservative media, they’re not always about electoral politics. But the hump that you have to get over to talk about a story on, say, Fox News, is that it has to have a politics to it, right? It has to fit into a broader narrative about politics, about the right, about conservatism and culture. (...)

If that is your identity and your mission from the start, that shapes why people come to you, but it also shapes the content that you put on. And if you stray too far from that, people might go with you a little bit if they are really attached to a particular host. So I think you’re exactly right about looking at the mission and the purpose of these outlets in order to understand why they function so differently.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ezra Klein, NYT

[ed. Sorry Republicans.... but nuts is nuts. Not saying Dems don't have their own baggage to deal with, but this is next level. Well worth a read. As usual, this will help with paywalls (including NYT).]

How Smart Are the Robots Getting?

The Turing test used to be the gold standard for proving machine intelligence. This generation of bots is racing past it.

The Turing test is a subjective measure. It depends on whether the people asking the questions feel convinced that they are talking to another person when in fact they are talking to a device.

But whoever is asking the questions, machines will soon leave this test in the rearview mirror. (...)

ChatGPT, a bot released in November by OpenAI, a San Francisco lab, leaves people feeling as if they were chatting with another person, not a bot. The lab said more than a million people had used it. Because ChatGPT can write just about anything, including term papers, universities are worried it will make a mockery of class work. When some people talk to these bots, they even describe them as sentient or conscious, believing that machines have somehow developed an awareness of the world around them.

Privately, OpenAI has built a system, GPT-4, that is even more powerful than ChatGPT. It may even generate images as well as words.

And yet these bots are not sentient. They are not conscious. They are not intelligent — at least not in the way that humans are intelligent. Even people building the technology acknowledge this point.

These bots are pretty good at certain kinds of conversation, but they cannot respond to the unexpected as well as most humans can. They sometimes spew nonsense and cannot correct their own mistakes. Although they can match or even exceed human performance in some ways, they cannot in others. Like similar systems that came before, they tend to complement skilled workers rather than replace them. (...)

“These systems can do a lot of useful things,” said Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI and one of the most important A.I. researchers of the past decade, referring to the new wave of chatbots. “On the other hand, they are not there yet. People think they can do things they cannot.”

As the latest technologies emerge from research labs, it is now obvious — if it was not obvious before — that scientists must rethink and reshape how they track the progress of artificial intelligence. The Turing test is not up to the task. (...)

ChatGPT is what researchers call a neural network, a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain. This is the same technology that translates between English and Spanish on services like Google Translate and identifies pedestrians as self-driving cars weave through city streets.

A neural network learns skills by analyzing data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of photos of stop signs, for example, it can learn to recognize a stop sign.

Five years ago, Google, OpenAI and other A.I. labs started designing neural networks that analyzed enormous amounts of digital text, including books, news stories, Wikipedia articles and online chat logs. Researchers call them “large language models.” Pinpointing billions of distinct patterns in the way people connect words, letters and symbols, these systems learned to generate their own text.

They can create tweets, blog posts, poems, even computer programs. They can carry on a conversation — at least up to a point. And as they do, they can seamlessly combine far-flung concepts. You can ask them to rewrite Queen’s pop operetta, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” so that it rhapsodizes about the life of a postdoc academic researcher, and they will.

“They can extrapolate,” said Oriol Vinyals, senior director of deep learning research at the London lab DeepMind, who has built groundbreaking systems that can juggle everything from language to three-dimensional video games. “They can combine concepts in ways you would never anticipate.” (...)

The result is a chatbot geared toward answering individual questions — the very thing that Turing envisioned. Google, Meta and other organizations have built bots that operate in similar ways. (...)

Turing’s test judged whether a machine could imitate a human. This is how artificial intelligence is typically portrayed — as the rise of machines that think like people. But the technologies under development today are very different from you and me. They cannot deal with concepts they have never seen before. And they cannot take ideas and explore them in the physical world.

ChatGPT made that clear. As more users experimented with it, they showed off its abilities and limitations. One Twitter user asked ChatGPT what letter came next in the sequence O T T F F S S, and it gave the correct answer (E). But it also told him the wrong reason it was correct, failing to realize that these are the first letters in the numbers 1 to 8.

At the same time, there are many ways these bots are superior to you and me. They do not get tired. They do not let emotion cloud what they are trying to do. They can instantly draw on far larger amounts of information. And they can generate text, images and other media at speeds and volumes we humans never could.

Their skills will also improve considerably in the coming years. (...)

In the months and years to come, these bots will help you find information on the internet. They will explain concepts in ways you can understand. If you like, they will even write your tweets, blog posts and term papers.

They will tabulate your monthly expenses in your spreadsheets. They will visit real estate websites and find houses in your price range. They will produce online avatars that look and sound like humans. They will make mini-movies, complete with music and dialogue.

