Alabama Shakes

[ed. Am I making myself clear?... (Brittany Howard). See also: Gimme All Your Love (Official Audio)]

Better Science/Better Apple: Cosmic Crisp

"In the late-90s Washington state's apple industry was on the brink of collapse. That's because over a hundred thousand acres of trees grown were for an apple that was losing it's popularity - the Red Delicious. (...) By the end of the decade farmers lost about $760 million dollars in about three years."

[ed. Cosmic crisp. A hands-down favorite. Now I know why.]

The Inland Empire

Warehousing, Supply & Logistics, the Environment and Jobs

After shipping containers are unloaded at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, much of the cargo makes its way 90 km northeast to California’s Inland Empire. This region, which includes San Bernardino and Riverside, is home to nearly 5 million people and roughly 4,000 warehouses. These warehouses, and their adjacent parking lots, cover about 140 square kilometers, an area larger than San Francisco. The Inland Empire has been a logistics hub since the early 2000s but “the ecommerce boom of the pandemic accelerated the land grab, and the region became ever more hardscaped.”

The growth of the logistics industry is a point of contention in the region, with economic development in constant tension with public health and environmental degradation. The sector has created tens of thousands of jobs, although the median wages are relatively low: $18.57 an hour for warehouse workers and $24.93 for truck drivers. Meanwhile, the diesel truck traffic has meant that counties in the Inland Empire have some of the worst air quality in the US. This 2022 video features a high school in Fontana, California that is flanked by warehouses, spurring community concern for students’ health; last month, the city blocked a warehouse development adjacent to another school. Communities in the Inland Empire pushed for a regional moratorium on warehouse development earlier this year, but the bill was unsuccessful.

by Hillary Predko, Scope of Work | Read more:
Images: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
[ed. Coming to a community near you soon. See also: Warehouse boom transformed Inland Empire. Are jobs worth the environmental degradation? (LA Times); also, the video referenced above - How online shopping is polluting California’s Inland Empire (YT):

Israelis Gird for a Deeper War Amid a Crisis of Trust in the Government

On the ninth day after Hamas overran more than 20 Israeli pastoral communities and army bases, killing more than 1,300 people and taking 150 hostages back to Gaza, Israel was a country on edge.

Israelis were girding with grim determination for what they widely see as a war of no choice after the attack on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history and, officials say, since the Holocaust. They were awaiting an imminent ground invasion into the Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas even as tensions escalated on the northern border with Lebanon, threatening a long and devastating conflict on several fronts.

All this is happening amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on. Initial assessments point to an Israeli intelligence failure before the surprise attack, the failure of a sophisticated border barrier, the military’s slow initial response and a government that seems to have busied itself with the wrong things and now appears largely absent and dysfunctional.

“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an author in Tel Aviv. “All the time you said to yourself, ‘I am paying half of what I earn in taxes, but it is for security, national security, at least that.’”

“We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there,” she added, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy, shocked and grieving Israelis have come together to fight the battle and volunteer on the home front in hopes of eliminating the threat from Hamas on their doorstep and emerging stronger.

But on Sunday, the start of the workweek, the streets of Israel’s major cities were ominously quiet. Supermarkets in Jerusalem had run out of bottled water. Some of the last of the 30,000 residents of Sderot were fleeing the long-suffering city that lies two miles from the Gaza border.

In a country of nine million people, where most Jews serve in the army, everybody appears to know somebody who was caught up in the Hamas massacre or who is now on the front line. “Your hands tremble each time you answer your phone,” Ms. Rabinyan said, for fear of bad tidings.

The military high command has apologized for failing in its mission. Along with the so-called people’s army of conscripts, the military has mobilized 360,000 reservists, some of whom have continued to volunteer into their 50s.

A few months ago, at the height of the antigovernment protests over the judicial overhaul, thousands of reservists were threatening to quit, and many disillusioned Israelis were discussing leaving the country. Now, the few planes still landing in Israel over the past week have been filled with thousands of reserve soldiers returning for duty.

Public fury at the government has been compounded by Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster. He has made brief, televised statements but has not taken reporters’ questions. On Sunday, he met with families of hostages for the first time. (...)

