How I Stopped Hating Steely Dan

[ed. The author, not me. I've always loved them.]

This is my story.

Back in those days, I thought Steely Dan music was too slick. It was too polished and radio-friendly, with no rough edges. And that meant (or so I thought back then) that it must be shallow and contrived. (...)

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the purveyors of this absolutely perfect studio sound, didn’t set their instruments on fire or trash their hotel rooms. They didn’t hang out with genuine Indian gurus who were teaching them a better way. They didn’t jam on the rooftop until the cops shut them down.

Instead, they were the kind of people who pave paradise and put up a parking lot. (...)

Sure, I couldn’t deny the skills of these ace session players. But sometimes I felt their versatility worked against them. I craved music with more prickly individualism—that’s probably why I gravitated towards jazz.

My attitude is much different nowadays.

I’ve seen such a decline in musicianship on commercial recordings over the years—even worse, the actual disappearance of real flesh-and-blood musicians. They’ve been displaced by loops, samples, and various pieces of hardware and software. And now the AI robots are coming. So, from the standpoint of the current moment, the idea of a recording studio packed with skilled professionals seems like a lost golden age of the distant past.

But that was all in the future back then. So I resisted the Dan during its glory years. It was slickly produced pop music. I had higher concerns.

In truth, I really didn’t know the band’s music very well. I didn’t own any Steely Dan albums—I only heard the stuff on the radio. On the other hand, their music was always on the radio. So I thought I had a pretty good handle on it.

Sure, I couldn’t deny that this stuff was catchy. But I had reservations:

• The guitar solo on “Reelin’ in the Years” (by session player Elliott Randall) did earn my begrudging respect. But this same guitarist played on TV commercials for Pepsi and Burger King, so I still couldn’t really trust him.
• The intro to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” at first annoyed me with its mindless rip-off of a riff from Horace Silver—but when I learned that Victor Feldman (formerly with Miles Davis) was on the track, I realized this was more of a homage or inside joke.
• I laughed at the lyrics to “My Old School” with those outrageous rhymes—California with tried to warn ya. I had to admit that this was the kind of thing I would try to do myself if I was writing commercial songs. Even so, it was a tune about school. C’mon.

These were just the radio hits, but they were all I knew about this band.

I still resisted the notion of buying an entire album of this music. The very idea of walking up to the counter of Tower Records with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in one hand and Can’t Buy Me a Thrill in the other was more than I could conceive.

But sometimes a lesser known Dan song found its way on to the radio—usually on one of those FM stations that played deep tracks. (I love that phrase—why did we ever stop using it?) These deep tracks contained surprises, musical twists that I wouldn’t expect from a pop band.

Frankly I was dumbfounded when I heard Steely Dan’s recording of “East St Louis Toodle-Oo”—a Duke Ellington hit from 1927. Walter Becker somehow imitated Bubber Miley’s distinctive plunger mute trumpet solo from the original recording, using only his voice and a plugged-in talk box.

Now that was a radical departure from the slick pop aesthetic I associated with those studio rats.

But the track that really stirred my enthusiasm was a fairly obscure number (another deep track) that closed side one of Steely Dan’s 1975 album Katy Lied. I don’t even recall how I stumbled upon this song, entitled “Dr. Wu.” I must have heard it on the radio, like the others. But this definitely wasn’t hit single material.

 

 The lyrics of “Dr. Wu” were absolutely bonkers. It’s a story song, but the narrative is incomprehensible.

You meet Katy—for whom the entire album is named—in the opening line. But then she disappears, except for a brief appearance later, when we’re told that “Katy lies.”

And that’s it. That everything we know about Katy, and it ain’t much.

Katy tried
I was halfway crucified
I was on the other side
Of no tomorrow.

Frankly, I didn’t know you could use the word ‘crucified’ on AM radio. Except maybe on KLAC (570 on your dial), where Oral Roberts had his Sunday show. You certainly didn’t rhyme it with “lied,” “tried,” and “side” in a pop song.

Then an even more mysterious personage enters the tune—Dr. Wu. That’s another unexpected rhyme. Dr. Wu might just be an ordinary guy, but his presence serves as the centerpiece of the unfolding drama. At least for a time—because the scene soon shifts to Biscayne Bay, “where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day.” (Where do they find these rhymes?).

Hearing this song was like getting a movie script with most of the scenes missing. But the forward momentum is insistent—how could it not be with Jeff Porcaro and Chuck Rainey in the rhythm section? So the music conveys a sense of narrative coherence that the lyrics can only hint at.

But the real kicker here was an unexpected alto sax solo—and from Phil Woods, of all people. Woods was a jazz heavyweight, and especially in those days. He’d even married Charlie Parker’s widow Chan and played Bird’s own horn.

In short, he was a genuine jazz star, not a studio musician. But somehow he went from Chan at home to Dan in the studio that day, and channeled his serious bebop chops into “Dr. Wu.”

I listened to that track over and over.

These things put a dent into my Dan-o-phobia. But it was just the start.

Finally, when Wayne Shorter appeared on a Steely Dan track, I waved the white flag. Fagen and Becker were no longer studio rats but major dudes with street cred.

It helped that Shorter delivered a blistering solo that is the total antithesis of the AM radio ethos I had assigned this band. The same is true of Steve Gadd’s drumming on this same deep track (“Aja”) which deliberately undermines the ultra-controlled dance grooves I had long associated with Steely Dan. Add to this the extreme length of the track—eight full minutes—and you could only assume that Fagen and Becker were playing slash-and-burn games with their radio-friendly image. (...)

But the larger truth was that Steely Dan now had a new image, at least in my mind. I now started describing what they did as jazz-inflected art pop. And I was increasingly aware of an edgy quality, especially in the lyrics. In fact, the words to the songs now struck me as deliberately designed to mock the conventional pop aesthetic. (...)

So, in a strange sort of way, Steely Dan ended up representing the exact opposite of what I initially thought—it challenged pop banality, resisting pre-packaged sentimentality and conventionality. The fact that the band did all this while generating top 40 airplay just made that fact all the more impressive. Fagen and Becker were like a resistance force operating behind enemy lines. 

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: Marc Meyers/YouTube

[ed. I'll give Ted a pass on this one. Do a search on this site for many other tracks from SD, like these: here and here (and buy Citizen, a great retrospective). Not only were they exceptional musicians - employing more exceptional musicians - but great lyricists, too. See also: Steely Dan’s “Aja”: Eight Minutes of Genius; and, Looking for the Ultimate Steely Dan Expert? We Found Him! (Culture Sonar).]

