Q&A: Golf Channel's Brandel Chamblee. He Had Plenty to Say

Rory McIlroy may have softened his stance on LIV Golf of late — to the point that rumors circulated that he was going to pull a Jon Rahm — but Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee shows no signs of backing down. In this candid interview, which lasted 2-plus hours and was conducted on the “Live From” set at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando, Chamblee doubled down on why of all the figures involved in pro golf’s split, he’s most disappointed in Phil Mickelson.

The invite for a live debate? It’s still out there — but Chamblee isn’t holding out much hope.

We talked hate mail, why he continues to squabble with the Twitter jackals, rated Jay Monahan’s leadership and listed some of the unsung heroes of the Tour-LIV ongoing war in professional golf. We covered a lot of ground in this Q&A so let’s just jump right into it.

GWK: Phil Mickelson had a now-infamous rant about the PGA Tour’s “obnoxious greed.” How do you define obnoxious greed in golf?

BRANDEL CHAMBLEE: Well, I would say it is only looking out for yourself and not the betterment of the game. That’s what’s going on in a lot of corners in professional golf. Every generation made more money than the generation before them. There was not a lot of boohooing about woe is me. Relative to the rest of the world, golfers were pretty darned well paid, if you were one of the best.

They tried to behave in a certain way that maintained, I would say, the pretty clean image of professional golfers that were concerned with the traditions of the game, self-policing the game, being philanthropic and giving back to the game. When I say giving back, I’m talking about talking to the media, talking to the fans. You don’t just get to take the money and leave. There’s no better example than where we sit right now at Bay Hill and Arnold Palmer. Peter Jacobsen came along after Arnold Palmer, and he almost with a megaphone, every chance he got, talked about how everybody should emulate Arnold Palmer. Nobody could win like Arnold Palmer. Very few could. But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t behave like Arnold Palmer. You leave the game a little bit better than you found it.

But I think what we’re seeing now because of obnoxious greed, we’re seeing players that are going to leave the game not a little bit worse but substantially worse than they found it.

GWK: Which LIV player are you most disappointed in?

BC: Well, Phil. Hardly any of these other players had the popularity to make a difference to tilt the game one direction or another. Phil had the potential to do a lot of good in the game. Look, he could have sat in that chair as a commentator for the next 20, 30 years. I have no doubt that he’d have been good at it. By all accounts, he’s a pretty smart guy. By all accounts, he spent a lot of time thinking about some cool stuff in the game of golf, and I would have liked to have listened to him for 20 or 30 years. I’d liked to have heard what he had to say. The fans loved him. You know, within the small world of golf, there were a lot of people that didn’t particularly care for him, but I certainly enjoyed watching him play. I didn’t love the way he played. I heard him say somewhere along the line that he got criticized for his aggressive style of play. It’s like, who else out here besides Tiger has won more than me? Maybe some people should try to play more like me. If there’s one criticism I have of what’s going on out here outside of the LIV world, it’s that everybody is being coached in the same way. They know their dispersion rates. They know where to play and everybody is counting cards, so to speak.

Phil wasn’t afraid to hit on 16, to make a gambling analogy, which may not be entirely fair to Phil, but as a gambler on the golf course, that’s what people pay to watch. Do something that’s a little bit risky, crazy – he did some things that were crazy on the golf course, like here on 16 out of the right trees. But he had a very high level of skill and a very high level of knowledge of what he was capable of, and it was fun to watch him.

I’m disappointed in him because he could have left the game in a better place. People were, early in his career or most of his career, they were making the analogy that he had similarities to Palmer, go for broke, gave the fans what they wanted, and I think he turned his back on the game. I think he turned his back on the stage that made him who he was and all the people that came before him.

I think that the players that have gone to LIV have done a disservice to the game of golf. It’s like they’re going to get theirs. It’s like they’re all pulling the ladders up. They had to climb up those ladders to get to where they were, and the people that had placed those ladders were the generations that came before them. But they got there, and they think, well, I did it all on my own, I’m going to get everything for me. I’m pulling the ladders up.

I think Phil could have done a lot of good for the game of golf. Instead he’s really hurt the game. (...)

GWK: It's possible there could be a PGA Tour event in Jeddah in a couple years. If there was a Live From set there, would you do it?

