Top 100 Most Viewed U.S. YouTube Channels - December 2023

In 2023, three different types of channels ruled our U.S. charts. Kid-friendly hubs, content aggregators, and world-beating creators took turns in the #1 spot in our U.S. Top 100 charts.

That trend held during the final month of the year, when the top creator of them all hit the top spot in our all-American chart.

Chart Toppers

MrBeast settled for second place in the November edition of the U.S. Top 100, but he did one better during the final month of the year. The creator also known by his birth name (Jimmy Donaldson) wrapped up one of his strongest years on YouTube with a 31-day sprint to the finish. The main MrBeast channel collected 1.93 billion monthly views in December, which put it in front of the U.S. Top 100. If Donaldson’s view count had been 10% lower, he would have finished the month in fourth instead of first. That’s how close things are near the top.

Toys and Colors followed up a stellar November with a solid December. After sweeping the #1 positions in last month’s Global and U.S. Top 100s, the kid-friendly channel added a runner-up finish in the latter of those two charts. Toys and Colors’ December total tallied 1.83 billion monthly views. That represented a 31% month-over-month dip that booted the all-ages content destination from the top spot. Toys and Colors will look to rebound next month, when it is expected to surpass 50 million subscribers on its main YouTube home.

The other family-friendly channel in this month’s U.S. top five is CoComelon – Nursery Rhymes. Thanks to this month’s dump of viewership data from Netflix, we know that CoComelon ranks among the most-watched children’s shows in the streaming world. Its haul on YouTube ain’t too bad, either. Thanks to familiar characters like J.J. and his friends, CoComelon pulled in 1.78 billion monthly views on its primary YouTube hub. Its 169 million subscribers give it the second-biggest audience among the U.S. Top 100 entrants (trailing only MrBeast).

One of the most surprising YouTube success stories of 2023 ended the year on a high note — and not the kind he usually sings. Jason Derulo first gained fame as a singer and dancer, but these days, YouTube audiences may recognize him as a content aggregator. Derulo collects short-form hits on his YouTube channel, where he picked up 1.72 billion monthly views in December. Despite what his song may suggest, Derulo isn’t riding solo on YouTube, as he is followed by more than 26.1 million subscribers.

MaviGadget rounds out the final U.S. Top 100 ranking of 2023. The machinery-focused Shorts hub concluded a strong year with 1.55 billion monthly views.

Top Gainers

There’s no shortage of suspicious children’s content on YouTube, but Ms. Rachel‘s brand of kid-friendly fun includes certified learning techniques. Her take on edutainment combines her teaching background with her multiformat acumen, and her class is pulling in more students every day.

First, let’s shout out some of Ms. Rachel’s most impressive numbers. The kids she teaches probably can’t count up to 336.1 million, but that’s how many views her primary YouTube channel received during the final month of 2023. That total was good for a 23% month-over-month uptick, which pushed Ms. Rachel to her highest-ever finish in the U.S. Top 100. She landed in 90th place and finished the year just short of five billion lifetime views. (Her channel dates back to 2019). (...)

Channel Distribution

This month, 77 channels in the Top 100 are primarily active on YouTube Shorts.

by Sam Gutelle, tubefilter | Read more:
Image: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images via
[ed. Pretty depressing, given everything else on there. Full list follows.]

Gianmarco Magnani

via:

Picasso, “Ulysses et les sirènes” (1946)
via:

The New Romantic Age

Who can know where we are or where we’re going? The passage of time, and eras themselves, become obvious only in hindsight. Living in the gyre of the present is the best way to be blind. But against all of that, I tried—I wrote about the new romantic age that might be upon us. This wasn’t a value judgement (good, bad, neither) but rather an assessment, an attempt to reckon with change. Here we are and here’s how we got here. Here’s what it might mean, if the fire burns brighter.

From my new writing in the Guardian:

The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms – their true calculus still proprietary – that rule all of digital existence. 

The famed mantra of the liberal left in the early months of the pandemic – trust the science – has faded from view, as hero worship ceases for the bureaucrat scientists (Anthony Fauci) and even for the pharmaceutical behemoths that developed, with federal assistance, the Covid vaccines.

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Credit to Ted Gioia for helping me formulate this. The first romantic age was a backlash to the enlightenment and the nascent industrial revolution, when new technologies were ascendant and upending daily life. Suddenly, time was a commodity; the great machines, if they weren’t replacing flesh labor, were forcing a disorienting pace of work. Newtonian law and capitalist law did not seem so different. The natural order of things pointed toward progress. More mystery would be quantified.

But what kind of progress awaited the human race? It was no coincidence Frankenstein arrived in the second decade of the nineteenth century or Beethoven, at the same time, broke open Western music. Or that a greater unease and even mysticism took hold. Anger is as much a part of the romantic mood as love. Luddites torched factories.

The poets and painters, the influencers of their age, lashed the old gods of logic and gentility. There were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, blasting away at British cultural elites in Lyrical Ballads, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron hurling between profound ecstasy and crepuscular sorrow in their poetry. William Blake, beset by visions of trees glittering with angels, believed imagination was the most vital element of human existence, and became the herald for generations of metaphysical insurgents and revolutionaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured about the invisible eyeball and the over-soul.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

Today’s algorithmic age will breed its own backlash. What form it takes, in the longer run, remains to be seen. We are too soon into this shift, from the techno-optimism of the 2000s and 2010s to now, too early to know if there will be a revolt against the technology of convenience that wraps itself around us. There’s the nagging sense that little of this stuff has made existence better. Indoor plumbing saved us from disease and the outhouse. Electricity delivered eternal light. The steam engine and the automobile and the airplane made the very far near, and changed forever how we would relate to the rest of the nation and the world. The smartphone, in turn, has delivered us screen addictions and teen depression. The tech giants seized control of the internet and herded us into our silos. Facebook and Twitter are losing their grip. TikTok rises, but will last only so long. Instagram hums through its strange middle period, no longer a place for genuine photography, reflecting unreality back to us. None of these platforms will vanish. But I would bet they will all matter less in ten years. (...)

Trust in the science did not curdle at the same instance as trust in the tech conglomerates, but they are not so dissimilar when weighed against the hype of progress. The new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”.

Science now promises a great leap forward with A.I., which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves—machines will now manufacture mediocre art, music, literature and even fact-challenged journalism. Little of it, after a while, amuses. Digital technology, of course, has radically cheapened music, television and cinema.

