Not One Tree

The sun hangs low and red like a stoplight over the city. Ten thousand cars idle and litter down Moreland, another interminable avenue, vanishing onward in one-point perspective until the city thins out into strip malls, retail chains, junkyards, and Thank God Tires, where mountains of rubber shimmer in the summer evening heat. It is June 2021, and rush hour in Atlanta, when we drive to the forest for the first time.

The parking lot is half full. A cardboard sign at the trailhead reads LIVING ROOM → in Magnum Sharpie, so we start up the bike path, where a trail of glow sticks hangs from the trees. A quarter mile later, sky darkening in the distance, the glow sticks veer off to the left down a footpath, which zags through logs and opens onto a clearing in the pines. People with headlamps settle onto blankets, popping cans and passing snacks. A dog in a dog-colored sweater chases a squirrel and stands there panting. There is pizza piled tall on a table. Syncopated crickets. A giggling A/V club pulls a bedsheet taut between two trees, angling a projector powered by a car battery just so.

Princess Mononoke, which we watch tonight reclined on the pine straw, is a parable about humans and nature. An Iron Age town is logging an enchanted forest to manufacture muskets. Our prince has been cursed, which is to say chosen, to defend the forest against the destroyers. Will the ancient spirit creatures deep in the woods be able to stop the march of progress? Cigarette smoke swirls in little eddies through the projector beam. The dusk is gone. There are no stars. Fireflies spangle the underbrush. The boars stampede the iron mine, squealing, “We are here to kill humans and save the forest!” The humans on the forest floor around us laugh and cheer.

The forest is a squiggly triangle of earth, four miles around, some five hundred acres, lying improbably verdant just outside Atlanta’s municipal limits. Bouldercrest and Constitution Roads are the triangle’s sides, Key Road its hypotenuse. The surrounding mixed industry indexes the American economy: an Amazon warehouse, a movie studio, a truck repair shop, a church, a tow yard, a dump, a pallet-sorting facility, a city water-treatment plant. Suburbs, mostly Black and middle-class, unfurl in all directions. Prison facilities—juvenile, transitional, reentry—pad the perimeter, removed from Constitution Road by checkpoints, black mesh fencing, and tornadoes of barbed wire.

Viewed from above, the forest triangle is bisected once by a flat straight strip clear-cut for power lines and then again by Intrenchment Creek. This skinny, sinuous waterway is a tributary to Georgia’s South River and swells with sewage from the upriver city whenever it rains. Intrenchment Creek also marks the property line that splits the forest in two. East of the creek is the 136-acre public-access Intrenchment Creek Park, with a parking lot and bike path and hiking trails through meadows and thickets of loblolly pine, and also a toolshed and miniature tarmac where the Atlanta RC Club flies. West of the creek is the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm.

For seventy years, Atlanta forced incarcerated people to work the land here, growing food for the city prison system under conditions of abuse and enslavement both brutal and banal. Since the prison closed quietly in the 1990s, its fields have lain fallow, reforesting slowly. Though it’s DeKalb County, this parcel belongs to the neighboring City of Atlanta. It is nevertheless not public property. The driveway to the old prison farm has long been fenced off. The only way in is to scrabble up the berm from Key Road. Or cross the sloping, sandy banks of the creek from the public park and trespass onto no-man’s-land.

For years, the South River Forest Coalition lobbied Atlanta to open this land to the public and make it the centerpiece of a mixed-use megaforest: a 3,500-acre patchwork of parks, preserves, cemeteries, landfills, quarries, and golf courses linked through a network of trails crisscrossing the city’s southeast suburbs. And in 2017, it seemed like a rare success for grassroots environmental activism when the Department of City Planning adopted the Coalition’s idea into their vision for the future of Atlanta. You should see the glossy, gorgeous, four-hundred-page book the city planners published unveiling their plan for a city of affluence, equality, cozy density, affordable transit, and reliable infrastructure for robust public spaces. We no longer thought optimism like this was even possible at the scale of the American metropolis. Even if the dream of the South River Forest had been downsized, the 1,200-acre South River Park was still far from nothing. The book called it “the enduring and irreplaceable green lungs of Atlanta,” “our last chance for a massive urban park,” and a cornerstone in their vision of environmental justice.

How simple things seemed back then! In 2020, local real estate magnate Ryan Millsap approached the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners with an offer to acquire forty acres of Intrenchment Creek Park in exchange for a nearby plot of denuded dirt. Three years prior, Millsap had founded Blackhall Studios across Constitution Road and now was eager to expand his already giant soundstage complex into a million square feet of movie studio. This is no longer unusual for the Atlanta outskirts. State-level tax breaks have lured the film industry here. Since 2016, Georgia has produced at least as many blockbusters as California. As part of the deal, Millsap promised to landscape the dirt pile into the public-access Michelle Obama Park.

Neighbors had already begun to organize to sue DeKalb County for violating Intrenchment Creek Park’s charter when in April 2021, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, announced a plan of her own. On the other side of the creek, the city would lease 150 acres of the land abandoned by the prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation, because the old police academy was falling apart and covered in mold. Cadets were doing their push-ups in the hallways of a community college. The lease would cost the police $10 per year for thirty years. The new training center would cost $90 million to build. But only a third of this would come from public funds, the mayor assured the taxpayers. The rest would be provided by the Atlanta Police Foundation—which is not the Atlanta Police Department, but a “private nonprofit” whose basic function is to raise corporate funds to embellish police powers.

Rest in peace Rayshard Brooks still practically gleamed in white spray paint on Krog Street Tunnel. The Atlanta police had killed Brooks during a confrontation in the parking lot of a Wendy’s not far from the forest barely two weeks after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The nation was still reeling after the upheaval of 2020—and now the mayor of Atlanta wanted not only to give $90 million to the murderers, but to clear-cut a forest to accommodate them. At first we were less indignant than insulted by the project’s intersectional stupidity. Hadn’t the city just agreed to invest in people’s leisure, pleasure, health, and well-being? Instead, the old prison farm would become a new surveillance factory.

In May, some two hundred people showed up to an info night in the Intrenchment Creek Park parking lot. A hand-painted banner fluttered from the struts of the gazebo: DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST. There were zines and taglines: STOP COP CITY. NO HOLLYWOOD DYSTOPIA. FUCK THE METAVERSE, SAVE THE REAL WORLD! The orgs were there with maps and graphs. #StoptheSwap detailed the Blackhall–DeKalb deal. The South River Watershed Alliance explained how the forest soaks up stormwater and wondered what would happen to the surrounding suburbs when the hilltop became a parking lot. Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm narrated a mini-history of the land. Before the city prison farm, it had been a slave plantation.

