Succession: Fox Style

The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch

It’s nice to know that Fox News, which has so deranged America while making Rupert Murdoch ungodly sums of money, has in the end made Murdoch miserable, at least if the journalist Michael Wolff is to be believed. But the consolation is a small one.

Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of Wolff’s amusingly vicious and very well-timed book, “The Fall: The End of Fox News,” which is to hit shelves next week, days after Murdoch, 92, announced his retirement from the Fox Corporation and News Corporation boards. Wolff paints Fox’s owner as embarrassed by the channel’s vulgarity and horrified by its ultimate political creation, Donald Trump. Murdoch apparently very much wants to thwart the ex-president, just not at the price of losing a single point in the ratings.

In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. “Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal,” writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch’s helplessness was a choice.

Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. (It was as part of that settlement, Wolff writes, that Fox fired its biggest star, the demagogic troll Tucker Carlson.)

In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on. (...)

Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”

But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.

Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.

by Michelle Goldberg, New York Times |  Read more:

Image: Mike Segar/Reuters

[ed. Crocodile tears. See also: Meet the New Murdoch, Same as the Old Murdoch (RS).]

Steve Jobs Loved Walking Meetings

New research shows why he was right.

Steve Jobs had a favorite way to hold a meeting with an employee, partner, or potential collaborator: He liked to walk, usually simply strolling around the company's neighborhood in Cupertino, California.

He was onto something. Conducting a meeting while walking has clear health benefits for the participants, but it turns out it benefits the meeting, too. New research from the University of Hong Kong shows that walking side by side helps people connect to each other. This effect is so powerful that it works on people who've never met before, even while they aren't speaking to each other. And it happens in less than five minutes.

Miao Cheng and the research team from Hong Kong University's Department of Psychology were curious to learn what effect walking had on relations between two people. They noted that previous research had conclusively shown that moving together, especially when synchronizing movements, tends to build bonds between people and that walking side-by-side while having a conversation has been shown to have this effect. But, as the researchers note, having a conversation in itself builds connections between people. They wanted to test the effect of walking together by itself.

To do this, they matched up a total 257 pairs of people and invited them to give impressions of each other before taking about a quarter-mile walk together. (Participants took the walk multiple times, but each time with a new partner. They were told the experiment was about their perceptions of how long the walk took.) At the end of the quarter mile, they again reported their impressions of each other and then walked back to the starting point. One group of pairs was forbidden from conversing on the first part of the walk but allowed to chat on the way back. In a second experiment, they were told to stay silent for the entire walk. And a control group of participants simply sat in a room together working on a simple task for about the same amount of time as the walk, to test the social effect of simply being in another person's presence.

Falling into step.

Researchers used sensors to measure how participants walked and found that participants tended to synchronize their walking--"fall into step" with each other--even if they were strangers and even if they weren't allowed to talk. They found that participants' impressions of their partners grew more favorable after the first part of the walk--which took only 3 to 4 1/2 minutes--even though they weren't allowed to speak to each other. Those who were allowed to converse on the return trip got to like each other even more.

by Minda Zetlen, Inc.  |  Read more:

Image: Getty  via

[ed. Seems intuitive (some might disagree). I wonder if the informal benefits of this might extend to educational situations, too.]

Velvet Underground and Nico

[ed. See also Screen Tests (an art project by Andy Warhol, who was VU's manager at the time), where subjects "attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed." For example, here's an uncomfortable Bob Dylan, and also Lou Reed drinking a coke. And, if that's not weird enough, check out this "Mod Wedding" in Detroit around the same time.]

The Stuffiest Country Club Stories We've Ever Heard

One story that best encapsulates country club point-missing has circulated for years. The setting is an old, eastern golf club, with one of the best courses in the state. The club is notorious for its men-only policy. Forget about women joining as members or playing the golf course. Only a few days a year are they even allowed on the property.

One day a member having lunch at the club abruptly falls ill at the table. He grabs his chest, falls to his knees. A concerned scrum gathers around his table. Word reaches his wife, who arrives at the club gates within minutes.

“He is inside,” she is told as she tries to pass through. “Unfortunately,” the attendant continues, “no women are allowed on property. Please wait here.”

No way this is true.

“I’m afraid it is true,” one longtime member of the club says. “I’ve heard it, too,” a frequent guest of the club confirmed.

“It’s true.”

A similar story comes from another elite club. You would know it if you heard it. Another lunch, another golfer topples over. (Is there something in the food at these clubs?) In this case the man regains consciousness. “Please contact my wife,” he says from the floor, and hands his friend his phone.

The friend starts dialing, then stops. He is also a member and is now saddled with an inconvenient thought. “I can’t,” he says. “No cellphones in the grillroom.”

You will not find a set definition of country club stuffiness. As with pornography and a vanity handicap, you know it when you see it: rules for the sake of rules, a rigid adherence to tradition, an outsized emphasis on the superficial. This attitude is also, hopefully, in decline. This collection of stories, most from within the past 15 years, represents a side of golf the game has made efforts to shake, with at least some degree of success. Golf today is more modern, more inviting. Golf might still have its share of snobs, killjoys, and Judge Smails disciples, embracing priorities that range from archaic to laughably misguided, but at least the narrative has shifted. Once a statement, This is just a part of golf, it is now a question: This is still a part of golf?

Short answer: not as much.

Longer answer: maybe still a little.

There is at least one counterintuitive element to the American dream, which is if you work hard and advance in your chosen profession, you might be lucky enough to join the sort of club where you will always feel on edge. This is not how it’s planned, of course, but it is an outcome nonetheless. The typical municipal course might have scruffier conditions and longer rounds, but at least you won’t be ostracized for using the wrong fork. Sometimes the more exclusive the address, the more precarious the footing. Once, a golfer joined a blue-blood Connecticut club and was excited to jump into his membership. He played both weekend days and showed up during the week to practice. This went on for a short time until one evening a member of the golf staff greeted him on the practice green. The conversation began with some innocuous small talk but then led to a message. “You’re showing up here too much,” the new member was informed. It was time to scale it back. (...)

At some top-of-the-pyramid clubs, the membership process follows the logic of high school courtships, which says the best way to secure interest from the other party is to express as little interest as possible. Your microscopic chances of an Augusta National membership are contingent on you never confiding to anyone—not to your significant other, not to your clergyman, perhaps not even to yourself—that you would ever want to join. Even when in the door, though, you remain on guard. As the story goes, a member invited a guest for a dream weekend of golf and lodging in one of the club’s cabins. When a high-ranking green jacket approached during cocktail hour one evening, it was not to solicit feedback on the green speeds. “Please tell your guest we wear socks here for dinner,” the green jacket told the other green jacket, never once looking in the bare-ankled offender’s direction.

Broadly, guest experiences at clubs can be divided into two categories—one in which they strive to make you feel at home, the other in which they work hard to remind you that you’re not. At some of the country’s A-list clubs, guests can show up ahead of a member and are treated as if they are the ones writing the checks, with access to locker rooms, the practice range, perhaps even a bite to eat. At other places, you’re encouraged to wait in the parking lot, if not the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street.

At a Northern California club with holes along the Pacific, a guest showed up one day and wandered innocently into the golf shop to buy a gift for his wife. The shop attendant informed him unaccompanied guests were prohibited from buying anything.

“OK, then,” the guest replied, “I’ll just hit balls.” When he asked to be pointed to the practice area, the attendant directed him to the range at a different course, a mile down the road. (...)

