Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change Our Minds?

The theory behind C.B.T. rests on an unlikely idea—that we can be rational after all.

Burns didn’t invent cognitive behavioral therapy, but he is connected to its founding lineage. He studied with the psychologist Aaron Beck, who created an approach known as cognitive therapy, or C.T., in the nineteen-sixties, and is often described as the “father” of C.B.T. Beck’s ideas dovetailed with the work of Albert Ellis, a psychologist who had invented rational-emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T., the decade before. There are substantive differences between C.B.T. and R.E.B.T., but also essential commonalities. They all reflect the so-called cognitive revolution—a shift, which began in psychology during the mid-twentieth century, toward a more information-based view of the mind. Freudian thinkers had pictured our minds as hydraulic machines, with pressures rising against resistances and psychic forces that might get bottled up. The cognitive model, by contrast, imagined something more like a computer. Bad information, if it were stored in a crucial place, could cause system-wide problems; irrational or inaccurate thought patterns could shape feelings or behaviors in counterproductive ways, and vice versa. Coders get at a similar idea when they say, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Ellis, who earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1947, trained as a psychoanalyst but grew frustrated with the tradition’s approach to therapy, which he felt emphasized dwelling on one’s feelings and ultimately subordinated patients to their pasts. The “rational therapy” for which he became known in the sixties proposed that individuals had the power to reshape themselves willfully and deliberately, not by reinterpreting their life stories but by directly analyzing and modifying their own beliefs and behaviors. “We teach people that they upset themselves then and that they’re still doing it now,” Ellis said, in a 2001 interview. “We can’t change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling, and behaving today.” Ellis showed his patients how to avoid “catastrophic thinking,” and guided them toward “unconditional acceptance” of themselves—a rational position in which you acknowledge your weaknesses as well as your strengths.

Beck, like Ellis, trained in a Freudian tradition. “He was a psychoanalyst who had people lie on the couch and free-associate,” his daughter, the psychologist Judith Beck, who heads the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. He switched from searching for repressed memories to identifying automatic thoughts after a client seemed anxious during her session and told him, “I’m afraid that I’m boring you.” Beck found that many of his patients had similar negative mental touchstones, and based cognitive therapy upon a model of the mind in which negative “core beliefs”—of being helpless, inferior, unlovable, or worthless—lead to a cascade of coping strategies and maladaptive behaviors. Someone “might have the underlying belief ‘If I try to do something difficult, I’ll just fail,’ ” Judith Beck told me. “And so we might see coping strategies flow from that—for example, avoiding challenges at work.” In C.T., patient and therapist joined in a kind of “collaborative empiricism,” examining thoughts together and investigating whether they were accurate and helpful. C.T. combined with elements from behavioral approaches, such as face-your-fear “exposure” therapy, to create C.B.T.

In the second half of the twentieth century, rational and cognitive therapies grew in prominence, their lingo sliding from psychology into culture in roughly the same way that Freudian language had. Ellen Kanner, a clinical psychologist who trained in the nineteen-seventies and has been in practice in New York since 1982, watched the rise of C.B.T. in her clinic. “I’ve seen psychology evolve from very Freudian, when I first did my training,” she told me. Cognitive behavioral therapy had an advantage, she recalled, because therapists and researchers liked its organized approach: exercises, worksheets, and even the flow of a therapy session were standardized. “You could more easily codify it and put it in a study with a control, and see whether it was effective,” she recalled. Patients, meanwhile, found the approach appealing because it was empowering. C.B.T. is openly pitched as a kind of self-help—“We tell people in the first session, ‘My goal is to make you your own therapist,’ ” Judith Beck told me—and patients were encouraged to practice its techniques between sessions, and to continue using them after therapy had ended. Compared with older approaches, C.B.T. was also unthreatening. “When they’re using it, therapists aren’t asking you about your sexuality or whether someone molested you,” Kanner said. “C.B.T. is more acceptable to more people. It’s more rational and less intrusive. The therapist doesn’t seem as powerful.”

