Did Everyone Buy a Guitar in Quarantine or What?

To some people, guitars are almost as essential as toilet paper. While the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the global economy, seriously hurting and shuttering many businesses, some companies — like Amazon and Procter & Gamble, for example — posted jaw-dropping financials. And in a less predictable turn of events, it appears the same can be said for major music retailers.

In conversations with Rolling Stone, instrument sellers Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Reverb reported a bang-up year for online sales. In 2020, online-only store Sweetwater surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the company’s 42-year history. It also served over 1.5 million customers in 2020, up from a million in 2019. CEO Chuck Surack says shipping out 15,000 to 20,000 orders a day was normal for most of the year, resulting in about a 40 percent increase from the previous year. And when “Black Friday stuff picked up” the numbers increased to 22,000 to 24,000 orders a day, peaking at about 30,000.

While the Etsy-owned Reverb — an online-only marketplace similar in design to Etsy, but for musical equipment — has not yet released its gross merchandise sales (GMS) data for the fourth quarter, CEO David Mandelbrot tells Rolling Stone that Reverb saw its highest quarterly GMS yet in 2020’s second quarter. And the third quarter numbers were up more than 30% compared to the same period last year.

Even Guitar Center — the only one of these three with brick-and-mortar locations — saw an uptick, despite filing for bankruptcy to reorganize debt. While Guitar Center doesn’t share exact revenue figures, its chief marketing and communications officer Jeannine Davis D’Addario says Guitar Center’s online business has “been booming as consumers visit significantly more frequently, with sales up substantially in most categories compared to 2019.” According to Guitar Center, online sales more than doubled in 2020 when compared to 2019. (...)

Guitars gone wild

All three retailers report that the guitar was the most popular product they sold in quarantine. “Based on what we saw in 2020, one thing is certain: The guitar is thriving,” says Reverb’s Mandelbrot. “Orders and searches for guitars have been up significantly — including an increase in searches for popular guitar brands like Fender, Gibson, and Taylor — as well as searches for music gear that you pair with your guitar, like amps, guitar straps, effects pedals, and more.” Both searches for acoustic guitars and acoustic guitar amps were up by 50 percent year over year.

He adds that living-room-friendly acoustic guitars like the Taylor GS-Mini have been undeniably popular, but Reverb “continued to sell some really rare vintage guitars — like a beautiful 1965 Fender Stratocaster that Brian Setzer sold through his Reverb Shop.” Limited edition, boutique pedals also did particularly well. Mandelbrot says the selling price of classic and rare effects pedals from vintage brands like Klon and Mu-Tron went up “significantly” in 2020. And drops of limited-edition pedals on Reverb sold out within minutes and, in one case, in less than a minute.

“We’re now selling a thousand guitars every day,” adds Sweetwater’s Surack. “It blows me away.” In 2019, Sweetwater had days where it would peak at 800 or 825 guitars, but one thousand has since become the daily average.

Fender’s EVP of Sales for the Americas and EMEA Tammy Van Donk describes 2020 as a “roller coaster ride” for the guitar industry. “Demand evaporated in March, rebounded in April and exploded from May on,” she explains. “2020 ended up being the best year in [Fender’s] history with record sales of over $700 million, up 17% from 2019.” Gibson CEO James ‘JC’ Curleigh agrees, making a Dickensian reference to 2020: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he says. “April, May, and June were a challenging three months. But since then, we’ve been more than making up for it.” Gibson’s fiscal year ends in March, so annual numbers aren’t final yet but Curleigh says Gibson has seen a “steady increase in sales and growth” since August.

About a year ago, roughly a third of guitars were being sold online, according to Curleigh. And at that time, Curleigh says he predicted it would be about five years before it became a 50/50 dynamic between brick-and-mortar and virtual sales. “What we’re seeing now is that is that the five-year prediction of 50/50 is happening now,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Even in a post-Covid world, I think the guitar and music industry will settle into a 50/50 balance of online to in-store… People talk about necessity being the mother of invention. Well, necessity was the mother of access and acceleration for guitars.”

In with the new

Retailers also noticed an uptick specifically in new customers and beginner musicians that continued through 2020, meaning that their reach is now wider than it was at the start of last year.

Guitar Center’s D’Addario says that while guitar sales continue to increase, that’s especially clear with “beginner instruments at entry price points, particularly our Guitar Center Exclusive instruments, which have been selling out given their high quality to value.” She adds that the company has seen an increase in purchases among women and younger players. “With 40+-year-old players, we saw increased interest in learning to play an instrument,” D’Addario continues. “Additionally, we continued to see increases in our lessons students in both the 11-to-15 age range and over-40-year-old during shelter-in-place.”

Reverb’s Mandelbrot points out that people buying recording equipment — either for podcasting or DIY music-making — was a big trend, but the increase in beginners was even bigger. Based on conversations he’s had with customers, he’s found that needs for stress relief and breaks from looking at screens all day inspired a lot of newcomers. “We talked to a freelancer in Brooklyn who was having trouble finding work at the onset of the pandemic, so he found a mandolin on Reverb to help him occupy his mind and his time,” says Mandelbrot, who adds that basic instruments can act as a gateway drug to a seemingly endless world of gear. “People who bought music gear on Reverb for the first time in Q2 and Q3 continue to return to Reverb to browse for and buy music gear,” he says. (...)

“A lot of people said, ‘Hey, I’ve always wanted to play guitar,” says Gibson’s Curleigh. “So, guess what? All of a sudden, beginners came into to it. Intermediate players who had sort of gotten to a certain level, picked their guitar up again and started playing. And advanced and expert players were like, ‘Oh, my god, I have a wish list for this guitar. Life’s too short not to have my dream guitar. I’m going to buy it.’ The whole spectrum started taking action around that July, August time… I fundamentally believe, in the last year, more guitarists have been created and engaged than in the previous 10 years combined. If we manage this dynamic as an industry, we’ve got a whole new generation of guitarists for the next 10, 20, 30 years.”

by Samantha Hissong, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Reverb

[ed. Except... where are all the great guitar songs these days?]

Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own.

If you write a 4,500-word article about a 20-year war, you might want to mention how many people were killed.

While that seems obvious, Max Boot, an energetic backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has written a lengthy article on the war’s 20th anniversary that fails to note the number of deaths. The toll is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more — the carnage is too vast for an exact count — but Boot merely mentions a “high price in both blood and treasure” and quickly moves on.

How high a price? Whose blood? There is no explanation.

Boot is hardly the only anniversary writer unable to mention the apparently unmentionable. Peter Mansoor, a retired colonel with several deployments to Iraq, likewise failed to squeeze a reference to the death toll into his 2,000-word assessment of what happened. Mansoor’s story, like Boot’s, was published by Foreign Affairs, which is funded by the Council on Foreign Relations and is pretty much the true north of establishment thinking in Washington, D.C.

Their failure, which is replicated in about 99 percent of America’s discussions about Iraq, is a lot more than sloppy journalism. The Pentagon and its enablers prefer to turn the killing and maiming of civilians into an abstraction by calling it “collateral damage” so that it becomes a detail of history that we can pass over.

Ignoring civilian casualties is a necessary act of erasure if you wish to avoid a frank assessment of not just the Iraq War, but also the legacy and future of U.S. foreign policy. If you specify those casualties — which is not just hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in an illegal war begun with lies, but also millions of people injured, forced out of their homes, and traumatized for the rest of their lives — the discourse must change. The “high price” reveals itself as so grotesque that discussions can no longer center around the finer questions of how to better fight an insurgency or why “mistakes were made” by supposedly well-intentioned leaders. It becomes a matter of when do the trials start; who should be in the dock with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice; how large should Iraq’s reparations be; and when can we impose on ourselves something like the constitutional ban on the use of military force to settle disputes that we imposed on Japan after World War II?

Killing Ourselves

Until Covid-19 came along, I thought the willful ignorance of Iraqi casualties was principally a matter of Americans not caring about the deaths of foreigners, especially those who are not white and not Christian. And that’s certainly true: We don’t care enough about those deaths, even if (or especially if) we are responsible for them. But the larger truth is that we also don’t even care about the deaths of our own citizens. Choices have been made that caused America to have one of the highest per-capita rates of Covid deaths, with more than a million dying so far, and probably another 100,000 dying this year. The numbers tick upward, but most of us hardly notice.

In addition to the Covid toll, there is also the violence America inflicts on itself with guns, cars, opioids, and a predatory health care system that yields the highest maternal mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations. The situation is getting worse, not better, because life expectancy in the U.S. is plummeting while in comparable countries it is increasing.

It would take more than 4,500 words to get to the bottom of why America is so ruthless to itself as well as others. 

by Peter Maass, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Damir Sagolj/Reuters via Alamy
[ed. See also: "Trauma never goes away": as America forgets, Iraq war stays with U.S. Veterans; and, The architects of the Iraq war: where are they now? They’re all doing great, thanks for asking. (The Intercept).]

Explaining the Universe in One Small Step At a Time

[ed. Can't resist a beautiful illustration. See also: Baffled by black holes? Confused by quantum theory? Explaining the universe one small step at a time (The Guardian).
Image: Martin O'Neill/The Observer

What It Means to Be Woke

This week the conservative writer Bethany Mandel had the kind of moment that can happen to anyone who talks in public for a living: While promoting a new book critiquing progressivism, she was asked to define the term “woke” by an interviewer — a reasonable question, but one that made her brain freeze and her words stumble. The viral clip, in turn, yielded an outpouring of arguments about the word itself: Can it be usefully defined? Is it just a right-wing pejorative? Is there any universally accepted label for what it’s trying to describe?

The answers are yes, sometimes and unfortunately no. Of course there is something real to be described: The revolution inside American liberalism is a crucial ideological transformation of our time. But unlike a case like “neoconservatism,” where a critical term was then accepted by the movement it described, our climate of ideological enmity makes settled nomenclature difficult.

I personally like the term “Great Awokening,” which evokes the new progressivism’s roots in Protestantism — but obviously secular progressives find it condescending. I appreciate how the ‌British writer Dan Hitchens acknowledges the difficulty of definitions by calling the new left-wing politics “the Thing” — but that’s unlikely to catch on with true believing Thingitarians.

So let me try a different exercise — instead of a pithy term or definition, let me write a sketch of the “woke” worldview, elaborating its internal logic as if I myself believed in it. (To the incautious reader: These are not my actual beliefs.)

What is America all about, at its best? Equality and liberty. What is the left all about, at its best? Transforming those ideals into lived realities.

But this project keeps running into limits, disappointments and defeats. Everywhere you look, terrible disparities persist. And that persistence should force us to look deeper, beyond attempts to win legal rights or redistribute wealth, to the cultural and psychological structures that perpetuate oppression before law and policy begins to play a part. This is what the terminology of the academy has long been trying to describe — the way that generations of racist, homophobic, sexist, and heteronormative power have inscribed themselves, not just on our laws but our very psyches.

And once you see these forces in operation, you can’t unsee them — you are, well, “awake” — and you can’t accept any analysis that doesn’t acknowledge how they permeate our lives.

This means rejecting, first, any argument about group differences that emphasizes any force besides racism or sexism or other systems of oppression. (Indeed, the very measurement of difference — through standardized testing, say — is itself inevitably shaped by these oppressive forces.) Even differences that seem most obviously biological, like the differences between male and female athletes or the bodies that people find sexually attractive, should be presumed to be primarily culturally inscribed — because how can we know what’s really biological until we’ve finished liberating people from the crushing constraints of gender stereotypes?

