via:
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
$700 Million Dollar Man - Eventually
No matter how inured you are to the absurd money that’s thrown around sports, no matter how much you’d rather see the revenue sports generate given more to the players on the field than the owners in the skyboxes, no matter how much joy one gets from watching Shohei Ohtani play baseball in a way no one on earth has ever played it — his new $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers can’t help but make you gasp.
$700 million. 700. That’s $700 million over 10 years, $70 million a year. That’s actually twice what Jamie Dimon makes! Not only is it the largest contract in baseball history — over $270 million more than the extension Mike Trout signed with the Angels in 2019, and that deal was spread out over 12 years rather than 10 — but it’s the largest contract in the history of sports, edging the one Lionel Messi’s signed with FC Barcelona. The previous highest salary for a single season by a North American athlete was the $60.9 million the Bucks’ Damian Lillard will make in the 2025-26 season. Ohtani is going to beat that by nine million for each of the next nine years. No baseball contract has approached this one. There are reports that the contract is heavily deferred, theoretically devaluing the deal in real dollars down the line, but $700 million is $700 million.
No baseball player has even remotely resembled Shohei Ohtani, either. Comparing him to Babe Ruth isn’t fair … to Ohtani. Ruth never was a star hitter and pitcher at the same time, let alone over multiple seasons like Ohtani. We’ve never seen anything like Ohtani before. He is my favorite athlete in sports right now.
But this contract is insane.
This is not to say that a baseball player shouldn’t make $700 million. As The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal pointed out, that such a contract exists at all is a sign of the general financial health of the sport and, again, if someone’s gonna get that money, you’d rather it be someone actually wearing a uniform. Ohtani isn’t just the best baseball player in the sport, he’s the most famous and the most marketable; the income he’ll generate off the field will be substantial in addition to what he provides on it.
But Ohtani is a far riskier proposition than he is being treated, not just 10 years down the line, but even five. There are certain players, like newest Yankee Juan Soto, who are easy to project future performance on, with a consistent skillset that we have seen in players for generations; Soto gets on base, hits for power and makes solid contact. Barring catastrophic injury, he’ll be doing that five, seven, 10 years from now, particularly because Soto is still so young, only 25 years old. Soto is a safe bet.
Is it being a killjoy to argue that Ohtani is anything but? First off, Ohtani will turn 30 next year, which is obviously not old, but, generally speaking, is when players at least start to show signs of decline. Fun fact: Of the 20 top finishers in MVP voting this year, only three—Marcus Semien, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman — were 30 years or older. This is, and really has always been (with the brief and notable exception of baseball’s Steroid Era), a young man’s sport, like all sports are. Because Ohtani has only really emerged the last three seasons, there is a sense that he is younger than he is. He’s almost 30. By the end of this contract — when he will be making $70 million, or, if the reports about deferrals are true, even more than that — he will be 40. There are only two players currently on MLB rosters over the age of 40. Maybe science will be dramatically different in 2033. But 40 is still 40.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
[ed. Normally I'd have the same reaction. But that passing mention of a deferred payment schedule is important. $680 million of that $700 million comes after 10 years - ie. when the contract is complete (see: Shohei Ohtani to defer $680m of $700m Dodgers deal to help new club build - Guardian). I've never seen anything like it, and it does wonders for the club's ability to acquire other important players. Crazy money aside, that strikes me as a pretty selfless gesture (given that he could probably have gotten the same amount or close to it without that clause). He's still going to make a ton of money from annual endorsements and a small annual salary, so granted, selfless is a relative term, but still...how many athletes do you see doing something for the greater good of their teams now days (Bobby Wagner and Geno Smith of the Seattle Seahawks are the only ones that immediately spring to mind). Contrast that with John Rahm's hypocritical decision to jump to the Saudi LIV golf league for upwards of half a billion dollars after denying repeatedly that he would in fact ever do that, and stressing over and over the value of tradition and real competition. Now he puts the PGA Tour in an even more compromised position, just because money was/is his primary and overriding metric. I mean, how much do you need, really? So, in the end, I have nothing but the highest respect for Mr. Ohtani and am so gratified to see that money doesn't always rule the day (these days).]
Monday, December 11, 2023
The Implosion of the American Evangelical Movement
I had begun to tune out the main-stage speakers by the time Jim Jordan was introduced.
It was the second day of Road to Majority, the annual symposium organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, and this year’s headliners were doing more wailing and gnashing of teeth than usual. Donald Trump was the show-stealer, naturally, vilifying his former vice president, Mike Pence, and egging on the crowd to boo their longtime Christian comrade for his refusal to subvert the Constitution eighteen months earlier. The dozens of other politicians and evangelical leaders who stepped to Reed’s podium were only slightly less unhinged: warning that it was open season on Christians, denouncing the satanic agenda of the Democratic Party, urging attendees to vote Republican in the upcoming 2022 midterms and end the reign of those godless, child-grooming, America-hating liberals.
When it was his turn, Jordan, the collegiate wrestling champion turned Ohio congressman, hit all the same notes. He slammed “the lefties” who “don’t like freedom” and “have disdain for the folks in flyover country.” He observed that, “Next to Jesus, the best thing that ever happened to this world is the United States of America.” It felt like the teleprompter had been stuck on the same page for hours. I stood up to leave the ballroom.
Just like that, I sat back down. Of all the names I expected to be invoked at Ralph Reed’s shindig, Thomas’s would have been the very last.
Jordan continued, “Cal Thomas had a great line. He said, ‘Every morning, I read the Bible and the New York Times, so I can see what each side is up to.’ ”
This was close enough to the quote Thomas had famously given during a 1994 C-SPAN interview promoting his book The Things That Matter Most. A witty and wily observer of American life, Thomas was at one time among the most-read journalists in the country, with a syndicated column that appeared in more than five hundred newspapers nationwide. That particular quip about the Bible and the Times, delivered with a playful smirk, was a nod to his past. Thomas had spent five years working as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s spokesman at the Moral Majority. He was an evangelical Christian and a political conservative—and, once upon a time, he had used those labels interchangeably.
What Jordan didn’t mention is that five years after giving that C-SPAN interview, Thomas wrote another book. It was a contrition-laden confessional called Blinded by Might, coauthored by Pastor Ed Dobson, the onetime Liberty University dean and Falwell confidant who had been present at the founding of the Moral Majority. The authors provided a damning window into the rise of the religious right: Given how the Scopes Trial had humiliated fundamentalists in the 1920s, and how progressives had hijacked both Church and culture in the 1960s, Thomas and Dobson recalled believing that Ronald Reagan’s presidency represented “the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians” since the dawn of the twentieth century. “We were on our way to changing America,” the authors wrote. “We had the power to right every wrong and cure every ill.”
But they didn’t change America—at least, not in the manner they had hoped.
Thomas and Dobson acknowledged, in the pages of their book, that they had not ushered in the sort of kingdom-on-earth spiritual utopia about which they and so many American evangelicals fantasized. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the country was angrier, more antagonistic, more fearful, more divided—less Christlike—because of the Moral Majority. If Jesus was known for hating sin and loving sinners, American evangelicals were known for hating both. The movement’s short-term electoral gains had come at a steep cost. Not only had the culture moved further away from them; the Church had sacrificed its distinctiveness in the process. “We think it is time to admit that because we are using the wrong weapons, we are losing the battle,” Thomas and Dobson wrote.
What they called for was radical: “unilateral disarmament” by the religious right. Christians need not be “political quietists or separatists,” they wrote, but a wholesale reestablishing of boundaries and priorities was in order. The Moral Majority’s use of shameless scare tactics had tempted the masses of American churchgoers to put their faith in princes and mortal men. This “seduction by power,” the authors wrote, was sabotaging the message of Christ. Winning campaigns had become more important than winning converts; scolding the culture had become more important than sanctifying the Church. Mustering some fire and brimstone of their own, Thomas and Dobson warned their old boss Falwell—and his many descendants, biological and otherwise—to stop confusing “spiritual authority for political authority.”
The book’s publication in 1999 caused a furor inside American evangelicalism. Christianity Today, the venerated magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, devoted an entire issue to a debate of Blinded by Might. (The cover asked: “Is the Religious Right Finished?”) Defending its thesis were former Reagan aide Don Eberly; Paul Weyrich, who had coined the term “Moral Majority” during that fateful meeting two decades earlier; and Thomas himself. Prosecuting the case against the book were Falwell Sr.; Focus on the Family chieftain James Dobson; and Reed, whose Christian Coalition had grown to become the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential evangelical-political organization.