At many clubs rules persist about where one can change shoes, as if the appearance of socks in broad daylight is a form of indecent exposure. At a name-brand club outside New York City, a guest showed up wearing sneakers, which he was told weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, so he then sought to change his shoes by his car.

“Amazingly, out of nowhere, an employee pops up from the trees and says, ‘Sir, you aren’t allowed to change your shoes in the parking lot,’ ” his friend recalled. “We tried to solve this issue and kept asking the employee what to do. His response, ‘Figure it out.’ ”

Briefly stumped, the guest resolved to walk back down the driveway of the club in his sneakers until he was outside the gates, changed into his golf shoes, then walked back. Problem solved, calories burned.

For an inanimate stretch of asphalt, a parking lot can provide a telling window into a club’s worldview in other ways. At a posh Palm Beach club, a guest arrived in a pickup truck and was asked if he was there to make a delivery.

“No, I have a tee time,” he replied. He returned from his round to learn the valet parked his truck in the service lot.

At a different club in the North Carolina mountains, the staff didn’t even pretend to make a mistake when a guest arrived in a new Ford pickup. “I kept it pretty,” the owner said of his vehicle. “This was no beater with rust.” Still, a club employee ran frantically into the locker room to report that pickup trucks aren’t allowed to be visible in the top parking lot and that it needed to be moved. “My nice truck had been banished to oblivion where apparently it belonged,” the guest continued. “They seemed to have stretched the traditional club etiquette to include well-behaved vehicles, too.” (...)

Sometimes it’s not the rule that is so unreasonable but the way it’s enforced. Consider the time a guest arrived at a top-100 course in Pennsylvania wearing cargo shorts, and his host decided the best way to spare his friend embarrassment was to tee off hoping no one would notice. He was wrong. On the third hole a staff member came with a letter from the club manager issuing a formal warning and a suggestion to buy new shorts in the golf shop as soon as possible. However, the letter’s delivery couldn’t be topped. The staff member was in a tuxedo, carrying the letter on a silver platter.

“The sight will be burned in my memory,” a third member of the group recalled. (...)

Play enough golf and these stories are not difficult to uncover. They travel freely because no one ever forgets them. The harder part is explaining them because a thorough unpacking should probably draw on insight from a broad assortment of anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and locker-room attendants.

A charitable view is that many golfers look to their club as a sanctuary from the disorder of their everyday lives, so they hold themselves and others to a standard that can’t be maintained anywhere else. That’s the nice way of framing it. Another perspective says some golf clubs make you feel privileged to be there, and others want you to feel unworthy. In that sense, the enforcement of silly rules about where you park or tie your shoes has the subtle benefit of putting visitors—members, too—on their heels from the start.

The simplest answer might be that as with any other organization of people, a golf club does not boast one personality but several. The problem isn’t always institutional but often individual. That’s why the manager of a Colorado private club has a letter framed on his wall from a member who wrote complaining about the club’s toilet paper unrolling the wrong way and why a golfer from a private club in Kansas enjoys recalling the story of another player yelling over from another hole to tell the man his son’s shirttail needed to be tucked in. The lesson: The world has its share of petty people, and some of them still happen to play golf.

by Sam Weinman, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Javi Aznarez

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Flute Player Triptych, 1883
via:

Government Stupidity Is By Design

Legendary Congressman John Dingell once let slip the dirty secret about power. “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure,” he said, “I'll screw you every time.”

Today I’m going to write about a little-noticed procedural change by antitrust enforcers that caused the lawyers who represent every large corporation, every foreign government, and every large private equity fund to scream in unison.

The goal of this change is to get the government to stop acting so stupidly when it comes to corporate power. Almost no one outside of the billionaire servant world noticed this shift when it was announced, but as it turns out, making public bureaucracies act competently is a threat to very powerful interests who rely on such institutional blindness.

In other words, if you want to know why the government is so clumsy and stupid, this issue is for you. I’m even going to show you a way that you can help fix the problem, without much effort.

How to Make Corporate Lawyers Extremely Unhappy

Six weeks ago, the government put out an anodyne press release, designed to put normal people to sleep. It was titled “FTC and DOJ Propose Changes to HSR Form for More Effective, Efficient Merger Review,” and it was accompanied with a long and equally boring notification in the Federal Register, which is the official journal of the U.S. government. The Federal Register publishes hundreds of pages every day, full of announcements of new rules and minor changes to government forms. Most days, it’s not something to pay attention to.

But something about this one was different.

Immediately, corporate lawyers started complaining, especially those who focus on helping the multi-trillion dollar private equity industry buy and sell companies. “This is breathtaking and astonishing in its reach and potential impact to deals,” said James Langston, a partner at Cleary Gottlieb, a firm that represents Google, as well as private equity giants KKR and TPG. "It's a huge change,” according to Deidre Johnson, an antitrust lawyer at Ropes & Gray, whose clients include Bain Capital, Silver Lake Partners, and Thomas Lee Partners.

“If adopted, these proposed changes will have a dramatic impact on merger filings in the United States,” said one law firm. “An already robust, time consuming and expensive process will become exponentially more challenging.”

When something significant happens, these law firms send out alerts to clients. And oh, did the client alerts come, in a flood. “Burdensome.” “Sweeping.” “Idiosyncrasy.” “Dramatic.” The words are muted but full of passive aggressive rage, authored as they were by extremely angry multi-millionaire lawyers who often help their clients skirt the law. And here are some of the firms that sent out such breathless, angry notices. Wilmer Hale. Steptoe. Kirkland and Ellis. Dechert. Wilson Sonsini. Sullivan and Cromwell. Covington & Burling. Etc.

These names may or may not be recognizable to you, and may sound like 19th century shipping firms trying to sneak opium into China. But in the legal world, these law firm brands are as recognizable as Coke, Pepsi, Apple, or Google. Every single major corporation, bank, foreign government, and private equity firm has one or many of these law firms on retainer, which means that every single CEO or general counsel at each and every one was alerted about this change, probably multiple times.

This is a very big reaction, just for changing a filing form. So the question is, what did the antitrust enforcers actually do to inspire such rage?

Cardboard X-Ray Glasses Don’t Work

As it turns out, the change is relatively simple. The Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division are requiring big corporations and private equity funds who want to engage in big acquisitions to actually tell the government what they are doing. That’s it. That’s the change. Merging firms will soon have to fill out basic questions, such as “Why are you merging?” “Who is on your board of directors?” And “Who are the major creditors and investors in this merger?”

If that sounds obvious, a sort of ‘well shouldn’t they be doing that already?!?,’ well, you’re not wrong. In 1976, Congress passed a law known as the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) mandating that companies notify the government upon any attempt to buy a company. In 1978, the FTC came out with an HSR form for firms to fill out, mostly a check-box type exercise to ensure they were paying the government filing fee.

The structure of the form didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Only 150 firms a year even had to file this form, because mergers just weren’t common. But today, there are about 3,000 qualifying mergers a year, a little over nine major transactions every day. Imagine you’re a government lawyer, and you are handed a separate transaction in an industry you know nothing about, and you have to decide within three hours or so whether to take legal action. (...)

We’ve seen this dynamic over and over. Earlier this year, insulin cartel member Sanofi bought Provention, rolling up a small part of the insulin market, which will lead to higher prices and more leg amputations. One analyst, horrified, privately asked me, “how the Federal Trade Commission could let that happen?” I’m guessing that the FTC lawyers simply didn’t know what Provention did, and Sanofi hid it from them enough to move the merger through.