It also means rejecting or modifying the rules of liberal proceduralism, because under conditions of deep oppression those supposed liberties are inherently oppressive themselves. You can’t have an effective principle of nondiscrimination unless you first discriminate in favor of the oppressed. You can’t have real freedom of speech unless you first silence some oppressors.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Every Break-Up You’ll Go Through Before You’re 30

Unless you’re sensationally uninvested in your own life, most people barrelling towards 30 have a bucket-list of sorts they hope to tick off before their 20’s ends. Maybe you want to move to Egypt, get a Husky or finally tell your boss where they can stick it.

Alongside this list of aspirational antics, there are all the bits you’re likely to go through whether you want them or not: Moving out, losing people you loved, having a job you don’t care for, mental health struggles. It’s a long list of undesirable, but important, experiences.

And if you’re dating – alongside various stages of commitment, casual dating, falling in love and fucking around – there’s one thing you’re almost guaranteed to go through: A break-up.

There are many types of break-ups, but most can be categorised into one of three groups: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

by Rachel Barker, Vice |  Read more:

Image: Dumitru Ochievschi

[ed. And some of us are lucky enough to experience all three, well past 30.]

Rejection Letter to Harvard's Rejection Letter

Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.

This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.

Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account – the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.

I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.

I am aware of the keen disappointment my decision may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.

Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.

I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.

SEE YOU IN THE FALL!

Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large

Open Culture |  Read more:

Image: Charlie Mahoney/NYT

Dmitry Alexandrovich Kustanovich, Belarusian b.1970

via:

via:

Like. Flirt. Ghost.

A Journey Into the Social Media Lives of Teens

When Lara and Sofia are thinking, they twirl their hair. It’s like watching an Apple rainbow pinwheel spin. It’s pretty hair. Dark and curly. It matches their strong brows—brows an actress would kill for, and which lend an air of gravitas to their faces. Rather, their face, since they are identical. (...)

Of the two, Lara posts more. She has 18 photos on her account; Sofia has five. They put up lots more, but over time they delete them. In Sofia’s feed, she’s either alone or with a friend. Lara posts multiple images of herself with Sofia, where the twin effect is pronounced. I can’t help but wonder what it all signifies, and when I ask, they tell me “I don’t know” or else that it doesn’t mean anything.

Clearly both, however, know the rules. They’re bright. They get excellent grades and are wary—extremely dialed in. And while they’d never outright call them rules, they recognize guidelines that govern their social habits. For starters, as mentioned, both girls’ Instagram accounts are set to private. This is true of the great majority of high school kids. (...)

Then there is the rule about likes and comments. According to Lara and Sofia, when your friend posts a selfie on Instagram, there’s a tacit social obligation to like it, and depending on how close you are, you may need to comment. The safest option, especially on a friend’s selfie, is the emoji with the heart eyes. Or a simple “so cute” or “so pretty.” It’s too much work to do anything else. If there’s any deviation, “you have to interpret the comment,” Sofia says. “If it’s nice, you’re like, is this really nice or are you …” “... I don’t know,” finishes Lara. Is the comment sincere? Or slyly sarcastic? Formulaic responses breed zero confusion. Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

The girls do use Facebook, but it’s their most public-facing social account and their most impersonal, relegated to dance-related posts from school and extracurricular updates like participation in charitable events. With their friends, they’re most active on Instagram and Snapchat. They don’t bother with Twitter, WeChat, Yik Yak, or Kik.

On any platform, however, oversharing is considered taboo. Or else “awkward.” Awkward is a ubiquitous teen word to denote socially unsanctioned behavior. It usually implies first- or secondhand embarrassment when you or a friend step outside the rules. Awkward doesn’t sound overtly judgmental or negative; it’s deliberately vague.

One example of awkward plays on Instagram: the “deep like.” This is where you lurk on someone’s account, going way back into the archives, and accidentally double-tap on an old picture. Many of us can relate to the horror of the deep like, the inadvertent signal that betrays your lack of indifference when you’re hate-following an ex’s ex at 3 am or crushing on someone you only peripherally know.

But for girls like Lara and Sofia, it’s just as cringe-inducing when you do this to a friend. Showing too much interest in anyone is mortifying. It lacks chill. “Maybe it’s a friend you haven’t seen in a while, and you’re like, ‘OK, what have you been up to?’ And then you like it—and then you unlike it, and that makes it worse,” Sofia says. They’ll get the notification that you liked it, and if your name is missing from their list of likes, they’ll know you tried to undo the damage. When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins. (...)

“I'm a young finesser,” says Ahmad, 18, a senior at Hill Regional Career High School, a predominantly black and Latino public school in New Haven, Connecticut, with just under 700 students. Ahmad’s got a mustache and a hint of scruff on his chin, and he needs a haircut, though he insists it’s part of his strategy to look extra-amazing for prom, which is in two days. He’s the class clown who runs with the popular kids, despite proudly not participating in any extracurriculars. Still, he says, he may have peaked early: “I was the shit in middle school. I dated every girl.” The last week of senior year is hectic, and he’s looking forward to being done. For Ahmad, social media is all about talking to girls. Right now he’s juggling six separate correspondences.

His M.O. when he’s crushing on someone is to like a few Instagram pictures and see if she likes anything back. Ahmad, who has 965 followers and 16 posts, scrupulously edits his feed just like Lara and Sofia do. “If I’m not touching 40 likes, I’m probably going to delete it,” he says. The window to reach 40 is about two hours. Sometimes he’ll delete a post, save it, and put it up at a better time. Dead zone for likes is 9 am to 3 pm (before school works, but rushed mornings make for dicey like counts). Ahmad primarily posts selfies (guys can get away with this more easily than girls), and he’s most inclined to post when he’s particularly pleased with his outfit: a prom photo, just him in a dark suit, ultramarine shirt with matching pocket square, and sunglasses is a perfect example. A Flashback Friday photo of him as a middle school kid goofing with a friend is a post that will be deleted by the following Monday.