Will this new romantic age deliver new revolutions in art? That I don’t know. Popular culture, for now, is static. There are rebellions below, since old distribution channels have been broken. Perhaps these rebellions will burst into view. Perhaps we are ready to be surprised and amazed again.

by Ross Barkan, Political Currents |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Perhaps, and I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure. There's the possibility we could be going in a completely different direction, as articulated recently by Ross Douthat in the NY Times: Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?, "... above all my shift reflected a reading of our times as increasingly and ineradicably populist, permanently Trumpy in some sense... that it would eventually produce some further populist escalation, ever-deepening division, not peace but the sword." Nevertheless, do read Mr. Barkan's recent Guardian article: The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms; and, also: A curious tech rebellion is brewing amongst young people (KHON).]

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

[ed. Beautiful. Reminds me of this: "Why We Can't Have Nice Things" (Ben Landau-Taylor):]

"The things around us have become plainer. In 1923, or 1823, the fashion was for intricate and richly ornamented architecture, furniture, clothes, dishware, or whatever else. In 2023, fashionable objects are plain and minimalist, if not outright utilitarian. Steve Jobs believed that every object should look as much like a featureless white sphere as possible, and the rest of us follow in his footsteps."

Image: via

Billionaires Building Bunkers

Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway.

A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, where cars slow to try to catch a glimpse of what’s behind it. Security guards stand watch at an entrance gate and patrol the surrounding beaches on ATVs. Pickup trucks roll in and out, hauling building materials and transporting hundreds of workers.

Nobody working on this project is allowed to talk about what they’re building. Almost anyone who passes compound security—from carpenters to electricians to painters to security guards—is bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement, according to several workers involved in the project. And, they say, these agreements aren’t a formality. Multiple workers claim they saw or heard about colleagues removed from the project for posting about it on social media. Different construction crews within the site are assigned to separate projects and workers are forbidden from speaking with other crews about their work, sources say.

“It’s fight club. We don’t talk about fight club,” says David, one former contract employee. WIRED has agreed to withhold his real name because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “Anything posted from here, they get wind of it right away.” (...)

Tall tales about the compound and its owner run rampant on the local rumor mill—known colloquially as the “coconut wireless.” One person heard that Zuckerberg was building a vast underground city. Many people speculate that the site will become some sort of postapocalyptic bunker in case of civilization collapse. What’s being built doesn’t live up to the coconut wireless chatter, but it’s close. Detailed planning documents obtained by WIRED through a series of public record requests show the makings of an opulent techno-Xanadu, complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.

According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen.

In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned, which will be connected by intricate rope bridges, allowing visitors to cross from one building to the next while staying among the treetops. A building on the other side of the main mansions will include a full-size gym, pools, sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, and tennis court. The property is dotted with other guest houses and operations buildings. The scale of the project suggests that it will be more than a personal vacation home — Zuckerberg has already hosted two corporate events at the compound.

The plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, featuring living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder. “There’s cameras everywhere,” David says—and the documents back this up. More than 20 cameras are included on plans for one smaller ranch operations building alone. Many of the compound’s doors are planned to be keypad-operated or soundproofed. Others, like those in the library, are described as “blind doors,” made to imitate the design of the surrounding walls. The door in the underground shelter will be constructed out of metal and filled in with concrete—a style common in bunkers and bomb shelters.

According to sources and planning documents reviewed by WIRED, the compound will be self-sufficient, with its own water tank, 55 feet in diameter and 18 feet tall—along with a pump system. A variety of food is already produced across its 1,400 acres through ranching and agriculture. Brandi Hoffine Barr, spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, declined to comment on the size or bunker-like qualities of the project.

The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history. Building permits put the price tag for the main construction at around $100 million, in addition to $170 million in land purchases, but this is likely an underestimate. Building costs on the remote island are still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

That price for a private residence is unparalleled in the local construction industry—as is the level of secrecy and security. “The only other time you see that is when you’re doing secure military installations,” says one local construction industry official affiliated with the site. “For a private project to have an NDA attached to it is very rare.” (...)

Many locals view the billionaire as a part of a larger machine, the same one that has been buying up Hawaiian land since the “Great Mahele” authorized private land ownership in 1848. Before this, the concept of private property did not exist in Hawaii. Though he has the highest net worth, Zuckerberg is far from the only wealthy outsider—or even the only billionaire—to purchase land and call Kauai their part-time home. Just south of the Zuckerberg property, Melaleuca billionaire Frank VanderSloot recently dropped $51 million on 2,000 acres of ranchland. As land becomes more desirable to wealthy mainlanders, properties increase in value, forcing locals to leave. “The people who are born and raised here can’t afford to live here,” says Laurel Brier, a former vocational counselor who lives a few miles south of the Zuckerberg compound. “And we have this whole new economy that is basically serving at the rich peoples’ whims. I don’t know how stable those kinds of jobs are.” (...)

It's been happening, and not just on Kauai. As the amount and total net worth of billionaires continues to grow in the US, many have used their wealth to purchase island seclusion and security.

This year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent $147 million buying two mansions on Indian Creek Island in Florida, which is also home to the likes of Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. The smaller Hawaiian island of Lanai, off the coast of Maui, is now almost completely owned by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.

New Zealand, considered by some to be the ideal place to wait out an apocalyptic event, is now riddled with bunkers for the tech elite. Recently reinstalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event. In his book Survival of the Richest, media theorist Douglass Rushkoff describes meeting with a group of billionaire preppers who bombarded him with questions about how best to configure their bunkers to survive the end times.

WIRED showed some of the planned bunker-esque elements of the Zuckerberg compound to Rushkoff earlier this year. “In order to justify having a palace, you’ve got to show you’ve done basic due diligence on its bunker capabilities,” Rushkoff says of the plans. “It shows it’s not just luxury. This is your skin in the game.”

by Guthrie Scimgeour, Wired |  Read more:

Images: Phil Jung

Dick Dale - The King Of Surf Guitar

[ed. Check out 3:40 - 4:05, where he mentions Freddie Tavares and his influence on Fender designs (see below). Also, this demonstration of Dick's seemingly simple but complex 'surfy' technique: World's Most Iconic Riff.]

All About… Freddie Tavares

Even if you’ve never heard of Freddie Tavares, you’ve almost certainly heard him. That was Freddie playing the iconic pedal-steel glissando at the start of the Looney Tunes theme tune in 1942, and he can also be heard strumming the ukulele on Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii. But there was much more to him than that.

Freddie Tavares was a Hawaiian designer, engineer and multi-instrumentalist who also played for Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, The Andrews Sisters, Henry Mancini and Lawrence Welk among countless others. What’s more, he was also a key figure behind the scenes at Fender across four decades.