The number of such mergers is endless. Small dialysis firms. Fertility clinics. Landscaping. Street sweeping. Etc. In 2019, mining giants Barrick and Newmont consolidated 75% of the gold market in Nevada to form a corporation called Nevada Gold Mine - the new monopoly quickly got rid of the union. In 2019, a private equity firm rolled up all three major mail sorting software firms, without anyone noticing. Employees involved were baffled that no one in D.C. was looking.

Cynicism about politics in the U.S. is rife, for good reason. And there are certainly grounds for thinking the game is rigged. But one of the reasons that the government doesn’t stop these mergers, or many others, is simple. No one in the antitrust agencies knows what is happening. If you work in the industry, you know, but why would anyone assume antitrust lawyers would? They aren’t Gods, they are smart lawyers in an understaffed agency responsible for mergers in a $24 trillion economy. And the reason for this blindness is intentional, rooted in the poor design of the form meant to notify the government of corporate combinations.

With the old form, corporations didn’t have to list subsidiaries. They didn’t have to tell the government why they were merging, or who was on their boards of directors. They didn’t have to give the merger timeline, or if there was foreign money involved. They didn’t even have to describe the acquiring firm, only the target firm. They had to turn over internal documents about the merger, but only final drafts, which meant they knew how to hide documents from enforcers. It’s not that the old forms required no work, firms had to provide a bunch of useless data about where they fit into the economic Census. The old form was the equivalent of being told to do an X-Ray and being given cardboard X-Ray glasses from the 1950s.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Much more... but here's what you can do, specifically:]

The agencies put out this form, and it’s now available to read and for public comment. That means anyone can actually tell the government what they think about it. Usually only lobbyists and lawyers working for billionaires do that, because, well, only lobbyists and lawyers working for billionaires notice these kinds of changes. But now I’ve told you about it.

And if you want to submit a comment, you can do that here. There won’t be many comments in this docket, so your voice actually will matter. I would specifically recommend that you talk up the need to collect data on labor markets, because that’s something that seemed to particularly offend much of the antitrust bar. But say whatever you want. 

Boyi Hao, Deep Marsh and Red Drop
via:

The Race to Save the World's DNA

The evolution of life on Earth—a process that has spanned billions of years and innumerable strands of DNA—could be considered the biggest experiment in history. It has given rise to amoebas and dinosaurs; fireflies and flytraps; even mammals that look like ducks and fish that look like horses. These species have solved countless ecological problems, finding novel ways to eat, evade, defend, compete, and multiply. Their genomes contain information that humans could use to reconstruct the origins of life, develop new foods and medicines and materials, and even save species that are dying out. But we are also losing much of the data; humans are one of the main causes of an ongoing mass extinction. More than forty thousand animal, fungal, and plant species are considered threatened—and those are just the ones we know about.

Osborn is part of a group of scientists who are mounting a kind of scientific salvage mission. It is known as the Earth BioGenome Project, or E.B.P., and its goal is to sequence a genome from every plant, animal, and fungus on the planet, as well as from many single-celled organisms, such as algae, retrieving the results of life’s grand experiment before it’s too late. “This is a completely wonderful and insane goal,” Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor who works with the E.B.P., told me. The effort, described by its organizers as a “moonshot for biology,” will likely cost billions of dollars—yet it does not currently have any direct funding, and depends instead on the volunteer work of scientists who do. Researchers will need to scour oceans, deserts, and rain forests to collect samples before species die out. And, as new species are discovered, the task of sequencing all of them will only grow. “That’s a heavy aspiration that will probably never be entirely achieved,” Greely, who is seventy-one, told me. “It’s like, when you’re my age, planting a young oak tree in your yard. You’re not going to live to see that be a mature oak, but your hope is somebody will.” (...)

Scientists didn’t even begin to sequence a DNA molecule until 1968. In 1977, they sequenced the roughly five thousand base pairs in a virus that invades bacteria. And, in 1990, the Human Genome Project started the thirteen-year process of sequencing almost all of the three billion base pairs in our DNA. Its organizers called the endeavor “one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of all time, even compared to splitting the atom or going to the moon.” Since then, researchers have been filling in gaps and improving the quality of their sequences, in part by using a new format known as a telomere-to-telomere, or T2T, genome. The first T2T human genome was sequenced only last year, but already scientists with the Earth BioGenome Project are talking about repeating this process for every known eukaryotic species. (Eukaryotes are organisms whose cells have nuclei.)

Because the E.B.P. does not have its own funding, it does not sample or sequence species on its own. Instead, it’s a network of networks; its organizers set ethical and scientific standards for more than fifty projects, including the Darwin Tree of Life, Vertebrate Genomes Project, the African BioGenome Project, and the Butterfly Genome Project. This way, “when we get to the end of the project, it’s not the Tower of Babel,” Harris Lewin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, who chairs the E.B.P. executive council, told me. “You know—your genomes are produced this way, and mine are produced that way, and they’re of different quality, so that, when you compare them, you get different results.”

By 2025, the participants hope to assemble about nine thousand sequences, one from every known family of eukaryotes. By 2029, they aim to have one sequence from every genus—a hundred and eighty thousand in all. After the third and final phase, which could be completed a decade from now, they aim to have sequenced all 1.8 million species that scientists have documented so far. (Roughly eighty per cent of eukaryotic species are still undiscovered.) This database of genomes, including annotations and metadata, will require close to an exabyte of data, or as much as two hundred million DVDs. The amount of information involved is more than “astronomical,” Lewin said; it’s “genomical.” He compared the project to the Webb Space Telescope, which received about ten billion dollars of government funding. Given how much these projects change the way that humans see the world, Lewin said, “the cost is really not that much.” (...)

One goal of the E.B.P. is to compare and contrast large numbers of genomes, revealing how they are related. Benedict Paten, a computational biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed software to align genomes and determine which genes correspond to one another. “It’s a really rich and difficult problem,” he told me, “because genomes evolve by a bunch of really complicated processes.” For a 2020 Nature paper, Paten and several collaborators used powerful computers to align more than a trillion As, Ts, Gs, and Cs and create a tree of six hundred bird and mammal species. On a typical home computer, such an undertaking could have taken more than a million hours. “If you wanted to do it for all plants and animals, it’s just a vast computational challenge,” Paten told me.

Sooner or later, a global database of genomes will have profound practical implications. Some creatures can regrow their limbs; others do not appear to die unless they suffer an injury. If the basis for such traits can be pinpointed in genes, humans might be able to borrow them, perhaps by using gene therapies. “Evolution has already done nearly every experiment, right?” Lewin told me. “There are organisms that’ll eat oil spills, there are organisms that’ll eat heavy metals. I mean, it’s incredible.” But, when genomes inspire new products, to whom will they belong? This question makes the E.B.P. not only a scientific project but a political one.

by Matthew Hutson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Petra Péterffy

[ed. Awesome.]

Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

A shit fountain.

Many of Amazon’s worst workplace elements have been chronicled for years, from drivers pissing into bottles when they’re unable to take a bathroom break to flagrant anti-union activity.

But there’s a different, more nuanced story of the megacorp’s chaos and male fragility, now available in Exit Interview, a memoir from a 12-year Amazon vet who got sober, ran screaming, and put together a darkly hilarious tale of her experiences there. We caught up with author and Seattleite Kristi Coulter for an Exit Interview interview.

How did you deal with reliving these incredibly high-pressure stories?