The pivot that C.B.T. represented—from the unconscious to the conscious, and from idiosyncrasy to standardization—has enabled its broad adoption. In 2015, a study by Paulo Knapp, Christian Kieling, and Aaron Beck found that C.B.T. was the most widely used form of psychotherapy among therapists surveyed; in a paper published in 2018, titled “Why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Is the Current Gold Standard of Psychotherapy,” the psychologist Daniel David and his collaborators concluded that it was the most studied psychotherapy technique. (“No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to be systematically superior to CBT,” they write. “If there are systematic differences between psychotherapies, they typically favor CBT.”) Meanwhile, the therapy keeps extending its reach. “I just got back from Japan, where they’re teaching C.B.T. in schools, and have used C.B.T. methods for people who were at risk for suicide,” Beck told me. In the U.S., many schools integrate aspects of C.B.T. into their curricula; the U.K.’s National Health Service has commissioned at least a hundred thousand C.B.T. sessions. Increasingly, C.B.T. is also delivered through apps or chat interfaces, by human therapists or bots; studies have shown that online C.B.T. can be as effective as therapy conducted in person. Even though C.B.T.’s central tenets are nearly half a century old, people who discover it today may still find that it feels au courant. It’s a serious therapeutic tool, but it’s also a little life-hacky; it’s well suited for an era in which we seek to optimize ourselves, clear our minds, and live more rationally.

Iasked Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, for his views on C.B.T., and he referred me to a comedy sketch, made in the early two-thousands, starring Bob Newhart as a therapist and Mo Collins as his patient. “I have this fear of being buried alive in a box,” Collins says. Newhart asks, rationally, “Has anyone ever tried to bury you alive in a box?” “No, no,” Collins replies. “But, truly, thinking about it does make my life horrible.”

“Well, I’m going to say two words to you right now,” Newhart explains. “I want you to take them out of the office with you and incorporate them into your life. . . . You ready?”

“Yes,” Collins says.

“Stop it!” Newhart screams. (...)

C.B.T. does contain a theory of change—and it’s not entirely convincing. If people could change just because rational thinking told them to, we wouldn’t live in such a crazy world. Yet the rationality of C.B.T. is aspirational. We can wish that we were the kinds of people who could solve our biggest problems simply by seeing them more clearly. Sometimes, by acting as though we are those people, we can become them.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Evan Cohen
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Want to Live to 150? The World Needs More Humans

Last year, the global population crossed 8 billion. In recent decades, it has also enjoyed the highest levels of nourishment, housing conditions, comfort in travel, and education in all of history, as Steven Pinker documents in “Enlightenment Now.” The 20th century’s scientific breakthroughs gave us vaccines, chemotherapies, and antibiotics. In just one century, average life expectancy rose from 31 to 68.

But this extraordinary leap in life expectancy happened without a corresponding increase in health-span. Because aging itself hasn’t been considered a medical disorder, people today generally spend half their lifetime in declining health.

Some 90 percent of all deaths in developed countries are due to to age-related decline, including cancers, heart disease, dementias, and severe infection. By 2029, the United States will spend an unprecedented half of its annual federal budget — $3 trillion, or thrice its military outlay — on adults 65 or older, on measures like Alzheimer’s care and retirement pensions. By 2050, Japan will lose some 20 million people, while Brazil’s senior population is set to triple. About 50 million Americans — predominantly women — are now unpaid caretakers of older adults, at a $500-billion-a-year opportunity cost.

Could new technologies solve these problems by extending the healthy years of long-lived populations? This is the question the emerging field of aging research has set out to answer — and labs in some of Boston’s elite institutions are among those with data suggesting that aging can be not just slowed down, but also reversed.

If we solve aging, we may well solve our emerging underpopulation crisis. (...)

In his 2019 book “Lifespan,” Harvard geneticist David Sinclair wrote that “aging may be more easily treatable than cancer.” After several years working to understand and control the biological mechanisms of aging, he tells me, his lab is showing that aging may be “like scratches on a CD that can be polished off.” His team’s latest findings were published in the journal Cell on Jan. 12. Their paper suggested mammalian aging is in part the result of a reversible loss of epigenetic information: our cells’ ability to turn genes on or off at the right time.

In “Lifespan,” Sinclair points out that if we cloned a 65-year-old person, the clone wouldn’t be born old — which says a lot about how our “youthful digital information” remains intact, even if this 65-year-old’s genetic expression and cell regulation mechanisms are presently functioning less than optimally. There seems to be, as Sinclair notes, a backup information copy within each of us, which remains retrievable.

There is no guarantee that cellular reprogramming will work in humans — but after decades of (at times, highly criticized) work, Sinclair’s lab published what is set to become a widely influential study on the role of epigenetic change in aging. Futurist Peter Diamandis, trained as a physician and now executive chairman of the XPrize Foundation (a science and technology nonprofit for which I consult), tells me aging must be “either a software or a hardware problem — solvable by a species capable of developing vaccines for a novel virus within months.”

