What We Can Do to Make American Politics Less Dysfunctional

A legislature is an arena for negotiation, where differences are worked out through bargains. But our polarized political culture treats deals with the other party as betrayals of principle and failures of nerve. Traditionally, winning an election to Congress has meant winning a seat at the negotiating table, where you can represent the interests and priorities of your voters. Increasingly, it has come instead to mean winning a prominent platform for performative outrage, where you can articulate your voters’ frustrations with elite power and show them that you are working to disrupt the uses of that power.

These expectations coexist, sometimes within individual members. But they point in very different directions, because the latter view does not involve traditional legislative objectives and so is not subject to the incentives that have generally facilitated Congress’s work. Instead, some members respond to the incentives of political theater, which is often at least as well served by legislative failure as success. This impulse is evident in both parties, though it is clearly most intense among a portion of congressional Republicans.

Most members still have a more traditional view of their job, and most voters do too, and yet today’s most powerful electoral incentives nonetheless militate toward the more populist, performative view. That’s because electoral incentives for most members of the House now have to do with winning party primaries.

This is not only because geographic sorting has made more seats safe in general elections but also because the parties have grown institutionally weak and so have little say over who runs under their banners. Whether justifiably or not, even established incumbents and swing-seat members often worry most about primary challenges and therefore about voters who do not want them to give ground or compromise. This effectively means they find it politically dangerous to do the job Congress exists to do.

This is a perverse misalignment of incentives. And it contributes to the dynamics that shaped the drama in the House, because it ultimately undermines the imperative for coalition building. Our parties are deadlocked in part because neither really strives to significantly broaden its coalition — doing so would involve playing down some priorities that most energize primary voters. Power is centralized in Congress to avert unpredictable cross-partisan coalitions and more effectively stage-manage a partisan Kabuki theater.

But more than anything, party primaries now leave both voters and members confused about the purpose of Congress and so disable the institution.

While there are some reforms of Congress’s procedures that could help it work better — like a budget process that did not culminate in needlessly dramatic crisis moments and a committee system with more genuine legislative power — it is also increasingly clear that nominee selection reforms are in order.

by Yuval Levin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
[ed. Political contribution and term limits, gerrymandering restrictions, refined Committee rules, filibuster and electoral college reforms.  Ranked-choice voting would likely be one of the easier solutions. Baby steps.] 

Welcome to the Jungle

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II.

China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan.

India has embraced a virulent nationalism.

Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history.

And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.

The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged. As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does. (...)

Why has American power receded? Some of the change is unavoidable. Dominant countries don’t remain dominant forever. But the U.S. has also made strategic mistakes that are accelerating the arrival of a multipolar world.

Among those mistakes: Presidents of both parties naïvely believed that a richer China would inevitably be a friendlier China — and failed to recognize that the U.S. was building up its own rival through lenient trade policies, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. spent much of the early 21st century fighting costly wars. The Iraq war was especially damaging because it was an unprovoked war that George W. Bush chose to start. And the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, overseen by President Biden, made the U.S. look weaker still.

Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine.

In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory. Netanyahu, of course, did not start this new war. Hamas did, potentially with support from Iran, the group’s longtime backer, and Hamas committed shocking human rights violations this past weekend, captured on video.

But Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas. An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, yesterday argued, “The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.” Netanyahu, Haaretz added, adopted “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”

Even with the rise of multipolarity, the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country, with a unique ability to forge alliances and peace. In the Middle East, the Trump administration persuaded Israel and four other countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — to sign unprecedented diplomatic agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. In recent months, the Biden administration has made progress toward an even more ambitious deal, between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Hamas attacked Israel in part to undermine an Israeli-Saudi deal, many experts believe. Such a deal could isolate Iran, Hamas’s patron, and could lead to an infusion of Saudi money for the Palestinian Authority, a more moderate group than Hamas (as Thomas Friedman explains in this column). But if the recent Hamas attacks lead Israel to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble in response, Saudi Arabia will have a hard time agreeing to any treaty.

by David Leonhart, NY Times: The Global Context of the Hamas-Israel War (read more):

***

When the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco announced that they were establishing relations with Israel in 2020, Emirati officials said the deals were symbols of peace and tolerance, while then President Donald J. Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East.”

Those words rang hollow to many in the region, though. Even in the countries that signed the deals, branded the Abraham Accords, support for the Palestinians — and enmity toward Israel over its decades-long occupation of their land — remained strong, particularly as Israel’s government expanded settlements in the Palestinian West Bank after the agreements.

On Saturday, when Palestinian gunmen from the blockaded territory of Gaza surged into Israel, carrying out the boldest attack in the country in decades, it set off an outpouring of support for the Palestinians across the region. In some quarters, there were celebrations — even as hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians were killed and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threatened a “long and difficult war” ahead. (...)

The ripples spreading from Gaza underscored what many officials, scholars and citizens in the region have been saying for years: The Palestinian cause is still a deeply felt rallying cry that shapes the contours of the Middle East, and Israel’s position in the region will remain unstable as long as its conflict with the Palestinians continues. (...)

Diplomatic “normalization” agreements between Israel and Arab governments — even with the powerhouse of Saudi Arabia, where American officials have been pushing recently for normalization — will do little to change that, many regional analysts say.

“The current war is a stark reminder that lasting peace and prosperity in the region is only possible after resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Bader Al-Saif, a professor at Kuwait University. “No amount of heavy lifting or acrobatics in dealing with Israel on other files can sidestep or erase this simple fact.”