It's almost hard for me still not to think, like, "What are people from Amazon going to think about this book? Am I putting the company in a light that's going to make people angry?" But a lot of that I worked through when I was writing. It took me 18 months to even feel like I had the self-esteem to write the book, because every time I would work on it, I’d think, “Oh, you're a worm. You sucked at your job.” It was Amazon's voice. I worked through so much of that in the writing process that at this point I just think, a-yuuup.

You’re blasé about it?

It’s more like: Early on, I thought of the book as a trauma memoir, and that mindset made the writing pretty unfun, not as strong. At some point I realized, this is more of a coming-of-age story, even though I was 36 when I started at Amazon. This is a hero's journey. I rescued myself. I still, you know, cover a lot of traumatic material—Amazon is a traumatic place to work, and it damaged me. Deeply. But it's very hard to look back on 12 years of your life and say, “Oh, I could have left at any time, and I didn't.” By the time I got to the end, I was like, “You went through the classic journey and came out the other end okay.” I do wish I'd had all those processing skills at the beginning of writing. But I had been gone from Amazon less than two years.

So you wanted to write a memoir while the memory was fresh?

I was still working there, my first book was about to come out, and I was thinking about what I might want to do next. I was like, “I guess I could write about Amazon? I wonder if anybody would be interested?” I was so deep inside Amazon that, even knowing how curious people were about the company, the idea that they'd want to read a memoir about it did not occur to me. I mentioned it to my agent, like, [shrugs shoulders], and she said, “Yes, please write that book.” And I was like, "Really? I don't know if I have anything to say."

Why did you feel that way?

It's funny—I was extremely aware of, like, you can't work at Amazon and not realize that half the world hates you. You personally. Especially living in Seattle, you know, I would dread people saying to me, “Everyone has to earn a living somehow.” Like I was unemployable otherwise. [Laughs] But it was more than that. When you're at Amazon, you're so unimportant. And invisible. Even knowing I’d outlasted all but like 98% of people [as a 12-year veteran] and I'd had all these huge jobs there, by the end, I still mostly thought, “You failed.” Working through the book made me realize: I failed some, I succeeded a lot.

Now that the book is out, how do you feel about Amazon actually reading it?

I’ve gotten so many notes from people I’ve never met who’ve worked at Amazon all over, in like Minneapolis or Munich. People at Amazon, especially women, are dying to read this book. I remember joking with my publisher early on: if we only sell a copy to everyone who works at Amazon, we’d make a profit.

For a lot of Amazon stuff, I wasn’t revealing anything that’s not publicly available already. That was really important to me because I wanted this to be a personal book. I had friends who were like, “I bet there’ll be Congressional hearings after your book.” I don’t see what they’d be about! It’s not that book.

Right, this isn’t a bullet-point collection of world-rollicking allegations. Your stories range from unsurprising to eww. It’s more a detailed chronicling of assholes all the way down.

Yeah, there’s a lot of them. I will say, most of the people that I worked with, I actually like quite a bit. They’re smart, creative, sometimes stoic [laughs]. But Amazon rewards a certain coldness and aggression. It also puts people under such psychotic pressure that it brings out the worst. I have a feeling there are people that I had bad experiences with that, under different circumstances, I would think, “They’re not so bad.”

You make the case that there’s something universal here—that Amazon’s problems are human problems.

Amazon is an unusually brutal place to work, but a lot of it is about people under pressure. Even the guy who at one point directly tells me I’m “stupid” and yells at me, I was like, even he was under pressure. Then I think about the super-senior executives—I see on social media, “fat-cat execs don’t do anything.” At Amazon, at least, those guys work their asses off. It’s heart-attack-at-50 kind of work. I don’t know why, like, they’re all worth $20-30 million, but they kill themselves. So I figured, even this guy above me is getting it from Jeff Bezos, and it’s a fountain, you know. A shit fountain, I guess. (...)

What about your story have you noticed surprises people?

The chaos. There is this belief that Amazon is this well-oiled machine that is coming to take over the planet. But so many parts of Amazon are like kids putting on a show in the barn. I remember when Amazon Publishing started, people in the industry predicted we were going to steamroll them. But there were only 13 of us. Our entire company’s calendar was a literal whiteboard. We were calculating royalties in Excel manually. It was frantic.

There’s lots about duct tape and panic being Amazon’s primary binding agents—but your example also gets to how cheap the company seems.

[Laughs] You hear about tech giants like Google with their own dry cleaners and hairdressers and all that stuff. People think Amazon is like that. Amazon is austere. My monitor died once, and I had to go pick up a new one. They couldn’t bring it to my building. I had to carry it four blocks! (...)

Some of the anecdotes in this book are wild, like your colleague spending days insisting that a store’s “broccoli rabe” dish be renamed “broccoli rape,” despite your outcries.

That kind of thing happened pretty often. In my first book, there’s a part where I was the one woman on a panel hosted by Amazon for interns, and a woman asks us, “What’s it like to be here as a woman?” I gave a very diplomatic perspective, and then all the men on the panel jumped in to say that I was wrong. They were like, “This is a great company for women!” I was like I literally am the only one who could answer that. That was for me.

Is the male fragility in this book representative of the company as a whole?

I think so. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, and many of the men I worked with are perfectly lovely. But especially in leadership, there’s a certain type of man who is very fragile—though this isn’t Amazon specific. These men where what gets to them is the idea that they might not be egalitarian. They can’t see that it’s not about them personally. It’s about systems. There are some guys at Amazon who, If you tell them, “It’s strange that most consumer purchases are controlled by women and yet there are no women in senior [leadership],” they think you’re attacking them personally. They’ll say, it’s important to understand that women often have other priorities in life, or women are too smart to want these jobs. They can’t just sit honestly and ask, what can we do to change it?

Hard to do that at a company where Jeff Bezos promotes internal stories written by men about what it’s like at Amazon to be a woman.

This guy at Amazon had written a blog post on LinkedIn in response to Jodi Kantor’s big New York Times piece about staffers crying at their desks and all that. First, he says, “I’ve been here 18 months, so I know a few things.” I was like, ohhh, I’m looking at him like an old sailor, saying, “Come on, landlubber.” He goes on about what a great company Amazon was for women. It landed on an internal email list, and I decided to reply, gently and diplomatically: “That wasn’t appropriate for you to speak to. You’re not a woman. You don’t—you can’t know what it’s like.”

So when Jeff Bezos emailed the whole company, he included a link to that guy’s post. That’s an endorsement. Jeff fucking Bezos sent that to a million people. We had a chance, while so many articles about gender were coming up, Jeff had a chance to suggest things to look at, at the very least about women, let alone other systems of privilege even I benefit from. Instead, he said, “Look at this glad-handing jackass’s blog post, I love it.” That’s when the concept of loyalty fell away for me fast.

by Sam Machkovech, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Jenny Jimenez

Olivia Rodrigo's 'Guts'

Last month, Billboard published a gloomy survey of record-label executive sentiment about the state of the music industry. Many of those interviewed lamented one unsettling shift in particular—a shift that the label executives themselves were no doubt complicit in creating. They noted that it had become near-impossible to “break” new stars. The sources explained that they could successfully sign loads of new talent and even create digital-era hits that generate millions—if not billions—of streams. The bigger challenge, though, was to find young artists who could break through the noise of the Internet and create the sort of genuine, lasting fandom that turns them into household names and sells out arenas. “Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed than the person I talked to before them,” one manager said. Given the nature of streaming, and of the TikTok algorithm in particular, the music business has never seemed more gameable—but the ability to create a viral smash on TikTok has also, perversely, led to an oversaturated landscape in which everything feels especially fleeting.