Reed’s piece was especially telling. Its headline: “We Can’t Stop Now.” Listing their many victories in recent years, Reed boasted of how he and his allies had defeated pro-gambling initiatives in numerous states. It would be another six years before Reed was exposed for taking millions of dollars in laundered payments from Indian tribes who enlisted him to mobilize Christian voters against rival gambling initiatives in nearby states. This was but one part of the sweeping scandal that took down and imprisoned Reed’s close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Although Reed had technically broken no laws (if duplicity were criminal, he’d be serving a life sentence) the revelations confirmed many a suspicion about the man and his movement.
Hence my surprise to hear Cal Thomas’s name mentioned at Ralph Reed’s event. I couldn’t think of anyone who would be more repulsed by this right-wing revival than Thomas.
A few months later, I met him for breakfast in Washington. The U.S. Capitol Building—its post–January 6 protective fencing having been removed—was visible a couple of blocks away. As we sipped coffee, Thomas, tall and slender and sharp as ever approaching his eightieth birthday, asked what I’d been up to. I told him about attending Reed’s event. He put his coffee down.
“When Trump mentioned Pence and the evangelical audience booed their brother in Christ, I said to myself, this is the final compromise,” Thomas told me. “Here is your brother. Here is a man who worships the Lord that you claim to worship. Here is a man who goes to church every Sunday. Here is a man who has had only one wife and never been accused of being unfaithful. And you’re booing him? As opposed to a serial adulterer? A man who uses the worst language you can think of and does every other thing you oppose? Explain that to me from a biblical perspective. Please.” (...)
“I got a letter the other day when I wrote something critical of Trump. The guy accused me of not even being a Christian,” Thomas said. “You can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump. Because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.”
What’s interesting, Thomas added, is that nobody went all in on Trump quite like Pence did. Once a respected arbiter of ethical matters, the former vice president forfeited his reputation—not to mention some longtime friends and admirers—by subjugating himself so thoroughly to his boss. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the MAGA mob. The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him. Thomas found himself pitying the former VP.
I did not. Pence, I reminded Thomas, described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.
Thomas wore a stoic expression. Then he began to nod. (...)
All those years ago, as a new Christian, Thomas faced a similar choice. He was involved with something corrupt, unethical, rotten to its core. Rather than stick around in the interest of reformation, he chose to walk away. Eventually he went even further, blowing the whistle while publicly atoning for his own offenses. In doing this, Thomas told me, he hoped to find peace. And yet today, as he surveys the wreckage of American Christianity and reflects on the unraveling of the religious right, all he can think about is what more he might have done. (...)
It would prove a halting journey. Like so many D.C. contemporaries, secular and Christian alike, Thomas was a political addict. He saw no issue with fusing the zeal of his Christianity with the convictions of his conservatism. This was how he came to fall in with the Moral Majority. Falwell Sr. needed an ambassador to the Washington press corps, someone reporters knew and liked and trusted. Thomas, with his deep connections to the city’s social and political scenes, fit the bill; he was that rare firebrand who regularly dined with his ideological counterparts and considered them close friends. Thomas, adrift since getting axed by NBC, joined the Moral Majority in 1980 and rose to become the organization’s vice president. At long last, he felt fulfilled.
Until he didn’t. There was no Road to Damascus moment, Thomas says, that made him question his work with Falwell Sr. Rather it was a steady accumulation of doubt, a growing sense of guilt about how the furiousness of their messaging—on any given subject—did not reflect the realities of the matter at hand, never mind the example of Christ Himself. Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.
“I would go to these fundraising meetings. They would start in prayer and end in manipulation,” Thomas recalled. “We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”
Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.
“You get these letters: ‘Dear Patriot, We’re near collapse. We’re about to be taken over by the secular humanists, the evil pro-abortionists, the transgender advocates, blah, blah, blah,’” Thomas said. “They’re always the same. ‘If you donate, we’ll do a double-matched gift!’”
Little has changed. There were emails in my inbox at that very moment—from Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, from Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins—that deployed similar language.
“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”(...)
“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”
It was the second day of Road to Majority, the annual symposium organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, and this year’s headliners were doing more wailing and gnashing of teeth than usual. Donald Trump was the show-stealer, naturally, vilifying his former vice president, Mike Pence, and egging on the crowd to boo their longtime Christian comrade for his refusal to subvert the Constitution eighteen months earlier. The dozens of other politicians and evangelical leaders who stepped to Reed’s podium were only slightly less unhinged: warning that it was open season on Christians, denouncing the satanic agenda of the Democratic Party, urging attendees to vote Republican in the upcoming 2022 midterms and end the reign of those godless, child-grooming, America-hating liberals.
When it was his turn, Jordan, the collegiate wrestling champion turned Ohio congressman, hit all the same notes. He slammed “the lefties” who “don’t like freedom” and “have disdain for the folks in flyover country.” He observed that, “Next to Jesus, the best thing that ever happened to this world is the United States of America.” It felt like the teleprompter had been stuck on the same page for hours. I stood up to leave the ballroom.
“I love the comment that Cal Thomas made one time,” Jordan told the audience.
Jordan continued, “Cal Thomas had a great line. He said, ‘Every morning, I read the Bible and the New York Times, so I can see what each side is up to.’ ”
This was close enough to the quote Thomas had famously given during a 1994 C-SPAN interview promoting his book The Things That Matter Most. A witty and wily observer of American life, Thomas was at one time among the most-read journalists in the country, with a syndicated column that appeared in more than five hundred newspapers nationwide. That particular quip about the Bible and the Times, delivered with a playful smirk, was a nod to his past. Thomas had spent five years working as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s spokesman at the Moral Majority. He was an evangelical Christian and a political conservative—and, once upon a time, he had used those labels interchangeably.
What Jordan didn’t mention is that five years after giving that C-SPAN interview, Thomas wrote another book. It was a contrition-laden confessional called Blinded by Might, coauthored by Pastor Ed Dobson, the onetime Liberty University dean and Falwell confidant who had been present at the founding of the Moral Majority. The authors provided a damning window into the rise of the religious right: Given how the Scopes Trial had humiliated fundamentalists in the 1920s, and how progressives had hijacked both Church and culture in the 1960s, Thomas and Dobson recalled believing that Ronald Reagan’s presidency represented “the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians” since the dawn of the twentieth century. “We were on our way to changing America,” the authors wrote. “We had the power to right every wrong and cure every ill.”
But they didn’t change America—at least, not in the manner they had hoped.
Thomas and Dobson acknowledged, in the pages of their book, that they had not ushered in the sort of kingdom-on-earth spiritual utopia about which they and so many American evangelicals fantasized. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the country was angrier, more antagonistic, more fearful, more divided—less Christlike—because of the Moral Majority. If Jesus was known for hating sin and loving sinners, American evangelicals were known for hating both. The movement’s short-term electoral gains had come at a steep cost. Not only had the culture moved further away from them; the Church had sacrificed its distinctiveness in the process. “We think it is time to admit that because we are using the wrong weapons, we are losing the battle,” Thomas and Dobson wrote.
What they called for was radical: “unilateral disarmament” by the religious right. Christians need not be “political quietists or separatists,” they wrote, but a wholesale reestablishing of boundaries and priorities was in order. The Moral Majority’s use of shameless scare tactics had tempted the masses of American churchgoers to put their faith in princes and mortal men. This “seduction by power,” the authors wrote, was sabotaging the message of Christ. Winning campaigns had become more important than winning converts; scolding the culture had become more important than sanctifying the Church. Mustering some fire and brimstone of their own, Thomas and Dobson warned their old boss Falwell—and his many descendants, biological and otherwise—to stop confusing “spiritual authority for political authority.”
The book’s publication in 1999 caused a furor inside American evangelicalism. Christianity Today, the venerated magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, devoted an entire issue to a debate of Blinded by Might. (The cover asked: “Is the Religious Right Finished?”) Defending its thesis were former Reagan aide Don Eberly; Paul Weyrich, who had coined the term “Moral Majority” during that fateful meeting two decades earlier; and Thomas himself. Prosecuting the case against the book were Falwell Sr.; Focus on the Family chieftain James Dobson; and Reed, whose Christian Coalition had grown to become the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential evangelical-political organization.
