[ed. I like the cat. Reminds me of the dirty looks I'd get from my grandmother.]
Thursday, February 15, 2024
My Time with Kurt Cobain
My Time with Kurt Cobain (New Yorker)
by Michael Azerrad
Images: Adams Carvalho, Charles Peterson
"In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. (...)
Images: Adams Carvalho, Charles Peterson
"In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. (...)
“Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time."
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
This Drug Can Mend a Broken Heart
Though the details of each case vary, romantic betrayal through infidelity, abandonment, or emotional manipulation can upend one’s life in an instant. For Lantoine, her future plans, and the person they were attached to, were suddenly gone, and her functioning along with them.
Exhausted and an emotional wreck after almost a year, Lantoine learned about a clinical trial at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a Canadian psychiatric hospital in Montreal, that sought to ease the pain of romantic betrayal. The study did not rely on traditional psychotherapy sessions. It claimed it would dampen the emotional reverberations of what happened to her by pairing a beta-blocker medication called propranolol with a series of “memory reactivation sessions.” She signed up.
It sounds like science fiction, or science romantic-fiction. The 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind often gets brought up, says Michelle Lonergan, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa who led the trial as part of her Ph.D. In the film, a couple, post-breakup, use a service to erase their memories of one another in response to the suffering of heartbreak.
But the experiments that Lantoine enrolled in were an attempt to use a very real feature of the brain—albeit one we’re still learning the ins and outs of—called memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.
“Memory reconsolidation” describes how, when we recall a memory, it can become pliable. There is hope—and some intriguing early data—that, at the moment of recollection, we might be able to intentionally change a memory and make it less burdensome. This ability to modulate distressing memories is being investigated as an intervention to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, phobias, and is thought to have promise for depression or anxiety more broadly. It rests on an idea that’s emerged from our understanding of memory over the past few decades: Memories are not fixed, even the ones that haunt us the most.
Described this year in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study Lantoine enrolled in is the first application of a memory reconsolidation-focused treatment for adjustment disorder resulting from romantic betrayal. (Adjustment disorder is defined as an emotional and behavioral maladaptive reaction to a stressful event, but not a life threatening one, so it doesn’t meet criteria for PTSD.)
Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Lantoine’s memories didn’t vanish in a dramatic collapse of a beach house into the Montauk coastline. She still had the declarative memory of what had happened. But, as Lantoine describes it, the memories were no longer debilitating.
“The treatment doesn’t remove the remembrance of the events,” Lantoine says. “It just removes the pain that was associated with the events. It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” (...)
Exhausted and an emotional wreck after almost a year, Lantoine learned about a clinical trial at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a Canadian psychiatric hospital in Montreal, that sought to ease the pain of romantic betrayal. The study did not rely on traditional psychotherapy sessions. It claimed it would dampen the emotional reverberations of what happened to her by pairing a beta-blocker medication called propranolol with a series of “memory reactivation sessions.” She signed up.
But the experiments that Lantoine enrolled in were an attempt to use a very real feature of the brain—albeit one we’re still learning the ins and outs of—called memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.
“Memory reconsolidation” describes how, when we recall a memory, it can become pliable. There is hope—and some intriguing early data—that, at the moment of recollection, we might be able to intentionally change a memory and make it less burdensome. This ability to modulate distressing memories is being investigated as an intervention to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, phobias, and is thought to have promise for depression or anxiety more broadly. It rests on an idea that’s emerged from our understanding of memory over the past few decades: Memories are not fixed, even the ones that haunt us the most.
Described this year in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study Lantoine enrolled in is the first application of a memory reconsolidation-focused treatment for adjustment disorder resulting from romantic betrayal. (Adjustment disorder is defined as an emotional and behavioral maladaptive reaction to a stressful event, but not a life threatening one, so it doesn’t meet criteria for PTSD.)
Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Lantoine’s memories didn’t vanish in a dramatic collapse of a beach house into the Montauk coastline. She still had the declarative memory of what had happened. But, as Lantoine describes it, the memories were no longer debilitating.
“The treatment doesn’t remove the remembrance of the events,” Lantoine says. “It just removes the pain that was associated with the events. It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” (...)
It soon became clear that memory reconsolidation could be a powerful therapeutic tool. But the methods used in animal studies to interfere with reconsolidating were often harmful to humans. Enter propranolol: a common beta blocker used for lowering blood pressure as well as for treating anxiety and preventing migraines. Propranolol impairs adrenaline hormones in the brain and is thought to impact the production of other molecules needed for memory reconsolidation.
Starting in the early 2000s, researchers showed that, in rats, the drug could have similar post-retrieval effects as the more toxic compounds. And in 2009, researchers found that propranolol could help people disengage from a learned fear response. In this study, scientists showed human participants images of spiders, paired with an electric shock. One day later, some were given propranolol and others a placebo. On the third day, when participants saw the same images, those who had received the placebo noticeably startled, a physical manifestation of the fear response usually paired with a negative emotional state. But those who had been given the propranolol no longer had that reaction. These participants could still remember what had happened to them; propranolol didn’t erase the facts. But they no longer exhibited the biological signs of being afraid.
Starting in the early 2000s, researchers showed that, in rats, the drug could have similar post-retrieval effects as the more toxic compounds. And in 2009, researchers found that propranolol could help people disengage from a learned fear response. In this study, scientists showed human participants images of spiders, paired with an electric shock. One day later, some were given propranolol and others a placebo. On the third day, when participants saw the same images, those who had received the placebo noticeably startled, a physical manifestation of the fear response usually paired with a negative emotional state. But those who had been given the propranolol no longer had that reaction. These participants could still remember what had happened to them; propranolol didn’t erase the facts. But they no longer exhibited the biological signs of being afraid.
by Shayla Love, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Max4e Photo/Shutterstock
[ed. See also: The Curse of Valentine's Day (UnHerd). Certainly has been cursed for me.]
[ed. See also: The Curse of Valentine's Day (UnHerd). Certainly has been cursed for me.]
The Method of Becoming a Character
On the surface level, acting can seem like a relatively fun job. You memorize lines, put on costumes, play pretend, and hang out on set with creative and engaging people. But like all jobs, there’s a reality that most people don’t consider. For acting, it’s executing it in an authentic manner.
To put that into perspective, not only do actors need to memorize pages and pages of script (and that can be a lot), but they also need to deliver it genuinely, as if they were speaking it for the first time. Their reactions and the way they display emotions also have to be read as genuine. Moreover, some actors have to memorize how to perform additional activities on the side, such as a dance, a walk, or an accent. All the while, they can’t look at the camera or break character. They must always be in a state that best impersonates their character. This is often why actors have to shoot multiple takes, even for just one sentence, to get a scene just right.
In our increasingly critical society, where every detail is scrutinized, clichéd acting can doom a film to irrelevance. So how does an actor realistically capture a character’s role? One infamous technique is method acting.
To put that into perspective, not only do actors need to memorize pages and pages of script (and that can be a lot), but they also need to deliver it genuinely, as if they were speaking it for the first time. Their reactions and the way they display emotions also have to be read as genuine. Moreover, some actors have to memorize how to perform additional activities on the side, such as a dance, a walk, or an accent. All the while, they can’t look at the camera or break character. They must always be in a state that best impersonates their character. This is often why actors have to shoot multiple takes, even for just one sentence, to get a scene just right.
Method acting is the process in which an actor adapts to their character’s physical or emotional state through a range of techniques. This, in theory, veers away from clichéd acting and instead exhibits originality in their portrayal of a character. No wonder that Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison and endured hypothermic conditions during his role as Hugh Glass in The Revenant; he was nominated six times for the Academy Award for it.