“This will be the next step up from Pixar — superpersonalized movies that anyone can create really quickly,” said Bryan McCann, former lead research scientist at Salesforce, who is exploring chatbots and other A.I. technologies at a start-up called You.com.

As ChatGPT and DALL-E have shown, this kind of thing will be shocking, fascinating and fun. It will also leave us wondering how it will change our lives. What happens to people who have spent their careers making movies? Will this technology flood the internet with images that seem real but are not? Will their mistakes lead us astray?

by Cade Metz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ricardo Rey

11 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT To Write Code

"Simplifying code This is one of my favorite tricks: Ask ChatGPT to simplify complex code. The result will be a much more compact version of the original code. Notice the explanation and how it tells us this is simpler but not the most efficient."
11 ways you can use ChatGPT to write code (Santiago) 

[ed. But! ... see also:]

[ed. Human nature. Interesting technological insight immediately gets sidetracked by banal threat (or something). Image via: Twitter. 

But it does highlight another issue I've been wondering about: intellectual property rights for anything AI produces, based on previously copyrighted material: For example:] 

Who Ultimately Owns Content Generated By ChatGPT And Other AI Platforms? (Forbes)

Before we all get too deep into using ChatGPT or other AI tools to create things for us, we need to address some of the questions raised around content custody, ownership, and attribution.

Some have breathlessly proclaimed ChatGPT to be the most important development since the invention of the printing press or the splitting of the atom. We’ll see. But there are issues with the accuracy, truthfulness, and inherent bias of the materials that AI platforms such as ChatGPT generate. In another matter, since there is speculation that ChatGPT or other AI platforms could take over at least some of the work of writers, analysts, and other content creators, we need to also understand its legal ramifications.

There’s no issue around personal use of ChatGPT as a conversational assistant. And the rules around using ChatGPT to generate term papers seem pretty clear (don’t even think about it). But when it comes to applying AI-generated prose in content intended for wider distribution — say marketing materials, white papers, or even articles — the legalities get a little murky. When it comes to intellectual property, the model for ChatGPT “is trained on a corpus of created works and it is still unclear what the legal precedent may be for reuse of this content, if it was derived from the intellectual property of others,” according to Bern Elliot, analyst at Gartner.

Foodie Fever Dreams Can’t Keep Restaurants Afloat

When René Redzepi announced he would close Noma, his Michelin three-star restaurant/work camp in Copenhagen, food magazines and newspapers treated the inability to run a profitable business as Mr. Redzepi’s problem. That is, a problem that emerges only when you call your kitchen a lab and your cooks will work without pay, just to have your name on their résumé. But extremist fine dining’s challenges are just the amuse-bouche in a multicourse menu of the rotting state of the restaurant business.

A large part of the hospitality industry is ravaged, thanks to the pandemic and its fallout. Even spots that pivoted through the initial crisis were soon suffocated by labor shortages or a mucked-up supply chain. But restaurants were struggling with losses in staffing, momentum and revenue long before 2020. The pandemic merely made obvious the archaic and limited nature of our gerbil wheel of a business model.

I recently closed my flagship restaurant in Kinston, N.C. For more than 15 years, Chef & the Farmer was a star in the farm-to-table sky. Our food exalted my region’s little-known cuisine, and the level of service we provided was an anomaly for miles. Chef & the Farmer wasn’t Noma. Our average check hovered around $60 per person. (At Mr. Redzepi’s? It’s $500 a pop.) We did not bury, dehydrate or reconcentrate things in our kitchen, but everyone — even the interns — got paid.

Even so, Chef & the Farmer closed, in large part because the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business model became impossible to ignore. Our industry needs to evolve or else more full-service, cuisine-driven restaurants like mine will languish their way to extinction.

Chef & the Farmer belonged to a corner of the industry where carrot dishes cost $16 and menus were printed nightly because said carrots were reimagined by a tweezer-bedecked wizard on a whim. We didn’t just serve cocktails, coffee and wine — we had a “beverage program,” and a director to oversee it. From the outside, our candlelit symphony of sophisticated servers, sommeliers and hosts looked just as we intended, bearing knowing smiles as they made round trips to the kitchen to fetch magic from the wizard herself.

But while guests sipped and savored their painstakingly created foodie fever dreams, the people behind the scenes got slammed — or, to apply some of the other words we used to describe our experience as we put together yours, we got crushed, pummeled and murdered.

Paper-thin margins make a career in this industry either a distinct choice or a dead end. Restaurateurs depend on alcohol sales to pay a large portion of our staff, and we rely largely on our guests’ tips to pay everyone else. Even when sales couldn’t be better, many independently owned restaurants have to overwork salaried employees and underpay hourly ones. It’s all but impossible to offer meaningful benefits like health insurance or paid leave. That’s perhaps why you so rarely hear a parent say: “You should get into the restaurant business. It looks like a nice life.”

