The Race to See 10,000 Birds

In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild.

Such a record had previously been unthinkable, but with new technology facilitating rare bird sightings, improved DNA testing identifying a growing number of bird species, and public listing platforms making it easier to keep track of and share findings, more super-birders are inching towards the five digits.

Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him.

The mystery birder seemed to have uploaded a backlog of thousands of species he had seen over several decades to now-defunct birding site Surfbirds.com, listing more than 9,000 birds over the course of a few months in a move that took Kaestner and others by surprise.

“Two people break 10,000 species, and on the same day? Can it be?” one incredulous birder posted in February. (...)

Bird observation has come a long way since ornithologist John James Audubon announced his goal to painstakingly document all the birds in North America through physical drawings, starting around 1820. With digital cameras, birds can now be captured in high-quality photos, and artificial intelligence technology can identify birds by their calls. While in the past, birders kept lists of “lifers” – the word for a new-to-you species – in paper notebooks, most hobbyists today use online platforms to track and share their sightings. Popular apps including iBird, iGoTerra and eBird allow hobbyists to see where rare birds have been found and try their luck at spotting them.

These platforms are now at the center of the controversy between the two birders.

‘Listing’ as a sport – with few rules

There is a broad range of intensity in the practice of observing birds. Casual hobbyists are known as “bird watchers”, while seeking to log species in a more competitive manner is known as “birding”. Those who log large numbers of species and rare sightings call themselves “listers”. Those like Kaestner who seek to break world records are known as “big listers”. (...)

The variability in recognized species represented a complicating factor in the quest to hit the 10,000-bird milestone. Popular platform eBird only uses the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, while iGoTerra offers users both the Clements and International Ornithological Community’s (IOC) World Bird List taxonomies. The latter recognizes 189 more species of birds, making larger lists more attainable.

Kaestner uses both sites, but he reached his record using the IOC taxonomy, which he logged through iGoTerra. Because eBird data is used for science and conservation, sightings are moderated by volunteers around the world. If a user claims to have seen a rare species, or an unusual number of a species, a moderator may reach out for more information or request photos or audio recordings as proof.

iGoTerra, on the other hand, does not fact-check sightings. The platform allows logging of plants insects, and other species in addition to birds. eBird’s focus on collecting and using large amounts of citizen science data makes moderation more consequential, whereas iGoTerra is more “geared towards the individual”, said Björn Anderson, iGoTerra’s vice-president.

“iGoTerra is more of a gentlemen’s agreement,” he said. “We provide the tools for you to keep track, but it’s up to you to determine what you have seen.”

That policy created a “very delicate situation” in the race towards 10,000 species, said Anderson. iGoTerra’s official policy was to stay out of the debate, relying on the transparency of its product to let those following the drama make their own decisions.

The race to see 10,000 birds

Kaestner, who lives in a suburb of Baltimore, has been watching birds as long as he can remember, he says, joining his older brother birding as early as age four. The career diplomat took advantage of his travels around the world to see as many species as possible, setting a record in 1986 for being the first person to observe an example of every bird family in the wild – a feat that was recognized by Guinness World Records. He built up a reputation in the birding community as he publicly shared many of his lists and photos.

In 2018, Kaestner realized he had surpassed 9,000 lifers and began pursuing the 10,000-bird milestone in earnest. His quest was highlighted in a May 2023 article in Outside magazine, as well as on his widely followed Facebook account. He explained his goal, how he planned to accomplish it, and his timeline – a move he now questions.

“I realize now that by publishing that, I may have been putting a target on my back,” he said. “Little did I know Jason Mann would be aiming for it.”

Mann, a little-known American birder living abroad, had recently appeared on the scene, posting occasionally on bird forum Surfbirds.com. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mann is a medical doctor and healthcare investor based in Hong Kong. In October 2023, he published a list detailing more than 9,000 species he said he had seen over the course of his lifetime. The move surprised the birding world. Nobody, including Kaestner, had ever heard of him – a rare occurrence in a close-knit community where the top players are well-recognized. Having been in the game for decades, Kaestner knew most of his high-level peers personally, on many occasions having taken birding trips with them in the spirit of friendly competition. Mann did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

The entry of a dark horse into the race sent Kaestner scrambling. He quietly moved up a planned trip to Taiwan, where he hoped to see a handful of final species. Mann was adding nearly a dozen new species per day. The sprint was on – and on 9 February 2024, having rushed to the Philippines for another birding trip, Kaestner crossed the finish line with the sighting of an orange-tufted spiderhunter, a small bird with a long curved bill and a penchant for banana plants. Kaestner immediately posted the sighting to birding apps and Facebook, with photo proof. He thought he had won.

Stunningly, Mann claimed to have seen his own 10,000th species in Colombia, a chestnut-bellied flowerpiercer, just hours before Kaestner on the same day. Mann’s achievement was later announced on the blog of a Colombian nature trip service in a post authored by Mann himself.

The shocking upset prompted online sleuths in the birding community to take a closer look at Mann’s list, where they found “several dozen extremely fishy species” that, besides Mann, “no one has claimed to have seen for decades”, according to one post on BirdForum, a community for birders with more than 100,000 visitors per month. The post had more than 400 comments discussing the validity of Mann’s sightings. Species Mann claimed to have seen included the Manipur bush quail and the new Caldonian nightjar, neither of which had been spotted since the 1930s.

“Either this guy is the luckiest birder alive, having rediscovered several lost species, or his list is not to be trusted,” one member auditing Mann’s list wrote.

by Kari Paul, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Orange-tufted Spiderhunter by Peter Kaestner

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (born Rosetta Nubin, March 20, 1915 – October 9, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. She gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and electric guitar. She was the first great recording star of gospel music, and was among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm and blues and rock and roll audiences, later being referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the Godmother of rock and roll". She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eric Clapton.

Tharpe was a pioneer in her guitar technique; she was among the first popular recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar, opening the way to the rise of electric blues. Her guitar-playing technique had a profound influence on the development of British blues in the 1960s. Her European tour with Muddy Waters in 1964, with a stop in Manchester on May 7, is cited by British guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards. (...)

Tharpe's 1944 release "Down by the Riverside" was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it "captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers" and cited her influence on "many gospel, jazz, and rock artists". ("Down by the Riverside" was recorded by Tharpe on December 2, 1948, in New York City, and issued as Decca single 48106. Her 1945 hit "Strange Things Happening Every Day", recorded in late 1944, featured Tharpe's vocals and resonator guitar, with Sammy Price (piano), bass and drums. It was the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard "race records" chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945. The recording has been cited as a precursor of rock and roll, and alternatively has been called the first rock and roll record. In May 2018, Tharpe was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.

via: Wikipedia

[ed. Not inducted until 2018. See also: Shout, Sister, Shout! Sister Rosetta Tharpe (YT).]