However, despite these great performances, this level of dedication to play a role can come with major health risks ranging from physical strain and injury to mental health issues such as trauma, fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and their accompanying psychotic disorders.
The Birth of Method Acting
In the early 20th century, Russian actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavski set out to revolutionize the novice world of stagecraft. He created a systematic approach to acting through a combination of techniques from various theaters and entertainment companies, calling it “the system.” Some could say he was feeling rather creative that day.
Thus, the method was born out of the system, designed to allow actors to realistically experience their roles rather than trying to imitate them. Stanislavski believed that by reforming their emotional and mental outlook, actors’ performances would accurately embody their characters.
Stanislavski then taught this innovative approach to his students, and when they performed in the United States, their techniques piqued many American actors’ interests. Deciding to commercialize this opportunity, a few of Stanislavski’s students relocated to the United States and established the American Laboratory Theatre. There, they began teaching the method to a new generation of actors who would go on to star in Hollywood, popularizing the mechanisms of method acting, and the rest became history.
Over time, three students of Stanislavski’s system stood out: Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Stanford Meisner, all of whom would become prominent figures in method acting. They defined “the method” in their unique way, each emphasizing their techniques and beliefs. Thus, the modern version of “the method” is essentially a combination of three, each a refined version of the original system, all aimed at helping actors connect more deeply with their characters.
Adler and Strasberg, now two of the most famous method coaches, parted ways due to their differing interpretations of “the method.” Strasberg, whose students included Al Pacino and Marilyn Monroe, focused on the emotional aspects of the system. He advocated for the use of personal experiences to portray a character, with the belief that the most natural performance could only come from immersing yourself in real experiences or events, leading to a genuine expression of emotion.
On the other hand, Adler, who trained well-known actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, emphasized the importance of “given circumstances.” This meant encouraging her students to draw their performances from their imaginations rather than their personal experiences.
Adler heavily disagreed with this approach, stating, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced – for example, when my mother died – to create a performance is sick and schizophrenic.” Despite her intense statement, Strasberg’s emphasis on personal experience is agreed to be the definition of the method, which may explain why it remains so controversial today.
Actors Who Took Their Roles to the Next Level
Several actors have made headlines for their extreme dedication to Method Acting. These on-set moments in acting history highlight the lengths actors will go through to embody their characters despite the detrimental impact on their health. From losing or gaining significant amounts of weight to living in isolation, these actors push the boundaries of what it means to be a character.
Natalie Portman in Black Swan
Natalie Portman’s role as Nina, a dedicated ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, is one of her most notable performances. The film follows Nina’s obsession with perfecting the contrasting roles of the White and Black Swan in a ballet production of Swan Lake. Portman’s preparation for the role mirrored her character’s dedication, involving rigorous training with former New York City Ballet dancer, Mary Helen Bowers.
In addition to ballet training, she incorporated swimming a mile a day into her routine. Her training schedule was rigorously brutal, starting with two hours of ballet a day for the first six months for strengthening and injury prevention. Later, at about six months, she increased to five hours a day, which included swimming and ballet classes. Two months before filming, she added choreography to her routine, extending her training to approximately eight hours a day. On top of this, Portman lost 20 pounds and lived primarily off carrots and almonds in order to achieve the slender frame of a ballerina.
However, despite these great performances, this level of dedication to play a role can come with major health risks ranging from physical strain and injury to mental health issues such as trauma, fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and their accompanying psychotic disorders.
The Birth of Method Acting
In the early 20th century, Russian actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavski set out to revolutionize the novice world of stagecraft. He created a systematic approach to acting through a combination of techniques from various theaters and entertainment companies, calling it “the system.” Some could say he was feeling rather creative that day.
Thus, the method was born out of the system, designed to allow actors to realistically experience their roles rather than trying to imitate them. Stanislavski believed that by reforming their emotional and mental outlook, actors’ performances would accurately embody their characters.
Stanislavski then taught this innovative approach to his students, and when they performed in the United States, their techniques piqued many American actors’ interests. Deciding to commercialize this opportunity, a few of Stanislavski’s students relocated to the United States and established the American Laboratory Theatre. There, they began teaching the method to a new generation of actors who would go on to star in Hollywood, popularizing the mechanisms of method acting, and the rest became history.
Over time, three students of Stanislavski’s system stood out: Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Stanford Meisner, all of whom would become prominent figures in method acting. They defined “the method” in their unique way, each emphasizing their techniques and beliefs. Thus, the modern version of “the method” is essentially a combination of three, each a refined version of the original system, all aimed at helping actors connect more deeply with their characters.
Adler and Strasberg, now two of the most famous method coaches, parted ways due to their differing interpretations of “the method.” Strasberg, whose students included Al Pacino and Marilyn Monroe, focused on the emotional aspects of the system. He advocated for the use of personal experiences to portray a character, with the belief that the most natural performance could only come from immersing yourself in real experiences or events, leading to a genuine expression of emotion.
On the other hand, Adler, who trained well-known actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, emphasized the importance of “given circumstances.” This meant encouraging her students to draw their performances from their imaginations rather than their personal experiences.
Adler heavily disagreed with this approach, stating, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced – for example, when my mother died – to create a performance is sick and schizophrenic.” Despite her intense statement, Strasberg’s emphasis on personal experience is agreed to be the definition of the method, which may explain why it remains so controversial today.
Actors Who Took Their Roles to the Next Level
Several actors have made headlines for their extreme dedication to Method Acting. These on-set moments in acting history highlight the lengths actors will go through to embody their characters despite the detrimental impact on their health. From losing or gaining significant amounts of weight to living in isolation, these actors push the boundaries of what it means to be a character.
Natalie Portman in Black Swan
Natalie Portman’s role as Nina, a dedicated ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, is one of her most notable performances. The film follows Nina’s obsession with perfecting the contrasting roles of the White and Black Swan in a ballet production of Swan Lake. Portman’s preparation for the role mirrored her character’s dedication, involving rigorous training with former New York City Ballet dancer, Mary Helen Bowers.
In addition to ballet training, she incorporated swimming a mile a day into her routine. Her training schedule was rigorously brutal, starting with two hours of ballet a day for the first six months for strengthening and injury prevention. Later, at about six months, she increased to five hours a day, which included swimming and ballet classes. Two months before filming, she added choreography to her routine, extending her training to approximately eight hours a day. On top of this, Portman lost 20 pounds and lived primarily off carrots and almonds in order to achieve the slender frame of a ballerina.
by Ashley Chen, The Science Survey | Read more:
Image: Avel Chuklanovon/Unsplash
Image: Avel Chuklanovon/Unsplash
Letters from a Missing Doll
At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin. He chanced upon a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka looked for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again.
The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll that said, “Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”
Thus began a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life.
When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. “This does not look at all my doll,” she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, “My trips, they have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her. A year later, Kafka died.
Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
by Dan MacGuill, Snopes | Read more:
Image: Dora Diamant and Franz Kafka, Wikipedia
[ed. True? Maybe.]
The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll that said, “Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”
When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. “This does not look at all my doll,” she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, “My trips, they have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her. A year later, Kafka died.
Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
by Dan MacGuill, Snopes | Read more:
Image: Dora Diamant and Franz Kafka, Wikipedia
[ed. True? Maybe.]