Many Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, have long insisted that the price of recognizing Israel must be the creation of a Palestinian state. But over the past decade, that calculus has shifted, as authoritarian leaders weigh negative public opinion toward a relationship with Israel against the economic and security benefits it could offer — and what they might be able to get from the United States in return. (...)

It also made comments by King Abdullah II of Jordan at a conference in New York last month appear prescient: “This belief by some in the region that you can parachute over Palestine — deal with the Arabs and work your way back — that does not work,” he said.

Indeed, some Arab officials and scholars complain that their warnings about normalization deals that do not sincerely address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have fallen on deaf ears.

Watching the events in Gaza feels like hearing Arabs say “we told you so” to the American president, Khalid al-Dakhil, a prominent Saudi academic, wrote on the social media platform X. “Ignoring what’s right in finding a just solution to the Palestinian cause creates a trap for the region and threatens peace,” he said.

American officials say that normalization is a key step toward a more integrated Middle East, with positive implications for regional security and American defense interests.

by Vivian Nereim, NY Times: Across the Mideast, a Surge of Support for Palestinians as War Erupts in Gaza (read more):

Image: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
[ed. See also: You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana (Noahpinion-Noah Smith).]

Dick Butkus

Dick Butkus, marauding Hall of Fame Chicago Bears linebacker, dies aged 80 (Guardian)

Image: via

[ed. One of the best linebackers in history (along with Ray Nitschke).]

Is it Defamation to Point Out Scientific Research Fraud?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Francesca Gino, a researcher on dishonesty who last month was placed on administrative leave from Harvard Business School after allegations of systematic data manipulation in four papers she co-authored. The alleged data manipulation appeared, in a few cases, chillingly blatant. Looking at Microsoft Excel version control (which stores old versions of a current file), various rows in a spreadsheet of data seem manipulated. The data before the apparent manipulation failed to show evidence of the effect the researchers had hoped to find; the data after it did.

In total, three researchers — Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn — published four blog posts to their blog Data Colada, pointing out places where the data in these papers shows signs of being manipulated. In 2021, they also privately reported their finding to Harvard, which conducted an investigation before placing Gino on leave and sending retraction notices for the papers in question.

Gino is now suing the three researchers who published the blog posts pointing out the alleged data manipulation, asking for “not less than $25 million.” (She is also suing Harvard.) Her argument is that because of the allegations of fraud, she lost her professional reputation and a lot of income. (Harvard Business School professors can make a lot of money through speaking appearances and book deals). I reached out to Gino for comment earlier this week but did not hear back before publication deadline.

Gino’s lawsuit argues that the researchers failed to consider other explanations for the “anomalies” in the data sets analyzed; that Harvard’s investigation into the allegations was “unfair and biased,” and that Harvard’s punishment was “overly harsh” — harsher than similar punishments when male professors were credibly accused of research misconduct.
Checking papers for data manipulation is good work

While Harvard, an institution with an endowment of more than $50 billion, has plenty of resources to defend itself, the lawsuit also targets Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn personally. They’re academics, and they’re not billionaires. Having to defend themselves in a defamation lawsuit is likely to be a substantial imposition for them.

Does Gino actually stand a chance of winning millions from them if the case goes to trial? Probably not.

If their statements are statements of opinion (“from comparing the data sets, I feel that Ms. Gino’s work was manipulated” would be an example of a statement of opinion), they are defensible. If they are statements of fact (like “the data in Table 3 has been manipulated in Excel to change the result”) and they are true, then they cannot be defamatory. If they’re false but the authors weren’t negligent in their publication (for instance, if they can substantiate their claims with adequate sourcing and that they considered other perspectives), then they may be defensible.

The problem, though, is that it will take years — and be extraordinarily expensive — to settle the factual question in court of whether the statements are true. “Your goal [as a defendant in a defamation case] is generally not ‘I’m going to win this at trial.’ Your goal is ‘I’m going to knock this out at the pretrial stage”,” attorney Ken White told me. “What you want is to be able to get away from all the stress and extreme expense of going through a defamation case and discovery; you want to knock it out at a motion to dismiss the case.”

But at that stage, the courts won’t evaluate complex questions of fact, like whether data was in fact manipulated. You can get a case dismissed by arguing successfully that your statements were statements of opinion, but a debate that turns on whether they are true or false may well go to trial. White says, “It’s very rare you can win a motion to dismiss on the theory, ‘Actually this was true.’”

“The process is the punishment”

Having read her case and spoken to defamation experts, I think Gino is unlikely to win at trial.

Gino would have to demonstrate that the claims the bloggers made aren’t true and that the bloggers should have known that. But the details contained in her lawsuit provide far more evidence that shows it was more likely that their claims were true and/or that they were not negligent in reaching those conclusions. Included in the appendices to the lawsuit are the analyses of the study data by an independent forensic firm Harvard hired to examine the situation. While the Data Colada researchers had to rely on public data for their analysis, they hypothesized that Harvard would be able to get more data from Qualtrics and other sources and compare it to the public data to find more evidence about whether manipulation happened. It appears that that’s exactly what Harvard did.

“The analysis of files demonstrated an apparent series of manipulations to a dataset prior to its publication ... Both the earlier version and the latest version of the data available for review were created in 2012 by Dr. Gino, and last saved by Dr. Gino, according to their Excel properties,” the forensic review of the 2014 paper concludes.