Burt Glinn… Ad Reinhardt, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964 

via: here/here

Shrimp Jesus

Who among us will cast the first stone at shrimp Jesus? I hesitate to talk about him because I believe that AI-generated content is categorically no better or worse than other clickbait, and the best way to reckon with clickbait is to deny it that for which it seeks: attention. Writing to marvel at or deride AI clickbait seems to invite more of it, which in turn will entice us to write more critiques about it, which will only further feed the downward spiral.

The bot that invented shrimp Jesus has no doubt procedurally generated thousands of other equally zany would-be memes, but it requires scholarly attention, like this from Stanford University researchers Renee DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein, and media attention like that provided here by Jason Koebler of 404 Media to make shrimp Jesus into something culturally relevant. DiResta and Goldstein write:

The magnificent surrealism of Shrimp Jesus—or, relatedly, Crab Jesus, Watermelon Jesus, Fanta Jesus, and Spaghetti Jesus—is captivating. What is that? Why does that exist? You perhaps feel motivated to share it with your friends, so that they can share in your WTF moment. (We encourage you to share this post, of course.)

And I encourage you to share this post too. Anyone who wants to circulate content on social media has a touch of shrimp Jesus and the purity of his cynicism in their heart.

The Stanford researchers want to use shrimp Jesus to examine, in the words of their post's title, “How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth.” Of course, spammers and scammers would basically leverage anything for growth on Facebook, so the stakes of this analysis are in the composition of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms: Shouldn’t Facebook shadow-ban AI images (since they are a kind of “inauthentic behavior”), especially given the company’s recent announcement that it would seek to label the generated images it hosts as “imagined by AI”?

Facebook claims that it is “working with industry partners to align on common technical standards that signal when a piece of content has been created using AI. Being able to detect these signals will make it possible for us to label AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads.”

But Facebook is apparently already able to detect AI-generated images well enough to boost them in people’s feeds when they show any interest in any other AI-generated material, as Koebler and the Stanford researchers point out. “We don't know why this is happening exactly,” Koebler writes, “but something is happening where, when you interact with one AI-generated image, you will be recommended other ones regardless of what type of content is being shown.”

That is not surprising, since that is how algorithmic recommendation is designed to work. The algorithms generate the spammers who make the shrimp Jesus images, and the spammers use AI because they are incentivized to make the most content with the least effort. They can use AI to churn out images arbitrarily and then optimize for the ones that gain traction, much as Facebook itself does with everything on its platform.

But why should it be more concerning that Facebook treats “AI-generated” as a formal category to guide algorithmic recommendations, given the innumerable other undisclosed, nonintuitive correlations it identifies to classify and condition its users? The algorithms predict what users are supposed to like, and spammers/“creators” find ways of providing fodder for fulfilling the predictions. When I use Facebook, Facebook effectively makes a fantastical and bizarre AI-generated image of me that I can’t see directly but is refracted in everything it chooses to feed to me. In other words, I don’t just look at shrimp Jesus; I am shrimp Jesus.

The AI-generated identities that platforms make for us seem more problematic than anything that might appear in a given AI-generated image. Weird images like shrimp Jesus seem to reflect the underlying weirdness of submitting to algorithmic control. It doesn’t seem useful to act as though there is some form of “authentic” image that is appropriate for algorithmic circulation or virality, or that algorithmic recommendation is justified as long as the content is “real.”

by Rob Horning, Internal Exile |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dearest Layla

When her marriage to George Harrison started to falter, under the strain of his extra-marital exploits and increasing preoccupation with Eastern spirituality, Pattie Boyd found herself drawn into a painful love triangle. In her 2007 autobiography, Boyd remembers meeting Eric Clapton for the first time: [Eric] had played on a couple of albums with George [Harrison], had been in the Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith. I first met him at a party [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein gave after a Cream concert at the Saville Theatre, which Brian had just bought. Eric was held in awe by his fellow musicians for his guitar playing, and graffiti declaring that “Clapton is God” had been scrawled on the London Underground. He was incredibly exciting to watch… He looked wonderful on stage, very sexy, and played so beautifully. But when I met him afterward he didn’t behave like a rock star: he was surprisingly shy and reticent. He and George had become close friends; they played, wrote music, and recorded together. Feeling increasingly neglected by her husband, Clapton’s attentions were a welcome distraction: I was aware that he found me attractive - and I enjoyed the attention he paid me. It was hard not to be flattered when I caught him staring at me or when he chose to sit beside me or complimented me on what I was wearing or the food I had made, or when he said things he knew would make me laugh or engaged me in conversation. Those were all things that George no longer did... George and I had been together for five years, married for three, and although we still loved each other dearly, life was not idyllic.

Things began to unravel around the time the couple moved into Friar Park, a Neo-Gothic mansion in Henley on Thames, in the spring of 1970. From time to time during the spring and summer of 1970 Eric and I saw each other, reveals Boyd. One day we went to see a film called Kes together, and afterward we were walking down Oxford Street when Eric said, “Do you like me, then, or are you seeing me because I’m famous?” “Oh, I thought you were seeing me because I’m famous,” I said. And we both laughed. He always found it difficult to talk about his feelings - instead he poured them into his music and writing. By Clapton’s own account, as divulged in his 2007 autobiography, he had by this time developed an all-encompassing obsession for the wife of his close friend. However hard I tried, I just could not get her out of my mind, Clapton admits. Even though I didn’t consider that I really had any chance of ever being with her, I still thought of all other affairs with women as being merely temporary. I was totally distracted by the idea that I could never love another woman as much as I loved Pattie. In fact, in order to get closer to her, I had even taken up with her sister… Tormented by my feelings for her, I threw myself into my music. Around this time, Clapton formed the blues rock ensemble Derek and the Dominos with three former members of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, and the quartet flew off to Miami in August 1970 to record the album that would become Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the majority of the tracks inspired by his unrequited passion for Boyd. Inspired by the classical love poem The Story of Layla and Majnun by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganiavi, Clapton penned the album’s powerful title track about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable, disguising Boyd as the titular Layla.

On his return from Miami in early October 1970, a desperate Clapton reached out to Boyd in an attempt to ascertain her feelings. It was in the big old kitchen one morning that I opened a letter addressed to Pattie Harrison, Friar Park, Boyd remembers. It had “express” and “urgent” written at top and bottom. Inside I found a small piece of paper. In small, immaculate writing, with no capital letters, I read: “as you have probably gathered, my own home affairs are a galloping farce, which is rapidly degenerating day by intolerable day... it seems like an eternity since i last saw or spoke to you!” It began, “Dearest L....” He needed to ascertain my feelings: did I still love my husband or did I have another lover? More crucially, did I still have feeling in my heart for him? He had to know, and urged me to write - much safer - and tell him: “please do this, whatever it may say, my mind will be at rest...all my love E.” I read it quickly and assumed it was from some weirdo… When I showed it to George and others in the kitchen at the time, “Look at this really weird letter,” they laughed and dismissed it as I had. I thought no more about it until that evening the phone rang. It was Eric. “Did you get my letter?” “Letter?” I said. “I don’t think so. What letter are you talking about?” And then the penny dropped. “Was that from you?” I said. “I had no idea you felt that way.” It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written to me and it put our relationship on a different footing. It made the flirtation all the more exciting and dangerous. But as far as I was concerned it was just flirtation.