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
The Rowdy Golf Tournament That Got Too Rowdy
The Phoenix Open calls itself “the greatest show on grass.” The annual tournament, held at TPC Scottsdale, is basically what LIV Golf wants to be: Four days of raucous, alcohol-soaked mayhem—or at least as much mayhem as a golf tournament can possibly provide. The 16th hole is flanked by grandstands from tee to green. It’s a short, easy hole; it has become known for fans booing when golfers miss the green and wild celebrations when someone gets a hole-in-one.
As with a lot of things about the event, it’s a bit much—and seemingly becoming more so every year. When Sam Ryder got that hole-in-one two years ago, beer cans flew from the stands onto the course. This year, things got a little messier. (...)
The weather stayed cold, but the beer eventually started flowing. At one point the gates were closed and alcohol sales were halted; organizers said that was to encourage fans to move toward the course so more could get in. Some fans were turned away. Golf Magazine said the atmosphere calmed down a bit after this, but this is still the Phoenix Open. This means that "calmed down" was relative.
Things did not always go well for the fans who got in over the weekend. One was carried out. A woman fell from the grandstands at the 16th green and suffered serious injuries. There were fights. One shirtless guy ran onto the 16th green and jumped into a sand trap. Cops and fans had altercations all weekend. And our friend in the lead photo of this story, dressed as William Wallace from Braveheart, ran onto a green and mooned a police officer before being taken away.
The golfers were not any more pleased by this than you'd expect. Jordan Spieth (14-under, T6) said he had trouble getting to the course. Zach Johnson (3-under, T60) yelled at fans: “Don't ‘sir’ me. Somebody said it. I’m just sick of it. Just shut up!” He stormed off. (...)
Billy Horschel (6-under, T41) defended the honor of Nicolo Galletti (2-over, 73): “Buddy, when he's over the shot, shut the hell up, man. Come on, he's trying to hit a damn golf shot here. It's our fucking job.” Spieth, once he got on the course, said “what the fuck” to the gallery. “Shitshows,” Byeong Hun An (1-under, T66) tweeted. “Totally out of control on every hole.”
Johnson told the Arizona Republic he probably wouldn’t be back next year. “This tournament has been inappropriate and crossed the line since I’ve been on tour,” he said, “and this is my 21st year.” (Incidentally: Nick Taylor and Charley Hoffman both finished at 21-under, and Taylor won on the second playoff hole.)
Maybe the golfers are just being babies at the one event where fans let loose. But it seems like things really were out of control. Fans told the Republic conditions were bad for them, too. “It was hard to enjoy the event when it took 30-plus minutes at any concessions and bathrooms were long waits, too,” Todd Williams said. “I felt cramped and anxious,” Elizabeth Suchocki said. “People just kept packing in and packing in and there were people all over. And I was like OK, this is a lot of people, this is very uncomfortable.”
Here’s what happened when things got better, per Golf Magazine’s James Colgan:
by Dan McQuade, Defector | Read more:
Image: via
As with a lot of things about the event, it’s a bit much—and seemingly becoming more so every year. When Sam Ryder got that hole-in-one two years ago, beer cans flew from the stands onto the course. This year, things got a little messier. (...)
The weather stayed cold, but the beer eventually started flowing. At one point the gates were closed and alcohol sales were halted; organizers said that was to encourage fans to move toward the course so more could get in. Some fans were turned away. Golf Magazine said the atmosphere calmed down a bit after this, but this is still the Phoenix Open. This means that "calmed down" was relative.
I would say he did not stick the landing pic.twitter.com/Y8bI8Eu9IK— Paige Spiranac (@PaigeSpiranac) February 10, 2024Fans almost never run onto the course at golf tournaments—except at the Phoenix Open. Last year a guy in a speedo ran onto the 16th green, pole danced on the flag stick, and jumped into a water hazard. In 2018 a streaker ran onto the course; he said he remembered having eight drinks beforehand. “The alcohol helped,” he said. “I definitely wouldn’t have done it if I was sober.”
The golfers were not any more pleased by this than you'd expect. Jordan Spieth (14-under, T6) said he had trouble getting to the course. Zach Johnson (3-under, T60) yelled at fans: “Don't ‘sir’ me. Somebody said it. I’m just sick of it. Just shut up!” He stormed off. (...)
Billy Horschel (6-under, T41) defended the honor of Nicolo Galletti (2-over, 73): “Buddy, when he's over the shot, shut the hell up, man. Come on, he's trying to hit a damn golf shot here. It's our fucking job.” Spieth, once he got on the course, said “what the fuck” to the gallery. “Shitshows,” Byeong Hun An (1-under, T66) tweeted. “Totally out of control on every hole.”
Johnson told the Arizona Republic he probably wouldn’t be back next year. “This tournament has been inappropriate and crossed the line since I’ve been on tour,” he said, “and this is my 21st year.” (Incidentally: Nick Taylor and Charley Hoffman both finished at 21-under, and Taylor won on the second playoff hole.)
Maybe the golfers are just being babies at the one event where fans let loose. But it seems like things really were out of control. Fans told the Republic conditions were bad for them, too. “It was hard to enjoy the event when it took 30-plus minutes at any concessions and bathrooms were long waits, too,” Todd Williams said. “I felt cramped and anxious,” Elizabeth Suchocki said. “People just kept packing in and packing in and there were people all over. And I was like OK, this is a lot of people, this is very uncomfortable.”
Here’s what happened when things got better, per Golf Magazine’s James Colgan:
Even if social media remained a steady stream of fan misbehavior, the acts remained largely within the realm of traditional WM Phoenix Open debauchery: faceplants, public urination and an apparent mudslide (the act, not the drink). Offenses worthy of the ire of players—screaming in backswings, crowd movement around the putting green, blatant disregard for typical golf etiquette—continued too, but at that point in the weekend, it was hard to feign surprise.The tournament has leaned into this, and by now the debauchery is something like their sales pitch. They sell shirts joking about the tournament’s mass drunkenness. The PGA Tour flaunts the event’s crowds. And why not? The tournament is unique. It makes people money. But when you build your event around people getting plastered, well, sometimes this is what you get.
by Dan McQuade, Defector | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
[ed. Shitshow is right. Ask anyone on the Champions (aka old guys) Tour if they'd put up with anything like that and you'd probably regret asking. But when you build a Colosseum-like arena and fill it with drunken partiers, what else would you expect? See also: Tensions mount at WM Phoenix Open as Zach Johnson, Billy Horschel have had enough of a few obnoxious fans (GD; w/video); and, Let the Phoenix Open learn from its wicked hangover (GD).]
[ed. Shitshow is right. Ask anyone on the Champions (aka old guys) Tour if they'd put up with anything like that and you'd probably regret asking. But when you build a Colosseum-like arena and fill it with drunken partiers, what else would you expect? See also: Tensions mount at WM Phoenix Open as Zach Johnson, Billy Horschel have had enough of a few obnoxious fans (GD; w/video); and, Let the Phoenix Open learn from its wicked hangover (GD).]
Monday, February 12, 2024
Is Temu Legit?
If you're a frequent online shopper and have been bombarded with ads from a site called Temu, you may wonder what the website is all about. Temu is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace that took the internet by storm over the last year. According to Statista, Temu sees over 30 million new downloads every month, making it the number one shopping app in the App Store and Play Store.
If you've hesitated to place an order, it may be because you're unsure if the items are real, how long they take to get to your door, and if the items are of good quality. Well, look no further because this article addresses all the questions you might have about Temu. Let's get into it.
What is Temu?
Temu is an online shopping megastore that offers just about any product you can imagine. You can buy car accessories, clothing, kitchen appliances, electronics, outdoor furniture, power tools, baby clothes, and everything in between.