Reed’s piece was especially telling. Its headline: “We Can’t Stop Now.” Listing their many victories in recent years, Reed boasted of how he and his allies had defeated pro-gambling initiatives in numerous states. It would be another six years before Reed was exposed for taking millions of dollars in laundered payments from Indian tribes who enlisted him to mobilize Christian voters against rival gambling initiatives in nearby states. This was but one part of the sweeping scandal that took down and imprisoned Reed’s close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Although Reed had technically broken no laws (if duplicity were criminal, he’d be serving a life sentence) the revelations confirmed many a suspicion about the man and his movement.
Hence my surprise to hear Cal Thomas’s name mentioned at Ralph Reed’s event. I couldn’t think of anyone who would be more repulsed by this right-wing revival than Thomas.
A few months later, I met him for breakfast in Washington. The U.S. Capitol Building—its post–January 6 protective fencing having been removed—was visible a couple of blocks away. As we sipped coffee, Thomas, tall and slender and sharp as ever approaching his eightieth birthday, asked what I’d been up to. I told him about attending Reed’s event. He put his coffee down.
“When Trump mentioned Pence and the evangelical audience booed their brother in Christ, I said to myself, this is the final compromise,” Thomas told me. “Here is your brother. Here is a man who worships the Lord that you claim to worship. Here is a man who goes to church every Sunday. Here is a man who has had only one wife and never been accused of being unfaithful. And you’re booing him? As opposed to a serial adulterer? A man who uses the worst language you can think of and does every other thing you oppose? Explain that to me from a biblical perspective. Please.” (...)
“I got a letter the other day when I wrote something critical of Trump. The guy accused me of not even being a Christian,” Thomas said. “You can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump. Because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.”
What’s interesting, Thomas added, is that nobody went all in on Trump quite like Pence did. Once a respected arbiter of ethical matters, the former vice president forfeited his reputation—not to mention some longtime friends and admirers—by subjugating himself so thoroughly to his boss. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the MAGA mob. The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him. Thomas found himself pitying the former VP.
I did not. Pence, I reminded Thomas, described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.
Thomas wore a stoic expression. Then he began to nod. (...)
All those years ago, as a new Christian, Thomas faced a similar choice. He was involved with something corrupt, unethical, rotten to its core. Rather than stick around in the interest of reformation, he chose to walk away. Eventually he went even further, blowing the whistle while publicly atoning for his own offenses. In doing this, Thomas told me, he hoped to find peace. And yet today, as he surveys the wreckage of American Christianity and reflects on the unraveling of the religious right, all he can think about is what more he might have done. (...)
It would prove a halting journey. Like so many D.C. contemporaries, secular and Christian alike, Thomas was a political addict. He saw no issue with fusing the zeal of his Christianity with the convictions of his conservatism. This was how he came to fall in with the Moral Majority. Falwell Sr. needed an ambassador to the Washington press corps, someone reporters knew and liked and trusted. Thomas, with his deep connections to the city’s social and political scenes, fit the bill; he was that rare firebrand who regularly dined with his ideological counterparts and considered them close friends. Thomas, adrift since getting axed by NBC, joined the Moral Majority in 1980 and rose to become the organization’s vice president. At long last, he felt fulfilled.
Until he didn’t. There was no Road to Damascus moment, Thomas says, that made him question his work with Falwell Sr. Rather it was a steady accumulation of doubt, a growing sense of guilt about how the furiousness of their messaging—on any given subject—did not reflect the realities of the matter at hand, never mind the example of Christ Himself. Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.
“I would go to these fundraising meetings. They would start in prayer and end in manipulation,” Thomas recalled. “We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”
Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.
“You get these letters: ‘Dear Patriot, We’re near collapse. We’re about to be taken over by the secular humanists, the evil pro-abortionists, the transgender advocates, blah, blah, blah,’” Thomas said. “They’re always the same. ‘If you donate, we’ll do a double-matched gift!’”
Little has changed. There were emails in my inbox at that very moment—from Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, from Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins—that deployed similar language.
“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”(...)
“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”
by Tim Alberta, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image:Khoa Tran
[ed. Too little too late (as always). I loathe the term "if only I'd/we'd known back then". A non-mea culpa mea culpa. Weaponized religion, Iraq, climate change denial, pick any major issue... Anyone paying attention knows what's what. It doesn't matter, because... Winning. Money. Power.]
Passion Requires Slow Cultivation
I’ve been pretty flat for a few weeks now. I keep looking for inspiration but I can’t touch it, can’t feel it. I keep trying to use my old tricks in my writing and nothing works. And when I can’t write, I don’t want to do much else. So when I remembered that I had a voice lesson on Tuesday morning, I had an urge to skip it. What an expensive indulgence, and you’re behind on your deadlines. Why sing? What’s the point? And while I’m questioning everything: Why write another book? Why even read another book? What’s so good about books? There’s too much work, infinite work, and what does it add up to? You’ll never be that good, and no one cares, and all will be forgotten. Everything you do is erased and erased and erased as you go.
Inspiration is more rare than I often like to pretend it is. And right now, I’m not pumped up over some new goal, some new destination.
But even that disappointment is a kind of a gift, because it forces me to face this reality: Gaining mastery of a new skill is mostly drudgery. You sit down and do the hard work and you marvel at how bad you are, day after day. That’s the road, and there is no end point, there is just more road, endless road. Even though we talk about passion like it’s this heavenly blast of light and sound that drives you forward to greatness, real, genuine passion often feels more like some Cormac McCarthy novel where things go from bad to worse and you never arrive anywhere at all. But somehow (also like a Cormac McCarthy novel!) the bleak trees, the pavement, the bitter cold wind, all of these things are weighty, lustrous. You are almost dead of course, always almost dead, but somehow more alive than ever.
It’s sometimes hard to tell that I’m improving, since my voice teacher isn’t one to overpraise. This makes sense, since he coaches young Broadway hopefuls at the highly celebrated musical theater program of a nearby college. He leads budding divas along the path to stardom every hour of the day, and then he takes a one-hour break on Tuesday mornings to get on Zoom and watch a middle-aged woman in bad yoga pants sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
You could say there’s something a little broken and pathetic unfolding in that hour of his day. You might even say that my voice teacher is almost like a ragged microphone plushie that this overgrown toddler of a middle-aged woman drags around with her, in order to imagine that she, too, is a budding diva on the path to stardom. And yet, like all of the best stuffed animals and lovies and woobies, he sits patiently and quietly and watches while she belts out
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”
And it’s true. I never thought I’d come to this, singing to a complete stranger over Zoom. What’s odd is that I enjoy it so much. I don’t mind that my view of myself on my computer screen is so horrific that I need to avert my eyes. I don’t mind that my gestures as I sing range from amateurish to flat-out tragic. I look like one of those 12-foot-tall, orange, air-tube people that flail their arms around outside used car dealerships.
It just feels so nice to sing, even in my bad yoga pants, in my empty dining room, where the acoustics are the best.
I have no dreams of Broadway. At this moment, I am low on dreams in general. So it can feel foolish to try to improve my voice, when I don’t have unrealistic fantasies or delusions of grandeur to guide me. Maybe I’m just being an idiot.
But on Tuesday, after we warmed up with some scales and then my voice teacher said, “Let’s get to some repertoire” (I mean can you imagine the ACTING, the absolute DRAMATIC CHOPS it must take to say the word REPERTOIRE with a straight face to a weird frizzy-haired stranger in her dining room?), I stood up and sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” And I hit most of the high notes in a belt I didn’t have a month ago. And my voice teacher said
“Wow!”
Which he never says.
***
So then he decided it was time to add some performance and acting notes to the piece. We didn’t have much time, so we went through the first four lines and I wrote down what I thought the emotion of that line was:
I don’t know how to love him (Vulnerable)
What do do, how to move him (Frustrated)
I’ve been changed, yes, really changed (Surprised)
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else. (Fearful)
Now if you ask me, that’s a lot of emotions to pack into one verse of a song, to the point where this very sweet tune could start to look like a cabaret act or something a street mime high on too many espressos might dream up before hitting the major tourist thoroughfares.
But when I sang the first line while thinking VULNERABLE!, my voice sounded clear and sad and better than usual. So of course I burst into tears.
If I were a Broadway hopeful, my voice teacher might’ve thought, “Hmmm, we really have our work cut out for us, to get this song ready in time for her big audition.” Instead, he had to watch me weep and sniffle for no reason at all. I mean, IMAGINE! Imagine the inherent, palpable, unavoidable ludicrousness of being an esteemed professor of the vocal arts on a ZOOM call with this strange flailing air-tube of a human and having to pantomime patience, for no good reason at all!