How to Think About the Drug Crisis

Almost nobody is taking America's drug crisis seriously. To be sure, the ever-mounting deaths attract headlines. They get a mention in the State of the Union, or on the campaign trail. But based on the outcomes, policymakers appear to have more or less given up.

Some numbers put the problem in perspective. After Covid-19, drugs are now the leading driver of America's steadily declining life expectancy. A reported 111,219 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2021. That figure has risen more or less unabated, and at an increasing pace, since the early 1990s. Back in 2011, 43,544 Americans died from a drug overdose — less than half the 2021 figure. Ten years earlier, in 2001, it was 21,705 — less than half as many again. And the problem keeps getting worse: The 2021 figure is nearly 50% higher than it was in 2019.

Compared to the scale of the problem, our ambitions to meet it are meager. In its 2022 National Drug Control Strategy, the Biden administration set a goal of reducing overdose deaths by 13% over the next two years. That would still mean 83,000 overdose deaths annually — higher than any year before 2020. Thus far, the trajectory is not positive: The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that there were roughly 110,000 overdose deaths in the year ending December 2022 — essentially unchanged from a year earlier.

Of course, President Biden is not uniquely to blame. Overdose deaths rose through the Obama and Trump administrations; the seeds of the crisis were planted as far back as Bill Clinton's first term. The failure has been ongoing and systematic. It is in part a failure of know-how: Over a century into drug control, we still have only limited ideas about how to abate the harms of drugs. It is also a failure of knowledge. One can easily find out how many people died of Covid-19 last week, but we still have only estimates of how many people died of drug overdoses last year. And of course, it is in part a failure of political will.

But in crucial respects what we face is a failure of understanding. What many people — policymakers and the general public alike — fail to grasp is that today's crisis is not like crises past. Historically, drug crises were characterized by the (re)emergence of a drug, followed by the spread of addiction and its attendant ills. The problems they caused affected individual and social health — physical illness, social dysfunction, frayed relationships, public disorder, etc. While these still play a role, today's crisis is predominantly characterized by an unprecedented increase in the drug supply's lethality. Historical crises inflicted many more or less equally weighty harms — to users' health, to families, to communities. In this crisis, one problem dwarfs all others: death.

Drugs have changed, probably for good. They now kill their users. Until policymakers internalize this fact, they will not make any progress. A haphazard approach was tolerable when the harms of drug use took time to accumulate. But with tens of thousands being poisoned to death every year, bolder action is required.

THE NEW DRUGS

Humans have long used drugs, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others. But drug crises — society-scale problems caused by drugs — are a relatively recent phenomenon. (...)

In the mid-1990s, something changed. Death rates began rising, slowly but exponentially. Between 1990 and 2000, the overdose death rate doubled, from 2.6 per 100,000 to 5.3 per 100,000. The decade between 2000 and 2010 saw another doubling. From 2010 to 2020, the rate tripled, to 29.2 per 100,000 — 10 times the rate in the 1980s, and 30 times the lows of the postwar period.

Drug overdose is now the leading cause of non-medical death in the United States. As of 2021, it was only slightly less deadly than all homicides, suicides, and motor-vehicle fatalities combined. Drugs still cause addiction, of course, and addiction still hurts addicts and society. But, likely for the first time ever, the primary harm of today's drug crisis is death.

DRUG INNOVATION AND DEATH

At the most abstract level, two changes explain this increase. The first is that the number of people using drugs has risen somewhat. The second is that the death risk of drug use has increased exponentially.

The story of the first change is relatively well known. As the American Enterprise Institute's Sally Satel has documented in these pages, in the early 1990s, physicians began prescribing more opioid painkillers at much higher doses. Many people became addicted, either to something they were prescribed or to pills diverted from the expanded legal supply. The growth of the drug-using population — and therefore the overdose risk — surely explains some of the increase in overdose deaths.

But a growing number of users cannot fully explain that increase. Estimates from the RAND Corporation indicate that between 2006 and 2016, the number of chronic heroin and methamphetamine users rose about 40%, while the number of chronic cocaine users fell 40%. In the same period, cocaine-involved deaths rose 30%, meth-involved deaths rose 380%, and heroin-involved deaths rose a staggering 617%. There are not just more people using drugs; drugs are killing more people. (...)

DEATH IS DIFFERENT

The emergence of synthetics has altered the balance of the harms associated with drug use. While addiction is still an issue, death now constitutes a far larger share of the problem. This has significant implications for the mitigation strategies the situation demands. (...)

Death is different. The risk of overdose death is not uncorrelated from history of use; both tolerance and probability of more aggressive use rise with time. But that risk exists in any use session. Death is an all-or-nothing proposition: Either this dose kills you, or it doesn't. Whereas historically, most of addiction's harms were concentrated among the population of the most serious users, a more deadly drug supply means that the risk that any given use session results in death is much higher.

In decades past, educators illustrating the harms of drug use usually described a life course: Someone tries a drug and gets hooked; he uses compulsively, burning through money and friends; and eventually he hits "rock bottom" or, in some cases, dies. Today, these events can all still happen. But the risk of death is also much, much higher, and can occur at any point along the life course of drug use. (...)

DEALING WITH DEATH

Given that today's drug crisis is fundamentally different from drug crises past, different policy measures are required to address it. Some dramatic shift is needed along at least some margin. But where should policymakers concentrate their attention and resources?

One increasingly common answer is "harm reduction," the umbrella term for interventions meant to reduce the harms associated with drug use short of encouraging cessation. Harm-reduction programs — distributing naloxone, operating needle exchanges, or setting up safe consumption sites (SCSs) where people can use under supervision — are gaining increased traction as a solution to the rise in deaths. Major urban areas from New York City to San Francisco are investigating or embracing harm reduction; the Biden administration has handed out tens of millions of dollars in harm-reduction grants.

Proponents argue that harm-reduction strategies are particularly well suited to the current crisis. The drug supply is toxic, they argue, so policymakers should prioritize reducing its toxicity over controlling its use. Opponents of harm reduction, meanwhile, often frame their objections in moral terms — we shouldn't facilitate drug use and addiction, even toward some instrumental end. But the "death is different" view provides another critique: Harm-reduction strategies are a poor fit for the current crisis because they address the safety of individual use sessions rather than trying to discourage people from using altogether. Such approaches may help to address accumulating harms, but they are not well suited to a risk that obtains across all use sessions and for which a single failure results in death. (...)