One rare exception to this dispiriting paradigm shift is the twenty-year-old former Disney star and vocal powerhouse Olivia Rodrigo. Rodrigo became a bona-fide pandemic-era success with her début single, “Drivers License,” from 2021, a piano power ballad that is both sweeping and finger-snappy, a post-breakup rumination rendered with unusual clarity. It’s a song that deeply satisfies the core requirement of great pop music—and pop music’s youthful fans—which is to make the mundane feel cinematic: “Yeah, today I drove through the suburbs / And pictured I was driving home to you,” Rodrigo sings.

The song quickly broke streaming records, clocking the single highest number of streams during a single day (holiday music excluded) on Spotify. Rodrigo followed up “Drivers License” with two more hit singles, and then a début album called “Sour,” released in the spring of 2021. “Sour” landed at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and established Rodrigo as one of the finest purveyors of breakup songs in the modern era. (It also won her three Grammys.) Bolstered by her musical-theatre expressiveness, a dynamic soprano, and a sharp lyrical specificity, the eighteen-year-old became not a vanishing sensation but an emotional firebrand and a new generational avatar. She was seemingly anointed to lead the post-Lorde and post-Billie Eilish wave of alternative-leaning female pop stars. Today, with hindsight, in such an evidently desperate moment for radio pop, “Sour” is being viewed not merely as a breakout star’s début but as perhaps the final successful star-making endeavor in pop history.

And so Rodrigo’s new record, “Guts,” is loaded not only with the customary sophomore-album expectations but with ideas about the health of an entire industry. The young star, now twenty, has spoken about being paralyzed by these expectations, and feeling frozen as she sat down to write songs. But “Guts,” the new record, does not betray any of that trepidation. If “Sour” was a single-minded project designed to publicly nurse the specific wound from one romantic betrayal, “Guts” is a transitional record on which Rodrigo begins to turn the mirror away from her exes and playfully, brashly toward herself. Rodrigo is at her best, perhaps owing to her acting background, when delivering screeds in a kind of hyper-self-aware, spoken-word register. “Yes, I know that he’s my ex, / But can’t two people reconnect?” she poses with an almost audible wink on “Bad Idea Right?” a song on which she contemplates the self-destruction of rekindling an old romance. “I only see him as a friend / The biggest lie I ever said,” she adds, always shrewdly one step ahead of herself.

Novelty is a critical aspect of any pop sensation’s rise. Part of what made Rodrigo feel fresh was that she was more indebted to various strains of rock music from the late nineties and two-thousands than to the hip-hop influences that had, for many years, become so enmeshed in the pop universe. Rodrigo cites the White Stripes’ Jack White as one of her biggest inspirations, and her music is a canny fusion of piano balladry and retro pop-punk, layered with flavors of grunge and emo. It’s a careful selection of styles that work harmoniously with the attitudinal thrust of her music, which sways between cheeky defiance and melodramatic longing. So much of her music sounds like the soundtrack to an early-two-thousands teen drama, each line delivered with an eye roll. And while her music, stylistically, is inherently nostalgic, Rodrigo is a quintessentially modern star in other ways. If pop stars of previous eras attempted to perform sexual maturity beyond their ages, Rodrigo is constantly offering reminders of her adolescent status—or, at least, the idea of adolescence—and revelling in juvenile poses. Lest anyone suspect that she has moved beyond normalcy, she paints a lucid image of bumbling teen-aged relatability: “I laughed at the wrong time, sat with the wrong guy,” she sings on “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” “Searching ‘how to start a conversation’ on a Web site.”

In the early days of her success, Rodrigo confessed to being the “biggest Swiftie in the world.” She had already indicated as much in April of 2020, when she recorded an impassioned, stripped-down piano cover of Taylor Swift’s song “Cruel Summer.” Later, Rodrigo acknowledged that “Cruel Summer” had such an influence on her own single “Deja Vu” that Swift would be added to its credits as a co-writer. Swift’s influence can certainly be heard throughout Rodrigo’s work, particularly when she sings—as she almost always does—about romantic betrayal. Rodrigo, like Swift, has mastered the narrative art of dressing down her past loves while rendering herself equal parts victim and victor: “I wanna kiss his face with an uppercut,” she sings on “Get Him Back!,” the lively pop-rock centerpiece of “Guts,” a song with the sweet pep of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” layered with a menacing, vengeful glower. “I wanna meet his mom / Just to tell her her son sucks,” Rodrigo utters, more spewing than singing.

by Carrie Battan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. More impressed with every album she puts out. See also: Olivia Rodrigo 'Bad Idea, Right?; and, Every Olivia Rodrigo Song, Ranked. Two albums, both classics. Let's celebrate a budding rock & roll legend (RS)]

'All I did was try my best. This the kinda thanks I get. Unrelentlessly upset. They say these are the golden years. But I wish I could disappear. Ego crush is so severe. God, it’s brutal out here.

I feel like no one wants me. And I hate the way I’m perceived. I only have two real friends. And lately I’m a nervous wreck. ‘Cause I love people I don’t like. And I hate every song I write. And I’m not cool and I’m not smart. And I can’t even parallel park'

The Real Stakes of the Google Antitrust Trial

The year 1998 was a pivotal one in the history of technology: Apple’s introduction of the iMac helped set the company back on the path to success after it nearly went bankrupt earlier in the decade; Google was founded by two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; and Microsoft introduced Windows 98, an improved version of its popular computer operating system. That May, Microsoft also became the target of a historic antitrust lawsuit lodged by the Department of Justice and twenty states, accusing it of anticompetitive behavior in two domains: attempting to maintain its monopoly in computer operating systems and trying to monopolize a new market, that of Internet browsers.

At the time, residential Wi-Fi connectivity was rapidly expanding across America, and, in the quaintly titled “browser wars,” Netscape Navigator, a popular browser released by Mosaic Communications Corporation in 1994, fought Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for the growing class of Web-connected consumers. Microsoft, the D.O.J. alleged, had attempted to crush Netscape by making deals with Internet-service providers that prioritized Explorer access at Netscape users’ expense. The trial began that fall, and included seventy-six days of testimony that took place over more than eight months, during which a government witness alleged that a Microsoft executive had pledged to “cut off Netscape’s air supply” (which a Microsoft attorney denied). The government also showed a video deposition of Bill Gates, then the company’s C.E.O., in which he was so evasive of many of the questions posed by David Boies, the Justice Department’s lead attorney, that people in the courtroom laughed. In 2000, the judge ruled in the government’s favor and ordered that Microsoft be broken up into two companies—one producing operating systems, another producing software. (In the end, the company was never disassembled—an appeals court reversed the breakup order—but an eventual settlement required Microsoft to drastically change some of its business practices.)

Although the case was much discussed within the tech industry and in the press, the Justice Department’s clampdown on anticompetitive behavior did not become the norm. Instead, for much of the past twenty years, Microsoft and other major tech companies have been allowed to expand as policymakers and regulators have struggled to confront the challenges posed by rapidly changing technology. This has only begun to change in the past half decade, as the effects of these companies’ dominance have come to be seen as negative by the public and by a new cadre of regulators, including Lina Khan, the young legal expert known for her critiques of Amazon and who became the chair of the F.T.C. in 2021. On Tuesday, the most significant antitrust trial since the 1998 case is set to begin in Washington, D.C. The trial stems from a case that was filed in December, 2020, by the Justice Department and attorneys general of eleven states, alleging that, much as Microsoft did when seeking to establish Internet Explorer as most users’ browser of choice, Google has maintained its dominance of the search and search-advertising markets by arranging deals with smartphone manufacturers and the creators of Internet browsers that make Google the default search engine almost everywhere a consumer might encounter one. Every year, it has been estimated that Google pays up to twelve billion dollars to Apple, and billions more to a number of other companies, including Samsung and Verizon, to make Google the default browser on their platforms. In some cases, the company’s agreements also prohibit its partners from preinstalling similar software made by its competitors.

