"Anti-Woke" Beer

"Anti-woke" Bud Light knockoff is $35 for a six-pack (Boing Boing)

Image: Ultra Right Beer

[ed. Faux indignation for profit. It's the American Way. (War on Christmas? Is that over already? Who won?)]

"In recent weeks, conservative activists have thrown an epic tantrum over the fact that Bud Light launched a Pride promotional campaign with a trans influencer because we live in capitalism and it is profitable for companies to launch PR campaigns that make their products appeal to different audiences. Now, a conservative political operative who previously worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign has launched a Bud Light alternative called "Ultra Right Beer." At $20 per six-pack and roughly $12 in shipping, here's what you get:"

***

See also: Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance (NYT):

"But they have everything to do with the manner in which an alarming fraction of Americans regard and respond to political developments today. They look for evidence of offense to, and persecution of, whatever group of people they identify with. They invent that proof when it’s not there; when it is, they upsize it. Either way, their predetermined sense of grievance is the prism through which all is passed and all is parsed. It’s their Rosetta stone. It’s their binky."

Open Sesame

I’m not sure if I really believe in the AI doomerism stuff, but one thing I find discouraging is how often we screw up similar problems that are analogous to AI alignment (predicting how a complex system will behave given a set of rules) — but much easier.

For example, recently a law was passed with the goal of protecting people with sesame allergies, and the result is that now sesame is being put in many more products.

Seriously, I’m not kidding. The Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education and Research (Faster) Act, which was passed with bipartisan support, basically said:

• If you’re selling a food that contains sesame, it has to be labelled.

• If you’re selling a food that doesn’t contain sesame, you need to follow a bunch of burdensome rules, including careful cleaning of manufacturing equipment, to be absolutely 100% sure there is no contamination.

The result is that now a lot of companies are choosing to add small amounts of sesame to products that had previously been sesame-free, and labeling it. According to the article, this is causing some pretty serious hardship for people who are allergic to sesame:

The article also quotes some consumer protection advocates and politicians who had lobbied for the passage of the law. None of them apologized or took responsibility for the situation. (...)

This is a general problem in public policy. Sometimes political conflicts happen when different groups have competing interests, public choice theory, etc, and advocate for policies accordingly. But other times there are these alignment problems where we simply fail to correctly predict what the results of a policy will be, so the results don’t match our desired outcome even when we get the policy we’re advocating for.

by Mike Saint-Santoine, Mike's Blog |  Read more:

Image: via Wikipedia

Lawyers Lawyering

Fox was resigned to a tough trial. Then, a secret mediator stepped in.

For months, as the pretrial proceedings wore on and the embarrassing internal messages kept spilling into public view, executives at Fox News slowly resigned themselves to a miserable slog of a trial followed by a possible loss before a jury in the blockbuster $1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

Viet Dinh, the highest-ranking legal officer at Fox News’s parent company, Fox Corp., had offered a glimmer of hope. He had walked company founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who is Fox’s chief executive, through the legal issues and reassured them that the company could eventually prevail on appeal, even if it required going all the way to the Supreme Court, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations.

But at the close of Friday’s hearing in the blockbuster defamation case against Fox News, Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court asked the lawyers for both companies to try to work out their differences. Trial was set to begin Monday, and he implored them to see if they could find common ground.

The two sides obliged, and their lawyers spent the weekend attempting to hammer out a deal without getting far. The space between them was still vast. Running out of time, they sent an emergency email Sunday morning to longtime mediator Jerry Roscoe, who was floating down the Danube River.

As calculations by both companies slowly played out, the stakes were clear, not just for them but for the news media and even for the country itself: Dominion was seeking accountability for Fox’s role in spreading the false claim that Dominion machines had been used to steal the White House from former president Donald Trump, a democracy-shaking lie that helped spark violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and, more than two years later, this consequential defamation battle in court.

But now, there was one last shot for resolution on the eve of the most highly anticipated libel lawsuit in a generation.

“Would I be willing to mediate an important case?” Roscoe said, recalling the dramatic email he received while on vacation.

In an interview, Roscoe said he was soon reading thousands of pages of documents, scrolling through them on his phone overnight in preparation for swooping in at the last minute to try to end the dispute.

Publicly, there was no sign of change in the posture of the two companies. So it was a surprise Sunday night, as dozens of reporters were checking into their hotels in Wilmington, Del., girding themselves for a weeks-long stay, when a strange note was circulated by the public information officer for the court: Judge Davis would delay the trial by one day. No explanation was provided, only an assurance that Davis would say more in court the next morning.

Two people familiar with the case told The Washington Post on Sunday night that the delay was to allow time for the two sides to try to reach a deal. The talks were coming at the insistence of the judge, one said, lowering expectations of success.

But behind the scenes, Roscoe said, he commissioned calls with lawyers for both sides, trying to feel out their red lines. On Monday morning, he brought them together for their first call.

An hour later, Davis gaveled the court into session only briefly to announce that he would proceed with seating a jury in 24 hours and declared that such delays in complicated suits were hardly “unusual.” Dominion sent just one lawyer to sit in the courtroom for Davis’s low-key remarks, a hint that the real action might have been taking place elsewhere.

Roscoe said expectations were muted at first. The companies’ lead trial attorneys, Justin Nelson for Dominion and Dan Webb for Fox, had minimal roles, too busy continuing to prepare for the planned courtroom clash.

“The parties weren’t too optimistic that it was going to resolve,” he said.

Fox staff and executives had watched in horror as their unvarnished, and often vicious, internal messages about one another — and Trump — became public throughout the pretrial proceedings. Many of Fox News’s top executives, including CEO Suzanne Scott, arrived at the network at its founding, and some have never worked anywhere else. And since Roger Ailes, Fox News’s late co-founder, was forced out in a sexual harassment scandal in 2016, Fox has operated without a domineering force leading it.

Inside Fox, as the trial date neared, staffers dreaded the witness testimony that might come with it. Rupert Murdoch was expected to be called second in the witness lineup, right after Dominion’s PR representative, Tony Fratto, according to people familiar with the witness lineup. Lou Dobbs was expected to be the third witness. High-profile Fox News hosts such as Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity were also expected to be called, along with several behind-the-scenes staffers.