PROBLEM USERS

A rule of thumb is that for any addictive substance — legal or illegal — consumption is power-law distributed. That is, 20% (or less) of the users consume 80% (or more) of the substance. The former are also the users among whom problems are most common, including most likely deaths. For this population — those who not only use, but are seriously, actively addicted — the best tool available is treatment. A proportional policy response to these individuals' needs must focus on offering — and compelling — treatment like never before.

How many Americans need treatment? As of 2020, survey data suggest that roughly 18 million Americans had in the past year suffered from an illicit drug-use disorder, including 4.2 million whose disorder involved a drug other than marijuana. Just 2.6 million people, however, reported actually receiving treatment that year, including 800,000 who received medication-assisted treatment (MAT). The survey from which those estimates come, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), likely underestimates the true prevalence of abuse: One study that attempted to account for insufficiencies in the NSDUH found that more than 7.6 million Americans suffered from an opioid-use disorder, while only about 1 million were receiving MAT.

by Charles Fain Lehman, National Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/US Congress/CDC

[ed. Pretty good summary until things go off the rails near the end. Whenever someone is forced to do something 'for their own good' (as in involuntary civil commitment), is when they lose me.]

Public Service Announcement - Missing Money!

[ed. Public service announcement. I recently received a notice from Schwab about my checking account, which I keep as a backup for my primary bank checking account, and for purchases of various investment products. Here's what it said: 

"PLEASE CONTACT US OR FUNDS IN YOUR INACTIVE ACCOUNT WILL BE TRANSFERRED.

We're writing about the Schwab Bank account noted above, which has been inactive since 1/9/2020. Unless we hear from you, we're required by Washington law to transfer the funds in the account to the State."

I'd never heard of this law before and was quite alarmed that because I hadn't used this account for a period of just three years, all funds could be transferred to the state (in this case, Washington state, where I live). After contacting Schwab and making sure they definitely would not give my money to anyone else, I asked for more information about this national program, which is apparently administered by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (a network of national state treasurers). Here's a short description from their website, which can be found at: unclaimed.org]:

"Unclaimed property means property held by an organization who has not had contact with the owner for an extended period of time. Property is usually considered unclaimed after three years, when it is turned over to the state of Washington. Banks, retailers, credit unions, utilities, corporations, insurance companies, and governmental entities are some of the many sources of unclaimed property.

The Department of Revenue is the custodian for unclaimed property, and administers an unclaimed property program to find the rightful owners.

Unclaimed property includes:

• Bank accounts.
• Insurance proceeds.
• Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
• Safe deposit box contents.
• Utility and phone company deposits.
• Uncashed checks, such as payroll, insurance payments, or travelers checks.
• Customer/patient credits.

Unclaimed property does not include real estate, vehicles, and most other physical property.

The state's role

Unclaimed property laws began in the United States as a consumer protection program and they have evolved to protect not only the owners, but their heirs and estates as well.

The Department of Revenue administers Washington’s unclaimed property program as a free public service. More than $1 billion in unclaimed property has been turned over to the Department of Revenue since 1955. In fiscal year 2020, the department’s Unclaimed Property Section received property worth more than $185 million. The department returned $74 million of the unclaimed property received to its rightful owners."

[ed. I'd suggest anyone with interest in this topic go to the unclaimed.org website, select your state and do a search on your name just to make sure you don't have any funds that were inadvertently confiscated because you hadn't used an account for a few years or weren't paying attention. I understand this may be necessary for situations where, for example, families havent gone through probate and a deceased member might have ghost accounts scattered in various places, but otherwise... Sheesh!] 

There’s No Ocean in Sight. But Many Hawaiians Make Las Vegas Their Home.

When Pauline Kauinani Souza was a child in Hawaii, she spent early mornings watering her grandfather’s watermelons and papaya trees.

Her family lived frugally, eating homemade bread and heating water over a fire for bathing. But the no-frills life came with the ultimate perk: living near the beach and drifting off to sleep at night to the sound of waves gently crashing on the shore.

Now, at 80, Ms. Souza lives in Las Vegas, a desert city of neon reinvention far from the ocean and her ancestral home. It is not paradise, but it is full of Native Hawaiians like her who have flocked there in recent years for the endless entertainment, reasonable cost of living and something few people can find in Hawaii: a house they can afford.

“I own it outright,” she said proudly of her two-bedroom, ranch-style home in Las Vegas. “In Hawaii, there aren’t many people who can say that.”

Increasingly, Las Vegas is drawing Hawaiians who came to visit and decided to stay, convinced that an affordable faux version of the islands is better than an endless struggle to make ends meet in the real thing.

Between 2011 and 2021, the population of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, grew by about 40 percent, for a total of nearly 22,000 people. That was the greatest number of newcomers in that demographic in any county outside Hawaii, according to population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. In that same period, the total population of Clark County grew by about 17 percent.

For many, the draw is real estate: Houses in the Las Vegas area have a median listing price of about $460,000, compared with about $800,000 in Honolulu, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data. (...)

The connection between Hawaii and Las Vegas stretches back decades, in large part due to the California Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas. “The Cal,” which opened in 1975, has long catered to Hawaiians through special travel deals and targeted marketing. At the casino, dealers at the craps table wear Hawaiian shirts, guests dine on island specialties, and signs on the hotel’s facade proclaim: “Aloha Spoken Here.”

Today, a flourishing Hawaiian community is scattered throughout what is informally known as the Ninth Island. Parents in Las Vegas eager to raise their children with Hawaiian traditions can enroll them in Hawaiian language classes or get them dance lessons at a local halau hula. This month, lei makers in Las Vegas are racing to fill a deluge of orders for high school and college graduations.

In Las Vegas, Hawaiians in search of home cooking can take their pick of local restaurants serving plate lunch and fresh poke. Spam musubi, a popular Hawaiian snack of rice and Spam wrapped in seaweed, and poi, a taro-based Hawaiian staple, are easy to find. Even Zippy’s, a popular Hawaiian restaurant chain, is poised to open a spot.

“What we’re doing is creating our own Hawaii,” said Cece Cullen, 38, a Native Hawaiian, at a lei festival this month at an office park in Henderson, a city just outside Las Vegas.

Ms. Cullen attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the early 2000s and later returned to Oahu. But life with a growing family was difficult. She and her husband, Nakoa Hoikaika Cullen, 37, worked multiple jobs and rented a modest 800-square-foot house. But their paychecks quickly disappeared.

“You get to the point where you’re like, is this it? Is this life?” she said.