People mingled, ate vegan barbecue. The cumbia lasted past dark. Half the audience had never been to the forest before, but now wanted to protect or maybe even enjoy it. History has apparently already decided that the movement was started by these organizations—but do you see those young people pacing the parking lot? Ask an anarchist. They all know who painted the banners, who printed the zines, who organized the inaugural info night. Who barbecued the jackfruit, who hauled in the speakers, who gave the movement its slogans and myths and indefatigable energy. Who got neighbors and strangers together to do something more than post about it. Who transformed concerned citizens into forest defenders.

For a city mirrored in skyscapers, of fifteen-lane highways, of five million people and building ever faster, Atlanta is run like a small town, or a bloated feudal palace, royal families overseeing serfs sitting in traffic. For almost a century, a not-so-secret compact has governed the city town council–style, bequeathing positions in the power structure along dynastic lines. The roles at the table are fixed: mayor, city council, Chamber of Commerce, Coca-Cola, the police, the local news, and, uniquely and importantly in Atlanta, miscellaneous magnates of a Black business class. The biracial, bipartisan, business-friendly, media-savvy, moderate, managerial tradition the group perfected during the golden age of American capital is called the Atlanta Way. (...)

Since 1974, every mayor has been Black. Business boomed and suburbs steamrolled the countryside. Railroading begat logistics and telecommunications: Delta, UPS, IBM, AT&T. Olympic fireworks bedazzled downtown in the ’90s, while hip-hop rooted and flourished on the city’s south side, and propagated across continents. The airport ballooned into the busiest in the world. Tyler Perry redeveloped a military base into one of the largest movie studios in America. By the 2010s, the general American pattern of white supremacy looked almost upside down in Atlanta. (...)

Or was it? In a city so restlessly forward-moving, it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s truly new and what’s business as usual. General Sherman burned the city to the ground, and Atlanta has spent the century and a half since the Civil War reenacting this founding trauma. Its motto is Resurgens, its mascot the phoenix, ever resurrecting from the ash heap of history. Every city booster’s plan to make Atlanta more modern, international, or cosmopolitan has been carried out by a wrecking crew, enforcing a disorienting amnesia on its residents.

Last year, all charges against the officers were dismissed, and both were reinstated to the department with back pay. Three protesters identified by police on social media from the night the Wendy’s burned were arrested and indicted with conspiracy to commit arson. Determined to somersault out of 2020 upright and armored, the city began to stabilize. The solution, as ever: demolish and build. The bulldozers aimed for the forest. (...)

The anarchist internet has been on the scoop since the initial info night. It’s Going Down has been exulting over sabotaged construction equipment, exalting the black bloc for smashing the windows of the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters downtown, exhorting readers to take autonomous action against Cop City’s corporate sponsors. The photos of burning bulldozers also give us that illicit little thrill, but our angle this summer is gentler. Somehow we want to defibrillate liberals into conscience and action. Not everyone in the media group agrees that the liberal establishment, Democratic machine, or NGO-industrial complex can help us stop Cop City, but we all know that no news is bad news. The problem is that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is owned by major donors to the police foundation, which ensures that the mainstream coverage is bad news, too. (...)

The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what? (...)

Though Atlanta is the eighth-largest metro area in the country, its police foundation is the second largest, smaller only than New York’s. Dave Wilkinson, its president and CEO, spent twenty-two years in the Secret Service, was personally responsible for protecting Presidents Clinton and W. Bush, and might be the highest-paid cop in the country. In 2020, he made $407,500 plus five figures in bonuses—more than twice as much as the director of the FBI. Wilkinson lives in a small town outside Atlanta, although, to be fair, three-quarters of city cops live outside city limits too.

We hear the list of major corporations in Atlanta whose executives sit on the board of the APF so often we accidentally memorize it: Delta, Home Depot, McKesson, J. P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Equifax, Cushman & Wakefield, Accenture, Georgia Pacific, disappointingly Waffle House, unsurprisingly Coca-Cola—though in October, news breaks that Color Of Change, a national racial justice organization, has successfully pressured Coca-Cola off the APF board. This feels huge! Coca-Cola and Atlanta are conjoined twins, and where one goes, so goes the other. Public pressure is mounting, people keep saying to each other in the forest. We even hear people say they believe that we will win. 

by A.C. Corey, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Tycko, Old Atlanta Prison Farm, Georgia. 2022
[ed. Wow. Reminds me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I thought was too over the top to be believable. Guess not. Here's another perspective: The Forest and Its Partisians (n+1):]

"So what is the movement “really” about, beyond the trees and the cops? Why this convergence? What is it that all these far-flung groups and individuals intuitively grasp about the importance of this particular struggle? What significance has been forced here? I don’t want Cop City to be built, and neither do my friends who live near its proposed site. I didn’t want them to cut down the forest either, and the progress they’ve made on that front is a tragedy. As worthy as both these causes are in their own right, they are not, in themselves, the reasons I care so much about the movement, nor are they the reasons why so many others do, nor are they why you should. You should care because the movement is both 2020 in miniature and a direct bridge to the mass struggles to come.

On top of its organic local base, the movement has ties and supporters across the country and across the world. Right now, that support has been spread largely through the milieus of those drawn to the flashier moments of direct confrontation. Mirroring this, the shrillest outrage and calls for crackdown are rooted in the fascoid Trumpist wing of the Republican Party and its further-right orbiters. The police and broader repressive state machinery, meanwhile, have rolled out tools of repression old and new, from age-old methods of surveillance, intimidation, physical violence, and murder to a test run of Georgia’s draconian domestic terrorism statute and the attempted prosecution of members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund for alleged financial crimes. The further right lurks in the background, taking pictures and writing articles that DHS cribs from when they publish their extremism advisories. Somewhere in an FBI office, someone is compiling files on the various support groups the movement has inspired in cities across the country and assigning threat designations to bookstores. Insurgent left, insurgent right, repressive state: it is clear to all three types of partisan that Atlanta is a test case and a site of innovation, that the contours of any future uprisings are being shaped here. (...)