Man of steel

Frederick Theodore Tavares was born on Maui Island, Hawaii, 18 February 1913. He began singing early on and when he was 12, Freddie’s eldest brother gave him a guitar. He clearly had natural ability because three years later he landed the rhythm guitar chair in Mary Kunewa’s orchestra. Having finished school, Freddie moved to Oahu, playing guitar three nights per week in Larry Bellis’ dance orchestra at the Alexander Young hotel. Soon after, Harry Owens offered Freddie the chance to play electric steel with the dance orchestra of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki.

At the time, Freddie couldn’t actually play the instrument that he would become most closely associated with, but Freddie told Owens, “I could easily learn to play one”. Armed with the arrangements, it took Freddie less than two weeks to learn all the steel guitar parts. (...)

In 1949, Freddie joined Wade Ray and his Ozark Mountain Boys on steel guitar, and began playing regularly at a club in Los Angeles called Cowtown. Over the next few years Freddie would write all the group’s arrangements, build their amplifiers and even figure out a way to amplify Ray’s violin. This facility with electronics led to a meeting with Leo Fender.

The fateful meeting

By 1953 the Fender factory was running at full capacity and Leo Fender was getting a bit burned out. He needed an assistant, preferably a professional musician, who could provide technical feedback from a player’s perspective. In March 1953, a mutual friend called Noel Boggs introduced the two men at Cowtown.

Freddie clearly wasn’t a fan of Fender amps and after the show he spent some time telling Leo what he thought was wrong with them. Rather than take offence, Leo took a screwdriver out of his infamous leather pocket pouch and opened up Freddie’s home-built amp on stage to check out how he had put it together. Leo was sufficiently impressed to offer Freddie a job as his assistant engineer.

Although Freddie was hired for his electronics expertise, at that time the Fender company was primarily focused on designing a new guitar to accompany the Telecaster. On Freddie’s second day at Fender he began his “first real project… to put the Stratocaster on the drawing board”. Working with Leo, Bill Carson and guitarist Rex Gallion, Freddie helped to refine and finalise the shape and contours of the Stratocaster body. However, it is widely accepted that Freddie’s most significant contribution to the Strat was his involvement with the design of the vibrato system.

Leo’s first design attempt was much closer to the vibrato that ended up on the Jazzmaster and Jaguar. Although it functioned pretty well, its roller bridge saddles reduced sustain and it had the tonal qualities of a banjo. Having already spent six months on development and $5,000 on tooling, this must have been a bitter pill for Leo, but the forthright Freddie talked him around.

Freddie realised that the bridge needed more mass, and he also advocated an integrated design based on a mechanical gram scale rather than one with a separate bridge. Freddie’s redesign was so effective, it has remained a feature of Stratocasters ever since, and the basic design principle was adopted for all the locking trems that came after.

For Freddie, it was a flying start and he went on to play a significant part in the development of the Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Jazz Bass and Bass VI. Despite Leo reverting to his original vibrato design for the Jazzmaster, it seems that model was the design Freddie liked best because he retained one from the first batch of three prototypes as his personal guitar.
Back to amps

Freddie was also heavily involved in amplifier design while at Fender, and was pivotal in the development of the 4×10 Bassman – arguably the most iconic and influential of all Fender amplifiers. Having helped to create the quintessential American rock amp, it’s ironic that Freddie disapproved of overdrive. In fact, it’s probably what bugged him most about TV front tweeds back in 1953.

His son, Terry Tavares, recalls Freddie complaining, “I’ve put my integrity and heart into the design of Fender amps, and they produce crystal-clear sound. These snot-nosed three-chord wonders now want them to sound like $39.95 Sears catalogue amps. One of these days I’m going to design a 10,000-watt amp and not tell them. When they turn the volume up to max and play their first chord, poof, they’ll just disappear.”

Freddie said that “all of the guitars were essentially Leo’s design”, and this natural self-effacement tallies with Dan Smith’s recollection of Freddie as “the most humble man I have ever known”. It’s probably fair to say he didn’t always get the credit or recognition he deserved, but Smith also described him as “outgoing by nature, funny and entertaining, articulate to a fault, continually in search of knowledge and unbelievably caring.” Others who worked closely with Freddie certainly did recognise his contribution to Fender’s history. John Page, who once headed up Fender’s Custom Shop, got his big break when Freddie recruited him as a design assistant in 1978.

“What a freakin’ honour, 23 years old and I was made a guitar designer at Fender working side-by-side with Freddie Tavares. Freddie became like a father to me. He even called me his third son. He taught me the ins and outs of guitar design, told lots of historical stories, made me take vitamins, and told lots and lots of really bad, old jokes. He would even do one-arm pushups when artists stopped by just to show them how spry he was. I loved him. What a great man”.

Guitarist and Fender executive Bill Carson, who was one of Leo Fender’s trusted consultants, said it all: “In my opinion, he was the greatest man in both musical talent and personal integrity that I ever worked with”. Even so, by the early 1980s, the management had stopped listening to Freddie, and some within the company regarded him as little more than a symbolic figurehead.

Life after Fender

Freddie stayed musically active throughout his career, keeping up the session work, recording movie soundtracks and playing with his brother Eddie in The South Sea Islanders. He was also a founder and long-serving treasurer of the Polynesian Society in California. Following his retirement in 1985 Freddie stepped up his gigging schedule, playing mostly for older people in nursing and retirement homes. It’s doubtful that any of them would have known that their entertainment was being provided by an inductee of the Fender Hall of Fame and the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

Referring to his mixed lineage, Freddie would proudly remark that, “the Portuguese makes me stubborn; Chinese makes me smart; English makes me high-class; Hawaiian gives me the music; Tahitian gives me the beat – I couldn’t ask for more.” Freddie died in Anaheim, California on 24 July 1990 at the age of 77 and he is buried in Nuuanu cemetery on Oahu.

by Huw Price, Guitar.com |  Read more:

Images: Fender Stratocaster (uncredited); and, Fred Tavares – Hawai`i’s Les Paul (Ho`olohe Hou Radio)

[ed. See also: Freddie & Ernest Tavares and their influence on modern music and the Stratocaster (Maui News)]

My Resignation

I have resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.

The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.

by Anne Boyer, Mirabilary |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Link credit: LitHub.]

Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants

Abstract

As a complement to vaccines, small-molecule therapeutic agents are needed to treat or prevent infections by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants, which cause COVID-19. Affinity selection-mass spectrometry was used for the discovery of botanical ligands to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Cannabinoid acids from hemp (Cannabis sativa) were found to be allosteric as well as orthosteric ligands with micromolar affinity for the spike protein. In follow-up virus neutralization assays, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid prevented infection of human epithelial cells by a pseudovirus expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and prevented entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells. Importantly, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid were equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha variant B.1.1.7 and the beta variant B.1.351. Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.

by Richard B van Breemen, Ruth N Muchiri et al., PubMed/NIH |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Good news for stoners. Also, in other research news: Experimental antibiotic kills deadly superbug, opens whole new class of drugs (ArsTechnica):]

The English Beat

[ed. One of my favorite 80s groups. See also: I Confess; Save It For Later; and End of the Party (... and many others).]