In 2018, Ms. Cullen and her family moved back to Las Vegas. A few months into the pandemic, she and her husband bought a roughly 3,000-square-foot house on a quiet cul-de-sac. They are among the first in their family to be homeowners. And in Las Vegas, they live comfortably, raising four children.

Ms. Cullen, who teaches the Hawaiian language at local libraries, has made it a priority to keep her children connected to the islands’ culture.

“We got priced out of paradise,” she said. “But all these traditions, all our language, it’s part of our identity.”

In 2022, Hawaii had the highest cost of living out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. The state imports the vast majority of its food, making everyday groceries especially expensive. And strict regulations on building have contributed to housing shortages and prices out of reach for many. 

by Eliza Fawcett, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hana Asano

[ed. If you were born or raised in Hawaii the islands will always be home, no matter how long you've lived somewhere else. The Hawaiian diaspora place a high priority on their culture, and are frequently more traditional than locals, who take a lot of it for granted. See also: Will The Real Hawaii Please Stand Up; and, Native Hawaiians Debate A Question Of Identity (Honolulu Civil Beat.]

Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free - The Making of Wildflowers

[ed. Similar to The Beatles 'Get Back'. Great to see TP (and the Heartbreakers) in their prime.]

ER Doctor: “Private Equity in Medicine is Dangerous to Patients”

So stealthily you probably never noticed, private equity firms have transformed American health care over the last decade — and not for the better, critics say. These Wall Street players have their eye on medical practices and facilities as so many untapped sources of revenue.

Over the last decade, the private equity industry has been on a massive shopping spree, taking over toy stores, restaurant chains, clothing stores, you-name-it — and too often leaving the businesses a shadow of their former selves, even bankrupt. The pandemic only jet-fueled the momentum: 2022 was the biggest year in the industry’s history, followed by a record-breaking 2021. According to industry tracker PitchBook, in 2021 alone these firms invested $206 billion into over 1,400 health care acquisitions.

With private equity’s aggressive entry into medicine, this is no longer about squeezing profits from shoe stores. This is about human life.

Private equity companies make their money by acquiring ownership or majority stakes in businesses, taking over management in order to boost revenue and “efficiency,” then flipping them in a few years for huge profits. Over the last decade, industry players have been quietly snapping up medical specialties like dermatology, anesthesiology, and gastroenterology for their vast profit potential. Some of these financial firms end up dominating such services in a growing number of metropolitan areas. Consider, if you’re being put under by an anesthesiologist in Orlando, Florida, chances are that doctor is employed by a private equity-owned firm. (...)

Firms that much of the public has never heard of, with names like KKR, Shore Capital Partners, and TPG, have set their sights on a broad range of healthcare businesses, from orthopedic practices to hospices to addiction treatment centers. They’re gobbling up emergency rooms, ambulatory surgical centers, even entire hospitals. Physician owners of private medical practices find themselves wooed by sweet-sounding deals when private equity comes calling, and those worn out by the financial challenges of owning a practice, or reaching retirement age, or just plain greedy find them hard to resist.

Private equity firms argue that they bring value to health care through better management techniques and investment in newer technologies. But critics say their presence is nothing more than money-driven medicine on steroids, pointing out that the private equity business model is particularly ill-suited for health care, when human lives hang on the balance sheet. In order to squeeze greater profits from businesses, say the critics, private equity firms cut corners in dangerous ways, like reducing staff or replacing physicians with less qualified personnel.

Critics also charge that federal regulators are practically blind to what is happening. Because many state laws restrict the corporate practice of medicine, private equity firms have become clever in how they structure takeovers so that the firm does not acquire a practice or facility outright, but instead buys a majority interest, often flying below the radar of regulators.

The stakes are high, and studies on the impact of private equity on health care are far from comforting. Research published in the JAMA Health Forum shows that private equity acquisitions of medical practices result in more lengthy and costly care for patients as well as reduced access to services. A 2021 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that entering a nursing home owned by private equity increases your chances of dying by 10%.

Every day, the private equity takeover of medicine impacts more people – more doctors, nurses, and medical staff. More human beings who depend on them for health and life. One thing seems clear: private equity executives with MBAs may know little about medicine, but they are determined to profit from your body, cradle to grave – literally: they’re even getting into funeral homes.

So, is anybody fighting back? The answer is yes: increasingly, doctors themselves are challenging an industry they say has forced them to violate their ethics.

When the pandemic struck, Dr. Ming Lin was on the front lines as an emergency physician at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Washington. But when he spoke out about the need for Covid safety measures like masking, improving ventilation, and limiting visitors, he was fired from a position he had held for 17 years. TeamHealth, a corporation which contracts with hospitals to staff emergency rooms (and is owned by the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm), offered to find Lin a new position in another state, or lower-paid, part-time work, but Lin found these conditions unacceptable for him and his family. He initiated a lawsuit in 2020 for wrongful termination against PeaceHealth and TeamHealth. The case is still pending. (...)

Lynn Parramore: How did you become concerned about private equity in health care?

Ming Lin: I noticed the problem of private equity growing gradually over the last 10 to 15 years. It all started slowly. I’d say to myself, “Oh, we can’t admit this patient because the hospital says it’s not financially viable.” Or maybe we would be told to find a way to get rid of a patient.

In the past, doctors would have been making the decisions about who should and shouldn’t be admitted. But when a private equity company has a contract with the hospital, they will make the rules and you either follow them or you’ll be terminated. It forces doctors into a position where you have to tell the patient, well, sorry, your hospitalization may not be paid for, it may cost you a lot of money. I’ve seen that private equity and corporate-driven medicine is not just dangerous, it’s costly to patients who are confronted with things like surprise billing. Private equity-controlled practices are also known to sue patients. And if the hospital or practice you work for is under the control of a private equity company, you can’t speak out about these dilemmas. (...)

LP: Why did you go into medicine in the first place? Why did you want to become a doctor?

ML: I went into medicine because I enjoy helping people. I enjoy helping to solve their problems. I particularly liked emergency medicine because they treat everybody the same. When financial considerations come into the emergency room, it makes it very difficult for me to treat everybody the same.

LP: So you feel you’re being asked to go against your value system, your medical ethics?

ML: Yes, it’s a real moral dilemma for a lot of people, including myself. I’ve had to tell patients I feel should be admitted that their hospitalization may cost 10k as their insurance may not authorize their stay. Or I’ve been asked to let mentally unstable, suicidal patients leave because we were not authorized to detain them for a more thorough evaluation. Over the years I have had more and more patients tell me about the exorbitant bills they have received on visits to the emergency room – we’re talking several thousand dollars for the application of some glue to a half inch wound.