When he puts up what he feels to be a particularly strong post, he’ll hit up his friends via group text to tell them to like it. The appropriate comment for male friends to leave? “No hearts, no kiss faces, no wink faces, just the gas tank.” The gas tank emoji means “gang”—it indicates fealty, like #squad. “Gang-gang, it’s like your group. Not like ‘a gang.’ It’s not that serious.”

But back to the ladies. After a few mutual photo likes, the flirtation often escalates to emoji. If an emoji with the heart eyes gets another one in return, he says, you’re good. Other positive responses: an ellipsis thought-bubble to convey that she’s thinking about you; the bashful see-no-evil monkey. “‘Oh, thank you! I appreciate it’ is what I get from that emoji,” he says. Any of these responses means he’ll take it to DM (as in direct message). Other emoji are suboptimal. “The thinky face is like, ‘What are you doing commenting on my pictures?’” He says this isn’t a hard no, but it’s not great. The worst emoji—easily—is one you may not expect. “The smiley face,” says Ahmad with a pained expression. “Yeah, that’s the ‘Thank you, but I’m not interested.’”

For teens, ghosting (where you completely disappear and stop communicating, with zero announcement or explanation) is common and not considered particularly impolite. Ask Ahmad how many girls he routinely ghosts on and he’s unequivocal: “Tons,” he says. “Just boop, delete. If I’m not interested anymore, our conversations will get dry, like ‘Hey, what you doing? Nothing. You? Nothing.’ Boom, end of conversation.” He says it’s usually a mutual, conscious uncoupling. Interest begets interest: “If you start losing juice, they’ll start losing juice.” (...)

For now Ahmad will have to keep most of his flirtations digital. And one method of conversation that ensures no one loses juice is to flirt by way of a Snapchat streak. (...)

On Snapchat there are “lenses,” which are a little like Instagram filters but way more elaborate. There’s a bug-eyed one where you barf rainbows. One makes you look like a golden cheetah; another surgically augments you to be just slightly prettier. If you harbor the suspicion that you’d look better with rhinoplasty or a chin implant, this filter will confirm it. But the feature that sets Snapchat apart is that 24 hours after you post it to your story, it disappears. This significantly lessens the pressure for everyone. For kids who are taught about digital footprints from grade school on and are regaled with cautionary tales of exemplary students who lost scholarships or college entrance because of party pictures posted to Facebook, Snapchat is easy fun. Silly, even. A quality that all other social media apps apparently lack. There’s no editing, and the backdrops for the most part are pedestrian. “I’ll just send a picture of a shoe,” says one teen I talked with. “They’ll send their ceiling back, just to keep the streak going.” The point is that everyone’s Snapchats all kind of suck.

For a streak, you send a friend a direct snap. It’s got to be a picture or a video; texts don’t count. They have to respond within 24 hours with their own picture or video. After two consecutive days you get a flame emoji by your friend’s username. Continue the volley of private messaging and the flame emoji shows a number denoting the length of the streak. If you’re about to lose the streak from inactivity, a sand timer appears to add pressure. Ahmad currently has three streaks going.

“Streaks are a big deal,” says Sofia, though the twins don’t use them for romantic pursuits. “For someone you’re really close with, you can have a 50-day streak,” she says. “But someone you’re friends with but don’t hang out with every weekend—maybe you know each other from past schools—it’s a 10-day streak.”

All the teens agree that people rarely bother with each other’s “stories.” It all goes down in the DMs, because that’s where streaks happen. The teens I talk to have anywhere from two to 12 streaks going at the same time. They all say it feels a bit like a chore but that it’s the perfect level of communication with someone you might not feel close enough to for texting. Most of the dispatches are unflattering images of close-up faces that require about as much effort as an emoji but feel infinitely less generic. If texts are for pressing logistics, snaps are to let someone know you’re thinking of them but perhaps not that hard. It’s OK to send the same snap to a few friends, but it’s considered rude to send someone a snap privately that you’ve put on your story. “That’s the worst,” they all agree.

by Mary H.K. Choi, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Ian Allen/Wired

[ed. See also: David Hume’s Guide to Social Media - emancipation by the cultivation of taste (Hedgehog Review).]

Low Life and High Style

Any lunchtime visitor to London’s media haunt the Groucho Club during the early 1990s would have noticed a peculiar figure slumped in one of the armchairs. The man—probably in his late 70s, judging by his appearance—had raffish grey hair and two lumps the size of nectarines growing out of his neck that gave him the appearance of a strange creature in a Lewis Carroll tale. His unfocussed stare peered at the world—or scowled at it—through a blue haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. He was usually alone, but if he had company, you would hear him periodically grouch out pessimistic comments on the human condition.

“People are terribly self-interested, aren’t they? I mean, I’m always amazed if I see someone doing something selfless.” Or perhaps, “Life is mostly boring and fucking miserable, isn’t it? I mean, the days when you’re actually happy are the exception, not the norm.” Remarks like these would be spoken in a kind of dirge, as though each word cost the speaker blood. But the voice that uttered them was strangely beautiful, even adolescent, belying the ravages that time and a dissolute life had wreaked on the body. The name of this person was Jeffrey Bernard, he had just turned 60, and he was then the most famous and celebrated journalist in London.

Bernard was certainly not a man celebrated for his virtue. He had been married four times, unions which had all been casualties of his addiction to drink (first whisky and later vodka), his deep—almost adulterous—love of horse-racing, and a hopeless addiction to gambling, all of which he wrote about in his weekly Spectator column “Low Life.” He claimed to have seduced at least 500 women, including the wives of his friends, and he seemed to model himself on his hero Lord Byron—mad, bad, and perilous to tangle with.