Trapped in Medicare Advantage Plans

"Timmins, though, discovered that his enrollment in a Premera Blue Cross Medicare Advantage plan would mean a limited network of doctors and the potential need for preapproval, or prior authorization, from the insurer before getting care. The experience, he said, made getting care more difficult, and now he wants to switch back to traditional, government-administered Medicare.

But he can’t. And he’s not alone.

“I have very little control over my actual medical care,” he said, adding that he now advises friends not to sign up for the private plans. “I think that people are not understanding what Medicare Advantage is all about.” (...)

“It’s one of those things that people might like them on the front end because of their low to zero premiums and if they are getting a couple of these extra benefits — the vision, dental, that kind of thing,” said Christine Huberty, a lead benefit specialist supervising attorney for the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources.

“But it’s when they actually need to use it for these bigger issues,” Huberty said, “that’s when people realize, ‘Oh no, this isn’t going to help me at all.’” (...)

David Meyers, assistant professor of health services, policy, and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, analyzed a decade of Medicare Advantage enrollment and found that about 50% of beneficiaries — rural and urban — left their contract by the end of five years. Most of those enrollees switched to another Medicare Advantage plan rather than traditional Medicare. (...)

“The problem is that once you get into Medicare Advantage, if you have a couple of chronic conditions and you want to leave Medicare Advantage, even if Medicare Advantage isn’t meeting your needs, you might not have any ability to switch back to traditional Medicare,” Meyers said.

by Sarah Jane Tribble, KFF Health News | Read more:
Image: DigitalVision/Getty
[ed. I've mentioned these deceptive Medicare Advantage plans before (see: Only Medicare is Medicare) but it's worth re-stating: don't do it! The answer, Healthcare For All, and if not that, at least Medicare For All. And for all the whiners who cry about cost (and the waste of their precious taxpayer dollars), see this (Twitter/X), and here:]

 "Congress has just passed a $1.59T spending bill for 2024, with a significant $886B for defense. With non-defense at $704B, defense now dominates 56% of spending."

[ed. That's 3/4 of a trillion dollars. Every year. I don't know how they spend it fast enough. Must be a big problem.]

Boeing: Safety Is Our Top Priority

[Boeing Representative] It’s a great pleasure, thank you.
[Interviewer] This aircraft that was involved in the incident over Oregon this week…
[Boeing Representative] Yeah, the one where the door fell off?
[Interviewer] Yeah.
[Boeing Representative] That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
[Interviewer] Well, how is it untypical?
[Boeing Representative] Well, there are a lot of these planes going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen … I just don’t want people thinking that 737 MAX planes aren’t safe.
[Interviewer] Was this 737 MAX safe?
[Boeing Representative] Well I was thinking more about the other ones…
[Interviewer] The ones that are safe...
[Boeing Representative] Yeah...the ones where the door doesn’t fall off.
[Interviewer] Well, if this one wasn’t safe, why did it have 171 passengers on it?
[Boeing Representative] Well, I’m not saying it wasn’t safe, it’s just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones.
[Interviewer] Why?

[Boeing Representative] Well, some of them are built so the door doesn’t fall off at all

[Interviewer] Wasn’t this built so the door wouldn’t fall off?
[Boeing Representative] Well, obviously not.
[Interviewer] How do you know?
[Boeing Representative] Well, ‘cause the door fell off, and the cabin explosively depressurized, forcing an emergency landing. It's a bit of a give away. I would just like to make the point that that is not normal.
[Interviewer] Well, what sort of standards are these new civilian airliners built to?
[Boeing Representative] Oh, very rigorous … aeronautical engineering standards.

[Interviewer] What sort of things?
[Boeing Representative] Well the door’s not supposed to fall off, for a start.
[Interviewer] And what other things?
[Boeing Representative] Well, there are … regulations governing the materials they can be made of.
[Interviewer] What materials?
[Boeing Representative] Well, cardboard’s out.
[Interviewer] And?
[Boeing Representative] …No cardboard derivatives… (...)
[Interviewer] Like paper? [Boeing Representative]. … No paper, no string, no Scotch tape… [Interviewer] Rubber?

[Boeing Representative] No, rubber’s out ... Um, They’ve got to have a door stop. There’s a quality control inspection.

[Interviewer] What’s the minimum inspection requirement?

[Boeing Representative] Oh… one two minute session, I suppose.

[Interviewer] So, the allegations that these 737 MAX airplanes are just designed to profit as much as possible and to hell with the consequences, I mean that’s ludicrous…
[Boeing Representative] Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. These are very, very strong vessels!

[Interviewer] So what happened in this case?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the door fell off in this case by all means, but that’s very unusual.
[Interviewer] But Mr. Representative, why did the door fall off?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the pressure hit it.
[Interviewer] The pressure hit it?
[Boeing Representative] A pressure wave hit the door.
[Interviewer] Is that unusual?
[Boeing Representative] Oh, yeah… during cabin pressurization?…Chance in a million.

[Interviewer] So what do you do to protect the environment in dangerous cases like this?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the door escaped outside its environment.
[Interviewer] Into another environment….
[Boeing Representative] No, no, no. it’s descended below the environment, it’s not in the environment.
[Interviewer] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Boeing Representative] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in any environment. It fell outside the environment.
[Interviewer] Well, what’s down there?
[Boeing Representative] Nothing’s down there…
[Interviewer] Well there must be something down there.
[Boeing Representative] There is nothing down there… all there is …. is houses…and cars….and buildings...
[Interviewer] And?
[Boeing Representative] And power lines.
[Interviewer] And what else?
[Boeing Representative] And birds.
[Interviewer] And anything else?
[Boeing Representative] And a Boeing 737 MAX-9 emergency exit door, but there’s nothing else out there.

[Interviewer] Mr. Representative, thanks for joining us.

[Boeing Representative] It’s a complete void.

[Interviewer] Yeah, well, we’re out of time.

[Boeing Representative] The environment’s perfectly safe. …. We’re out of time?.. Can you book me a flight?

[Interviewer] But didn’t you come in a Boeing press plane?

[Boeing Representative] Yes, I did, but

[Interviewer] What happened?

[Boeing Representative] The door fell off.

by Andi, Twitter/X | Read more:

Image: Boeing

[ed. Slightly modified from the old Clarke and Dawe skit "The Front Fell Off" (Y/T). See also, this:]

***

"The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on long-standing safety calls for longer in-flight recordings.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data."

