Inside the Actors Strike Press Apocalypse: “The Celebrity Factory Has Shut Down”

With the Screen Actors Guild strike now compounding the already industry-shattering screenwriters stoppage, the entire Hollywood apparatus has officially been turned on its head, from writers rooms and on-set productions all the way down to restaurant workers, hairstylists, and florists. Here’s one more afflicted constituency to consider: all the publications that are in the business of covering Hollywood stars. (Vanity Fair very much included.)

As part of SAG-AFTRA’s showdown with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, actors are barred from promoting their projects in the press starting at midnight Friday. Q&As? Dunzo. Breezy gab sessions on the Today show or Good Morning America? Nope! Cover stories? Forget it. “This is basically like, the celebrity factory has shut down,” says Janice Min, CEO of The Ankler and former editorial director and copresident of The Hollywood Reporter. “If this goes on for a long time, you will feel it across the whole internet.”

Celebrity interviews are a huge audience driver for any publication that has digital scale. Once those are gone, it impacts not only the primary reach of a given interview, but the secondary reach as well: Other publications picking up quotes, people getting worked up on Twitter, the widespread circulation of photos—that all ceases to exist for an indefinite period of time. (Weeks? Months?) Also, the loss of all this “earned media,” as it’s called, could theoretically inflict some pain at the box office, where organic buzz can be just as lucrative as paid marketing campaigns. (Not to mention the fact that the suspension of the late-night shows due to the writers strike had already taken a bite out of the studios’ marketing muscle; for a fleeting moment, magazine and newspaper interviews were all the more valuable.)

Another thing to consider is just how unprecedented the current situation is. The last time actors and writers were both on strike was in 1960, an entirely different media world. (An entirely different world altogether: That actors strike was led by Ronald Reagan, SAG president of the day.) Sure, there will be other things to write about despite the press blackout, including the strikes themselves, as well as industry-oriented topics like streaming strategy and corporate intrigue, the goings-on of Bob Iger, David Zaslav, and the like. But as far as coverage goes, actors are “on a whole other level because they have access to the public,” as Min put it. “Bob Iger is a meaningful figure in the industry, but on a magazine cover, people typically want to see Brad Pitt instead.”

On Monday, SAG leadership held a Zoom meeting with publicists to go over what would and wouldn’t be allowed in the event of a strike. Let’s start with the wouldn’t, as relayed to us by a publicist in the know: photo shoots, interviews, prep shooting, fittings, voice-over, writing, fan screenings, red carpets, premiere parties, and social media promotion for SAG projects. (Not long after this story was published, SAG sent the full list of prohibited promo activities to members.) Agreements might be hammered out on a case-by-case basis for truly independent projects, and actors serving as executive producers on projects in which they are not acting will apparently be permitted to promote them.

Also allowed: press for a book unrelated to an actor’s acting; press and social media that was banked before the strike took effect, as long as it comes with a disclaimer; charity red carpets, but only if there aren’t any logos on the step-and-repeat (and absolutely no talking about current projects); and receipt of lifetime achievement awards (but again, logos on the step-and-repeat are a no-no). SAG will reach out to publicists if it comes across anything it feels is in breach, and SAG will boot any clients who cross the lines. What about Comic-Con, the latest installment of which kicks off July 20? SAG would prefer that no performers attend, and if they do, they’ll be able to sign autographs but be barred from participating in moderated interviews unless the topic is, say, their entire career. All in all, SAG leaders told the assembled publicists not to put clients in a position to have to defend their actions. One word used to describe the call: “chaos.”

by Joe Pompeo and Natalie Jarvey, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

[ed. Quite an ecosystem. See also: Actors Strike Is On, Throwing Hollywood Into Turmoil (VF).]

The Algorithmic Anti-Culture of Scale

Here's what 24 hours inside of Threads has been like

When I first opened Meta’s new Threads app on Wednesday night I was extremely excited for a very brief second. I hadn’t followed anyone yet, but my feed was already full of content. I initially thought they had just opened the floodgates and put everyone in the same feed together. The Bluesky Hellthread as an app. I quickly realized that wasn’t what was happening and that, in fact, Threads was running on an algorithm similar, if not identical, to Instagram’s. And that’s when I became deeply depressed. But I also realized I had a unique opportunity.

I decided not to follow anyone. And so, for the last couple days, I have only been seeing the raw machinery of Threads. Its algorithm is just blasting me with random posts and, every so often, it tries to show me more of a particular user I click on or spend too long reading in the feed.

My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.

But let’s start at the beginning. Myspace launches in 2003 and it quickly makes the idea of a social network mainstream. Facebook goes live exclusively for users with college email addresses a year later. Facebook’s News Feed, which turns the platform into something beyond just a Myspace for rich kids, turns on in 2006. Myspace use peaks in 2008. Facebook overtakes it in 2009. The chronological News Feed is phased out in 2011. The algorithmic era begins.

Twitter, on the other hand, comes from an entirely different evolutionary branch. It launches in 2006 as a place for nerds to eventually complain about Google Glass discrimination and for much of its early years it largely exists as a complimentary service to Google Reader. Its earliest users were bloggers and journalists using it to syndicate stories. The earliest concept of “Black Twitter,” which The Awl described as “Late Night Black People Twitter,” appears in 2009. “Weird Twitter,” a collection of Something Awful goons and semi-leftist shitposters, is recognized as a subculture in 2012. In 2013, Justine Sacco posts the AIDS tweet. And, finally, the #Gamergate hashtag starts in 2014.