Around the country, the atmosphere has been bleak as funeral after funeral has taken place. Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, continued firing rockets deep into Israel and the military has retaliated, pounding Gaza with punishing airstrikes. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization, has also kept up a steady drumbeat of provocations in the north.

At dusk one day this past week, a ghostly silence had fallen over the center of Nahariya, a normally lively seaside town in Israel near the border with Lebanon. Most of the residents of the villages in the area had left for safer parts of the country.

And in the pastoral farmland along the border with Gaza, rows of tanks and armored vehicles were lined up this weekend in dusty fields among the cotton crops and orchards. The soldiers there said the mission was clear.

“To restore honor to Israel,” said Shai Levy, 37, a tank driver who in civilian life is a rabbi and teacher in a seminary. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all,” he said, while stationed in a makeshift camp outside the gate of Be’eri, one of the worst-hit villages, where more than 100 people were killed.

“We’ve trained for years for this,” he said. (...)

There is no telling how it will end. But the strong sentiment is that the Israel after Oct. 7 will not be the same as the Israel before.

by Isabel Kershner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Brenda Cablayan
via:

The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time

The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (Rolling Stone)

Rolling Stone published its original list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2011. It was compiled by a panel of musicians, mostly older classic rockers. Our new expanded list was made by the editors and writers of Rolling Stone. This one goes to 250.

Guitar players are often as iconic as the lead singers for the bands they play in. But mythic guitar gods like Jimmy Page, Brian May, and Eddie Van Halen are only one part of the story. We wanted to show the scope of the guitar’s evolution. The earliest entrant on the list (folk music icon Elizabeth Cotten) was born in 1893, the youngest (indie-rock prodigy Lindsey Jordan) was born in 1999. The list has rock, jazz, reggae, country, folk, blues, punk, metal, disco, funk, bossa nova, bachata, Congolese rumba, flamenco, and much more. There are peerless virtuosos like Pat Metheny, Yvette Young, and Steve Vai, as well as primitivists like Johnny Ramone and Poison Ivy of the Cramps. There are huge stars like Prince, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, and behind-the-scenes masters like Memphis soul great Teenie Hodges and smooth-rock assassin Larry Carlton. (...)

In making the list, we tended to value heaviness over tastiness, feel over polish, invention over refinement, risk-takers and originators more than technicians. We also tended to give an edge to artists who channeled whatever gifts god gave them into great songs and game-changing albums, not just impressive playing.

[ed. An improvement.]

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes. Fans call it "baseball radio ASMR".

It is the perfect podcast for sleeping or relaxing, if you're into that kind of thing.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

"You don't listen to it, you listen through it"

[ed. What a world. See also: The Rapture of Listening to a Fake Baseball Game (New Yorker); and, these other sleep-inducing podcasts: Village of Nothing Much; and Normal Gossip.]

Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)

via:

Robert Doisneau. At the Café, Chez Fraysse, Rue de Seine, Paris 1958

Image via: Context:
"The image is open to many interpretations, all of which are based on the context which surrounds (both literally and pictorially) them.

What we see is a relationship/interaction between a man and a woman. Beyond that the image can tell us nothing, everything else is supposition. The publications mentioned above use this picture, in one to illustrate or support an article about the evils of alcohol, and another to fortify an article about prostitution. It is easy to read either or both scenarios into this image, and many more besides. And so we begin to get an idea about how fragile the perception, or intended perception of an image can be, solely based on the paraphernalia contained within & surrounding that image and how context is added whether it is overtly deliberate or covertly subliminal."

Rethinking the Liberation Pledge

The Failure of the Pledge and a Better Way Towards Vegan Tables

In 2015, animal advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) launched an inspired new campaign among their members. It took courage, required sacrifice, and greatly backfired. This three-part series examines what the movement learned from the Liberation Pledge, how we might energize the intention behind the Pledge in a better way, and a piece to share with friends and family to do just that.

 
What We Learned From the Liberation Pledge
How It Started

The Liberation Pledge was a fascinating idea and a bit of a disaster. Instead of energizing supporters’ social networks to create change, as its creators intended, it often had the opposite effect- to isolate advocates from their closest relationships.

In this piece, you’ll learn

• What it was
• Why it was a good idea
• Why it failed

The next piece in this series suggests a better way to energize the intention behind the pledge, for animal advocates to align their actions with their values in their personal relationships.

