Monday, April 10, 2023
Comic High Jinks and Repressed Despair in Netflix’s “Beef”
As far as road rage goes, the outburst that sets off the rivalry in the wickedly loopy comic drama “Beef” is downright piddling. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman in Los Angeles, attempts to pull his beater pickup truck out of a hardware-store parking lot, when he’s met by an obnoxiously long honk from a gleaming white Mercedes S.U.V., then a middle finger thrust out the window. Danny is in a foul enough mood that he gives chase to the other driver, Amy Lau (Ali Wong). After the pursuit leaves him unsatisfied, he decides to slowly insinuate himself into her home, even her family, to wreak chaos. His choice of target proves unfortunate; Amy is even more desperate for a sense of control, and thus for revenge.
Yet the most gratifying reveals in the ten-part Netflix series aren’t the wild escalations of the central pair but their rich psychological shadings. When Danny and Amy arrive at their respective homes after their encounter, neither can get out the full story about what happened. Danny, recounting the incident to his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), in the cramped apartment that they share, brags that he “scared the shit out of that motherfucker,” in a bit of masculine bravado that bears little resemblance to the truth. Amy, speaking to her woo-woo husband, George (Joseph Lee), can barely even begin to tell him about the confrontation before he shuts her down: “You’ve got to start focussing on the positive.” He’s a genial stay-at-home dad (with, perhaps, the world’s most beautiful sweater collection) and the coddled son of a famous artist, while she’s the overworked founder and aspirational face of a buzzy plant business she’s on the verge of selling for millions—and the one resentfully funding the couple’s bougie Calabasas life style. But the chasm between husband and wife is never wider than when George tells Amy, “Anger is just a transitory state of consciousness.” Amy and Danny accidentally uncork something in each other, and it’s a race to see whether they can do more harm to themselves or to the other.
“Beef” makes it both relevant and not that Danny and Amy are Asian American. As the season progresses, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, stresses that his dual protagonists are especially damaged, beset by depression and likely something else: a “void” in their bodies, the characters agree, that feels “empty but solid.” But they also belong to a group—in Amy’s case, two groups—whose members have been socialized to believe that their value lies in their willingness to accommodate, to fit in, to oblige. Now, by having a stranger to fuck with, they’ve stumbled upon a seemingly safe outlet for their most antisocial impulses. The joke’s on them: when Amy catfishes Paul (using thirst traps from her young, white female employee’s Instagram), and when Danny befriends George (by posing as “Zane,” a fellow-cyclist), the pitiful hotheads find themselves confiding in their marks what they cannot express to their loved ones.
The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. The soul-crushing interactions between Amy and the potential buyer of her business, Jordan (a bitch-perfect Maria Bello), are spectacularly cringey; a collector of artifacts from various cultures, Jordan treats Amy like another souvenir, a consumable affirmation of a pleasing stereotype. “You have this serene, Zen Buddhist thing,” Jordan airily tells Amy, who might be the first character I’ve ever seen masturbate with what turns out to be a Chekhov’s gun. Later, in couples counselling, Amy says that her Midwestern Chinese-immigrant father and her Vietnamese-refugee mother didn’t exactly model healthy emotional expression. She’s worried that she’s ill-equipped to parent her agitated young daughter, who acts out by picking at her skin and hitting a teacher. On a visit to her childhood home, Amy laments that she’s filled with “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” her—though “Beef” smartly leaves open the possibility that Amy may be deflecting the blame for her personality flaws onto her upbringing. Either way, the story line feels like a confident step toward Asian American pop culture’s maturation. Unlike the hallmarks of Asian Americana (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Beef” is less interested in dwelling on the cultural clashes that have led to the dislocation of the second generation than in exploring how that generation can raise their children without passing on all the hangups and traumas from their formative years.
Amy doesn’t get much support from her mother-in-law, the outwardly colorful but patrician-cold Fumi (an excellent Patti Yasutake), who indulges her grown son while making demands on Amy. The two women are vividly written, and Wong is fantastic in her first leading dramatic role. But “Beef” is, at its heart, a study of male loneliness—a theme that, while bog-standard in prestige television, finds renewed urgency when couched in an Asian American context.
“Beef” makes it both relevant and not that Danny and Amy are Asian American. As the season progresses, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, stresses that his dual protagonists are especially damaged, beset by depression and likely something else: a “void” in their bodies, the characters agree, that feels “empty but solid.” But they also belong to a group—in Amy’s case, two groups—whose members have been socialized to believe that their value lies in their willingness to accommodate, to fit in, to oblige. Now, by having a stranger to fuck with, they’ve stumbled upon a seemingly safe outlet for their most antisocial impulses. The joke’s on them: when Amy catfishes Paul (using thirst traps from her young, white female employee’s Instagram), and when Danny befriends George (by posing as “Zane,” a fellow-cyclist), the pitiful hotheads find themselves confiding in their marks what they cannot express to their loved ones.
The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. The soul-crushing interactions between Amy and the potential buyer of her business, Jordan (a bitch-perfect Maria Bello), are spectacularly cringey; a collector of artifacts from various cultures, Jordan treats Amy like another souvenir, a consumable affirmation of a pleasing stereotype. “You have this serene, Zen Buddhist thing,” Jordan airily tells Amy, who might be the first character I’ve ever seen masturbate with what turns out to be a Chekhov’s gun. Later, in couples counselling, Amy says that her Midwestern Chinese-immigrant father and her Vietnamese-refugee mother didn’t exactly model healthy emotional expression. She’s worried that she’s ill-equipped to parent her agitated young daughter, who acts out by picking at her skin and hitting a teacher. On a visit to her childhood home, Amy laments that she’s filled with “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” her—though “Beef” smartly leaves open the possibility that Amy may be deflecting the blame for her personality flaws onto her upbringing. Either way, the story line feels like a confident step toward Asian American pop culture’s maturation. Unlike the hallmarks of Asian Americana (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Beef” is less interested in dwelling on the cultural clashes that have led to the dislocation of the second generation than in exploring how that generation can raise their children without passing on all the hangups and traumas from their formative years.
