It’s All Bullshit

Performing productivity at Google

Free food, nap rooms, wellness walks, unlimited vacation days: such are the workaday perks of a job in tech. These perks, along with the six- and sometimes seven-figure salaries that accompany them, are, we’ve long been told, well-deserved. Not only are tech workers portrayed as feverishly hardworking, they are the epitome of innovation and productivity.

However, it’s become apparent that they aren’t as productive as we’ve been told to think. Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” Over at Google, a company known to have pioneered the modern tech workplace, one designer complained of spending 40 percent of their time on “the inefficien[cy] overhead of simply working at Google.” Some report spending all day on tasks as simple as changing the color of a website button. Working the bare minimum while waiting for stock to vest is so common that Googlers call it “resting and vesting.” ​(...)

For much of this century, optimism that technology would make the world a better place fueled the perception that Silicon Valley was the moral alternative to an extractive Wall Street—that it was possible to make money, not at the expense of society but in service of it. In other words, many who joined the industry did so precisely because they thought that their work would be useful. Yet what we’re now seeing is a lot of bullshit. If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?

In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding. These range from software systems to help businesses distribute and manage job applications (Hired by Google) to social media platforms that tried to mimic Facebook’s success (Google+) to manifestly uncool wearable technology (Google Glass). But projects at that scale are far and few between. Many were small and hackathon-sized in ambition. All failed to make a splash on the balance sheet. These “dead” projects are also just the tip of the iceberg. The website only documents projects that have been publicly launched; untold more have been nixed before ever being announced.

Google has always had a founders-first mentality; it’s ingrained into the company’s DNA. According to a former employee, Google tries “to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success” by recreating the environment in which it was founded: On top of having the flexibility to decide when to work, how to work, and, in some cases, what to work on, Google allows employees to spend 20 percent of their paid working time on side projects. Senior employees can also pitch project ideas to upper-management and get funding to work on them, while junior employees are encouraged to “take ownership” over their assigned projects and to act as if they were the CTO of it. Google even has a literal startup incubator—called Area 120—for employees to pitch projects and start new companies.

To tech optimists, projects that don’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line are seen as sustaining the intrepid spirit of innovation—necessary to achieve breakthrough technologies that could generate profit at some point in the future. As one employee puts it, Google is into “generating luck,” since they are willing to try “a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off” for the rest of their failed projects. Many will fail but those that succeed are supposed to rake in so much cash that they pay for the failures. But for this model of innovation to work as intended, employees have to believe in it; to the faithless, it has become little more than a means of personal advancement.

The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon. “The [promo] incentive throughout,” as explained by a former employee, “is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible.” For years at Google, promotions weren’t given at the discretion of an employee’s manager; instead, employees initiated a promotion by compiling a “promo packet”—a collection of essays that explain why their contributions merit a promotion, corroborating evidence, and recommendations from teammates. This packet was then evaluated by upper-level engineers and management, who then determined an employee’s “impact.” But because the vast majority of projects do not, in any direct way, contribute to revenue, impact can be difficult to assess. So the number of product launches became a proxy measure of value. As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”

Writing promo packets became an artform at Google, one untethered to productivity. Instead of solving legitimate problems, many engineers found themselves gravitating toward tasks that could build their case for a promotion. This frequently led teams to build new products that compete internally, creating confusion for all parties involved, while pressing engineering tasks get neglected for months at a time. Sometimes, projects were simply redundant. One employee told me that “there are some people who launch a project then switch to another org to launch the same project.” The performance of usefulness thus replaced the act of actually being useful.

Even failed launches could land someone a promotion. One employee told me the story of his team’s tech lead, who was “super-gifted [and] one of the smartest engineers” he has worked with, but “going from project to project without a final launch is routine to the way he did things.” Even after eight years at Google where he worked his way up to the title of staff engineer—a highly respected role—none of his code has ever made it to Google’s production servers. Instead, he has swung from one failed or canceled project to the next, collecting promotions along the way. As the employee put it to me: “It’s literally failing upwards with no end in sight.”

Bullshit projects are abundant, in large part, because of the LPA cycle, and its proliferation is only aggravated by Google’s army of increasingly despised middle managers. Employee dissatisfaction with middle management is hardly a new phenomenon. Writing in the 1990s, labor economist David Gordon argued that U.S. businesses are addicted to expanding the ranks of middle management, resulting in corporations that are “Fat and Mean,” which is also the title of his last book. According to Gordon, the waning competitiveness of American industries could be attributed to the bloating of middle managers who are at once expensive (fat) and prone to suppress wages (mean).