“There appear to be multiple discrepancies in certain score sets between the original data source (“Qualtrics Data”) and public repository data associated with the 2020 JPSP Paper (“OSF data”). ... Utilizing the same analyses for the Qualtrics data demonstrates that outcomes a) appear contrary to reported study effects, and b) have lower (or no) statistical significance,” the review of the 2020 paper concludes.

At this point, multiple independent examinations of the data have concluded that it appeared manipulated, in many cases in ways that made the authors’ hypothesis come true. This occurred across multiple papers that Gino co-authored.

Truth is always a defense to block defamation claims. But the lawsuit can still substantially harm the defendants even if the courts eventually find that they were telling the truth. “The system is so broken ... that a case like this will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and go on for years,” White told me. “Realistically, you could wind up going to trial, and even if you’re going to win at trial eventually you’re going to be ruined doing it.”

“The process,” he added, “is the punishment.”

by Kelsey Piper, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
[ed. This story has been making the rounds lately, and for good reason. What happened to the time-honored tradition of investigating scientific replicability? Probably a couple things: 1) the kind of intimidation/retribution/professional mud-wrestling spectacle we see here; and 2) the glamour (and grant money) of discovering something new rather than retreading/verifying other researcher's work. Not the way science is supposed to operate. See also: A disgraced Harvard professor sued them for millions. Their recourse: GoFundMe.]

When Did Cashing Savings Bonds Become So Impossible?

Hoping to cash in a paper savings bond that’s been lying around for a few decades? Set aside a lot of time for disappointment.

Those government-backed slips, doled out by generations of well-meaning grandparents to children expecting more exciting gifts, were long thought to be as good as cash. Shaped like dollar bills, savings bonds promise recipients a lucrative lesson in the value of prudence: The longer you keep them, the more interest they accrue and the more they will be worth when you finally cash them.

Of course it doesn’t matter how much something is theoretically worth if you can’t exchange it for money. And in the case of savings bonds, trying to do so increasingly results in a journey into a world of colliding, inconsistently enforced bank policies.

Like all bonds, savings bonds are essentially a loan, in this case, to the federal government. Though the paper slips may be labeled $100, they cost the purchaser only $50. The higher face value includes interest the loan accrues over years, which generally doubles the value of the bond over two decades and allows the holder to be paid out at the higher sum.

If this sounds simple, it should be, but since you’re lending to the U.S. government, the last step gets tricky. You can’t just waltz into any government building and demand your money. (Until 1977, post offices sold bonds, but never redeemed them.) You can either send your savings bonds to the Treasury — more on that later — or try cashing them at a bank.

The fine print on the back of savings bonds usually reads, “payable by any financial institution.” Hence, any bank should do.

Banks, however, are merely an intermediary, so this is true only in theory. If they agree to exchange the bond for cash, they are essentially fronting money for a piece of paper that they then have to chase after the government for.

Many, like Capital One and USAA, which caters to military families, simply won’t cash savings bonds for anyone. A Capital One spokeswoman cited “limited consumer demand.” Other banks reject the bonds, citing policies they don’t actually hold or are incorrectly applied, or offering reasons that are the equivalent of “sorry, we just don’t feel like it.”

Depositors who have tried cashing savings bonds at banks recently have been inundated with questions, they said. How long have you been a bank client? How much are looking to cash out? Are you willing to put a hold on your account until the funds clear? Have you ever changed your name — and why?

“Everyone thinks that bonds are like cash — well, not anymore,” said Pam Dubier, a 62-year-old San Francisco real estate broker who underwent a four-month odyssey this year to help her retired mother cash her savings bonds.

The process is only getting harder. In May, the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, began imposing a $500 limit on each savings bond cashed for longtime depositors — that’s total redemption value, so including any interest owed. Wells Fargo and Citi place a $1,000 limit on new customers. U.S. Bank has a five-year waiting period before it will cash a bond for a new customer.

No bank will accept savings bonds via electronic deposit, as they do with nearly all personal checks.

If you haven’t heard of any of this, you’re not alone. Few banks post their savings bond policies publicly, and all allow themselves wiggle room to bend their own rules. Colin Wright, a Citi spokesman, said that while Citi would theoretically cash any sum for a longtime depositor, “it’s hard to say that in every instance we would do it.” Asked why, he said the decision would be based on “a number of other factors.”

by Rob Copeland, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Hoppe
[ed. Surprise, surprise. Banks. What good are they, other than the minimal effort they expend to keep the economy lubricated and running? (... and hardly accomplishing even that without periodic government bailouts and fines).]

Xavier Rodés, Pizza 2013
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Christopher Burk, Hupper Island House
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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon, wunderkind of pop-culture-savvy asides and youthful nostalgia, began his first novel while still an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed the manuscript, which he called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and turned it in as his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine, where one of Chabon’s advisors, MacDonald Harris, sent the manuscript (unbeknownst to its author) to a literary agent. It put $155,000 in Chabon’s pocket and thrust him into the blistering heat of the limelight.

Chabon’s colorful endeavors in writing the novel are explored in several of his personal essays (one of which is now published in the P.S. section at the end of Mysteries): in an attic no bigger than a crawlspace in his mother’s house, Chabon balanced on a dangerously feeble chair under the dim glow of a single dangling light bulb and pounded away on a primitive word processor, all of 64 kb of memory at his fingertips, the words scrolling along a screen just five inches wide, with barely enough room to extend his arms. That the novel, a bildungsroman of a recent college grad and his motley crew of friends and acquaintances (bikers, homosexuals, old rich white men, a beautiful but detached young girl named Phlox), has a back-story almost as interesting as the novel itself is the stuff of literary stardom.