According to the complaint, Google accounts for nearly ninety per cent of general search-engine queries in the U.S., a fact that led the government to dub the company a “gatekeeper for the internet.” As long as Google maintains its lock on this market, the complaint argues, it can take the billions in monopoly profits it makes and continue to share them with other companies in exchange for help maintaining its monopoly, in a potentially endless cycle. According to the government, Google’s current annual revenue is more than a hundred and sixty billion dollars, the majority of which is derived from search and search ads. With so many billions at stake, the company has been responding to the case aggressively: as its top lawyer told the New York Times, dozens of staff lawyers and three law firms have been dispatched to prepare for the trial.

According to sources on Google’s legal team, the defense the company plans to present will rely on the idea that Google’s market dominance is the result of offering a superior product. Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, made this point in a recent blog post, writing, “browser and device makers have a choice, and they choose Google.” Comparing Google’s current predicament to the case from 1998, the company argued that user preference was a key distinction: in Microsoft’s case, most users preferred to use Netscape, not Explorer, but, with Google, consumers are getting what they actually want. The company also plans to argue that it’s relatively easy to download another search engine, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo, if one doesn’t want to use Google, which many phones and computers use by default.

There are signs that Google faces a steep battle. For years, antitrust watchdogs considered trying to restrain the company’s growth, but failed, standing by as it bought out other tech companies (such as YouTube, which it acquired in 2006) and expanded into new businesses, including map applications, e-mail, mobile phones, and self-driving cars. This era has come to an end. ​​By some estimates, Google is now the most investigated company in the world, with three antitrust suits launched against it in 2020 alone. One is the case initiated by the Justice Department that is going to trial this week. Another was filed by thirty-eight attorneys general, which alleged similar complaints, as well as additional allegations about Google making it hard for users to find more specialized search engines, such as Yelp, which lists restaurants and other businesses, and Expedia, which lists hotels and flights. (This case was later combined with the D.O.J. case; many elements of it were dismissed in early August.) A third case, filed by ten attorneys general, accused the company of using anticompetitive behavior in order to become the dominant company in the online-advertising market, allegedly employing some of the same kinds of strategies described in the search-engine case. This January, the Justice Department joined with eight other states to file a case over similar issues. Google has also faced multiple antitrust probes in Europe, where it has paid billions of dollars in fines. (In 2020, the online news site the Markup reported that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had begun training its employees to mind their language. “Alphabet gets sued a lot,” one document read. “Assume every document will become public.” The company’s discouraged words and phrases included “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “Get ahead of competitors.”) (...)

The outcome of the Google trial similarly has implications that will go well beyond online advertising and search engines. In the past year, major tech companies and upstart competitors have been in a race to commercialize new A.I. technologies, which offer transformative possibilities in many domains—including search. In a newly released policy brief, Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank, and his colleague Sahaj Sharda argue that, if the judge in the case leaves Google intact, the company’s continued dominance of the online-search market could stymie companies creating new search products that integrate novel A.I. technologies as these potential competitors conclude that it’s too difficult to try to break into the search market.

by Sheelah Kolhatkar, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Shira Inbar
[ed. See also: The Google Monopoly Trial as a Morality Play; and, Big Tech On Trial (BIG):]

If you read my earlier preview of the Google trial – or have been reading coverage of it elsewhere — you know how important this trial is. It could determine the future of artificial intelligence, search, newspapers, antitrust law, and innovation. It will set precedent for monopolization cases in a lot of other industries. And of course, the bad guys know it. The rumor is Google is putting together a war room with dozens of PR professionals to spin the outcome, and I’ve heard from reporters that they are being lavished with attention like never before. Dozens of media outlets are previewing the trial. As just one example, I was quoted in the New Yorker today discussing its impact on the deployment of AI.

And Google’s PR team is already earning its pay, planting a story in the New York Times by Steve Lohr about how Google isn’t the big bad guy that Microsoft was in the 1990s, and besides, these days no one really cares about this case. Lohr covered the Microsoft case, and seems singularly unaware that there in fact has been a much larger cultural argument about big tech and monopolies over the last ten years than there ever was around Microsoft.

But this coverage matters, because the fight is as much about how the public and members of Congress understand the trial as it is the legal outcomes themselves.

In other words, this trial isn’t just important because of the potential outcome, but also because the public and lawmakers are paying close attention. We’re going to learn a lot about how the internet itself was shaped, advertising, the coercion and power plays in board rooms, the ugly deals between Google and Apple to divide up the world between them, and how billionaires fight with each other when all the money in the world is at stake. So regardless of the final verdict, the facts that come out at trial will help shape the future direction our elected leaders and judges take in addressing our increasingly monopolistic order. The point is, there’s a lot of bullshit in politics, but this trial is the big one, where the debates over big business that have gone on for years meet the law.

Joni Mitchell/Taylor Swift

[ed. See also: An Open Letter to Taylor Swift (HB):]

You have also shown your willingness to take on the system. Even better, you have gone to battle against power brokers in the music business—and have won!

And that’s just a start. You’re also proving that live music not only can survive, but actually flourish in the digital age. Other superstars have taken the easy way out—playing shows for high rollers in Las Vegas or setting up shop on Broadway for tourists and elites.

But you didn’t do that, Taylor Swift. You’re bringing live music everywhere, creating the most popular music tour in history. The numbers blow my mind. You’re taking your music to five continents, showing people in a hundred cities that a concert can be the biggest entertainment event of the year.

Your total tour revenues are more than the GDP of most nations. In Singapore alone, more people tried to buy concert tickets than the entire population of the country. In the US, 2.4 million people purchased tickets the first day they went on sale—that’s never happened before.

By the time your tour ends, you will have generated more demand for live music than any artist in history—with huge beneficial effects for everybody. When you show up in town, it gives a Super Bowl-sized boost to the entire local economy.

Along the way, you have made so many other contributions to the music ecosystem. You treat everyone generously—paying out $50 million in bonuses to your team. Even truck drivers got $100,000 bonuses. You’ve also made donations to food banks, employed locals, and have even purchased carbon credits at twice the level of the emissions of your tour.

You also revitalized physical music media by convincing a million or so fans to buy their first vinyl album—boosting demand for LPs to levels not seen since the last century. You’ve actually done more to help record stores than the record business.

Nobody else is doing these kinds of things with such impact. It’s not even close.

So I feel that destiny has blessed us.

For the first time in ages, the superstar musician at the top of the hierarchy is brave, independent, generous, and willing to take a hard stand in changing the system. You stand up for artist rights. You stand up for live music. You stand up for people. And you do all this with a grass roots power base that nobody can match—no politician, no billionaire technocrat, and certainly no other performer.

Musicians have never had that kind of visionary leader.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: YouTube/ Michael Hicks)

The One Thing Everyone Should Know About Fall COVID Vaccines

The simplest way to think about them—everyone should just get one—is arguably the best.