Why are our margins so small? For starters, several people spent hours transforming in-a-husk corn into that artfully plated smoked corn agnolotti. Many restaurants have prep cooks, butchers, sous chefs, bakers, managers and custodians who spend hours on the clock before the restaurant opens and begins taking in revenue.

Restaurants also require expensive specialized equipment. Our staff needs to cook on a range, fry in a fryer and do dishes in the dish pit. None of that is possible without a robust hood system. Pricey equipment, even pricier infrastructure, all the small things (plates, linens, flatware, pots and pans) and the not-so-small things (tables, chairs, light fixtures and signs) turn dinner into an experience worth remembering. A restaurant is a hefty investment that looks terrible on paper — but when we have a spitfire talent at the helm, we convince ourselves that it just might work.

I’m not the first to recognize the fallacies of our business model. Fast food, counter service and drive-throughs proliferate for a reason. Think about your region’s most noteworthy chef, the one with a James Beard Award and a custom apron. I bet at a certain point, after being anointed a creative genius by diners and journalists, your favorite magician decided to pull a burger joint, a taco shop or a fried chicken shack out of his or her toque.

by Vivian Howard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Noma via:

CSN&Y

[ed. David Crosby has died. Beautiful voice... not a particularly nice person though, apparently. That's all I'll say about that. See also: mercurial musical genius who thrived through the chaos; and, David Crosby obituary (The Guardian).]

Fatboy Slim ft. Bootsy Collins

[ed. Rabbit hole review. I saw some reference to Fatboy Slim this morning and while I'd heard the name before (not completely comatose), I didn't know a thing about his music. So, found this recent video of a visit to the US in 2022. Then this one, a classic with Christopher Walken (which I do remember). Ok, popular DJ. Got it. See also: Sunset (Bird of Prey); and, Praise You.]

Why Golf Saudi Sees Women's Golf As Ripe For Disruption

It was time to talk about the future, the commissioner wrote. In a letter dated Sept. 12, 2022, Mollie Marcoux Samaan—then 16 months into her new role as head of the LPGA—sent a note to players congratulating them on a successful season, expressing her gratitude for the opportunity to lead their tour and optimism for where it was headed. However, Marcoux Samaan said, the LPGA could only get where it wanted to go by having everyone headed in the same direction. “This is your tour and our success depends on your passion, your actions and your commitment to both your individual success and that of the organization,” Marcoux Samaan wrote.

A former athlete and athletic director at Princeton, Marcoux Samaan said she would be providing information on conversations the LPGA was having with players on the Ladies European Tour and with LET officials, “and hope we can share perspectives on the changing global golf landscape.” The letter did not state the series, organization or monarchy that was spurring this change although the implication was clear: If LPGA players had the same reservations about dealing with the Saudis as their PGA Tour counterparts, this was the time to talk about it.Marcoux Samaan went on to outline that she would be at six of the remaining eight events on the 2022 LPGA schedule, starting that week in Portland, Ore., for roundtable discussions to share information, thoughts, concerns and ideas. “I know it’s hard to make time during a tournament, but I can’t stress how important it is for us to communicate,” Marcoux Samaan wrote. “Your legacy is more than just how you play on the course or how much money you earn.” The first meeting was scheduled at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 14, in the player dining area at Columbia Edgewater Country Club.

No players showed up.

Some of the attendance issues could be attributed to miscommunication. Months later, miscommunication was blamed for players skipping a sponsored dinner at the CME Group Tour Championship, leading to the sponsor’s CEO publicly blasting Marcoux Samaan. Players did attend other meetings in the fall with LPGA brass; still, while no one is sure of Saudi Arabia’s long-term aspirations with the women’s game, few expect resistance to the kingdom’s efforts from LPGA leadership like those encountered by LIV Golf on the men’s side. Or, as the incidents above illustrate—along with snafus at this week’s season-opening Tournament of Champions, where players were initially denied locker-room access by the host course—whatever resistance exists may be rudderless.

It’s already been documented that Golf Saudi’s genesis is tied to the kingdom’s Vision 2030 blueprint, a plan to diminish the country’s reliance on oil by diversifying the economy, modernizing its public services and improving its global reputation. Golf was seen as a vessel to those ambitions with projects like developing courses and hosting professional competitions. It is this last point that sparked the Saudi International into existence in 2019, a tournament that was initially sanctioned by the European Tour. But Golf Saudi—and, as an extension, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman—were rebuffed in their attempts to become a more permanent fixture of golf’s political matrix with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. This is what led the Saudis to start their own tour, which beget LIV Golf and the current schism in men’s professional golf.