Amy doesn’t get much support from her mother-in-law, the outwardly colorful but patrician-cold Fumi (an excellent Patti Yasutake), who indulges her grown son while making demands on Amy. The two women are vividly written, and Wong is fantastic in her first leading dramatic role. But “Beef” is, at its heart, a study of male loneliness—a theme that, while bog-standard in prestige television, finds renewed urgency when couched in an Asian American context.
by Inkoo Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris Kim
[ed. Looks fun/interesting. Possibly cringey. Update: It's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good. Some great acting. Love Steven Yuen doing the Incubus cover - Drive.]
The Exhausting History of Fatigue
Image: Christoph Niemann
[ed. Great illustration.]
"What’s extraordinary is that, when John Everett Millais came to paint his version of “Mariana,” twenty-one years later, he pushed the legend—derived from “Measure for Measure”—to a further stage. The lonesome woman, pining for her paramour, is depicted in a dress of midnight blue, stretching, with her breast uplifted and her hands at the base of her spine; the posture is a kind of pun, expressing both fatigue (that is how we all like to stretch, at the close of a working day) and a physical craving yet more intense. The death wish is entangled with desire."
Image: John Everett Millais, Mariana (Wikipedia)
Are Coincidences Real?
There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue. I don’t believe the Universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact there’s nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.
The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. On first hearing he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.
Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific children’s author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with worn velvet collars, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: ‘Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum’. Baum had died some 20 years before the film was released but the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed. (...)
While some coincidences seem playful, others feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on ‘an intermittent rock-grave odyssey’ visiting the last resting places of revered UK rock musicians. About halfway through, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to gather thoughts at the headstone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died at the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious quantity of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a few days earlier to get a picture to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, ‘an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen’ and, fitting with one of the key motifs of that film, the photographer was ‘spooked by the appearance of an unaccompanied black dog, which urinates on the gravestone and then disappears’. ‘Black Dog’ (1971) happens to be the title of one of the most iconic songs in the Led Zeppelin catalogue.
If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My ‘broken arms’ coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other, still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange connections and forces. (...)
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mother’s suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage to a cabaret dancer who left him for a chemist (‘Had she taken with a bullfighter, I would have understood, but such an ordinary chemist…’), Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics (formulating the ‘Pauli exclusion principle’; postulating the existence of the neutrino), he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.
The term ‘coincidence’ covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disk of the Moon and the disk of the Sun by sheer chance appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the personal and parochial (my granddaughter has the same birthday as my late wife). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction can be drawn between serendipity – timely, but unplanned, discoveries or development of events – and what the 20th-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer called seriality, which he defined as ‘a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things or events … in time and space’.
The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. On first hearing he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.
Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific children’s author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with worn velvet collars, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: ‘Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum’. Baum had died some 20 years before the film was released but the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed. (...)
If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My ‘broken arms’ coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other, still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange connections and forces. (...)
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mother’s suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage to a cabaret dancer who left him for a chemist (‘Had she taken with a bullfighter, I would have understood, but such an ordinary chemist…’), Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics (formulating the ‘Pauli exclusion principle’; postulating the existence of the neutrino), he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.
Pauli turned for help to Jung who happened to live nearby. His therapy involved the recording of dreams, a task at which he proved himself to be remarkably adept, being able to remember complex dreams in exquisite detail. For his part, Jung saw an opportunity. Not only was Pauli an extraordinary chronicler of dreams, but he was also a willing guide to the arcane realm of subatomic physics. Meanwhile, Pauli saw synchronicity as a way of approaching some fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, not least the mystery of quantum entanglement, by which sub-atomic particles may correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions of synchronicity emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a form of double-aspect theory of mind and matter, which viewed the mental and the physical as different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.
by Paul Broks, Aeon | Read more:
Images: Ernst Haas/Getty; David Sillitoe courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd
Bold Glamour
Hira Mustafa is no stranger to the dangers of beauty filters, recalling the few quick fixes she learned to make to her pictures with a photo editing app in high school, which ultimately led to an unhealthy body image fixation.
"These were little changes, you know, and it's basically me but it's just a little bit enhanced. And then every time I went to edit one of my photos, I would have to do the same steps so it'd be a consistent image," she tells Yahoo Life. "My routine got so long, that it'd be like 10 different things that I had to do to an image of myself to match this appearance that I was building."
Mustafa, now 26 and working as a content creator in the beauty space, explains that she started to believe that the curated version of her images was what she really looked like.
"You look at yourself in the mirror, and it's a different person," she says. "You become a lot more critical of yourself and you start to nitpick at yourself to a whole different level. And I noticed myself doing that."
With the latest "Bold Glamour" filter gaining popularity on TikTok, she's worried about just how many people will experience that same feeling as a result of the pressures and prevalence of social media.
The 16.4 million videos created with the filter — which slims the nose, sculpts cheekbones, creates fuller lips, smooths skin and applies contour and smoky eyeshadow — illustrate its ubiquity. And with so many people praising how beautiful they look with the AI generated filter, it's difficult to ignore its impact on beauty standards for young people, in particular.
"Filters create an unattainable standard for beauty that can’t be matched in real life. Human beings have pores in their skin, asymmetry in their faces, wrinkles after a certain age, stretch marks, cellulite and bodies that aren't 'perfect,'" Florida-based psychologist Carolyn Rubenstein tells Yahoo Life. "When someone sees their face in a filter, that can become the standard they wish to live up to."
While the existence of a beauty standard isn't new, its pervasiveness is unique to social media.
"I was eight years old 40 years ago, and the thin ideal and beauty standards were a thing, but they were a thing that we saw maybe in movies or on TV, or at the magazine stand in the grocery store," Dr. Kimberly Dennis, chief medical officer at SunCloud Health, a mental health treatment center, tells Yahoo Life. "Kids today are getting a more intense version, a more toxic version and so, so, so much more pervasively." (...)
Angela Zhang is one TikTok creator who pointed this out in a video that has garnered seven million views as of Wednesday afternoon. She tells Yahoo Life that she found herself curious about the differences she perceived in the function of this particular filter from others.
"With the traditional filters, when you put your hand in front of your face it immediately kind of gives away that you have a filter, you have something layered on top of your face. Because you see like the lipstick tint or the eyeliner and eyelashes floating," she says. "But this filter, with all the girls and guys that were using it, people will be touching their face, they'll be putting their hand in front of their lips or trying to smudge their eyebrows and it's just like their face."