Some people compare Temu to sites like Shein, Wish, and AliExpress, but Temu is a little different. Shein primarily focuses on fashion and clothing items, while customers can buy almost anything on Temu. Wish and AliExpress are known for having lower-quality items, longer shipping times, and a shorter item return window.
Temu launched in late 2022 and quickly rose to the top spot in the App Store and Play Store's shopping categories. People found out about Temu from ads and were attracted to the site's low prices.
Is Temu a legitimate website?
It depends on your definition of 'legitimate'. Yes, most of the products on Temu are real, as in, you will receive them, and it takes about 10 days before they reach your doorstep.
But any tech products you order on Temu are not name-brand unless they have a blue checkmark on their product listing. However, you can buy items like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, but they're from lesser-known manufacturers.
Last year, an HP representative told ZDNET that the company could not verify that the HP products on Temu were "from an authorized reseller or are authentic HP devices." Since ZDNET's inquiry, there are no products on Temu advertised as HP products.
Some customers say the items they ordered look slightly different than they did on the website or were lower quality than they expected.
What can I expect when I place an order?
Buying items from Temu follows the same formula as buying from any e-commerce site. You find things you like, add them to your cart, then check out.
However, there is one caveat before you purchase your items: You must have at least $10 worth of items in your cart before you can check out. Temu says the $10 minimum is to cover shipping fees for users who want free shipping.
If your items arrive late, Temu offers a $5 credit for packages purchased with standard shipping that arrive late. The company will credit you $13 for packages purchased with express shipping that arrive late.
In other cases, the items can arrive on time, can be decent or good quality, and can be exactly how they look on Temu's website. Product quality can be unpredictable, which is not so different from offerings on other online stores.
If you receive your items and they don't look like their online listing, or they arrive damaged, or they don't arrive at all, your order is eligible for Temu's Purchase Protection Program. This program guarantees your money back with a full refund if you return your items within 90 days of purchase.
Item prices on Temu are constantly fluctuating. If you buy an item and it decreases in price after your purchase, you can request a price adjustment. After you request a price adjustment, the difference will be available on your account as a Temu credit within minutes.
Why is Temu controversial?
Temu was accused by the U.S. government of potential data risks after its sister site, e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, was suspended by Google for containing malware. However, according to CNBC, analysts say Temu is less of a threat, and the risks associated with Pinduoduo were targeted at Chinese users.
Additionally, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party published a report that states Temu does not take the necessary steps to ensure the products on the site comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Act.
The same report asserts that Temu exploits a U.S. commerce loophole that allows the company to avoid paying tariffs and complying with U.S. commerce laws and regulations.
Are the products on Temu good quality?
Temu is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and has an average rating of two-and-a-half out of five stars. Many recent complaints about Temu on the BBB website say that items never arrived or, if they did, took weeks or even months to arrive.
On social media, particularly on TikTok, many people are pleased with their Temu purchases. From little gadgets and household items to clothes and shoes, Temu is one of TikTok's popular obsessions.
I've tried products from Temu, and I encountered minimal problems. Of course, some items are cheaply made, but that's to be expected for a $1 to $3 item. However, generally, the items on Temu are what you would expect them to be.
by Jada Jones, ZDNET | Read more:
Image: Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Game Day Dress Up
Image: Joe Camporeale/USA Today Sports
[ed. Guess who. What a weirdo. Also along for the fun - his two kids. (Hopefully this will be the last thing I'll ever post here about Super Bowl LVIII, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, Kanye West (above), more celebrities, and anything or anyone else associated with this whole over-the-top spectacle. Hopefully. Great game though.]
[ed. Guess who. What a weirdo. Also along for the fun - his two kids. (Hopefully this will be the last thing I'll ever post here about Super Bowl LVIII, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, Kanye West (above), more celebrities, and anything or anyone else associated with this whole over-the-top spectacle. Hopefully. Great game though.]
Media Updates
In December, I made predictions about a shift in the media during 2024. I anticipated that this year would witness a tipping point—marked by rapid weakening of the macroculture (traditional legacy media) and a huge increase in the power of the microculture (alternative platforms, such as Substack).
We’re only six weeks into the year, and here’s the bloodshed we’ve already seen.
Sports Illustrated got rid of all of its staff.
Time magazine eliminated 15% of its unionized editorial staff.
NBC News announced layoffs.
LA Times laid off 20% of its newsroom employees.
Chicago Tribune suffered the first employee strike in its 180-year history.
TikTok refused to make concessions to Universal Music, and the largest record label in the world is now gone from this fast-growing platform.
Pitchfork’s corporate owner Condé Nast announced that the entire magazine would be absorbed into GQ.
Business Insider got rid of 8% of its staff.
There’s even a rumor about a network canceling its nightly news.
Meanwhile Spotify gave a new $250 million contract to Joe Rogan. And I keep hearing stories like this and this and this about successes on emerging platforms.
Welcome to the new normal—and we are only a few weeks into the year.
I did the math. The numbers told me that you simply can’t offer unlimited music for $9.99 per month. Somebody would get squeezed—probably the musicians (for a start).
And now?
I note that Spotify has sharply increased its subscription price and recently laid off 1,500 employees.
But the company released quarterly earnings this week—and it is still losing money!
Meanwhile the CEO continues to sell his shares—another $57.5 million in the last few days.
Let me put this into perspective: Spotify was founded in 2006, and has now been operating for almost 18 years. It has 236 million subscribers in 184 countries. But the business still isn’t profitable.
I expect that Spotify will find a way to make money, sooner or later. But the company has already squeezed subscribers and musicians. So who gets squeezed next?
We’re only six weeks into the year, and here’s the bloodshed we’ve already seen.
Sports Illustrated got rid of all of its staff.
Time magazine eliminated 15% of its unionized editorial staff.
NBC News announced layoffs.
LA Times laid off 20% of its newsroom employees.
Chicago Tribune suffered the first employee strike in its 180-year history.
TikTok refused to make concessions to Universal Music, and the largest record label in the world is now gone from this fast-growing platform.
Pitchfork’s corporate owner Condé Nast announced that the entire magazine would be absorbed into GQ.
Business Insider got rid of 8% of its staff.
There’s even a rumor about a network canceling its nightly news.
Meanwhile Spotify gave a new $250 million contract to Joe Rogan. And I keep hearing stories like this and this and this about successes on emerging platforms.
Welcome to the new normal—and we are only a few weeks into the year.
-------
When Spotify first listed its shares on the stock exchange, I expressed skepticism about its business model—declaring that “streaming economics are broken.”I did the math. The numbers told me that you simply can’t offer unlimited music for $9.99 per month. Somebody would get squeezed—probably the musicians (for a start).
And now?
I note that Spotify has sharply increased its subscription price and recently laid off 1,500 employees.
But the company released quarterly earnings this week—and it is still losing money!
Meanwhile the CEO continues to sell his shares—another $57.5 million in the last few days.
Let me put this into perspective: Spotify was founded in 2006, and has now been operating for almost 18 years. It has 236 million subscribers in 184 countries. But the business still isn’t profitable.
I expect that Spotify will find a way to make money, sooner or later. But the company has already squeezed subscribers and musicians. So who gets squeezed next?
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Value Line/Spotify Financial Report
Ron Carter Feat. Austin Peralta
The Jazz Great Who Never Was (HB)
"Peralta was such a modest young man—I reached out to him as a music critic who hoped to write about his work. But he didn’t want me to hear to any of his recordings.
He insisted they weren’t good enough.