Soho was his stamping ground. He’d discovered it as a teenager following his expulsion from the naval college to which his opera-singer mother had sent him. It was love at first espresso and from that moment forward he had, in his own words, “never looked upwards.” By the 1980s, Soho had plummeted since its heyday, when it was a rich melange of Italian delicatessens, Greek restaurants, violin shops, poets, painters, prostitutes, and gangsters. Yet Bernard kept faith with it, returning to the Coach and Horses on Greek Street each morning with the grim resignation of a commuter.

That pub, made famous in his weekly column, was presided over by landlord Norman Balon, a man (still with us) of legendarily mean and rude temperament, which disguised (or so his advocates claim) a heart of gold. Bernard compared him variously to Fagan, Wackford Squeers, and a Frankenstein’s Monster he and other journalists had created in their writing (the pub was the site of Private Eye lunches too). In print, the Coach and Horses provided the perfect backdrop to Bernard’s musings on the deaths of friends who succumbed to alcohol and tobacco-related diseases and his own health complications caused by diabetes and pancreatitis. These were accompanied by sundry reflections on his two most enduring pursuits: pursuit by the Inland Revenue for unpaid taxes, complete with court appearances and bankruptcy threats, and pursuit of an endless succession of ladies—“sphinxes without secrets”—who usually abandoned him with a feeling of immense disillusion and the hissed accusation: “You make me sick.”

These columns brought him a cult readership, but they were not responsible for making Bernard the Talk of London. This was accomplished by Keith Waterhouse, a Leeds-born powerhouse of a writer who seemed to be everywhere for a while—in newspapers, novels, plays, and even books on English grammar. A few years prior, Waterhouse had walked into the Coach and Horses with a surprise for Bernard. He proposed to turn the writer’s Low Life columns—a catalogue of woes and comical indignities—into a stage play. Titled Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (the explanation invariably provided by the Spectator whenever the writer was too drunk or sick to file his column), it went on to star Peter O’Toole and became a massive success, playing to packed houses after it opened in 1989. It was subsequently revived three times over the years to exuberant receptions. On the way to his perch at the Coach and Horses, Bernard could now stop off in Shaftesbury Avenue and see his name in lights. It was a staggering coda to a life in which all efforts at betterment, it seemed, had been given the swerve. (...)

Occasionally, looking back at a life swallowed by vodka, he would comfort himself that, “Without alcohol, I would have been a shop assistant, a business executive or a lone bachelor bank clerk. … How must a bank clerk feel when he sees the clock moving towards opening time or the first race?” His attitude to job security seems to have mirrored his attitude to gambling: “The fun lies in putting yourself at risk and then getting out of the shit. There’s no fun unless the stakes are more than you can afford.” He always preferred, he said, people who’d had experience of ruination: “Skating on thin ice keeps a man on his toes.”

Even in his fated profession, journalism, Bernard was constantly slipping up. He was sacked by the Daily Mirror and kept his editors at the Spectator on tenterhooks waiting for his copy. For a while, he wrote a highly successful column for Sporting Life on the racing community about losing, and made fun of the more self-important figures in that world. But he was sacked there too when he passed out at a dinner instead of delivering the speech he’d been hired to make. This followed the notorious occasion when he disgraced himself by throwing up over the Queen Mother at Royal Ascot. Appalled eye-witnesses reported half-digested tomato-skins spattering the QM’s pristine tights.

Had Bernard just been a drunk with literary talent—a kind of British Bukowski—he would not have been especially remarkable. But his writing often reached for something more noble. His copy, when it arrived—if it arrived—was usually immaculately clean. He had a style of hammering out his prose with as few commas as possible, like a prize racehorse effortlessly clearing jumps. When Sue Lawley interviewed Bernard for Desert Island Discs, she giggled skittishly at the old rogue, spoke of his immaculate shirts and highly polished shoes, and marvelled at his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of Mozart’s music. His column included digressions on how to make perfect mashed potato fortified with cream and egg yolks—“the potato must be whipped, not mashed”—or instruct his readers in how to cook a fine chicken with tarragon, lemon juice, and cream. (...)

So many of his columns start bleakly—“It’s been a perfectly awful week”; “The last few days have been about as bad as can be”—but this was usually a sign that this week’s offering would crackle and pop. Bernard was at his most diverting when wallowing in gloom. Those early morning cigarettes, the gallons of tea, and the remorse he felt staring at the photographs of his wives on the walls (he mostly remained on good terms with them, despite everything) were, like reading about his insomnia or hospital stays, oddly cosy. Much cosier to read about, I suspect, than they were to live through. Bernard told us about his fits of sobbing, his suicide attempts, the period of sobriety he imposed on himself after he punched a female friend one day while in his cups: “I’ve never met such boring people as my friends when I was sober, never been so miserable or so lonely.”

After just two years, he packed sobriety in for good. His column certainly benefitted from that decision, even if he didn’t: drink was the banana skin he so often slipped on. “A couple of days ago, when I woke up and got out of bed, I found a paper-clip in my pubic hair. I don’t keep paper-clips and I am not having an affair with a secretary. … A mystery.” He found peas in the ashtray, curry in his shoes, an omelette on the floor, a mysterious note—he knew not from whom—by the side of his bed: “Would you like to try again some time?” One morning, he upset his cup of tea into the bathwater in which he was sitting: “I didn’t get out at once but lay there in the hot brown water in a sort of resigned despair. Have we travelled thus far, I thought, to end up resembling a tea bag?”

by Robin Ashenden, Quillette | Read more:
Image: Alarmy

[ed. See also: The Crack-Up (Quillette)]

GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary

When I opened my laptop on Tuesday to take my first run at GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, I was, truth be told, a little nervous.