Revelations from pretrial discovery had been excruciating for the cable network, exposing a backbiting internal culture that featured employees who regularly doubted the content that aired nightly for millions of viewers. They privately rejected the myth that Trump had won the election, even as the network put forth conspiracy theories in the weeks after the November 2020 election. (...)

But Fox had insisted publicly it was standing up for the First Amendment by refusing to settle, claiming that Dominion was unfairly blaming it for airing allegations that at the time were being promoted by the president and his lawyers.

Despite the reassurance from Dinh, a trusted Murdoch adviser (and godfatherto one of Lachlan’s sons), who had taken on an outsize role at Fox Corp., Murdoch himself was inclined to settle the matter financially, as he has done many times in his career, the people familiar with the Fox deliberations said.

After that first call Monday morning, others quickly followed. Over Monday and into Tuesday, Roscoe estimated that he conducted as many as 50 calls with both sides. Some were long, others short, some on Zoom, others traditional phone calls. Lawyers and company executives joined, he said. When asked if Rupert Murdoch had joined the calls, Roscoe said that no potential witnesses had been part of the discussions with him.

“We were on the phone nonstop,” he said. “Emotions ran high.”

By Monday evening, they still hadn’t made progress, and both parties went to bed expecting a trial the next day. On Tuesday morning, the lawyers suited up and headed for the courtroom.

But outside the courtroom, Roscoe was making headway.

For the vacationing mediator, that required calling in from his hotel, a boat, even a bus, holding his phone in his winter coat for privacy.

Roscoe said that he quickly ascertained that Dominion’s monetary demand was not the only issue keeping the two apart. They were also divided by a dispute over the language that Fox would release acknowledging the court’s ruling that Fox had spread falsehoods about the company.

But over many calls, the sides got closer.

by Sarah Ellison, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Rachel Wisniewski/Washington Post

[ed. Oh to be a fly on the wall to those conversations.]

Masters Champions Dinner

Masters 2023: What really goes on at the Champions Dinner, according to those in the room (Golf Digest)

Image: Augusta National GC/uncredited

[ed. One of the most exclusive dinners on earth.]

"Winning the Masters brings many rewards, but attending the Masters Club dinner might be the most intrinsically meaningful. However far removed each man is from his respective success, he gets to bask in the glow of his triumph as part of golf’s most cherished brotherhood. Through that prism, the memories become amplified, shared nostalgia stirring an elixir of renewal. Something happens at that dinner; it’s a feast of fulfillment."

The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but Should

You might think you already know your family’s stories pretty well—between childhood memories and reunions and holiday gatherings, you may have spent hours with your parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles soaking up family lore. But do you really know as much as you think?

As a professor of anthropology, I have always been fascinated by the stories that families tell, and a few years ago, I started researching the tales that are passed down from generation to generation. Part of my motivation was personal. When my mother died in 2014, I realized how much I didn’t know about her life. I never asked the questions that haunt me now—questions about what interactions she had, what it was like to live in her time in the places she did. I wish I had a fuller sense of her as a person, especially how she was when she was young, with a lust for life.

In my research, I have been astonished to find that so many other people also know little of the lives of their parents and grandparents, despite the fact that they lived through some pretty interesting decades. Even my students, some of whom majored in history and excelled at it, were largely in the dark about their own family history. Our elders may share some familiar anecdotes over and over again, but still, many of us have no broader sense of the world they lived in, and especially what it was like before we came along. The people I interviewed knew so little about their grandparents’ or parents’ early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people. Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children. Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.

As I interviewed more people, many of them parents or grandparents themselves, I became interested in hearing their stories and learning about their childhood. I developed a set of questions designed to get a person talking about the past in a way they never had before. Their answers opened whole new worlds to me, and reflected each person’s unique place in history. I heard some things I expected, but I was also surprised and delighted. I gained a new appreciation for those I interviewed—and for humanity as a whole. And I became convinced of the value of preserving these family histories. Doing so helps you learn more about not only your relatives, but also yourself and a period in history that might otherwise feel remote. 

The questions I created, which I lay out in my new book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, span 13 different topics. They include basic background information, such as where someone was born, as well as more abstract inquiries, such as how someone conceives of their identity, what they believe in, and what they’ve noticed about the passage of time. Specificity is key, so after asking a relative about the home they grew up in, follow up with requests for details: What did their windows look out onto? What did they hear when they woke up in the morning? When you ask for descriptions of an elder’s childhood home and the neighborhoods they roamed around, you’ll hear stories that place you in a rich sensory world you knew little about. So ask what family dinners were like and what your relatives were taught about expressing emotion. Ask about their worst first dates and where they bought their clothes. And remember that the most important questions can also be the plainest. One of my favorites is just “What do you wish people knew about you?”

The reason many people don’t know very much about their grandparents or even their parents is surprisingly simple: They’ve never thought to ask and didn’t have the right questions.  (...)

But even hearing about ordinary life can be interesting—because what was ordinary for your grandparents is likely not what’s ordinary for you.

So give it a try. You may be surprised by how much your parents and grandparents haven’t told you, perhaps because they thought you wouldn’t be interested, or they weren’t sure how you’d judge them. Just as the precious oral literatures and histories of whole communities are being lost the world over through rapid change, migration, language death, and a failure to ask, there is a risk that your family’s personal stories, too, will be lost forever. Your parents and grandparents have unique snapshots and memories of the world they knew, and in learning about them, you can not only preserve the past but also create lasting meaning and connection. In families and communities, there are secrets to be discovered.

by Elizabeth Keating, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty; The Atlantic
[ed. This is certainly something I wish I'd done more of. I don't know a thing about my great- grandparents, and only a few memories of the times I spent with my grandparents. As for my parents - there's the period I spent growing up with them, and vacations as an adult, but otherwise, their interior lives and most personal experiences remain a mystery. That kind of information, perspective, and continuity is something I'd like to pass on. How much they'd have disclosed is another matter.]