I have kept the letter ever since in a little box filled with trinkets and things, Boyd told us, and when I was writing my autobiography, ‘Wonderful Today’, I brought it out. It’s a very beautifully written letter, but the writing is so small - it takes up not even a third of the page. It’s like he was rather shy about writing it. It’s like a whisper instead of a talk. George and I were going through a bit of a spiky time together, continues Boyd. The Beatles had this chaos and anxiety surrounding the band, and George was being dismissive. Then Eric keeps coming over to our house asking me to run away with him. Well, that was tempting, but I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t right. Not long afterwards, Clapton would play the finished album for Boyd. He switched on the tape machine, Boyd remembers, turned up the volume, and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard. It was “Layla” …My first thought was, Oh God, everyone’s going to know who this is… But the song got the better of me, with the realisation that I had inspired such passion and such creativity. I could resist no longer.

When Clapton admitted the affair to Harrison, telling him I’m in love with your wife, Boyd made the choice to go home with Harrison, refusing to leave her husband. The dejected Clapton retreated into seclusion and a burgeoning heroin addiction at his Surrey home Hurtwood Edge, and Boyd would hardly see him again for almost four years. No longer able to turn a blind eye to her husband’s many infidelities, which reportedly included Ringo’s wife Maureen, Boyd finally left Harrison for Clapton in July 1974.

~ Christie's Lot Essay (from the Pattie Boyd Collection at auction)

Image: Letter from Eric Clapton to Pattie (Boyd) Harrison

[ed. See also: ‘Dear Layla’: Letters for Sale From a Rock Music Love Triangle (NYT).]

Francis Wolff: Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones & George Colman

via: (and Jazzinphoto)

via:

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House Republicans Call for $2.7 trillion in Social Security and Medicare Cuts

Donald Trump had just about climbed out of the very deep hole he’d dug for himself last week when he went on TV and talked loosely about “cutting” programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Then along came the Republicans in the House of Representatives on Wednesday dragging him right back into it.

In a document that deserves extraordinary credit for chutzpah, if maybe not tact, House Republicans have just proposed a budget that would slash an astonishing $2.7 trillion from combined spending on Social Security and Medicare over the next decade — more than 8% of the total.

This isn’t just touching the third rail of American politics. It’s throwing your arms around it while soaking wet.

They also talked about raising the U.S. retirement age at some point in the future, the better to reflect rising life expectancy, though they left open the date for making such a change.

Those proposals come from the Republican Study Committee. This is not the official Republican leadership group, but it is not a fringe caucus, either. Its membership includes 178 House Republicans, or more than 80% of the total.

The committee hardly made matters any better in an election year by leaving the details vague.

As we’ve mentioned here before, talking about “cutting” entitlements — and especially Social Security — is ambiguous. Future retirement benefits per person are expected to rise faster than inflation. Someone can slow that growth — or ice it altogether — and still say they haven’t actually “cut” anything.

But if lawmakers aren’t clear about what exactly they plan to do, voters may be apt to fear the worst.

Especially if those legislators also talking about making deep tax cuts — namely, extending the 2017 tax cuts indefinitely. Something’s got to give.

The document from the Republican committee will raise yet more concerns, especially among seniors and those in middle age, that the GOP is coming for their retirement benefits. (...)

The latest proposals are sailing into the wind, too. More Americans than at any time in recent history want to shore up Social Security’s finances by raising taxes rather than by curbing the program’s growth. According to a recent poll by Gallup, the tax raisers outnumbered the benefit curbers by a full 30 percentage points, or a ratio of two to one: That’s 61% for raising taxes, 31% for reining in benefits.

That gap is double what it was when Gallup conducted the poll in 2015 and in 2005, and triple what it was in 2009. 

by Brett Arends, Marketwatch |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images via
[ed. Republicans have been calling for cuts in government spending ever since Reagan. In fact, it's been essentially their entire platform for decades. Cuts in taxes, government programs, services, regulations, enviromental protection, healthcare, consumer protections, libraries, parks, arts, infrastructure, etc. Basically everything that makes a country great and run efficiently. In the case of this particularly shameful effort, they might alternatively consider cutting the military's roughly $800 billion annual budget by half or a third and achieve the same result in just a few short years (vs. grandma having to eat more ramen and cat food, which, I guess is still better than eating missles). But no. That would detract from their real priorities: more policing, immigration enforcement, incarceration, sweetheart government contracts, privatization of public resources, and overall worldwide domination (military/economic/political, etc). Those are the things that really animate and matter. See also: House Republican budget calls for raising the retirement age for Social Security (NBC); and, Historical Background And Development Of Social Security (SSA).] [Update: this bit of humor (from the NBC link). Republicans hate Obamacare and its subsidies, preferring widespread privatization instead, but then propose the same thing for Medicare:

"The new budget also calls for converting Medicare to a "premium support model," echoing a proposal that Republican former Speaker Paul Ryan had rallied support for. Under the new RSC plan, traditional Medicare would compete with private plans and beneficiaries would be given subsidies to shop for the policies of their choice. The size of the subsidies could be pegged to the "average premium" or "second lowest price" in a particular market, the budget says. (...)"

"The RSC budget launches blistering criticism at "Obamacare," or the Affordable Care Act, and calls for rolling back its subsidies and regulations that were aimed at extending insurance coverage."

MacKenzie Scott Donates $640 million, More Than Doubling Her Planned Gifts to Nonprofit Applicants

Billionaire philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday she is giving $640 million to 361 small nonprofits that responded to an open call for applications.

Yield Giving’s first round of donations is more than double what Scott had initially pledged to give away through the application process. Since she began giving away billions in 2019, Scott and her team have researched and selected organizations without an application process and provided them with large, unrestricted gifts.

In a brief note on her website, Scott wrote she was grateful to Lever for Change, the organization that managed the open call, and the evaluators for “their roles in creating this pathway to support for people working to improve access to foundational resources in their communities. They are vital agents of change.”

The increase in both the award amount and the number of organizations who were selected is “a pleasant surprise,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president at The Center for Effective Philanthropy. She is interested to learn more about the applicants’ experience of the process and whether Scott continues to use this process going forward.

Some 6,353 nonprofits applied to the $1 million grants when applications opened.

“The donor team decided to expand the awardee pool and the award amount,” said Lever for Change, which specializes in running philanthropic prize awards.

The 279 nonprofits that received top scores from an external review panel were awarded $2 million, while 82 organizations in a second tier received $1 million each.