However, Golf Saudi has had far more success making inroads into the women’s game. In just two years, Golf Saudi has gone from hosting one event on the Ladies European Tour to six, with one of those events played in the United States. Unlike LIV Golf—which is composed largely of players a notch or two below the game's elite—Golf Saudi’s women’s events have attracted in-their-prime talent. (...)

So why is Golf Saudi interested in the LPGA and the women’s game?

Like much of the Saudi involvement in golf, a clear answer is elusive. The uncomfortable truth is that women’s professional golf garners nowhere near the amount of attention—and by extension, money—as its male counterpart, so it’s doubtful Golf Saudi is investing millions and millions into this realm solely for financial reasons. Chalking up the Saudi’s efforts as mere sportswashing seems to be an elementary distillation of the matter, and yet that observation rings louder here than other Vision 2030 sports undertakings. (...)

After Marcoux Samaan said she would listen to Golf Saudi, activist Lina Alhathloul—whose sister, Loujain al-Hathloul, is a two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and current political prisoner of Saudi Arabia—implored the LPGA to reconsider. “I am sounding the alarm on the consequences of such actions,” Alhathloul wrote in an open letter. “I urge you to consider the human rights aspect of your potential involvement with LIV Golf and use your influence to positively raise the situation of women in the country and to publicly distance yourself from the Saudi regime."

So far, many of the best women pros have not been deterred by the stigma of association with the Saudi regime. There have been dissidents, though most, including Hall of Famer Karrie Webb, are no longer active players. Unlike their male counterparts, this is not the rich getting richer. It's the upper- to middle-class players becoming rich, or ensuring stability to those just getting by. The case can be made that some don’t have a choice: The Aramco series is roughly 20 percent of the LET schedule. If a player on that tour sits out those events, there’s a good chance they risk losing their card.

“To be honest with you, it’s hard to compare what the partnership that Aramco Series has with the women versus what’s going on with the men,” Lee told Golfweek. “It’s apples and oranges. The women on the LET, they play for almost nothing. It’s very similar purse sizes on the [Epson] Tour. A million-dollar purse for them is huge, absolutely huge. It’s almost life-changing for some of those girls when they make a big check at the end of the week. I feel like on the men’s tour, you don’t have guys rooming every week with another player; you don’t have them sharing an AirBnb; you don’t have them sharing a rental car, staying at host families every week.”

There’s also the air of inevitably, that the LPGA doesn’t have the means for a fight and resistance is futile. “I hope we survive it,” Stacy Lewis told Golfweek last summer. “I’m scared for this tour. I’m scared to lose all the opportunities that we’ve created … I think you have a majority [of players] that would ask, ‘What’s the number?’ Should we talk to them? Absolutely. Ultimately, I think we have to find a way to co-exist.”

by Joell Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image:Amer Hilabi

[ed. So, LIV just got a tv golf deal (in a do or die situtation). I don't know... I read this whole story and still can't figure out what's going on. There's a lot of people (and a lot of money) working at cross purposes and it's hard to know where the momentum is going. Some golfers will benefit for sure, but the game not so much. See also: The PGA Tour vs. LIV: Inside the battle between a giant that won't budge and a startup that won't stop; and, The $153 million question: Breaking down the PGA Tour’s response to LIV (GD).]

The Masters of the Universe Think They're Do-Gooders

Has there ever been a “meeting that should have been an email” so glaring as Davos? Each year, the world’s masters of politics and finance ride carbon-spewing jets to the World Economic Forum in a lavish Swiss resort town bristling with armed guards, where they opine somberly about solving poverty and climate change. The very act of attendance exposes all the subsequent dialogue as hypocrisy. The event serves primarily as a rare point of unity for political right and left wings, both of whom agree that everyone there should be in jail. If all of these professional decision-makers were really good at decision-making, they would replace the whole farce with an annual quick chat. “So then, we’ll carry on with global capitalism for another year. Agree? Right. Cheerio.”

Davos and similar conclaves can only be understood as performances. They are the stage upon which the Masters of the Universe act out the dramatic narrative of their own lives. They are exercises in mutual self-affirmation: we’re here, and we are important. What good is a powerful position without a rapt audience to listen to one’s pronouncements? Anyone can be rich, but only a select few can be influencers.

It is this intoxicating allure of performative influence that lends Davos its underlying absurdity. There is nothing very remarkable about officials who control the world getting together in private to make self-serving decisions; they do that all the time. That’s the job. The fatal flaw of the Davos crowd is that they are not satisfied simply with being in control of everything. They also want to be good, or at least to give the public impression of being good. Thus the typical CEO and presidential interviews and panels of economic and geopolitical predictions – the real things – are leavened with piles of other cultural and do-gooder content meant to convey the idea that at the center this crowd of the world’s most cut-throat plutocrats and cold-blooded status-seekers lies a heart of gold.