The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge to 

• live vegan,
• refuse to sit at tables where animals’ bodies are being eaten, and
• encourage others to do the same.

Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.

Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals.

The pledge gave us hope that there was another way: being honest with those around us while continuing to spend time with them. And, on a larger scale, we hoped that if we all joined together, we could create a world where eating meat is stigmatized: a world where someone would ask, “Does anyone mind if I get the steak?” before making an order at a restaurant (or maybe even one in which restaurants would think twice before putting someone’s body on the menu).

Some people took it a step further, arguing it was immoral not to take the pledge, saying, “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?” According to this view, it was our duty not to sit idly by while violence was committed in our presence.

While some beautiful and inspiring stories were detailed on a Facebook group for the Pledge, it seemed to me that there were many more instances of total disaster: people experiencing huge ruptures in their oldest relationships around the Pledge while often lamenting that those they had just discarded “care more about eating dead animals than they care about me.”

From where I stood, the biggest effect of the Pledge was for advocates to lose relationships with family members who didn’t comply. Upon taking the Pledge, a close friend at the time experienced a years-long estrangement from their family, including those who were already vegan while many others decided to skip birthdays, weddings, and holidays with family. It’s possible that all of this added stigma around eating animals. With these relationships broken down, we don’t know.

 
My Liberation Pledge

I believe the pledge was so popular because it politicized something that we desperately wanted for our own comfort–no animals on the table while we were there–and I took it pretty much as soon as it launched.

The Pledge certainly contributed to my alienation from nonvegans, though I neither experienced the best nor the worst of it. My immediate family accommodated a request for vegetarian tables at holiday dinners, but I’m sure that there were many invitations I would have received if not for it. While my overall immersion in the animal rights community during that time certainly deserves some of the credit for the fact that I didn’t develop many new relationships with nonvegans during the following several years, the effect of the Pledge can’t be discounted.

A website was created with advice for taking the pledge, which is still online as of this writing. It suggested that pledge-takers write a public statement (a model announcement is provided) to inform their friends and family about their new commitment. It also offered some logistical suggestions for getting together with friends and family who aren’t willing to cooperate with the rules of the Pledge. Most importantly, it laid out the reasoning for why we must, together, participate in the Liberation Pledge (to stigmatize eating animals) and directs the reader to “stay firm and nonviolent in the face of conflict.”

This was the right kind of advice, but it fell far short. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the founders of the Liberation Pledge underestimated just how difficult an undertaking they were proposing. In fact, the pledge in practice often had the opposite of its intended effect, an outcome that profoundly undermined DxE’s central theory of change. DxE believed in the power of social networks to create change. That is, by taking bold actions and making personal sacrifices, activists would present a model to their communities and inspire friends and family members to reconsider their views on animals. However, while the pledge was meant to spark this process, in practice, it resulted more often than not in the disconnection of activists from their social networks. Instead of creating change by leveraging their personal relationships (the most important resource activists have, according to the social movement theory of change), the pledge weakened and sometimes even severed these relationships.

I believe these problems were mostly a matter of inadequate training. Pledge-takers were sent to the front lines of a fiery struggle for social change (their family dinner table) with nothing but a template letter. In contrast, tactics that involved legal risk or personal safety were only encouraged with plenty of training. While the Pledge wasn’t a matter of life and death, freedom or prison, it was a risk to members’ closest and most important relationships. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems that it was unwise to encourage pledge-takers to risk these relationships with so little training.

The Alienating Aspects of the Framing

Instrumentalizing Relationships

Framing the Pledge as a political action instrumentalized our closest relationships, communicating to those closest to us that we thought of them as objects to be used for the cause.

I Matter to You, but You Don’t Matter to Me

By framing the Pledge as a pledge or oath, it was presented as a promise to people who weren’t present. Exasperated by the custom and direction to make a public statement before having private conversations with those affected, the Pledge had an unnecessary effect of communicating to our loved ones that they didn’t really matter to us, at least not in comparison to this new thing we were doing. By not including our loved ones in a decision that would greatly affect our future interactions, we communicated something that was often taken as profound disrespect.

At the same time as it communicated that we didn’t particularly care about our loved ones, it explicitly appealed to their care for us, creating a heartbreaking competition about who loves the other less, and therefore gets the accommodation. Some of our loved ones must have felt that they’d be showing disproportionate care for us by agreeing to vegan tables, and so they attempted to call our bluff by serving meat.