Competitions like Scott’s open call can help organizations who do not have connections with a specific funder get considered, said Renee Karibi-Whyte, senior vice president, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

“One of the best things about prize philanthropy is that it surfaces people and organizations and institutions that otherwise wouldn’t have access to the people in the power centers and the funding,” she said. Her organization also advises funders who run competitive grants or philanthropic prize competitions to phase the application to diminish the burden of applying on any organization that is eliminated early. (...)

The open call asked for applications from nonprofits who are community-led with missions “to advance the voices and opportunities of individuals and families of meager or modest means,” Yield Giving said on its website. Only nonprofits with annual budgets between $1 and $5 million were eligible to apply.

The awardees were selected through a multilayer process, where applicants scored fellow applicants and then the top organizations were reviewed by a panel of outside experts.

Scott has given away $16.5 billion from the fortune she came into after divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Initially, she publicized the gifts in online blog posts, sometimes naming the organizations and sometimes not. She launched a database of her giving in December 2022, under the name Yield Giving.

In an essay reflecting on the website, she wrote, “Information from other people – other givers, my team, the nonprofit teams I’ve been giving to – has been enormously helpful to me. If more information about these gifts can be helpful to anyone, I want to share it.”

Smith Arrillaga, of CEP, said it was important that Scott is, “continuing to honor her commitment in terms of giving away her wealth, even though she’s thinking, changing and tweaking the ‘how’ of how it’s done and she’s still trying to go with the spirit of what she committed to.”

by Thalia Beaty, AP | Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
[ed. Full list of recipients here. Wonderful woman who'll be remembered in history for her generous and compassionate philanthropy. I think she's doing it exactly right: focus on small projects that could use a short-term infusion of cash to really get going, and identifying organizations that might otherwise lack the resources to effectively promote and grow their programs. 

Also... love these lukewarm comments by organizations one might expect would be dancing on the ceilings right now (professional consultants, non-profits, lobbyists)  : )

"The increase in both the award amount and the number of organizations who were selected is “a pleasant surprise,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president at The Center for Effective Philanthropy. She is interested to learn more about the applicants’ experience of the process and whether Scott continues to use this process going forward."

"Smith Arrillaga, of CEP, said it was important that Scott is, “continuing to honor her commitment in terms of giving away her wealth, even though she’s thinking, changing and tweaking the ‘how’ of how it’s done and she’s still trying to go with the spirit of what she committed to.”

The Toxicity of Female Tokenism

An Interview with Kathleen Alcott:

Though Kathleen Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find, is set in the mid-twentieth century, its concerns are eerily current—nearly every character is caught between the stability of convention and the blazing allure of revolution. Alcott depicts several big American events—the moon landing, the carnage of Vietnam, and the Reagan administration’s dismissal of the AIDS crisis—but she renders just as many intimate realities with a sensibility that she has come to define as her own. Her prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal: the private toil of being a single mother or a fatherless son, the bright loneliness of youth, and, perhaps most vividly, the torrid struggle of a single citizen who is “sickened by the masculine bark of her country” as she tries to find a way toward action.

Fay Fern rejects the traditional path her parents had envisioned for her to instead bartend in the Mojave Desert near an Air Force base; Fay’s transition from the doting mistress of a pilot nearly twice her age to a radical antiwar activist serves as the spine of the narrative. Her stoic ex-lover, Vincent, has moved away to become one of the first astronauts in the nascent space program. He’s also unwittingly become a father to Fay’s son, Wright.

This triangulation sets the book’s plot in motion, but what hooks the reader are Alcott’s darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations. A woman’s youth is “the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.” Another character’s relationship with the possibility of suicide is “like some billboard he had to drive by every day … a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere.” The last moments of a sunset are “when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest.”

Alcott’s narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. “Call me when you’re sober,” Fay says to her sister over the phone, who replies, “Call me when you shit out whatever rotten thing it is you ate.” A young man in San Francisco stumbles across his apartment and declares of his hungover state: “I feel like a goddamned aborted murder.” (...)


INTERVIEWER

Recently another novelist asked me if I have a specific emotional state or feeling that compels me to write fiction. I said whatever I said, then the asker told me he thought mine would have been anger. Could you tell me where you imagine your fiction comes from?

ALCOTT

I have written things because people in my life have died and I have written things because I have loved men who hated women and I have written things in answer to a part of me that swims out farther than is safe. This book in particular is a response to a transitional and itinerant chapter of my life, and there are many versions of myself who sat down to write it. You might have to ask me about a particular chapter, or even a sentence, to winnow it.

INTERVIEWER

There are a series of scenes in which Elise, a betrayed wife, icily takes up a regular barstool at the bar where her husband’s lover works. It culminates in a beautifully staged scene—you could make a whole three-act play out of this thread in the novel alone—that’s flush with a terrifying, nearly sexual tension. I am not sure I have much of a question here. I just love these scenes, the final one in particular, and want to know more about the ideas you think they raise. What was on your mind as you worked on them?

ALCOTT

Feminism, and in particular what feminists owe other women. Adrienne Rich gave a great commencement address at Smith in 1979 in which she talked about the toxicity of female tokenism, the great lie of the exceptional woman who travels in male circles. How well that lie sits on the tongue of American capitalism—it’s not other women you need, not equality for all women. It’s the exceptionalism of you, who will, after all, be the only one up against the patriarchal fence as you search for a chink. The idea of that shortcut is augmented by financial and solipsistic investment in the right pseudospiritual practice, in the self as a brand, in the consumerist narcissism. I think female tokenism is something Fay swallowed wholesale, which I certainly did in my late teens and early twenties, taking advantage of situations that I believe now took power from other women. I almost categorically dated older, powerful men, musicians and writers and filmmakers, who I think made my intellectual world bigger but my emotional world smaller, or more contorted, because I always measured my life in contrast to theirs. I would try to conceive of each of those relationships as exceptions, as exceptional as these men made me feel, ignoring the ghostly margin that was the age-appropriate women displaced, materially or emotionally, directly or indirectly, by the freedom this granted those men, who chose the malleability of someone young over the experience-based standards of someone older. At least in a conception of heterosexual womanhood that involves partnership and childrearing, when a much younger woman takes up with an older man, I tend to think, it tells the males in the world that their lives always come with an emergency exit, another shot, and the women of the world that the windows are closing quickly.

by Catherine Lacey, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image:

[ed. See also: Ms Alcott's memoir - Trapdoor (Harper's). Recommended.]

A Bullshit Genius

On a friendly stroll somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2004, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson if he would consider writing his biography. Isaacson, a journalist, academic, and policymaker who was then CEO of the Aspen Institute, an influential think tank, had just published a six-hundred-odd-page study of Benjamin Franklin, and was at work on another about Albert Einstein. “My initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly,” Isaacson later reflected, “whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.”