Disturbingly, this exorbitant billing was done unbeknown to me. Unlike hospitals and insurance companies, private equity companies can hide behind the physician and not absorb any of the outcry over such fraudulent profiteering.

LP: Would you say there is an atmosphere of fear among physicians who are afraid to speak out?

ML: Absolutely. There are so many physicians who are afraid to speak out. In many cases, when they do they feel they have to do so anonymously.

by Lynn Parramore, Naked Capitalism/Institute for New Economic Thinking  |  Read more:

Image: via:
[ed. See also: Private Equity is Out of Control and Looting America. This Prosecutor Says We Can Fix It. (INET); and, The Moral Crisis of America’s Doctors (NYT).]

Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1952–2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1952–2023 (The Baffler):

"I stepped into his catalog blind, selecting 1981’s Left Handed Dream probably for its cover: a close-up photograph of Sakamoto’s face in a loose, softly abstract application of full kabuki makeup. From the music itself, I expected the sounds of vintage Japanese pop with which I was vaguely familiar: sleek funk-flecked city pop, bombastic anime themes, and soapy teen idol hits. What I heard instead was a fractal slice of time, deeply psychedelic in its ability to warp the texture of lived experience. Here, traditional Japanese taiko was stretched and refracted into slow, simmering, primeval techno, but from a time before techno had a clear name or lexicon, before it called Detroit or Düsseldorf its home. Here, shards of new wave were crushed under marimba mallets and scattered into a steaming sea. There was sprawling, raw-edged sci-fi gagaku and—something I soon found to be a path through Sakamoto’s work—a prevailing sense of huge, mythical urgency that he was unafraid to use any and every tool available to communicate. And when those tools were insufficient, he invented new ones."

Image: James Hadfield

[ed. Left Handed Dream (full album) here (YouTube).]

Paranoid Posting: Psyops on TikTok

Hailey Lujan is big on TikTok. With blue eyes, chestnut brown hair, and a preternaturally symmetrical splatter of freckles, she’s not unlike many twenty-one-year-old influencers—save for the fact that Lujan is a psychological operations specialist in the U.S. Army. In most of her videos on TikTok, where she has over seven hundred thousand followers, she pouts adorably in full camo somewhere on the JFK Special Warfare Campus at Fort Bragg. In one, Lujan pets a YF-6000 stealth unmanned vehicle as if it’s a precious puppy. In another, she dances inside an army bunker while offering lip-contouring tips to the Sex and the City soundtrack.

Lujan may seem like most Gen-Z influencers on the lucrative side of surveillance capitalism’s commodity chain, one of the lucky few whose penchant for self-promotion swept them from suburban banality into viral celebrity. But while she has spent some of her newfound social capital partying in Vegas penthouses owned by political moguls—including Donald Trump Jr.—she hasn’t quit her day job as an expert in audience analysis and information dissemination on behalf of the U.S. empire. Her personal brand blends military pin-up aesthetics with the post-irony of a Gen-Z art-school dropout, all broadcast in the paranoid syntax of covert military operations. When Lujan isn’t posing with night vision goggles and guns, she posts provocative selfies interspersed with CIA and FBI logos with captions like: “No one is immune to propaganda.”

In recent months, Lujan’s sudden virality has stoked conspiracy theories that she is a DoD-sponsored troll, created to bolster recruitment numbers amid near-record low enlistment among Gen Z. But whether or not this is true, Lujan reveals how the army benefits from America’s influencer economy. The military is not just relying on cute e-girls to attract chronically online Gen-Zers to the armed forces (although it’s also doing that). Influencers like Lujan help the army stoke ontological crises across the internet in a bid to consolidate its own authority. (...)

Lujan enlisted in 2019—the February of her senior year at Zeeland West High School in Michigan—and shipped off to basic training that same July, just shy of her eighteenth birthday. When asked why she joined the military in an interview with the Betaverse podcast on YouTube last October, Lujan shrugged. “All the obvious reasons most other people join: free college might be nice and, you know, whatever. . . . But also, my whole life has been pretty chaotic. And I just like to keep that going.”

My entreaties for an interview went unanswered, but that conversation provides a snapshot of Lujan before she became an internet personality. She sits cross-legged on a bedspread, wearing an oversized red and white softball T-shirt, intermittently vaping while petting an adorable spotted pug. Her tone is disaffected, yet slightly insecure. At first, Lujan admits, her ideological commitments felt at odds with a military environment. “For the first like, year and a half or two years I hated it. Not necessarily because I knew much about politics or anything, but I was questioning like, am I part of a terrorist organization?” She recalled wondering, “were we all super patriotic . . . are we all just like blindly fascist?”

Lujan gradually changed her mind. “I got so bored of people calling me a war criminal/terrorist just because of the uniform I wear,” she posted on Instagram stories a few months later. “I just can’t help but wonder what those people would do if their dreams of disbanding the military came true. . . . I’d rather take some pride in the place I come home than being overrun by China or Russia.”

Today, Lujan eagerly mines her ties to the covert sphere for all they are worth. She mostly portrays herself as a cute prophet capable of influencing entire populations, foremost her fans. In January, she partnered with Weapons Outfitters to release a calendar titled “The Fucking of Hearts and Minds: A Twelve-Step Operation.” The cover features Lujan in a black leather bra, holding a shotgun, and pointing suggestively toward the viewer. That same month she launched SikeOps, which markets limited-edition Lujan merchandise like Tic Tacs shaped like bullets and iron-on patches announcing, “You’ve just been fucked by psyops.”

While there are many breeds of military influencers—from National Guard recruiters to infantry lifestyle gurus—Lujan might be the only psychological operations soldier cashing in on a booming influencer market. Still, her content bears a striking similarity to prior recruitment strategies blasted by the U.S. military. In May 2022, the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion released a recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine.” “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the film asks over a manicured reel of special ops forces gallivanting around the world with automatic weapons. More akin to an abbreviated psychological thriller, the film seems to promise that those who enlist will gain access to a trove of secret knowledge that will allow them to separate fact from fiction.