Google managers may not be mean, but they have—by Gordon’s definition—become fat. In the early days of the company, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought that middle managers were a layer of bureaucracy that obstructed engineers from doing good work, so they kept the number of managers to a minimum—and even experimented with eliminating them altogether. In 2009, they funded a multiyear research initiative called Project Oxygen to test whether managers mattered (the results indicated that, yes, apparently, they did). But while the project gave Google the data to justify the role of management, the ensuing lack of scrutiny over the role has resulted in bloat. Today, about 15 percent of Google’s workforce is made up of middle managers, roughly one manager for every five to six employees, far surpassing the average manager to employee ratio in the service sector of one to fifteen. Where it was possible for a hundred engineers to report to a single manager in the aughts, most engineers are now placed on teams of no more than a dozen, frequently less. (...)

Another major stumbling block to actual innovation is that projects that may not actually be bullshit get nixed all the time, transforming all that work into bullshit. The primary reason projects get cut is because of Google’s pathological addiction to reorganization, or reorgs—when organizational boundaries get shuffled often because of a power struggle among managers. Sometimes reorgs are productive and can result in the elimination of redundant work. However, reorgs aren’t always economically motivated. If a manager can use a reorg to expand the size of their team, it is almost certainly the right career choice even if it doesn’t make the company more efficient. For employees, this can inhibit their ability to perform their jobs, participate in launching projects, and, as a result, build their case for promotions. According to a why-I-quit-Google blog post by former employee Michael Lynch, this was a central concern:

Six weeks before the performance period ended, my project was canceled. Again. Actually, my whole team was canceled. This was a common enough occurrence at Google that there was a euphemism for it: a defrag . . . My teammates and I all had to start over in different areas of the company.

In some cases, workers anticipating a re-org may stop working altogether since they expect their project to get canned. Lynch sums it up: “Google kept telling me that it couldn’t judge my work until it saw me complete a project. Meanwhile, I couldn’t complete any projects because Google kept interrupting them midway through and assigning me new ones.” Between the drive for headcount and the never-ending square dance of reorgs, it’s clear that middle management is just as responsible for waste as their promo-hungry employees. Bullshit, it would appear, permeates every level of the organization.

Innovation at Google is clearly in crisis. After establishing search advertising as a veritable cash cow, Google has spent hundreds of millions trying to reproduce that initial success—with little to show for it. In its early years, the company quickly developed platforms like Gmail, Google Maps, among others that locked users into the company’s ecosystem, driving traffic and ad spending. Today, the platform economy has calcified. The platforms that most people might want already exist; and major ones like Facebook and X, the platform previously known as Twitter, are even past their peak.

“Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads,” wrote a Google employee on HackerNews. This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.” For Google, however, this stagnation hasn’t produced an urgent existential crisis: advertising revenue has grown to $224 billion from $43 billion in 2012. Today, Google has over 90 percent of the search market in the United States. With virtually no credible competition to threaten the firm’s position, it can sit back and collect its fat paycheck.

by JS Tan, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Servizi Multimediali

Two Big Bangs

Two cosmological mysteries continue to fascinate scientists and science enthusiasts alike. The first is understanding in detail how the Universe came into existence. The second is the nature of dark matter, a substance which is thought to be far more prevalent than all the stars and galaxies in the Universe. A recent paper explores a possible intricate connection between these two phenomena and proposes that the beginning of the Universe included not one, but two, Big Bangs.

To understand the implications of this interesting new idea, we must first consider the prevailing understanding of both the Big Bang and dark matter.

In the Beginning

According to the accepted theory of the beginning of the Universe, a tiny fraction of a second after the Universe began, there was a period called “inflation.” During inflation, the Universe expanded very quickly—faster than the speed of light. Inflation was driven by the existence of a form of energy called “vacuum energy.” Inflation persisted only for a very short time, lasting far less than a second, during which our visible Universe expanded from a size smaller than an atom to about the size of a football stadium.

As the inflation period ended, the energy driving the expansion changed form and created the matter that evolved into the Universe we see today. The moment that the Universe transitioned from being governed by inflation to being filled with a hot and dense plasma is the beginning of what scientists call the Big Bang.