Isaacson did not take Jobs up on the offer until 2009, when he learned that the Apple boss was dying of pancreatic cancer. When Steve Jobs was published in 2011, just a couple of weeks after its subject passed away, it became clear that during his years of reporting the book, Isaacson had been convinced of what had first struck him only in jest. The front cover, designed with input from Jobs himself, featured a black-and-white photograph of the tech guru gazing knowingly at the camera, his thumb on his chin in contemplation: here is Jobs as world-historic genius, Silicon Valley successor to Franklin and Einstein. The narrative resonated with a public still enthralled by the misfit, college-dropout tech genius. That year was a kind of high-water mark for techno-optimism; the Arab Spring protests were still bringing democracy to the Middle East one tweet at a time; Google, with its ping-pong tables and massage rooms, was still widely considered the best place to work in the world. Isaacson’s portrait of Steve Jobs played to this market, selling around 380,000 copies in its first week.

A decade later, Isaacson was casting around for the next genius to include in his rarefied canon, which had grown to include Leonardo da Vinci, too, and was being sold as a “genius biographies” box set. What was kindred among these men, according to Isaacson, was not necessarily high I.Q. but an original spirit. They thought differently than others did — hit targets, as Schopenhauer put it, that no one else could see. This quality often put them out of step with the prevailing attitudes of their time, but these men did not acquiesce to ideological pressure or subscribe to social mores. The Isaacson genius was an avatar of intellectual freedom, a kind of liberal humanist hero who flourished in the West’s innovative meccas: Renaissance Florence, revolutionary America, prewar Western Europe, Silicon Valley.

As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so. In Isaacson’s telling, he arranged a call in 2021 with the help of some mutual friends, and the two spoke for an hour and a half. (Musk has also taken credit for the idea.) Musk, unsurprisingly, was enthusiastic about the prospect of being written about. Isaacson, in turn, demanded full access to his subject, and the freedom to make up his own mind. “You have no control,” he reportedly told Musk. Over the next two years, the biographer followed the Tesla boss around, spoke to his family, friends, and colleagues, and received Red Bull-fueled text messages from Musk late into the night. During this period, Musk’s already bizarre life devolved into pandemonium. He bought Twitter at a massive loss, intervened in the war in Ukraine, spawned offspring with otherworldly names, and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. A Fox News segment compared the two men by height, weight, age, and I.Q.: Zuckerberg, 152; Musk, 155. A battle of the geniuses, and also one of the dumbest spectacles of all time.

Nevertheless, when Musk was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

This time, the pitch didn’t quite land. Mainstream liberal attitudes toward Silicon Valley culture had cooled since the Jobs era, in large part due to a perceived rightward lurch among its upper echelons during the Trump years. Musk had emerged as the poster boy for this shift; he shared a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, and frequently posted about the “woke mind virus” and Covid vaccines. Isaacson’s book was panned by many; some critics accused the author of engaging in access journalism. In a combative interview, tech reporter Kara Swisher repeatedly asked Isaacson if he had come to “like” Musk. You can hear her frustration and bewilderment. How could Isaacson, her old friend and fellow liberal stalwart, not see Musk for the “asshole” he is, and, in fact, try to rehabilitate his image and burnish his legacy? Jill Lepore posed a similar question in her New Yorker review. Isaacson, she wrote, is “a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer.” Why did he write this apologia for a “supervillain”?

But within the context of Isaacson’s nine books, Musk is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacson’s genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.

by Oscar Schwartz, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: John Kazior

Crime and Punishment

Can American policing be fixed?

In May 2020, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked the largest wave of civil unrest in U.S. history. An estimated twenty-three million people took to the streets, calling for the reformation, defunding, disarming, or even abolition of police departments. Protesters pointed to policing’s disproportionate targeting of black and brown communities, its role in creating the world’s largest carceral state, and its increasing reliance on military weapons and tactics. Defenders of law enforcement countered that a militarized police force is necessary to regulating the most heavily armed civilian population on earth. These defenders claimed that racism is not endemic to American policing, and that defunding departments would be catastrophic for the very marginalized communities that the protesters sought to support.

In the years that followed, state and local governments across the country considered major reforms, with some increasing budgets for housing and addiction programs and creating unarmed response teams to handle non-violent mental-health emergencies. At the same time, officer recruitment flagged, and the ranks of police departments in some of the largest metropolitan areas shrank. But the effect of these changes has been hard to measure: In New Orleans, where the number of sworn officers decreased by about 20 percent in the two years after Floyd’s death, violent crime increased, and its murder rate became the highest in the country. In Minneapolis, however, where the size of the department has fallen by around 40 percent, the number of homicides has plummeted.

These discrepancies, which were further complicated by varying local responses to the pandemic, appear to suggest no clear path forward. What have we learned in the four years since George Floyd’s murder? Which reforms have proved most successful in reducing violence, both on the part of police officers and among the communities they serve? And what, if anything, can be done to fix law enforcement in the United States?

by Ras Baraka, Rosa Brooks, Barry Friedman, Christy E. Lopez, Tracey L. Meares, Brian O’Hara, Patrick Sharkey, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Collages by Mike McQuade. Source images: Police officers in combat uniform © Kostya Pazyuk/Alamy; Black Lives Matter protester © Edwin Remsberg/Alamy; Minneapolis © Superstock/Alamy

Where Honour and Ridiculousness Collide

Received wisdom holds that haughty music critics, grinding our axes on fans’ beloved pop stars, are nothing more than failed musicians. This has always struck me as slander – not of critics, who certainly can be bitter and mean, but of supposedly failed musicians. How, after all, does one fail at music? To suggest success rides on certain technicalities, like talent or a career, gravely underestimates music’s draw, and nowhere is the lie more spectacularly exposed than in karaoke.

Here is an arena of musical greatness in which incompetence is the house style. Delusions of grandeur, haywire pitch, weird stage presence? Join the party. On that valorising little stage, “failed musician” becomes the most entertaining role in the business.

We take this noble pursuit for granted, so it was alarming to learn last week that the inventor of the karaoke machine had died at the age of 100 – having walked, sashayed and warbled among us till the end. Who would bear witness to a world without karaoke machines and know just what was missing? The visionary in question was Shigeichi Negishi, a Japanese consumer-electronics whiz who invented the Sparko Box machine in 1967, apparently to get one over on a colleague who had mocked his singing around the factory. Quibbles surround the origin story – Daisuke Inoue independently invented his own karaoke box in 1971, and the bar-karaoke tradition predates both – but Negishi, who won the race to make a commercially available machine, tends to get the credit.

And, occasionally, the blame. Negishi’s invention has attracted a chorus of naysayers, starting with the live musicians who saw the Sparko Box as the latest robot hustling to snap up their jobs. In the decades since, non-believers have denounced the endeavour on aesthetic grounds, deeming it tedious, silly and kitsch. I understand this bad opinion, because until last year I shared it. Karaoke bars – clandestine lairs seemingly populated by the unembarrassable – are custom-made to intimidate the uninitiated. (...)