It’s this stardom that Chabon has been rebelling against for 25 years.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out in 1988 and was an instant critical and commercial hit. Chabon’s rapid literary ascendancy catalyzed at the peak of the Brat Pack, a group of recent college grads (all of whom honed their prose in workshops, like Chabon) who tackled difficult subject matter—drugs, sex, violence, living in Los Angeles—and favored sparse, minimalist prose. The two archetypes of the movement, Brett Easton Ellis and Jay Mclnerney, drew notoriety with their debuts: Easton’s cocaine-laced Less Than Zero, a pseudo-existentialist depiction of L.A. youth driving on freeways and snorting this and that, came out in 1985, when Easton was only 22; Mclnerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, known for its second-person narration, came out one year earlier and similarly portrays high-brow intellectuals with a penchant for the good snuff.

Together, these two novels marked the beginning of the Brat Pack, and collegiate would-be novelists who sought instant success consequently unleashed a deluge of derivative transgressive slop. (Chabon pokes slightly bitter fun at the mess that was ‘80s workshops in his second novel, Wonder Boys.) (...)

It must have been tempting for critics to lump Chabon in with the Brat Pack. He was young, a workshop survivor, his fiction steeped in sexual yearning and adolescent experimentation. But Chabon had different aspirations. His writing, sometimes dazzling and sometimes flowery, was (and is) voice-dominant. Every page offered sentence after sentence of wonderfully overwrought descriptions of young lust, ambitions outweighed by apathy, youth enveloped by the sultry allure of lazy afternoons spent drinking, smoking, fucking. And his prose exhibited wit, whereas the Brat Pack preferred gloomy brashness. He wrote with empathy, with earnest reflection and self-consciousness, pervaded by sepia-daubed nostalgia. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a lens through which we can view his career, his rise to stardom and his aversion to that stardom, his similar origins to the Brat Pack and all the ways in which he differs from them—in his prose, his life, his fame, his ongoing legacy.

Along with Ellis and Mclerney and, a few years later, Donna Tartt (whose debut, The Secret History, is unquestionably the most ambitious and gorgeously-written of all the writers associated with the Brat Pack), Chabon was held up as the future of American literature; and only Chabon has grown as a writer, has earned a Pulitzer, had one of his novels included in Time’s 100 Novels of the Century. Ellis may have the most notorious Twitter account in America, but only Chabon is still debated and discussed in journals and magazines, his literary worth fought over by esteemed scholars and casual readers. Only Chabon has a reputation to uphold. (...)

Chabon wouldn’t ditch the first-person narrative until 2001, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize. (Not to discredit him, but the competition wasn’t very stiff that year.) More ambitious in scope and subject than his previous efforts, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells a sprawling, decades-spanning tale of two Jewish New Yorker boys, one an escapee of Hitler’s Germany, who collaborate on comics during World War Two. It strives for deep-seeded cultural issues, an attempt to capture the fears and anxieties and proclivities and lusts of a time and place, a dissection of Jewishness and sexual identity and nationalism, of art as escapism and as life support.

In Chabon’s hands, comics, “low art”, become more profound than eight square panels on a page. Like his friend and contemporary Jonathan Lethem, Chabon uses pop-culture as a vessel to explore gentrification and racial and generational schisms, with New York acting as a microcosm. His prose is at its most succinct in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay though still long and verbiage-heavy, each and every sentence has a task, illustrates a theme or develops a character or details the time and place. It’s a long but lean novel, moving quickly and captivatingly. Though in comparison to the preceding 500 pages, the ending feels a little—discounted? unearned? light? This was the novel that established Chabon as a “Great” American Author, not just a wordsmith. (Brett Easton Ellis called it one of the two or three best novels of his generation, whatever that means.) (...)

Transcending Nostalgia

Then came 2012. The world hasn’t yet ended, but Chabon’s reputation began teetering dangerously close to post-Pulitzer self-destruction, like F. Murray Abraham or Adrian Brody or Halle Berry or Cuba Gooding, Jr. after their Oscar wins. He penned the script for the über-expensive mega-flop John Carter, an almost-$300 million disaster, directed by Pixar guru Andrew Stanton in his live-action debut. Though it boasts some impressive visual effects, John Carter earned overwhelmingly mediocre reviews, with particular antipathy directed towards its failure to transcend or improve upon the countless sci-fi serials and epics Burroughs’ work inspired (chief among them Star Wars, and how odd for a film adapted from a seminal work to feel derivative of the other works it inspired) and, in the world of pulp art, mediocrity fares far worse than horridness. (...)

So Telegraph Avenue arrives in the wake of a very bad year for Chabon. Will it redeem him, boost him back to the ranks of the Letter Elite? Or will it convince those on the fence that his best years are indeed behind him?