And for the last decade, we have basically had these two digital spheres — Facebook’s relatively safe algorithmic walled garden or the sociopolitical Hunger Games of Twitter. Except, Twitter would be the one to go on to gain such jaw-dropping levels of cultural importance that an entire presidency was run on it. Meanwhile, Facebook grew both in users and affiliated apps, but retreated up the asshole of its own algorithm. Case in point: Last spring, Elon Musk and the weird freaks in his group chat became so obsessed with Twitter that Musk agreed to acquire it for $44 billion. And the biggest Facebook page in the US at the time was livestreaming bingo.

In retrospect, it seems like Jack Dorsey and his, what I like to call, “Burning Man libertarianism” approach to content moderation, was the real secret sauce to Twitter’s cultural cachet from 2015-2021. He was able to balance enough plates with a deft enough hand to keep all the disparate parts of the app in place. You could watch porn. Its hashtags could topple governments. Minorities could put pressure on society’s power structures. Rich people could feel like celebrities and celebrities could feel like artists. And, most importantly, it created a lot of really good memes. Even if everyone was completely miserable. Facebook, over the same stretch of time, became a place for old people to share Ring camera footage and haggle over used furniture. I discovered while putting together this month’s Garbage Intelligence trend report that the fourth-most interacted with Facebook post in June was a picture of a potato shared by an Amazon dropshipping page that users were writing “Amen” underneath.

(This potato had 3.1 million interactions on Facebook in June.)

And now we have Threads. Meta clearly dusted off their “kill Snapchat” playbook to launch it because, just as they did with ephemeral stories in 2016, Meta has taken the surface-level components of a competitor’s platform and ported them over to their network and retrofitted them to run on their algorithm. Comparing Meta to the Borg from Star Trek implies a level of sophistication I don’t think they deserve. Comedy writer Jason O. Gilbert came closer to nailing it, writing this week that, “Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.”

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads’ algorithm is primarily about discovery. “We do rank posts lightly and show recommendations (posts from accounts you don't follow) in feed, which is particularly important for a new app before people follow enough accounts,” he posted this week. (And a chronological feed is reportedly coming.) Though, I’d put all of this another way: Meta’s algorithms are automated digital gentrification. And the only good thing about Threads is that its largely text-based interface gives us the clearest look yet at how all of Meta’s apps work. (...)

My guiding theory has been that neither Bluesky or Threads will end up killing Twitter. That this whole race to build a new Twitter will just result in a bunch of increasingly-smaller versions of the same app, used by different groups. Nothing I’ve seen from Threads this week has convinced otherwise. But I do think it’s worth pointing out the scale already at play here.

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day |  Read more:

Images: Facebook

A Shrinking Alaskan Village Needs New Families to Save Its School. Thousands Responded.

When leaders in the shrinking Alaskan fishing village of Karluk made a plea on social media asking two families with three to four children each to move to the Last Frontier state to save their cherished school, they did not expect thousands of responses to pour in.

“We have been bombarded with phone calls, and overwhelmed with emails,” Alicia Andrews, the president of the Karluk Tribal Council, told The Washington Post. “For years, we have been trying to save our school and our community, and now it seems we have a solution.”

The advertisement that quickly spread on social media promises families willing to relocate a year with all their expenses paid, a picturesque landscape, a three- or four-bedroom home, and fishing, kayaking and camping adventures. The new residents will also be presented with employment opportunities in the village of 37 people living along the western shore of Kodiak Island, which is reachable by a nearly 10-hour ferry ride from mainland Alaska — or two airplane rides from Anchorage.

If the village succeeds in increasing its student population to 10, it will qualify for state funding by clearing a head count mandated by law in Alaska since 1998. This will allow the two students currently there, a brother and a sister who are 11 and 10 years old, to have peers and certified teachers, and it will prevent the Kodiak Island Borough from boarding up the school building or passing financial responsibility of keeping the facility open to the tribal council.

School buildings in rural Alaska serve as more than classrooms; they are gathering places for birthday parties, a space where travelers and locals can spend the night when homes can’t be heated, computer and internet hubs, and community centers.

The Karluk school building, which lost its state funding in 2018, lost funding from the borough last month, leaving the critical community structure’s fate in the hands of the tribal council.

For the council, it is economically more viable to support two families until they become self-sufficient than to run the school building on its own in the long term. The council received roughly 5,000 responses from families across the United States and other countries. These families will now receive application forms that the council hopes to process in the coming months.

If no families are up to the task of relocating to Karluk, the school building will be one more casualty in a state facing a crisis in education funding. Schools — both as education centers and cultural hubs — permanently shutting down are often the first signs of a struggling village in Alaska, education advocates said, adding that a school shutdown encourages those remaining in the village to leave. (...)

“I can’t fault anyone for trying an outside-the-box approach to improve outcomes for their kids,” said Dave Johnson, president of the Kodiak Island Borough School District Board of Education. “Our people are desperate for people to come up with creative solutions.”

Johnson said Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) appears “downright hostile to public education.” Dunleavy did not return a request for comment.

“The governor just vetoed over half of the increase in student funding that the legislature approved, which has cut our budget to the absolute bare minimum,” Johnson said. This contributed to the borough deciding to shut down the school building, he added.(...)

The biggest hurdle, however, will be in finding teachers willing and able to live and work in Karluk, which rests on the largest island in an archipelago stretching out from Alaska proper.

“That is what keeps me up at night, finding the teacher,” he said. “Educators may agree to come, but many don’t even last the school year in a remote, rural setting.” (...)

Since the Karluk school was shut down in 2018, teaching aide Joyce Jones has stayed on, teaching eight students at first, and now only two. When the school was shut down for seven years in the early 2000s because the student population dwindled below 10, it was Jones who taught the students by herself until the school reopened and the certified teachers returned, said Kathryn Reft, the secretary and treasurer for the council.

“The school is a big part of the community in Karluk,” Reft said. “It’s important for the morale of the village, for the two students who deserve to have peers and fully functional school, and it’s where we meet and gather.”