Zhang credited Luke Hurd, a TikToker who creates AR filters, for helping her understand the phenomenon. Hurd's page features his own in-depth analysis of Bold Glamour where he talks about the machine learning technology that makes it so "next level."
"This actually takes the camera image itself and then processes it. It does track your face," Hurd said in his video, noting that traditional filters simply overlay a 3D mesh that's taught to find your face within a two-dimensional screen.
"It's the most seamless," Zhang adds.
by Kerry Justich, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: zhangsta via TikTok[ed. Late to the party again. How about a smart bathroom mirror that does the same thing first thing in the morning? See also: Why won’t TikTok confirm the Bold Glamour filter is AI? (The Verge); and, Does the 'Bold Glamour' filter push unrealistic beauty standards? TikTokkers think so (NPR).]
Sunday, April 9, 2023
Saturday, April 8, 2023
Why Should We Care About Penguins?
I braced against the wind in the middle of a chinstrap penguin colony blanketing a rocky ridge. All around me penguins waddled through the colony or sat incubating their eggs on nests built from pebbles. The birds squabbled and crooned to one another. Some were in ecstatic display, flippers flung out from their bodies, heads pointing straight up, chests rising and falling in time with their screeching calls. The sound came from all directions and the noise was deafening. Penguin colonies are an assault on the senses: a cacophony of calls, a pungent fishy odor, and the penguins’ short black-and-white bodies always in movement.
It was time for the annual nest census, which I was conducting with my coworker Matt. We tiptoed through the fray, laying bright ropes down between the nests to section them into countable pieces. Sitting on eggs, the penguins reached over to investigate the rope with their bills, tugging it and shaking it.
By the time we finished, the ropes were brown and muddy with the thick penguin muck ubiquitous across all the colonies. We tried to discern the ropes’ shape from uncontaminated patches of color and count the nests on a rusty tally-whacker, a metal yo-yo-size counter that kept track of the numbers every time my finger pressed a rusty button.
A passing penguin mounted my boot and directed a flurry of flipper slaps at my calf, squawking its displeasure with characteristic chinstrap belligerence. If I’d looked down to nudge him off, I would have lost my concentration and had to count the section of nests again, so I let him go ahead and slap me. The sting kick-started my blood flow and pumped warmth to my increasingly numb feet. (...)
The nearest US base in Antarctica was some two hundred miles away. We had been dropped off by a ship two months ago, with all our gear and food, and would be picked up in three more. Our crew of five was the only human presence on this isolated promontory.
Our home was a one-room plywood hut that served as a living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom. We had no internet, no running water, limited electricity. We worked every single day, in all weather: snow, wind, rain, blizzards, gales, hail, sun. Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, weekends, full moon, new moon. We measured and counted, captured and released, tracked and took notes. My job, in essence, was to observe. (...)
Every figure about antarctic marine species is the result of an enormous output of time and labor. For every single dot on a graph scientists present to clean-cut diplomats and policy makers, there is a grimy field-worker like me, stationed on an isolated island, surrounded by penguins, covered in penguin muck and smelling like fermented shrimp, writing down metrics and surveys in an equally grimy field notebook.
For every long-term population trend reported in a journal article there are decades of field biologists standing in wind and snow, monitoring penguins or seals, hitting tally-whackers with numb fingers, far from family and friends and anything resembling human civilization. Our lives are tied to the weather, the season, and the wildlife itself.
It’s not glamorous work. You’re dropped on this frigid island with four other people and no privacy. Your body is buffeted by the elements, your mind strains under the work’s demands, your heart is rubbed raw with beauty. You live among wild things in a wild place, stand on a stark island facing your own stark nature. There are no shops, no roads, no TVs, no trails, no distractions from the machinations of your own mind. Just a handful of lonely shelters, your crew, the wind, the rocks, and the penguins.
Yet, it is a joy to work at Cape Shirreff, for reasons that, to field biologists, seem self-evident. But personal fulfillment does not fund research. It is the curse of a biologist to justify the existence of their study species to the world. Beneath the grant proposals, paper introductions, and presentations must lie proof that the species under scientific scrutiny have immediate value to our society.
by Naira de Gracia, LitHub | Read more:
Image: Scribner
[ed. A good description of field work everywhere in the world.]
Turbotax is Blitzing Congress Again to Make Tax Filing Harder
Every year, Americans spend billions on tax prep services, paying a heavily concentrated industry of giant, wildly profitable firms to send the IRS information it already has. Despite the fact that most other rich countries have a far more efficient process, many Americans believe that adopting this process here is either impossible, immoral, or both.
That puts tax preparation in the same bucket as other forms of weird American exceptionalism – like the belief that we're too untrustworthy to have universal healthcare, or that we're so violent that we must all have assault rifles to protect ourselves from one another. (...)
It's a no-brainer, or it would be – if it wasn't for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry – wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
... The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn't to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them – it's to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which they rake in billions in profits.
It's a no-brainer, or it would be – if it wasn't for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry – wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
... The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn't to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them – it's to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which they rake in billions in profits.
by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. This is the first year I've stopped using TurboTax and it's really no big deal. Yeah, you fill in a few more blanks (like, name and address - horrors!), and probably should look closely at a couple sections in the IRS tax booklet, but beyond that, the pleasure of screwing Intuit and Block is more than worth it.]
Federal Reserve Independence Is the Problem
I watch CNBC almost every morning, and whenever a Biden administration official comes on to discuss the economy, the anchors inevitably ask about some aspect of Federal Reserve policy, usually interest rates. The last one I saw was the Treasury Department’s top deputy Wally Adeyemo, who said that the administration doesn’t comment on Fed actions, over concern of jeopardizing the independence of the central bank.
It is a very odd situation, to have the elected leader of the United States with a policy of such deference to the Fed that he even has his own officials refuse to make any public statement for fear of exerting influence. Even judges, whom most liberals hold in undeserved high regard, don’t get such deference. In 2011, Barack Obama openly criticized the Citizens United decision in the State of the Union. And Democrats routinely criticize judges. Unlike the Fed, judges are an entirely separate branch of government in the Constitution!