The other interesting phenomenon is dark matter, a proposed substance that, if it exists, explains some observed astronomical anomalies. Galaxies, like people, are made of ordinary matter, and we can use the laws of physics to predict how they should move. However, when astronomers study the heavens, they see some surprises. One example is that galaxies rotate faster than expected. A second example is that certain galaxy clusters shouldn’t exist, as individual galaxies are moving so fast that they should escape the gravitational attraction of their neighbors.

While there are several possible explanations for these and other astronomical mysteries, most scientists believe that in addition to the visible matter of stars and galaxies, there exists another form of matter, called dark matter. If dark matter exists, it is five times more prevalent than ordinary matter, and this additional mass exerts additional gravity, which means that galaxies can rotate faster and move more quickly than expected. The only way researchers have inferred the existence of dark matter is by how it affects nearby ordinary matter through gravitational attraction. There is no evidence that dark matter interacts in any other way.

Two Big Bangs

In the prevailing theory of the origins of the Universe, both familiar matter and dark matter were created at the same time, less than a second after the Universe began. Effectively, it is thought that a series of steps converted the energy that governed inflation into matter and dark matter.

However, the new paper raises a different possibility. Given that ordinary matter and dark matter only interact via gravity, perhaps they didn’t appear at the same time in the early Universe. This paper suggests that while the energy of inflation eventually transitioned into ordinary matter, dark matter might have had a different origin. In the new theory, there was a second form of energy, similar to the vacuum energy that caused inflation, but this new energy was dark vacuum energy, which became the origin of dark matter.

If it is true that ordinary vacuum energy and dark vacuum energy are different, it is not necessary that they convert into particles at the same time. Indeed, the new theory suggests that instead of being created a split second after the Universe began, vacuum dark energy could have created dark matter particles as long as a month later. This is still a short time compared to the lifetime of the Universe, but a long time compared to the timescales involved in particle physics.

by Don Lincoln, JSTOR |  Read more:

Image: A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years, via Wikimedia Commons

[ed. Hmm. How does the universe expand at a speed faster than light? I thought that was a physical constant.]

Last Minute Shopping

Lego Cities: Gaza Edition

via:

[ed. Reddit satire.]

Gretchen Bender, You & Me Accessible, 1984

via: Speaking in Tongues (N+1)

Nitrogen Cycling by Microbes in Native Hawaiian Culture

Peeing in the pool

via: Aeon

[ed. He’eia fishpond. A success story (for now), but how will climate change affect coastal communities and fragile ecological systems like this in the future. Nice documentary on my home though, far removed from the usual tourist attractions.]

Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party

It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment.

You need to get away from it all, just for one moment. So against your better judgment, you find yourself heading to another Bay Area House Party.

Of course it doesn’t work. Everyone is talking about Sam Altman. One person is wearing a shirt that says SAM ALTMAN DIED FOR YOUR SINS. Others are dressed in red polo shirts over green polo shirts, a viral new fashion trend called Altmancore.

“I heard Q-star broke AES-192 encryption, Ilya used it to read Sam’s credit card transactions, and he found Sam spent all the Microsoft money on Aella’s OnlyFans,” says a woman, in a hushed whisper.

“That’s just a myth. I heard that Ilya checked inside one of the mainframes and found a Turkish dwarf who was answering all the questions. He confronted Sam, and Sam admitted ‘GPT’ was just a trick to scam Satya Nadella out of $8 billion in cloud compute so he could use it to mine Bitcoin,” says a man.

“That’s an urban legend,” says another man. “I heard the Winklevoss twins were behind everything. Ever since that one movie, I never trusted them.”

You need to get away. You head into the kitchen and take a potato chip from the bowl. It’s completely tasteless. You almost spit it out in surprise.

“What is this?” you ask Hans and Jonathan, the caterers. “Is this another one of your weird food startup schemes?”

“Well we were thinking . . . “ says Hans.

“People say that modern food is addictive,” interrupts Jonathan. “But it really isn’t. It’s shocking how little work people put into optimizing the addictiveness of food. Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class . . . “

“ . . . is that intermittent reward is the most addictive reinforcement schedule,” interrupts Hans. “It’s what drives gacha games and slot machines. So we invented . . . . “

“ . . . the intermittent reinforcement potato chip!” concludes Jonathan. “Four out of every five are just plain potato slices. But the fifth has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands.”

You take another potato chip. Tasteless again. Another. Still tasteless. A fourth. Your mouth explodes with a sudden shock of flavor, even stronger for its unexpectedness.

“So, you’re, like, trying to make even worse, more addictive food than everyone else? Isn’t that a little, you know, unethical?”