Indeed, the human life expectancy of 80 years and the current health span of roughly 40 (when most chronic illnesses begin to appear) are not just economically alarming — they don’t appear to be a biological imperative.

Humans are one of only five species in the animal kingdom that undergo menopause. Lobsters are often more fertile at 100 than at 30. Naked mole rats’ chances of dying do not increase with age. Bowhead whales live to 200 and are incredibly resistant to the diseases of aging.

Other examples abound — and the genetic therapies that could translate these features into human bodies are becoming increasingly precise. Promising research in human genes, cells, and blood drives home that aging is a malleable process that can be decoupled from the passing of time.

It is well established that aging can be sped up, slowed down, and reversed. This is done every day with diet, mental health practices, and exercise. What’s novel about this century’s science is the promise to engineer therapies that might control the aging process more effectively.
And we have, I will suggest, an ethical imperative to do both — even though tackling aging itself as a medical problem remains a contrarian idea. (...)

Yet despite the enormous promise of aging therapies, the field hasn’t attracted a correspondingly large amount of government funding. Out of the $4 billion devoted to the National Institute of Aging yearly, only $300 million goes to fundamental aging research.

Why?

by Raiany Romanni, Boston Globe |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s War of the Rosé

The call came in to the concierge at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the fabled luxury hotel on the French Riviera. It was spring 2007, and an assistant to Angelina Jolie said that Jolie and her fiancé, Brad Pitt, were seeking a sizable property in the South of France to rent.

So began a glorious holiday, away from the spotlight, for Jolie, Pitt, and their four children in a sprawling château with a staff of 12 in the leafy glades of southwestern France. It was so idyllic that they decided to find an even bigger and more secluded property, not to rent but to buy.

Now, in June 2007, Brad Pitt sat in a twin-engine helicopter, his blue eyes scanning the verdant Provençal landscape. He and Jolie were “helicopter-hopping” with Jonathan Gray, the real estate broker recommended by the hotel. “There were six of us: two pilots, Brad and Angelina, their daughter Shiloh—who was one at the time—their American Realtor, and myself,” says Gray, who had arranged a top secret three-day tour of the region. They spent their days flying from one address to the next, searching for what Pitt would later describe as “a European base for our family…where our kids could run free and not be subjected to the celebrity of Hollywood.”

They touched down at more than a dozen properties, from cozy châteaux to vast estates, from the Riviera to Provence. Finally, on the morning of the third day, they flew over a magnificent 1,000-acre château and vineyard nestled in its own valley. Its name reflected its grandeur: Miraval, French for “miracle.”

They were 50 miles east of Aix-en-Provence and just outside of the tiny town of Correns, population 830. “Brad and Angelina took one look and immediately said, ‘Yeah, let’s go see it!’ ” says Gray.

Wine has been made at Miraval for centuries. The privileged domain of an Italian noble family for five generations, it was sold in 1972 to the French jazz musician Jacques Loussier. He produced red, white, and rosé wine on the estate and converted an ancient water tower into a recording studio, which attracted the likes of Sting, Sade, and Pink Floyd, who recorded their 1979 hit album The Wall there.

In 1992, Miraval was purchased by a US Naval Academy engineering graduate named Tom Bove and his family for approximately $5 million. Bove had made a fortune in water treatment before catching what he calls “the wine bug.” He ramped up the estate’s winemaking operation, turning out a small selection of vintages, including Pink Floyd rosé, which he launched in 2006.

Now Miraval was on the market. Bove, whose wife had died, was ready to move on. Suddenly, a helicopter descended and out stepped two of the world’s biggest superstars.

Pitt extended his hand for a shake. Jolie had Shiloh in her arms and “asked for a place to change the baby,” says Bove. Then Jolie, Pitt, and their brokers scouted the vast estate, a wonderland of olive and oak trees, lavender fields, a lake, vineyards on stone terraces, and ancient stone buildings, including a 35-room manor house.

Bove sensed that Jolie was allowing her husband to take the lead. “She let him talk,” says Bove. “From my side she was very gentle. You read all this stuff now, but they were a very nice couple, very sweet and obviously in love with each other.”

And obviously in love with Miraval. So much so that, as the morning stretched into afternoon, Bove invited everyone to stay for a meal. “Brad and I moved the tables around in the garden, and we had lunch,” says Bove. “Drank the wines of Miraval, which were very good. And then we toured the rest of the property.”