But if that were his vibe, I wouldn’t still be taking lessons. I’m not paying him to play make believe with me, no matter how strange these Zooms would look to a stranger who just walked in. If I wanted undue praise, he would’ve bailed a while ago. If he served up insincere praise, I would’ve bailed.
Instead, every two weeks, my voice teacher reminds me of an important truth: When you have a genuine passion for something, you can summon that passion in many different contexts. Tapping into that passion feels good. You care a lot, even when the stakes couldn’t be lower. (...)
New things are almost always scary, even when the stakes are low. Maybe low stakes make them even more frightening sometimes. Because MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, YOU FOOL?
But our time was up. So he told me to write down emotions for the rest of the song and practice it with those emotions. Then we said goodbye. And for a while after that, I sat there feeling
Vulnerable
Frustrated
Surprised
Fearful
Then I stood up and sang the song again. And no, I didn’t feel like a diva headed for Broadway, but I also didn’t feel like an air-tube outside a used car dealership. I didn’t feel like Mary Magdalene, singing about how many, many men she’s had before Jesus (yes queen yes) but I also didn’t feel like an over-caffeinated mime.
I felt like a regular person who cares so much about singing that she can care about it in almost any context. And when I sang
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”
I lifted off from the mundane world, into some sublime realm where vulnerability, frustration, and fear add up to something bigger, something transcendent. That’s what the song is about, after all: surrendering to a force that’s bigger than you, a force you can’t control with your old tricks.
[ed. The process is the reward. See also: Rick Rubin on taking communion with Johnny Cash and not rushing creativity (NPR).]
Inspiration is more rare than I often like to pretend it is. And right now, I’m not pumped up over some new goal, some new destination.
***
On Tuesday, I practiced my new song with my voice teacher. I’m taking voice lessons over Zoom, which is extremely weird and awkward. I disliked it for months, but it’s been over a year now and my voice has slowly improved.It’s sometimes hard to tell that I’m improving, since my voice teacher isn’t one to overpraise. This makes sense, since he coaches young Broadway hopefuls at the highly celebrated musical theater program of a nearby college. He leads budding divas along the path to stardom every hour of the day, and then he takes a one-hour break on Tuesday mornings to get on Zoom and watch a middle-aged woman in bad yoga pants sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
You could say there’s something a little broken and pathetic unfolding in that hour of his day. You might even say that my voice teacher is almost like a ragged microphone plushie that this overgrown toddler of a middle-aged woman drags around with her, in order to imagine that she, too, is a budding diva on the path to stardom. And yet, like all of the best stuffed animals and lovies and woobies, he sits patiently and quietly and watches while she belts out
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”
And it’s true. I never thought I’d come to this, singing to a complete stranger over Zoom. What’s odd is that I enjoy it so much. I don’t mind that my view of myself on my computer screen is so horrific that I need to avert my eyes. I don’t mind that my gestures as I sing range from amateurish to flat-out tragic. I look like one of those 12-foot-tall, orange, air-tube people that flail their arms around outside used car dealerships.
It just feels so nice to sing, even in my bad yoga pants, in my empty dining room, where the acoustics are the best.
I have no dreams of Broadway. At this moment, I am low on dreams in general. So it can feel foolish to try to improve my voice, when I don’t have unrealistic fantasies or delusions of grandeur to guide me. Maybe I’m just being an idiot.
But on Tuesday, after we warmed up with some scales and then my voice teacher said, “Let’s get to some repertoire” (I mean can you imagine the ACTING, the absolute DRAMATIC CHOPS it must take to say the word REPERTOIRE with a straight face to a weird frizzy-haired stranger in her dining room?), I stood up and sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” And I hit most of the high notes in a belt I didn’t have a month ago. And my voice teacher said
“Wow!”
Which he never says.
***
So then he decided it was time to add some performance and acting notes to the piece. We didn’t have much time, so we went through the first four lines and I wrote down what I thought the emotion of that line was:
I don’t know how to love him (Vulnerable)
What do do, how to move him (Frustrated)
I’ve been changed, yes, really changed (Surprised)
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else. (Fearful)
Now if you ask me, that’s a lot of emotions to pack into one verse of a song, to the point where this very sweet tune could start to look like a cabaret act or something a street mime high on too many espressos might dream up before hitting the major tourist thoroughfares.
But when I sang the first line while thinking VULNERABLE!, my voice sounded clear and sad and better than usual. So of course I burst into tears.
If I were a Broadway hopeful, my voice teacher might’ve thought, “Hmmm, we really have our work cut out for us, to get this song ready in time for her big audition.” Instead, he had to watch me weep and sniffle for no reason at all. I mean, IMAGINE! Imagine the inherent, palpable, unavoidable ludicrousness of being an esteemed professor of the vocal arts on a ZOOM call with this strange flailing air-tube of a human and having to pantomime patience, for no good reason at all!
But if that were his vibe, I wouldn’t still be taking lessons. I’m not paying him to play make believe with me, no matter how strange these Zooms would look to a stranger who just walked in. If I wanted undue praise, he would’ve bailed a while ago. If he served up insincere praise, I would’ve bailed.
Instead, every two weeks, my voice teacher reminds me of an important truth: When you have a genuine passion for something, you can summon that passion in many different contexts. Tapping into that passion feels good. You care a lot, even when the stakes couldn’t be lower. (...)
New things are almost always scary, even when the stakes are low. Maybe low stakes make them even more frightening sometimes. Because MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, YOU FOOL?
But our time was up. So he told me to write down emotions for the rest of the song and practice it with those emotions. Then we said goodbye. And for a while after that, I sat there feeling
Vulnerable
Frustrated
Surprised
Fearful
Then I stood up and sang the song again. And no, I didn’t feel like a diva headed for Broadway, but I also didn’t feel like an air-tube outside a used car dealership. I didn’t feel like Mary Magdalene, singing about how many, many men she’s had before Jesus (yes queen yes) but I also didn’t feel like an over-caffeinated mime.
I felt like a regular person who cares so much about singing that she can care about it in almost any context. And when I sang
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”
I lifted off from the mundane world, into some sublime realm where vulnerability, frustration, and fear add up to something bigger, something transcendent. That’s what the song is about, after all: surrendering to a force that’s bigger than you, a force you can’t control with your old tricks.
by Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly | Read more:
Image: Seashore (1969) by Helen Lundeberg[ed. The process is the reward. See also: Rick Rubin on taking communion with Johnny Cash and not rushing creativity (NPR).]
Sunday, December 10, 2023
‘It’s Gone on Too Long'
'Push me over the edge': Diana Rigg’s dying wishes in the grip of cancer.
I will never forget the look in my mother’s eyes that day near the end; the “north face of the Eiger”, as my family christened it. You have seen it in Game of Thrones, that look. As the Queen of Thorns, she used it to great effect. Fixing me with it for the first time in these last months, she said: “Rachie, it’s gone on too long – push me over the edge.”
She had by then been on end-of-life drugs for four days. I felt sick. I knew what she was asking me to do. I had made a promise when I was quite young, that I would one day put a pillow over my mother’s face if she ever asked me to. It was a joke for years. Until now. And I couldn’t do it. It was the one and only time she showed anger or bad temper in any of her suffering. She died the next day.
End of life is not for wimps. When Ma was very weak and the nurse came to insert her catheter, I sat listening from my bedroom next door. My mother still wanted dignity and privacy when she could get it. It was only afterwards that I realised the nurse had inserted it without offering anaesthetic cream or any local pain relief, but my mother was too tired to protest. I was furious. Unnecessary pain was the thing I’d promised I would protect her from. Unnecessary suffering. It was a promise that I could not keep.
Quite apart from the lack of bowel control, by the end her dehydration was such that her mouth was dry and cracked and horribly ulcerated. We dabbed it constantly with gel on a sponge atop a lollipop stick, but still she suffered. By the time the doctor said she could have the syringe driver to comfort her and to help her toward death, she had suffered as much as I have known any human to suffer. She was terribly weak and woefully thin. By the end it hurt her to even smile, let alone laugh. “I think I’ve rather gone off God,” she said slowly and painfully, the day before she died. “I think he’s fucking mean.”
I had known of my mother’s views on assisted dying for years. In her last few months she became increasingly adamant that the law should be changed, and so we recorded her statements on assisted dying to be released after her death. (...)