The Gentrification of Disability

When I was in my late 20s (early 2007 to mid 2009, maybe) I worked for the local public school district in my hometown. For the bulk of my time there I was in a special program for kids with severe emotional disturbance, which I’ve written about once or twice. But I worked in a number of capacities in those years, and for a little while I helped out in a conventional special ed classroom for the middle school. I guess you’d say I was a paraprofessional, just extra coverage when they needed it.

In that class there were two boys who had autism which resulted in severe academic and social and communicative impairments. One of them was completely nonverbal and had been his entire life. As I understood it, he had never been capable of speaking or reading, could not dress himself, wore sanitary garments, could not go to the bathroom without assistance. He would occasionally screech very loudly, without clear cause. I believe these days he would be referred to as having Level Three autism, as defined by the DSM. He needed a lot of help, and though he was unable to complete what might conventionally be called academic work the school provided him with structure, support, and time during which his mother didn’t have to care for him. I met her on several occasions when she came to pick him up after school. She would sometimes talk about the difficulties of raising a disabled child in language that would be frowned on today, but I admired how frank and honest she was.

She was really not a fan of the autism awareness community of the time. This was well before the “neurodiversity” movement and all of its habits. It was all about awareness, raising awareness, 5ks for awareness, bumper stickers for awareness. That was precisely what angered her the most. She said to me once, “What does awareness do for my kid? How does it help me?” Words to that effect. It was a good question, one I couldn’t answer. Today I don’t hear about awareness so much, but there’s still plenty of the basic disease of awareness thinking - the notion that what people who deal with a particular disability need is a vague positivity, that what every disabled person requires is the laurel of strangers condescendingly wishing them the best. Now, with the rise of neurodiversity and the notion that autism is only different, not worse, we are confronted with similar questions. When a mother struggles every day to care for someone who will likely never be able to care for himself, what value could it hold for her that his condition is called diversity, rather than disorder? What value can it have for him, who cannot speak to comment on the difference?

I thought of that mother when I read about the recent cancelation of an academic panel at Harvard. It seems a panel of experts was slated to speak on the subject of how best to help those with autism. But as they planned to speak about treatment, about treating autism as a hindrance to be managed, the event was decried as “violently ableist” by Harvard activists and swiftly shut down. It’s worth looking at the petition that was organized as part of this effort. One part reads

Autism is a neurodevelopmental and neurobiological disability that is not treatable or curable. It is not an illness or disease and most importantly, it is not inherently negative. Autistic people at Harvard and globally have advocated in the face of ableism to defend ourselves from such hateful, eugenicist logic.

This is, I think, nonsensical. It asserts that autism is a disability, a dis-ability, but also that it’s not an illness, a disease, or inherently negative. But the very concept of disability depends on the notion that disabilities are inherently negative. If they are not in some sense disabling, the term has no meaning. What’s more, the entire moral and legal logic that underpins the concept of reasonable accommodation - the affordances we make for people with disabilities, mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act - depends on the idea that these things are both unchosen and harmful. If they’re not, then there’s no communal obligation to accommodate them. What would they even need accommodation for? (...)

In the years that followed my brief employment at the school district, the ideology that led to people like King was born. In the early 2010s there was a flurry of interest in autism. Dozens of books and hundreds of essays were written about autism, almost all of which talked about it as a set of valuable personality quirks rather than as a disorder. In article after ponderous article, autism was described as a newer, perhaps better way of thinking, sometimes even a “new evolution” for the human species. Always, always, always, this navel-gazing fixated relentlessly on the highest-functioning people with autism. You could read tens of thousands of words in this genre without ever once being informed about the existence of those whose autism debilitates them. Whenever I read yet another article talking about how some high-achieving computer scientist saw their autism as the key to their success, I would think of those whose autism has prevented them from enjoying all manner of elements of human life. Where were those people in all of that hype? Will Tyler Cowen ever write a book about them? Are they ever going to appear on the cover of Forbes magazine or whatever the fuck? No. They have been replaced; in their stead, we have members of the striving classes whose autism has never prevented them from flourishing at everything they’ve ever tried. And since “autism is not a disorder” has become the enforced opinion, those whose autism plainly is a disorder have to be marginalized - by the very people who complain about the marginalization of the “neurodiverse.” Autism has been gentrified.

This is a dynamic I now cannot stop seeing: once a human attribute like autism or mental illness becomes seen as an identity marker that is useful for social positioning among the chattering class, the conversation about that attribute inevitably becomes fixated on those among that chattering class. It becomes impossible to escape their immense social gravity. The culture of that attribute becomes distorted and bent towards the interests and biases of those who enjoy the privilege of holding society’s microphone. Because you must be able to effectively communicate to take part in the conversation, and because all of the usual privileges of class and circumstance influence whose voice sounds the loudest, the discussion becomes just another playground for college-educated urbanites. To speak you must be able to speak, literally, and you must also enjoy the privileges of communicative competence and educated-class signaling mechanisms. So we will always tend toward a conversation that defaults to the interests of the least afflicted. This is inevitable; it’s baked into the system.

We could overcome this problem if the people in the arena were dedicated to fronting (excuse me, “centering”) the interests of the most afflicted. But we can’t have that. We can’t have that because contemporary disability ideology is obsessively fixated on telling people to center themselves. That is perceived to be the entirety of the work: every individual with a disability must demand that the world sees them as “valid,” that they are just as authentically disabled as anyone else, that their ADHD grants them perfectly equal priority in receiving accommodation as someone who’s paralyzed from the neck down. The whole social culture of disability activism and studies is leveraged to support the individual’s demand for attention and proper respect; it cannot countenance the notion that there are those who we should put before ourselves. And the obvious impulse to say that someone who faces total debilitation from their disorder should, in fact, be a higher priority for the medical and therapeutic communities is treated as the height of bigotry.

I am watching, in real time, as the same process of gentrification that overtook autism overtakes mental illness. (...)