It would take the entire length of this essay to describe the novel’s plot with any coherent thoroughness, as it’s as contrived and labyrinthine and purposefully dense as the title track on Bitches Brew. Characters flow in and out of the story, which is as non-linear and inconsequential as a Tarantino flick (QT and Miles both act as motif and metaphor here, with numerous references to their albums/ films coming from all sides), with little-to-no back story offered. There’s Archy Stallings (who is black) and Nat Jaffe (who is white), the co-owners of Brokeland Records, a small independent used record store. Archy and Nat struggle to keep Brokeland afloat as vinyl aficionados seem an endangered species, and those who survived the advent of digitalization and P2P piracy, the Great Vinyl Genocide as initiated by Napster and its spawn, now flock to larger, cheaper outlets.

Thence the conflict of the story: the fifth-richest black man in the country, Gibson Goode, former NFL star, is preparing to build one of his string of large, black-oriented malls, called Dogpile Thang, a few blocks from Brokeland, which doesn’t have a prayer of competing with Goode’s immense selection of jazz and funk and soul, his selection deeper, his copies more bountiful, his prices four or five dollars less per disc.

Goode has some sort of history with Archy’s father, Luther, a washed-up would-be icon of ‘70s blaxploitation kung fu films, sometimes drug-user, and full-time disappointment of a father. Chan Flowers, a one-time partner of Luther during Chan’s days of rolling with the Black Panthers (he botches a murder in our first encounter with him, a shotgun and a target no more than five or ten feet away and he somehow misses every vital body part, blowing the guy’s hand off, instead), also has some kind of beef with Luther. Flowers is now a congressman and turncoat to Brokeland as he suddenly switches his position against Dogpile and becomes a proponent of Goode’s monster.

Then there’s Gwen (Archy’s pregnant wife) and Aviva (Nat’s wife and mother of his son), midwives facing the swelling monsoon of a lawsuit that may unravel their friendship. Gwen, four weeks from her due date, is reeling from a brief affair Archy had with the girl who makes Gwen’s smoothies. And Archy’s illegitimate 12-year-old child, the smart-ass and aspiring filmmaker Titus, pops up unexpectedly, his mother dead, nowhere to go. And Nat’s son develops a crush on Titus, who may or may not reciprocate the feelings (he doesn’t say much).

Almost all of this is revealed on the book flap, perhaps in an attempt to clarify readers’ confusion: it’s up to the reader to figure out how someone is related to someone else and what everyone’s motivation is, and it’s often an ordeal. Characters are sketched slowly, and there’s not a whole lot of exposition. No one says, “I hate so and so because of this and that”; Chabon will give us a scene of the characters interacting and we have to decipher what’s going on. It doesn’t sound very complex or earth-shatteringly revelatory, but this is the most subtle Chabon has ever been.

Though it’s concerned with nostalgia (true to form), the prose is written with an of-the-moment intimacy. As loudly as he writes (his comparison of a bald man’s head to a “porn star’s testicle” is one of his less-audacious analogies, and he even reuses that “cup of foaming regret” metaphor, possibly as self-deprecating meta-humor), Chabon whispers about character details and themes more than he bellows. His subtlety is subtly lurking beneath the sheen of five-syllable words and fragmented sentences.

Nothing and no one is above or below Chabon’s prodigious prose. He describes all with equal opportunity opulence. Here, he colors a supporting character who you may or may not forget several pages later: “Rob Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical worker’s union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked in the malefactor thumbs of life.” (...)

This makes the novel a difficult read for the first two-hundred pages or so, as you have to keep flipping back to remind yourself of minute characters who are often referred to by several names and monikers (Who the hell is Gary? Oh, Mr. Singletary, aka the King of Bling, aka Brokeland’s landlord, aka friend of Archy and Nat, aka Aisha’s father). This really gets disconcerting where race is concerned: ethnicity and racial heritage weave through the novel, a serpentine theme coiled around every character and every page, slithering through every conversation, not overtly manifested like nostalgia in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but intangible, ethereal; imperceptible and eternal to nostalgia’s ephemeral avowal; race as a culture and ethnicity as persona, music and movies and lexicon and fashion and sexual tendencies all rooted in one’s genetic make-up, the countries from whence one’s lineage stems.

Chabon doesn’t reveal the race of his characters to us, and only sometimes mentions it in passing (Gwen calls a doctor racist, says something like “my black ass,” etc.). It’s a little uncomfortable trying to decipher a character’s ethnicity, the average reader not wanting to concede to stereotyping, but this is all part of Chabon’s brilliance: he doesn’t bring direct attention to race (though it eventually feels like the main thread connecting the events and characters). He treats it naturally, almost casually. It’s frustrating for a long while, but when you start to get it, the novel falls into place brilliantly. (...)

The long sentences, ramblings, and seemingly irrelevant details aren’t Chabon unhinged or the author’s mind spraying like a fire hose but the consciousness of an avenue and its inhabitants. When you finally penetrate its glitzy façade, Telegraph Avenue is, ultimately and essentially, Chabon’s Chaboniest novel.

by Greg Cwik, Pop Matters |  Read more:

Image: Telegraph Avenue via

[ed. Just finished reading Hernan Diaz's Trust today (excellent) and picked up Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I've been meaning to get to for a while. Then wondered if I should re-read Telegraph Avenue, since it's been so long. A lot of people don't get it for reasons well articulated here, but I thought it was great. Also great: Kavalier and Clay.]

The Harrowing Heat Hump

If you took a walk in Phoenix, Arizona, in late July 2023 and tripped—perhaps over a buckling concrete sidewalk—the tumble could have landed you in the hospital at the local burn unit. Pavement temperatures sizzled over 80 °C , [ed. 170 F] and local news outlets reported hospitals full of burn patients who had fallen on the skillet-hot streets.