As a forest defender friend put it, “the skills we emphasize and practice in this movement should be the skills we want to take with us.” This is a very young movement, but one that’s attracted the involvement of seasoned oldheads with wisdom to spare. Thanks to that wisdom, and to the movement’s unusual vibrancy and much-vaunted “diversity of tactics,” the learning opportunities are unique and extremely valuable. Just as Atlanta has attracted veterans of Line 3, Standing Rock, and older struggles, you can be certain that alumni of this movement will be on the frontlines of whatever comes next. On the second: echoing state and federal law enforcement, the White House itself has indicated the importance of Cop City as a model for the rest of the country and—as another friend, a criminal defense attorney, observed about the unprecedented, draconian legal repression the movement has faced—“the state would love a new set of prosecutorial tools to go along with their fancy new training facility.” Fighting the development of these tools, inside and outside the courtroom, will have a direct impact on protest and repression in the years to come."

The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule

Apocalyptic anxieties are a mainstay of human culture. But they are not a constant. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they tend to spike into brief but intense extinction panics — periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future — before quieting again as those developments are metabolized. These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.

Hearing that historical echo doesn’t mean that today’s fears have no basis. Rather, it is crucial to helping us blow away the smoke of age-old alarmism from the very real fires that threaten our civilization. It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources. That suite of ideas is traditionally associated with political conservatism, though it can apply as easily to left-wing climate doom as to right-wing survivalist ideology. Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity? What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right. (...)

***

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period just as much as the bacchanals and black market booze for which it is infamous. The ’20s were indeed roaring, but they were also reeling. And the figures articulating the doom were far from fringe. 

On Oct. 30, 1924 — top hat in hand, sporting the dour, bulldog grimace for which he was well known — Winston Churchill stood on a spartan stage, peering over the shoulder of a man holding a newspaper that announced Churchill’s return to Parliament. He won the Epping seat the day before, after two years out of Parliament. The dapper clothes of the assembled politicians and his wife in heels and furs were almost comically incongruous with their setting: a drab building with dirty windows and stained corrugated siding. It was a fitting metaphor for both the decade and for the future prime minister’s mood. Churchill was feeling pessimistic.

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.” In September of the following year, one month before his Epping election, two other notable events in Churchill’s intellectual life — one major, one minor — offered signs of his growing gloominess. The major event was his decision to run for Parliament as a constitutionalist with Conservative Party support, marking the end of his long affiliation with the Liberal Party and the beginning of a further rightward drift. The minor event was the publication of a bleak essay that argued new war machines may soon wipe out our species.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.” (...)

***

One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

Despite the similarities between the current moment and the previous roaring and risky ’20s, today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions. It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years. It will depend, too, on rejecting the conservative doommongering that defines our present: the entangled convictions that we are too selfish to forestall climate change, too violent to prevent war with China, too greedy to develop A.I. slowly and safely.

Extinction panics are often fomented by elites, but that doesn’t mean we have to defer to elites for our solutions. We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires. Our survival may well depend on reversing this trend. We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously. It’s time we started treating these issues as urgent public priorities and funding them accordingly.

The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.” Much turns, as the novelist well knew, on that ambiguous final word. Both transformation and extinction are transitions, after all.

by Tyler Austin Harper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cari Vander Yacht

The Enduring Influence of the Op-Ed

Early in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 film, La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret), we see a writer and editor meet inside the printing room at the El País headquarters in Madrid. “I would like to write about literature for your paper,” the writer says. This is the first time the two have met, having been connected through a mutual friend. As the conversation moves from the printing floor to the editorial offices, the gap between the writer’s ambitions and reality widens. “I don’t want this job as a favor to my friend,” she explains. “I actually want to earn it, but I haven’t published anything. I just have a draft of a novel and two essays,” handing the editor a hefty stack of printouts. Within a matter of scenes, the editor gives the writer a job as a books columnist for the newspaper’s weekend literary supplement. Her first assignment is to review the latest short story collection from a famous author of romance novels, which she gets in part as a result of her open contempt for the novelist. The editor, who is a fan of the novelist, assigns himself a positive review of the same collection, which will appear alongside her negative review.

Soon comes the twist: the amateur writer who landed the gig as a columnist is, in fact, the pseudonymous romance author whose book she is supposed to review. The twist throws into relief the film’s many ironic criticisms of newspaper columns and novelist intellectuals. In 1990s Spain, the film seems to argue, newspaper columns are a dime a dozen. Any amateur writer with a personal connection to an editor can land one. Moreover, columns in the Sunday pages function as cultural gatekeepers, allowing a high-minded newspaper like El País to decide which artifacts of popular culture deserve a stamp of approval. Not only that: nepotism is rampant in the clubby world of newspapers. So rampant, in fact, that writers are even allowed to review their own books! And, to cap it all off, shady editorial decisions often hide behind an outward appearance of balance, where each side of an issue receives equal column space—literally, in the case of the short story collection, which will receive exactly one positive and one negative review. Once one sees how the sausage is made, such balance, the film underscores, looks more and more like a charade.

A decade later, Almodóvar’s criticisms of newspaper opinion columns would seem prescient. In a 2005 column at El País, the very newspaper Almodóvar was satirizing, the writer Elvira Lindo diagnosed—and, as an op-ed columnist, self-diagnosed—a condition that increasingly afflicted the Spanish public sphere: “opinionism.” Every morning, she wrote, thousands of professional opinion-makers go to work knowing “that they have to come with a well-formed opinion… that they must defend it vehemently… [and] that they must draw blood from those who don’t think the same way.” Whether these opinionators actually had any expertise, knowledge, or worthwhile opinions on the topics of the day, she noted, was beside the point. They were required to have opinions all the same, whether that pressure came from a public sphere in which not having a forceful opinion was “interpreted as not wanting to take sides or just being an idiot,” or from the desire to keep one of the precious few jobs in the opinion-making industry.

Fast-forward a decade and opinion-making appeared to have undergone democratization. In a 2018 editorial, the American literary magazine n+1 diagnosed “the generalization of the op-ed form across the internet.” “Everything is an op-ed now,” the editors argued. For every columnist at a highly visible outlet like the New York Times, there is an entire “reserve army of op-ed labor waiting in the wings.” Social media in particular, they wrote, “has helped turn the internet into an engine for producing op-eds, for turning writers into op-ed writers, and for turning readers into people on the hunt for an op-ed.” The twenty-first century, it seemed, had conditioned journalists and writers to produce opinion columns on demand. To become an intellectual one no longer needed one of the precious few columnist jobs at a major newspaper or website. But one still likely needed an opinion column.