“I have cancer and it is everywhere, and I have been given six months to live,” she says. “Yet again we found ourselves in the bathroom this morning, my beloved daughter and I, half-laughing and half-crying, showering off together, and it was loving, and it was kind, but it shouldn’t happen.
“And if I could have beamed myself off this mortal coil at that moment, you bet I would’ve done it there and then.”
She adds that nobody talks about “how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.” (...)
I recorded her saying to the doctor who had delivered the bad news, “I will pursue, in the end, an end to my life that I have chosen.” Finally, she agreed to come home to live out her last, and to die with me and my family.
She had by then been on end-of-life drugs for four days. I felt sick. I knew what she was asking me to do. I had made a promise when I was quite young, that I would one day put a pillow over my mother’s face if she ever asked me to. It was a joke for years. Until now. And I couldn’t do it. It was the one and only time she showed anger or bad temper in any of her suffering. She died the next day.
Quite apart from the lack of bowel control, by the end her dehydration was such that her mouth was dry and cracked and horribly ulcerated. We dabbed it constantly with gel on a sponge atop a lollipop stick, but still she suffered. By the time the doctor said she could have the syringe driver to comfort her and to help her toward death, she had suffered as much as I have known any human to suffer. She was terribly weak and woefully thin. By the end it hurt her to even smile, let alone laugh. “I think I’ve rather gone off God,” she said slowly and painfully, the day before she died. “I think he’s fucking mean.”
I had known of my mother’s views on assisted dying for years. In her last few months she became increasingly adamant that the law should be changed, and so we recorded her statements on assisted dying to be released after her death. (...)
“I have cancer and it is everywhere, and I have been given six months to live,” she says. “Yet again we found ourselves in the bathroom this morning, my beloved daughter and I, half-laughing and half-crying, showering off together, and it was loving, and it was kind, but it shouldn’t happen.
“And if I could have beamed myself off this mortal coil at that moment, you bet I would’ve done it there and then.”
She adds that nobody talks about “how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.” (...)
At her request I had explored every avenue. Dignitas, which she had been a supporter of, was a bureaucratic nightmare. My mother would be dead by the time she was allowed go to Switzerland to legally die. Then we discussed hiring a swanky house and a dodgy doctor. We discussed every possible scenario. We howled with laughter, of course, but came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to pop your own clogs without it being plainly barbaric or painfully inefficient.
I recorded her saying to the doctor who had delivered the bad news, “I will pursue, in the end, an end to my life that I have chosen.” Finally, she agreed to come home to live out her last, and to die with me and my family.
My boys welcomed her with open arms. She slept in her own bed, now in our house, in a room surrounded by her favourite pictures and her creature comforts; a radio by the bed and Narcisse perfume sprayed in abundance if she didn’t feel up to a shower. We put a telly in there which she hoped would, and indeed did, entice my son to hang out with her. I fed her when she wanted to be fed but never forced food on her. She loved those cold yoghurt drinks when solids became too much. After a while she had no appetite at all, and so she began to take control of her circumstances. Not eating was also a way of making sure she never needed the lavatory. (...)
But the truth is, in the initial aftermath of her death, the press and the public wanted to remember Diana Rigg as she once was. It was too soon to associate Emma Peel with physical decline, or the only Mrs James Bond with incontinence. But it was the indignity of incontinence which made my mother want to end her life. For her, and I know this isn’t the same for everybody, the tipping point in her quality of life was the inability to control her bowels. It depressed her so completely that her dignity was, on a daily basis, stretched beyond breaking point. She simply didn’t want to be here any more.
But the truth is, in the initial aftermath of her death, the press and the public wanted to remember Diana Rigg as she once was. It was too soon to associate Emma Peel with physical decline, or the only Mrs James Bond with incontinence. But it was the indignity of incontinence which made my mother want to end her life. For her, and I know this isn’t the same for everybody, the tipping point in her quality of life was the inability to control her bowels. It depressed her so completely that her dignity was, on a daily basis, stretched beyond breaking point. She simply didn’t want to be here any more.
by Rachael Stirling, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: The Avengers/Wikipedia/Moria
[ed. I don't know what factors will finally force a change in society - maybe just more people dying and loved ones experiencing that process - but it will happen, eventually. We're taught from the earliest of age to control ourselves, our impulses, our bodies. Then that control is wrested away when we need it the most and appropriated by the government. It's forced torture, and for who's benefit? Not the person dying, that's for sure. Band-aids like Dignitas simply exist to give the illusion of an alternative - workarounds with nearly insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles (eg., only 540 British people in the last 20 years). It's just insane cruelty. In this day and age.]
Too-Muchness
Images: Balenciaga
[ed. Retail $2100. Probably pairs well with a 10-gallon cowboy hat. See also: Balenciaga’s Creepy (and Cool) Take on Hollywood Culture (The Cut). It could be worse:]
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Was It Worth It, Kevin?
And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain.
Come on! You know the Sinatra classic. Croon along with me as we emotionally gird ourselves for the closing act of Kevin McCarthy’s long, disappointing stint in Congress.
Having spent most of 2023 as a punching bag for his conference’s right flank, Mr. McCarthy has finally reached his pain threshold. At the end of this month, he announced on Wednesday, he will pack up his toys and flee the House, having made history as the first speaker booted from the job.
But do not cry for the former young gun. He has too few regrets to mention. As he bravely cheered his own performance in a Wall Street Journal essay announcing his departure, “I go knowing I left it all on the field — as always, with a smile on my face.”
Boy, did he. In his fevered pursuit of the gavel, Mr. McCarthy time and again prostrated himself before the altar of Donald Trump, sacrificing basically all the things that matter: his dignity, his integrity, his values (such as they were), his soul — you name it.
Now, looking back on each and every highway the congressman traveled to reach this point, I feel compelled to ask: Was it worth it, Kev?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Mr. McCarthy came roaring into Washington from California in 2007 with big dreams and enormous promise. Alongside Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, he was part of a new generation of fresh, feisty conservatives looking to overhaul what they saw as a stale, out-of-touch Republican Party.
Like an adorable boy band, the three pals each had a persona: Mr. Ryan, the policy wonk; Mr. Cantor, the blossoming leader; and Mr. McCarthy, the political animal. Mr. McCarthy was less concerned about policy or ideology than about mapping out the wins — for his team and, above all, for himself. Riding high in the mid-Obama era, the trio wrote a book, titled, of course, “Young Guns,” that boldly demanded to know: “America urgently needs a new direction. But who will provide it?”
Spoiler alert: none of these guys.
Instead of remaking the party, the party wound up remaking the young guns — or, in some cases, simply kicking them to the curb. Mr. McCarthy hung on longer than the others, which was a real tribute to his ability to shape-shift as circumstances dictated. (...)
Of course, a shape-shifting, flip-flopping, overpromising, self-serving politician is nothing new. Where Mr. McCarthy truly distinguished himself was in his willingness and ability to debase himself in the service of Donald Trump — even as he occasionally pretended to still have a spine. “My Kevin,” as Mr. Trump so delighted in calling him, certainly did his part to aid Mr. Trump’s political revival after the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol. In a turnaround so dramatic it must have given him whiplash, Mr. McCarthy went from saying that Mr. Trump needed to “accept his share of responsibility” for his role in the attack to, some weeks later, slinking down to Mar-a-Lago for a grotesque photo op with the former president.
What could be more pathetic than this little field trip? Mr. McCarthy’s attempts to justify it. In “Oath and Honor,” the new book by Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman and Trump scourge, she dishes some dirt about confronting him.
“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” she asked, according to CNN.
“They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy offered. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”
Betraying democracy because the MAGA king’s appetite was off? Wow. Just wow.
Give Mr. McCarthy his due: All that butt smooching worked, kind of, allowing him to wheedle his way into his dream job for 11 not-so-glorious months. But having handed his leash to the right-wingers, he had no room left to do his job leading the House. And the moment he dared to cross them, using his deal-cutting, coalition-building skills to hammer out a bipartisan debt limit agreement and avoid crashing the global economy, he was a marked man. The extremists were on the prowl for any excuse to take him down, and come late September, the stopgap funding deal he cut to prevent a government shutdown filled the bill. A few days later, they snatched the gavel back from him, along with the last remaining shreds of his dignity.
It’s hard to dispute that this is the ending that Mr. McCarthy deserved. By contrast, the American people don’t deserve the damage that he has done to the House — and, really, the nation — that will linger long after he is gone. By empowering the most extreme elements of the Republican conference, he made an already fractured, fractious chamber even more dysfunctional. Worse, by shoring up Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, he helped put America back on a crash course with a dangerous, antidemocratic demagogue looking for political revenge.