Johnson agrees that a village’s school serves as a symbol for the social health of the village itself.

“Once the school goes, it feels like the village is kind of on the brink,” he said. “Look at how much effort Karluk is putting in getting their school back. They don’t want to see their community fall apart.”

by Maham Javaid, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Alistair Gardiner/Kodiak Daily Mirror

[ed. Side benefit: some of the best salmon fishing in the world.]

Once Hailed for Decriminalizing Drugs, Portugal is Now Having Doubts

Cocaine production is at global highs. Seizures of amphetamine and methamphetamine have exploded. The multiyear pandemic deepened personal burdens and fomented an increase in use. In the United States alone, overdose deaths, fueled by opioids and deadly synthetic fentanyl, topped 100,000 in both 2021 and 2022 — or double what it was in 2015. According to the National Institutes of Health, 85 percent of the U.S. prison population has an active substance use disorder or was jailed for a crime involving drugs or drug use.

Across the Atlantic in Europe, tiny Portugal appeared to harbor an answer. In 2001, it threw out years of punishment-driven policies in favor of harm reduction by decriminalizing consumption of all drugs for personal use, including the purchase and possession of 10-day supplies. Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to “dissuasion commissions.” For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. The decision to attend is voluntary.

Other countries have moved to channel drug offenses out of the penal system too. But none in Europe institutionalized that route more than Portugal. Within a few years, HIV transmission rates via syringes — one the biggest arguments for decriminalization — had plummeted. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5 percent. Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation. There was no evidence of a feared surge in use.

“None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass,” a landmark Cato Institute report stated in 2009.

But in the first substantial way since decriminalization passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

“At the end of the day, the police have their hands tied,” said António Leitão da Silva, chief of Municipal Police of Porto, adding the situation now is comparable to the years before decriminalization was implemented.

A newly released national survey suggests the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages. Portugal’s prevalence of high-risk opioid use is higher than Germany’s, but lower than that of France and Italy. But even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong. (...)

Elsewhere in the world, places implementing decriminalization are confronting challenges of their own. In Oregon — where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model — attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation. Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.

Some places that were early adopters of liberal drug policies have moved to curb permissive laws or backed away from more radical change. Amsterdam — a city long famous for its pot cafes — last month instituted a new ban on smoking marijuana in public places. In Norway, a Portugal-like plan to decriminalize drugs collapsed in 2021, and the country opted instead for a more piecemeal approach.

“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”

An eight-minute walk uphill from Porto’s safe drug-use center, in a neighborhood of elegant two-story homes with hedgerows of roses and hibiscus, neighbors talk of an “invasion” of people using drugs since the pandemic. Some gravitated here earlier, from a notorious public housing complex condemned and demolished nearly a decade ago. Others arrived more recently. (...)

Porto’s mayor and other critics, including neighborhood activist groups, are not calling for a wholesale repeal of decriminalization — but rather, a limited re-criminalization in urban areas and near schools and hospitals to address rising numbers of people misusing drugs. In a country where the drug policy is seen as sacred, even that has generated pushback — with nearly 200 experts signing an opposition letter after Porto’s city commission in January passed a resolution seeking national-level changes.

Tenuous gains

Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available.

João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.

After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.

Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”

by Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post

[ed. Probably less a policy failure than a honeypot situation (with declining funding). Drug users will migrate to areas where they have a lower chance of being hassled. Human nature.]

Jumping Paywalls: OpenAI Pauses New ChatGPT App After People Used It to Read Paywalled Content for Free

ChatGPT is back to not knowing about anything that happened after 2021

Less than two weeks after launching its "Browse With Bing" browser integration, OpenAI has put the kibosh on the plugin after users were able to bypass paywalls on websites with the app.

In a tweet posted earlier this week, OpenAI admitted that the new feature integrated into the ChatGPT mobile app "can occasionally display content in ways we don't want, e.g. if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request" — which is a fancy way of saying that it allowed users to jump article paywalls.

"We are disabling Browse while we fix this — want to do right by content owners," OpenAI continued.

In the now-amended blog post announcing the beta program, OpenAI said that it had temporarily disabled the integration "out of an abundance of caution" and that it would hopefully be back up shortly.

That means paying ChatGPT Plus customers, who shell out $20 a month, now have access to a far more limited set of tools — and that isn't likely going to help OpenAI in its efforts to monetize the tech.

The incident also highlights the contentious issue of AI companies training their models on scraped data without compensating content creators.

Plus/Minus

The new rollback could severely limit the usefulness of ChatGPT. According to TechCrunch, prior to OpenAI's Bing integration feature, the chatbot was only trained on data up to 2021, which means that if you want to search the web with ChatGPT right now, you won't get any current answers.

In other words, ChatGPT is back to being oblivious to anything that happened after September 2021.

by Noor Al-Sibai, Futurism |  Read more:

Image: Nurphoto via Getty/Futurism

[ed. See also: Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up (Ars Technica):]

"Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, people began proclaiming the end of the search engine. At the same time, though, many examples of ChatGPT's confabulations began to circulate on social media. The AI bot has invented books and studies that don't exist, publications that professors didn't write, fake academic papers, false legal citations, non-existent Linux system features, unreal retail mascots, and technical details that don't make sense."

And, introducing Claude 2: New ChatGPT rival, Claude 2, launches for open beta testing (Ars Technica)

"On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude 2, a large language model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT that can craft code, analyze text, and write compositions. Unlike the original version of Claude launched in March, users can try Claude 2 for free on a new beta website. It's also available as a commercial API for developers."

João Callado

João Callado, Sambience 2

[ed. Cavaquinho: Different forms of cavaquinho have been adapted in different regions...the locally iconic Caribbean region cuatro family and the Hawaiian ukuleles were both adapted from the cavaquinho. (Wikipedia).]