“On contraire!” says Jonathan. “A bag of these potato chips only has a fifth as much salt and oil as the normal brand. But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake 80%!”

You do find yourself oddly driven to keep munching on the potato chips. Before you become a hopeless addict, you bid Hans and Jonathan good-bye. On your way out of the kitchen, you almost knock over a guy in a t-shirt that says “THE BURROWING COMPANY”.

“I am desperate for non-Sam-Altman-related conversation,” you say. “Tell me about your startup.”

His eyes light up. “So. The Boring Company. Exciting idea! Dig tunnels, end traffic. But Elon’s grown old. Gotten distracted. It’s been five years and he’s dug a grand total of two miles. The machines just don’t drill fast enough. It’s sad to see a great founder lose his touch like that. Not that I had a better idea. Until last month! That was when I read about paleoburrows. These are long tunnels they find in Brazil. Farmers would be plowing their field and fall into one. Nobody knew where they came from. Until they brought in a paleontologist. He figured it out right away. They’re the burrows of giant ground sloths. People describe them as ‘a hamster the size of an elephant’. Some of the tunnels go half a mile. Let’s say it took a year for the sloth to dig that. So give three sloths two years, and you’ve beaten Musk!

“Aren’t giant ground sloths extinct?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said the man. “That’s our moat! We called up George Church, the guy who’s using cloning to try to bring back the woolly mammoth. Asked him, what’s the ROI on mammoths? Not great, right? We’ll buy as many ground sloths as you can produce. He lent us a grad student. We’re making progress. All we need is funding. It’s the same old mon -”

“Are you talking about Sam Altman?” asked a man who you didn’t even realize was listening to the conversation. “I’ve been trying to figure the whole situation out. I understand that Toner was part of the deep state conspiracy and McCauley was part of the effective altruist conspiracy. And D’Angelo, he used to work for Zuck, so he must have been part of the Meta conspiracy - Meta as in Facebook, not meta-conspiracy in the sense of a conspiracy controlling all the others. There was a meta-conspiracy controlling all the others, but that was . . . “

You desperately search for another conversation, and stumble right into your old friend Ramchandra. “Please,” you say. “Talk to me about some demented financial scheme or something. Anything!”

“Really?” says Ramchandra. “That’s how you greet a friend? Although now that you mention it, Bob and I have been working on something.”

“Anything,” you repeat.

“Have you read Going Infinite? The book on Sam Bankman-Fried? Not that I generally approve of Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s just that - the book says Sam tried to bribe Trump not to run in 2024. Apparently Trump was willing to do it for $5 billion. And again, not to say Sam Bankman-Fried was right or anything, but obviously if you have $5 billion and you’re a Democrat, then that’s the best use of your money, right? And not to say that I wish he was never caught and had gone on to become a multi-deca-billionaire, but, well, you know . . . “ he trailed off. “Anyway, I was reading about all these delicate negotiations between Sam’s people and the Trump team, and it was funny - here’s this guy who’s famous for creating markets, and he’s stuck with boring old Mk 1.0 backchannel negotiations. So I thought - what if there was an Amazon or an eBay for paying politicians not to run? We wouldn’t have to get Trump our first year. We could start with your local city council member - Aaron Peskin, someone like that. Lots of people would pay Aaron Peskin money not to run. Then we build up from there.”

“Is that even - “

“Of course, there’s a coordination problem. Peskin doesn’t want to advertise that he’ll drop out for $500,000, because then his constituents will know he’s mercenary, and people can just wait for him to lose instead of paying. What you need is for buyers to publicly post their bid, and then Peskin can accept in one click. I’m imagining the marketplace as a sort of Kickstarter, where everyone who hates a certain politician can add more money to the pot, and politicians can go on, see how much is in their pot, and accept once it gets big enough.”

“Doesn’t this make a mockery of democracy?”

“This fortifies democracy. People like Donald Trump who are just in it for themselves will drop out, leaving only the true patriots.”

“But doesn’t it incentivize politicians to be as annoying and confrontational as possible, so that the maximum number of people will be willing to donate to take them out?”

“The way I see it, our system already incentivizes politicians to be as annoying and confrontational as possible, just for press coverage and primary victories. At least in my system, you eventually get rid of them.”

“And isn’t it illegal to bribe politicians?”