These are Mr. McCarthy’s legacies. If he is remembered at all, it will be as a cautionary tale about what happens when one leaves it all on the field in the service of little more than blind ambition.
"Local Republican officials have been quick to sing McCarthy’s praises since the announcement of his retirement from Congress, calling him optimistic, unafraid of hard work, a patriot, and a “tremendous advocate for the Central Valley”. But others less beholden to him have been notable mostly by their silence.
Bakersfield’s mayor, Karen Goh, who has been photographed with McCarthy on passingly few occasions since she took office seven years ago, issued no statement. When invited to comment on ways in which McCarthy had helped the city in his 16 years in Washington, she told the Guardian she was too busy to respond."
And so I face the final curtain.
Come on! You know the Sinatra classic. Croon along with me as we emotionally gird ourselves for the closing act of Kevin McCarthy’s long, disappointing stint in Congress.
Having spent most of 2023 as a punching bag for his conference’s right flank, Mr. McCarthy has finally reached his pain threshold. At the end of this month, he announced on Wednesday, he will pack up his toys and flee the House, having made history as the first speaker booted from the job.
Boy, did he. In his fevered pursuit of the gavel, Mr. McCarthy time and again prostrated himself before the altar of Donald Trump, sacrificing basically all the things that matter: his dignity, his integrity, his values (such as they were), his soul — you name it.
Now, looking back on each and every highway the congressman traveled to reach this point, I feel compelled to ask: Was it worth it, Kev?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Mr. McCarthy came roaring into Washington from California in 2007 with big dreams and enormous promise. Alongside Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, he was part of a new generation of fresh, feisty conservatives looking to overhaul what they saw as a stale, out-of-touch Republican Party.
Like an adorable boy band, the three pals each had a persona: Mr. Ryan, the policy wonk; Mr. Cantor, the blossoming leader; and Mr. McCarthy, the political animal. Mr. McCarthy was less concerned about policy or ideology than about mapping out the wins — for his team and, above all, for himself. Riding high in the mid-Obama era, the trio wrote a book, titled, of course, “Young Guns,” that boldly demanded to know: “America urgently needs a new direction. But who will provide it?”
Spoiler alert: none of these guys.
Instead of remaking the party, the party wound up remaking the young guns — or, in some cases, simply kicking them to the curb. Mr. McCarthy hung on longer than the others, which was a real tribute to his ability to shape-shift as circumstances dictated. (...)
Of course, a shape-shifting, flip-flopping, overpromising, self-serving politician is nothing new. Where Mr. McCarthy truly distinguished himself was in his willingness and ability to debase himself in the service of Donald Trump — even as he occasionally pretended to still have a spine. “My Kevin,” as Mr. Trump so delighted in calling him, certainly did his part to aid Mr. Trump’s political revival after the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol. In a turnaround so dramatic it must have given him whiplash, Mr. McCarthy went from saying that Mr. Trump needed to “accept his share of responsibility” for his role in the attack to, some weeks later, slinking down to Mar-a-Lago for a grotesque photo op with the former president.
What could be more pathetic than this little field trip? Mr. McCarthy’s attempts to justify it. In “Oath and Honor,” the new book by Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman and Trump scourge, she dishes some dirt about confronting him.
“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” she asked, according to CNN.
“They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy offered. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”
Betraying democracy because the MAGA king’s appetite was off? Wow. Just wow.
Give Mr. McCarthy his due: All that butt smooching worked, kind of, allowing him to wheedle his way into his dream job for 11 not-so-glorious months. But having handed his leash to the right-wingers, he had no room left to do his job leading the House. And the moment he dared to cross them, using his deal-cutting, coalition-building skills to hammer out a bipartisan debt limit agreement and avoid crashing the global economy, he was a marked man. The extremists were on the prowl for any excuse to take him down, and come late September, the stopgap funding deal he cut to prevent a government shutdown filled the bill. A few days later, they snatched the gavel back from him, along with the last remaining shreds of his dignity.
It’s hard to dispute that this is the ending that Mr. McCarthy deserved. By contrast, the American people don’t deserve the damage that he has done to the House — and, really, the nation — that will linger long after he is gone. By empowering the most extreme elements of the Republican conference, he made an already fractured, fractious chamber even more dysfunctional. Worse, by shoring up Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, he helped put America back on a crash course with a dangerous, antidemocratic demagogue looking for political revenge.
These are Mr. McCarthy’s legacies. If he is remembered at all, it will be as a cautionary tale about what happens when one leaves it all on the field in the service of little more than blind ambition.
by Michelle Cottle, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
[ed. Good luck with that Wikipedia page. Power is such an intoxicating drug (really, the absolute worst). People are still jockeying for Trump's favor despite all evidence they'll eventually end up being smeared, humiliated, in court, or broke - just like everyone else who enters his orbit. It says all you need to know. Bottom feeders at the bottom of the barrel. See also: California hometown sheds few tears for retiring McCarthy: ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Kevin’ (The Guardian).]
[ed. Good luck with that Wikipedia page. Power is such an intoxicating drug (really, the absolute worst). People are still jockeying for Trump's favor despite all evidence they'll eventually end up being smeared, humiliated, in court, or broke - just like everyone else who enters his orbit. It says all you need to know. Bottom feeders at the bottom of the barrel. See also: California hometown sheds few tears for retiring McCarthy: ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Kevin’ (The Guardian).]
"Local Republican officials have been quick to sing McCarthy’s praises since the announcement of his retirement from Congress, calling him optimistic, unafraid of hard work, a patriot, and a “tremendous advocate for the Central Valley”. But others less beholden to him have been notable mostly by their silence.
Bakersfield’s mayor, Karen Goh, who has been photographed with McCarthy on passingly few occasions since she took office seven years ago, issued no statement. When invited to comment on ways in which McCarthy had helped the city in his 16 years in Washington, she told the Guardian she was too busy to respond."
Urban China
[ed. Whatever you imagine Chinese life to look like, it's probably not this. But...]
"Americans, used to their own shabby infrastructure and dowdy downtowns, often view these videos — or their own trips to these cities — as signs that China is “way ahead” of the West.
And so it may be. But there are a couple important subtleties that tend to get missed when people drool over these glowing skylines.
The first is about China’s style of urbanism. The montages of Chinese cities tend to look very different from montages of other Asian cities like Tokyo or Seoul or Hong Kong or Singapore, where the shots tend to focus on pedestrian spaces. There’s a reason for this; China has generally chosen a different approach to urbanism from other Asian countries. It’s more car-centric, with lots of giant highways and thoroughfares. The retail tends to be clustered in malls or other giant showpiece shopping centers rather than along walkable streets. Residential areas tend to be far from retail and commercial areas, clustered in ultra-high-density “superblocks”. This form of development has sometimes been referred to as “high-density sprawl”.
You can really see this when you look at ground-level videos of Chinese cities. Foot traffic tends to be concentrated in shopping malls or dedicated promenades, while the centers of cities are dominated by huge roads filled with cars. What walkable mixed-use pedestrian-friendly areas do exist tend to be very old, like Shanghai’s Bund and Old City. The skyscrapers and bridges do have plenty of spectacular LEDs on them — LED lighting has become very cheap in recent years — but this is perhaps necessary to break up the imposing, impersonal scale of these cities.
The reason these cities look like they were built for giants instead of people is that…well, they were. The “giants” here are corporations. As Michael Pettis would probably tell you, China over the last three decades has been a producer-centric economy, where the needs of construction companies and developers outweigh the needs of consumers. Giant skyscrapers and highways and concrete promenades and bridges and malls maximized the throughput of Chinese companies, so that’s what got built.
This type of urbanism surely showcases vast production capacity, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily makes Chinese cities amazing places to live, when compared with other Asian cities.
The other thing these videos neglect is capital depreciation. The more you build, the more you have to maintain. In 20 years, these glittering new buildings and infrastructure will begin to show their age; at that point, China’s government will have the choice to spend a lot of GDP upkeeping and rebuilding them (as Japan and Korea do) or letting them start to look a bit shabby, worn, and old on the outside (as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States do).
Depreciation isn’t a mistake on China’s part; every country has to deal with it. But the cycle of new construction followed by depreciation does seem to give a lot of American visitors a very predictably biased impression of whether a country is “rising” or “declining”. In general, a city that looks like the “city of the future” is just one that was recently built.