The PGA Tour, PIF and Understanding the Deal to Shape Golf’s Future

[ed. See also: summary of today's historic Senate hearing: PGA Tour executives testify before Senate on deal with Saudi Arabia’s PIF (The Athletic)]

The PGA Tour ultimately decided to partner with the PIF because it wants to own and control professional golf just as much as, if not more than, the Saudis, and is no less power hungry and morally nimble. The Public Investment Fund, meanwhile, previously prioritized making money on professional golf and long ago understood a deal with the PGA Tour presents that pathway. The PIF, valued at more than $700 billion, is in the business of making money to transform the kingdom’s oil-dependent economy and finance a government ruled absolutely by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family.

But there hasn’t been much room in the conversation for any of this since June 6.

So let’s talk about it.

This all, in hindsight, could’ve very well ended that late April day in London.

Al-Rumayyan sat opposite PGA Tour emissaries Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy. The first meeting. Neither side came looking to spar. This was, instead, an attempt to breathe the same air, see what was in the middle. Both sides agreed professional golf’s schism was bad for everyone. Both agreed ongoing litigation between the U.S.-based PGA Tour and Saudi Arabian-backed LIV Golf was both costly and ineffective. Neither wanted to go through the discovery process of a further drawn-out court battle. So al-Rumayyan removed any possible contention with a move no one saw coming.

The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, he said, intended to drop all litigation against the PGA Tour, regardless of how the meeting proceeded.

Dunne, a member of the PGA Tour’s policy board, and Herlihy, the chairman of the board, stared back at al-Rumayyan.

“I think they were stunned by it,” said an individual with knowledge of the PIF’s side of the meeting. “I mean, they were shocked. (Al-Rumayyan) just put that on the table in exchange for nothing.”

That alone may have been worth the trip for Dunne and Herlihy. “A massive win,” the individual said. “They could’ve said that was enough.”

Yet, they didn’t.

That’s not why they were there.

The PGA Tour’s dalliance with the PIF was not a matter of peace or survival. The goal was to both somehow surrender the fight and commandeer the boat. The tour’s financial position over the last year went from tenuous to potentially unsustainable. The costs of massively increased purses (a byproduct of the arms race vs. LIV), subsidies earmarked for the DP World Tour, and legal fees exceeding $10 million monthly, were not being funded by a new windfall of sponsorship money or a magically increased media deal. The tour’s 2023 finances are strained and, according to Monahan, in order to make changes in ’24, “we’ve had to invest back in our business through our reserves.” On top of everything, a constant dread existed, fear of another big star leaving, weakening the product more and more. Some around the tour believe outside recruitment threats were greater than any fiscal concerns.

This was, at its core, an existential crisis. The tour’s books weren’t yet at the brink, but would inevitably get there, as long as the PIF continued unhindered spending on LIV. Which, why wouldn’t it?

“They could further marginalize us and lure away players and, in time, transform the tour into a minor league,” said one individual involved with the PGA Tour’s negotiation with the PIF.

Facing an uncertain financial future and uncertain legal outcomes, Dunne and Herlihy didn’t leave the table. Sure, al-Rumayyan dropping litigation might ease some tension on the tour, but wouldn’t solve the larger problem — competing with Saudi spending.

They were there to make a deal, not a truce.

It was six months earlier when Monahan added Dunne to the PGA Tour policy board, a 10-member group made up of five PGA Tour players and five independent board directors from the corporate world that collectively casts the deciding votes of consequence and, ostensibly, acts as Monahan’s boss.

Dunne, an investment banker with a long history in mergers and acquisitions, is a Wall Street legend and an omnipotent and omnipresent figure in golf. As a new independent director on the board (joining Bond Capital partner Mary Meeker, former AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, former Wellington Management vice chairman Mark Flaherty, and Herlihy, one of the most highly regarded corporate lawyers in the country), he was seen as a wartime ambassador — a trusted intermediary to convince the best players in the game to remain with the PGA Tour.

But ultimately a chance arose for Dunne to fall into a more natural role.

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that he was brought in and settlement discussions for a commercial basis began,” said one person familiar with the makings of the deal. “Progressing from a legal path to a commercial is in Jimmy’s DNA.”

Between Monahan, Dunne and Herlihy, the decision was made that, instead of competing against the PIF’s billions, the PGA Tour would instead take it and use it. (Al-Rumayyan has long maintained the PIF approached the tour before LIV was ever imagined to make such an investment but never heard back.)

After London, there was Venice. Al-Rumayyan was in town for the wedding of the daughter of Lawrence Stroll, the Formula 1 racing billionaire, while Monahan was there for al-Rumayyan. According to multiple individuals briefed on the conversations that followed, al-Rumayyan told Monahan the PIF was “ready to invest in the tour and ready to invest in you.” Monahan tested al-Rumayyan over the next two days. “Testing if he was serious to commit behind the PGA Tour,” one person familiar with the meeting said. The two got along fairly instantly.

On the second day in Venice, Monahan laid out six key principles focused on the PGA Tour operating as a “not-for-profit, with for-profit streams.” He laid out possibilities around media and data capabilities and aligning the game globally. Al-Rumayyan nodded along.

“Jay laid out four or five ideas, each of which were billion-dollar investments that the PGA Tour obviously couldn’t make alone,” said a person familiar with the meeting. “The goals aimed to roughly triple the number of people playing golf, triple the number watching and triple the revenue.”

From the Venice meeting came the vision of this new for-profit company. The PGA Tour and DP World Tour would combine their commercial interests behind a large cash investment from the Public Investment Fund. The PIF, in turn, would also contribute its own golf-related investments and assets, including LIV Golf, to the company. The PIF would be granted a right of first refusal on future capital funding. The two men agreed on Monahan serving as CEO of all commercial operations and al-Rumayyan being chairman of the new company’s board (of which the tour will have a majority of seats), while also taking a seat on the PGA Tour policy board.