Yes, they are here to dominate all aspects of your life, but they are doing so with the best interests of humanity in mind. Trust them! Would people who didn’t genuinely care about morality sit through a panel entitled “Profit and Purpose: Accelerating the Equity of Opportunity?” Checkmate, Marxists! The word “equity” is right there in the description!
Anyone can be rich, but only a select few can be influencers

The pastry-munching crowds of Davos want to have their Swiss chocolate and eat it, too. And that is their fatal flaw. The supreme irony is that this event that claims to identify and analyze global trends – and which has, for years now, been fretting over the rise of what is inexactly termed “populism”, which threatens to consume the political order that has facilitated corporate capitalism’s postwar dominance – is itself one of the most perfect fuels on earth for populist anger. If the minds of Davos actually believed their own bullshit, they would shut the conference down immediately, understanding that it is a threat to the values they purportedly believe. It is no exaggeration to say this monstrosity of opulence playing out amid the ominously reduced snowpack of the Alps is such a powerful symbol of all that is wrong with the neoliberal era of the world that it will help to bring about its own downfall.

It is a symbol of cloistered elites boldly pampering themselves as they lecture on the need for sustainability; it is a symbol of exclusivity draping itself in the language of democracy; it is a symbol of the unaccountable financiers and bureaucrats and intellectuals who went to the right schools and work for the right institutions and are therefore allowed to lock themselves in an impermeable bubble, gaze out in ignorance at a world whose problems they have never experienced, and prescribe a course of action that will, coincidentally, perpetuate the dominance they have enjoyed for generations.

The utility of any actually worthwhile networking or communication or information-sharing that occurs in the halls of Davos pales in comparison to the inferno of disgust that its existence stokes among millions of angry, mistreated, locked out people around the world who will never set foot inside its security cordon. If nothing else, the attendees of Davos should shut it down out of pure self-interest. They’re making everyone mad.

by Hamilton Nolan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
[ed. Exactly. Tell me again why we need something like Davos when we have a UN? Like the recent COP27 Climate Change Conference, Davos turns 50 now and after generations of happy talking, backslapping dog and pony shows our world's climate and economic inequalities are worse than ever. Why is that? See also: Davos elites need to wake up to ‘megathreats’ the world is facing (Guardian); and, Is Davos As Bad As Critics Say? Global Leaders Weigh In (NPR); and World’s billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people (Oxfam).]

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Library (flickr)
via:

Does the War Over Abortion Have a Future?

In decades past, as the calendar turned to January, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade would come into view. Abortion opponents would be planning to acknowledge the date with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. Supporters of abortion rights would schedule seminars or meet for quiet conversations about whether and when the Supreme Court might actually go so far as to repudiate the decision it issued 50 years ago on Jan. 22, 1973.

There will, of course, be no Roe to march against this year, the right to abortion having died a constitutional death in June at the hands of five Supreme Court justices. There has been ample commentary on how anger at the court for its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization helped to block the predicted “red wave” in the midterm elections. Not only did Dobbs-motivated voters enable the Democrats to hold the Senate, but they also, given the chance to express themselves directly, accounted for abortion rights victories in all six states with an abortion-related question on the ballot (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont).

But the justifiable focus on the role of abortion in the country’s politics has crowded out much talk about what this unexpected political turn actually means for the future of abortion. There is a case to be made, it seems to me, that abortion access has won the culture war.

I know that might sound wildly premature, even fanciful: Abortion access has vanished across the South in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and anyone anywhere in the world remains free to pursue Texas women seeking abortions, along with anyone who helps them, for a minimum $10,000 bounty under the state’s S.B. 8 vigilante law. The picture is bleak indeed. But it’s when it appears that things couldn’t get worse that weakness can become strength. (...)

The full dimension of the post-Dobbs world will come into ever clearer view, as news accounts mount up of what happens when women whose wanted pregnancies have gone drastically wrong are denied the prompt terminations that barely seven months ago would have been the obvious treatment. People who have regarded abortion as something that befalls wayward teenagers will come to realize that abortion care is — or was — an ordinary and necessary part of medical care. And while all the justices in the Dobbs majority were raised in the Catholic church, nearly two-thirds of American Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. (...)

What I mean is that the polarity has shifted. The anti-abortion position that was so convenient for Republican politicians for so long is, with surprising speed, coming to seem like an encumbrance. The once-comfortable family-values rhetoric no longer provides cover for the extremism that the Dobbs decision has made visible. Yes, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives this week passed two anti-abortion measures, both recognized as dead on arrival. The important point about this bit of legislative theater was the label a conservative South Carolina Republican, Representative Nancy Mace, affixed to it: “tone-deaf.” Even so, she voted for the two bills.