You can judge for yourself. Here he is at age 16—recording with Ron Carter. Peralta’s solo starts at the one minute mark.
Breathtaking, isn’t it?
I’ve never encountered such shyness from a recording artist. I had to order his albums from Japan because he refused to provide me with even a single track." (...)
There was much to admire here. That clean touch, reminiscent of Chick Corea’s brightly articulated tone—where every note rings like bell—jumps out at you immediately. The solos are persuasive, well beyond what I’d expect from a teen. But I especially liked the in-the-moment feeling of the music, a devil-may-care attitude that makes you feel the intensity of the song viscerally.
He insisted they weren’t good enough.
You can judge for yourself. Here he is at age 16—recording with Ron Carter. Peralta’s solo starts at the one minute mark.
Breathtaking, isn’t it?
I’ve never encountered such shyness from a recording artist. I had to order his albums from Japan because he refused to provide me with even a single track." (...)
There was much to admire here. That clean touch, reminiscent of Chick Corea’s brightly articulated tone—where every note rings like bell—jumps out at you immediately. The solos are persuasive, well beyond what I’d expect from a teen. But I especially liked the in-the-moment feeling of the music, a devil-may-care attitude that makes you feel the intensity of the song viscerally.
[ed. Learn something new every day. See also: Austin Peralta - Endless Planets (2011), and Goodbye Porkpie Hat (last performance). So many potentially great careers, prematurely cut short. Here's another one: Sean Costello (Love is Amazing), (Don't Pass Me By), many others.]
The Real Immigration Problem Is Capital, Not Labor
Why do companies relocate their manufacturing facilities to other countries? We all know the answer to that: To minimize labor costs. To lower the portion of the company’s revenue that goes to the people who do the work and to increase the portion of the company’s revenue that is reserved for investors and management. This is accomplished by the arbitrage of human desperation. A less desperate and impoverished group of workers is traded for a more desperate and impoverished group who will accept less money and a lower standard of living. In addition to this physical relocation of facilities, big companies routinely pursue the legal relocation of their operations to various tax havens, for the purpose of minimizing their tax payments. Physical relocation takes from workers, and legal relocation takes from the public of the nations that should, under a more common sense definition, be taking in tax revenue from these businesses. Working people get poorer, and the public gets poorer, and the gains are funneled into the pockets of the companies themselves, which is to say the investor and management classes. This is all done quite openly. It is not a secret at all. Apple manufactures its iPhones in gargantuan worker villages in poor countries like India and China and Apple evades tens of billions of dollars in taxes by stashing its money in offshore tax havens and Apple is, not coincidentally, worth close to $3 trillion. (...)
Now, why do working people relocate themselves from one country to another? For pretty much the same reason. They are seeking opportunity. They are seeking a way to improve their family’s lives. They want to leave a place with fewer jobs and lower wages and move to a place with more jobs and better wages. The process of human immigration is, at its most elementary level, the mirror image of corporate relocation. The difference is the way that these two things are treated. Capital moves freely; labor is tightly restricted. Who does this benefit? It benefits capital, and corporate power, and allows the rich to get richer at the expense of desperate workers. To a global corporation, a pool of poor labor that is locked in by national borders is a convenient thing to exploit. You can move all of your factories into that pool and reap the profits of paying much lower wages and then, if that nation finally develops to the point that workers demand a higher standard of living, you can just leapfrog over to another, more desperate nation and start the process over again. The free movement of capital comes with great benefits, but those benefits go almost exclusively to capital itself.
When you think about our national political debate over immigration in this context, it is clear that we are lunatics. If we wanted to have a completely honest discussion of immigration policy in the United States, it would begin with Point 1) Racism. That is the most powerful force that underlies the way that politicians approach this issue. It is an issue that is incredibly easy to weaponize, and it provides a handy set of scapegoats who can’t vote and who can be blamed for anything that requires an excuse. But of course that is not how it is discussed publicly. Instead, it is spoken of in terms of economics, as if cutting off the flow of immigrants to this country will provide some great benefit to the current citizens of the United States. That is not true. It will provide some great benefit to multinational corporations seeking to offshore jobs and it will provide some great benefit to unscrupulous politicians looking for a vulnerable group to blame for the fact that their state is a shitty place to live. But it will not provide you, the average person, with anything at all. (...)
Here is a little thought experiment: Which of these two scenarios is better for American blue collar workers? A) You allow companies to freely close down their factories and move them right across the Mexican border, where the workers are paid ten percent of what their American counterparts were earning for the same work. Or B), All of the factories that moved to Mexico are magically dropped back on the US side of the border along with their Mexican work forces? Consider the fact that in scenario B, large numbers of Mexican immigrants are entering America. Scary! Bad! Woo woo! But also in scenario B, those factories will immediately see huge wage increases because they would become subject to American wage laws and competition, and American workers would be able to go get jobs at those factories, and the American economy itself would grow, and demand for goods and services would increase, and there would be more jobs created elsewhere, a virtuous cycle. Yet, if you go by the conventional wisdom that flows from the mouths of our political leaders, and if you follow the logic of the policies that both Reagan and Clinton pursued with equal fervor, you would have to say that scenario A, in which your job is gone, is the economically rational move, and scenario B would be evidence of The Problem At the Southern Border [spoken with a grim look of concern and a small shake of the head].
Part of the reason why our immigration debate is so bad is the perception among many people that there is a fixed number of jobs in this country. If someone comes in, they are taking a job that could have gone to you. This is not true. Economies expand and contract. Jobs are created when they expand. (Also, you could have gone down and gotten a day laborer job yesterday, before someone came over from Mexico to do it. But you didn’t, did you?) Apart from racism, the biggest driver of immigration panic among the general public is economic superstition. This panic is particularly ironic when you consider that we are a nation of immigrants. (...)
There is a strain of political thinking that tries to simultaneously occupy the right wing and “pro-worker” lanes by casting immigrants as the villains in the story of American inequality. This is bullshit. Immigrants are not the problem. Capital is the problem. Immigrants are people who want to work, which is to say, they are part of the working class. Immigrants are not inimical to the interests of labor; they are labor. The labor movement should always welcome them in as brothers and sisters. Their interests are the same as ours. I beg any well-intentioned people who are concerned about the very real erosion of the US manufacturing base and the many decades of declining labor power and the hollowing out of middle American factory towns not to be seduced by the semi-plausible idea that this was caused in any meaningful way by immigration, or that sealing the borders will solve the problem. That’s not how it works. Don’t think in terms of Americans and foreigners. Think, instead, in terms of working people and bosses, labor and capital. That is the divide that matters.
Now, why do working people relocate themselves from one country to another? For pretty much the same reason. They are seeking opportunity. They are seeking a way to improve their family’s lives. They want to leave a place with fewer jobs and lower wages and move to a place with more jobs and better wages. The process of human immigration is, at its most elementary level, the mirror image of corporate relocation. The difference is the way that these two things are treated. Capital moves freely; labor is tightly restricted. Who does this benefit? It benefits capital, and corporate power, and allows the rich to get richer at the expense of desperate workers. To a global corporation, a pool of poor labor that is locked in by national borders is a convenient thing to exploit. You can move all of your factories into that pool and reap the profits of paying much lower wages and then, if that nation finally develops to the point that workers demand a higher standard of living, you can just leapfrog over to another, more desperate nation and start the process over again. The free movement of capital comes with great benefits, but those benefits go almost exclusively to capital itself.