BC: I was asked a question about China all the time. I have no problem with PGA Tour China. I have no problem with trying to grow the game in Jeddah or Riyadh or Mecca or Medina. I have no problem with trying to grow the game. The problem I have is with somebody trying to buy the game and run tournaments to obfuscate their atrocities. I don’t have any problem with the PGA Tour or any other golf league going to play at the four corners of the world to grow the game.

PGA Tour China was about trying to promote golf in China. It wasn’t owned by the Chinese – far as I know, it was run by the PGA Tour reaching out to grow the game of golf. The players that went over and played there were not playing for Xi. They were playing for avenues on to the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour or wherever in the world they wanted to play.

The LIV Tour is about distracting from Saudi Arabia’s atrocities. Give the masses bread and circuses and they will forget. The whole idea of sportswashing is nothing new. It goes back to Roman times. That’s what the gladiator games were all about.

The money from Saudi Arabia is everywhere. It’s everywhere because publicly traded companies don’t get to control who invests in them. They have no recourse to stop a foreign investment. But golfers do.

GWK: Which player who has stayed loyal has revealed himself as selfish and not added any constructive input during this ordeal?

BC: Well, I felt like Rory didn’t get the support that he needed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that players were selfish. But I felt like Rory was out there and was a force against the source of the money for LIV, and he was a formidable source for the PGA Tour, and he didn’t get the support from any of the players. I didn’t hear Jordan Spieth being vocal in support of him. I didn’t hear Justin Thomas. I didn’t hear Scottie Scheffler. I didn’t hear Xander Schauffele. I didn’t hear any of them as forcefully as Rory was speaking out on the issue. It was like he was taking most of the heat if not all of the heat, and I think after a while, I don’t know it to be the case, I haven’t talked to Rory, but I think after a while, it was listen, I’ve done everything I can do and I’m not getting any support, so I’m going to bow out. Why is it up to me to fight this whole battle myself?

I would have loved to see more players come out and speak on behalf of the PGA Tour or just the traditions of the game and the foundation of the game and talk about how where the game has gone over the last couple years has been bad for professional golf. It’s been great for them from a financial standpoint, but they’re alienating the biggest stakeholder in the game of golf, which is the core fan.

GWK: Should Tour loyalists be compensated for staying loyal?

BC: No, I don’t think so at all. I believe they already have been. I think the money has already been distributed. But I certainly didn’t agree with that. Doing the right thing is in and of itself a reward. They did the right thing, those that stayed. I think the reward is there, and for them to be compensated ignores the generations that came before them and the generations that would come after them.

Again, this is a place in time where these players occupy a spot in the game of golf, but it’s a very short window. Most of them are going to play for 15 years, 10 to 20 years. It’s a pretty short window. There will be players that come after them. Should they be compensated? Should the players before them be compensated? If you’re going to compensate current players, you’re ignoring past generations that bequeathed to them the foundation of the PGA Tour. So no, I disagree with it. I’m happy enough to listen to people argue the other side of it, and I have listened to them that you need to, as best you can, stop the threat of LIV poaching the best players and try as best you can to make players understand that if they stay loyal to the PGA Tour, the financial benefits will be tremendous, which they are. I understand it. I just don’t condone it.

GWK: Are you concerned that LIV's poaching of Tour talent will continue?

BC: I turn on the broadcast and look at the leaderboard and there are 10-15 names I’ve never heard of. The fields suck. They’re small fields. People want to make it out like Joaquin Niemann is a great player. Did you miss the part where he played for 3-4 years and never had a top-10 in a major championship? Yeah, he was a good player, he was on his way, maybe he was going to be a great player but what is he forced to do because he went to LIV? He’s forced to go play wherever he can to get world ranking points. Give him credit, he’s willing to do all that but in the meantime he’s whining that he doesn’t get world ranking points knowing full well he joined a tour that didn’t qualify for world ranking points.

All these guys that go to LIV, it’s amazing, take the money and shut up. Why are you whining? You all knew the consequences of your actions, all of you. You all knew you were playing a tour with no ranking points for very explicit and defined reasons. Shut up! Take the money and by the way, don’t think that you’re a top-10 player in the world because you beat 12 guys. That’s who you’re beating. (...)

GWK: How do you rate Jay Monahan's leadership during this?