We used to say, “you wouldn’t stigmatize someone with diabetes, would you?” And there was wisdom in that. An obvious corollary is that you wouldn’t make having diabetes core to your identity, either; you wouldn’t try to sell diabetes as the most interesting thing about you. I don’t know why we walked away from that insight. Today we have the usual demand to have it both ways, to be seen as one’s disorder when convenient for differentiating ourselves from the pack and then setting aside that definition when uncomfortable. Again, the truly disabled can’t do this. They do not deftly craft facades from their disorders, lacking the self-control and capacity for social scheming required to do so. They aren’t afforded the possibility of ignoring their condition when convenient. Yet the voice of the ambitious and shameless patient seeking validation and coin for being sick is becoming the voice of mental illness, those unprincipled enough to treat it all as marketing. Mental illness should not be fodder for building your personal brand. (...)

Our mental disorders are a part of us, and thus are inevitably a part of our personalities. I have never said that those who suffer from them should try to excise their mental illnesses from their sense of self or treat it as a troubling secret to be hidden from the world. (That would be weird, if I said that.) I have said that it’s unhealthy to define your essence through what are, I remind you, diseases. For one thing, as I recently pointed out this tactic may seem to provide succor when you’re young but will inevitably fail you when you grow older. For another, there’s this awful, prurient tendency now for young people who want to have careers as “creatives” to leverage their mental illness for book deals and YouTube hits, making themselves spectacles and trading dignity for attention. They splash their diagnoses on every part of their self-presentation online, hoping to appear cool and romantically unstable and fuckable in doing so. (“Dude, I’ve always wanted to hook up with like a really crazy girl!”) I find this psychically perverse, but it also means that their direct incentive is to not get better. If your career is being mentally ill, your financial stability depends on not effectively treating that mental illness. 

by Freddie deBoer, FdB |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I'm reminded of Cat Marnell's autobiography, How To Murder Your Life. A couple reviews here and here. Excerpt here.]

via:

The Empty Basket

Economics is the language of power and affects us all. What can we do to improve its impoverished menu of ideas?

Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of ‘schools’ containing different visions and research methods – classical, Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, institutionalist, and behaviouralist, to name only the most significant. These schools of economics – or different approaches to economics – had (and still have) distinct visions in the sense that they had conflicting moral values and political positions, while understanding the way the economy works in divergent ways. I explain the competing methods of economists in my book Economics: The User’s Guide (2014), in a chapter called ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom – How to “Do” Economics’.

Not only did the different methods coexist but they interacted with each other. Sometimes, the competing schools of economics clashed in a ‘death match’ – the Austrians vs the Marxists in the 1920s and ’30s, or the Keynesians vs the neoclassicals in the 1960s and ’70s. At other times, the interactions were more benign. Through debates and policy experiments tried by different governments around the world, each school was forced to hone its arguments. Different schools borrowed ideas from each other (often without proper acknowledgement). Some economists even tried the fusion of different theories – for example, some economists fused the Keynesian and the Marxist theories and created ‘post-Keynesian’ economics. (...)

Since the 1980s, however, economics has become the British food scene before the 1990s. One tradition – neoclassical economics – is the only item on the menu. Like all other schools, it has its strengths; it also has serious limitations. This ascent of the neoclassical school is a complex story, which can’t be adequately considered here.

If told, the story would have many ingredients. Academic factors – like the merits and demerits of different schools, and the increasing dominance of mathematics as a research tool (which advanced knowledge of particular kind while suppressing others) – have mattered, of course. However, the ascent has also been critically shaped by power politics – both within the economics profession and in the outside world. ... In terms of power politics beyond the profession, the neoclassical school’s inherent reticence to question the distribution of income, wealth and power underlying any existing socioeconomic order has made it more palatable to the ruling elite. The globalisation of education during the post-Second World War era, in which the disproportionate ‘soft’ cultural power of the United States has been the biggest influence, has played a crucial role in spreading neoclassical economics, which had become dominant in the US first (in the 1960s).

But, whatever the causes, neoclassical economics is today so dominant in most countries (Japan and Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Italy and Turkey are exceptions) that the term ‘economics’ has – for many – become synonymous with ‘neoclassical economics’. This intellectual ‘monocropping’ has narrowed the intellectual gene pool of the subject. (...)

Some readers may legitimately ask: why should I care if a bunch of academics become narrow-minded and engage in intellectual monocropping? However, you should all care, because, like it or not, economics has become the language of power. You cannot change the world without understanding it. In fact, I think that, in a capitalist economy, democracy cannot function effectively without all citizens understanding at least some economics. These days, with the dominance of market-oriented economics, even decisions about non-economic issues (such as health, education, literature or the arts) are dominated by economic logic. I have even met some British people who are trying to justify the monarchy in terms of the tourist revenue it allegedly generates. I am not a monarchist, but how insulting is it for the institution to be defended in that kind of way?

When so many collective decisions are formulated and justified with the help of the dominant economic theory, you don’t really know what you are voting for or against, if you don’t understand at least some economics. (...)

We all know that economic theories affect government policies regarding taxes, welfare spending, interest rates and labour market regulations, which in turn affect our daily material lives by influencing our jobs, working conditions, wages and the repayment burdens on our mortgages or student loans. Economic theories also shape the long-term collective prospects of an economy by influencing policies that determine its abilities to engage in high-productivity industries, to innovate, and to develop in an environmentally sustainable way. But beyond even that: economics doesn’t just influence economic variables, whether personal or collective. It changes who we are.

Economics shapes us in two ways. First, it creates ideas: different economic theories assume different qualities to be at the essence of human nature, so the prevailing economic theory forms cultural norms about what people see as ‘natural’ and ‘human nature’. The dominance in the last few decades of neoclassical economics, which assumes that human beings are selfish, has normalised self-seeking behaviour. People who act in an altruistic way are derided as ‘suckers’ or are suspected of having some (selfish) ulterior motives. Were behaviouralist or institutionalist economic theories dominant, we would believe that human beings have complex motivations, of which self-seeking is only one of many; in these views, different designs of society can bring out varying motivations and even shape people’s motivations in diverse ways. In other words, economics affects what people see as normal, how people view each other, and what behaviour people exhibit to fit in.