Here is a little thought experiment: Which of these two scenarios is better for American blue collar workers? A) You allow companies to freely close down their factories and move them right across the Mexican border, where the workers are paid ten percent of what their American counterparts were earning for the same work. Or B), All of the factories that moved to Mexico are magically dropped back on the US side of the border along with their Mexican work forces? Consider the fact that in scenario B, large numbers of Mexican immigrants are entering America. Scary! Bad! Woo woo! But also in scenario B, those factories will immediately see huge wage increases because they would become subject to American wage laws and competition, and American workers would be able to go get jobs at those factories, and the American economy itself would grow, and demand for goods and services would increase, and there would be more jobs created elsewhere, a virtuous cycle. Yet, if you go by the conventional wisdom that flows from the mouths of our political leaders, and if you follow the logic of the policies that both Reagan and Clinton pursued with equal fervor, you would have to say that scenario A, in which your job is gone, is the economically rational move, and scenario B would be evidence of The Problem At the Southern Border [spoken with a grim look of concern and a small shake of the head].
Part of the reason why our immigration debate is so bad is the perception among many people that there is a fixed number of jobs in this country. If someone comes in, they are taking a job that could have gone to you. This is not true. Economies expand and contract. Jobs are created when they expand. (Also, you could have gone down and gotten a day laborer job yesterday, before someone came over from Mexico to do it. But you didn’t, did you?) Apart from racism, the biggest driver of immigration panic among the general public is economic superstition. This panic is particularly ironic when you consider that we are a nation of immigrants. (...)
There is a strain of political thinking that tries to simultaneously occupy the right wing and “pro-worker” lanes by casting immigrants as the villains in the story of American inequality. This is bullshit. Immigrants are not the problem. Capital is the problem. Immigrants are people who want to work, which is to say, they are part of the working class. Immigrants are not inimical to the interests of labor; they are labor. The labor movement should always welcome them in as brothers and sisters. Their interests are the same as ours. I beg any well-intentioned people who are concerned about the very real erosion of the US manufacturing base and the many decades of declining labor power and the hollowing out of middle American factory towns not to be seduced by the semi-plausible idea that this was caused in any meaningful way by immigration, or that sealing the borders will solve the problem. That’s not how it works. Don’t think in terms of Americans and foreigners. Think, instead, in terms of working people and bosses, labor and capital. That is the divide that matters.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty basic Econ 101, but a lot of people still don't get it. Or do, and won't admit it. Or don't want to. Example No. 1 - Republicans killing an immigration bill they themselves initially sought, just to keep the situation from improving and on the front burner for this year's elections. Sad.]
Sunday, February 11, 2024
What MAGA Influencers Are Missing About Football
More than 100 million people are expected to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, most likely making it the year’s most watched television broadcast — again. The National Football League is an American cultural behemoth: Ninety-three of 2023’s 100 most-watched television broadcasts were N.F.L. games.
Among those who will be watching the game is National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cooke. A native of England, Cooke has become an avid football fan (specifically, of the Jacksonville Jaguars) and has written about his growing understanding of America’s one true national sport. He has also written about some on the Right’s aversion to the N.F.L., particularly as some concoct convoluted conspiracy theories involving singer Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, the Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, while others denounce professional sports as a whole.
As Cooke wrote in National Review, “Online, one can say that Taylor Swift is a ‘Deep State psyop’ and prompt a million Lost Boys to clap their hands in glee. At a bar, a baseball game, a kids’ Christmas concert, or a church, such declarations would yield embarrassed confusion, the sound of feet slowly shuffling away, and a hasty investigation into the availability of straitjackets.”
I spoke to Mr. Cooke about falling in love with football, what the sport means to Americans, why some on the Right are fine with being “toxic” to most Americans, and why he thinks the 49ers will win the Super Bowl. This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew. (...)
Coaston: The politics around the N.F.L. specifically have gotten pretty weird online since the 2010s. Some people tried to get people to boycott the N.F.L. because of Black Lives Matter. Now we’re a few months into very intense online right-wing reactions to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce that ranges from people saying football distracts from Jesus to saying the 49ers have to win the Super Bowl to prevent World War III. But let’s start with the boycott aspect. Was that even possible in the United States? What were people thinking?
Cooke: I think that what you are seeing is right-wing puritanism or right-wing totalitarianism. And by totalitarianism, I don’t mean authoritarianism so much as the subordination of everything to politics, which has historically been a great tendency on the left. This idea that sports are a distraction from politics that has crept in on the right is quite East German. It suggests that politics is all that anyone should care about and insofar as they care about anything else be that sports or art, it should be contained within politics. And again, that’s a tendency that I historically saw among radical, slightly weird progressives who would see all art either revolutionary or non-revolutionary, maybe certain feminists as well. And it’s odd and alienating and destined to fail because most Americans are not politics-addicted weirdos, and they understand that politics exists to engender civil society, not to replace it.
The problem is that it just separates you from the middle of the country. And if your aim is to win elections, which these people seem to want to do, that’s just not the way to go about it. One of the great things about football is just that when you go to a game, everyone is the same. We’re all rooting for the same thing. And I have no idea what those people think about politics, and I don’t want to know because the point of being there is that we’re Jaguars fans. This weird tendency on the right, this hyper politicization that has crept in that doesn’t like anything that isn’t partisan politics — it’s just going to put people off.
Coaston: Do you think they want to win? And if they do, what is it: Elections? Prestige? Cultural acclaim?
Cooke: Well, that’s a great question and that’s more of a political question than a sports question. On the one hand, yes, I think a lot of those people want to win, and they’re just perhaps a bit odd. But then I also think that there are people who like the victim status that comes with losing. And also, this is one of the things the internet’s done is create a world in which you can be absolutely toxic to the vast majority of Americans, but have enough fans or subscribers or donors to make you quite rich. So there are certain people — and this is by no means limited to the right — there are certain people within American politics who really are a liability for their side, broadly construed, but who have made tons of money because they’ve managed to convince 10,000 people, a hundred thousand people, a million people to follow them.
Coaston: How do you think conspiracy theory culture, which is not new, but how do you think it ties into this idea that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are having a fake relationship to endorse Biden on the field? It just seems conspiratorial, but it’s the kind of conspiratorial that 15 years ago would be coming from just some guy on the street, and now it’s coming from people who are, like, someone who ran for president or people who are actual influencers with a fair amount of followers. What happened? Do conspiracies breed more conspiracies?
Cooke: So America’s always been absolutely chock-full of conspiracy theories. Going back to the founding, yes, the very traditional American pastime. This one baffles me because there is nothing that is more predictable than a female pop star dating a male football star. This isn’t odd.
Coaston: Something that’s funny is I just keep thinking, was Tony Romo dating Jessica Simpson a conspiracy theory? It’s interesting how this has happened before. The quarterback of the Broncos, Russell Wilson, is married to a popular R&B singer. This isn’t new, but this is new.
Cooke: Yeah, this is new. You said the conspiracies beget more conspiracies. And I do think you’re on to something there in that there has been now for quite a long time, a need to justify Donald Trump’s claims. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but he said he won it. I suspect quite a lot of the people who like Donald Trump think deep down that he’s going to lose in 2024. And so some of them are looking for reasons as to why that might be. Now, it is true that there is media bias, and there is a great deal of progressive authority wielded outside of the electoral process. I would love to see conservatives enjoy the same influence in the media and academia and corporate America and so on as progressives do. But that doesn’t change the fact that Donald Trump lost the election and is just broadly disliked by Americans.