Before the party climbed back on board the helicopter, Pitt told Bove, “We’ll be back.” Bove didn’t doubt it. “It seemed like they wanted to buy it right then.”

Bove says Pitt then added, “This is the first place we visited where Angie is smiling.”

Not so long ago, there was no couple in the world bigger than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. From the moment they met, on the set of the 2005 action romance Mr. & Mrs. Smith, their attraction was magnetic, fiery, passionate, incendiary, almost insane. Their divorce would be even fiercer in its intensity.

At the center of it all is Miraval. Conceived as a family retreat, it became a high-end commercial enterprise, producing honey, olive oil, a skin care line, and music from Miraval Studios. It all began with a signature wine, Miraval Côtes de Provence rosé, whose revenues reached $50 million in 2021.

“Even now impossible to write this without crying,” Jolie would say of Miraval in an email she sent Pitt in 2021, four years after she filed for divorce. “Above all, it is the place we brought the twins home to, and where we were married over a plaque in my mother’s memory. A place…where I thought I would grow old…. But it is also the place that marks the beginning of the end of our family.”

The story of Miraval parallels the story of Jolie and Pitt. As their legal battle stretches ever onward, their dueling lawsuits offer competing versions of a dark and disturbing saga. In Jolie’s telling, it’s a tale of alcohol abuse and financial control. For Pitt, it’s one of vengeance and retribution. Neither can deny its sheer dramatic force. There are echoes, even, of the movie that brought them together, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which they played a “married couple” per IMDB, “surprised to learn that they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other.”

Soon after Pitt and Jolie’s visit to Miraval, Bove heard from their brokers, then from lawyers and more lawyers. The overtures became even more urgent when Jolie learned she was pregnant with twins. “They wanted to be in ahead of the birth,” says Bove. Through their respective holding companies, the couple purchased the property on May 8, 2008, for 25 million euros.

Eight days before the deal was signed, Jolie’s business manager suggested adding a doomsday clause stipulating that, should the couple ever split, each would have the right to buy the other’s share of Miraval. Pitt rejected the idea, according to her cross-complaint, telling his business manager it “wasn’t necessary for two reasonable people.” However, as a by-product of their supposedly everlasting love, he would insist that he and Jolie later made a pact agreeing never to “sell their respective interests in Miraval without the other’s consent.” It was a promise Jolie would deny, claiming “no such agreement ever existed.”

Bove agreed to stay on and continue running Miraval’s wine operation. He retained 220 acres to operate on his own. “I think at that moment, Brad wasn’t really interested in making wine,” Bove says. “He liked the idea that he’d have a vineyard, but he really left the wine thing to me.”

From his office, Bove watched an armada of vehicles deliver the family’s possessions. “Vans and vans arriving with furniture, incredibly packaged by the finest movers,” all of it orchestrated by Pitt, says Bove. “He came more often because he wanted to get things started with the renovation.”

Along with the possessions came the staff: “nannies, from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.,” according to one published source, along with two personal assistants (not always in residence); “a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a plongeur, or busboy; [and] four close-protection bodyguards.” Extensive renovations began immediately. “More Californian as opposed to Provençal,” says Bove. The ancient stone chapel became a parking area for the four-wheel all-terrain vehicles the family used to traverse the massive property.

And finally came the movie stars and their growing brood of children. They joined an invasion of celebrity home buyers in Provence that would come to include, just within a 100-mile radius of Miraval, Johnny Depp and his then wife Vanessa Paradis, George Lucas, George Clooney, John Malkovich, and many more.

For a time, leading the pack, were the most famous of them all—the couple known worldwide as Brangelina. (...)

They were “our last great Hollywood couple,” the New York Post eulogized after the breakup. “Their lineage was Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, Liz and Dick—golden megastars all, with outsize love stories.”

They began as mere mortals. The daughter of Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight and actor Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie was a wild child who collected knives and aspired to be a funeral home director. At age five, she reportedly said she intended to become “an actress, a big actress.” She won raves for her performance in the 1998 HBO movie Gia, whose tagline—“Everybody Saw the Beauty, No One Saw the Pain”—seemed apt in light of her fraught relationship with her father. The following year, she broke big in Girl, Interrupted, riding a wave of acclaim to the Oscar podium, where, all of 24 years old, she accepted the award for best supporting actress.

By then, William Bradley Pitt was already a star. He’d arrived in Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, in a battered Datsun with $325 in his pocket. The astonishingly handsome son of a trucking company dad and a stay-at-home mom, he had dropped out of college two weeks short of graduating with a journalism degree. He told his folks that he was moving to LA not to act but to “go into graphic design, so they wouldn’t worry.”