Before Monahan and al-Rumayyan left Venice and scheduled a subsequent meeting in San Francisco, it was made clear the PIF was comfortable ceding management authority to Monahan and the tour. Those concessions would be offset, of course, by the PIF and, by proxy, the Saudi monarchy, having some dominion in professional golf.

The two sides met next on Memorial Day weekend. The deal was finalized at the San Francisco Four Seasons and a five-page framework agreement was carved out.

So, how grand are the plans of this new PGA Tour-led, PIF-backed company? Some individuals interviewed here have mentioned the possibility of the tour buying the LPGA. Or buying the PGA of America, along with its most coveted holding — the Ryder Cup. Hell, maybe all of the above? Open access to multiple billions of dollars is now readily available. It was suggested the tour may also want to expand its property portfolio. How much would Pebble Beach go for, anyway?

For all the talk of THE SAUDIS ARE BUYING GOLF!, it’s being missed that, in fact, it can equally be said that it’s the PGA Tour that’s buying golf, albeit with Saudi money. Did such a deal require a shocking degree of abasement? And a total reveal of the performance art that was its moral stand? And a betrayal of its own players who existed totally in the dark as the deal was made? Yes, yes, and yes. But PGA Tour leadership would clearly rather eat sand than let go of its self-assessed birthright as the most powerful brand in the game.

by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Sam Richardson / The Athletic; Photos: Cliff Hawkins / Getty Images, Adam Hagy / USA Today, Jonathan Ferrey / LIV Golf via Getty Images

[ed. Update: Secret meetings, a Tiger request, ANGC membership: 15 explosive takeaways from Congressional hearing on PGA Tour-Saudi PIF (Golf Digest).]

Rose Zhang: Tee Fun

Rose Zhang’s tee magically flipping back into her pocket at Pebble Beach broke the internet this weekend (Golf Digest)
[ed. I do this too when I'm lazy. See also: Rose Zhang: The secrets behind the sweetest swing in golf (GD); and, Michelle Wie West and Annika Sorenstam Finish Their 2023 U.S. Women's Open Rounds at Pebble Beach:

What John Roberts and His Court Have Wrought Over 18 Years

The end of a Supreme Court term always sparks a lively conversation about how to characterize what just happened, and this year was no exception. In refusing to weaken the Voting Rights Act any further, did the court show itself to be a bit less dogmatically conservative than the year before? Did the 6-to-3 rejection of a dangerous theory that would have stripped state courts of the authority to review election laws show that the justices could still build bridges across their ideological divide?

Yes, democracy survived, and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought experiment. Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand.

To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.

These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.

On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.

The Grutter decision in 2003, upholding affirmative action in admission to the University of Michigan’s law school, appeared to put racially conscious admissions decisions on a solid footing, at least for 25 more years.

On religion, a 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia held that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause ordinarily did not provide a religious opt out from compliance with laws that applied to everyone. And one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s last major opinions, Locke v. Davey, called for maintaining a cautious “play in the joints” between free exercise and the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the establishment clause. (“In other words,” as the court put it, “there are some state actions permitted by the establishment clause but not required by the free exercise clause.”) The decision rejected the claim that a state offering scholarships for postsecondary education had to cover study for the ministry as well. There is little doubt that the same case would come out differently today.

Finally, actions of the federal agencies that make up the administrative state were largely insulated from judicial review based on the court’s 1984 Chevron decision, requiring courts to defer to an agency’s plausible interpretation of its own authority if Congress had failed to speak precisely to the question at hand.

That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.

It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”

Likewise, the court has not formally overruled its Chevron decision. Its administrative-law decisions have just stopped citing that 1984 precedent as authority. The justices have simply replaced Chevron’s rule of judicial deference with its polar opposite, a new rule that goes by the name of the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court will uphold an agency’s regulatory action on a major question only if Congress’s grant of authority to the agency on the particular issue was explicit. Deference, in other words, is now the exception, no longer the rule.

But how to tell a major question from an ordinary one? No surprise there: The court itself will decide. While the ratio of major questions to ordinary questions of administrative law remains to be seen, it’s hard to envision an issue important and contentious enough to make it to the Supreme Court not being regarded as major by justices who flaunt their skepticism of the administrative state.

Justice Neil Gorsuch was candid about this in a concurring opinion last year when the court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The major questions doctrine, he explained, “applies when an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.’” What is a better indicator of political significance than sustained conservative backlash? Last year’s environmental case set the stage for the court’s June 30 decision overturning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. (...)

My focus here on what these past 18 years have achieved has been on the court itself. But of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t stand alone. Powerful social and political movements swirl around it, carefully cultivating cases and serving them up to justices who themselves were propelled to their positions of great power by those movements. The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.

by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matt Rota

[ed. Worth a full read.]

Porpita porpita (blue button jellyfish)
Image: Kyle Hartshorn/Flickr
via: (NPR)

The Beast Within Capitalism

The most popular YouTuber in the world is MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, a 24-year-old from North Carolina who specializes in ever-more-costly stunts and giveaways. MrBeast’s videos include:

• Extreme endurance feats and challenges (counting to 100,000, reading the entire dictionary, spending 50 hours in Antarctica, spinning a fidget spinner for an entire day, being buried alive, starving himself for 30 days, completing a marathon in comically oversized shoes, eating a really big slice of pizza)

• Game show setups (last person to take their hand off an object wins a cash prize, high-stakes hide-and-seek, an elaborate Squid Game simulation that entirely misses the original series’ satirical point)

• Unpleasant dares (Would you sit in a bathtub full of snakes if someone paid you a lot of money?)