So what is the Fed? Technically, it’s the central bank, mandated by Congress to ensure that most people have jobs (“full employment”) and that prices are reasonably stable (“low inflation”). It executes on this dual mandate by controlling the price of money and credit in the economy. The Fed has two main functions. One, through the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), it sets the level at which big banks on Wall Street borrow money, thus organizing the amount of money the central bank prints. And two, through its bank supervisors, the Fed oversees the health of the financial system by examining individual banks.
Though it’s not often presented this way, these two functions jointly foster monetary policy. The FOMC pushes interest rates up or down, and the banks overseen by the Fed transmit those choices to borrowers and lenders throughout the economy. The FOMC is like the general setting the direction of an army, and the supervisors are the mid-level officers who make sure the army can do what it is ordered to do. Generally speaking, the Fed and Wall Street are partners, and Wall Street exerts significant influence over Fed actions, simply because they work together every day to trade billions of dollars of bonds.
So why does the Biden administration stay silent about how high finance works in America? There’s no law that says they must, and there’s also no evidence that keeping politicians silent about monetary policy is good for the economy. Indeed, from 1935 to 1950, when the president directly ran monetary policy, inequality collapsed, the economy boomed, and inflation was kept low despite economy-wide mobilization to fight World War II. But since the 1980s, we’ve had a weird 40-year tradition of what is known as “Fed independence,” whereby politicians are supposed to leave the Fed and its destructive economists alone. As far as I can tell, there is no reason for this choice, except that Wall Street likes it when high finance is considered apolitical.
A hands-off policy toward any entity that makes core political-economy decisions is problematic. But we’ve seen how this deference is especially damaging in real time, primarily because the Fed has done such a bad job recently. Take the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. SVB was regulated by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and examiners at the SF Fed didn’t act on the bank’s serious problems until the fall of the bank was imminent. This is despite public reporting in The Wall Street Journal about the hole in the bank’s balance sheet months earlier. The SF Fed examiners reportedly wrote several stern letters to SVB executives about the risks they were taking, and the executives threw them in the trash, and everyone went on with their lives until the bank collapsed.
The incompetence of the Fed examiners is quite obvious. The incompetence of the FOMC, which gave the orders to have its banks march to the tune of higher interest rates, and never bothered to care about whether the banks could handle it, is worse.
The closer you get to the facts, the more incompetent the Fed looks. Supervisors should never have allowed a bank funded with between 90 and 100 percent uninsured “hot money” deposits by venture capitalists to bet on unhedged long-term bonds. And you didn’t need to be a genius to get this fact. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew that SVB was insolvent; it was pretty much an open secret. Fed supervisors knew it, and so did the FOMC. They took no action.
And though the Fed might feel independent of politics, politics is not independent of the Fed.
In 2018, the Fed, along with its banking allies, wrote and lobbied for a bill, S. 2155, that didn’t quite take away its regulatory authority so much as give it the political cover to relax regulatory requirements over large regional banks. SVB lobbied for this legislation, but the prime actor here was the Fed itself. The general counsel of the Fed, Mark Van Der Weide, helped author S. 2155, and Fed Chair Jay Powell testified in favor of it. Janet Yellen, the former Fed chair and current Treasury secretary, supported it as well. Just a few months after Donald Trump signed S. 2155 into law, SVB announced a $500 million stock buyback program. And a few months after that, SVB began taking in huge deposits and making the bets that would lead to its undoing.
In 2019, the Fed wrote aggressive rules rolling back obligations on large regional banks. At the time, opponents of the legislation that triggered the rewrite predicted that removing requirements would lead to a blowup, but Fed officials (with one exception) nonetheless condescended to everyone who warned of too much risk in the system. Nellie Liang, who ran the Federal Reserve’s financial stability division for six years, responded to the bill by saying, “meh,” and from her temporary perch at the Brookings Institution, “It’s fine … I’m not upset about it.”
The Fed has announced it will investigate itself, which is, frankly, a very Fed thing to do. We will probably find out a few more relevant facts, as the Fed discovers that though the Fed could have done a bit better, the Fed’s stringent internal reform program that the Fed oversees will fix the problem. Don’t worry, the Fed is on it, even if the Fed is the problem. But because of deference from the White House and the Democrats in the name of Fed independence, no one will propose any real fixes. The Fed will promise to regulate banks a bit more, but of course, there’s no reason to assume the Fed will even realize what went wrong.
by Matt Stoller, The Amercian Prospect | Read more:
Image: Alex Brandon/AP
It is a very odd situation, to have the elected leader of the United States with a policy of such deference to the Fed that he even has his own officials refuse to make any public statement for fear of exerting influence. Even judges, whom most liberals hold in undeserved high regard, don’t get such deference. In 2011, Barack Obama openly criticized the Citizens United decision in the State of the Union. And Democrats routinely criticize judges. Unlike the Fed, judges are an entirely separate branch of government in the Constitution!
Though it’s not often presented this way, these two functions jointly foster monetary policy. The FOMC pushes interest rates up or down, and the banks overseen by the Fed transmit those choices to borrowers and lenders throughout the economy. The FOMC is like the general setting the direction of an army, and the supervisors are the mid-level officers who make sure the army can do what it is ordered to do. Generally speaking, the Fed and Wall Street are partners, and Wall Street exerts significant influence over Fed actions, simply because they work together every day to trade billions of dollars of bonds.
So why does the Biden administration stay silent about how high finance works in America? There’s no law that says they must, and there’s also no evidence that keeping politicians silent about monetary policy is good for the economy. Indeed, from 1935 to 1950, when the president directly ran monetary policy, inequality collapsed, the economy boomed, and inflation was kept low despite economy-wide mobilization to fight World War II. But since the 1980s, we’ve had a weird 40-year tradition of what is known as “Fed independence,” whereby politicians are supposed to leave the Fed and its destructive economists alone. As far as I can tell, there is no reason for this choice, except that Wall Street likes it when high finance is considered apolitical.
A hands-off policy toward any entity that makes core political-economy decisions is problematic. But we’ve seen how this deference is especially damaging in real time, primarily because the Fed has done such a bad job recently. Take the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. SVB was regulated by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and examiners at the SF Fed didn’t act on the bank’s serious problems until the fall of the bank was imminent. This is despite public reporting in The Wall Street Journal about the hole in the bank’s balance sheet months earlier. The SF Fed examiners reportedly wrote several stern letters to SVB executives about the risks they were taking, and the executives threw them in the trash, and everyone went on with their lives until the bank collapsed.