BC: Poor, unfortunately. I think Jay is a sharp guy and I hear nothing but great things about him. When I go up to TPC Sawgrass, I go up there once or twice during a year and take groups up there and play golf, and I go in and have dinner, and unprompted they tell me the nicest things about Jay Monahan, that he’s one of the greatest guys you’ll ever meet. I hardly know Jay. I’ve probably sat in his presence two or three times and talked to him two or three times in my life, and that’s about it. By all accounts, he’s the greatest guy.

But I think if he had the chance to do it over again, he would have done it differently. He would have kept more players in the loop, done the best he could to ameliorate the difficulties of that scenario knowing players were in the loop and it may change the deal.

But he was in a really tough spot. The derision that is directed at Jay Monahan I think is misdirected. How could you, in running a business, have anticipated an irrational economic actor? How could anybody in any business anticipate their competition essentially giving away a product for free, and then being held accountable for the loss of market share? How could you as a CEO of a company – let’s say you make TVs and Sony and Samsung starts giving them away for free. How could you have anticipated that? How could you react to that? How do you respond to that? That’s economic suicide, but they don’t care on the other side because it’s not about selling the TV, it’s about obfuscating something else.

by Adam Schupak, Golfweek |  Read more:

Image: Chris Condon/PGA TOUR

[ed. Exactly right.]

The D.E.A. Needs to Stay Out of Medicine

Even when her pancreatic cancer began to invade her spine in the summer of 2021, my mother-in-law maintained an image of grace, never letting her pain stop her from prioritizing the needs of others. Her appointment for a nerve block was a month away, but her pain medications enabled her to continue serving her community through her church. Until they didn’t.

Her medical condition quickly deteriorated, and her pain rapidly progressed. No one questioned that she needed opioid medications to live with dignity. But hydrocodone and then oxycodone became short at her usual pharmacy and then at two other pharmacies. My mother-in-law’s 30-day prescriptions were filled with only enough medication to last a few days, and her care team required in-person visits for new scripts. Despite being riddled with painful tumors, she endured a tortuous cycle of uncertainty and travel, stressing her already immunocompromised body to secure her medications.

My mother-in-law’s anguish before she died in July 2022 mirrors the broader struggle of countless individuals grappling with pain. I’m still haunted by the fact that my husband and I, both anesthesiologists and pain physicians who have made it our life’s work to alleviate the suffering of those in pain, could not help her. It is no wonder that our patients are frustrated. They do not understand why we, doctors whom they trust, send them on wild goose chases. They do not understand how pharmacies fail to provide the medications they need to function. They do not understand why the system makes them feel like drug seekers.

Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad-stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities. This is a bad and ineffective strategy for solving the opioid crisis, and it’s incumbent on us to hand the reins of authority over to public health institutions better suited to the task.

Since 2015, the D.E.A. has decreased manufacturing quotas for oxycodone by more than 60 percent and for hydrocodone by about 72 percent. Despite thousands of public comments from concerned stakeholders, the agency has finalized even more reductions throughout 2024 for these drugs and other commonly prescribed prescription opioids.

In theory, fewer opioids sold means fewer inappropriate scripts filled, which should curb the diversion of prescription opioids for illicit purposes and decrease overdose deaths — right?

I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter. (...)

Paradoxically, the D.E.A.’s production cuts may drive patients to seek opioids on the illicit market, where access is easy but drugs are laced unpredictably with fentanyl, xylazine and other deadly synthetics. My patients confide that they cannot go through cycles of pain relief and withdrawal and cannot spend hours in the emergency room; in their minds, they have no choice but to turn to the streets. (...)

The D.E.A. isn’t new to this criticism. As recently as January, it insisted that manufacturing issues or other supply-chain disruptions were the real issues limiting patient access to pain medication, not manufacturing quotas or the imposition of limits. And the agency suggested that action would be taken if the Food and Drug Administration told it about shortages, which the F.D.A. hasn’t so far. But when more than a third of health care professionals attest that their patients struggle to fill opioid scripts, something is clearly not working. The D.E.A.’s responses read more like a deflection of blame than a serious strategy.