But anyway, the LED skylines of Chinese cities are still fun, especially when set to some nice music."
"Americans, used to their own shabby infrastructure and dowdy downtowns, often view these videos — or their own trips to these cities — as signs that China is “way ahead” of the West.
And so it may be. But there are a couple important subtleties that tend to get missed when people drool over these glowing skylines.
The first is about China’s style of urbanism. The montages of Chinese cities tend to look very different from montages of other Asian cities like Tokyo or Seoul or Hong Kong or Singapore, where the shots tend to focus on pedestrian spaces. There’s a reason for this; China has generally chosen a different approach to urbanism from other Asian countries. It’s more car-centric, with lots of giant highways and thoroughfares. The retail tends to be clustered in malls or other giant showpiece shopping centers rather than along walkable streets. Residential areas tend to be far from retail and commercial areas, clustered in ultra-high-density “superblocks”. This form of development has sometimes been referred to as “high-density sprawl”.
You can really see this when you look at ground-level videos of Chinese cities. Foot traffic tends to be concentrated in shopping malls or dedicated promenades, while the centers of cities are dominated by huge roads filled with cars. What walkable mixed-use pedestrian-friendly areas do exist tend to be very old, like Shanghai’s Bund and Old City. The skyscrapers and bridges do have plenty of spectacular LEDs on them — LED lighting has become very cheap in recent years — but this is perhaps necessary to break up the imposing, impersonal scale of these cities.
The reason these cities look like they were built for giants instead of people is that…well, they were. The “giants” here are corporations. As Michael Pettis would probably tell you, China over the last three decades has been a producer-centric economy, where the needs of construction companies and developers outweigh the needs of consumers. Giant skyscrapers and highways and concrete promenades and bridges and malls maximized the throughput of Chinese companies, so that’s what got built.
This type of urbanism surely showcases vast production capacity, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily makes Chinese cities amazing places to live, when compared with other Asian cities.
The other thing these videos neglect is capital depreciation. The more you build, the more you have to maintain. In 20 years, these glittering new buildings and infrastructure will begin to show their age; at that point, China’s government will have the choice to spend a lot of GDP upkeeping and rebuilding them (as Japan and Korea do) or letting them start to look a bit shabby, worn, and old on the outside (as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States do).
Depreciation isn’t a mistake on China’s part; every country has to deal with it. But the cycle of new construction followed by depreciation does seem to give a lot of American visitors a very predictably biased impression of whether a country is “rising” or “declining”. In general, a city that looks like the “city of the future” is just one that was recently built.
But anyway, the LED skylines of Chinese cities are still fun, especially when set to some nice music."
~ Some Thoughts on Chinese Urbanism (Noahpinion)
via:
Friday, December 8, 2023
The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
A friend of mine, a screenwriter in New York, believes Get Back has a catalytic effect on anyone who does creative work. Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together.
This is strange, in a way, since the series does not present an obviously alluring portrait of creative collaboration. Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on. As we watch them hack away at the same songs over and over again, we can start to feel a little dispirited too. And yet somewhere on this seemingly aimless journey, an alchemy takes place. (...)
Watching extraordinary people do ordinary things is also just oddly gripping. I loved witnessing the workaday mundanity of The Beatles’ creative life. Turning up for work - for the most part - every day, at an agreed time: Morning Paul. Morning George. Taking an hour for lunch, popping out for meetings. Sticking up your kid’s drawing by your workstation. Confessing to hangovers. Discussing TV from the night before. Fart jokes. Happy hour at the end of an afternoon. Coats on: Bye then. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.
Immersed in all this banality, a funny thing happens to the viewer. As we get into the rhythm of the Beatles’ daily lives, we start to inhabit their world. Since we live through their aimless wandering, we share in the moments of laughter, tenderness and joy that emerge from it with a special intensity. When they get up on that roof at the end of the final episode we feel exhilarated, joyful, and almost as thrilled as they look. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable.
Let’s remind ourselves about how unwise, or if you prefer, insane, the Twickenham project was. The Beatles had only just finished a double album, the White Album (that was its nickname - I love hearing the Beatles call it “The Beatles”). It was a huge project and they had plenty of arguments in the making of it. Fortunately, it sold boatloads - their most commercially successful album to date. Paul and John have new girlfriends they’re very serious about. George is with Patti and hanging out with Dylan, Ringo has two young kids. In other words, they had every excuse, and every reason, to take six months or a year off. But no. In September, they enjoy making a promo for Hey Jude in front of a live audience, which rekindles their interest in performing, and they come up with a vague plan to do a TV special in the new year.
The initial idea was to perform songs from the White Album. That makes sense: using a show to perform songs from the album they just made is what ANY NORMAL BAND WOULD DO. But no. John and Paul get together before Christmas and decide they have to create a whole album’s worth of new songs, learn to play those while being filmed, and then perform them. That would be hard enough to achieve in three to six months. But because Ringo has to make a film they end up trying to cram all of this - writing, learning, rehearsing, show-planning - into three weeks. And they choose to do it all in an aircraft hangar.
The Beatles’ allergy to repetition, their relentless instinct to seek out the new rather than repackage the old, is here taken to such an extreme that it puts them in an absurd position. As a group, they were terrible at making non-musical decisions. They were much better at saying what they didn’t want to do than at making sensible plans for what they did want to do. So they ended up in this trap. As we watch the four Beatles try to escape from it, we are moved, because we see, for the first time, quite what a fragile creative entity they always were, and how hard they worked to stay together.
Nearly every Beatles album was perfect or close to it, a succession of immaculate conceptions. The Beach Boys, perhaps their closest artistic rivals, made some jewels, some stinkers, and some just-OK albums. That was typical, even for the best artists. There was something mysterious and implacable about The Beatles’ ability to keep a high standard at a high volume of output. It baffled their peers. Brian Wilson said of them, “They never did anything clumsy. (...)
Let It Be, the album that eventually emerged from the Get Back sessions, and the last new Beatles album to be released, has always been the closest thing to a glitch in this long run of jewels. Unfinished by the group, it is messy, uneven and incoherent by their standards, even though it contains a few songs that would be enough to turn most bands into legends by themselves. Today, Let It Be exists in various iterations, none of them definitive. One effect of Jackson’s Get Back is to find, or restore, a purpose to this loose strand from The Beatles’ recording career, by letting us in on a secret: they didn’t know what they were doing.
At one point in Get Back, during the endless discussion about why they’re all here, George Harrison reminds the others that The Beatles have never really made plans: “The things that have worked out best for us haven’t really been planned any more than this has. It’s just… like, you go into something and it does it by itself. Whatever it’s gonna be, it becomes that.” I think this represents a profound truth about The Beatles. They moved through the world in a dream, and the world became their dream.
by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian | Read more:
Image: Get Back
[ed. Thinking of re-watching this, but more closely this time instead of in big gulps.]
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever
Image: Hokyoung Kim
[ed. This will get written into history - the reason AI alignment fails. If it does. How will we ever know?]
[ed. This will get written into history - the reason AI alignment fails. If it does. How will we ever know?]
Leaving Twitter
Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist. It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all - indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.
Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitter, but though a better product was pretty easy, the network effects were too strong and none of them really worked. Instead, we unbundled use cases one by one. As Andrew Parker pointed out in 2010, a whole range of people from Airbnb to Zillow to Tinder unbundled separate pieces of Craigslist into billion dollar companies that didn’t look like Craigslist and solved some individual need much better. This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better - they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.
Hence, Mastodon has been around since 2016 without getting much traction, but slices of conversation, content or industry have been unbundled to Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, Discord or, more recently, Substack, which someone joked was Twitter’s paywall.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself drifted aimlessly for a decade, becoming known in Silicon Valley as a place where no-one could get anything done. This is a big part of why Elon Musk was able to buy it - $44bn was a top-of-the-market price, but even Snap was worth $75bn in January 2022, when he started building a stake - how much bigger should Twitter have been? And so, when he made his bid, there was, briefly, a lot of enthusiasm in tech: pent-up frustration with the existing product and a sense of how much better it could be; enthusiasm that there could be innovation and new product ideas (and, from a small but noisy group, frustration with the politics of Twitter’s content policies, of which more in a moment).
It didn’t work out like that. The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down - and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.
There are various diagnoses for this.