According to a new report from Berkeley Earth, August 2023 was the planet’s hottest August since written records began in 1850, with temperatures hovering 1.7 °C above the historical baseline.

Image: Berkeley Earth

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Timon Koch, mobula rays
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What the Heck Happened in 2012?

What the heck happened in 2012? (The Intrinsic Perspective)

Image: via

[ed. Wierd. I've felt for a long time that 2012 was a watershed year too, but just assumed it was me. I lost my mother, my partner, and the place I'd been living in for most of my adult life (Alaska - relocating to Washington state). Apparently there were other significant things happening around that time too.] 

Swiftology

July 7 has arrived, the sun has risen, and Kansas City is waking to the Taypocalypse.

The economic and cultural juggernaut that is Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has thundered into town for two long-awaited shows at Arrowhead Stadium. My 14-year-old daughter is out of bed shockingly early for a high school student on summer break—especially considering that last night, at 11 p.m., Swift dropped her latest album, the rerecorded Taylor’s Version of her 2010 LP “Speak Now,” the most recent flex in the 33-year-old global pop star’s ongoing power move to reclaim control of her back catalog by releasing note-for-note reconstructions of early albums whose master tapes were sold against her wishes. Any new music release—even new old music—is a major happening for millions of Swifties (as the worldwide community of hardcore Taylor Swift fans call themselves) who analyze and debate every song lyric, Instagram photo, tweet and snippet of stage patter like scripture.

The buzz this morning, my daughter tells me, is that Swift changed a lyric in one of her “Speak Now” songs that some fans and critics had deemed sexist. This development is not entirely surprising, but still thrilling for the Swiftie legions who stayed up half the night playing, deconstructing and discussing the new release. This is the first of what will be many news flashes today. My daughter, against all odds, has landed tickets to one of the Kansas City shows, defying scalper bots and Ticketmaster’s meltdown, thanks to the help of her mother, aunt and cousin, who spent hours online during the Nov. 15 presale. It takes a village to raise a Swiftie.

The Eras Tour will inject around $4.6 billion into the U.S. economy and is expected to propel Swift herself to billionaire status. More than 110,000 ticket holders will pack Arrowhead for the Friday and Saturday night concerts, and many of them will be screaming teenage girls. But not all. Also out in force will be Taylor mamas introducing their daughters to Swiftie culture, Swiftie dads gamely sporting themed T-shirts emblazoned with song lyrics, college students attending their third or fourth show in the retrospective journey through the singer’s 17-year career, plus Gaylors, OG Swifties and a host of other subgroups that defy the common stereotype that the obsession with all things Taylor is exclusively a teen mania.

Among them will be a 51-year-old KU sociology professor whose scholarship and award-winning teaching focus largely on cultural sociology, which is concerned with the study of societal institutions, norms and practices. The author of three books that have peered into popular culture’s seedier corners, Brian Donovan will bring to his first Taylor Swift show the dual interests of a social scientist and a fan. Thanks to a research pivot that has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, the professor and self-described Swiftie is now concentrating his teaching and scholarship on the entertainment icon—in particular, on a product of her music and the community around it that is more difficult to quantify than tax revenue and other economic boosts, but that is essential for human well-being:

Joy.

Donovan joined the KU sociology faculty in 2001 and for two decades has taught the department’s class in cultural sociology. The class explores popular culture, and in the past few years the professor noticed that students often mentioned Taylor Swift in class discussions. Those references increased during the pandemic, which coincided with an uptick in Donovan’s own interest in Swift’s music.

He has considered himself a “low-key” fan since 2014, having bought Swift’s fifth album when it came out.

“I was really late to the party, but I fell in love with ‘1989,’” Donovan says. “I thought it was a perfect pop album. But I didn’t consider myself a Swiftie.”

He listened to her next album, “Reputation,” and followed the celebrity news about her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. A documentary on Swift, “Miss Americana,” provided a glimpse into her private life and hinted at a greater depth lurking behind her public persona.

But it was the pandemic that moved Donovan from casual fan to Swiftie. In 2020, while presumably on lockdown like many of her fans, Swift made two spare, folk-influenced albums. As families coped with isolation and schoolchildren’s relationships with friends and teachers suddenly narrowed to computer screens, Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” arrived like a double shot of hope. Hearing her music ringing out during breaks from Zoom school offered consolation that at least some of the traditional delights of childhood were still there for the taking.

“When she released those two albums and I heard the song ‘The Last Great American Dynasty,’ something just clicked,” Donovan says. “That song seemed so brilliant to me that I just fell down the rabbit hole. I was listening to her back catalog and realizing I’d had a lot of preconceptions about her as a musician. I realized what a genius she was.

“I can claim that I was a fan during the ‘1989’ era, which is true, but like a lot of men my age, I only started to identify as a Swiftie in the ‘Folklore’ era.” (...)

Thus was born The Sociology of Taylor Swift, an honors seminar that (according to the syllabus) uses the pop supernova’s life and career “as a mirrorball to reflect on large-scale processes like the culture industry, celebrity, fandom, and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American life.” The class, new this fall, will explore many of the cultural sociology topics Donovan normally teaches, such as the construction of authenticity, symbolic boundaries and gatekeeping, fandom and fan labor, and celebrity politics. “We will also use recent controversies and legal conflicts involving Swift,” the syllabus continues, “to examine questions about intellectual property, copyright, and the economics of creative industries.”

by Steven Hill, Kansas Alumni |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Same with me, when I heard  The Last Great American Dynasty I became a believer - just the casual and matter of fact statement "... then it was bought by me". Wow. As evocative a story as Eleanor Rigby.]