In a recent article published by ProPublica, Richard Briggs, a Tennessee state senator and cardiac surgeon who co-sponsored the state’s exceptionally strict abortion ban in 2019, now says he had assumed the law would never actually take effect and believes it is too harsh “because the medical issues are a lot more complex.” Not incidentally, 80 percent of Tennessee voters believe that abortion should be legal at least under some circumstances.

Abortion is surely not going away as an issue in politics. But it will be just that: an issue, like food safety, reliable public transit, affordable housing and adequate energy supplies. All these, and countless others, are issues in politics, too. We need these things, and if the government won’t provide them, we assume at least that the government won’t stand in the way of our getting them.

Democrats played defense on abortion for so long (remember the apologetic Clinton-era mantra “safe, legal and rare”?) that defense became part of the Democratic DNA. What this posture ultimately led to was Dobbs. And now the midterm elections have made Dobbs not an end point but an opportunity, a gift, albeit an unwelcome one, in the form of a national admonition on what extremism looks like.

by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston for The New York Times

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter (Current Affairs)

Image: Current Affairs

[ed. Lots of depressing links.]

The Toxoplasma of Rage

Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat.

Predictably, the move caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”.

Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.

People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybody has heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?”

While not everyone is a vegan, most people who learn enough about factory farming are upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroots pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of attention.

PETA creates attention, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”

So there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other.

Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it.

And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.

But at least they’re paying attention!

PETA doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot because they’re stupid. They shoot themselves in the foot because they’re traveling up an incentive gradient that rewards them for doing so, even if it destroys their credibility. (...)

And now, for something completely different.

Before “meme” meant doge and all your base, it was a semi-serious attempt to ground cultural evolution in parasitology. The idea was to replace a model of humans choosing whichever ideas they liked with a model of ideas as parasites that evolved in ways that favored their own transmission. This never really caught on, because most people’s response was “That’s neat. So what?”

But let’s talk about toxoplasma.

Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder. (...)

A while ago I wrote a post called Meditations on Moloch where I pointed out that in any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond to what any individual within the system wants. The classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which usually ends at defect-defect even though both of the two prisoners involved prefer cooperate-cooperate. I compare this malignant discoordination to Ginsberg’s portrayal of Moloch, the demon-spirit of capitalism gone wrong.(...)

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.

People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.

Imagine Moloch looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”. And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. And so it goes. Greenpeace has been doing this since, like... forever. Manipulating public opinion for propaganda and profit (as old as history itself) with outrageous antics. This is actually an old post, dredged up after reading the essay following this one on the decline (or siloing) of History studies (below). For something more current, see also: How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy (NYT):]

***

But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.

ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. (...)

Rather than flooding legislators’ inboxes with supportive emails, or dominating the Capitol switchboard with synthetic voice calls, an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage.

When we humans do these things, we call it lobbying. Successful agents in this sphere pair precision message writing with smart targeting strategies. Right now, the only thing stopping a ChatGPT-equipped lobbyist from executing something resembling a rhetorical drone warfare campaign is a lack of precision targeting. A.I. could provide techniques for that as well. (...)

Moreover, the flexibility of A.I. could help achieve influence across many policies and jurisdictions simultaneously. Imagine an A.I.-assisted lobbying firm that can attempt to place legislation in every single bill moving in the U.S. Congress, or even across all state legislatures. Lobbying firms tend to work within one state only, because there are such complex variations in law, procedure and political structure. With A.I. assistance in navigating these variations, it may become easier to exert power across political boundaries.

The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession

When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.

Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.

History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.

The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.

Yet as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.

The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.

What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans. (...)

These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.” (...)

It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.

Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It’s easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias. In today’s world, if you don’t have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.

If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies. Many Republican politicians support “divisive concepts” laws that try to regulate what college professors teach. Are they aiming at an easy target in the culture war? Perhaps. But it’s also true that a humanities education encourages thinking that often challenges xenophobic and racist dogma. Progress depends on studying and arguing about the past in an open and informed manner. This is especially true in a moment like our own, in which Americans use history to fight over which vision of the country will dominate politics. If there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph.

by Daniel Bessner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Soohee Cho

[ed. The weaponization (and decline) of history studies - most notably described in Orwell's 1984. Not sure where it overlaps most effectively with propaganda, but obviously related.]

Calvin K, MLK

[ed. Budding historian/artist.]

When Did We All Become Pop Culture Detectives?