My profession makes me acutely aware of opioid risks, including addiction and overdose, but at times and under careful dosing and monitoring, opioids are the right choice for our patients. Still, some health care providers are reluctant to prescribe them, even for cancer pain, for which opioids are a mainstay of treatment. Many cited opioid dispensing at pharmacies as a barrier.

This is concerning, since untreated pain is associated with decreased immunity, a worsening of depression, reduced mobility and adverse effects on quality of life. Ineffective pain management has also been associated with increased medical costs. Among people with sickle cell disease, for instance, 10 percent of patients account for 50 percent of emergency room visits. Although they suffer from other possibly contributing disorders, the common feature among them is chronic pain.

Dangerous prescription drugs require safeguards, but a scalpel has more promise than a sledgehammer. The D.E.A., an agency staffed with law enforcement officials, is not equipped to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate prescribing, and it has apparently confused inappropriate with criminal. Instead of defining medical aptness, the D.E.A. should pass the baton to our nation’s public health agencies.

Collaboratively, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services can take a tailored, more precise approach to opioids that is informed by medical and clinical acumen. The F.D.A., in particular, should strengthen existing risk evaluation and mitigation strategies programs, which place controls on individual medications and respond to signs of inappropriate prescribing. Although such programs have not always responded effectively, they can be improved with planning, time and resources. And lastly, the government should strip the D.E.A. of its authority to suspend providers’ controlled substance licenses when dangers arise and should hand that power over to these public health agencies.

by Shravani Durbhakula, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Hickey
[ed. Hear, hear. Why is a drug enforcement agency in charge of pharmaceutical supply? Since the opioid hysteria started, the situation has only gotten worse - not because of prescription practices (which can be monitored and controlled, unlike street drugs) - but because patient needs are not being met. The "pill mills" and unethical doctors of yesterday were weeded out fairly quickly, but we continue to see legitimate pain patients (I was/am one of them) denied access to drugs that would allow pain maintenance and a productive life. There's a difference between addiction and dependency, and anyone who conflates the two is either misguided and/or uninformed at best. As one commenter put it: "How, as a society, have we gotten so far off-track, punishing patients for the abuse of addicts? If such a law were applied to driver’s licenses, we would take cars away from safe drivers to keep bad drivers off the road."]

Lake Clark Adventure

[ed. Reminds me of a story: Lake Clark Adventure.]

Image source: misplaced

Edward Hopper, 1906

via:

via:

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.

The corporate entity in question was Mercedes-AMG sponsor INEOS, the petrochemical company. Not exactly the kind of institution a bicycle-loving, card-carrying socialist wants to get involved with. But part of the reason I took them up on their offer was because INEOS and its CEO, Jim Ratcliffe, also sponsor cycling—they are the title partner of the INEOS Grenadiers, so named after the off-road vehicle the company is now producing in what was once an ex-Mercedes factory in France. The F1 trip was also organized by the automotive division, arguably to show off its cars to car journalists with a bit of sport mixed in for fun. Regardless of this hand-wringing, it's still INEOS, just a car-shaped version of it—kind of like how the United Arab Emirates, as in the country itself, sheathes its sponsorship of sports in the scabbard of its airline. Knowing this fully, and having chosen to commit to the dark side, on a Friday afternoon in cold, autumnal Chicago, I packed my shorts and cowboy boots for Austin, Texas. Looking at my ticket, I noticed it was first class. I had never flown first class before, not even on an upgrade. Because I was flying first class, everyone who talked to me did so nicer than usual even though I had adjunct professor eye bags and was wearing sweatpants. In first class stewardesses give you warm washcloths for your hands and a real glass for your water instead of a plastic cup. The lady beside me wore a suit and read from a spreadsheet, stopping only for brief pauses during takeoff and landing. I don't think she looked at me once the entire time. (...)

The landscape of Formula 1 has changed tremendously since the premiere in 2019 of the Netflix series Drive to Survive, which catapulted the sport to new levels of popularity in places it previously lagged—most importantly, the U.S. All sports are powered by the personalities of their practitioners, and Formula 1 has those in spades—the chipper, effusive Daniel Ricciardo; Mr. Suave, Carlos Sainz; plucky George Russell; the deep-feeling Charles Leclerc; and, perhaps above all, the sport's longtime great champion, a man from some of the humblest beginnings in motorsport, the regal and soft-spoken Lewis Hamilton, who just announced an absolutely shocking move to Ferrari after an illustrious 11 years and six championships behind the wheel of a Mercedes (and six seasons and one championship with Mercedes-powered McLarens). These men are augmented by a cast of supporting players, especially in the form of team principals like Mercedes-AMG's gruff and blunt but endearing Toto Wolff and Christian Horner, the ambitious and at times unscrupulous boss from Red Bull who makes for an entertaining antagonist.