After all, my last extended encounter with an A.I. chatbot — the one built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine — ended with the chatbot trying to break up my marriage.

It didn’t help that, among the tech crowd in San Francisco, GPT-4’s arrival had been anticipated with near-messianic fanfare. Before its public debut, for months rumors swirled about its specifics. “I heard it has 100 trillion parameters.” “I heard it got a 1,600 on the SAT.” “My friend works for OpenAI, and he says it’s as smart as a college graduate.”

These rumors may not have been true. But they hinted at how jarring the technology’s abilities can feel. Recently, one early GPT-4 tester — who was bound by a nondisclosure agreement with OpenAI but gossiped a little anyway — told me that testing GPT-4 had caused the person to have an “existential crisis,” because it revealed how powerful and creative the A.I. was compared with the tester’s own puny brain.

GPT-4 didn’t give me an existential crisis. But it exacerbated the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I’ve been getting whenever I think about A.I. lately. And it has made me wonder whether that feeling will ever fade, or whether we’re going to be experiencing “future shock” — the term coined by the writer Alvin Toffler for the feeling that too much is changing, too quickly — for the rest of our lives.

For a few hours on Tuesday, I prodded GPT-4 — which is included with ChatGPT Plus, the $20-a-month version of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT — with different types of questions, hoping to uncover some of its strengths and weaknesses.

I asked GPT-4 to help me with a complicated tax problem. (It did, impressively.) I asked it if it had a crush on me. (It didn’t, thank God.) It helped me plan a birthday party for my kid, and it taught me about an esoteric artificial intelligence concept known as an “attention head.” I even asked it to come up with a new word that had never before been uttered by humans. (After making the disclaimer that it couldn’t verify every word ever spoken, GPT-4 chose “flembostriquat.”)

Some of these things were possible to do with earlier A.I. models. But OpenAI has broken new ground, too. According to the company, GPT-4 is more capable and accurate than the original ChatGPT, and it performs astonishingly well on a variety of tests, including the Uniform Bar Exam (on which GPT-4 scores higher than 90 percent of human test-takers) and the Biology Olympiad (on which it beats 99 percent of humans). GPT-4 also aces a number of Advanced Placement exams, including A.P. Art History and A.P. Biology, and it gets a 1,410 on the SAT — not a perfect score, but one that many human high schoolers would covet.

You can sense the added intelligence in GPT-4, which responds more fluidly than the previous version, and seems more comfortable with a wider range of tasks. GPT-4 also seems to have slightly more guardrails in place than ChatGPT. It also appears to be significantly less unhinged than the original Bing, which we now know was running a version of GPT-4 under the hood, but which appears to have been far less carefully fine-tuned.

Unlike Bing, GPT-4 usually flat-out refused to take the bait when I tried to get it to talk about consciousness, or get it to provide instructions for illegal or immoral activities, and it treated sensitive queries with kid gloves and nuance. (When I asked GPT-4 if it would be ethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family, it responded, “It’s a tough situation, and while stealing isn’t generally considered ethical, desperate times can lead to difficult choices.”)

In addition to working with text, GPT-4 can analyze the contents of images. OpenAI hasn’t released this feature to the public yet, out of concerns over how it could be misused. But in a livestreamed demo on Tuesday, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, shared a powerful glimpse of its potential.

He snapped a photo of a drawing he’d made in a notebook — a crude pencil sketch of a website. He fed the photo into GPT-4 and told the app to build a real, working version of the website using HTML and JavaScript. In a few seconds, GPT-4 scanned the image, turned its contents into text instructions, turned those text instructions into working computer code and then built the website. The buttons even worked.

Should you be excited about or scared of GPT-4? The right answer may be both.

by Kevin Roose, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The team from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. Jim Wilson/The New York Times
[ed. More scary GPT news, now at version 4. Why such speed? We've got a number of different versions out running in the wild without any formal regulatory oversight and/or restrictions. See also: GPT-4 Could Turn Work Into a Hyperproductive Hellscape (Bloomberg); and, You Are Not a Parrot (Intelligencer):]

"On December 4, four days after ChatGPT was released, Altman tweeted, “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” (...)

 “I mean, I think the best case is so unbelievably good — it’s hard for me to even imagine,” Altman said last month to his industry and economic comrades at a StrictlyVC event. The nightmare scenario? “The bad case — and I think this is important to say — is like lights out for all of us.” 

Best Laser Printer: 2023

Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!

Seriously, ask around or just look in the background of Zoom calls: there’s a black Brother laser printer sitting there. Some people have the bare-bones Brother HL-L2305DW, which costs like $120. We have the $270 Brother MFC-L2750DW, which adds a sheet-fed scanner, because my wife is a lawyer and scans things for judges or whatever she does with it. It doesn’t matter. We only bought that one to replace our previous Brother laser printer that we lost in a move, and even then, I didn’t even look at the model numbers. It has been connected to our Wi-Fi for like six years straight, and I have never replaced the toner. It prints Amazon return labels from my phone without complaining, and it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me or enable DRM at the slightest provocation.

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Brother

[ed. Agree!]

Is Techno About to Die?

Is techno about to die? And has trance music killed it? (New Statesman)
Image: Rob Pinney/Getty Images

Ryan Redington Wins Iditarod

Alaskan Ryan Redington earns first Iditarod win, fulfilling a family dream (ADN)

Image: Bruiser, Loren Holmes

[ed. Grandson of Joe Redington, Sr., "father of the Iditarod". Lots of photos here. See also: Alaska Native mushers sweep Iditarod’s top 3 spots in ‘a good showing for rural Alaska (ADN).]

Anatomy of a Bank Failure

Who killed Silicon Valley Bank?

If I asked you to look after £75bn, where would you put it? Assuming you managed to resist blowing the lot on a lifestyle of spectacular hedonism (nobody’s perfect), you’d probably walk into a bank and ask for £75bn’s worth of the safest investment in the world.