Halfway through last December, Britney Spears logged on to Instagram. A year had passed since the pop star was released from a 13-year conservatorship, thanks in part to the #FreeBritney movement, whose fastidious members suspected she’d been using the platform to send coded messages to her nearly 42 million followers. Now free to express herself, the 41-year-old singer shared an edited video aboard a private jet; a clip of Bette Davis flirting with a farmhand in the 1932 film “The Cabin in the Cotton”; and a two-slide carousel that included a top Google image search result for “Santa Claus + painting” and a recording of Spears and her husband, Sam Asghari, goofing around in front of a Christmas tree, with the caption, “He’s coming soon.”

One commenter surmised that Spears’s excitement about St. Nick’s arrival was in fact a veiled pregnancy announcement. Others trailed different, increasingly outrageous crumbs: What had happened to the gap between her two front teeth (which the would-be Britney Army attributed to dental decay, a possible side effect of the lithium she’d reportedly been forced to take against her will)? Why was the couple dressed in clothing they’d worn a few nights earlier on her birthday? Where was her wedding ring? And could it be a coincidence that when rearranged, the letters in “Santa” spell “Satan”? At least that would explain, added another conspiracist, why Spears was so often photographed giving Asghari devil horns.

Intense scrutiny has never been incidental to life as a public figure, but in our age of disinformation, when facts are fungible and nothing is what it seems, the discourse about celebrities and their work seems to have shifted from criticism to full-on forensics. Taylor Swift, an expert at lodging ciphers into her lyrics and liner notes, has trained her fans to comb her online content for clues about new music. “Thought you were slick, thinking this was your age. It’s not! I caught you!” said a breathless Swiftie on TikTok, still high from the dopamine hit of his discovery: He’d interpreted a photo of Swift taken on her 33rd birthday in December, in which she held up three fingers in each hand, as proof that the rerelease of “Speak Now,” her third record, was imminent; the purple filter she’d applied to the image, the same color as the dress she wore on the 2010 album’s cover, corroborated his suspicion.

Although Easter eggs — covert messages planted within books, video games, films, TV shows and songs, or on social media — are now part of the cultural fun, steganography began as an early fight for free speech. During the Middle Ages, when governing bodies were known to punish the creators of politically, socially or theologically disruptive literature, so-called heretics sometimes buried notes and phrases in text, or used invisible ink. In 1499, the first edition of “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” an unattributed erotic love story published in Venice, included an acrostic made by combining the first letter in each chapter, which, when translated into English, seemed to reveal the author’s identity.

A half-century later, the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder became known for embedding his crowded depictions of pastoral life with scatological humor, a crass antecedent to the English illustrator Martin Handford’s 1987 children’s book “Where’s Wally?” And while making “Rubber Soul” in 1965, the Beatles, inspired by the electronic manipulation of musique concrète from the 1940s, popularized backmasking, in which sound is recorded backward on a track. The technique’s use in the 1968 song “Revolution 9,” which created a line that sounded like “Turn me on, dead man,” fueled a rumor that Paul McCartney had been in a fatal car crash and replaced by a look-alike.

***

Easter eggs didn't get their name until around 1980, when Warren Robinett, then a disenchanted Atari designer, frustrated that he hadn’t received public credit or royalties for his innovations, created a secret room in the video game Adventure where players could find his signature. Robinett remembers Steve Wright, the company’s director of software development at the time, saying, “Well, I don’t know that this is bad to have hidden surprises. It’s like waking up on Easter morning and searching for Easter eggs underneath the bushes and flowers.” (Decades later, the rebellious act inspired Ernest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi scavenger hunt novel, “Ready Player One.”)

Unlike an allusion — a tip of the hat to a previous work — an Easter egg, when found, is an anachronistic disruption, an anti-mimetic breaking of the fourth wall to make room for a joke, clue or grievance. And yet, as the search for clandestine meanings intensifies everywhere, the distinction has collapsed to include anything that lies just beneath the surface, and what was once the subtext — a stratum of fandom accessible only to the most loyal and discerning observers — has become the context.

by Nick Haramis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs” (1559). The artist embedded his crowded depictions of pastoral life with scatological humor.Credit...Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

[ed. Not detectives. Conspiracy nuts. See also: Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion (ACT); and, Driven by Election Deniers, This County Recounted 2020 Votes Last Week (NYT).]

How N.F.L. Receivers Run Their Routes, Step by Step

The N.F.L. is a passing league, so quarterbacks’ names — rightfully — receive top billing.

But marquee throwers also need teammates to catch their passes, and in many instances receivers aren’t getting due credit for their role in making big plays successful.

Tua Tagovailoa, Kirk Cousins and Jalen Hurts led their teams to the playoffs after posting some of the best stats of their careers this season in part because of their receivers. The choices those pass-catchers make long before they flex in the end zone often dictate as much of the offense as their quarterbacks’ decisions.