David (Foster) Wallace's Syllabus

etc.

by Sophia, À LA SOPHIA | Read more: (pdf)
Images: DFW/Pomona College 2005

[ed. Now this is how you write a course syllabus (and I'd be suitably terrified). It also says a lot about the instructor.]

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time
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These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

Do (Some) Women See More Colors Than Men?

Based on Dr. Neitz's estimates, there could be 99 million women in the world with true four-color vision. However, before they pat themselves on the back for their superior evolution, he said, it is important to note that humans are just getting back to where birds, amphibians and reptiles have been for eons.

Those creatures have long had four-color vision, but a main difference is that their fourth type of color detector is in the high-frequency ultraviolet range, beyond where humans can see. In fact, that conclusion allowed scientists to figure out recently why the males of some species of birds did not appear to have brighter plumage than the females, Dr. Neitz said.

The problem was in the observers, not the birds, he said. When those species were viewed through ultraviolet detectors, the males had markedly different feathers than the females.

Do Women see More Colors than Men? (Sciplanet)

Fear not men! For despite being excluded from the beautiful colors the rest of the animal kingdom has access to, you can see (again, on average) motion better than your opposite sex. This is why it is the fate of all men to march about oblivious, existing solely in a gray world without color, sensitive only to motion, lumbering around like the Tyrannosauruses in Jurassic Park as our faces become distended, our skin scaly and rough, our arms becoming tinier as our legs and bellies grow huge, and all the while we glare beadily out of our cavernous eye sockets so we can catch, at a glimmer, the smallest of movements. It is only when activated by such a tick of motion that we come alive and can speedily shift our bulk into a killing blow dealt with lethal grace. An athleticism now mostly reserved for flies that get into the house. (via)

Image: Tetrachromacy/Wikipedia

Nothing Is Better Than This

 The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’

David Byrne is showing me why a lamp isn’t usually a good dance partner.

“A normal floor lamp is meant to go alongside a chair,” he says, springing up and placing his hand on an imaginary object level with his seat. “So it would be about that high off the ground, which, if you’re standing, that’s not a good place for illumination of your face.” Then he points above his head. “We want it to be about here. So we had to artificially extend the lamp to still have it look like a floor lamp.”

Talking Heads guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, who’s been watching this demonstration from across a marble table in an airy Los Angeles conference room, smiles and then distills his old bandmate’s explanation: “A floor lamp for Shaq.”

Byrne’s Fred Astaire–esque, extra-tall light fixture routine, scored by “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” is still understandably fresh in his memory. Four decades later, it’s one of the many surreal moments in Stop Making Sense that are impossible to shake. Shot over the course of a handful of Talking Heads concerts at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, the late Jonathan Demme’s film is as transfixingly propulsive today as it was when it came out in 1984.

There are no interviews, no breaks, and no fooling around. It’s pure performance. But the way Byrne sees it, the show isn’t just a show. It’s a journey toward selflessness. “As the show builds, the music becomes funkier, and it becomes harder to maintain this self that’s outside of that,” he says. “You just have to surrender to it.”

The frontman starts out on a bare stage, alone with an acoustic guitar and a boom box, and ends up as part of a collective. “As a musician, you strive for that,” Harrison says. “You’re entirely in the moment of that music. You stop being self-conscious because you’re just all there.”

This month, Byrne is back jiggling around in his big suit on the big screen. Thanks to the discovery of the movie’s original negative, A24 is releasing a restored version of Stop Making Sense in 4K in IMAX and standard theaters. Years of tension led Byrne to officially break up the band in 1991, but the members of Talking Heads know that their film will always be around to bring the party. “We’re very proud that this is our legacy, that we have this,” says bassist Tina Weymouth, who’s been married to drummer Chris Frantz since 1977. “And we’re so grateful that Jonathan Demme was the one to approach us and say, ‘Hey, this needs to be shot.’”

Part 1: “What Is This Guy On?”

In the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme was still a decade out from receiving an Academy Award for directing The Silence of the Lambs, but he had already earned a reputation as an artful filmmaker. After his dramatic comedy Melvin and Howard won two Oscars, he was hired to make Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, and Ed Harris. The production was a disaster: frustrated stars, rewrites, reshoots, and one miserable director. Demme needed a palate cleanser.

Around the same time, Talking Heads was preparing to go on the road to support its new album, Speaking in Tongues. The conceptual tour, which featured a series of slides and images on projection screens and an expanded lineup—including singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Alex Weir, and percussionist Steve Scales—reflected Byrne and the band’s art school roots.

Adelle Lutz (creative consultant and Byrne’s former wife): The show had been on tour for quite a while. I’d been going to Lincoln Center, the Library for the Performing Arts, quite a bit. I said to Dave then, “Even if it’s only for our records, even if it’s only me with a VHS machine at the back of the theater, it should be documented for the library.” And so he said, “Well, let me talk to our manager.” Gary Kurfirst was everyone’s manager—the Clash, the Eurythmics, Ramones—and so David mentioned to Gary the possibility of filming this. And one of his ideas was “Let me talk to MTV.”