And I do see in some of these conspiracy theories as pre-emptive excuse making: “Well, he would’ve won the election if the Pentagon hadn’t recruited Taylor Swift as an asset.” And then, I mean, it’s so silly. “It made her famous.” She’s the most famous person in the world. (...)
Coaston: I’ve been thinking about how Erick Erickson argued that a lot of the noise around Kelce and Swift from MAGA influencers was basically an act to produce attention and clout. But what is that performance trying to tell us is? What are they trying to say?
Cooke: My test is always, if you said that in a bar, how would people respond? This is why I think some of the intersectional types don’t know how they sound. If they said that at a bar and they would be met with blank stare — just imagine pointing to the screen in the A.F.C. championship game when they cut to Taylor Swift and saying, oh, you see her, she’s a Pentagon psyop. Could you imagine the looks that you would get from someone?
But look, the incentives do line up for people to do it. There’s enough people out there who buy this stuff. I don’t know if they mean it or not, but the way I put it in my piece was, either way, they’re wrong. If they really think that this is happening, then they’re crazy. If they think that this is the sort of thing that people want to hear, then they’re wrong. And if they know full well that it’s crazy and wrong and counterproductive, and they’re doing it anyway because they understand that there are enough lost people out there who will shovel money their way for saying it, and they’re evil, however you look at it, this is bad.
Image: Claire Merchlinsky [ed. Aligns with this previous post. (DS).]
Among those who will be watching the game is National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cooke. A native of England, Cooke has become an avid football fan (specifically, of the Jacksonville Jaguars) and has written about his growing understanding of America’s one true national sport. He has also written about some on the Right’s aversion to the N.F.L., particularly as some concoct convoluted conspiracy theories involving singer Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, the Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, while others denounce professional sports as a whole.
I spoke to Mr. Cooke about falling in love with football, what the sport means to Americans, why some on the Right are fine with being “toxic” to most Americans, and why he thinks the 49ers will win the Super Bowl. This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew. (...)
Coaston: The politics around the N.F.L. specifically have gotten pretty weird online since the 2010s. Some people tried to get people to boycott the N.F.L. because of Black Lives Matter. Now we’re a few months into very intense online right-wing reactions to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce that ranges from people saying football distracts from Jesus to saying the 49ers have to win the Super Bowl to prevent World War III. But let’s start with the boycott aspect. Was that even possible in the United States? What were people thinking?
Cooke: I think that what you are seeing is right-wing puritanism or right-wing totalitarianism. And by totalitarianism, I don’t mean authoritarianism so much as the subordination of everything to politics, which has historically been a great tendency on the left. This idea that sports are a distraction from politics that has crept in on the right is quite East German. It suggests that politics is all that anyone should care about and insofar as they care about anything else be that sports or art, it should be contained within politics. And again, that’s a tendency that I historically saw among radical, slightly weird progressives who would see all art either revolutionary or non-revolutionary, maybe certain feminists as well. And it’s odd and alienating and destined to fail because most Americans are not politics-addicted weirdos, and they understand that politics exists to engender civil society, not to replace it.
The problem is that it just separates you from the middle of the country. And if your aim is to win elections, which these people seem to want to do, that’s just not the way to go about it. One of the great things about football is just that when you go to a game, everyone is the same. We’re all rooting for the same thing. And I have no idea what those people think about politics, and I don’t want to know because the point of being there is that we’re Jaguars fans. This weird tendency on the right, this hyper politicization that has crept in that doesn’t like anything that isn’t partisan politics — it’s just going to put people off.
Coaston: Do you think they want to win? And if they do, what is it: Elections? Prestige? Cultural acclaim?
Cooke: Well, that’s a great question and that’s more of a political question than a sports question. On the one hand, yes, I think a lot of those people want to win, and they’re just perhaps a bit odd. But then I also think that there are people who like the victim status that comes with losing. And also, this is one of the things the internet’s done is create a world in which you can be absolutely toxic to the vast majority of Americans, but have enough fans or subscribers or donors to make you quite rich. So there are certain people — and this is by no means limited to the right — there are certain people within American politics who really are a liability for their side, broadly construed, but who have made tons of money because they’ve managed to convince 10,000 people, a hundred thousand people, a million people to follow them.
Coaston: How do you think conspiracy theory culture, which is not new, but how do you think it ties into this idea that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are having a fake relationship to endorse Biden on the field? It just seems conspiratorial, but it’s the kind of conspiratorial that 15 years ago would be coming from just some guy on the street, and now it’s coming from people who are, like, someone who ran for president or people who are actual influencers with a fair amount of followers. What happened? Do conspiracies breed more conspiracies?
Cooke: So America’s always been absolutely chock-full of conspiracy theories. Going back to the founding, yes, the very traditional American pastime. This one baffles me because there is nothing that is more predictable than a female pop star dating a male football star. This isn’t odd.
Coaston: Something that’s funny is I just keep thinking, was Tony Romo dating Jessica Simpson a conspiracy theory? It’s interesting how this has happened before. The quarterback of the Broncos, Russell Wilson, is married to a popular R&B singer. This isn’t new, but this is new.
Cooke: Yeah, this is new. You said the conspiracies beget more conspiracies. And I do think you’re on to something there in that there has been now for quite a long time, a need to justify Donald Trump’s claims. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but he said he won it. I suspect quite a lot of the people who like Donald Trump think deep down that he’s going to lose in 2024. And so some of them are looking for reasons as to why that might be. Now, it is true that there is media bias, and there is a great deal of progressive authority wielded outside of the electoral process. I would love to see conservatives enjoy the same influence in the media and academia and corporate America and so on as progressives do. But that doesn’t change the fact that Donald Trump lost the election and is just broadly disliked by Americans.
And I do see in some of these conspiracy theories as pre-emptive excuse making: “Well, he would’ve won the election if the Pentagon hadn’t recruited Taylor Swift as an asset.” And then, I mean, it’s so silly. “It made her famous.” She’s the most famous person in the world. (...)
Coaston: I’ve been thinking about how Erick Erickson argued that a lot of the noise around Kelce and Swift from MAGA influencers was basically an act to produce attention and clout. But what is that performance trying to tell us is? What are they trying to say?
Cooke: My test is always, if you said that in a bar, how would people respond? This is why I think some of the intersectional types don’t know how they sound. If they said that at a bar and they would be met with blank stare — just imagine pointing to the screen in the A.F.C. championship game when they cut to Taylor Swift and saying, oh, you see her, she’s a Pentagon psyop. Could you imagine the looks that you would get from someone?
But look, the incentives do line up for people to do it. There’s enough people out there who buy this stuff. I don’t know if they mean it or not, but the way I put it in my piece was, either way, they’re wrong. If they really think that this is happening, then they’re crazy. If they think that this is the sort of thing that people want to hear, then they’re wrong. And if they know full well that it’s crazy and wrong and counterproductive, and they’re doing it anyway because they understand that there are enough lost people out there who will shovel money their way for saying it, and they’re evil, however you look at it, this is bad.
by Jane Coston, NY Times | Read more:
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Dion DiMucci (Dion)
I Wish Buddy Holly Released More Bad Music (CGMH)
"Dion DiMucci and his backing group The Belmonts were also part of the Winter Dance Party. Had Dion been on the flight, he would have died a minor musician from the 1950s, not the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famer that gave us such classics as “The Wanderer”, “Runaround Sue”, and “Abraham, Martin and John”.