~ Loss of Alaska cockpit recording rekindles industry safety debate (Reuters)

The Rest of the Details They Left to the Lawyers

​Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president?

Ms. Pritzker sounded weary, and it was posed as an open question, two people with knowledge of the conversation said. But Dr. Gay understood what it meant. Her six-month tenure as Harvard’s president was over. On Jan. 2, she announced her resignation.

That marked the end of one of the most tumultuous periods in Harvard’s 387-year history, a controversy that thrust the school into the public debate after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Not only did the university’s president lose her job, but the secretive workings of its board, the Harvard Corporation, were laid bare.

For weeks the board had stood by its embattled president as she dealt with withering criticism of her tepid response to antisemitism on campus, her disastrous testimony before a House panel and mounting allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. Ms. Pritzker, who had led the selection of Dr. Gay as the school’s first Black president, was an especially ardent backer.

On Dec. 12, the corporation put out a statement in support of Dr. Gay, citing “our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

But within two weeks, the once strong support had begun to dissolve, according to interviews with a dozen people with knowledge of the discussions, including those who had spoken directly with Dr. Gay, Ms. Pritzker and other board members or were briefed on their thinking and actions. They requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about the deliberations publicly. As the board members flew to ski towns and beaches for the holidays, they had a dramatic change of heart about their president.

A handful of the 12 members of the board, which included Dr. Gay, came from great American fortunes built on name brands. Others were self-made financiers, philanthropists or retired academics. All but one attended Harvard. Accustomed to a certain level of success, they had hoped that their Dec. 12 statement would signal a new beginning and show their commitment to righting the ship. (...)

Along with the public declaration of support they offered on Dec. 12, the board members privately asked Dr. Gay to help come up with a plan to turn things around, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. Over the next week or so, Dr. Gay and her staff created a plan they called a “spring reset,” one of the people said. Come the new year, she would appear all over campus, hold office hours and express her empathy. There would be task forces to address antisemitism and Islamophobia.

But before Dr. Gay could send the board additional details, more trouble erupted. On Dec. 19, new allegations of more than 40 examples of plagiarism in Dr. Gay’s academic work emerged, first reported in conservative media outlets. When she sent her latest plan to the board the next day, some members told her they liked it, but to others, it showed that she didn’t understand the urgency of the expanding crisis, according to people with knowledge of board members’ thinking. (...)

Dr. Gay has stood by the overall integrity of her work. Harvard has said she didn’t commit “research misconduct,” though she did offer to make minor changes to some of her prior writings in the wake of the allegations.

Cracks in the board’s support were starting to show. Especially concerned was Timothy R. Barakett, Harvard’s treasurer and a relatively new member of the corporation. From early on, he didn’t think keeping Dr. Gay was tenable. He told his fellow board members that Dr. Gay’s poor leadership and academic conduct might disqualify her from the presidency, those who spoke with him said.

Mr. Barakett didn’t think Dr. Gay’s apologies got it right and argued that she was failing to take full responsibility for her plagiarism, according to donors, professors and others who spoke with board members.

At first, Mr. Barakett was an outlier in the group. But his arguments slowly won supporters on the board. One was Paul J. Finnegan, a co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm. In mid-December, he caught word of a recent closed-door session at the Harvard Club of New York City where Flynn Cratty, a prominent Harvard academic, pointedly criticized Dr. Gay’s and the university’s commitment to academic freedom. (...)

Corporation members also scattered to vacation homes and resorts around the world. Ms. Pritzker, a former secretary of commerce and an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, spent time in Aspen, Colo. Kenneth I. Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express, went to Miami. Mr. Barakett was also in Florida, while Karen Gordon Mills, a former leader of the Small Business Administration and an heir to the Tootsie Roll fortune, was at an economic conference in India.

The board members had received plenty of advice and criticism by others in their wealthy circles, Harvard alumni and donors. But when they arrived at their vacation spots around Christmas they were besieged by a new wave from friends and relatives. Some people told Ms. Pritzker that she might be forced to resign from the Harvard Corporation because she had helped choose Dr. Gay and stood by her.

More than one board member had children studying at Harvard. At least one worried that other students would harass them because of their parents’ roles on the board and the bad press, according to two people who spoke with corporation members.

It was clear that the controversies were not dying. On Christmas Eve, William Ackman, a hedge fund manager and a vigorous opponent of Dr. Gay, posted on X that she had been asked to resign — which was not true at the time. He also revealed that she had hired outside lawyers — which was true. Newspaper articles about Dr. Gay and the board kept coming.

At this point, Dr. Gay was somewhat removed from the situation. She called Mr. Chenault from Rome at Christmastime, and he was sympathetic and supportive, a person familiar with the conversation said. She reached out to Ms. Pritzker on Christmas Day.

By then the board action had shifted from formal meetings to a flurry of phone calls and email discussions among small groups of members, with Ms. Pritzker guiding many of the conversations. (...)

For weeks, the focus of board conversations had been on finding a way to keep Dr. Gay and end the crisis on campus. But by the day after Christmas, that had changed, people briefed on the events said. The board members agreed that they were dealing with a crisis of leadership and that the best path forward for Harvard was without Dr. Gay in the president’s chair. Everyone agreed it was time for Ms. Pritzker to call her.

On that Dec. 27 phone call, Dr. Gay said she would resign. Ms. Pritzker gave her the weekend to sort out her exit, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. In subsequent phone calls, the two began to hammer out the terms of Dr. Gay’s departure, including what the Harvard Corporation’s and her statements should say and an agreement that she would remain on Harvard’s faculty.

The rest of the details they left to the lawyers.

by Maureen Farrell and Rob Copeland, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sophie Park for The New York Times
[ed. Can't think of a better example of how 'elites' operate in the real world. This appears to muddy the waters between the Harvard Corporation and the actual Board. So what does that mean? Who knows? Damage control, all the way down.]

Peak Hydration

In 2023 Hydration Became a Lifestyle. Giant Stanley cups, WaterTok, Erewhon’s $26 luxury water. This year it seems we were thirstier than ever.

This September, Brooke Shields had a rough night at L’Artusi in Manhattan. She’d been preparing for her one-woman show, “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields,” by hydrating. A lot. Shortly after she entered the restaurant, everything started to go black. She was having a grand mal seizure. “I had had too much water,” she told Glamour. “I flooded my system, and I drowned myself.” Luckily, L’Artusi’s sommelier called an ambulance, and Shields made a full recovery at the hospital. “I didn't know. I just kept thinking I was hydrating," she said in a later interview.