Paul Offit is not an anti-vaxxer. His résumé alone would tell you that: A pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine for infants that has been credited with saving “hundreds of lives every day”; he is the author of roughly a dozen books on immunization that repeatedly debunk anti-vaccine claims. And from the earliest days of COVID-19 vaccines, he’s stressed the importance of getting the shots. At least, up to a certain point.

Like most of his public-health colleagues, Offit strongly advocates annual COVID shots for those at highest risk. But regularly reimmunizing young and healthy Americans is a waste of resources, he told me, and invites unnecessary exposure to the shots’ rare but nontrivial side effects. If they’ve already received two or three doses of a COVID vaccine, as is the case for most, they can stop—and should be told as much.

His view cuts directly against the CDC’s new COVID-vaccine guidelines, announced Tuesday following an advisory committee’s 13–1 vote: Every American six months or older should get at least one dose of this autumn’s updated shot. For his less-than-full-throated support for annual vaccination, Offit has become a lightning rod. Peers in medicine and public health have called his opinions “preposterous.” He’s also been made into an unlikely star in anti-vaccine circles. Public figures with prominently shot-skeptical stances have approvingly parroted his quotes. Right-leaning news outlets that have featured vaccine misinformation have called him up for quotes and sound bites—a sign, he told me, that as a public-health expert “you screwed up somehow.”

Offit stands by his opinion, the core of which is certainly scientifically sound: Some sectors of the population are at much higher risk for COVID than the rest of us. But the crux of the controversy around his view is not about facts alone. At this point in the pandemic, in a country where seasonal vaccine uptake is worryingly low and direly inequitable, where health care is privatized and piecemeal, where anti-vaccine activists will pull at any single loose thread, many experts now argue that policies riddled with ifs, ands, or buts—factually sound though they may be—are not the path toward maximizing uptake. “The nuanced, totally correct way can also be the garbled-message way,” Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me.

For the past two years, the United States’ biggest COVID-vaccine problem hasn’t been that too many young and healthy people are clamoring for shots and crowding out more vulnerable groups. It’s been that no one, really—including those who most need additional doses—is opting for additional injections at all. America’s vaccination pipeline is already so riddled with obstacles that plenty of public-health experts have become deeply hesitant to add more. They’re opting instead for a simple, proactive message—one that is broadly inclusive—in the hope that a concerted push for all will nudge at least some fraction of the public to actually get a shot this year.

On several key vaccination points, experts do largely agree. The people who bear a disproportionate share of COVID’s risk should receive a disproportionate share of immunization outreach, says Saad Omer, the dean of UT Southwestern’s O’Donnell School of Public Health.

Choosing which groups to prioritize, however, is tricky. Offit told me he sees four groups as being at highest risk: people who are pregnant, immunocompromised, over the age of 70, or dealing with multiple chronic health conditions. (...)

Offit, had he been at the CDC’s helm, would have strongly recommended the vaccine for only his four high-risk groups, and merely allowed everyone else to get it if they wanted to—drawing a stark line between those who should and those who may. Fauci, meanwhile, approves of the CDC’s decision. If it were entirely up to him, “I would recommend it for everyone” for the sheer sake of clarity, he told me.

The benefit-risk ratio for the young and healthy, Fauci told me, is lower than it is for older or sicker people, but “it’s not zero.” Anyone can end up developing a severe case of COVID. That means that shoring up immunity, especially with a shot that targets a recent coronavirus variant, will still bolster protection against the worst outcomes. Secondarily, the doses will lower the likelihood of infection and transmission for at least several weeks. Amid the current rise in cases, that protection could soften short-term symptoms and reduce people’s chances of developing long COVID; it could minimize absences from workplaces and classrooms; it could curb spread within highly immunized communities. For Fauci, those perks are all enough to tip the scales.

by Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: What to Know About Fall COVID Vaccines (a discussion of Ms Wu's article - Atlantic).]

Old Friends Are Better Than New Clothes

And, don't step on a rake twice.

A WhatsApp message to me early this morning from WION, the Indian English-language global broadcaster, prompted me to pay special attention to the visit to Russia of the North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, which I was asked to comment upon. I put on my thinking cap and came up with a couple of observations that should guide our appreciation of what Kim may accomplish and why the West should be worried.

First, not much has been said in major media about the timing of Kim’s visit. He is arriving in Vladivostok on the second day of the three-day Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He will not be taking part in that event, to be sure, but all of the Russian government and business leaders with whom his delegation should meet to discuss a comprehensive deepening of relations are on the spot in Vladivostok. The very wording with which Press Secretary Peskov described arrangements for the visit is a tip-off: he said that Putin and Kim will have one-on-one talks “if necessary.” This summit event is thus very different from the Trump-Kim meetings of several years ago which were focused on a very few issues and were held with no one but translators present. Moreover, though the talks may be behind closed doors, the Russian-North Korean negotiations are not surreptitious; they are going on under the noses of global media.

The second question given me by the program host from WION was what does this meeting mean for the West given that the accent is likely to be on arms sales.

Allow me to quote a relevant interpretation of the meeting’s sense by today’s online New York Times:

“North Korea could provide Russia with much-needed ammunition. In return North Korea is seeking food aid and some advanced technology.”

The widespread assumption that Russia needs North Korean ammunition for its ongoing war in Ukraine is just plain wrong. The other type of military supply which Russia is said to seek in North Korea is medium range ballistic missiles, which some analysts say are among the best and least vulnerable to air defenses in the world. There, too, I say that the Russian interest is not to deploy such missiles in the Ukraine campaign.

Instead, I believe the Russians are seeking the aforementioned military materiel from North Korea to add to their weapons inventory in preparation for a direct war with NATO if that comes. In such eventuality this materiel can be of crucial importance. In the meantime, conclusion of agreements for supply from North Korea allows the Russians to be more liberal in their deployment of their own top-of-the-line hardware as they shift in coming weeks from defense to offensive operations on the ground in Ukraine. By way of example, I note that Russian use of their Iskander hypersonic missiles in Ukraine thus far has been very sparing. But most recent news suggests that Russia is placing large numbers of Iskander in the field for use when it goes on the offensive. These missiles cannot be produced in great numbers quickly. Therefore, it will be very handy for Russia to have a back-up in the form of Korean medium range missiles. (...)

Update: Post-meeting

As for the meeting with Putin, Russian news carried video images of the exchange of toasts by the heads of state during a festive banquet that preceded the departure. We were told that all-in-all the two sides met for two hours of talks with all key officials present and for an additional hour of tête-à-tête talks between Kim and Putin.

What could they possibly achieve in this brief get-together, you may ask? However, that would be to miss the point highlighted by Russian commentators on state television, namely that over the past year the number of staff at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang more than doubled and was filled with experts who surely were preparing all the agreements which were officially signed during the visit.

Why was the meeting held in the Vostochny space launch complex, or cosmodrome? Firstly, because such a visit was a mirror image of what Russian Defense Minister Shoigu was shown in Korea during his visit there this spring – the Koreans’ latest achievements in missile technology.

The Russians are immensely proud of the Vostochny site which has been replacing their main launch site at Baikonur from Soviet days. Baikonur is in Kazakhstan. Vostochny is on Russian land. At Vostochny they can show off their state of the art military and civilian space technologies. This addresses the known Korean pursuit of assistance in launching military spy satellites, where so far they have failed on their own. More broadly, it underlines the fact that cooperation in the “military technical” sphere is the driving force of Russian-Korean partnership.

The term “military technical” entered the vocabulary of Russia observers at the start of the Special Military Operation when it was used by Defense Minister Shoigu to describe what the Russians would be deploying to vanquish the Ukrainians and their Western backers. At the time, nearly all Western pundits were scratching their heads over the term.