Of course, not every Pledge conversation went this way, and many included affirmations of how much the relationships meant to us. Some relationships truly were deepened by the pledge, but it seems that they were the exception.

Unnecessary Escalation

Even if you plan to hold a boundary around sitting at such a table, framing it as such in initial conversations is confrontational to an antisocial degree. Rather than inviting others to understand our experiences, the explicit focus on integrity (I wouldn’t sit if a dog were being eaten) unnecessarily created an adversarial dynamic.

One Size Fits None

By being all or nothing, the Pledge puts us in a position where we are de facto excluded from many large events or gatherings with people who don’t know us well. In these cases, it won’t make sense to accommodate us by inconveniencing so many others, especially if our hosts don’t know us well.

 

by Eva Hamer, Effective Altruism Forum |  Read more:

Image: Liberation Pledge

[ed. How not to win friends and influence people. Alienating everyone you're trying to influence just seems dumb from the get go.]

via:

Devon Turnbull, OJAS, Byredo, BYOJ-001, Olfactive Stereophonique, Blue Edition Fragrance Diffuser, 2022

via: here/here
[ed. Smell diffusion. Hmm. Ok. See also: The Principles of Retrograde Audio Design Inform a Cult Perfumer (Surface).]

Essentially, the device applies acoustic horn loading theories from speaker design to smell diffusion, resulting in a state-of-the-art bottle. Somewhat humorously called the “BYOJ-01 Biradial Controlled Directivity Scent Dispersion Device” and resembling an alien gramophone, it can distribute smells more efficiently than ever before.

Gorham and Turnbull, who both share childhood experiences at Hindu temples and meditation halls, also created a custom scent inspired by wooden structures to go inside. The fragrance evokes a temple-like experience while listening to music on a high-fidelity sound system and helps facilitate the transition between states of consciousness.

My Astounding And Yet Not At All Unusual Day In Culture

9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.

9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!

9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.

10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.

T.S Elliot

10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my “writing mode.” Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill’s dentist. Soak it in.

11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.

12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother"; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.

2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.

3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.

4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.

4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.

6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.

6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”

6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.

6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”

6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.

6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”

6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.

8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.

9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.

10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.

12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.

12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.

12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.

1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.

2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.

2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.

by David Orr, The Awl |  Read more:
Image: T.S. Elliot, Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Saw a mention of beignets this morning and thought of this. : )]

The New Reading Environment

After a long and glorious spell of underpolicing, the modern paywall has attained its final, fortress-defending form. For years the illicit pleasure of an incognito tab often exceeded the actual reading experience. Today’s paywalls, however, are hostile and impenetrable. Might they be sentient too? Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults. (...)

In the good old porous days, paywalls had the quality of a suggestion. Now they are binding contracts with strong personalities. The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, which log readers out much more reliably than they keep them logged in, are aggressive bouncers averse to bribes and persuasion. Contra its gloomy disposition and intense commitment to Courier, which give it the appearance of a bomb threat, Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties is more like a generous (if creepy) uncle, offering two free articles in exchange for an email address. (...)

Paywalls, of course, keep publications in business, even if an online subscription can never replicate the pleasures of print. But even the most passionate faith in the system’s logic is liable to be shaken by regular encounters with the draconian paywalls of local news sites. An attempt to read even a single article in the Houston Chronicle or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or any number of other newspapers slams the reader against an unforgiving prompt for a one-time micropayment followed by a weekly rate somewhere down the line. Pay nothing, read nothing — beyond a lede or a dateline. On their own, these fees are small and even reasonable. Still, the situation is clearly counterproductive: Who is going to subscribe when it’s impossible to know exactly what one is subscribing to? There are stories in these papers about the depravities of local cops, state legislatures, and transnational landlords that could provide an essential service, and nothing quite literalizes the tragedy of local news like the obvious fact that, in the face of such discouragement, the vast majority of people simply won’t read their local reporting at all.