You can hardly blame Shields for her overhydration. Drinking more water is good for us we’re always told, and hydration is the key to health. Drinking enough water each day has been a pillar of wellness advice for years, but in 2023, something tipped hydration culture into overdrive. The viral water brand Liquid Death is a cult favorite of Gen Z, and Liquid IV, which bills itself as a “hydration multiplier” and is used as a preemptive hangover cure, claims to be closing in on a billions dollars in net sales. Prime Hydration, the beverage line created by social media giants Logan Paul and KSI, is also on track to pass a billion dollars in sales this year, even as experts raise eyebrows at its caffeine content. A Le Creuset-like fandom has sprung up around those enormous and apparently indestructible Stanley reusable water bottles, and the widely panned AirUp bottle somehow went viral on TikTok, where #WaterTok also surged in popularity. In 2023, it seems we were thirstier than ever.

Plain tap water isn’t enough because it’s not doing enough for us; drinking a glass of tap water only slakes our thirst for a moment. In our endless quest for hydration, we need Water Plus: It must have vibes, or taste like candy, or go through a rebranding process so mind-bending that it self-describes as a “nonalcoholic seltzer.” It’s no longer good enough to drink only when you’re literally thirsty. We’re told to consume our beverages, be they water, electrolyte solutions, or influencer-peddled caffeine bombs, more often and faster than ever. In exchange, we’re promised more energy, a better immune system, better sleep, a better life.

You might know Ophora water—”water for wellness,” as its website proclaims in large letters—from one of several TikToks that went viral this year. It’s sold at Erewhon for a bold $26. It is the ultimate Water Plus, the apex of uber-hydration. It starts with purity: Ophora claims to filter out contaminants like microplastics and potentially harmful chemicals that many other filtered waters still contain. It balances pH to make the water alkaline, and the big sell is its “hyper-oxygenation”—which means oxygen is stabilized in the h2O at a density of 40 parts per million, the company says. Ophora claims to have patents pending for the technology it uses to infuse the water with “high levels of molecular oxygen,” which creates water that allegedly increases energy, decreases inflammation, enhances cell detoxification, and reduces sports recovery time.

Ophora is more than just $26 bottled water: The company will install a complete water filtration system in your home, or set you up with an entire hot tub or pool filled with nothing but Ophora water. “The skin is the largest organ on your body,” a spokesperson says earnestly in one video. “Imagine soaking in a hot tub that's 102 degrees that has 30 parts per million of oxygen penetrating your body.” That’s a lot of penetration. Ophora says drinking and bathing in its water will lead to benefits including more energy and less sickness. Testimonials claim the water has led to weight loss, improved metabolism, and the sensation that “the ocean doesn’t feel as cold.” Meanwhile, water experts are skeptical.

For four days, I only drank Ophora water. Its bold claims of being “the world’s healthiest water” rang in my ears as I hoped that true hydration would be all it’s been promised to be. I had four jugs of 64 ounces that I would drink over four days. Near the cap, each jug had a single loop big enough for one finger to slip in—not ergonomic, but perfect for tilting it up to your mouth for a quick swill. I recorded my weight, body fat percentage, and resting heart rate at the start of my journey, feeling optimistic. (...)

With a pH level of 8, Ophora water is slightly basic. Studies on the effects of alkaline water on the body have shown mixed results—some studies (funded by companies that sell alkaline water) suggest it could improve hydration in athletes, but experts are doubtful of other claims, like detoxification. Still, I felt vindicated to learn that nausea, stomach aches, and even vomiting are side effects to drinking alkaline water as it can upset the pH balance of your body. Were four days of intense stomach pain simply the price I had to pay for the ocean to feel less chilly? (...)

Even if I did, not even Ophora could fill the colossal role we’ve created for hydration. Anistacia Barrak-Barber is a water sommelier (yes, it’s a real thing) and holds a Water Center Certificate from Columbia University—basically, she loves water and has studied its effect on our bodies. Barack-Barber is a great proponent in the supposed healing properties of mineral waters—specifically as it pertains to digestion and the absorption of minerals our body needs, like calcium. (Some mineral waters have been shown to aid in digestion, and have increased bioavailable calcium.) When it comes to Ophora, though, she’s a non-believer. “The scientific testing doesn't really bear out what Ophora promises,” she wrote in an email. Some research seems to agree. A 2006 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that “oxygenated water fails both quantitative analysis and practical physiological tests of exercise performance and recovery,” and that “significant intestinal absorption of O2 is unsubstantiated.” In other words, it acted a lot like normal water.

There have always been those who proselytize about the healing effects of water, but bottled water didn’t take off in America until the 1970s, when Perrier essentially created the market. In the 2000s, the big beverage makers Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola got into the bottled water game with familiar brands like Dasani and Aquafina. As more people became distrustful of tap water (rightfully so, in some regions), and diet culture became more prevalent in the American psyche, waters branded as speciality and small-batch, like Fiji Water, became more coveted. In the mid-2010s, brands like SmartWater that offer features like pH balance and added electrolytes defined what optimized water might look like—that is, water formulated for athletic performance. Now, we get our hydration from any number of products, from sports drinks to electrolyte powders to ionized, antioxidant-producing water.

by Sam Stone, Bon Appétit |  Read more:

Image: Qianhui Yu
[ed. See also: Why People Are Camping Out at Target for the Valentine’s Stanley Tumbler; and, #WaterTok: What Ever Happened to Just Drinking Water? (NYT); and, We’ve Reached Peak Beverage (BA):]

***

"At seemingly every supermarket and drugstore, I’ve tripped over a dozen hard seltzer displays spilling into the aisles. I kept my cool through the influx of cactus, hop, birch, aloe, probiotic, and adaptogenic waters; through the canned highballs, sake spritzes, and margaritas (a few quite good), flavored lattes, sparkling cold brews, and redundantly conceived “hard” kombuchas. I didn’t even overreact that time I brought home an energy drink I’d mistaken for tangerine-flavored sparkling water—mostly due to humiliation that I somehow missed ENERGIZE shouting in all caps on the box. (...)

The global ready-to-drink (RTD) market reached $89 billion as of 2022, according to research company Transparency Market Research. The firm also estimates that the North American RTD beverage market will hit somewhere between $13.9 and $22.3 billion by the end of this year. Between 2020 and 2021, premade, spirits-based RTD makers increased revenues by 42 percent in the US, no doubt buoyed by recurring periods of at-home happy hours due to the pandemic."

College Bowl Games: Send in the Memes

After winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., Kansas State’s football team gathered on the field around a garage-size toaster that was protected by a pair of mall cops wearing “Snack Security” shirts.

An unusual chant erupted — “Toast that mascot! Toast that mascot!” — as Strawberry, a giant Pop-Tart with limbs, climbed to the top of the toaster, bopping along to the disco-era beat of “Hot Stuff,” by Donna Summer.