“The opinion column is the sonnet of journalism.” No line connecting literature and journalism has become quite so iconic in Spain. Its author, Francisco Umbral, perhaps the country’s most influential columnist since the transition to democracy, first made the comparison in the early 1980s, in the introduction to Spleen de Madrid 2 (1982), a collection of Baudelaire-inspired columns on the countercultural scene in the Spanish capital. The phrase has since become a literary-journalistic refrain, with much energy spent attempting to peel back its layers of meaning. Many commentators have taken this phrase to refer to the column’s literary qualities. Like Baudelaire’s prose poetry, Umbral’s opinion columns are said to innovate aesthetically by compressing meaning and observation into a limited prose structure. For me, however, the oft-quoted phrase most importantly draws our attention to the genre’s staying power.

The op-ed’s durability as a genre of opinion writing is indeed puzzling. Despite fears that an array of new shortform writing on the internet would spell an end to the op-ed, the opposite seems to have happened. Blog posts and Twitter threads have morphed into “think pieces,” each of which argues its own “hot take” on current affairs. Make no mistake: this is the language of opinion journalism, dressed-up for twenty-first century internet culture. If forms of internet writing had become as universal and generalized as many had assumed, there would be no need to convert their arguments into an op-ed form. But op-eds are still the universal medium of opinion writing. The genre’s capaciousness to translate ideas that were initially published on Twitter or Facebook, delivered as TED talks or academic lectures, or written for peer-reviewed publications or personal diaries, even today, remains unparalleled. Although the New York Times decided to retire its use of the term “op-ed” in 2021, some five decades after popularizing it, the form of opinion journalism the term came to represent will very likely endure for decades to come.

by Bécquer Seguín, The Millions | Read more:
Image:The Artists Father Reading a Newspaper; Albert_Engstrom

via:

Turkish Coffee Or Universal Khaki

Turkish Coffee Or Universal Khaki? Another Honolulu Condo Dispute Goes To Court (Honolulu Civil Beat)
Image: Stewart Yerton/Civil Beat/2024

Sharman Miller thought she had settled the issue about the interior of her fence through mediation a decade earlier.

The crux of the dispute: the condo association wants the fence to be painted dark “Turkish Coffee” brown to match the outside of the fence. But Miller says that for 17 years she’s kept the interior of her fence painted a light tan, known as “Universal Khaki” — more the color of a soy latte than the dark coffee color that the board wants.

But instead of following the result of a 2013 arbitration proceeding, Miller says, her condo association this past April sent over a locksmith and a painter, along with a vice president from condo management company Cadmus Properties Corp., to enter Miller’s Hawaii Kai property where they intended to paint the offending fence without her consent.

Miller called the police and the trio left. The fence remained khaki.

Miller’s color scheme hardly stands out at Colony Marina, where she lives. The khaki color matches the exterior of the rows of town homes that make up the complex. And it’s only the interior of the fence that Miller has painted khaki. The exterior of the fence is Turkish Coffee. And the khaki portion of the fence is barely visible from outside Miller’s property.

What’s more, a recent visit to the complex found at least three of Miller’s neighbors have a similar color scheme: coffee outside, khaki inside.

Now the dispute has devolved into litigation. Miller has sued the Colony Marina condo association and its president, Andy Scontras, asking the Honolulu Circuit Court to make them honor a mediation agreement Miller says she and the board entered in 2013. (...)

Miller says the board is retaliating against her for asking questions about association finances.

“Based on the Board’s threatening letters, even if Plaintiff decided to paint the fence ‘Turkish Coffee’ color, the Board would still be charging her for the fines and late fees allegedly ‘accrued’ in 2022 and 2023,” Miller’s complaint says. “The Board’s ongoing failure to provide the requested documents reinforces the fact that this is nothing more than a repeat of a decade of harassment.”

Chea Paet, a vice president with Cadmus Properties, said there indeed appears to be long-running animosity between Miller, who was board president a decade ago, and Scontras, the current board president.

Paet said it’s costing the association needless time and money to fight over something that could be solved with a $200 paint job.

“It’s really doing a disservice to her other owners and her community,” he said. (...)

Board Refuses Second Mediation

In July 2022, the board sent Miller another letter saying she would be fined if she didn’t paint her fence Turkish Coffee within seven days. In March 2023, the board escalated the threats, saying it would have the fence painted and charge Miller for a locksmith’s services if needed to get inside the gate of her property and onto her front lanai.

The board also said it would not resolve the dispute outside of court.

“Also, please note that the Association will not agree to mediation regarding this matter,” the letter said. “The AOAO may paint the common element fence as the BOD deems appropriate to maintain a uniform appearance, prevent damage, and protect property values.”

On April 15, Paet, the property manager, showed up with a painter and locksmith. Miller called the police.

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Images: Stewart Yerton
[ed. I was going to say something snarky, but some stories just speak for themselves.]

C'est La Vie - You Never Can Tell

[ed. Really great cover (killer guitar riffs and fills). Check out Emmylou Harris' awesome version, too (w/Albert Lee).]

It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53
They drove it down to Orleans to celebrate the anniversary
It was there that Pierre was married to the lovely mademoiselle
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

Lost Highway

"If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so much money. Encourage them to get their CDL, too.”

A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.

Johnny’s rosy pep talk was built on the belief that trucking is still a lucrative career in America. And despite the devastating shortage of truckers observed by media outlets, politicians, and trucking associations, the classroom was full of people who seemed willing to buy in. The founder of Changing Lanes, a charismatic veteran named Delbert, asked for a show of hands: How many people definitely wanted to do long-haul trucking? Three hands. How many people were from Texas? Nearly all. Who had child support to pay? Four or five. How many people were here in a workforce training program? Five or six. How many people had been to prison before? At least four hands went up, fast. (...)

The logistics industry has long sounded the alarm over the shortage of American truck drivers and the havoc it wreaks on supply chains, but just why that shortage exists gets less attention. Millions of Americans are trained to drive trucks and choose not to. Long-haulers, lauded as the backbone of our economy, live out of their trucks for weeks at a time, often working eighty-plus-hour weeks while earning little more than minimum wage. The economist Michael Belzer has equated commercial trucking to working in a “sweatshop on wheels.” The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent. “It’s a self-inflicted wound,” Steve Viscelli, the sociologist, former trucker, and author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, told me, “because the jobs are so bad. We don’t really have a shortage of drivers. We just have a shortage of people willing to live that lifestyle.” (...)