“It’s a gray area. It’s illegal to bribe them to do a specific thing once they’re in office. But I don’t think it’s illegal to bribe them not to run. If you think about it, imagine Mitt Romney’s company was unhappy that they’d lose him to a presidential run, so they offered him a higher salary, and he decided to stay. That’s got to be legal, right? And all we’re doing is the equivalent of that. Of course, I don’t know if the SEC will see it that way. That’s why we’re going to use crypto. We’ll come up with some altcoin . . . “

“Did you say Sam Altman?” asks a woman who has apparently been lurking at the edge of your conversation. “Because I think I’ve got it all figured out. 

by Scott Alexander, ACX/Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Heinrich Theodore Frank; Esteban De Armas/Alamy
[ed. Some light West Coast/SF humor for the morning. However, giant sloth paleoburrows really are a thing! Click the link or go here. See also: OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story (DWAV).]

50 Greatest Moments in Electric Guitar History

The 50 greatest moments in electric guitar history (Guitar World)

Images: Future; Earnie Ball

[ed. Amazingly, they left out cheap guitar tuners - like the vibration-based, clip-on Snark pictured below. In my mind, one of the most awesome innovations of the last few decades. Before then you either had mostly awful acoustic tuners (or, awfully expensive tuners), or just a tuning fork.]   

 
Rocky and Bullwinkle
via:

Phoebe Bridgers x Arlo Parks

Sylvan Serenity Residence, Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam

Sylvan Serenity Residence, Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam
Mahna Momenzade

"This modern farmhouse is nestled amidst the lush landscapes of Vietnam and offers a blend of minimalism and enchanting charm of nature. Surrounded by verdant hills, the residence is a serene sanctuary that welcomes residents to escape the frenetic pace of city life. The architectural marvel strikes a perfect equilibrium between sleek modernity and rustic allure, creating an ambiance that seamlessly melds with the surrounding picturesque scenery. The exterior facade is a testament to this fusion, marrying light wood and concrete in a contemporary dance that gracefully integrates the dwelling with its environment.

Once inside, the farmhouse reveals a warm and inviting atmosphere dominated by earth tones, providing a cozy retreat from the outside world. The living spaces are adorned with meticulously chosen handcrafted furnishings that exude both simplicity and sophistication. The modern kitchen, a still-life masterpiece, boasts state-of-the-art appliances, elevating the culinary experience. Natural light floods the spacious interior, establishing a seamless connection between the inside and the mysterious jungle just beyond the doorstep."

via: Amazing Architecture, more here

Images: Liliana Alvarez

Stop Press! Mencken’s Obituary for William Jennings Bryan

Shortly after the famous Scopes Trial, the first trial ever broadcast live on national radio, William Jennings Bryan died. H.L. Menken was less than kind to him in this anti-thesis of a eulogy. This is easily the most vicious, scathing obituary I have ever read.

William Jennings Bryan

It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him -- that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.

When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks brothers law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed in the Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional -- that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the curious shirt he wore -- sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.

But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.

II

What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally loose their belts and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were very benignant. In that very courtroom, indeed, were some of them -- for example, old Ben McKenzie, Nestor of the Dayton bar, who sat beside Bryan. Ben was full of good humor. He made jokes with Darrow. But Bryan only glared.

One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Bryan into a folly almost incredible.

I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I'd never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic -- and once, I believe, elected -- there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool.

III

Worse, I believe that he somehow sensed the fact -- that he realized his personal failure, whatever the success of the grotesque cause he spoke for. I had left Dayton before Darrow's cross-examination brought him to his final absurdity, but I heard his long speech against the admission of expert testimony, and I saw how it fell flat and how Bryan himself was conscious of the fact. When he sat down he was done for, and he knew it. The old magic had failed to work; there was applause but there was no exultant shouts. When, half an hour later, Dudley Field Malone delivered his terrific philippic, the very yokels gave him five times the clapper-clawing that they had given to Bryan.

This combat was the old leader's last, and it symbolized in more than one way his passing. Two women sat through it, the one old and crippled, the other young and in the full flush of beauty. The first was Mrs. Bryan; the second was Mrs. Malone. When Malone finished his speech the crowd stormed his wife with felicitations, and she glowed as only a woman can who has seen her man fight a hard fight and win gloriously. But no one congratulated Mrs. Bryan. She sat hunched in her chair near the judge, apparently very uneasy. I thought then that she was ill -- she has been making the round of sanitariums for years, and was lately in the hands of a faith-healer -- but now I think that some appalling prescience was upon her, and that she saw in Bryan's eyes a hint of the collapse that was so near.