“We will always love you, Strawberry,” the announcer Jason Ryan Perry said over the stadium’s public address system. “Can’t wait to eat you.”

For nearly three hours, Strawberry had worked the crowd as one of the surprise stars of the game — and of the entire college bowl season, which was no small feat for an anthropomorphized breakfast pastry. By the time Strawberry tossed aside a sign that read “Dreams Really Do Come True” so that it could happily slide through a slot and have its crust toasted to golden-brown perfection, the internet was about to crater.

Sure enough, Strawberry soon emerged from the toaster as an edible version of itself. The victorious players pounced, gorging themselves on Strawberry by the handful until all that was left — R.I.P., Strawberry — was its left eye.

“I think those guys were really hungry,” Heidi Ray, the senior director of brand marketing for Pop-Tarts, said in a telephone interview.

In a crowded marketplace, the Pop-Tarts Bowl — renamed this year after having previously been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Camping World Bowl and several other monikers — managed to do something special: elevate an otherwise ordinary game into a viral sensation.

Michigan and Washington will face off in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday night, but in an era in which there are more than 40 bowl games a season, with only two of them — the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, serving as national championship semifinals — carrying any sort of significance, the Pop-Tarts Bowl won the internet.

Or, at the very least, it shared the internet championship with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. (...)

With so many mostly meaningless bowls — the Guaranteed Rate Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl and the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl — the most intense competition is not necessarily between teams on the field but among the brands that are hoping for a fleeting (and profitable) moment of virality. (...)

When Duke’s Mayo, a condiments company based in Richmond, Va., began sponsoring the game in 2020 — it had previously been sponsored by, among others, Meineke Car Care Center — the feeling was that the company “needed to do something different to make mayonnaise cool again,” said Joe Tuza, the condiments president of Sauer Brands, which owns Duke’s Mayo. In partnering with college football, the brand has sought to capitalize on its share of made-for-the-internet moments, both planned and unplanned.

Since 2021, the winning coach of the game has gotten drenched with a cooler full of mayonnaise as Tubby, the brand’s aggressively eyebrowed mascot, triumphantly raises his arms and Mr. Tuza stands nearby with a cartoon-size check. The incentive for the coach is that $10,000 goes to a charity of his choice.

“Every time I’m up onstage with the trophies, the players start chanting, ‘Mayo dump! Mayo dump!’” Mr. Tuza said. “It’s like a payoff for them to see their coach get doused after all the hard work they’ve put in.”

And while various skeptics, including Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, a noted mayonnaise hater, have questioned whether it is actually mayonnaise, Mr. Tuza and Mr. Yoho both vouched for its authenticity.

“It’s 100 percent mayonnaise,” Mr. Yoho said. “I’ve smelled it. They have to stir it to get the viscosity right.”

by Scott Cacciola, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Reper/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
[ed. Grumpy old man comment: appalling. Beyond the corporate branding of nearly everything in life, this'll probably be the last game most players in these bowls ever play. Imagine working all season (all your life actually) building toward a goal and be awarded the Pop-Tarts Championship and trophy (to show your grandkids)? Ackk.]

via:
[ed. Blog maintenance]

Down In the Groove

 

“Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump,” Ray Wylie Hubbard says. “I’m just hanging around, and things happen.”

Like Forrest Gump, the character played by Tom Hanks in the 1994 film of the same name, Hubbard has a history of seemingly stumbling into connections with famous people. His past albums have contained guest appearances by Lucinda Williams, Eric Church, Joe Walsh, Chris Robinson, Ronnie Dunn, Patty Griffin, Tony Joe White and Ashley McBryde, His newest album, Co-Starring Too, features Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Randy Rogers, James McMurtry, Hayes Carl and Wynonna Judd.

It’s easy to get the wrong impression from this roster of guests. While it’s true that Hubbard hasn’t chased after these big names, neither is it true that the collaborations were as accidental as Gump’s. When you’re 75 years old and have been releasing albums for 57 of those years, your music has a way of sneaking into places you’d never suspect. “When you put these records out,” Hubbard marvels over the phone from his home in Wimberly, “you never know who’s listening to them.”

A case in point is his unexpected friendship with Starr. “About eight years ago,” Hubbard recalls, “someone told me, ‘Ringo’s been talking you up on his website.’ I went to the site, and Ringo had written, ‘This is what I’ve been listening to: some mono Beatles tracks that George Martin sent me, the new Dylan thing, and this guy from Texas going, ‘Snake farm, ooh-woo-woo.’

“A few months later, my drummer Rick Richards and I are playing McCabe’s in California, and Brent Carpenter, the guy who does all of Ringo’s videos, is there. He says, ‘Ringo’s at the Greek Theatre tomorrow night, and he wants you to come.’ So we go, and I introduce Rick as ‘my band.’ Ringo liked that my whole band was a drummer. He asked me to come on stage and sing ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ with him at the end of his show.

“Six months after that, my wife Judy is opening the mail, and she says, ‘Damn, I have to lose seven pounds.’ Why’s that? I ask. ‘Because we’ve been invited to the wedding of Joe Walsh and Marjorie Bach.’ It turns out that after his divorce, Joe was living with Ringo and his wife Barbara Bach. When Ringo put ‘Snake Farm’ on, the two Bach sisters started dancing around, and when Joe’s eyes met Marjorie’s, the rest was history.”

Like Gump, Hubbard presents a mirror that allows other people to see themselves. In contrast to Gump, whose very blankness invited reflection, however, Hubbard presents a mirror crowded with paradoxical aspects to identify with. Hubbard’s song “Snake Farm,” for example, championed by Starr and recorded by Paul Thorn, Bobby Bare, Waymore’s Outlaws and many more, has something for everyone.

If, like Starr and Bare, you have a weakness for jovial humor, you’ll enjoy the song’s suggestion that the Texas tourist trap “just sounds nasty” and it “pretty much is.” If, like Hubbard’s Red Dirt disciples, you enjoy barroom sing-alongs, the song’s “ooh-woo-woo” refrain is hard to beat. If, like Thorn, you appreciate the more gothic aspects of Southern culture, the song’s python-tattooed, malt-liquor-swilling, ticket-taking protagonist Ramona is made for you. And if, like the song’s original producer, Gurf Morlix, you savor a greasy blues groove, this song boasts one of the best.

“Ray is deep down in the mud with those grooves,” says Morlix, who plays bass and/or guitar on six of the new album’s 11 tracks. “All the emotions are mixed in — it’s the lowdown rhythm of the earth itself. It’s the blues, of course, but it’s also that dirty beat. There are a handful of songwriters I know of who can approximate that same feeling with the rhythm, but none can write lyrics like Ray does. No one. Dylan could maybe come close, but … no … not even him.” 