The incompetence of the Fed examiners is quite obvious. The incompetence of the FOMC, which gave the orders to have its banks march to the tune of higher interest rates, and never bothered to care about whether the banks could handle it, is worse.
The closer you get to the facts, the more incompetent the Fed looks. Supervisors should never have allowed a bank funded with between 90 and 100 percent uninsured “hot money” deposits by venture capitalists to bet on unhedged long-term bonds. And you didn’t need to be a genius to get this fact. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew that SVB was insolvent; it was pretty much an open secret. Fed supervisors knew it, and so did the FOMC. They took no action.
And though the Fed might feel independent of politics, politics is not independent of the Fed.
In 2018, the Fed, along with its banking allies, wrote and lobbied for a bill, S. 2155, that didn’t quite take away its regulatory authority so much as give it the political cover to relax regulatory requirements over large regional banks. SVB lobbied for this legislation, but the prime actor here was the Fed itself. The general counsel of the Fed, Mark Van Der Weide, helped author S. 2155, and Fed Chair Jay Powell testified in favor of it. Janet Yellen, the former Fed chair and current Treasury secretary, supported it as well. Just a few months after Donald Trump signed S. 2155 into law, SVB announced a $500 million stock buyback program. And a few months after that, SVB began taking in huge deposits and making the bets that would lead to its undoing.
In 2019, the Fed wrote aggressive rules rolling back obligations on large regional banks. At the time, opponents of the legislation that triggered the rewrite predicted that removing requirements would lead to a blowup, but Fed officials (with one exception) nonetheless condescended to everyone who warned of too much risk in the system. Nellie Liang, who ran the Federal Reserve’s financial stability division for six years, responded to the bill by saying, “meh,” and from her temporary perch at the Brookings Institution, “It’s fine … I’m not upset about it.”
The Fed has announced it will investigate itself, which is, frankly, a very Fed thing to do. We will probably find out a few more relevant facts, as the Fed discovers that though the Fed could have done a bit better, the Fed’s stringent internal reform program that the Fed oversees will fix the problem. Don’t worry, the Fed is on it, even if the Fed is the problem. But because of deference from the White House and the Democrats in the name of Fed independence, no one will propose any real fixes. The Fed will promise to regulate banks a bit more, but of course, there’s no reason to assume the Fed will even realize what went wrong.
by Matt Stoller, The Amercian Prospect | Read more:
Image: Alex Brandon/AP
[ed. This and the article below from TAP's special issue: Washington's Secret Policy Engine.]
Friday, April 7, 2023
Six Ways Existing Economic Models Are Killing the Economy
Americans have been hammered for decades with an economic message that amounts to this: When wealthy people like me gain even more wealth through tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that keep wages low, that leads to economic growth and benefits for everyone else in the economy. And equally, that investing in you, raising your wages, forgiving your debt, or helping your family would be bad—for you! This is the trickle-down way of thinking about economic cause and effect, and there can be no doubt that it has substantially contributed to the greatest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the world.
You would think that trying to sell such a disastrous outcome for the broad mass of citizens would be incredibly unpopular. No politician would outright say they want to shrink the middle class, make it harder to get by, or reward hard work less. No politician would outright say that rich people should get richer, while everyone else struggles to make a decent life.
But this message has been hidden under the confusing, technical-sounding, and often impenetrable language of economics. Many academic economists do important work trying to understand and improve the world. But most citizens’ experience of economics comes from hearing a story—a narrative that rationalizes who gets what and why. The people who benefit from trickle-down policy the most have deployed economists to work their magic to tell this story, and explain why there is no alternative to its scientific certitude.
One of the trickle-down economists’ main persuasive tools is the economic model, used to predict and assess the outcome of economic policies and other major economic developments. These existing models exert such great force on the political debate in large part because their predictions are treated by politicians and reporters as neutral, technocratic reality—simple economic facts, produced by experts, that reflect our best understanding of economic cause and effect.
What few understand is that these economic models do not, and never can, fully reflect the extraordinary complexity of human markets. Rather, the point is to create useful abstractions to provide decision-makers with a sense of the budgetary and economic impacts of a given policy proposal. More disturbingly, the assumptions baked into these models completely define what the models predict. If the assumptions are wrong, the models will be wrong too.
And these models are deeply and consistently wrong.
But “wrong” doesn’t capture the true problem. The deeper problem is that these models are all wrong in the very same way, and in the same direction. They are wrong in a way that massively benefits the rich, and massively disadvantages everyone and everything else.
The headlines derived from these models consistently reflect this bias: “Raising Minimum Wage to $15 Would Cost 1.4 Million Jobs, CBO Says,” or “Biden Corporate Tax Hike Could Shrink Economy, Slash U.S. Jobs, Study Shows.”
Models serve less as scientific analysis and more as incantations from the cult of neoliberalism, and if politicians and journalists continue to accept them with the same naïve credulity that they always have, they will hamper the astounding middle-out economic progress that the Biden administration has made toward rebuilding a more equitable, prosperous economy for all.
The problem is that few people take the time to explain what these faulty assumptions are, why they all promote the worldview of the rich and powerful, and why they shouldn’t be treated as science but as a trickle-down fantasyland.
Here are six of the assumptions built into most economic models that are among the most pernicious:
1. Models assume that public investments will “crowd out” private investment, and are by definition less productive than private investments.
What happens to the economy if the federal government spends $1 billion? The normal person would say that it depends what they spend it on, and how the policy is designed.
Not so in most economic models. They assume that any government spending will have less of a return than whatever private businesses spend their money on. Always.
But that’s not all. They say that government spending even comes with a penalty: It automatically causes businesses to spend less, leading to lower overall investment. Always.
Essentially, models assume that every increase in public investment is canceled out by the combination of lower returns and reduction in private investment. Taking this assumption to its logical extreme, there’s almost nothing government should ever invest in. It’s a good thing Eisenhower took office before the neoliberal style of thinking came to dominate Washington, or instead of interstate highways we’d still have dirt roads.