Unlike Jolie, he had no movie-star dad, no contacts, nothing but a dream. He stood in the streets in a yellow El Pollo Loco chicken costume, waving a sign to beckon diners inside, and drove exotic dancers to their Strip-a-Gram appointments. Then Billy Baldwin dropped out of the 1991 feminist road picture Thelma & Louise to do the firefighting movie Backdraft. Tapped as a last-minute replacement, Pitt set his scenes ablaze as a hunky hitchhiker who hooks up with Geena Davis before taking off with her cash.

In May 2000, Jolie, then 24, married 44-year-old Billy Bob Thornton in Las Vegas. That July, Pitt married Friends star Jennifer Aniston in a $1 million wedding in Malibu.

By the time Jolie and Pitt met four years later on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jolie and Thornton had divorced, though not before she adopted an orphaned baby boy from Cambodia, whom she named Maddox. Pitt and Aniston were still very much a couple—until he collided with Jolie.

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Anthony Harvey. Chateau: Michel Gangne/AFP. Both Getty Images

How Russia Went from Ally to Adversary

In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush. They met off the coast of Malta, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Gorbachev was very much looking forward to the summit, as he looked forward to all his summits; things at home were spiralling out of control, but his international standing was undimmed. He was in the process of ending the decades-long Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear holocaust. When he appeared in foreign capitals, crowds went wild.

Bush was less eager. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had blown a huge hole in the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending; then he had somewhat rashly decided to go along with Gorbachev’s project to rearrange the world system. Bush’s national-security team, which included the realist defense intellectual Brent Scowcroft, had taken a pause to review the nation’s Soviet policy. The big debate within the U.S. government was whether Gorbachev was in earnest; once it was concluded that he was, the debate was about whether he’d survive.

On the summit’s first day, Gorbachev lamented the sad state of his economy and praised Bush’s restraint and thoughtfulness with regard to the revolutionary events in the Eastern Bloc—he did not, as Bush himself put it, jump “up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Bush responded by praising Gorbachev’s boldness and stressing that he had economic problems of his own. Then Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”

As the historian Vladislav Zubok explains in his recent book “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale), “This was a fundamental statement, a foundation for all future negotiations.” But, as two members of Gorbachev’s team who were present for the conversations noted, Bush did not react. Perhaps it was because he was recovering from seasickness. Perhaps it was because he was not one for grand statements and elevated rhetoric. Or perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender. (...)

In February, 1990, two months after the summit with Bush on the Maxim Gorky, Gorbachev hosted James Baker, the U.S. Secretary of State, in Moscow. This was one of Gorbachev’s last opportunities to get something from the West before Germany reunified. But, as Mary Elise Sarotte relates in “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate” (Yale), her recent book on the complex history of NATO expansion, he was not up to the task. Baker posed to Gorbachev a hypothetical question. “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces,” Baker asked, “or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” This last part would launch decades of debate. Did it constitute a promise—later, obviously, broken? Or was it just idle talk? In the event, Gorbachev answered lamely that of course NATO could not expand. Baker’s offer, if that’s what it was, would not be repeated. In fact, as soon as people in the White House got wind of the conversation, they had a fit. Two weeks later, at Camp David, Bush told Kohl what he thought of Soviet demands around German reunification. “The Soviets are not in a position to dictate Germany’s relationship with NATO,” he said. “To hell with that.”

The U.S. pressed its advantage; Gorbachev, overwhelmed by mounting problems at home, settled for a substantial financial inducement from Kohl and some vague security assurances. Soon, the Soviet Union was no more, and the overriding priority for U.S. policymakers became nuclear deproliferation. Ukraine, newly independent, had suddenly become the world’s No. 3 nuclear power, and Western countries set about persuading it to give up its arsenal. Meanwhile, events in the former Eastern Bloc were moving rapidly. (...)

After the Soviet collapse, Western advisers, investment bankers, democracy promoters, and just plain con men flooded the region. The advice on offer was, in retrospect, contradictory. On the one hand, Western officials urged the former Communist states to build democracy; on the other, they made many kinds of aid contingent on the implementation of free-market reforms, known at the time as “shock therapy.” But the reason the reforms had to be administered brutally and all at once—why they had to be a shock—was that they were by their nature unpopular. They involved putting people out of work, devaluing their savings, and selling key industries to foreigners. The political systems that emerged in Eastern Europe bore the scars of this initial contradiction.