• A lot of what I would classify as “labor-intensive stupidity” (filling a friend’s house with a million Legos or tons of green slime, dropping a car from a helicopter into a pool of Orbeez, crashing a train into a brick wall, having a hundred people in dinosaur costumes walk into a store)

Many of MrBeast’s most popular videos are what is known as “stunt philanthropy,” making an entertaining spectacle out of giving large sums of money away. MrBeast hit upon the formula after using money from an early sponsorship deal to film a video in which he simply approached a random homeless man and handed him $10,000. The video became hugely popular, and MrBeast realized the “sheer viral power of simply giving money away.” As each video racked up views, the money it brought in was used to create the next cash giveaway stunt, with the amounts given away becoming more extreme as the channel became successful. When he filmed himself giving his mom $100,000, he explained to her that the video itself would go viral and therefore make the money back. (“So you’re using me for views?” she said. “Yes, but you get money too, so we’re both happy,” he replied.) Subsequent giveaway videos include: giving people on the street a credit card they can use to buy anything they like, tipping servers with actual gold bars, tipping a pizza guy by giving him the house he’s delivering to, opening a restaurant that hands out wads of cash to patrons, offering random people $100,000 to quit their jobs, and giving one of his subscribers an island.

Extravagantly giving away money has been extremely lucrative for MrBeast: he is now poised to be the first billionaire YouTuber. His line of chocolate bars (Feastables) is now stocked in Walmart, a custom Nerf gun bears his imprimatur, and he has a chain of “ghost franchise” burger restaurants (essentially, local restaurants deliver their own burgers to you in a MrBeast wrapper). His online shop has sold tie-in merchandise “like socks ($18), water bottles ($27) and T-shirts ($28).” (...)

MrBeast insists in interviews that the main goal of all of this is simply to help people and make positive change in the world. In the authorized documentary on his rise to fame, MrBeast says he just loves the feeling that comes from changing lives. When he handed a stranger thousands of dollars, “a lot of them just broke down in tears in front of me.” A pizza delivery guy who received one of MrBeast’s mega-huge tips was profusely thankful, telling him “I just got to spend the rest of the day with my kid because you gave me money and it allowed me to take the day off.”

MrBeast has therefore tried to target many of his giant cash donations to those who actually need them. He has given away a million dollars in food to people in need, given tens of thousands of dollars to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, bought all of the food in a grocery store to give it to a food bank, filled five buses with school supplies for poor schools, given millions to Ukrainian refugees, built houses for homeless families, rebuilt tornado survivors’ homes, and planted 20 million trees. 

The latest MrBeast philanthropy video, “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” has attracted some controversy. In it, he pays for thousands of sight-restoring surgeries for vision-impaired people around the world, and documents their reactions as they see the world with clear vision for the first time. (He also gives some of them stacks of cash, and gives one young man a brand new Tesla. One patient peels off the bandages and the first thing he sees is a sign that reads “You Just Won $10,000.”) Some viewers called the video “demonic” and “exploitative.”  (...)

But MrBeast has a defense of what he does: Would he be a better person if he didn’t cure the blind and donate to food banks? If he stuck to paying people to cover themselves in snakes, would he be less controversial? The people whose surgeries he paid for seem genuinely overwhelmed with gratitude, and it is clear he has changed their lives. One might argue that if he’s going to pay for surgeries, he shouldn’t do videos about it, because this kind of “inspiration porn” essentially coerces people with disabilities (since who is going to be able to turn down a sight-restoring operation?) into appearing on YouTube and uses them for clicks. MrBeast would likely counter by saying that his video has raised both awareness and money, and that people are going to have their sight restored who would not be able to see if the video hadn’t caused the public to donate the funds. One irate Beast-defender said “Go ahead and cancel him, that’s 1000 people that wouldn’t get a life-changing surgery they can’t afford.”

I think we can better understand the problem with MrBeast, however, if we don’t focus so much on MrBeast himself. In fact, the person who called MrBeast’s video “demonic” said exactly that: Beast himself was merely “fascinating and bizarre”; what was disturbing was a video whose core message was: “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” Another critic pointed out that the real problem was “the dystopian thought [that] we’re reliant on YouTube videos instead of competent government for assistance,” and we “can never again untangle acts of kindness from brand-building.” As Hasan Piker explained, the problem with the video is less with MrBeast paying for the surgeries than with the fact that a quick, easy surgery isn’t accessible to people in the first place and so they’re getting it through a MrBeast video:

“You watch this video and go, ‘Aww, how cute and how nice.’ I watch this video and I’m filled with rage that we shut off access to a ten-minute procedure because we paywalled it and decided that like some people just simply can’t get it. It is so insanely frustrating that it’s up to like one YouTube guy to decide to make content out of it, that people who are too poor can’t just fucking see.” (...)

It’s nice that MrBeast plants trees and donates to food banks. Plenty of the super-rich use less of their wealth to fund good works, so targeting him in particular can seem a little harsh. (However, I don’t mean to single him out for criticism; I’ve previously written about lots of other terrible rich people.) But he could do a great deal more good if, when trying to change lives, he gave some indication that he understood the basic concept of justice. As it is right now, it seems like the only thing he knows is that when he hands a giant roll of hundred dollar bills to someone, they become overjoyed, and he likes the feeling he gets when they tell him how wonderful he is and how much he has done for them. MrBeast could actually have done a video on blindness that would have avoided controversy if he had demonstrated some of the anger that Hasan Piker had about how it’s absurd that MrBeast even has to do this. He could have not just advocated that people in the audience give money, but encouraged them to think seriously about the fact that this problem could easily cease to exist with a few tweaks to the healthcare financing system. I realize it may be too much to expect from a 24-year-old YouTube bro who just enjoys playing Willy Wonka, showering golden tickets (blindness cures, bricks of cash, Teslas) on random people. But I am willing to take MrBeast at his word when he says he wants to give away his money and help people, and I believe it’s possible for him to undergo moral and political self-education that will make him a better advocate for the causes he says he cares about.