These assumptions aren’t even well hidden in models but baked directly into the math. As economist Mark Paul has noted, the Congressional Budget Office model assumes that all public investments are exactly half as productive as private investments. Public investments return 5 percent annually, while the same amount of private investment returns 10 percent.
The first indication that something is amiss here can be sensed in all these round numbers—a flat declaration that public spending is 50 percent less good than private spending. Precisely 50 percent. Every time. Obviously, this is not the result of rigorous data analysis. It’s simply recapitulating the old trickle-down myth that government is by definition wasteful, while private investment is always maximized for the greatest efficiency and return.
And it’s not even a little bit true. Think about health care. The U.S. government invests billions in basic research each year and is responsible for funding an incredible range of innovations, from mRNA vaccine technology to new antibiotics. Everyone benefits from this publicly funded research, sparking further innovations and benefits—much of it carried out by the private sector.
Then consider how Big Pharma invests its profits: with huge marketing budgets, predatory patent enforcement, $577 billion in stock buybacks over five years (more than was spent on research and development), and a 14 percent increase in executive compensation. It’s a bonanza for those corporations, but it’s the opposite of efficiency—except in the make-believe world constructed by economic models.
The point isn’t that government spending always returns more than private spending, just that the flat assumption that it is always worse by 50 percent simply doesn’t map to reality. We should assess policy by what it proposes to do, not who proposes to do it.
by Nick Hanauer, The American Prospect | Read more:
Image: KYODO
[ed. See also: How Policymakers Fight a Losing Battle With Models (TAP).]
You would think that trying to sell such a disastrous outcome for the broad mass of citizens would be incredibly unpopular. No politician would outright say they want to shrink the middle class, make it harder to get by, or reward hard work less. No politician would outright say that rich people should get richer, while everyone else struggles to make a decent life.
One of the trickle-down economists’ main persuasive tools is the economic model, used to predict and assess the outcome of economic policies and other major economic developments. These existing models exert such great force on the political debate in large part because their predictions are treated by politicians and reporters as neutral, technocratic reality—simple economic facts, produced by experts, that reflect our best understanding of economic cause and effect.
What few understand is that these economic models do not, and never can, fully reflect the extraordinary complexity of human markets. Rather, the point is to create useful abstractions to provide decision-makers with a sense of the budgetary and economic impacts of a given policy proposal. More disturbingly, the assumptions baked into these models completely define what the models predict. If the assumptions are wrong, the models will be wrong too.
And these models are deeply and consistently wrong.
But “wrong” doesn’t capture the true problem. The deeper problem is that these models are all wrong in the very same way, and in the same direction. They are wrong in a way that massively benefits the rich, and massively disadvantages everyone and everything else.
The headlines derived from these models consistently reflect this bias: “Raising Minimum Wage to $15 Would Cost 1.4 Million Jobs, CBO Says,” or “Biden Corporate Tax Hike Could Shrink Economy, Slash U.S. Jobs, Study Shows.”
Models serve less as scientific analysis and more as incantations from the cult of neoliberalism, and if politicians and journalists continue to accept them with the same naïve credulity that they always have, they will hamper the astounding middle-out economic progress that the Biden administration has made toward rebuilding a more equitable, prosperous economy for all.
The problem is that few people take the time to explain what these faulty assumptions are, why they all promote the worldview of the rich and powerful, and why they shouldn’t be treated as science but as a trickle-down fantasyland.
Here are six of the assumptions built into most economic models that are among the most pernicious:
1. Models assume that public investments will “crowd out” private investment, and are by definition less productive than private investments.
What happens to the economy if the federal government spends $1 billion? The normal person would say that it depends what they spend it on, and how the policy is designed.
Not so in most economic models. They assume that any government spending will have less of a return than whatever private businesses spend their money on. Always.
But that’s not all. They say that government spending even comes with a penalty: It automatically causes businesses to spend less, leading to lower overall investment. Always.
Essentially, models assume that every increase in public investment is canceled out by the combination of lower returns and reduction in private investment. Taking this assumption to its logical extreme, there’s almost nothing government should ever invest in. It’s a good thing Eisenhower took office before the neoliberal style of thinking came to dominate Washington, or instead of interstate highways we’d still have dirt roads.
These assumptions aren’t even well hidden in models but baked directly into the math. As economist Mark Paul has noted, the Congressional Budget Office model assumes that all public investments are exactly half as productive as private investments. Public investments return 5 percent annually, while the same amount of private investment returns 10 percent.
The first indication that something is amiss here can be sensed in all these round numbers—a flat declaration that public spending is 50 percent less good than private spending. Precisely 50 percent. Every time. Obviously, this is not the result of rigorous data analysis. It’s simply recapitulating the old trickle-down myth that government is by definition wasteful, while private investment is always maximized for the greatest efficiency and return.
And it’s not even a little bit true. Think about health care. The U.S. government invests billions in basic research each year and is responsible for funding an incredible range of innovations, from mRNA vaccine technology to new antibiotics. Everyone benefits from this publicly funded research, sparking further innovations and benefits—much of it carried out by the private sector.
Then consider how Big Pharma invests its profits: with huge marketing budgets, predatory patent enforcement, $577 billion in stock buybacks over five years (more than was spent on research and development), and a 14 percent increase in executive compensation. It’s a bonanza for those corporations, but it’s the opposite of efficiency—except in the make-believe world constructed by economic models.
The point isn’t that government spending always returns more than private spending, just that the flat assumption that it is always worse by 50 percent simply doesn’t map to reality. We should assess policy by what it proposes to do, not who proposes to do it.
by Nick Hanauer, The American Prospect | Read more:
Image: KYODO
[ed. See also: How Policymakers Fight a Losing Battle With Models (TAP).]
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Mary Lou Williams
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mary Lou Williams (NYT)
Today, Williams is remembered as a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz, possibly the greatest multiplier of openness and mastery the music has yet known.
Today, Williams is remembered as a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz, possibly the greatest multiplier of openness and mastery the music has yet known.