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Image: Andrew Parker
[ed. Money will always have strange effects on people. But, not just money. Power. Musk controls one of the largest media platforms on the planet. Trump gets elected President. Nazi's make a comeback in the US (less than 75 years after WWII). AI charges full speed ahead with no apparent brakes. Weaponized capitalism is pervasive. Economic inequality is stratospheric. The world heats and burns. Meanwhile, trivia, celebrity, technological toys/distractions, sports and games rule the day. Overall, a civilizational mental health crisis/breakdown. See also: Elon Musk offers $1B to Wikipedia if it changes its name (The Hill):]"Billionaire Elon Musk offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion under the condition that it changes its name to “Dickipedia.”
2023 Person of the Year
2023 Person of the Year, Taylor Swift (Time)
"Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion. And as a celebrity—who by dint of being a woman is scrutinized for everything from whom she dates to what she wears—she has long commanded constant attention and knows how to use it. (“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks tells me. “She doesn’t need it.”) But this year, something shifted. To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world."
[ed. Well, not sure about all that but give her time. Loved this one comment, though: "Time named Taylor Swift its 2023 Person of the Year, and somehow made her look like Nicole Kidman on the cover." Haha. See also: Why Does Taylor Swift Want More? (Freddie deBoer):]
"I think it’s fair to say that Taylor Swift and her team ran a full-court press in 2023. You had the brief but massive success of her concert film, the continued release of the “Taylor’s version” series of re-recordings of her old material, absolutely constant media visibility, and of course the relentless publicizing of her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The latter is a good example of choosing to expand your media footprint. There are some conspiracy theories that suggest that the relationship is all a sham; Kelce, at 34 years old, is clearly looking to set up a career as a media personality after football, and the endless shots of Swift in a luxury box at NFL games have taken her inescapability to a new high. I have no opinion about and no interest in those theories. I do want to stress, though, that had she wanted it, that relationship could have been much quieter. She certainly has the juice to say to the NFL “I want to sit in privacy in the back of a luxury box with no cameras on me, and plus let my team in the back of the stadium with no publicity.” She chose to do the opposite and make this romance as public as possible. That’s generally been her MO in 2023 - whenever she’s had the opportunity to go bigger, get richer, get more famous, harvest more attention, she’s pursued that opportunity with gusto.
Hey, look! Yet another august academic institution is giving a course on Taylor Swift! That’s fun! Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we all having fun? (...)
It’s also the case that I think this stuff has reached a level of absolute madness, that the sense that no matter how obsessed we are with this woman, it’s never enough, is genuinely creepy and reflects a deeply diseased society. I’m genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life. Personally, I think people are fixated on Swift in this way because they’re lonely and directionless and lack any source of transcendent meaning, and have tried to invest celebrity with the hopes that once accrued to God or country or the party, and I further think that this is bound to result in inevitable disillusionment and sadness."
I’m interested in a different issue: why does Swift harbor such a palpable feeling that she needs even more success? 15 years after “You Belong With Me” was released, she’s grinding more than ever, clawing for more and more presence in the national popular consciousness. Her vast professional apparatus has worked relentlessly to make sure that she stays in said popular consciousness. And my question is… why? For what? What does she want, that she does not already have? What need could she fill that hasn’t already been filled? She has more of everything than almost any human being who has ever lived. Why does she need more than more?
[ed. Because that's what she does? The satisfaction of running a well-oiled, precision machine? Of your own making? It's not complicated.]
You Good?
Do not under any circumstances give me a hug
One of the truest and most sublime rights we possess in a trash-strewn city of 8.5 million is to cry in public unbothered, ideally next to a bottle of piss or over the bone-crunching sound of an elevated train. It’s a ritual to be respected—in most cases, the perfect collective anonymity of the city offers a more private weeping experience than in an apartment or office, where you might encounter a person who feels compelled to ask how they might help. In extreme cases, when it’s possible someone is experiencing such a wave of preventable agitation or grief you feel moved to alleviate it in some way there is only one course of action: You ask that person, briefly and politely, if they’re good.
It is my personal opinion that if you encounter a crying person on the train, your sole responsibility as a New Yorker is to do something sort of psycho in their general vicinity in order to compound the weepers’ sorrow and make a great story later on. There’s something poetic and deeply affirming about having a bad time surrounded by weirdos and/or filth. On one occasion, I cried next to an insufferable bachelor party in Midtown as men in mirrored sunglasses detailed last night's grotesque exploits. A friend of mine cried into a plate of mozzarella sticks at the Applebees in Downtown Brooklyn at 11:00 in the morning to a Fiona Apple song. No one asked for a hug because it would have been obscene, an aberration in the therapeutic practice of feeling sad and sorry for yourself in a place that will continue churning at a rapid clip no matter how you, an insignificant speck, happen to feel.
by Molly Osberg, Hell Gate | Read more:
Image: Zhivko Minkov/Unsplash
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
It's Official: Golf Ball Distances To Be Restricted (and Drivers Might Be Next)
It’s official. Golf, but shorter.
The USGA and the R&A formally announced Wednesday their intention to roll back the distance golf balls can travel. The rollback goes into effect January 2028 for elite competitions and for everybody come January 2030. The decision, part of the governing bodies’ Distance Insights Project, comes after some three years of “Notice and Comment” in which the USGA and R&A accepted feedback from golf’s stakeholders.
“Governance is hard. And while thousands will claim that we did too much, there will be just as many who said we didn’t do enough to protect the game long-term,” said Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “But from the very beginning, we’ve been driven to do what is right for the game, without bias. As we’ve said, doing nothing is not an option—and we would be failing in our responsibility to protect the game’s future if we didn’t take appropriate action now.”
All golf balls submitted to the USGA for conformance during or after October 2027 will be evaluated using the new protocol. In other words, if everyday golfers want to continue using longer golf balls in 2028 and 2029, they will be older-model balls. There was no mention in the Notice of Decision how one would be able to tell what is an old conforming ball and what is a new conforming ball other than comparing it to the conforming list. However, John Spitzer, the USGA's managing director of equipment standards, said approximately one-third of balls currently on the conforming list would still be conforming under the new protocol, primarily two- and-three piece balls with ionomer covers.
The change in speed and the fact it affects all golfers are significant departures from the governing bodies previous stance. In 2022, the speed being looked at was 125 mph but that was amended in March 2023 to 127. However, also at that time the proposal was stated as a Model Local Rule impacting elite professional golfers only. Said Whan at the time, “We don’t see recreational golf obsoleting golf courses any time soon."
So why the change to include everybody? The governing bodies say the move to a universal rollback was the result of feedback during the Notice and Comment period triggered in March after the announcement of the proposed MLR. In a note to all industry stakeholders, the USGA and R&A conveyed that, “While we previously proposed a targeted change to only elite golf, we have incorporated feedback from a broad range of stakeholders/players who stressed the importance of unification in the game of golf, mainly the importance of maintaining a single set of playing rules and a single set of equipment standards. This feedback clearly indicated that an across-the-game solution with deferred implementation is the preferred solution.” (...)
"It's five yards at most and likely limited to your driver," Pagel said. "I don't want to minimize people's feelings or concerns about losing even a yard. We all have those concerns. We all want that extra yard or two. But just put this in the practical senses of this would mean, you know, 222 yards instead of 225. And you do have the ability to move tees up. You do have the ability to play forward tees. I would just say trust in the process. Over the next six years, I think we'll find that the sky hasn't fallen, the game is still going to be healthy.”
Perhaps just as important as the decision on golf balls, it appears the governing bodies are not quite done putting a governor on distance. Included in the note to stakeholders were two additional areas being looked at. The first is expanding testing of submitted drivers to keep tabs on “CT Creep,” which is drivers getting springier over time due to use, leading to the possibility of a conforming club becoming non-conforming. This is not a change, per se, and does not impact everyday players.
The next item, however, is to continue its research into the forgiveness of drivers at the elite level, which could lead to reductions in moment of inertia (which mitigates distance loss on mis-hits), driver-head size or both. Although the language was aimed solely at elite players, as we have seen with the ball rollback decision, things have a way of changing.
by E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Distance is overrated (for most of us). Just get better with all your clubs (especially around greens). I imagine (as with previous restrictions on driver size, COR, anchored 'broomstick' putters, etc.) this will blow over soon enough. Rory McIlroy had the best response, I think (see here); but there were opposing perspectives too (see here). Nearly everyone agrees something had to be done - you can't just keep increasing the length of golf courses, and it's no fun watching the game reduced to simple bomb and gounge driver/wedge shots. It's up to the engineers to figure it all out now. More on the rollback here (SI).]
Tuesday, December 5, 2023
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