So while I’m tempted to say “the problem isn’t MrBeast himself, it’s the economic system that lets people become so desperate they need MrBeast in order to take a day off and see their kid,” and I do think that’s true, MrBeast himself is also grotesque. In his videos, he relishes the power that unlimited wealth gives him. Sometimes he uses this to change lives, but sometimes he will only give people the money if they first swim with sharks. The competitions mostly seem pretty harmless, if often unpleasant (staying in a small circle for 100 days to win $500,000), but it’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives. In a world where everybody was doing fine economically, maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it. (...)

I do think, however, that there is something fundamentally tawdry about MrBeast’s money obsession. The videos I like most are the ones where he does a complicated and cool thing like building a giant Lego tower. The videos I like least involve simply going up to people and handing them wodges of cash, not just because it conflicts with my notions of distributional justice, but because it’s lazy, taking advantage of the fact that just having a bunch of money gives you an immense amount of power in our world. Yes, it means you can get people to do things like sit in a big bucket of ramen noodles for hours. But the side of humanity that will eat worms for money is not the side we should be encouraging, because these scenarios are, at worst, exploitative and, at best, extremely stupid.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: MrBeast/uncredited

[ed. Links galore (if you're into this sort of thing). I've only been peripherally aware of this guy and glad I didn't waste my time finding out more.]

The Rage and Joy of MAGA America

I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.

It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGA-land:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.

Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!

It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.

Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”

Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero? (...)

Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.

It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient Ron DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.

The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle, via Getty Images
[ed. Sounds about right. I'm as sick of MAGA idiots (and their enablers) as I am Nazi sympathizers (white supremacists). Probably a lot of overlap.]

Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica. (...)

Already, the surge has been striking. The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.

And in the North Atlantic, the ocean has been off-the-charts hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.

The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.

“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”

by Brad Plumer and Elena Shao, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Wong/Associated Press
[ed. Not your grandmother's planet. Especially the ocean temps. See below.]

via:

Human Resources

ITEM: Insects are an ideal source of protein for denizens of a world facing climate change and a growing population.

ITEM: The rise of government-assisted euthanasia produces a new source of organ donations.

ITEM: A new startup that specializes in composting people seeks to raise $5 million in its latest funding round.

Scenes from a 1970s dystopian science fiction film? Nah, just typical headlines from the past year. How apropos, then, that it should be the fiftieth anniversary year of one of that subgenre’s most iconic films, Soylent Green. And, while we’re counting anniversaries, we’ve just passed the year in which that story was set, 2022.

But, to paraphrase the film’s central mystery, what is Soylent Green? It is many things: dystopian science fiction, kitsch, excellent meme-fodder, a showcase for Charlton Heston (who is simultaneously a genuine charismatic and one of cinema’s great hams), and more. It came out of that fertile late-1960s and early-1970s period of imaginative fiction, in which the gee-whiz optimism of the early postwar era gave way to increasing pessimism and even nihilism, and cosmic anxieties became metaphors for social ones, and vice versa.

Like most major science-fiction movies, it is based (loosely) on a novel, the mostly forgotten Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. And, like many science-fiction films — including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future II, and Blade Runner — the action takes place in a future that has now already passed. Soylent Green’s then-distant future of 2022 is one of desperate overpopulation, global warming, and class inequality. The few rich live in fortified compounds and have access to regular food and water, while the many poor must rely on synthetic foodstuff, mass-produced by the powerful Soylent Corporation. A partial solution to the demographic crisis is euthanasia.

The story centers on an NYPD detective, Robert Thorn (played by Heston), who uncovers a conspiracy spanning the government, scientific elites, and of course the Soylent Corporation. Through a series of plot machinations too convoluted to elaborate here, he discovers that the synthetic food Soylent Green is in fact made from the corpses of the recently euthanized, leading to the film’s famous climax, in which he reveals the awful truth.

It is a testament to the film’s resonance that many people who have never sat through an entire viewing of it nonetheless know its famous concluding scene — up there with the ending of Planet of the Apes (another Charlton Heston sci-fi showcase) for producing a cultural legacy that has outgrown that of the movie itself. (...)

Of course, overpopulation fears were hardly limited to the domain of imaginative fiction. Amid exponential population growth worldwide, the postwar era saw widespread expressions of concern, crystalized by Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, which erroneously predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions of people through starvation within a decade.

But the Malthusian nightmare did not come to pass. While the population of the United States (not to say the world) has increased substantially in the intervening years — growing nearly 60 percent since 1973 — apocalyptic fears of overcrowding and mass starvation did not materialize. In fact, throughout most of the world, demographic collapse is the more likely future, as birth rates continue to decline. Meanwhile, our agricultural output has been keeping pace with population growth thanks to the Green Revolution (though its benefits are not yet entirely global). If you lifted an extra out from inside the world of Soylent Green and deposited him in our own present day, one imagines he would be astonished at the world of plenty he now inhabits.

Is Soylent Green then merely a curio — a Seventies relic like The Late Great Planet Earth or pet rocks? Perhaps not. For technological advancement is not a panacea for social ills. And while our own story (so far) has averted the apocalypse, we have not averted some of the more dystopian implications of that era’s speculative fiction. (...)

Of course, one might argue that any prescience on the part of Soylent Green is qualified by its getting the larger Malthusian argument wrong. But beneath this material issue lies a deeper philosophical fear: that faced with external constraints, technocratic modernity will find instrumental uses for people, whether they want that or not. In this sense, the film retains a certain queasy power not in spite but because of its ridiculousness, its willingness to make explicit our otherwise tacit horror of turning human beings into mere matter — in this case, literally.