A 20-Year-Old Unlike Any Other Is Golf’s Next Global Superstar
Augusta, Ga. — “If you would’ve told me when I was 16, which was four years ago …”
Tom Kim says this so comfortably, in a way that only the young can, those lost in the good life, whose age hasn’t worn away at that cloak of invincibility. Kim is 20. On Monday he played a practice round at Augusta National with Rory McIlroy, who turned pro in 2007, when Kim was 5; and Tiger Woods, who was an eight-time major winner by the time Kim was born in 2002; and Fred Couples, who was born in 1959, a breezy 43 years earlier.
Kim walked alongside those luminaries on the way from No. 11 green to 12 tee. The crowd greeted them as you’d expect. Swooning. Tiger did his little wave-and-nod. Rory smiled like Rory smiles. Freddie was Freddie.
Tom Kim says this so comfortably, in a way that only the young can, those lost in the good life, whose age hasn’t worn away at that cloak of invincibility. Kim is 20. On Monday he played a practice round at Augusta National with Rory McIlroy, who turned pro in 2007, when Kim was 5; and Tiger Woods, who was an eight-time major winner by the time Kim was born in 2002; and Fred Couples, who was born in 1959, a breezy 43 years earlier.
But there, too, in that rarest of air, was Tom Kim.
Tom.
Kim.
Ask him about these moments and oftentimes he responds with the type of poise that suggests he’s always felt this was inevitable. That this is where he’d be. That this is where he belongs. He comes at it with an aw-shucks quality, but there’s an underlying tension at play — Tom Kim is aware of the hype. A few weeks ago, in a conversation at TPC Sawgrass, he offered a look and a shrug and said, “I don’t think I’m quite where people say I am. Basically, I’m just trying to get more experience out here really fast.”
How does one get experience really fast?
That’s the type of contradiction that comes on with a white-knuckle ascent like Tom Kim.
It’s not slowing. If anything, it’s only accelerating. It’ll hit another atmosphere on Thursday when Kim makes his Masters debut, playing alongside McIlroy and Sam Burns in a marquee afternoon grouping.
Why the big to-do? For those catching up, Kim began 2022 only holding status on the Asian Tour. He then landed a spot in the Scottish Open, finished third, then made the cut at the Open Championship at St. Andrews. Some began wondering, who the hell is this? Then Kim accepted special temporary status on the PGA Tour, finished seventh in Detroit, and then, in a thunderclap, won the Wyndham Championship by five shots. This was only seven months ago. At 20, Kim became the second-youngest winner on the PGA Tour since 1932, trailing only Jordan Spieth. (...)
That brings us to today where, more than any ranking, Tom Kim is a thing. A certified thing. The Nike deal came in January. An undisclosed amount, but surely a massive bag. Instead of being a walking billboard, Kim is exclusively adorned by the swoosh and no one is shy about what that means.
“He wants to be the GOAT,” Ben Harrison, Kim’s agent, said. “And, you know, if you want to be the GOAT, you’ve got to be among them. So, for him, as a brand, Nike is such an elite global brand. All the best athletes in the world, at some point, have been with them.”
This is a far cry from what was.
Kim speaks of formative years as if they’re of another time. Far removed. Unsentimental. Then you realize he’s referencing, like, 2019.
It was that recently that Joohyung Kim, born in 2002 in Seoul, South Korea, was essentially supporting his family. Parents Changik Lee and Kwanjoo Kim went all-in on Joohyung’s golfing dream early. Changik was a mini-tour pro turned teaching professional and taught his son the game. The family moved often, eventually landing in Australia, where Joohyung learned English and grew into a world-class junior player. As a kid, Joohyung loved Thomas the Tank Engine. He had the lunchbox, all the toys; he loved it so much that he started going by Thomas. By the time he was 11, an incidental name change was complete. He was Tom.
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
[ed. It's Master's week. Whether he makes the cut or not, he's the real deal.]
Tom.
Kim.
Ask him about these moments and oftentimes he responds with the type of poise that suggests he’s always felt this was inevitable. That this is where he’d be. That this is where he belongs. He comes at it with an aw-shucks quality, but there’s an underlying tension at play — Tom Kim is aware of the hype. A few weeks ago, in a conversation at TPC Sawgrass, he offered a look and a shrug and said, “I don’t think I’m quite where people say I am. Basically, I’m just trying to get more experience out here really fast.”
How does one get experience really fast?
That’s the type of contradiction that comes on with a white-knuckle ascent like Tom Kim.
It’s not slowing. If anything, it’s only accelerating. It’ll hit another atmosphere on Thursday when Kim makes his Masters debut, playing alongside McIlroy and Sam Burns in a marquee afternoon grouping.
Why the big to-do? For those catching up, Kim began 2022 only holding status on the Asian Tour. He then landed a spot in the Scottish Open, finished third, then made the cut at the Open Championship at St. Andrews. Some began wondering, who the hell is this? Then Kim accepted special temporary status on the PGA Tour, finished seventh in Detroit, and then, in a thunderclap, won the Wyndham Championship by five shots. This was only seven months ago. At 20, Kim became the second-youngest winner on the PGA Tour since 1932, trailing only Jordan Spieth. (...)
That brings us to today where, more than any ranking, Tom Kim is a thing. A certified thing. The Nike deal came in January. An undisclosed amount, but surely a massive bag. Instead of being a walking billboard, Kim is exclusively adorned by the swoosh and no one is shy about what that means.
“He wants to be the GOAT,” Ben Harrison, Kim’s agent, said. “And, you know, if you want to be the GOAT, you’ve got to be among them. So, for him, as a brand, Nike is such an elite global brand. All the best athletes in the world, at some point, have been with them.”
This is a far cry from what was.
Kim speaks of formative years as if they’re of another time. Far removed. Unsentimental. Then you realize he’s referencing, like, 2019.
It was that recently that Joohyung Kim, born in 2002 in Seoul, South Korea, was essentially supporting his family. Parents Changik Lee and Kwanjoo Kim went all-in on Joohyung’s golfing dream early. Changik was a mini-tour pro turned teaching professional and taught his son the game. The family moved often, eventually landing in Australia, where Joohyung learned English and grew into a world-class junior player. As a kid, Joohyung loved Thomas the Tank Engine. He had the lunchbox, all the toys; he loved it so much that he started going by Thomas. By the time he was 11, an incidental name change was complete. He was Tom.
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
[ed. It's Master's week. Whether he makes the cut or not, he's the real deal.]