The New York Times spoke with five of the N.F.L.’s elite receivers: Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen of the Minnesota Vikings, Tyreek Hill of the Miami Dolphins, DeVonta Smith of the Philadelphia Eagles and CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys. They helped us dissect the art of route running, and we reviewed footage of some of their touchdowns this season. They detailed an intricate mental and physical battle to beat defenders, happening in fractions of a second, which most football viewers tend to miss.

Before the play even starts, a receiver needs to identify what coverage the defender is using, as understanding what responsibilities the defender has will influence the pass catcher’s decisions as the route develops.

Seeing where the defender is aligned and using motions across the formation are two main methods to infer the coverage before the ball is snapped, players said.

Jefferson, who led the league in yardage this season (1,809), said he studies at least six hours of film per week. By game day, he said he has a good understanding of the defense’s tendencies and how they might play him on certain downs and distances.

He looks for the defensive back to reveal before the snap how he will be covered: Little tells like the defender leaning one way or another can tip Jefferson off whether the defense is in man coverage or zone.

Jefferson looked for those minor clues against the Bills’ defense in the Vikings’ wild comeback win on Nov. 13. Long before his jaw-dropping fourth-quarter catch, Jefferson scored a 22-yard touchdown in the first quarter by recognizing how cornerback Dane Jackson was playing him. Jackson lined up close to the line of scrimmage, picking up Jefferson immediately after the snap in man coverage. The play called for the Vikings receiver to run a fade route, or a straight-ahead sprint designed to end with the receiver creeping toward the sideline once the pass was thrown.

Seeing Jackson play him tight, Jefferson sped past and broke toward the outside, leaving Jackson in a bad position: Trailing his man and with his back turned to the pass, the defensive back could only hope to use his body as a shield against the ball.

“The whole week, we were saying, ‘If they go man, we’re going to throw it up,’” Jefferson said in an interview. “I wanted to get in a position where he couldn’t see the ball or know where it was coming, to block him off and catch the ball.”

by Emmanuel Morgan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Clayton-King/Associated Press; photo illustration by The New York Times
[ed. Pretty cool (with videos). It's more complicated than it appears (and, as always, if you're having problems with access try this).]

Tom Bukovac & Guthrie Trapp (and Lovin' Spoonful)

[ed. Nashville cats. See also: 42:50 - 48:30 on speed picking. Tom is a top notch session player with a wildly popular YouTube channel for guitar instruction - Homeskoolin' (charmingly low-tech - mostly him recording in his kitchen with a guitar, a beer, and his iPhone). Check it out.]

Nashville cats, play clean as country water
Nashville cats, play wild as mountain dew
Nashville cats, been playin' since they's babies
Nashville cats, get work before they're two

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee ant hill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks his guitar could play
Twice as better than I will

Yeah, I was just thirteen, you might say I was a
Musical proverbial knee-high
When I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes
And they blasted me sky-high
And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, "But I Will"

[Chorus]

Well, there's sixteen thousand eight hundred 'n' twenty one
Mothers from Nashville
All their friends play music, and they ain't uptight
If one of the kids will
Because it's custom made for any mothers son
To be a guitar picker in Nashville
And I sure am glad I got a chance to say a word about
The music and the mothers from Nashville

[Chorus]

Pick it...

US Covid Numbers Surging: 'People Aren't Taking This Seriously'

In the fourth year of the pandemic, Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays, fewer precautions and the continuing evolution of Omicron subvariants of the virus.

New sub-variants are causing concern for their increased transmissibility and ability to evade some antibodies, but the same tools continue to curtail the spread of Covid, especially bivalent boosters, masks, ventilation, antivirals and other precautions, experts said.

Yet booster uptake has been “pitiful”, said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Antiviral uptake has been low, and few mandates on masking, vaccination and testing have resumed in the face of the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.

New Covid hospital admissions are now at the fourth-highest rate of the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Covid hospitalizations declined somewhat after the summer wave, but never dropped to the low levels seen after previous spikes, persisting through the fall and rising again with the winter holidays.

“Hospitals are at maximum capacity,” said Brendan Williams, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, of his region’s current rates. “I’m not sure what the trajectory of this thing’s going to be, but I am worried.”

The majority of Covid hospitalizations are among those 65 and older, although the share for children under four roughly doubled in 2022.

In the past week, Covid deaths rose by 44%, from 2,705 in the week ending 4 January to 3,907 in the week ending 11 January.

This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus. It’s much lower than the peak in January 2022, but similar to the summer 2022 surge, which was the second biggest.

And it’s not done yet. “Certainly it does not appear that we are peaking yet,” Sehgal said. 

by Melody Schreiber, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Justin Lane/EPA