Verstappen, as talented and precocious as he is, is not one of these big personalities. Bereft of a grand bildungsroman of his own (he is the son of Jos Verstappen, who also was an F1 driver) in literature, we would call Verstappen a foil, one who reveals more about the characteristics of other people than a well-built character in his own right. Quiet and terse, he is the epitome of the Dutch predilection for straightforwardness, and like his boss, he makes for an easy villain. If you are trying to sell a sport on a grand narrative of intrigue and rivalry between the two powers, Red Bull and Mercedes—and indeed, this was the narrative for years prior to Verstappen's triumph over Hamilton in a controversial and fan-alienating final race to the 2021 season marred by adjudication blunders—you need both powers to be powerful.

Instead, Red Bull has so dominated the field of late the sport is barely worth watching at all. Commentators must resort to spending more time hyping up drama in the midfield than on who's leading the race. Dominance is boring. But it is especially boring in the age of front-to-back television and social-media coverage that leaves no room for mythmaking. In the time of just newspaper coverage, writers who had access to athletes fashioned stories from whatever they were given. Now we all have access and what you see is what you get.

None of this would be a big deal—sports will be sports, after all—if Formula 1 did not bank hugely on a new American audience. In addition to the race at Circuit of the Americas, F1 in the last couple of years has introduced a grand prix in Miami, and now, an all-out, hyper-glitzy, celebrity-sodden motorsport "Super Bowl" in Las Vegas. But those ventures can only succeed if people are willing to pay exorbitant ticket prices—10 times the cost of NASCAR cheap seats—in order to attend. That's a lot of money for an ordinary person to splurge just to see Max Verstappen on pole and Max Verstappen P1. For years, Formula 1's growth strategy and its expansion were looking like a capitalist fairytale. But without a compelling story to keep the momentum going, one starts to wonder what the future will have in store. (...)

The trip to the track took about 30 minutes. When we came into the entrance, there were people walking from seemingly miles away with lawn chairs. The landscape in Texas always looks a little burnt and scruffy, but the asphalt leading into the track was new, dark as night and smooth as butter. The buildings themselves were white, clean-lined, and pristine. They reminded me more of a horse track than a stadium such as Charlotte Motor Speedway. In the middle stood a viewing tower in the form of a parabolic spire, which added a bit of architectural flair. When we got out of the cars, we were given VIP passes on lanyards. They had a luxurious heft to them, kind of like the Apple credit card. What I did not realize until that moment was that we would be viewing the race from the paddock with all the team sponsors and employees and random assorted people willing to spend the equivalent of more than my life's savings on one afternoon.

I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.

In the paddock, expert chefs prepared food and alcohol flowed freely, though I did not partake, already a little queasy. Stocks were discussed in passing conversations. I opted to step outside onto the balcony and watch the last of the F1 Academy racers zip around the track. Directly beneath the balcony were the Mercedes and Ferrari garages, so close one could almost touch them.

The day's activities commenced with a tour of the garage. In the garage, there are many mysteries one is not allowed to know or see. The use of phones is forbidden lest one incur accusations of espionage. When we got into the garage, Lewis's car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic. Hamilton himself walked through in his helmet, unexpectedly on an errand. After being in the presence of the car, I perceived him differently than before, when he was just a guy driving in circles on TV. The scope of his capabilities became more directly known to me in the face of that which I believed to be unknowable. All of that was built in service of him. He stopped and looked into the open maw of the car. The tour guide led us hurriedly into the back room where the coffee and tire bags were stored so that no one could listen to what Lewis said.