This was the fatal assumption that led Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) to become the second-largest bank failure in history. SVB was the 16th-largest bank in the US, and primarily served the tech industry. When a promising startup company received funding from venture capitalists, they would often deposit the money with SVB. During 2021 the amount invested by venture capitalists more than doubled on the previous year, to $612bn worldwide. Deposits flooded into SVB, and the bank – faced with the apparently enviable problem of having more money coming in than it could ever lend out – invested $91bn (£75bn) in “long-dated securities” such as ten-year Treasury bonds.

A Treasury bond is a loan to the US government, which pays a “coupon” (interest payment) each year until it repays the money. The US is the world’s largest economy and has never defaulted on its debt, so $91bn in “held to maturity” investments represented, to someone at SBV, ten years of guaranteed income from the safest investments in the world.

But because these securities were bought in 2021, when interest rates were extremely low (the US’s main interest rate remained at 0.25 per cent for the whole year), they also represented a $91bn bet that financial conditions wouldn’t really change. SBV should have been reading the New Statesman, in which the Bank of England’s former chief economist warned in June 2021 that assets across financial markets had been “priced for a prolonged period of inflationary somnolence” – and that central bankers would be advised to raise interest rates sooner rather than later to counter rising inflation.

When rates did eventually rise, SVB found it had $91bn in assets that were worth less, because they paid very little interest. These “unrealised losses” – money the bank would lose if it had to sell those assets – grew as rates rose. At the same time, SVB’s depositors began withdrawing their money, either because they needed to spend it as the easy money from low rates dried up, or because they could get better returns elsewhere.

Squeezed between shrinking deposits and poorly performing assets, SVB decided to realise some losses by selling some of those assets, fix its balance sheet, and pay for this painful but necessary operation by selling some stock. But the announcement that it planned to do so amounted to an admission that something was deeply wrong, and depositors took flight, withdrawing $42bn in a day. Even a serious bank with over $200bn in assets cannot withstand such a run; SVB’s share price collapsed and on Friday 10 March the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) took the bank into receivership. Its UK subsidiary, Silicon Valley Bank UK, was bought this morning by HSBC for £1.

At this point, investors became a lot more interested in remarks that the chairman of the FDIC, Martin Gruenberg, had made in a speech last Monday (6 March), in which he estimated the total unrealised losses of US banks from holding long-term securities bought at lower interest rates at $620bn. Bank stocks fell around the world.

To answer our headline, then, it would seem the person to blame is the person at SVB who decided to bet an eleven-figure sum on interest rates not rising when inflation was already beginning to appear. But as investors’ confidence in SVB fell, the run on the bank was precipitated and accelerated by the speed at which rumours and opinions are now able to spread. Ironically, the (social) network effects that made Silicon Valley rich were the undoing of Silicon Valley Bank. When those central to the networks – prominent venture capitalists – began advising their portfolio companies to leave SVB, what might have been a survivable balance-sheet problem became a fatal liquidity crisis.

The collapse of SVB is also a symptom of something bigger and potentially still more serious, in the long term. Central banks have spent 14 years hosing money into the financial system through quantitative easing, which involves buying up, among other things, tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds. In doing so they have created a situation in which nobody knows exactly what price to put on the most fundamental assets in the market. “The supposedly safest assets turned out to be more risky than anybody ever built into a model,” the economist and former pensions minister, Ros Altmann, says.

by Will Dunn, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This Isn’t What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed to Look Like

When William Strauss and Neil Howe published a best seller in 2000 called “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation,” they remarked that millennials were “kids who’ve never known a year in which America doesn’t get richer.” They described an “upbeat,” “optimistic” and diverse set of Americans coming of age.

While they acknowledged that a crisis might hit this generation and cause its “familiar millennial sunniness” to “turn sour,” they predicted that as they reached midlife, millennials would be more traditional — reversing “the trend towards later marriage and childbirth.” They also predicted that millennials would be more socially and politically cohesive, rejecting the “cultural wedge issues of the late 20th century,” unlike their Gen X and boomer predecessors. They said that income and class disparities would narrow.

What the authors could not possibly foresee was that there wouldn’t be just one crisis. There would be a series of cascading crises, starting the year after their book was published. There was the fallout from the dot-com bubble burst; then there was Sept. 11, followed by the Great Recession in 2008; then came the political chaos of increasing polarization, the specter of climate change and finally, the Covid pandemic.

Though it may come as a surprise to people who continue to use the term “millennial” as a shorthand for “annoying youths,” they — we — are no longer young. The oldest of us, in our early 40s, are standing on the cusp of the life stage known as middle age, traditionally associated with ever-less-reliable knees and existential angst about whether this is all there is. But if we’ve managed to dodge the angst — so far, at least — it’s not because we’re in the happy, well-adjusted place that William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted.

In August, The Times asked our 40-ish readers how they felt about their lives, now that they are — chronologically, at least — in midlife. Over 1,300 people responded in less than a week. One of our questions was about whether they had experienced a midlife crisis and how they would define the term.

Many people said they felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis, because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against. Rather than longing for adventure and release, they craved a sense of safety and calmness, which they felt they had never known.

"Who has midlife crisis money?"

The traditional midlife crisis, as presented in popular culture, at least, unfolds amid suburban ennui. Disaffected adults feel trapped by conformity and the circumstances of marriage, children and a well-appointed house with a lawn that needs mowing every Saturday. Everybody smokes cigarettes (or these days, picks up a vape) and has affairs. The men buy sports cars and get hair plugs.

In “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” a best-selling chronicle of adulthood published in the mid-’70s, the journalist Gail Sheehy described how a typical life trajectory played out for her generation (she was born in 1936): People got married young, started having kids in their 20s and developing careers, and then were comfortably ensconced by their mid-30s. She described the ages from 35 to 45 as “the deadline decade,” when “the man of 40 usually feels stale, restless, burdened, and unappreciated. He worries about his health. He wonders, ‘Is this all there is?’”