Trucking is an industry steeped in some of the most stubborn of American aspirations: join the middle class; build a career you can count on; work without a boss looking over your shoulder. These are narratives whose centers do not hold, even in an industry that still takes place on the open road.

But they used to. After World War II, trucking became one of the highest-paying working-class jobs in America, backed by the Teamsters. Then, in 1980, in response to skyrocketing fuel rates, inflation, and nationwide strikes by drivers, Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking industry, which meant that the government no longer had oversight of freight rates and routes. New low-cost carriers flooded the market, pushing union firms out of business. Prices for consumer goods stayed low, and drivers’ wages fell. The median annual pay for a trucker today is just shy of $50,000, which, according to Belzer, is less than half of what truckers were earning in 1980 when adjusting for inflation. Over the same span of time, union membership among truck drivers has fallen from around 60 percent to less than 10.

A classmate often wore a red T-shirt that said 'IF DIESEL AIN'T BURNIN', THEN I AIN'T EARNIN'. He saw the refrain as a motivator, but it also could be read as an admonition to the industry he was being trained to join. Drivers, particularly long-haulers, who make up about two million of the some 3.6 million truckers nationwide, are typically paid by the mile. Safety inspections, loading, unloading, fueling, and maintenance generally don’t count, nor does time spent waiting on loads. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempts truck drivers from the right to overtime.

This landscape makes the American trucker both essential and disposable. As Viscelli writes in The Big Rig, “It is more profitable to manage the problem than to fix it.” But when a record eighty-one thousand trucking jobs went unfilled in 2021, contributing to the supply chain crisis, shipping costs rose and store shelves sat empty. Suddenly, the driver shortage was everyone’s problem. The Biden Administration unveiled a plan for getting more drivers on the road and keeping them there, which included pathways for veterans and young people, funding to help states issue CDLs faster, and a joint compensation initiative between the Departments of Labor and Transportation. A flurry of proposed legislation followed: bills guaranteeing drivers’ right to overtime, one seeking to retain veteran drivers and attract newcomers through tax credits, and another cutting the red tape around CDL certification. It remains to be seen what will become law, but what does seem clear is that the structural issues plaguing truckers are too consequential to ignore. The shortage improved last year, with sixty thousand vacancies, but the American Trucking Associations has warned that the figure could more than double by 2030.

by Emily Gogolak, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Texas State Highway 130; Sandy Carson for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free - The Making of Wildflowers

Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free - The Making of Wildflowers
[ed. A Masterpiece. Could watch this forever.]

Gary Larson, Far Side
via:

Preserving Chinatowns in the United States

Preserving Chinatowns in the United States (Nat. Trust for Historic Preservation)

Chinatowns have been bastions of community resilience for over 160 years. New threats make preservation more important than ever.

Historic Chinatowns are communities of resilience, and while they do not look the same across the country, they all reveal different sides of the formation of America and teach us more about our identity as a nation. From the bustling density of Chinatowns in major urban centers, to the smaller Chinese communities in rural landscapes—ones that have long gone quiet, leaving single streets or mere buildings as evidence where they once stood—these places have the power to tell intergenerational stories that continue to redefine what it means to be American.

In the summer of 2021, as Chinatowns continued to grapple with the fallout of the dramatic decline in business brought on by the pandemic and an alarming rise in xenophobia and racism against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, the National Trust for Historic Preservation worked with Karen Yee, a graduate researcher studying at the University of Maryland, to develop a tool and research ways to identify, elevate, and preserve these treasured places that tell Chinese American history.

Her work focused on three different questions:

• What is the current state of preservation activity associated with Chinatowns/International Districts, and what opportunities exist to strengthen existing community work?
• What types of places associated with Chinatowns/International Districts have been identified, protected, and interpreted?
• What research and data have been collected on this topic, and what gaps remain?

Many of these areas are recognized as International Districts to represent the multi-ethnic identities and nationalities present in these communities today including Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Thai, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Burmese and so many others. For this story, we focus on Chinatowns as places where a majority of the population was/is Chinese and the communities self-identify as Chinatown.

by Karen Yee, Nat. Trust for Historic Preservation |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Gold Mountain and Beyond: A History of Chinatowns in the United States (NTHP); and, Chinatowns are struggling to survive... why they matter (WaPo):]

***

"Walking around Chinatown’s deserted streets has now made Young fear that this iconic neighborhood could possibly be lost forever. And New York was far from the only Asian community affected: The same empty businesses could be found in Chinatowns — as well as Japantowns, Koreatowns and Little Saigons — across the United States, from San Francisco to Boston.

If it seems impossible to imagine the death of such an established and historic community, one need only look to D.C.’s Chinatown, founded in the 19th century and which, just 30 years ago, catered to a significant resident Asian population with large grocery stores, shops, and dozens of traditional restaurants. Today, the community is a shadow of its former self, populated with chain restaurants and stores, while just a handful of Chinese restaurants remain, along with far fewer Asian American residents.

It’s no coincidence that Lisa Mao, director of the 2021 documentary “A Tale of Three Chinatowns,” refers to it as a “dead Chinatown.”

“The immigrant experience is fraught with challenges,” Mao says, “and these were segregated communities where people were forced to live, in what were considered less desirable areas. But once that area becomes popular, it can be hard to hold on against developers.” (...)

Indeed, New York Chinatown’s Zip code, which it now shares with trendy SoHo and Tribeca, has created real problems for Asian American business owners: the 10013 Zip code is considered to be a high-income neighborhood, preventing struggling restaurants from qualifying for targeted economic injury disaster loans through the Small Business Administration, while other pandemic relief programs seem to benefit national companies. Young points to the multimillion-dollar Paycheck Protection Program loan received by Asian-themed restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s, saying, “Their sales doubled. Meanwhile, restaurants that have been mainstays in Chinatown for decades — Hop Shing, which was 47 years old, Hoy Wong, which had been there for 42 years — they had to close. These were old-style Cantonese restaurants, you’ll never replicate that cooking again.”

Again, if that sounds dramatic, it’s not. The restaurants that are still hanging on in Chinatown were already facing an aging workforce before the pandemic; the chefs working the woks at venerable restaurants like Hop Lee on Chinatown’s storied Mott Street are often in their 50s and 60s, and it’s their long years of experience that help bring that flavor of “wok hei” — the umami-rich char that comes from cooking over high heat with a well-seasoned wok — to lo mein, snow peas and much more. (...)