Economics also influences who we are by affecting the way the economy develops and thus the way we live and work, which in turn shapes us. For example, different economic theories offer contrasting views on whether developing countries should promote industrialisation through public policy intervention. Different degrees of industrialisation, in turn, produce a variety of types of individuals. For example, compared with those who live in agrarian societies, people who live in more industrialised countries tend to be better at time-keeping, as their work – and consequently the rest of their lives – is organised according to the clock. Industrialisation also promotes trade union movements by amassing large numbers of workers in factories where they also need to cooperate much more closely with each other than in farms. These movements in turn create centre-Left political parties that push for more egalitarian policies, which may be weakened but do not disappear even when factories disappear, as has happened in most rich countries in the past few decades.

We can go further and assert that economics influences the kind of society we have. First, by shaping individuals differently, varying economic theories make societies of contrasting types. Thus, an economic theory that encourages industrialisation will lead to a society with more forces pushing for more egalitarian policies, as explained above. For another example, an economic theory that believes humans to be (almost) exclusively driven by self-interest will create a society where cooperation is more difficult. Second, different economic theories have different views on where the boundary of the ‘economic sphere’ should lie. So, if an economic theory recommends privatisation of what many consider to be essential services – healthcare, education, water, public transport, electricity and housing, for example – it is recommending that the market logic of ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ should be expanded against the democratic logic of ‘one-person-one-vote’. Finally, economic theories represent contrasting impacts on economic variables, such as inequality (of income or wealth) or economic rights (labour vs capital, consumer vs producer). Differences in these variables, in turn, influence how much conflict exists in society: greater income inequality or fewer labour rights generate not just more clashes between the powerful and those under them but also more conflicts among the less privileged, as they fight over the dwindling piece of pie available to them.

Understood like this, economics affects us in many more fundamental ways than when it is narrowly defined – income, jobs and pensions. That is why it is vital that every citizen needs to learn at least some economics. If we are to reform the economy for the benefit of the majority, make our democracy more effective, and make the world a better place to live for us and for the coming generations, we must ensure some basic economic literacy.

by Ha-Joon Chang, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty
[ed. Also, from the comments:]

"The effect of economics on politics is an important force which is mentioned in this piece. However, the effect of politics on economics is an idea which doesn’t seem to get much attention anywhere despite, as this article points out, the fact that neoliberalism has reached a point of largely unchallenged orthodoxy.

At least at one time, there was a saying that if you want to find the truth follow the money. Can it be entirely coincidental that neoliberalism, which inherently skews the distribution of wealth massively towards the wealthy, has reached ascendancy independant of political considerations?"

Barry: Awesome Chase Scene

Barry: this hitman comedy is one of the most overlooked and brilliant shows on TV (The Guardian)
[ed. Wow. An awesome chase scene that really takes it's time.]

This Planet Will Not Survive Capitalism

Alan MacLeod: This planet will not survive capitalism. (Twitter)

[ed. I'm waiting for zippered bananas.]

Ahmad Jamal

Ahmad Jamal, influential jazz pianist, dies aged 92 (The Guardian)

[ed. See also: Jazz Piano Innovator Ahmad Jamal Is Dead at Age 92 (Honest Broker).]

Hypebeast Culture: An Introduction

At its origins, hypebeast is a derogatory term. A hypebeast is a person who lives and breathes fashion and gets most expensive, most ‘hyped’ streetwear. If every culture has its geeks, then hypebeasts, are the geeks of streetwear. A hypebeast is someone who gets sucked in and absorbed with all the latest drops from streetwear brands - often paying big money to get hold of the latest gear.

The other defining feature of a hypebeast is that they love their brands – and most importantly the logo on their clothes - to be seen. The clothes produced by hypebeast-type brands are intentionally conspicuous. Based on streetwear styles, they invariably feature big, bold logos that make it more about the brand than the cut, the style, or anything else. It’s almost a case of if the logo isn’t seen, then what’s the point?

The hypebeast blog

The word hypebeast is also significant because it’s the name of an influential media site, which, at its origins, was all about hypebeast culture. In 2005, the underground blog known as HYPEBEAST was founded by Kevin Ma. At the time, it was difficult to find information about exclusive sneaker drops, so the site proved to be a useful resource for fashion-obsessed youth.

After attracting the attention of hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco, and eventually Kanye West (the site even got a mention in one of Kanye’s tracks) the once underground blog was propelled to international renown. In recent years, the blog - now a fully-fledged media site - has branched out from its origins to cover other aspects of fashion and culture. But it remains true to hypebeast culture, covering product drops from all the brands that hypebeasts rave about.

Hypebeast and status

Hypebeasts are primarily interested in the most expensive streetwear brands on the market. This means that hypebeast culture clearly carries an aspirational element. In theory, it symbolises self-made success, rising from humble origins on the streets. But for many, that narrative has long gone, and hypebeast fashion has just become a generic status symbol that’s lost much of its authenticity. It still clearly serves the function of a status symbol though & shows that the person who owns it can afford it.

It’s for this reason that streetwear, and hypebeast culture in particular, occupy a fascinating space in culture today. The roots of hypebeast culture come from streetwear. But what happens when a streetwear brand becomes a multinational brand? And what happens when a streetwear brand uses exclusivity to drive prices up? The answer is that a swathe of young men and women, looking to establish a sense of identity, and looking for symbols to affirm their place in the world, latch onto it.

There’s nothing wrong with status symbols, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with aspiration. But the most common critique you’ll hear of hypebeast culture is that hypebeasts are ultimately being mugged off by the brands they love so much. You might imagine that everyone understands that fashion brands are profit-driven enterprises. But hypebeasts seem to lack a certain level of awareness about their relationship to the brand. Looking at it one way, hypebeasts spend a lot of money to become walking billboards.

Hypebeast vs streetwear?

When you think about the origins of streetwear - which is about individuality and self-expression - the idea of today’s hypebeast culture can seem almost unrelated. How did we get here, and how will streetwear and hypebeast culture co-exist in the future?