***

For the most part, nonprofit journalism—once a novel phenomenon, now a critical node in the news infrastructure—has avoided the paywall trap. National institutions like ProPublica and the Marshall Project, and local ventures like New York Focus and the Texas Tribune, publish essential investigative reporting and make it widely available to readers. The American Prospect’s editor David Dayen, who has been explicit in his antipathy for the paywall model, wrote last year that “the greatest threat to democracy as it relates to the media is not the spread of disinformation, but the spread of paywalls. The information that an informed citizenry needs to make choices about who governs them and what is happening underneath the surface has been privatized, gated, and kept from those with an inability to pay.

The New New Reading Environment (The Editors, N+1) Read more:

Image: Paul Chan, die Galerie. 2020

Human_Fallback

The recruiter was a chipper woman with a master’s degree in English. Previously she had worked as an independent bookseller. “Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role,” she told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate. They had developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings. Brenda had been acquired by a larger company that made software for property managers, and now thousands of properties across the country had put her to work.

Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda twenty-four hours a day. When Brenda went off script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realize the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. Because Brenda used machine learning to improve her responses, she would pick up on the operators’ language patterns and gradually adopt them as her own. (...)

Many of the properties that used Brenda were similar in a way that unnerved me: blocky, polychrome behemoths located near transit hubs and composed entirely of glass and vinyl siding, their facades as flat as iPhone screens. There was something heedless about these constructions. They didn’t seem aware of what cities they were in. No matter the culture or the clime, there they were, with their keyless locks, pet spas, and smart appliances, each one like a candy-colored app icon the size of a monument. As I clicked through virtual tours, I encountered variations on the same minimalist fever dream: gray sectionals, gray laminate floors, a fiddle-leaf fig tree that cast no shadow. The kitchens had islands, the islands had barstools, the rugs looked like they had been drawn with the polygon tool in Microsoft Paint. I suspected that like Brenda herself, these images were hybrids, cobbled together from real and simulated elements.

I was intrigued by the property names. The older complexes imparted old-fashioned domestic comfort with gerunds and a grab bag of pastoral morphemes (The Crossing at Hillcrest, The Landings at Meadowood), while others conveyed prestige with manorial resonances (Foxchase, Hunt Club, Pheasant Run). The newer complexes, in contrast, had vaporous, nonmaterial names—Continuum, Prism, Vivo, Axiom, Radius, Verge, Spark, Spectra, Ascend—names I found more reminiscent of medical equipment than the tech products they were meant to suggest. Then there were names that spelled out the street address in an unusual way (One One Six, Off Broadway, 2900 On First), and names that incorporated the word Lofts. There were properties with human names (The Seymour, The Ashley) and names that sounded like brunch spots (Harper House, Palmer House, The Outpost). After hundreds of hours with Brenda, the names rattled around in my head like psychic junk. They cleaved apart and collided to form new chimeras. The Chimneys at Carriage Crossing, The Cradles at Crossing Pointe, Vitamin Lofts, The Ether, Parallelogram @ Prospect, Parq Malaise. Sometimes I would jolt awake at night, my heart racing, with no thought at all but Legacy Lofts on Main.

Who were these apartments for? They seemed tailored to a certain kind of tenant, a tenant surely derived from repeated focus groups. This tenant spent more time at work than at home, but when they were home, they were emphatically indoors. They had voice-controlled light switches and ice machines connected to the internet. At the end of the day, they pulled their luxury vehicles into underground garages, picked up their packages from the on-site Amazon Hub locker, ran in place at the fitness center, then ordered delivery from a restaurant endorsed by online reviews. In the same way that algorithms tell us what they think we want, and do so with such tenacity that the imagined wants become actual, these buildings seemed intent on shaping a tenant’s aspirations. They seemed to tell the tenant they should not care about regional particularities or the idea of a neighborhood. The tenant should not even desire a home in the traditional sense, with hand-me-down furniture, hand-built improvements, and layers of multigenerational memory. This tenant was a renter for life, whose workplace was their primary address, and who would nevertheless be unable to afford property for as long as they lived. No matter: their job might take them to Omaha one year and to El Paso the next, but they would always find a home just like this one, as frictionless as the internet, which means that it wasn’t a home somewhere, but everywhere, which was nowhere at all.

by Laura Preston, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Rochelle Goldberg, Consent (detail). 2022; photo by Roberto Marossi

[ed. See also: Why Is Everything So Ugly? (N+1)]

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).]