He sank into his seat a wreck, and was presently forgotten in the blast of Malone's titanic rhetoric. His speech had been maundering feeble and often downright idiotic. Presumably, he was speaking to a point of law, but it was quickly apparent that he knew no more law than the bailiff at the door. So he launched into mere violet garrulity. He dragged in snatches of ancient chautauqua addresses; he wandered up hill and down dale. Finally, Darrow lured him into that fabulous imbecility about man as a mammal. He sat down one of the most tragic asses in American history.

IV

It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

End of H.L. Mencken's eulogy of William Jennings Bryan.

via: National Center for Science Education (here); and, Peenie Wallie (here)

Images: NR

[ed. Sounds like a future obituary I can imagine. They say history doesn't repeat itself exactly but does echo. When the dam breaks, sometimes it happens suddenly. WJB, McCarthy (Joe), many others. We'll see.]

Rainbows

via:

Elvis - '68 Comeback Special

[ed. From his famous '68 Comeback Special. Did anyone wear leather better than Elvis (in his prime)? Charisma to burn! Many more, like this one.]

What Time Is It?

The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era

In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?

During the past weeks, I’ve been casting about to see what ideas are already out there. Suggestions I’ve found include the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. The novelist William Gibson coined “the Jackpot” in his 2014 novel “The Peripheral” for a near-future period of intersecting apocalyptic crises, when everything seems to be happening at once. In 2016, the scholar Donna Haraway deemed our time the Chthulucene, inspired by a word derived from ancient Greek, “chthonic”—of or relating to the muddy, messy, impenetrable underworld. The artist and author James Bridle titled their 2016 book on technology and our collapsing sense of the future “New Dark Age,” taking a phrase from H. P. Lovecraft.

For Bridle, our era is defined foremost by the utopian promise of the Internet and the subsequent disappointment. Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,” Bridle writes. Part of what feels so particularly jarring about living right now is our ability to follow news events everywhere in the world at once as they’re broadcast in real time on social media. The crush of stuff happening only underscores our lack of agency in relation to it. “In history, humans as animals have lived in uncertainty and helplessness, but we haven’t had it demonstrated to us on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s hard psychologically to deal with it,” Bridle told me. In the past few years, the term “new dark age” has been used to encompass the decay of democracy and the increasingly blatant impact of climate change. The name represents “a smack in the face to the idea of progress. That there can be a dip in the line—that alone terrifies people,” Bridle said. (...)

The urge to name reflects the urge to understand. In February, Liz Lenkinski, a social strategist in Los Angeles, began referring to our era as the Age of Unhingement in conversations with friends. The phrase stuck, and she started an Unhingement-themed newsletter. “It makes me feel saner to talk about it,” Lenkinski told me. She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to. This knowledge can cause a kind of spiritual infirmity. “The unhingement comes from not being able to know what’s next,” Lenkinski said. “Since 2020, it feels like we have all just collectively been through one nightmare after another.” The emergencies vary drastically in scale, impacting every facet of our lives: news about climate change commingles with that of warfare, inflation, and supply-chain delays, not to mention everyday incidents like neighbors stealing your Amazon packages. “If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there,” Lenkinski said. (...)

A sense of historical chaos might just be a perennial phenomenon, a cultural pendulum that swings forth every so often without much grounding in reality. (“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre,” Michel de Montaigne complained of France, in the midst of the Renaissance.) Faced with a name like the Terrible Twenties, many people might point out that humans today are in some ways far better off than they’ve ever been: life expectancies are up, on the whole, compared with a century ago (though they dipped during the pandemic); extreme poverty has sharply declined. It seems possible, though, that both interpretations are true simultaneously: we are living through a time of unprecedented health and prosperity and through a time of historic anxiety and calamity.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker
[ed. Winter of Our Discontent? Age of Delusion? The Great Fracturing? Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment?]

tokyo fishbowl
via:

$700 Million Dollar Man - Eventually

Shohei Ohtani Is My Favorite Athlete, But Paying Him $700 Million Is Bonkers (Intelligencer)

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:

Images: here and here

[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).]

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.

“I love the comment that Cal Thomas made one time,” Jordan told the audience.

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.”

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.

***

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).]

‘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.” (...)

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.

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.]

Diana Rigg will always be Mrs Peel to me. My first real crush. Obituary here.

Too-Muchness

Balenciaga Reveals the Dad Shoes of All Dad Shoes: the 10XL Sneaker (SF)

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:]

Defender: monster truck of sneakers