This is to say that Soylent Green may remain kitsch, but kitsch can sometimes express widespread hopes and fears more clearly than great art. And its particular fears concerning the appropriate size and equality of our population are arguably perennial ones, for every human society must reckon with them in some measure. Beneath these fears lies the question of whether our ever more utilitarian modern society has transformed humanity itself into something merely instrumental.

by David Polansky, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Soylent Green

Natalia Lafourcade

[ed. See also: Natalia Lafourcade: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert]

The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot

There’s a thought I keep on having, and maybe you’ve had it too. The main question they’ll ask about our age is: how did everything get so stupid, so fast? You can look at our economies and see inflation ripping through them. But there’s another kind of inflation at work too. In human folly, and all its flavors, from ignorance to malice to bad faith and beyond. It’s pulsating through our societies, and the lunatics, it seems, are seizing control of them, faster and faster.

I know you know that. But I also think it’s instructive to really think about it for a moment.

Think back to a decade ago. Just a decade ago. 2013. It seems like a…practically a…Golden Age…by comparison. We’d go online, and Twitter and Facebook weren’t…great. But they weren’t the smoking wrecks of disinformation, hate, and moronitude they are today, either — not even close. Our politics was fragmented and a little bit fractured — but nation after nation hadn’t been seduced by fanatics who’d go on to wreck its institutions and norms, like Brexit did to Britain, or Trumpism did to America. Our economies weren’t exactly in stellar shape — stagnation was beginning to bite.

But we weren’t exactly in the insane — to me as an economist, anyways — position of a recession hammered home by central banks raising rates to astronomical levels just as the mega-scale impacts of climate change hit. Which themselves were largely ignored, in favor of an endless parade of celebrities and billionaires.

Does it feel a little bit like…what’s the phrase I’m looking for…The Bonfire of Vanities at the end of a civilization…out there today? Welcome to the Acceleration of the Age of Stupid.

Think back, again, just a decade, and remember how you felt. How do you feel now, in comparison? If indicators are any bet, you feel not just worse, but astonishingly worse. People are so pessimistic that it’s hard to even do it justice in words — 80% of people, and this finding holds true across societies, basically think there’s not going to be a future, for them or their kids. A decade ago? Societies might not all have been shining examples of happiness — but they weren’t exactly biting their nails to keep from screaming in despair, either. And all that’s taken a knock-on effect on social cohesion, meaning trust and ties, which are collapsing at light speed.

When I or you say “stupid,” as in, “Jesus, how can people even be this stupid?” — and we mean everything from climate denial to regressive who want to take rights away to fanatics who want to ban books to lunatics who think storming Congress is wonderful and peaceful — part of what we mean, even if we don’t know it, is all that: pessimism, the loss of social cohesion, trust and ties collapsing — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

by Umair Haque, Eudimonia and Co. |  Read more:

Image: Peter Dynes

"So a weird and startling megatrend is emerging: human consciousness is shrinking — that’s what all these flavors of stupidity really are — at precisely the time it needs to expand. Expand most, given our civilization crossing the threshold into the Age of Extinction.

The growth of conscisouness is the expansion of empathy, grace, truth, beauty, justice, goodness, wisdom, courage, humility. See any of that happening? Or just the explosive growth of every flavor of folly, every crazed admixture of stupidity, history’s ever seen, at light speed?"

via:

They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.

Chris Hedges:They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine. (ScheerPost)

Image: Preying for Peace – by Mr. Fish

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Review – Tom Cruise Does It Better

Already, the keynote stunt has become a legend: the one on the poster, the one he reportedly did – for real – six times in one day before he was satisfied. Tom Cruise’s compact body floats free of the motorbike as it drops to earth from between his diamond-hard thighs, having launched him with a throaty roar off an unfeasibly high cliff-edge; he sails through the sky, pulls the ripcord on a nifty little parachute, and swoops down towards … the speeding Orient Express, fully intent on the traditional carriage-top punch-up. We gasped in the audience. Someone behind me went: “Oh shi-i-i …” Carly Simon should have come in with a new song: Fair Enough, Somebody Does It Better.

This outrageously enjoyable spectacle has compelled my awestruck assent with its sheer stamina, scale and brio: the seventh in the Mission: Impossible action franchise with Cruise starring as Ethan Hunt, the mysterious, superfit leader of a top-secret intelligence/combat unit called the Impossible Mission Force, brought in by a shadowy US government agency when they want deniable stuff doing. Their initials of course are IMF, and in this film they finally get round to doing the gag about them not being the International Monetary Fund, the one we reviewers have been doing for years.

  

Seven films! Daniel Craig got sick of 007 after just five. But at 61, Cruise looks better than ever and pretty much wedded to the IMF. (...)

In this film, as in so many in the past, evil forces are trying to get hold of a MacGuffiny object which will permit them to control/destroy the world, and Ethan and the gang are the only people to stop them. There is some tremendous stunt work, including a wacky Italian Job-style chase around Rome in a titchy little yellow Fiat, the biggest train scenes since Paddington 2 and some very impressive horsemanship from Tom in the Arabian desert – in his headdress he is the seventh pillar of hunkiness. A very tense opening sequence aboard a Russian sub called the Sebastopol – its associations with Crimea being perhaps a rebuke to Putinist chauvinism – introduces us to a certain bejewelled cruciform key, split into two; this is the oddly low-tech object whose owner, having reunited the halves, can master a new and terrifying form of AI, a self-replicating digital consciousness with the capacity to invade any operating system in the world. Already the genie is emerging from the bottle. (...)

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube
[ed. Taking my grandson to see this one. See also: Running, jumping, looking: is the new Mission Impossible the Tom Cruisiest film Tom Cruise has ever made? (Guardian).]