It’s clear that streetwear means different things to different people. And the words ‘hypebeast’ and ‘streetwear’ don’t belong to anyone, so no one gets to define it. It may have come from the streets, but now it’s out there in the open, and in the global marketplace. That means it’s up for the taking for anyone who wants to have a say.

by Nautica |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

AI Policy Restrictions - Two Views

Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down.

What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

A place to start is with the frameworks policymakers have already put forward to govern A.I. The two major proposals, at least in the West, are the “Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights,” which the White House put forward in 2022, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which the European Commission proposed in 2021. Then, last week, China released its latest regulatory approach. (...)

[ed. Generally broad explanations of each follow...]

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Others will have different priorities and different views. And the good news is that new proposals are being released almost daily. The Future of Life Institute’s policy recommendations are strong, and I think the A.I. Objectives Institute’s focus on the human-run institutions that will design and own A.I. systems is critical. But one thing regulators shouldn’t fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry. For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down.

The Surprising Thing A.I. Engineers Will Tell You if You Let Them (by Ezra Klein, NY Times)

***

Our societal experience with self-driving technology reminds me of the saying, “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” It’s a saying that everybody should keep squarely in mind when thinking and forecasting about generative AI, as well. Even with a fundamental technological breakthrough, there always needs to be further (and unpredictable) innovation in the technology itself, complementary innovations, regulatory responses, and efficient business adoption. And while many of these things seem to be happening at warp speed right now with GenAI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT, history suggests the process will take far longer than all the breathless tweeting currently indicates. (...)

The bottleneck is not the technology – though faster advances certainly wouldn’t hurt – but rather a lack of complementary process innovation, workforce reskilling and business dynamism. Simply plugging in new technologies without changing business organization and workforce skills is like paving the cow paths. It leaves the real benefits largely untapped. However, by making complementary investments, we can speed up productivity growth.

Almost certainly new regulations will be part of that process, as the recent calls for a pause in training large language models suggest. And as those calls show, there will be ideas both good and bad. To avoid creating a regulatory bottleneck, I urge policymakers to take a look at a new analysis by Adam Thierer of R Street, “Getting AI Innovation Culture Right.” Among things, Thierer argues that the U.S. should foster the development of AI, machine learning and robotics by following the policy vision that drove the digital revolution.

It’s a policy vision based on the President Bill Clinton-era Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which contained five key principles: (1) private sector leadership and market-driven innovation, (2) minimal government regulation and intervention, (3) a predictable, minimalist, consistent and simple legal environment for commerce, (4) recognition of the unique qualities and decentralized nature of the Internet, and (5) facilitation of global electronic commerce and consistent legal framework. These principles can guide technology policy today. just as effectively as they did back then.

As policymakers consider governance solutions for AI and computational systems, they should appreciate how a policy paradigm that stacks the deck against innovation by default will get significantly less innovation as a result. Innovation culture is a function of incentives, and policy incentives can influence technological progress both directly and indirectly. Over the last half century, “regulation has clobbered the learning curve” for many important technologies in the United States in a direct way, especially those in the nuclear, nanotech and advanced aviation sectors.106 Society has missed out on many important innovations because of endless foot-dragging or outright opposition to change from special interests, anti-innovation activists and over-zealous bureaucrats.

What self-driving cars should teach us about generative AI (by James Pethokoukis, Faster, Please!)

Image: Matt Edge for The New York Times

[ed. Personally, I lean more toward the former. If you're dealing with an existential threat, pace of business innovation should probably take a back seat.] 

Can Conservatism Be More Than a Grudge?

Since the end of the Cold War—and Ronald Reagan’s presidency—Republicans have won only one of eight presidential popular votes (George W. Bush’s narrow win in 2004). Republican candidates of course won two additional electoral college victories during this period: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. On the whole, however, it is increasingly doubtful whether the GOP as presently constructed is capable of winning a national popular vote, or if it is even trying to do so. Today, the party essentially has no positive policy agenda, garners little support among America’s leading corporations in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street and is almost completely marginalized from academia, Hollywood, and mainstream media.

Despite these obstacles, both of Donald Trump’s campaigns revealed possible paths back to national majorities. In 2016, Trump broke the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest. In 2020, he made significant inroads among nonwhite working-class voters, demonstrating that any “demographic destiny” predictions may be less certain than previously thought. Nevertheless, the Trump administration was too chaotic and incoherent to consolidate any larger “populist” realignment. Instead, the violent denouement of the Trump presidency further deepened an already growing divide between the Republican base and party elites: at this point it is almost impossible for Republican politicians to appeal to the party’s “populist” wing—now defined largely around Trump’s scandals—without alienating the GOP’s (ever fewer) “respectable” donors and business constituencies, and vice versa. Under these circumstances, even when Republicans can win at the national level, it is very difficult for them to pursue any substantive agenda.

These problems are not merely issues of “communication,” the perennial response of DC consultants. Nor are they simply matters of ideology or even policy. At bottom, the Republican Party faces what might be called a crisis of constituency: the party in its current form cannot serve the constituencies it has, much less those it would need to assemble an electoral majority. (...)

Why, then, does it not change, or simply disappear?

Ideology certainly plays a role—the party’s embrace of libertarian economics severely constrains its ability to use policy to advance real interests, whether partisan or national—but it is hardly a sufficient explanation. Historically, the ideological commitments of American political parties have been relatively flexible. A party that genuinely sought electoral dominance would adapt its ideology accordingly. So why haven’t Republican politicians abandoned Reagan-Bush conservatism (as Trump haltingly and inconsistently began to do in 2016), especially now that it lacks any meaningful popular, intellectual, or economic base?

The best answer, in my view, is that the Republican Party’s remaining connection to the dominant sectors of the American economy occurs through its usefulness as a tool to selectively balance and discipline the members of the Democratic coalition. Big Pharma, for instance, will throw money at the Heritage Foundation to rant against “socialized medicine” whenever talk of the government negotiating drug prices surfaces, but pharma is hardly interested in repealing Obamacare, much less dismantling Medicare. Financial lobbies will rent the Republican Party to ward off troublesome regulations or taxes, but are hardly interested in “sound money” policies or big spending cuts that would derail financial markets, never mind social conservatism. Big Tech will team up with Americans for Prosperity to oppose legislation limiting app store developer fees, all while more aggressively controlling conservative speech online, and so on.