Last year, some friends and I succumbed to the tractor beam of a karaoke bar in a crowded east London basement, with a vigilant no-drinks-on-stage policy and catty drag queen hosts to enforce it. Private booths have their loyalists, but in that murkily fabulous venue, witnessing dreams manifest or be brutally dashed, I was forever sold on the magic of the public act. More than a nostalgic ritual, karaoke at its best is a high-stakes spectacle where honour and ridiculousness collide.

One recent evening, I stepped up for the sacred duty of performing Björk’s It’s Oh So Quiet. The drag queen, clocking my heterosexual overshirt, sourly regaled us with the cautionary tale of a man who had attempted the song a week before, exuding insufficient charisma. This was clearly a warning shot, and it gets to the heart of the matter. Karaoke tests not only our steel but also our deep-seated sense of propriety. You have to be willing to be ludicrous – to cast off humility and etiquette and basically look like a bit of a freak – to get a shot at transcendence.

In a room filled with potential hecklers, the threat, or certainty, of a stranger’s judgment adds to the faux-gravitas. The music starts. Tension ripples through the room. You find your pose and cast about for the opening note, discovering that breath control is not a technical skill but a mysterious elite art form. Maybe in the chorus, needing a distraction, you drop to your knees, palms imploring the sky. By then, at least in the mind’s eye, your adoring audience is heartily screaming along. At the end your friends enshrine the performance with whoops and hollers, like loving parents sticking your naff crayon drawing on the fridge.

Karaoke’s conjuring of phantom star power occupies a unique space in music fandom, nothing like the communion of a concert singalong. To get on stage and hyperventilate through Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire – fumbling the bridge, perhaps, but doing so with all your heart – may be an act of love, but it could never be mistaken for one of respect. Whether you go in for a bit of fun or a Stars in Their Eyes throwdown, the role you inhabit is fundamentally one of mischief: kill your idols, amuse your friends and banish all hope of sparking romance in the immediate vicinity.

by Jazz Monroe, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jill Giardino/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

Our Real National Security Budget

$2 Trillion, Here We Come.

The Biden Administration has just published its proposed budget, generating copious commentary, much of it displaying a commensurate degree of misunderstanding, especially regarding our gargantuan national security spending. To get at the truth of the matter, I consulted my friend Winslow Wheeler, who has been observing the insalubrious intricacies of the budget process over the past fifty years as a senior aide to Senators from both parties as well as a senior analyst for the General Accounting Office and directing the Center for Defense Information.

The defense budget has just been posted by the administration is being described as approaching a trillion dollars. Is that accurate? :

No. It's actually a lot more than that. In fact it's beginning to inch up on $2 trillion.

How so?

The problem is that when most people look at the defense budget, they don't count everything that we spend even for the Pentagon. But in addition to that, there are hundreds of billions of dollars outside of the Pentagon's budget that we spend for national security. Things like the nuclear weapons activities in the Department of Energy; that’s $37 billion; $26 billion for retired military pensions and healthcare and $12 billion for the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, and a strange and suspicious looking category for the international activities of the FBI in something called “Defense Related Activities.”

Do we have any idea what that last one is for?

It has always been classified. In the 50 years I've been watching the defense budget, it's never been explained other than some occasional hints. One year they admitted to a lot of money being spent by the FBI in, wait for it, Taiwan, and so it's very unclear exactly what this is, but it's always counted as part of so-called defense related activities.

The expenses that I have just been describing come to $970 billion, but that leaves out a lot.. Add in about $800 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the State Department and its associated agencies, the Department of Homeland Security. And we know now from our Republican friends that border protection is a dire national security issue. Add all that together. Then you can calculate the share for the interest on the debt that we pay each year. All those activities I've just described come to 21% of all federal spending. Calculating in that percentage as a the amount it contributes to the debt burden gives you $254 billion.. And so you add all of that up together and you get $1.767 trillion. (...)

Since the budget was published, there's been some wailing and lamentation that because of irksome spending restraints, this budget actually represents a cut or at least restraint on defense spending. What's your view on that?

Well, last year the budget deal that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the Democrats for the Pentagon allowed only a 1% increase in defense spending. But because of the screwy way that we actually calculate things, if you put together everything we spent just for the Pentagon without all those other items I mentioned, last year, it looks like we will have spent $968 billion, while for 2025, Biden's requesting $921 billion. So yes, that's a cut. But that doesn't include the supplementals that Biden will request later this year for the Pentagon, for Ukraine, Israel, God knows what, that will get us back into competition with 2024. The reason why 2024 is higher than the Biden request is because it had 60 billion worth of emergency supplementals that Congress is about to approve and that money is counted in my total. But because of the broken accounting rules that we use for the budget, that money's not counted when you calculate the deal that McCarthy made with the Democrats, and that's emergency money that doesn't count on budget cap.

For years we had the Overseas Contingency Operations defense spending, the so called war budget, which was the extra money the military got for actually fighting wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Are we getting back to that?

Yes. The politically-derived budget caps don’t apply to that money. And it’s a lot more than just for the wars; lots of billions for goodies for everybody added each year there. It's all part of the hocus pocus ways that Congress allows itself to appropriate money so it can pretend that it's using restraint, but actually is exploiting all kinds of loopholes to increase whatever cap or restraint they pretend that they've added to the defense budget.

What's the next budgetary legislative stage that we're going to endure?

We haven't finished with 2024 yet, because Congress has gotten into this habit of never passing budgets on time. And it also helps the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate discipline members so they don't get out of the line on things. We do these things called continuing resolutions that keep the money flowing but only at the level approved in the previous year. And we're in that situation for the Defense Department for 2024. Next week or the week after, they're going to resolve that and pick a final total for 2024, which will include most, but probably not all of the emergency supplemental that Biden requested for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and defense industrial base spending. So that number will become final in two or three weeks. We have barely begun on the 2025 consideration in Congress that will take the next three, four months and we'll have another continuing resolution because they won't pass things in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1st, and we'll go through this charade once again. And because this is an election year, it'll be all that more sloppy, painful, and unappealing to observe.

Then when they do it, Chuck Schumer and whoever is the Speaker of the House will pat themselves on the back and say, ‘well, we've done a great job. Who says we can't do anything. We just got the budget finally passed.’ But that will be months late yet again.

Are there items tacked onto the defense bills that have nothing to do with defense?

Yes. There's two bills. One is the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the bill that goes to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. That's a policy bill. It doesn't make money actually available to be spent, but it pretends it does. It has lots of numbers in it; it’s a tar baby for all kinds of crazy stuff or politically driven stuff because the legislative process is so broken. Members don't have an opportunity to do stuff on the floor of the House and Senate and especially in the Senate because the Majority Leader exploits the rules to make amendments impossible. The National Defense Authorization Act is one of those bills where they actually get a chance to do amendments and they do all kinds of crazy stuff, lots of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense. Last year they had 600 amendments for that bill.

Whew.