Ivanka Trump Is Pained
Nepotism was never supposed to be this hard.
I ache for Ivanka. But mostly, I marvel at her — and at the many, many people like her who have a special talent, a preternatural discipline, for pausing at every pivotal crossroads and making a coldblooded, single-minded assessment: How do I navigate this to maximum advantage for me?
Ivanka navigates like Magellan. She’s GPS made flesh. At times, the coordinates and calculations have been easy: Daddy’s going to the White House; I will not be left behind. She traipsed after him to Washington. She traipsed after him to meetings with European leaders. She even traipsed after him to the Demilitarized Zone. She did so much traipsing that Twitter had a hashtag for it: #unwantedivanka. And then Daddy was dethroned, and the traipsing just wasn’t what it used to be.
Things got tricky: Daddy sent those ruffians to the Capitol, where they made a horrible mess and threatened to maul Mike Pence. Ivanka recalculated. For her appearance before the Jan. 6 committee, she wore a glimmer of disapproval.
And now, well, there’s no figuring out where to turn or whom to burn. Daddy was just hauled into a Manhattan courthouse because of that smuttiness with the porn star. Can Ivanka play the part of a distracted onlooker without seeming like a 24-karat ingrate?
Nothing good for her can come of this, so she’s saying and doing almost nothing at all. She’s in limbo. She’s in hiding. She has gone from gaga to Garbo and wants to be left alone, at least until the Stormy weather clears.
She did, according to a report in The New York Post, visit Daddy at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. And last week, following his indictment, she put out that statement about it on Instagram. But it read as though it were written by a chatbot getting a pedicure. It comprised just 27 weightless, gutless, exquisitely noncommittal words — about loving Daddy, about loving America, about being “pained.” His indictment is a kidney stone to be passed.
And she’s the patron saint of all the unscrupulous opportunists who are taking little or big steps away from Daddy but contentedly ignored his depravity and destructiveness when there was power to be gained from that. When there was a profit to be made. (...)
For Daddy’s current presidential campaign, she sent her regrets. “This time around,” she said in a statement released the same night he announced his candidacy, “I am choosing to prioritize my young children.” Were they not priorities before?
She added that she didn’t “plan to be involved in politics.” The thing about plans is they can change. Ivanka’s vanishing act is a testament to that.
I ache for Ivanka. But mostly, I marvel at her — and at the many, many people like her who have a special talent, a preternatural discipline, for pausing at every pivotal crossroads and making a coldblooded, single-minded assessment: How do I navigate this to maximum advantage for me?
Things got tricky: Daddy sent those ruffians to the Capitol, where they made a horrible mess and threatened to maul Mike Pence. Ivanka recalculated. For her appearance before the Jan. 6 committee, she wore a glimmer of disapproval.
And now, well, there’s no figuring out where to turn or whom to burn. Daddy was just hauled into a Manhattan courthouse because of that smuttiness with the porn star. Can Ivanka play the part of a distracted onlooker without seeming like a 24-karat ingrate?
Nothing good for her can come of this, so she’s saying and doing almost nothing at all. She’s in limbo. She’s in hiding. She has gone from gaga to Garbo and wants to be left alone, at least until the Stormy weather clears.
She did, according to a report in The New York Post, visit Daddy at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. And last week, following his indictment, she put out that statement about it on Instagram. But it read as though it were written by a chatbot getting a pedicure. It comprised just 27 weightless, gutless, exquisitely noncommittal words — about loving Daddy, about loving America, about being “pained.” His indictment is a kidney stone to be passed.
And she’s the patron saint of all the unscrupulous opportunists who are taking little or big steps away from Daddy but contentedly ignored his depravity and destructiveness when there was power to be gained from that. When there was a profit to be made. (...)
For Daddy’s current presidential campaign, she sent her regrets. “This time around,” she said in a statement released the same night he announced his candidacy, “I am choosing to prioritize my young children.” Were they not priorities before?
She added that she didn’t “plan to be involved in politics.” The thing about plans is they can change. Ivanka’s vanishing act is a testament to that.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman
[ed. Who doesn't appreciate a good burn now and then? Also in this column, a return to Love of Sentences:]
Anthony Lane had great fun reviewing the movie “Cocaine Bear,” which lends new definition to the phrase “high concept”: “Allegedly, it’s based on true events, in much the same way that ‘Pinocchio’ is based on string theory.” Also: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.” (...)
Also in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller described the effect of the internet and smartphones on college students’ attention spans: “Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.” (...)
In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan weighed in on the chilliness of Ron DeSantis, who gives her the feeling “that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.”
Anthony Lane had great fun reviewing the movie “Cocaine Bear,” which lends new definition to the phrase “high concept”: “Allegedly, it’s based on true events, in much the same way that ‘Pinocchio’ is based on string theory.” Also: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.” (...)
Also in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller described the effect of the internet and smartphones on college students’ attention spans: “Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.” (...)
In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan weighed in on the chilliness of Ron DeSantis, who gives her the feeling “that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.”
In Pristine Alaska, an Oil Giant Prepares to Drill for Decades
At the earliest, the crude would begin flowing in about six years. By that time, the Biden administration hopes that demand for oil will have plummeted because of federal investments to encourage use of renewable energy and to encourage a transition to electric vehicles. (...)
“The stone age did not come to an end for a lack of stone,” Mr. Marks said, making the point that he expected the same would be true with oil. “That’s the long-term risk these companies face with electric cars and wind and hydro and everything else,” he said. “Eventually oil is going to go away, even if there’s still some to produce.” (...)
Willow will consist of as many as 199 wells spread across three drill sites, which the company believes could produce nearly 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years. That would make it the largest oil project in the United States. (...)
The benefits to Alaska, which remains dependent on fossil fuel revenues because it has no statewide sales tax or personal income tax, will be somewhat limited. Willow is on federal land, which means that Washington will receive royalties but that Alaska will be able to collect only oil-production taxes, which would be offset by company tax deductions for expenses. For a few years, until the oil starts flowing, Willow could even have a small negative impact on state revenues.
by Lisa Friedman and Clifford Krauss, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff
[ed. My best friend Deb is an environmental supervisor there. Two weeks on, two weeks off.]
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