Again, the point is not that the Democratic coalition is perfectly consistent or that its donors are perfectly sincere; they are not. But the relationship between America’s most powerful industries and the Democratic Party is different from their relationship with the Republican Party. These sectors look to the Democrats to positively promote their interests and to the Republicans merely to obstruct any developments adverse to their interests. In other words, the Republican Party’s primary—or even sole—value to “capital” at present lies not in any positive agenda but in the ability to constrain other members of the Democratic coalition. In this respect, the only plausible role for today’s Republican Party is as an obstructionist party. And its obstructionist conservatism—whether in its “principled” libertarian or reflexive “own the libs” shades—is a perfectly serviceable ideology for this role, perhaps the only serviceable one. For that reason, it is hard to see it going away, even if it abandons any pretense of building a majority constituency.

by Julius Krein, Kennedy School Review | Read more:

Image: Unsplash – Birmingham Museums Trust
[ed. Referenced from the Ross Douthat essay below.]

Why the Left and the Right Hate Kenneth Griffin’s Huge Gift to Harvard

The news that Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire, is donating a cool $300 million to Harvard University, where his name will adorn the entire Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, provoked the kind of pan-ideological revulsion that in our polarized times only the richest Ivy League schools still reliably inspire.

From the left came disgust not only at the wastefulness of the gift itself, so much money given to a hedge fund — sorry, hallowed seat of higher learning — with over $50 billion in resources already, but also at Harvard’s willingness to honor Griffin in particular. In addition to being an alumnus, class of 1989, he’s also a notable donor to the Republican Party, and lately to Ron DeSantis. To fulsomely praise a Republican-leaning plutocrat for his philanthropy and even affix his name to your institution, the civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis tweeted, exposes the Ivy League’s pretensions to high-minded social concern as “a cruel charade for laundering generational wealth.”

From the right came the same disgust but in reverse, at the giver’s ideological betrayal rather than the school’s hypocrisy. Here was a Republican donor, with every cause in the world to choose from, giving an absolute fortune to, of all places, Harvard — the Kremlin on the Charles, the fons et origo of so many liberal follies, the central shrine in the academic-progressive cathedral. At best, you could describe Griffin as a sucker, a more extreme version of the many right-leaning donors who gripe about wokeness at their alma maters but keep on writing checks out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. At worst, his donation just shows that the right’s leading donors aren’t conservatives at all, that the party is ruled by big money that’s functionally liberal on every issue except the marginal tax rate.

Since I wrote a newsletter a few months back defending “ineffective altruism,” meaning the virtues of giving to eccentric and personal causes without careful cost-benefit analysis, I briefly looked for something to defend in Griffin’s gift. Maybe his donation would smooth the way for some personal passion project, endowing chairs in obscure economic subfields or setting up a center to study esoteric languages. Maybe he wanted Harvard to establish an intramural Calvinball association or build a Theosophist chapel in the Yard.

Alas, no: The gift basically funds Harvard qua Harvard, carrying coals to the Newcastle that is the school’s almost bottomless endowment, which even by ineffective-altruist standards seems indefensibly useless and pathetic. Even if Griffin’s interests were ruthlessly amoral and familial — all-but-guaranteed admission for all his descendants, say — the price was ridiculously inflated: The Harvard brand and network might be worth something to younger Griffins and Griffins yet unborn, but not at that absurd price. And if he’s seeking simple self-aggrandizement, he won’t gain it, since nobody except the chatbot in charge of generating official Harvard emails will ever refer to the “Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.” (At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument along the Charles, Ken!)

The sheer unimaginativeness makes Griffin’s gift a useful case study in one important ingredient in our society’s decadence: the absence of ambition or inventiveness among of our insanely wealthy overclass when it comes to institution building. There was a time when American plutocrats actually founded new institutions instead of just pouring money into old ones that don’t need the cash. And for the tycoon who admires that old ambition but thinks playing Leland Stanford is too arduous these days, there are plenty of existing schools that could be revived and reconfigured, made competitive and maybe great, with the money that now flows thoughtlessly into the biggest endowments. (...)

As for the ideological critiques of Griffin’s gift, they both capture key dilemmas facing our political coalitions. For the left, to imply that Harvard is functionally right-wing because it takes money from Republicans is wildly overstating things, but the truer observation is that progressivism’s self-image as a champion of the underdog is in deep tension with progressivism’s entrenchment as the official ideology of the highly educated upper classes, and Griffin’s largess is a condensed symbol of that tension.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alain Pilon

Steven Yeun’s New Frontier

I first met Steven Yeun in New York, where I live, in 2018 on assignment for GQ. Over Scarr's pizza we had an oddly life-affirming conversation about everything from growing up in our respective churches to evolving ideas of masculinity to Jeremy Lin's run with the Knicks. It was…strange! I left in such a daze that I got lost walking back to the office. Part of what made that conversation so comfortable was the fact that we were both Asian guys around the same age. (I'm Filipino.) Still, it's rare to talk to a stranger and find yourself so easily locked onto the same frequency. “It feels cool to talk to you, and dangerous,” Yeun said this time around, laughing. “We can share so much perspective, so I just puke.”

Over a series of long Zoom calls this winter, Yeun was candid and philosophical, the kind of talker whose thoughts balloon into long, floaty paragraphs stippled with the occasional “duuuude.” Earlier in his career, he had flittier, eager-to-please energy, but these days he's mellowed out; his speaking cadence has an almost melatonin effect. If this once-in-a-generation-actor thing doesn't work out, he'd make a great hostage negotiator.