But they don’t really get debated. This is yet another way that the Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, controls things. If you’re a Senator, you have to supplicate Schumer to get him to accept your amendment. That will then will get into a package that he's blessed and it'll be adopted wholesale by the Senate with perfunctory debate and members giving staff-written speeches about ‘this is a wonderful bill. It includes my important amendment to increase ice block cutting in Minnesota’ and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Every one of these will have been approved by Schumer or his agents as politically acceptable. If you are a dissenter and have a problem with how things are done in the Pentagon or anywhere else, you will not get Schumer's blessing and your amendment will not be added to his package to be dumped into the National Defense Authorization Act, and you'll be out in the cold. We go through essentially the same process with the appropriations bill, which is the one that actually makes the money available to all these agencies. Yet again, Schumer controls the process where if he likes the smell of your amendments and it's okay with the prevailing political dogma that week or that month or for the last decade, it'll get included. And if you have something that that Chuck Schumer doesn't like, your amendment will be out in the cold.

Was it always like this?

When the Senate described itself as the world's greatest deliberative body back in the 1970s and eighties, it would have a process where a bill would come up on the floor in the Senate, and the Senate took great pride in the fact that it had unlimited amendments, and you could offer an amendment on anything you wanted to all of these bills, whether it's the National Defense Authorization Act or the FAA Authorization Act, and there would be a proper debate, and then the Senate would vote and the majority of those senators present in voting would prevail.

Today it's a fundamentally broken process because of the automatic filibuster, which allows the party leaders to totally control things. Unless a Senator can somehow put together sixty votes to override a filibuster, Schumer and McConnell can simply prevent your amendment from even coming to the floor, let alone get debated. It’s also a corrupt process because if you legislate in ways that Chuck Schumer, or whoever is the leader, doesn't like or your idea is a pain in the ass for the Democratic, or Republican, caucus, you will be on the outs. Furthermore, Schumer, and McConnell control a large portion of the money that you need for your reelection campaign. And if you don't behave yourself, you'll be on the outs, not just on getting your amendment adopted, but you'll be on the outs so far as getting any of his money is concerned. And for the money that he doesn't directly control, he'll be sending the message to the big political donors, ‘don't give anything to Senator So and So. He's not one of us; he’s not a good boy.’ That's the way we do business these days. 

by Andrew Cockburn, Spoils of War |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. For everyone wondering how "their tax dollars" are spent.]

Aerial Relocation Service

Some of our best friends play golf.

Seriously. But we’re not that into it. It’s not just all the pesticides, fertilizers, water consumption, obstructed flood plains and fish migrations. It’s also the whiff of patriarchal privilege and work-masquerading-as-leisure that hangs about it.

So when Early Majority member Krzysztof Wroński shared his work with us, we loved it. As trees are threatened by changing climate and increasingly inhospitable conditions at Southern latitudes, Krzysztof is exploring playful approaches to their assisted migration, moving seeds to new locations within a particular species' historical range.

Using a commercial drone, a remotely operable basket, and a series of biodegradable parachutes made of kraft paper and straw, Krzysztof takes acorns dropped from oak trees near the urban and built environment and relocates them to locations where they have a greater chance to thrive in the long-term. The tools and practice can also be used to make a political statement, for example, by dropping acorns onto a golf course to challenge the practice of managing landscapes in highly humanistic and structured ways.

by Krzysztof Wroński, Early Majority | Read more:
Video: Who knows.
[ed. Must be some kind of dumb art project. If this person (and his enablers) had spent 30 seconds researching golf course recycling and management practices (and privileges) in the last few decades maybe they'd be a little more circumspect about making sweeping statements about maintenance and access these days. Guaranteed these little acorn droplets (litter) were swept up early the next day, probably before the first tee time.]

Not Your Gramp's Old Toupee

While losing a battle with genes and nature atop his scalp, Long Islander Rene Galarza came across the Instagram account of a barber offering very realistic hair pieces. To find such a service closer to home, he did some googling and found Dina Kales, who owns the N.Y.C. business Top Shoppe. She told him producing the same results he’d seen on social media wouldn’t be easy or cheap. But after his first appointment, Galarza said he fell in love with the way he looked.

“It was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot believe this,’” the 43-year-old told Robb Report. “I’m able to style my hair, like, naturally. You just get a different level of confidence about yourself.”

Galarza is one of a growing number of men of his age—and considerably younger—having toupees installed, thanks to next-gen versions that are slimmer, easier to wear, and way more realistic than anything your grandfather might have considered. They even have a new street name. Gen-Z guys (and their willing barbers) call them hair systems or hair additions. And they look very, very good. 

“Back in the day, you’d hear the word toupee and it was a no-no,” says celebrity stylist Mark Bustos, who’s cut the hair of stylish, famous men including Jeff Gordon and Philip Lim. “The stigma is not as strong anymore, fortunately. Men are starting to take a lot more care of themselves.”

Given that about 80 percent of men experience some form of hair loss—and that market analysts value the U.S. hair transplant industry at around $6 billion—it’s no surprise that hair systems are booming. Their progression has only been hastened by the deluge of happy hair system recipients that have started to flood our social media feeds.

Barber Geraldo Quinones, who goes by “Q,” operates the Royal Crown Hair Club in Harlem and says the demand for hair systems has jumped 500 percent over the last two years. (It doesn’t hurt that he documents the process for his 21,000 Instagram followers.) The Las Vegas-based barber Samara Elizabeth, a.k.a. @Hairartbysam, a.k.a. Toupee Barbie, once installed a system for the video version of the podcast The Yard, which, naturally, has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube. And then there’s Em Cheney, known online as the Toupee Queen, who has generated 36 million views on TikTok through viral videos of guys who enter her shop balding and leave looking decades younger.

Kales, Galarza’s hairy godmother, says social media isn’t the only reason the systems have gotten so popular. There’s also something far more ancient, and Freudian, at play: No young person wants to look like their dad. “Somewhere in the early 1990s, shaving your head became a hairstyle,” she says. The generation entering its 20s now had fathers who often dealt with hair loss by simply shaving their scalps. In one sense, you can consider the shift to hair pieces as Gen Z’s move away from Gen X.

While guys in the ‘50s and ‘60s would measure their heads for a full-coverage, helmet-style wig, today’s toupee wearers are much more precise. Instead of covering up one’s entire head with a rug, barbers now aim to meld a hairpiece with the strands that remain, providing a more natural and seamless appearance. In that way, modern hair systems do more with less: Pieces are -sized to a subject’s balding area, adhered with a special glue, and then styled with the existing hair. “We can now customize the hair system to where they’re really, really thin,” says Quinones. The potential for a perfect pate, and all that comes with it, is only as limited as a stylist’s skill set.

Part of what makes the new versions work is that they’re disposable. “You’re basically wearing a hair system for anywhere between four weeks to six months and then throwing it out and putting on a new one,” Kales says.

Pricing varies wildly depending on where you live, how skilled your barber is, and what your needs include. Kales charges $875 for a Top Shoppe hair system (this includes fitting, “installation,” a haircut, and styling. Maintenance appointments, which you can schedule as often as you’d get a normal haircut, run $195.) Quinones charges around $500 for the piece and $200 to install it.