Now we know better. “Military-technical” puts the accent on military hardware as opposed to warm bodies in uniform, and Shoigu was confident that the latest Russian equipment now in serial production would prove its worth against anything that the West supplied to Kiev. Watching the videos of German Leopard tanks, British Challenger II tanks and American Bradley armored personnel carriers burning to ash after being struck by Russian artillery and the killer drone known as “Lancet,” we understand today that he was right.

“Old friends are better than new clothes.” This bit of folk wisdom was part of Vladimir Putin’s toast at the festive banquet. But are the Russian-Korean relations something more than friendship?

by Gilbert Doctorow, International Relations/Russian Affairs |  Read more: here and here

Image: Sputnik/Reuters via

[ed. See also: Vladimir Putin: The Early Years (BTW).]

A Template for America: What Republicans Are Doing to Wisconsin

If you need a reminder that the Republican party’s problem with democracy extends beyond the antics of Donald Trump, look no further than Wisconsin. A battle is under way there which began before the January 6 insurrection was even a twinkle in Trump’s eye, and which will do much to determine the future of democracy in America whether Trump ultimately answers for his crimes or not. It’s no exaggeration to say that Wisconsin and its state capitol, Madison, are now the front line of the battle to save American democracy.

In 2011, Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin’s state legislature so badly that the party can win supermajorities despite losing the popular vote, as it did in 2018. Voters have fought back, and earlier this year they elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court, ushering in a new liberal majority which looked poised to finally overturn the gerrymander and bring democratic regime change to Madison.

But Wisconsin Republicans have no intention of seeing their undeserved power slip away. They’re proposing to impeach Protasiewicz on spurious charges before she has ruled on a single case, paralyzing the court and leaving the gerrymander intact.

When Trump argued that he was the real winner of the election because the votes of people living in Democratic-leaning urban areas were somehow fraudulent and should not count, he was repeating arguments that Wisconsin Republicans had already honed. The speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos, has explained that the state’s gerrymander is fair because “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority”. Because Madison and Milwaukee are the parts of the state with the largest concentration of non-white voters, Vos has revealed what the Wisconsin gerrymander is really about: race.

There is a long history in the United States of skewed electoral systems being used to suppress the voices of minority voters, and Wisconsin’s is only the latest example. Like their predecessors in other states, Wisconsin Republicans have been remarkably frank about their intention of ensuring that minorities stay in their place. When Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers powered to victory in 2018 with massive wins in Madison and Milwaukee, the Republican legislature used a lame-duck session to strip him of much of his power. Not content with that, Evers’ Republican opponent in 2022, Tim Michels, promised that if he was elected then Republicans in Wisconsin “will never lose another election”.

The latest target of this raw, racist power politics is the Wisconsin’s electorate new choice for the state supreme court. Protasiewicz won by more than 10% on record turnout, which was spurred by widespread voter dissatisfaction with the fruits of Republican rule. In particular, voters oppose the state’s harsh anti-abortion law, which makes abortion illegal unless it is necessary to save the life of the mother, with no exceptions for other medical problems or rape. A majority of Wisconsinites wanted a liberal state supreme court which would overturn that law, and they voted accordingly.

By linking abortion rights to questions of democracy, Protasiewicz came up with a playbook that can be used across America to push back against attacks on basic constitutional rights, be they in the doctor’s office or the voting booth. That’s why Republicans are so scared of her and desperate to find a way to stop her from succeeding.

Republicans’ plan to impeach Protasiewicz is nakedly hypocritical: They argue that Protasiewicz, who received Democratic campaign donations, cannot give unbiased rulings in gerrymandering cases – despite the fact that numerous other Wisconsin state supreme court justices, including Republicans, have also received party donations and ruled on cases with political implications.

Their plan also bends democratic norms, in this case by impeaching Protasiewicz and then simply leaving her in limbo, legally unable to hear cases. Because the plan wouldn’t actually formally kick her from office, it denies the state’s Democratic governor the opportunity to replace her with another liberal. Democrats are fighting back, but their chances of success hinge on their ability to convince Republicans in the gerrymandered assembly to do the right thing.

As Wisconsin goes, so goes America. Although sometimes referred to as a “moderate” state, it is more accurate to view Wisconsin as one very conservative state and one very liberal state jammed together. The fact that it is narrowly divided between the two parties is precisely why Republicans have resorted to constitutional and political skullduggery to give themselves an unfair advantage.

The same is true of many other states, and indeed of America as a whole. What happens in Wisconsin is a crucial test case of whether the most brazen attempts to turn competitive elections into uncompetitive one-party control will fly.

by Andrew Gawthorpe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Morry Gash/AP
[ed. See also: The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans (NYT).]

Aaron Rodgers Gave the Jets Reason to Believe

Is There Any Hope Without Him?

Before Monday Night Football, ESPN aired a segment in which tennis legend John McEnroe interviewed Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets’ new quarterback. The interview was charming, but as Rodgers repeatedly talked about winning the Super Bowl, McEnroe, a diehard Jets fan, kept squirming in his seat. Clearly scarred by the last 50 years of his Jets fandom, McEnroe was so visibly uncomfortable with Rodgers discussing a championship that Rodgers called out McEnroe’s pessimism.

“You’re a Jets fan!” Rodgers said.

“Exactly,” McEnroe said.

Rodgers rejected New York’s negativity and preached how he believed in manifesting what is in your heart. Rodgers sounded like Ted Lasso, if Ted Lasso took (more) hallucinogens and subscribed to Joe Rogan’s podcast.

“Once we start believing and start playing the right way, you’ll see everyone else like yourself start believing,” Rodgers said. “And you won’t be saying shit like ‘What if it doesn’t go right?’ And then when everybody else is believing in this city, there is a never-ending unstoppable wave of positivity and energy that we’re going to take all the way.”

As if to emphasize Rodgers’s point, a storm swirled over the stadium before the game. Fans were warned to shelter in place two hours before kickoff. But as kickoff approached, the clouds were replaced by a double rainbow. It was as if the heavens themselves were pleading with Jets fans to believe.

But rainbows are tricks of the light. In the most Jets thing that has ever Jets’ed in the history of the Jets, Rodgers was injured four plays into his New York career. While the severity of the injury has yet to be confirmed pending an MRI on Tuesday, Jets head coach Robert Saleh confirmed after the game that they fear Rodgers suffered an Achilles injury, which could be not only season-ending but could be career-threatening for a quarterback who turns 40 later this year. As the fans say in Ted Lasso, it’s the hope that kills you.

But in the least Jets thing that has happened since Joe Namath guaranteed and delivered a Super Bowl III victory (another guy who believed in speaking positivity into existence), the Jets ended up beating the three-time defending AFC East division champ Buffalo Bills anyway. At the risk of being caught in the moment, it feels fair to say this might go down as the single wildest game of this season.

by Danny Heifetz , The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty/AP/Ringer Illustration
[ed. What hype, what expectations, what commercials, interviews, choreography, over the top pre-game analyses... everything. It felt like a Super Bowl. Then this happens. Would've loved to see a montage of executive faces when Rodgers got carted off the field: NFL, upper management, agents, ad and tv execs, everyone financially and psychologically invested in the myth-making of the moment. Then the Jets go off and win it anyway. In a thriller. Wow. Update: Rodgers’s Jets Season Ends Early With Torn Achilles’ Tendon (NYT).]

Byron Birdsall, Anchorage '83
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