With the history of Chinatown neighborhoods across the United States directly connected to racist politics of the 19th century that barred Asian immigrants from citizenship and owning property as well as enforced residence in designated areas, issues of exclusion are indelibly imprinted upon these communities. The effect of covid-19 has made Chinatowns, already dependent on foot traffic and tourism even while trying to preserve traditions dating back thousands of years, more fragile than ever.

Bonnie Tsui, author of “American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods,” sees these neighborhoods as deserving of support from all Americans, regardless of race.

“Chinatown has always been characterized by history, culture and vital continuity,” she says. “There's a nostalgia, a romance to that, for sure, but it's also very functional and practical. It evolves. This is a place that serves its community — which has become a very diverse community — and those beyond its borders, too.”

by Kristen Hartke, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Rat

ProCo Rat

via:

[ed. A Classic (ProCo Rat pedal myths, history and timeline).]

Overturning ‘Chevron’ Can Help Rebalance the Constitutional Order

The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that could go a long way toward fixing some of the systemic dysfunction in American government. The case, which revisits a judicial doctrine known as the “Chevron deference,” has been widely described as a conservative effort to limit government. But that’s not entirely correct. The case is better understood as a key part of the effort to restore the proper balance of power among the three branches of government.

If you took high school civics, there is a good chance you’ve heard the phrase “coequal branches of government.” It’s such a common formulation for America’s separation of powers that it’s easy to slide into the false belief that each branch of government is equal in authority to the others.

But if you read the Constitution, you’ll quickly see that while each branch of government has some power to check the others, one branch is plainly supreme. The government can’t spend one dime unless it’s appropriated through Congress. Impeachment gives Congress the power to fire not only the president but also any member of the Supreme Court. Only Congress has the power to declare war.

Even if the president takes the exceptional step of vetoing a bill it has passed, Congress has the power to override that veto. And the Constitution gives Congress immense power over the federal judiciary. Congress defines the number of judges and justices, sets their compensation and defines the full extent of their jurisdiction.

Not only is Congress the most powerful of the three branches of government, it’s also the branch closest to the people. Members of the House and Senate are elected by popular vote, and members of the House run for election every two years. By contrast, no American ever votes for a single federal judge — let alone a Supreme Court justice — and the Electoral College distances the presidency from majority rule to such an extent that the last two Republican presidents entered office having failed to win the popular vote.

And indeed there is a compelling logic in the most powerful branch also being the branch closest to the people. It builds popular support for public policy, and it provides Americans with the crucial sense that they are participants in American democracy, not mere observers of the machinations of a distant government elite.

But by now you most likely see the problem. Congress is not performing its constitutional tasks. It’s a broken institution that contains too few genuine lawmakers and far too many would-be activists and TV pundits. Time and again, it has proved incapable of compromise or of accomplishing even the most basic legislative tasks. It’s been 27 years since it even passed a budget on time. And that barely begins to capture the current level of dysfunction, with a razor-thin House Republican majority consistently held hostage by a mere handful of MAGA extremists.

As Congress has shirked its duties, presidents and the courts have filled the power vacuum. Presidents have used the power of their executive agencies to promulgate new regulations without congressional involvement. Executive agencies publish 3,000 to 4,500 new rules per year, and these regulations have a substantial impact on the American economy. Compounding the problem, courts have ratified that presidential power grab by enacting a series of judge-made rules that require federal courts to defer to the decisions of executive agencies.

The most important of those judge-made rules is called “Chevron deference,” named after the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The case involved a highly technical dispute over the meaning of the term “stationary source” under amendments to the Clean Air Act. Congress did not define the term, so the E.P.A. defined it for itself. The question at issue was whether the court should defer to the agency’s interpretation or interpret the statute itself.

The court chose to defer to the E.P.A., and it established a default rule of deference going forward. If the statute an agency administers is “silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue,” the majority held, “the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

The justification for Chevron deference is compelling, at least on the surface. Agencies regulate some of the most complex businesses and industries in the United States. They possess a level of expertise that’s clearly beyond the capabilities of Congress. Why not defer to their determinations? Isn’t that simply wise?

But what might be wise in specific, highly technical circumstances can be very problematic when adopted as a general rule, as the Chevron doctrine has been. Chevron disrupted the constitutional order by effectively giving the president the power to make, interpret and enforce laws acting solely through his administrative agencies. It injected the presidency’s lawmaking abilities with steroids.

This is not the way the United States was intended to function. It magnifies the power of the president beyond recognition, diminishes democracy, raises the stakes of presidential elections to destabilizing levels and puts immense pressure on the president to maximize his rule-making authority. Just as bad, it encourages congressional inaction and incompetence. If the agencies can take over when Congress is silent or ambiguous, it diminishes the necessity for Congress to speak clearly. It’s much easier to punt the hard decisions to the president, and then heckle (or cheer) from Fox News or MSNBC.

How have we seen this dynamic play out? Three consecutive administrations — Obama, Trump and Biden — have attempted radically different immigration reforms through executive action rather than through legislation. We’ve also seen the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations enact or propose divergent rules and regulations on sex discrimination under Title IX. We’ve witnessed President Biden attempt to forgive student loans and mandate workplace vaccinations through executive action. [ed. I think this all really started with Reagan].

These policy disputes and policy shifts have very little to do with “agency expertise” and everything to do with presidential ideology. The language of Title IX or of federal immigration statutes isn’t changing, but the ideological commitments of the president do, and the president is then using his rule-making authority to alter the law. The same law shouldn’t mean wildly different things based on the whim of a president. 

Wednesday’s oral argument signaled that America may be on the verge of a welcome restoration of proper constitutional order. The case is called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and the facts are both simple and representative of how the Chevron doctrine distorts American law. The plaintiffs are fishing companies that are challenging a federal rule that requires them to pay the cost for federal observers who board their boats and observe their compliance with federal fishing rules. (...)

The question isn’t how much power the government should possess, but rather who should possess it. And it’s far from clear to me that it’s inherently “conservative” or “Republican” to say that Congress, the most democratic branch of government, should possess more power than the president. Indeed, a number of conservatives adhere to a theory of presidential power called the “unitary executive” that often means the opposite, increasing executive authority at the expense of Congress.

Moreover, reversing Chevron wouldn’t end executive rule-making. Nor would it block Congress from explicitly granting agencies a degree of discretion based on agency expertise. It would instead roll back the president’s extraordinary dominance. Do we really want to maintain a system that enables a man like Donald Trump to eclipse both Congress and the judiciary?