At the higher end is N.Y.C.-based Terri Green, who mostly works with actors and rock stars to create hair additions that look so real a high-definition camera operator couldn’t tell the difference. She employs a team of five wigmakers who make each piece with untreated human hair, because Green doesn’t trust factory-made options. (“It doesn’t matter what the hair quality they start with in a factory; as soon as they dip it in that acid treatment, it looks like doll hair,” she says. “I’ve tried many, many factories. None of them will work with raw hair.”) Then she applies the systems with clips and micro beading—the same technique used to install hair extensions—and applies her five decades of styling experience in shaping a look. The costs of such perfection start at $6,000 and can reach upward of $15,000.

But if you’re going to spend the money, why wouldn’t you just get hair plugs? The surgical alternative can cost tens of thousands of dollars in this country, though there is a bustling plug tourism industry in Turkey, where the government typically subsidizes the operation to the tune of a few thousand.

“So few people are good candidates for transplants,” says Cheney, the aforementioned Toupee Queen, who operates a hair systems business from Salt Lake City and Newport Beach. There are other drawbacks: you need a strong donor area; your hair will still look very thin on top until it’s grown back to full strength; and it’s surgery. Cheney followed her mother into the business, who began doing hair systems because so many of her clients came to her unhappy with their transplant results.

by John Ortved, Robb Report |  Read more:

Image: Wirestock

[ed. Check out the accompanying videos and pictures.]

Judge Shopping Restricted

For more than a decade, conservative plaintiffs have been gaming the judiciary by filing lawsuits before a hard-right judge who’s guaranteed to rule in their favor. Worse, a handful of Republican-appointed judges have made a habit of issuing sweeping decisions that apply nationwide—hobbling the federal government, short-circuiting the democratic process, and transferring inconceivable amounts of power into the hands of a few unelected jurists. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which makes policy for the federal courts, finally struck a blow against this cynical gamesmanship on Tuesday, announcing a new rule to restore the random assignment of cases and close the loophole that lets plaintiffs hand-pick their judges.

On the Slate Plus bonus segment of Saturday’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the new policy and its furious reception among the fringe-right faction of the judiciary. Below is a preview of their conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity. (...)

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s always hard for me to think that anything the Judicial Conference does is a big piece of news, but they did announce a new policy that sets out to curb judge-shopping. It’s the Conference trying to say: “Hey, you can’t just go to the casino that is Amarillo, Texas, and get Matthew Kacsmaryk every time you file a case.” This certainly doesn’t make a difference going backward, but can you tell us about the new policy and whether it will in fact curb litigants shopping for a judge who’s certain to hand them a nationwide injunction?

Mark Joseph Stern: So we don’t actually have the text of the rule yet. We have a press release from the Judicial Conference announcing the policy and its broad strokes. [Update, 5:10 p.m.: The text has been released.] We can glean that under this rule, when somebody files a lawsuit in federal district court that challenges some kind of federal policy—specifically, if it seeks a nationwide injunction or other sweeping relief—it must be randomly assigned to any judge in that district. The lawsuit cannot simply be glued onto the one judge who happens to sit in the division of the district where the plaintiffs strategically filed to prevail in their case.

As you suggested, this is the Matthew Kacsmaryk fix. Kacsmaryk is the guy who sits in a one-judge division in Amarillo, Texas, who will do whatever anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant plaintiffs ask him to do. The state of Texas goes back into his courthouse over and over again to get sweeping injunctions. The same thing happens with a handful of other Trump-appointed judges in Texas and Louisiana. But judge-shopping is also a problem in patent litigation: Patent trolls spent years going to the same judge in Texas because they knew they’d get a favorable ear. That obviously can’t be right.

Chief Justice John Roberts brought up this problem in one of his annual reports, and now he has dropped the hammer. He’s the head of the Judicial Conference, and one of the other most prominent members is Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Sutton is a very Roberts-ian figure who has complained bitterly, and I think correctly, about the scourge of nationwide injunctions. And now they’ve sort of shivved this entire scheme. Their message to these out-of-control district judges seems to be: “It’s over. You can’t keep the grift up. We’re patching this workaround.”

Judge Sutton, talking about this new rule, said: “I actually think the story is about national injunctions. That’s been a new development, really in the last 10 years and maybe the last two or three administrations, where that has become a thing.” I always love when a judge runs out of words and just says “a thing.” But I think it’s important to understand that this policy doesn’t actually stop a single-judge division from issuing a nationwide injunction. It just makes it harder. It sends cases through the spinner to avoid a case going directly to someone like Kacsmaryk. But cases will still end up being randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk.

Yes. It’s alarming that if a case is randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk, he can still work his mischief. He clearly has no hesitation to do whatever his client-plaintiffs want him to do in their ongoing collusion. So the ultimate solution has to be an end to this trend of single judges purporting to seize control of the law and make it whatever they want because they got 51 votes in the Senate and they have a God complex and they’ve decided that they’re the King of America.

But nationwide injunctions will remain until either Congress or the Supreme Court steps in to stop it. And I think the three liberal justices are clearly holding off on dropping the hammer here. They might see some value in nationwide injunctions under Republican presidents and Republican policies. But I have become convinced that this stuff has no basis at all in the law or the Constitution.

Look at Kacsmaryk’s decision purporting to remove medication abortion from the shelves of every pharmacy and doctor’s office in all 50 states. That is just king-level arrogance. It is monarchic. It is czarist. It is transferring so much power away from Congress, from the executive, from the people, into the hands of this one guy in Amarillo.

Just stop and consider, Mark, that we have federal judges making Fox News sound bites complaining about this policy. Because that is perfectly normal now.

All the worst people are throwing total hissy fits about this. Especially from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews and upholds a lot of injunctions from Kacsmaryk and his disgraceful ilk. (...) All they can do is whine and gripe about the Judicial Conference allegedly overstepping its bounds and making policy.

But Congress created the Judicial Conference to make policy for the courts! It is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is, like, the bare minimum that it could have done to put a dent in this completely outrageous and lawless system of judge-shopping.

Even Republican politicians are getting in on the bashing of the poor Judicial Conference.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell himself, from the floor of the Senate, delivered a screed against this policy, calling it an “unforced error” and also encouraging district courts to defy the Judicial Conference’s authority and ignore the new policy. McConnell actually sent a letter to the chief judge of every district court in the country, co-signed by GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, encouraging them to disregard the policy, basically saying it’s illegal. So we’re seeing Republicans telling courts to defy the chief justice of the United States and his ultimate authority as head of the entire Article III judiciary. We might see an intra-war branch within Article III between judges who accept the policy and judges who don’t.

by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: John Roberts, uncredited

Nashville Sessions

[ed. The mechanics of a Nashville recording session (with Tom Bukovac). The singer, Cecilia Castleman has such a beautiful voice.]