It may seem strange that the DoD is telling Americans to distrust all official narratives in a bid to bolster its popularity. Yet we’ve entered the age of “psyop realism,” as Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed, in which we are all “targeted individuals under the shadowy control of the Influencing Machine.” Rather than seeking alternative sources of media unmarred by government or corporate influence, more tech users seem resigned to the fact that everything they consume online is propaganda. A riff on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism,” psyop realism affirms its conditions of possibility by acceding to the ontological crisis of our post-truth era, a time where the terms of reality are interminably up for grabs. It is a condition that oozes, in the words of Jak Ritger, “a pervasive paranoia of all politics and deep distrust of authority.”

by Sophia Goodfriend, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © Alex William

via:
[ed. And the rest as they say, is history. Fender Broadcaster/Telecaster. Argueably as influential as the smartphone, if not more so.]

via:

Blood Meridian's Place in the American Canon

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate his Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.

My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on the novel’s second page, when the 15-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, 30 years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature, murders the Kid in an outhouse. So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of Blood Meridian that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Syria in 2019.

Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s. When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust.

But I cannot turn away from Blood Meridian, now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico-Texas borderlands in 1849 and 50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call Blood Meridian a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out by both Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, in this third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come. (...)

We first meet the Judge on page six: an enormous man, bald as a stone, no trace of a beard, and eyes without either brows or lashes. A seven-foot-tall albino, he almost seems to have come from some other world, and we learn to wonder about the Judge, who never sleeps, dances and fiddles with extraordinary art and energy, rapes and murders little children of both sexes, and says that he will never die. By the book’s close, I have come to believe that the Judge is immortal. And yet the Judge, while both more and less than human, is as individuated as Iago or Macbeth, and is quite at home in the Texan-Mexican borderlands where we watch him operate in 1849 and 50, and then find him again in 1878, not a day older after 28 years, though the Kid, a 16-year-old at the start of Glanton’s foray, is 45 when murdered by the Judge at the end.

McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the Judge in their final debate in a saloon. But though the Kid’s moral maturation is heartening, his personality remains largely a cipher, as anonymous as his lack of a name. The three glories of the book are the Judge, the landscape, and (dreadful to say this) the slaughters, which are aesthetically distanced by McCarthy in a number of complex ways. (...)

My passion for Blood Meridian is so fierce that I want to go on expounding it, but the courageous reader should now be (I hope) pretty well into the main movement of the book. I will confine myself here to the final encounter between the preternatural Judge Holden and the Kid, who had broken with the insane crusade 28 years before, and now at middle age must confront the ageless Judge. Their dialogue is the finest achievement in this book of augmenting wonders, and may move the reader as nothing else in Blood Meridian does. I reread it perpetually and cannot persuade myself that I have come to the end of it.

The Judge and the Kid drink together, after the avenging Judge tells the Kid that this night his soul will be demanded of him. Knowing he is no match for the Judge, the Kid nevertheless defies Holden, with laconic replies playing against the Judge’s rolling grandiloquence. After demanding to know where their slain comrades are, the Judge asks: “And where is the fiddler and where the dance?”

I guess you can tell me. I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin.

To have known Judge Holden, to have seen him in full operation, and to tell him that he is nothing is heroic. “You speak truer than you know,” the Judge replies, and two pages later murders the Kid, most horribly. Blood Meridian, except for a one-paragraph epilogue, ends with the Judge triumphantly dancing and fiddling at once, and proclaiming that he never sleeps and he will never die. But McCarthy does not let Judge Holden have the last word.

The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue, is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all.

The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton gang. Perhaps all that the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.

by Harold Bloom, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. The most violent book I've ever read. Glad to see it took someone else a couple tries to get it. Cormac McCarthy 1933-2023.]

The Real Lesson of 'The Truman Show'

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

The Truman Show, the film, premiered in June of 1998: a summer blockbuster guided less by literal explosions than by metaphorical ones. Its durability is typically attributed to its insights about technology: Through Truman’s story, the movie predicted, with eerie acuity, the rise of reality TV, the transactions of social media, the banality of surveillance. But Truman is not the story’s true everyman. The people who watch The Truman Show are. As the years go by, Christof’s efforts to keep Truman in Seahaven become more extreme and more cruel. The viewers watch anyway. The series, we learn, has a global audience of more than 1 billion people. That audience, for Christof and for all those who defer to him, rationalizes everything else. This is what elevates The Truman Show from prescience to prophesy. The viewers are watching a captive. They believe they are watching a star. (...)

On day 10,909 of The Truman Show’s run—the day the film begins—a klieg light falls from the sky. The intrusion of accident into this meticulously manufactured world leads Truman to do what his show cannot abide: to question. Is his reality … real? Is he part of an elaborate show? Truman confesses his doubts to his best friend, Marlon. Christof dictates Marlon’s response through the actor’s hidden earpiece: If Truman’s life is a show, Marlon says, then he would have to be in on the ruse. And “the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.”

For the film’s viewers, scenes like this—gaslighting by way of a flamethrower—can be difficult to watch. And yet: In the movie, people do watch. Some do so fervently, invested in the life of Truman, the human character. Others tune in because there’s nothing else on. The movie interrupts its show-within-a-show to remind us that the series has made Truman not only a subject of sanctioned voyeurism but also a superstar. We see, at various moments, a Truman-themed bar—think TGI Friday’s, crowded with kitschy Trumanabilia—where fans go to watch the show together. (I’m a Tru Believer, announces a bumper sticker pasted next to the TV.) We meet two older women seated next to couch pillows emblazoned with Truman’s face. We learn of the existence of TruTalk, a show dedicated to discussions of The Truman Show. We see the one-sided dynamics of the parasocial relationship, and the ease with which one person’s life can be repackaged as other people’s gossip. “I can’t believe he married Meryl on the rebound,” one woman tells another, her voice sharp with indignation.

Truman’s partnership with Meryl—she is named, like Truman’s best friend, for a famous actor—is another slow-moving manipulation. Hannah, the actor who plays Meryl, is unable to disguise her dislike for Truman when she’s not facing him. Their dialogue in the film consists mostly of chipper banalities; Meryl is most animated, in Truman’s presence, when she is reciting the marketing copy that allows the show to double as an endless act of product placement. For Truman, too, the film implies, his marriage is an act of concession. The woman he really loves was an extra on the show: a fellow student at his college, meant to function, primarily, as scenery. He fell for her at first sight. The producers quickly removed her from the show. Attraction is unruly, Christof knows, and Meryl has already been cast in the role of “Truman’s love interest.”

Christof is the direct agent of Truman’s abuse, but the show’s audience enables it. Captivated by the storylines, they see nothing wrong with the fact that Truman’s freedom is the cost of their fun. We learn, eventually, about a group of people who protest Christof, his show, and the general assumption that bad behavior can be justified by good TV. But those people are “a very vocal minority,” TruTalk’s host says, dismissively, as he conducts a fawning interview with Christof.