In almost every former Communist state, the story of reform played out in the same way: collapse, shock therapy, the emergence of criminal entrepreneurs, violence, widespread social disruption, and then, sometimes, a kind of rebuilding. Many of the countries are now doing comparatively well. Poland has a per-capita G.D.P. approaching Portugal’s; the Czech Republic exports its Škoda sedans all over the world; tiny Estonia is a world leader in e-governance. But the gains were distributed unequally, and serious political damage was done.

In no country did the reforms play out more dramatically, and more consequentially, than in Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s first post-Soviet Cabinet was led by a young radical economist named Yegor Gaidar. In a matter of months, he transformed the enormous Russian economy, liberalizing prices, ending tariffs on foreign goods, and launching a voucher program aimed at distributing the ownership of state enterprises among the citizenry. The result was the pauperization of much of the population and the privatization of the country’s industrial base by a small group of well-connected men, soon to be known as the oligarchs. When the parliament, still called the Supreme Soviet and structured according to the old Soviet constitution, tried to put a brake on the reforms, Yeltsin ordered it disbanded. When it refused to go, Yeltsin ordered that it be shelled. Many of the features that we associate with Putinism—immense inequality, a lack of legal protections for ordinary citizens, and super-Presidential powers—were put in place in the early nineteen-nineties, in the era of “reform.”

When it came to those reforms, did we give the Russians bad advice, or was it good advice that they implemented badly? And, if it was bad advice, did we dole it out maliciously, to destroy their country, or because we didn’t know what we were doing? Many Russians still believe that Western advice was calculated to harm them, but history points at least partly in the other direction: hollowing out the government, privatizing public services, and letting the free market run rampant were policies that we also implemented in our own country. The German historian Philipp Ther argues that the post-Soviet reform process would have looked very different if it had taken place even a decade earlier, before the so-called Washington Consensus about the benevolent power of markets had congealed in the minds of the world’s leading economists. One could add that it would also have been different two decades later, after the 2008 financial crisis had caused people to question again the idea that capitalism could be trusted to run itself.

Back during the last months of Gorbachev’s tenure, there was briefly talk of another Marshall Plan for the defeated superpower. A joint Soviet-American group led by the economist Grigory Yavlinsky and the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison proposed something they called a Grand Bargain, which would involve a huge amount of aid to the U.S.S.R., contingent on various reforms and nonproliferation efforts. In “Collapse,” Zubok describes a National Security Council meeting in June, 1991, at which the Grand Bargain was discussed. Nicholas Brady, then the Secretary of the Treasury, spoke out forcefully against extensive aid to the Soviet Union. He was candid about America’s priorities, saying, “What is involved is changing Soviet society so that it can’t afford a defense system. If the Soviets go to a market system, then they can’t afford a large defense establishment. A real reform program would turn them into a third-rate power, which is what we want.”

But, if our advice and actions did damage to Russia, they also did damage to us. In a forthcoming book, “How the West Lost the Peace” (Polity), translated by Jessica Spengler, Ther writes on the concept of “co-transformation.” Change and reform moved in both directions. Borders softened. We sent Russia Snickers bars and personal computers; they sent us hockey players and Tetris. But there were less positive outcomes, too. It was one thing to impose “structural adjustment” on the states of the former Eastern Bloc, quite another when their desperate unemployed showed up at our borders. Ther uses the example of Poland—a large country that underwent a jarring and painful reform period yet emerged successfully, at least from an economic perspective, on the other side. But in the process many people were put out of work; rural and formerly industrialized sections of the country did not keep up with the big cities. This generated a political reaction that was eventually expressed in support for the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, which in 2020 all but banned abortions in Poland. At the same time, a great many Poles emigrated to the West, including to the United Kingdom, where their presence engendered a xenophobic reaction that was one of the proximate causes, in 2016, of Brexit.

The reforms did not merely cause financial pain. They led to a loss in social status, to a loss of hope. These experiences were not well captured by economic statistics. The worst years for Russians were the ones between 1988 and 1998; after that, the ruble was devalued, exports began to rise, oil prices went up, and, despite enormous theft at the top, the dividends trickled down to the rest of society. But the aftereffects of that decade of pain were considerable. Life expectancy had dropped by five years; there was severe social dislocation. At the end of it, many people were prepared to support, and some people even to love, a colorless but energetic former K.G.B. agent named Vladimir Putin.

by Keith Gessen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Eduardo Morciano; Source photograph from Getty

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)
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