Americans feel alienated from their government for good reason. Democracy feels more distant because it is more distant. Decades of congressional failure have diminished congressional power and placed it in the hands of presidents and their army of unelected administrators. We need to reverse bad precedent. Regardless of whether one is for big government or small government, we should all be for democratic government, and that — at the very least — requires Congress to do its job.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

[ed. Ok, I'm officially changing my mind (people are allowed to do that, you know). This is a very persuasive argument that I've never heard before. I do believe in leaving regulatory expertise to the experts, but Mr. French is right, new administrations frequently impose whiplash changes to administrative policy that make regulatory oversight a joke. You know, there are a lot people who are paranoid about a Deep State in government. Well, it's true, it does exist but what they call a Deep State is really just a deep bureaucracy, and it's absurd to think that it's in any way coordinated toward some single purpose. Government is a system of competing checks and balances and different agencies reflect those tensions. When a new administration comes in, one agency or another may find itself in ascendancy while others get sidelined - and those temporarily in power exert their influence while they have it. Are there likely to be unfortunate consequences of changing Chevron? Probably. Should we do it? I don't know. But things aren't working now, so what are the alternatives?]

Shocker in the Desert

No sport forces us to question what we think we know more than golf does because no sport has the ability to surprise us more than golf. It’s an unpredictable game that even at the highest levels is played by imperfect practitioners possessing skills that are tenuously grasped and unevenly applied.

Chaos tends to ensue, but generally there is a measure of order restored at the finish and a result that makes some sense emerges. Then there is the conclusion of the American Express on Sunday in La Quinta, Calif., where 20-year-old Nick Dunlap became the youngest amateur ever to win a PGA Tour event. The outcome is shocking, an amateur playing in his fourth tour event beating a field that included 21 of the top 50 in the world, including World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. The kid, who had missed the cut in his only other tour starts, stared down his playing partners, Sam Burns and Justin Thomas, members of the most recent U.S. Ryder Cup team who have 20 tour wins between them.

Again shocking. “I’m still in shock. I really am,” said the young man who did all the shocking things to bring about such a seismic occurrence in a game rife with all kinds of recent surprises. But maybe it’s not that shocking after all. Talent doesn’t check birth certificates and a game that allows for endless possibilities just provided a finish a pure serendipity because, well, this guy is really good.

One day after shooting 60 to tie the record for the lowest score by an amateur in a tour event, Dunlap weathered bouts of doubt and jangled nerves to shoot a two-under 70 at the Stadium Course at PGA West for a one-stroke victory over South Africa’s Christiaan Bezuidenhout. Dunlap capped the victory by getting up and down for par from off the green, drilling a six-footer that caused him to shout with excitement before he was reduced to tears as he hugged his parents.

He finished with a 29-under 259 aggregate total and started an immediate period of inner turmoil as he decides how to proceed with a career that already appeared promising after he won the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Junior, a feat only Tiger Woods previously accomplished. Dunlap had to forego the $1.512 million first prize, but he possesses an exemption on the PGA Tour through 2026 along with myriad additional benefits.

Dunlap couldn’t say whether he would continue on at the University of Alabama, where he is a sophomore member of the golf team, or start chasing the pot of gold, an opportunity that he earned with poise and maturity beyond his years. He was still processing what the hell happened over a magical four days after accepting a sponsor exemption two weeks earlier.

“I probably had a thousand different scenarios in my head of how today was going to go, and it went nothing like I expected,” said the native of Huntsville, Ala. “I think that was the cool part about it. That's golf. I hit a lot of shots that I didn't think I was going to hit and then I hit some shots that went way better than I expected, and the same thing with putting. Like I said, I just think that's the cool part of golf.”

Dunlap, who came into the tournament loaded with confidence after shooting an 11-under 60 at NorthRiver Club in Tuscaloosa, Ala., the day before leaving for California, is the first amateur to win a tour event since Phil Mickelson captured the 1991 Northern Telecom Open. He is the second youngest winner on tour since World War II, trailing only Jordan Spieth, but he eclipsed Chick Evans, winner of the 1910 Western Open, as the youngest amateur to win a tour event.

Burns, three shots behind Dunlap after 54 holes but his nearest pursuer, looked to be the spoiler to a potential storybook tale by overtaking Dunlap with a six-foot birdie putt on the 11th hole, and the Louisiana golfer remained in front until the 16th hole when Dunlap rolled in a 10-footer for birdie to forge a tie at 29 under. (...)

After Dunlap found the green at the par-3 island 17th hole, Burns flamed his tee shot to the right of the green and into the water. The ensuing double bogey enabled Dunlap to forge a two-shot lead. Burns then fully capitulated by driving into the water left of the fairway at 18, leading to another double bogey.

With an 11-foot birdie at the last, Bezuidenhout completed a 65 and climbed within one, a fact Dunlap didn’t realize until he arrived at his ball beside the green. No matter. Dunlap was up to the challenge, something you’d expect from a kid who shot 59 when he was 12 years old. (...)

The final putt, the pressure-is-a-privilege moment he had mentioned only a day earlier, was the chance to live out a dream far sooner than he ever imagined. And attempting to live out a dream is more pressure than most of us can handle. “Most nervous I've ever been, by far. Just tried to breathe.”

And when the stroke was true and the ball dived dead in the middle, Dunlap was breathing in some rarefied air.

by  Dave Shedloski, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Orlando Ramirez

[ed. Fun to watch history being made. I can't imagine him not turning pro. Nice kid, nerves of steel, great future ahead.]

Social Media Platforms Profit, Social Media Creators - Not So Much

The creator economy is ready for a workers’ movement (TC)

Image: Bryce Durbin

"Erin McGoff has 3 million followers on social media, but with the money she gets from Instagram and TikTok, she wouldn’t be able to pay for the plate of mozzarella sticks we’re sharing in a Baltimore bar.

“On Instagram, I’ll have a video hit 900,000 views and make six dollars,” McGoff said. “It’s insulting.”

Like most content creators, McGoff makes her living from brand deals, sponsorships and subscription products, rather than from the platforms themselves. But that reality is emblematic of the conundrum creators find themselves in: They’re propelling social platforms to new heights, but those same platforms can betray them at any second with one small algorithm change or unfounded suspension."