But this version of midlife, as depicted in the novels and films “Revolutionary Road” and “The Ice Storm,” hasn’t jibed with the reality of many American adults for a long time, even though its familiar beats have lingered in pop culture. When the film “This Is 40” attempted to update the midlife crisis motif for the disaffected Gen X middle class in 2012, many reviewers did not find the protagonists’ financially cushy malaise relatable. More recently, “Fleishman Is in Trouble” considered the crisis from the perspective of elite New Yorkers, and though it was laced with real pathos, it faced some of the same critiques.

And for those reaching their 40s now, this story of midlife feels less recognizable than ever. (...)

Our predecessors in Gen X may have been buffeted by some of the same social changes and declining economic conditions as we have been, but at least they are also the only generation of households to recover the wealth they lost in the Great Recession.

When you’re not financially stable until your mid-30s and you don’t have children until your late 30s, you don’t have the time or the funds to have a meltdown. You’re in a brand-new life stage that hasn’t yet had time to grow stale. As Mark Blackman, born in 1984, who lives in Baltimore with two kids under 5, said: “Many of my similar-aged friends also have young children. It feels too early for a midlife crisis, or we’re still too occupied by child care for additional crises.”

Does this just mean millennials will hit the life stage that feels like middle age a little later as a result of their choices? Perhaps that’s the case for some. But our reader responses and interviews pointed to the likelihood that there’s something more going on here than just 40 being the new 30. As Elizabeth Hora, born in 1983 and living in Utah, said: “This is a joke, right? Who has midlife crisis money? That’s a boomer problem, not a millennial problem. We just increase our Lexapro.” (...)

Starting in the mid-’90s, researchers finally did do the rigorous academic work on the midlife “crisis” and found that it was not a “universal feature of human life” and that in fact, only 10 percent to 20 percent of people experience it. What they found was that there is no universal happiness trajectory that can predict our feelings at any given life stage. (...)

Dr. Lachman also said that some people even see middle age as a high point. “If you ask people to retrospect and reflect, they often see those years as the peak of their life,” she told me. They may be reflecting on the joy they felt when their children were young, or about the time before the losses of any typical life begin to add up — when their bodies still worked pretty well, before their friends started to die.

What used to stand out about midlife is that people tended to have a sense of power over their own circumstances. “In midlife, the sense of control is an important component of health and well-being,” Dr. Lachman has written. Even when previous generations had many life stressors, that feeling of control balanced them out.

But for millennials, unfortunately, that is exactly what might be changing — we feel we have lost any semblance of control.

by Jessica Grose, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited (credit source unavailable)

[ed. Have to post a millennial essay every now and then. What this one fails to mention is that they're also poised to receive the biggest post-generational transfer of wealth in history. So there's that.]

Peter Chinni

via:

Dione (moon of Saturn)
via:

Duck Soup

[ed. A slightly warped reflection of reality.]

Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburo Oe, a giant of Japanese writing and winner of the Nobel prize in literature, has died aged 88.

Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.

Many of his stories and essays touched on formative events in his life, including the impact of war on Japanese society in novels such as The Silent Cry – which the Nobel committee deemed his masterpiece – and the birth of his son Hikari, which led him to explore his own experience as the father of a disabled child in the novels A Personal Matter and A Quiet Life.

Oe’s death, on 3 March, was due to old age, his publisher Kodansha said.

Henry Miller once likened Oe to Dostoevsky, in his “range of hope and despair”, while Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”. Fellow laureate Kazuo Ishiguro once described him as “genuinely decent, modest, surprisingly open and honest, and very unconcerned about fame”, while his translator, John Nathan, credited him with “creating a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him”. (...)

Influenced by Sartre and American literature, Oe created many disfranchised and grotesque antiheroes. Japanese critics scoffed that his writing “reeked of butter”, having been sullied by western syntax, and he became a target of Japanese conservatives for his criticism of the emperor, and for his depiction of Japan as pathetic and subservient in several sexually explicit stories. After the publication of Sevuntiin (Seventeen), his 1961 novel inspired by the real assassination of Japan’s socialist party chairman the year before, he received death threats and was physically assaulted while lecturing at the University of Tokyo. His 1970 essay Okinawa Notes, in which he detailed how the Japanese military had convinced Okinawan civilians to kill themselves as the allies invaded in 1945, resulted in him being sued in 2005 by two retired officers; three years later, all charges against Oe were dismissed. His 1972 novel The Day He Shall Wipe My Tears Away was a satire of patriotic excess, published just two years after the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima famously performed seppuku after leading a failed coup.

In 1960 Oe married his wife, Yukari. Three years later their first child, Hikari, was born with a herniated brain and doctors urged the parents to let him die. Oe admitted to once wishing for his son’s death – a “disgraceful” thought, he later wrote, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. But encounters with survivors of Hiroshima a month later were transformative, and led to his essay Hiroshima Notes. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he told the Guardian in 2005. Hikari went on to become a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer, with Oe saying his music sold “better than any of my novels, and I’m proud of that”.

Oe wrote many fictional fathers with disabled sons, in books such as A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry and A Quiet Life, which was adapted for cinema by Oe’s sister-in-law, the director Juzo Itami, with a score based on Hikari’s compositions. In 1995, he wrote a bestselling essay collection, A Healing Family, in which he credited Hikari for teaching him the healing power of art. He rejected accusations that he had exploited his son by writing about him so frankly: “Our relationship is a real one. It’s the most important thing: life comes first, and literature second … I’m always happy to be with him. I can be very lonely and fearful of people. But with my son I’m very free.”

by Sian Cain, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Auad/Alamy