And so David said, “Before you talk to them, I have to watch concert movies on TV.” And so he watched everything. All we had was this little Sony Trinitron. And it had my sticker on it that said, “Kill Your TV.” It was seriously puny. And nothing looked good. Altamont didn’t look good. The Last Waltz didn’t look good. And then he saw Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. All of a sudden, he knew that it was possible to do a show and film it and project it.

Sandy McLeod (visual consultant): David actually made a concert tour that had a narrative to it, which was pretty unusual. (...)

Byrne: I’m surprised that a lot of people don’t realize this, that the film is basically a document of the tour that we were doing but with a few songs cut out to streamline it a bit. So it’s not like Jonathan came in with the concept. It was there. That’s not to take anything away from what he did, but what you see is what we were doing, and what he did was to bring out the relationships and interactions between all the band members throughout the show and the characters of each, as if it was acting, as if it was a story.

McLeod: Even though it’s very subtle and not a narrative in any traditional sense, it still has this story that evolves with the lighting effects, the music, and the stories that David tells of the songs. I think Jonathan really got that, loved it, appreciated it, and helped bring that forward.

Byrne: That’s what he saw, and I thought, “That’s not something I would’ve seen.”

Jerry Harrison (guitar and keys): It brought an intimacy to it. The camera blows up interactions that you wouldn’t see. (...)

Ednah Holt (backing vocals): I can tell you that I’m getting chills as I talk to you. This is years later, and I still get the chills.

Lynn Mabry (backing vocals): It was really a collective, of course. David being front and center—I think his take on his own style and music and the way he delivered it, or at least shared it with the audience, was very unique and very entertaining. Then you had the band, you had the musicians, and us, the singers, and we added a new flavor. It was a mixture of retro pop and rock ’n’ roll, and then you had R&B in there. It was soulful. (...)

Steve Scales (percussion): We rehearsed, and we rehearsed, and we rehearsed, but nobody inside quite could get what the heck the picture was in David’s head.

Mabry: At rehearsal I would be watching David performing, and then watch him in front of a mirror, coming up with all of those crazy moves. That was weird. It was like, “What is this guy on?” And he was completely straight. He never drank. He never smoked. Water and clean food.

Scales: He would be in my room at night, or somebody else’s room, doing these crazy little things. We said, “Man, you should do that in the show.” And he would do that in the show. He put it in. (...)

Scales: When we did Forest Hills, Mick Jagger changed his seat five times trying to figure out what the hell we were doing.

Weymouth: This stuff does make you scratch your head. Why choose this? And it’s just sort of like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just part of the entertainment factor.” And so we just thought, “The people who are working with us, they liked it. The crew liked it. We liked it. Hopefully the fans will like it.”

Scales: The first show we did was in Hampton, Virginia. When we finished playing, we were in the dressing room for at least an hour, and the crew said, “You got to come out and see this.” The upper deck of this arena, one side of it was still there, still singing.

Holt: We had fun every night. Every night. It was so much fun that I actually said, “We’re going to die. This is it. This is our last gig.” (...)

Harrison: David was in the challenging position of having to not only be the performer and play his own parts, but also having to run out all the time and see what it looked like.

McLeod: One of the backup singers decided to get her hair cut for the show, and, of course, their hair was really important in the movement in the show.

Holt: I don’t even know what I was thinking. I had no idea that would be important for the movie.

Lisa Day (editor): David was so beside himself.

Holt: David was real nice. He never showed me that side, but he said, “I think it’d be best if you put your hair back. Because it really worked.” I said, “OK.” He had Lynn find a hairdresser to match what we had.

McLeod: That’s an incredibly laborious situation, to replace the missing locs. It didn’t seem to impair her energy at all. She was incredibly vivacious on stage.

by Alan Siegel, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Stop Making Sense via

Gerard Victor Alphons ’ Gé ’ Röling, Mussels in a ceramic bowl with lemons

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Maeve Brennan (Irish b.1980), September, 2020

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Lou Reed

Lou Reed: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Erased’ (Vulture)

[ed. As one commenter puts it, there's a reason this song never gets covered... it can't be improved. Dick Wagner & Steve Hunter on guitars.]

Why We’ll Never Live in Space

Why We'll Never Live in Space (Scientific American)

"Human bodies really can't handle space. Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head, which may be pathological for the brain over the long term—among other things. (...)

Perhaps the most significant concern about bodies in space, though, is radiation, something that is manageable for today's astronauts flying in low-Earth orbit but would be a bigger deal for people traveling farther and for longer. Some of it comes from the sun, which spews naked protons that can damage DNA, particularly during solar storms. (...)

Even if most of the body's issues can be fixed, the brain remains a problem. A 2021 review paper in Clinical Neuropsychiatry laid out the psychological risks that astronauts face on their journey, according to existing research on spacefarers and analog astronauts: poor emotional regulation, reduced resilience, increased anxiety and depression, communication problems within the team, sleep disturbances, and decreased cognitive and motor functioning brought on by stress. To imagine why these issues arise, picture yourself in a tin can with a small crew, a deadly environment outside, a monotonous schedule, an unnatural daytime-nighttime cycle and mission controllers constantly on your case.

Physical and mental health problems—though dire—aren't even necessarily the most immediate hurdles to making a space settlement happen. The larger issue is the cost. And who's going to pay for it?"

by Sarah Scoles, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Tavis Coburn

[ed. Maybe not physically, but perhaps something something something combined... AI, transhumanism, robotics, metaverse, time and evolution? No idea.]