Read more:

A Knife Forged in Fire

Sam recently hosted a group of Chicago knife makers for a potluck lunch at the shop. After the meal, Sam cranked up the forge, and one of them, Dylan Ambrosini, crafted a blade while we all watched. Dylan, at 24, is one of the youngest and most talented knife makers in the Midwest. He and Sam collaborated on a nine-inch chef’s knife, which sold for $950 before they could get it on display at Northside Cutlery. Top-end chef’s knives can cost even more. Anthony Bourdain bought one of his favorites for $5,000 from Bob Kramer, a popular bladesmith in Washington State. It brought $231,250 at auction after Bourdain’s death.

Taking care of a knife is pretty simple. You strop it before each use. You don’t throw it in the sink. You wipe it off and put it in a safe place when you’re done — a knife block, for example. And we would chop down telephone poles with it before we’d put it in a dishwasher. Then again, to qualify as a master bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society, you have to chop a wooden two-by-four in half two times with a knife you made and then still be able to shave with it. The rules for that qualification test clearly state: “The test knife will ultimately be destroyed during the testing process.”

The knives that Sam and his fellow Midwestern smiths make, passed from hand to hand with care, from mother to son to uncle to granddaughter, could last a thousand years, by which time every speck of high technology we know today will be dust. But the reality is that if a knife maker has become too famous, you simply can’t get his or her knives any longer.

by Laurence Gonzalez, Chicago |  Read more:

Image: Clayton Hauck

[ed. Pretty fascinating step by step guide to an ancient art.]

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted.

“So my visit wouldn’t be classified?”

Vivian confirmed that I could tell anyone I wanted. “Just don’t tell them my name—or I’ll have to kill you. Just kidding!”

As I considered the invitation, I kept wondering why I’d been invited. I don’t write about CIA-adjacent topics, nor am I successful enough a novelist that people outside a small circle—one that I doubt includes U.S. intelligence agencies—know my name. So the invite was a bit of a mystery. This was the second-most common question that came up when I told writer friends about it, topped only by: “No speaking fee?” At first, I wondered whether the gig was part of a recruitment strategy. But it doesn’t take a vast intelligence apparatus to know that I am not intelligence material, not least because I am a professional writer.

Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question. In 2021, I had turned down an invitation from the government of Saudi Arabia for an all-expenses-paid trip to a writers’ retreat at al-‘Ulā, as I didn’t want to be a part of their arts and culture whitewashing. But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.

***

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.”

It turned out that, like in many bureaucracies, the individual parts that made up the CIA were siloed, and there was no point in arguing about logical contradictions.

Vivian gave up and drove me back to my car, clearly stressed. I told her it wasn’t a big deal—I would just follow her.

The problem, she said, was that we wouldn’t be able to park in the same lot. And I had to be escorted at all times. And employee parking at the CIA was a mess. “It’ll take me forever just to walk to you.”

She resolved that she would simply park in VIP visitor parking with me, and if she got a ticket, she got a ticket. “Just follow me.”

I got in my car and followed her to the gate. I watched from behind the wheel as she drove up to the gate, talked to one of the police officers, and drove off past the gate at a good clip, very much not being followed by me.

I pulled up to the gate, and an aggressive police officer questioned me about why I had two badges.

“Didn’t it seem strange to you to get a second badge when you’d just got your first one?”

“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “Everything seems strange to me.”

A different cop told him to give it a rest, handed me a third badge, and asked if I needed directions to VIP parking. I have a terrible sense of direction—I once got lost at Costco for so long that they had to call my mom over the PA; I was fifteen—and Google Maps isn’t much use at Langley.

The nice cop said that I needed to turn right and follow the road until the sixth left. There I would see a line of squad cars and a gate, where my badge would swipe me in.

“If you see a helicopter, you’ve gone too far,” he said. “Just loop back around. Don’t make a U-turn.”

When I later told Vivian about the mean cop and the nice one, she said, “They’re always doing that good cop–bad cop thing.”

“For parking?”

“For everything!” (...)

I asked Vivian how many people worked at the CIA.

“Maybe two million?” She smiled and confessed that she had no idea, even though I was made to understand that she had been at the CIA, and in the writing group, for a number of years. (...)

At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

We finally found the conference room, through a side door in the CIA Museum. It was unclear who this museum was for, but it was not a bad museum, full of objects of interest: pieces of the Berlin Wall, tie-clip cameras, Soviet bugging devices, et cetera, displayed in glass cases. Six people were seated at the conference table inside the conference room, which was windowless and had a big CIA seal on the wall.

“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.

“Strip search?” one of the men joked.

“Parking,” I said.

A collective groan. The goddamned parking.

I began by asking what people were writing. Surprisingly, none of the CIA writers were writing spy novels. They were working on short stories. Self-published dystopian sci-fi. A presidential biography. Upmarket fiction. A personal blog, which I was told to check out if I ever wanted a really good muffin recipe. The writing group was organized around what sounded like a listserv announcing periodic meetings to whatever members were available that day. Only about half the people in the room seemed to know one another.

I talked a little bit about writing beginnings and working through false starts. I read the first page of my latest novel, explained why I’d set the first scene in the U.S. when the rest of the novel takes place in Ukraine, and went through all the false starts I’d taken to get where I was going. One officer raised their hand and asked about establishing voice in first versus third person. Another asked about revision techniques. Another about the shift from writing alone to working with an editor. It was the least remarkable Q&A I’ve ever been a part of.

I had a little time to kill before our lunch reservation—seating time in the executive dining room was not flexible—so Vivian took me to the gift shop.

Given that almost no one’s allowed inside Langley and the people who work for the CIA aren’t supposed to advertise it, it was, like with the museum, a bit of a mystery who the gift shop was for. The shelves were stocked with T-shirts (Central Intelligence Agency), mugs (Central Intelligence Agency), and novelty barbecue sauce (Top Secret Recipe!). There was also a Pride Month display (Central Intelligence Agency in rainbow). I bought a Pride Month pen for four dollars.

by Johannes Lichtman, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: CIA HQ; Wikimedia Commons

Channel 1: The World’s First AI-Generated News Channel

[ed. Well, here we go. Actually, most tv announcers seem like AI creations anyway, so this was probably a no-brainer from the start. Good luck media stars (and others in media, PR, commercials, creative arts, etc.). Pretty obvious now why there was a Hollywood strike. See also, this overview: Channel 1: The world's first AI-generated news channel for context, background, intent and future applications. And if all of this seems fundamentally wrong or artificial, consider how quickly football viewing audiences accepted VR first down lines in televised games (and top tracer technology in golf).]
Video: YouTube