Perhaps Taylor Swift Isn't the Defining Political Issue of Our Times
In a controversy that makes me want to strap on a suicide vest, Taylor Swift is now feuding with MAGA world, or I guess they’re now feuding with her. This makes me very, very tired, but I do admit it’s a good vehicle for observing the ever-quickening decay of American empire. The story represents so much of the detritus of a broken culture: you’ve got the replacement of a nuthouse Jesus-is-coming right wing with a paranoiac and obsessive the-Jews-are-coming right wing, the increasingly deranged worship of celebrity, the endless retreat into a exhausting political binarism, the contemporary liberal urge to treat immensely powerful people as underdogs, the era of mandated artistic populism, the triviality of American collapse, the overwhelming fear people in the media have of looking old. But I want to focus specifically on a topic related to all of that, which is treating consumption as a substitute for politics. This is one of the clearer examples of the way that many people, many political people, now unthinkingly presume that their politics is simply a function of their capitalist consumption, their brand affinities. Who you are is what you buy.
The great conservative freakout at Bud Light is prototypical consumption-as-politics. Conservatives were already mad that trans people have become more visible and accepted, then Bud Light hired transwoman Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson, so those conservatives had a fit and made their attitude towards Bud Light core to their political identity. There was a bit of a Streisand effect at play in that whole controversy; I never saw a single ad with Mulvaney in it, and might have never known about the campaign, were it not for conservative snowflake tears. But either way, Anheuser Busch at least partially pulled back.
All of this was profoundly stupid. You can buy whatever beer you want, including beer that tastes like dirty water, for whatever reasons you want. You can of course consume things in a way that you think is reflective of your political values. (...) Hating Bud Light is not a political identity. Not buying Bud Light is not a political action. In fact, I would say that the ostentatious, preening refusal to buy Bud Light is an example of something the right-of-center complains about all the time, virtue signaling. They just happen to be signaling a different set of virtues. The embedded critique in the term “virtue signaling” functions just as well for them, which is that they’re engaged in ostensibly political actions or attitudes that in fact have no material consequence and are thus done purely for optics, as a form of self-marketing. (...)
Well, here we have the same thing breaking out, only now almost no one is being coy about it: you’re a liberal if you support Swift, you’re a conservative if you don’t. Conservatives, for their part, will… I don’t know, get vaguely mad about her and yell about it on “X” like a doofus? There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes. I tell people all the time that politics is a thing you do, not a thing you are. It gets a little more bleak when all you are is all you buy.
Perhaps it’s worth saying that this was all written. All of it was predicted. Left theorists have been saying for a very long time that the ultimate outcome of “markets in everything” is a citizenry that can conceive of itself as nothing but consumers in a marketplace. With the labor movement devastated by decades of hostile legislation and the two-party system reducing electoral politics to a farce of limited bad choices, many Americans feel entirely disempowered and disenfranchised. Meanwhile our culture industry, eager for any financial reason to go on existing, sells them on the idea that (say) watching RuPaul’s Drag Race is the same as personally throwing a brick at Stonewall. (...)
Personally, I don’t care for Taylor Swift or her music or her boyfriend’s stupid overly-sculpted En Vogue-backup-dancer beard. That’s just me! Taste is, of course, only taste. I have to make this clear every time this stuff comes up, but I don’t have any ill will towards Swift and am perfectly happy that she’s a pop star. I simply don’t care for her music, myself. I realize that legally speaking I just committed a crime against humanity, by uttering those words, but I’m a 42-year-old man and must live my truth. But so what? If she was normal famous, normal rich, I wouldn’t have any problem with any of it. What I do object to, though, is that her fame has rendered her literally unavoidable, no matter how hard I try; that the devotion of her fans has inspired behavior I find truly unhealthy and concerning, like literally putting off surgery to pay for concert tickets; that with the anti-MAGA narrative having taken hold, her rabid, vengeful stans now have even more pretext for declaring that if you aren’t a Swiftie you must be a fascist. Growing tired of an overexposed celebrity is an entirely common and unobjectionable affair. It’s my right as an American. And yet there’s this whole new genre out there suggesting that there’s no legitimate reason to feel that way.
Yes, it’s true - I was one of those people who was annoyed by the shots of Swift during Chiefs games! Is that really so hard to understand, such that the entire sports media feels it must lock hands to defend the fair maiden? I just want to watch a fucking football game. Does that really make me a reactionary?
I am not a joiner. I instinctively hate any group or movement people are pushing me to become a part of. And lately I’ve been chafing a little bit at the Kelce Family Involuntary Fan Club, which the entire advertising industry seems intent on forcing me into. (...) I just want to be left the fuck alone, for this woman to entertain her fans and then go count her stacks of million-dollar bills in one of her forty palaces, where I can’t see it. Go with God. But every time a liberal says “hahaha, those conservatives, so triggered by a simple pop star,” they’re engaging in sophistry. Something deeper and weirder has been happening with this phenomenon and you know it.
This isn’t cute. It’s fucking lunacy. It’s toxic and corrosive. Stop celebrating it. (...)
That’s the sort of thing I mean when I say that Swift’s dominance of American headspace is not normal, the way everyone seems constantly eager to bend the rules in service of her mythos. In the piece I linked to at the top, James Poniewozik admits that “Since 2020, it’s true that her fame level has risen from ‘star’ to ‘molten cosmic supercluster from which galaxies are born.’” He does not tell us whether this is normal or not normal, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, which are precisely the questions that are the most interesting and the most necessary. The media writ large seems divided by those who are already hopelessly devoted to Swift and those who know better than to be seen as getting in her way.
by Freddie deBoer, FdB | Read more:
Image: Luiz Edvardo|Flickr
[ed. Media navel-gazing again, same as it ever was. Happy Super Bowl weekend everybody. God help us. See also: Taylor Swift, the NFL, and two routes to cultural dominance; and, Everyone’s being weird about Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (Vox).]
"Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour ever, taking in more than the next two biggest 2023 tours combined. She broke the record for most global streams ever on Spotify at more than 26.1 billion in 2023 — or more than three streams for every human on Earth — and had four of the 10 most-consumed albums this year, all without actually releasing an album of new music. When she made history with her fourth Album of the Year Grammy last week, it was just one more jewel in the tiara.
On the other side, the NFL is to the rest of the entertainment industry what 6-foot-8, 365-pound Philadelphia Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata would be to a peewee football player. Of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023, NFL games accounted for 93 of them, up from 82 in 2023 and 72 in 2020. The NFL pulls in about as much revenue as the NBA and MLB combined. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, 30 of them are NFL teams. By just about every metric, the already dominant NFL is going up and to the right."
"Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour ever, taking in more than the next two biggest 2023 tours combined. She broke the record for most global streams ever on Spotify at more than 26.1 billion in 2023 — or more than three streams for every human on Earth — and had four of the 10 most-consumed albums this year, all without actually releasing an album of new music. When she made history with her fourth Album of the Year Grammy last week, it was just one more jewel in the tiara.
On the other side, the NFL is to the rest of the entertainment industry what 6-foot-8, 365-pound Philadelphia Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata would be to a peewee football player. Of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023, NFL games accounted for 93 of them, up from 82 in 2023 and 72 in 2020. The NFL pulls in about as much revenue as the NBA and MLB combined. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, 30 of them are NFL teams. By just about every metric, the already dominant NFL is going up and to the right."
Friday, February 9, 2024
Catch, Cook, Serve: Hong Kong’s Legendary One-Stop Fish Market
Bon Appétit joins chef Lucas Sin to try some of Hong Kong’s freshest steamed fish at Ap Lei Chau Market. Steamed fish is a traditional Cantonese dish and the fresher the better–at Ap Lei Chau Market they're serving fish caught in the harbor that morning straight to your plate.
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