They may be, or they may not. One of the still-resonant messages of The Truman Show is that mass media has a way of making, and then simply becoming, reality. However numerous the protesters are, they are, on their own, ineffective: There Truman remains, tracked by 5,000 cameras. And there is his audience, despite it all, like a merch-laden Greek chorus. They speak across time, to the people viewing the film: Would you watch The Truman Show? Or would you be one of the people who speak out against it? (...)

Today, when works of pop culture revisit the 1990s, with all its ambient cruelties, they tend to do so with a tone of self-congratulation: Things might not be great now, they typically suggest, but look how much worse they were then. The Truman Show preemptively questioned some of that smugness. The film predicted how the louche voyeurism of that decade would settle into the muted voyeurism of this moment. It presaged the immense popularity of true crime, a genre that treats murder as a puzzle to be solved, abuses as stories waiting to be spun. It anticipated how readily we would come to see people as characters—the ease with which we would treat their lives as our entertainment.

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Paramount/Everett

Adventures in Reading

Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a chatbot that can read a novel in less than a minute

An often overlooked limitation for chatbots is memory. While it’s true that the AI language models that power these systems are trained on terabytes of text, the amount these systems can process when in use — that is, the combination of input text and output, also known as their “context window” — is limited. For ChatGPT it’s around 3,000 words. There are ways to work around this, but it’s still not a huge amount of information to play with.

Now, AI startup Anthropic (founded by former OpenAI engineers) has hugely expanded the context window of its own chatbot Claude, pushing it to around 75,000 words. As the company points out in a blog post, that’s enough to process the entirety of The Great Gatsby in one go. In fact, the company tested the system by doing just this — editing a single sentence in the novel and asking Claude to spot the change. It did so in 22 seconds.

You may have noticed my imprecision in describing the length of these context windows. That’s because AI language models measure information not by number of characters or words, but in tokens; a semantic unit that doesn’t map precisely onto these familiar quantities. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, words can be long or short, and their length does not necessarily correspond to their complexity of meaning. (The longest definitions in the dictionary are often for the shortest words.) The use of “tokens” reflects this truth, and so, to be more precise: Claude’s context window can now process 100,000 tokens, up from 9,000 before. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 processes around 8,000 tokens (that’s not the standard model available in ChatGPT — you have to pay for access) while a limited-release full-fat model of GPT-4 can handle up to 32,000 tokens.

Right now, Claude’s new capacity is only available to Anthropic’s business partners, who are tapping into the chatbot via the company’s API. The pricing is also unknown, but is certain to be a significant bump. Processing more text means spending more on compute.

by James Vincent, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. See also: Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It? (NYT):]

"Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it. But bubbling underneath this bland, upbeat consensus is a simmer of individual anxiety and collective panic. We are in the throes of a reading crisis. (...)

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Reading is something else: an activity whose value, while broadly proclaimed, is hard to specify. Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends. (...)

But nothing is ever so simple. Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment. It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented. Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages. The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it."

Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)

The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it’s any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now.

But within the community of concerned people, numbers vary all over the place:

Scott Aaronson says says 2%
Will MacAskill says 3%
The median machine learning researcher on Katja Grace’s survey says 5 - 10%
Paul Christiano says 10 - 20%
The average person working in AI alignment thinks about 30%
Top competitive forecaster Eli Lifland says 35%
Holden Karnofsky, on a somewhat related question, gives 50%
Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%

As written this makes it look like everyone except Eliezer is <=50%, which isn’t true; I’m just having trouble thinking of other doomers who are both famous enough that you would have heard of them, and have publicly given a specific number.

I go back and forth more than I can really justify, but if you force me to give an estimate it’s probably around 33%; I think it’s very plausible that we die, but more likely that we survive (at least for a little while). Here’s my argument, and some reasons other people are more pessimistic.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. More AI prognosticating (but in this case, more signal than noise). See also: the comments.]

Tolstoy and Chill

[ed. Adventures in non-reading.]

In 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature. (...)

It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. To most, it seemed entirely unappealing. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”

Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like “being seduced, or maybe drugged,” a very different experience from “deep reading,” which Birkerts characterized as “the slow and meditative possession of a book.”

According to Matthew Rubery, the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a fascinating history of the audiobook, the notion that listening to a book is too absorbing to lend itself to deep reflection is the “most enduring critique” of the format. “It was striking to me when I began researching audiobooks how many people in Edison’s time welcomed efforts to make books more entertaining,” Rubery, a literature professor at Queen Mary University of London, told me. “The idea of books needing to be hard work, difficult, and read firsthand in order to be deemed valuable only took hold in the next century.”

That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. As film and television became the dominant modes of storytelling in the 20th century, book lovers were forced into a defensive crouch, left to argue that the very aspects of reading that made it more rigorous than watching a movie or a show were, in fact, precisely what made reading superior. Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was “like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.”

The stigma associated with audiobooks hasn’t gone away since The Wall Street Journal published its 1993 article on audiobooks’ failure to catch on. Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies reading, says that the most common question he gets is whether listening to an audiobook for a book club is “cheating.” But if anxiety surrounding audiobooks lingers, it’s no longer stopping Americans from purchasing them. Audiobook sales have seen double-digit increases each year since 2012. Last year, the increase was 10 percent, amounting to $1.8 billion in sales. The trend is only likely to accelerate in the years ahead given that Spotify recently made a major push into the market, and Google and Apple are racing to produce AI-narrated books. (Even the dead can now narrate audiobooks.)

Still, if the audiobook moment has arrived, that doesn’t, of course, mean that all of the concerns about the format have been misplaced. I suspect that listening to a novel truly is less likely to elicit critical engagement. What I’m less sure about is whether that’s such a bad thing.

Like many fans of the format, I turned to audiobooks out of convenience. I was teaching a graduate course on contemporary American writers at Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to me that speeding through audio editions of the novels and memoirs I’d assigned could be a good way to refresh my memories of the books in the days before a class. But, along the way, something happened that surprised me: I started to fall in love with the audio novel. It took me a little while to admit it to myself—I had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt heretical—but, in many cases, I was enjoying the books even more when listening to them.

The next surprise arrived when I began listening to audiobooks in bed. In recent years, I’d been reading much less at night. Exhausted from long days of parenting and emailing and Zooming, I would often end up watching a TV show I was not at all excited to watch rather than reading a book I was genuinely excited to read. Then, one night, I put in my earbuds and downloaded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s wonderful narration of Anna Karenina. Listening to a skilled actor read a literary masterpiece was every bit as blissful as the 19th-century utopians had imagined. “Netflix and chill” became “Tolstoy and chill,” and then “Jane Austen and chill,” “James Baldwin and chill,” “Kafka and chill!”

Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. There’s not a lot of science on the differences between reading and listening to books. The existing research suggests that adults score the same on reading-comprehension tests whether they read or listen to a passage. But it’s one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what you’ve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me there’s good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does.

by Sam Apple, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic/Getty

‘I’m Not Just Faster, But Taller’: How I Learned to Walk Properly

In all the time I spent with Joanna Hall, she barely stopped walking. I would see her coming towards me in Kensington Gardens, London, gliding past the other strollers as if she alone were on a moving walkway. When she reached me, I would fall into step and off we would walk, for an hour. At the end, Hall would stride into the distance and keep walking, for all I knew, until we met the following week.

Hall’s WalkActive system, a comprehensive fitness programme based around walking, aims to improve posture, increase speed, reduce stress on joints and deliver fitness, turning a stroll into a workout and changing the way you walk for ever. She says she can teach it to me, and we have set aside four weeks for my education.

It is easy to be sceptical when someone claims you can reap huge health benefits simply by learning to walk better. You think: I’m already good at walking. And sometimes, I walk a long way.

But according to Hall, a fitness expert who enjoyed a three-year stint on ITV’s This Morning, almost nobody is good at walking: not you, not me and not all the other people in the park, who provide endless lessons in poor technique. I notice they are still managing to get where they are going. Are we not in danger of overthinking something people do without thinking?

Hall tells me: “If you ask someone, ‘When you go for a walk, do you enjoy it?’, they will say, ‘Yes’, but if you ask, ‘Do you ever experience discomfort in your lower back?’, quite a few people will say, ‘Yeah, I do get discomfort in my back, or I feel it when I get out of bed, or I’m tight in my achilles or stiff in my shoulder.’ And those are all indicators that an individual is walking sub-optimally.”

What are we doing wrong? Most of us, she says, tend to walk by stepping into the space in front of us. “I want you to think about walking out of the space behind you.”

If that sounds a bit abstract to you – as it did to me, at first – think about it this way: good walking is an act of propulsion, of pushing yourself forward off your back foot. Bad walking – my kind of walking – is overly dependent on traction: pulling yourself along with your front foot. This shortens your stride, relies too much on your hip flexors and puts unnecessary stress on your knees.

The struggle to get me to absorb this basic concept takes up most of our first hour together. My opening question about optimal walking was: “Will I look mad?” I imagined great loping strides and pumping arms.

“I promise you, you won’t look mad,” Hall said. But when you stroll haltingly through a public park while someone instructs you on heel placement, you do attract a certain amount of attention. People think: poor man, he’s having to learn to walk all over again.

They are not wrong. It takes a tremendous amount of concentration to do something so basic, and so ingrained, in a different way. It begins with the feet: I am trying to maintain a flexible, open ankle, to leave my back foot on the ground for longer, and to peel it away, heel first, as if it were stuck in place with Velcro.

“Feel the peel,” says Hall. “Feel. The. Peel.”

Second come the hips: I need to increase the distance between my pelvis and my ribs, standing tall and creating more flexibility through my torso. Then my neck: there needs to be more distance between my collarbone and my earlobes. I need to think about maintaining all of these things at the same time.

Hall acknowledges that, for beginners, there will be what she calls “Buckaroo! moments” – named after the children’s game featuring a put-upon, spring-loaded mule – when too much information causes a system overload. This happens to me when, while I’m busy monitoring my feet, my stride, my hips and my neck, Hall suggests that the pendular arc of my arms could do with a bit more backswing.

“What?” I ask. My rhythm collapses. My shoulders slump. My ribs sink. My right heel scuffs the pavement. I can feel, for the first time, just how not good my normal walking is. How did I get like this? (...)

Hall’s programme may be low-impact, but it is not low energy. By the end of our second session together, I am exhausted, because of the concentration required and the distance we have covered. A study that Hall commissioned showed that participants who completed a month of WalkActive training increased their walking speed by 24%. This alone amounts to a pretty big lifestyle adjustment – and you suddenly find that everyone is in your way. I’m not just faster, but taller, and my arms swing with a natural, easy rhythm, exuding a confidence wholly at odds with the rest of my personality. It feels, frankly, amazing. (...)

Perhaps the most significant claim Hall makes is that, in terms of fitness, walking can be enough. It can complement other forms of exercise, such as yoga and pilates, but if you don’t do anything else, improving your walk can still confer major health benefits.

“I’m not anti-running, I’m not anti-gyms, I think they all have a role to play,” she says. “But I also think, sometimes, if we just think about the simplest thing that we could all do, and just get people to do it better, even if someone doesn’t necessarily feel as if they want to walk for longer, even if they just looked at changing their walking technique and applied it to their commute, that can be powerful.”

by Tim Dowling, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
[ed. This sounds like good advice. Joanna's WalkActive channel on YouTube can be found here.]

Design Fakes

Automakers can’t quit manual transmissions so they’re cramming fake stuff into EVs (The Verge)

There’s no question that the rise in electric vehicles represents a wholesale shift in the auto industry. But while most car companies appear ready to embrace the electric future, a lot of them are having trouble letting go of the past.

Take Toyota, for example. The biggest automaker in the world is reportedly working on an electric vehicle prototype that mimics the feel of driving a manual transmission, complete with a gear shift that’s not connected to anything and a floor-mounted speaker to pipe in fake engine noises. The car will even pretend to stall out if you fumble the controls — in order to deliver drivers the complete experience of driving a manual car.

Keep in mind this is an electric vehicle. There is no engine, no drive shaft, no gears to speak of. All of this is achieved using software and a bit of smoke and mirrors. Toyota says the goal is to preserve the driving experience for car enthusiasts, but it’s unclear whether people actually want this.

***

Shutterless cameras deserve good shutter sounds (The Verge)

Snapping a camera’s shutter to take a picture is one of the best feelings in photography. You get a timeless, tactile feedback as you capture every decisive moment with a satisfying auditory “click” sound. But we’re slowly losing this hallmark of picture-taking. Not only because smartphones are replacing full-size cameras for most people but because more cameras are being built without mechanical shutters at all.

by Andrew J. Hawkins, and Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge |  Read more: here and here
Images: Toyota/Becca Farsace

[ed. Sensing a trend here...]