“He thinks about things deeply,” Boots Riley told me when describing his own long conversations with the actor. He cast Yeun in Sorry to Bother You after the two shared a languid night out at a restaurant. Some weed was smoked, and a friendship blossomed from there. “If I'm going to call him on the phone, I have to have a few hours set aside,” Riley added, “because we're going to run the gamut of everything in existence that needs to be talked about.”

In the two-plus years since I'd last spoken with Yeun, a lot had changed—namely, it's boom times for Asian American film and television. You have rich and tasteless Asians with six-packs on reality TV (Bling Empire). You have hyper-violent Chinatown wars, where the gangsters also have six-packs (Warrior). And you have artful indie films such as Lulu Wang's 2019 feature, The Farewell, for which Awkwafina (six-pack unconfirmed) became the first Asian American to win a Golden Globe for best actress. Not everything being produced right now is “good” necessarily, which is in itself good. That's how this should work. Representation, practically speaking, requires some latitude to suck.

Few people have thought about their place in all of this with as much care and attention as Yeun, even as he acknowledges that when it comes to the topic of authenticity, conversations can quickly become circular. “It's like you get tricked into representing your entire culture, and then the game becomes policing your authenticity to each other,” he said. “But how can you be authentic? What's actually authentic to you is just being this middle person—Korean and American. This third culture.”

by Chris Gayomali, GQ | Read more:
Image: Diana Markosian

[ed. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much from the new Netflix series 'Beef" based on what little I'd heard about its plot: a road rage "revenge tragedy" with confrontational, near psychopathic characters. But it's actually pretty great. The acting is terrific, especially Ali Wong and Steven Yeun. Below: the church scene in the second episode (followed by Yeun singing Drive). See also: Beef is the best show Netflix has had in recent memory (Vox):]

"What makes Beef so anxiety-inducing and so gripping is that it fully explores what it means to hurt someone. Sure, Amy and Danny could resort to violence and physically harm the other, but that’s almost too simple. They want more.

As they learn more about each other, they both realize they can do the most hurt by taking aim at the people the other person loves most. And as the show unfurls, there’s an increasing, heart-in-your-stomach fear that Danny will go after June or George or that Amy may retaliate by hurting Paul or Danny’s parents — innocent people who have no part in this feud.

The more Amy and Danny ramp up their feud, the more vulnerable their family members become. Amy and Danny inadvertently distance themselves from their loved ones, in an effort to keep their escalating war a secret. And insidiously, Amy and Paul become more entrenched in each other’s lives. (Vox)]

Elon Musk founds new AI company called X.AI

Elon Musk has created a new company dedicated to artificial intelligence — and it’s called X.AI, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company, which a Nevada filing indicates was incorporated last month, currently has Musk as its director and Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, listed as its secretary. The filing, which The Verge has also obtained, indicates that Musk incorporated the business on March 9th, 2023.

Rumors about Musk starting up an AI company have been floating around for days, with a report from Business Insider revealing that Musk had purchased thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs) to power an upcoming generative AI product. The Financial Times similarly reported that Musk planned to create an AI firm to compete with the Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Musk even reportedly sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla investors to get the company started.

During an interview on Twitter Spaces, when Musk was asked about all the GPUs he purchased, the billionaire made no mention of his plans to build an AI company, stating “it seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point.” The purported X.AI name matches the branding of the X Corp. name he has since assigned to Twitter, along with the “X” label he’s applied to his vision of an “everything app.”

by Jay Peters and Emma Roth, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Lille Allen/The Verge
[ed. Great, just the kind of guy you'd like having his own AI (which, means what?). I blame Google and Microsoft for making this a race. See also: OpenAI’s CEO confirms the company isn’t training GPT-5 and ‘won’t for some time’ (The Verge).]

Solar Canals

... it goes without saying that water conservation will continue to be a central issue in the Golden State for years to come.

A new state-funded project in the San Joaquin Valley hopes to find a new way to build drought resilience. The idea is simple: Cover the state’s canals and aqueducts with solar panels to both limit evaporation and generate renewable energy.

“If you drive up and down the state, you see a lot of open canals. And after year after year of drought it seemed an obvious question: How much are we losing to evaporation?” said Jordan Harris, co-founder and chief executive of Solar AquaGrid, a company based in the Bay Area that’s designing and overseeing the initiative. “It’s just common sense in our eyes.”

The California Department of Water Resources is providing $20 million to test the concept in Stanislaus County and to help determine where else along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals — one of the largest water conveyance systems in the world — it would make the most sense to install solar panels. The project is a collaboration between the state, Solar AquaGrid, the Turlock Irrigation District and researchers with the University of California, Merced, who will track and analyze the findings.

“This hasn’t been tried in the U.S. before,” said Roger Bales, an engineering professor at U.C. Merced who specializes in water and climate research. “We want these to eventually be scaled across the western U.S., where we have a lot of irrigated agriculture and open canals.”

California’s efforts got a jump start from a 2021 study published by Bales and his colleagues, who determined that covering the state’s canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation by as much as 90 percent and save 63 billion gallons of water per year — enough to meet the residential water needs of more than two million people.

The team identified other possible upsides: The installations could generate large amounts of energy; reduce algae growth and the need for maintenance by limiting sunlight falling on the water; enhance the functioning of the solar panels by allowing them to stay cool near the water; and improve air quality by creating an energy source that would limit the need for diesel-powered irrigation pumps.

The sheer number of benefits documented in the study eased hesitations about the idea and “kind of changed our thinking,” said Josh Weimer, spokesman for the Turlock Irrigation District, which volunteered its 250 miles of canals in Stanislaus County for the pilot. Another benefit for the district, which is also a power provider, is that it doesn’t need to buy new, costly tracts of land to install solar panels since the canals are already its property.

by Soumya Karlamangla, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Solar AquaGrid
[ed. Sounds like a no-brainer, unless they end up installing fencing which would disrupt animal movements.]

Linda Ronstadt

[ed. Got sidetracked this morning on a Glenn Frey interview (shortly before he died), which led to a speech he gave inducting Linda into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was so good. See also: Rare Linda Ronstadt 1970s interview talks about The Eagles (YT).]

Eagles

[ed. For .. someone. Her favorite song once...]