There’s a song on the new album simply called “Groove” that explicates the musical side of Hubbard’s appeal. Opening with the funkiest of bass lines by the late George Reiff and supplemented by Bukka Allen’s high-pitched organ squeal, the song practices what it preaches. The groove, Hubbard sings, “came about when a woman was walkin,’ sashayin’ down like she owned the street. A man with a guitar emulated that and fabricated a lowdown beat.” (...)

The roots of Hubbard’s two recent, guest-loaded albums go back to 2019. He was playing a show in Nashville, when Julian Raymond, an A&R rep for Big Machine Records, Taylor Swift’s original label and Tim McGraw’s current home, asked Hubbard what he’d been up to.

“I’ve been making a record,” the singer-songwriter replied, “and I’ve got a song with a Beatle, an Eagle, a Black Crowe and a Was (Not Was) on it.” He wasn’t lying. The album he was cutting for his own label, Bordello Records, opened with the song “Bad Trick,” which featured help from Starr, Walsh, Chris Robinson and Don Was. “I’d like to hear that,” replied Raymond. That’s how the album, Co-Starring, and this year’s sequel, Co-Starring Too, both wound up on Big Machine Records rather than Bordello.

So it wasn’t like this Nashville major label paired Hubbard with a bunch of guest stars. The collaborations were the result of folks volunteering to work with Hubbard on a record intended for his own small label. And they do so because songs like “Snake Farm” stand out like islands in an ocean of mere cleverness and competence. The lyrics are so surprising and visual and the music so slinky and catchy, fellow musicians want to be part of those songs. (...)

The devil makes three appearances on Hubbard’s 2017 album, Tell the Devil I’m Gettin’ There as Fast as I Can. On the title track, the devil is the promoter of a show at Austin’s Continental Club, and the narrator keeps calling from the interstate to say he’s running late — not just for the show but also for every dream he’s ever had. (...)

“I believe in spiritual awakening, not religious conversion,” says Hubbard, trying to explain his personal philosophy. “As an agnostic guy who believes in voodoo, you hope someone’s praying for you. I’ve resigned myself to the four possible outcomes: heaven, hell, nothing or reincarnation. All the comparative religions’ idea of hell is scary. I don’t know if I want to go to heaven because of the clientele. So I prefer reincarnation. I don’t understand it, but it’s as logical as the other three. I try not to steal anxiety from the future.”

by Geoffrey Himes, Texas Music |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube/Ray Wylie Hubbard

[ed. My buddy Jerry (from Texas) turned me on to this article. We're both big RWH fans and he just got back from a concert road trip to Luckenbach, Texas. Been enjoying Ray's music ever since his Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother got named dropped by Jerry Jeff Walker on his famous Viva Terlingua album (recorded in Luckenbach), which pretty much put country outlaw music on the map and shot it into orbit.]

Academia Will Not Love You Back

I have always loved academia. I am the only child of an academic, and I grew up thinking that the academy was the “last good place,” where there was intellectual freedom and inquiry coupled with a modest, middle-class income. I loved college. I admired my professors. I wanted to be like them. When I began graduate school in the 1990s, I was assured by my advisors that there would soon be a job boom: all of the faculty who were hired in American academia’s decades of expansion were about to retire. There would be a need for assistant professors in all fields, nationwide.

That did not happen.

Instead, as this older generation retired, university administrations replaced them with adjunct faculty, to whom they did not have to pay benefits and could pay a paltry wage, with non-tenure-track instructors, who would teach heavy course loads for low pay, and with graduate students, who cost next to nothing. As I went on the job market, there were often hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job. (One very polite and considerate rejection letter informed me that the search committee was very impressed with my work, but that there were over seven hundred applicants for the position. I have since served on such committees, and it’s heartbreaking so see all of the wasted talent.)

The academic job market did not grow. It shrank—drastically.

It has since gotten much, much worse. I was one of the lucky ones—at least in one sense—because I landed a tenure-track job, one of the few available nationally in my field the year that I went on the market. I was fortunate enough to place an article in a top journal in my final year of graduate school, and that was just the edge that I needed. Since then the faculty in our department has aged in place, with very few hires. We have lost our specialists in the eighteenth century and British Romanticism to retirement, and these lines have not been replaced. With falling enrollments in the field, we cannot justify the hires, and we must cover those areas as well as we can with the faculty we have.

Our university administration clearly sees humanities faculty as a (barely) necessary annoyance, as is the case in most public universities these days. It is all about STEM fields and professional schools and grant money, especially as state appropriations for higher education have shrunk. The only values are economic. Students have gotten the message and are avoiding the humanities like the plague. We have had only one small raise in the last ten years (which amounted to less than one year of inflation), and we do not receive cost-of-living adjustments, so while I have no desire for great wealth, I find myself in the process of becoming poorer and poorer every year as I gain seniority in my profession, as my spending power diminishes to the point that a middle-class life seems to be slipping away. Again, I’m one of the lucky ones. My non-tenure-track colleagues are in even worse financial straits.

Meanwhile, the university has built a new football stadium and a deluxe football practice facility, has bought a second hospital, and has hired numerous vice presidents (don’t ask me what they do all day; they certainly don’t teach), all of whom make well into six figures. Our president (who does not hold an advanced degree and is not an academic but a former politician) is one of the most well-compensated of any regional public university in the country and makes a base salary of more than half a million dollars a year, not including perquisites. We have a brand new, luxurious alumni center. This is a national trend: see this recent article from The New York Times.

And here is the thing: our administration knows that they have us over a barrel. They hold all the cards. Pick your metaphor. They know that the job market is so bad that tenured faculty don’t have options if they want to remain in the field, so they don’t have to pay us a reasonable salary. And if we did end up leaving, they really wouldn’t care. Either they would replace us with even cheaper labor, or they wouldn’t replace us at all. (And I mean cheap labor. Our graduate students’ annual teaching stipends amount to $8000, a number that has not changed in over two decades. Adjunct pay is far below the poverty level, with no benefits and no health insurance.)

by John Halbrooks, Personal Canon Formation |  Read more:

Image: Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

[ed. I don't know. Seems like general stupidity and civic/political buffoonery are at epic levels these days and somehow universities keep wading into that swamp up to their necks (see post below about Harvard). Why? Why make political statements at all if you can avoid them? And these armies of bureaucratic paper shufflers. Dropping humanities programs left and right but infusing curricula with more and more DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) courses/policies, while STEM graduates face a bleak AI future. The whole enterprise is looking more corporate and lost every year. See also: Are Harvard Graduates Better Than Harvard Dropouts? (THB); and, Why the Humanities are Indeed Worth Teaching (NYT).]