About half an hour later, they brought him up to the paddock to talk to us. It wasn't a press conference, but rather a kind of a TED Talk. The questions were rote and a guy with a microphone asked them as though they were being broadcast on television. Hamilton talked rotely about how much he loved America and the fans here, talked—to the people who needed reassurance—about how the car was "getting there" but made it pointedly certain that they knew it still needed some work, which surprised me, making me realize this was still a private setting. I come from a sport where chivalry never died and no one is allowed to say anything negative because it is "unsportsmanlike" and every cyclist has to play his part in the farcical pageant of being a dull, humble farmer's son. It is a pretty open secret that a lot of cyclists don't like their bike sponsors but they would never, ever, ever say it. It's somewhat contradictory, but the sheer financial calculus of F1 is what makes it possible for Hamilton to be critical. This is a multibillion-dollar industry putting its full heft behind him doing well. It's reminiscent of the patronage system of precapitalist times, when rulers and nobles with endless riches paid musicians and composers to live in the palace with them. (...)

When they set off, one by one, first in the sprint, then the first shootout, what struck me was how quiet the cars were. This makes sense to me as someone who once studied acoustics in graduate school. Formula 1, again like sword fighting, is about an economy of motion. Noise is a hallmark of mechanical inefficiency. When mechanical systems work well, they work quietly. Noise at its core is excess energy. In Formula 1 cars, being perfect machines, that energy is redirected where it could be of use. The track began with a big hill, 11 percent in gradient, which made for a spectacular formal gesture, especially with the people on the lawn alongside it crowded on blankets. This, the finish line, and the straightaway coming off the final turn, were all I could see. There was a television above the opposite grandstands, but information was refreshingly scarce. When I watch F1 on TV, I'm used to the constant chattering of the commentators, the endless switching of perspectives and camera angles, the many maps. Here, I stood, and the cars merely passed, and when they passed, numbers changed on a big tower. It was so clean and almost proper, the way they flew by me in the sprint, dutifully, without savagery. Team principals and engineers were lined up on stools in their little cubbyholes crowding around laptops. In between each car was a calm lull in which calculations and feedback were made. A man with a sign walked up to the edge of the track to mark the laps for the Mercedes drivers. Then, almost bored, he sat on a stool waiting to do it again. I found this lull and surge transfixing, as though I were viewing the scaffolding behind a convincing theater set, the mundanity behind the spectacle.

The sound came before the machine and then the machine blurred by and disappeared over the elegant hill, singing. By the second sprint shootout, even though I've watched F1 for a few years now, I had no idea what was going on without 10 split-screen views and a guy yelling in my ear. The cards fell where they fell: Max in first as usual, followed by Leclerc, but then, unexpectedly, Alex Albon. After the second sprint, the INEOS folks informed the journalists that we needed to leave early in order to avoid traffic and make it to dinner on time, where, apparently there would be a special guest. Frustrated, I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color. Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form—cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles. As we waited for the van to take us where we were parked, a part of the track was still visible to us. Hamilton distinguished himself by the lines he cut along the corner and the loudness of his engine, that pushing. We heard over a loudspeaker that he had finished third, a remarkable improvement above the last two sprints, where he lagged behind in the midfield. This made everyone in our camp happy. They always called him by his first name. It reminded me of how I used to talk about cyclists after I started interviewing them, with the swagger of knowing them. An SUV passed by us with a cavalcade of cars in front.

"That's Prince Harry," someone said.

The dinner was in the private room of an expensive steakhouse. I was wise to have brought a dress but the other journalists, newly arrived, were not as fortunate—they came in Car and Driver T-shirts. In the room with us were other executives from INEOS and their wives. The prices of the steaks began at 70 dollars. People overuse the expression "crawling out of one's skin," but I felt it then. My family is not from the stock that prepares their children with arcane table manners necessary for moments like this. I ate a lovely cut of beef praying that no one was looking at me. My knife clattered and startled one of the wives. The four journalists talked about cars. They were definitely journalists, a lively bunch, though most of them were rookies around my age, with the requisite excitement. We made self-deprecating jokes about ourselves. The executives watched, making some conversation. They knew I worked in cycling and talked to me about that. It's very funny. We know there is a class system in America, a great divide between the haves and have-nots. To be a have-not and be talked to by the haves has an air of the farcical to it. Everything is just manners with nothing inside. Everyone is perfectly nice as though that would bridge the chasm of difference. When Hamilton came into the room he was wearing a cool pair of pants with shimmery colored mesh sewed in and had an exhausted appearance, having come just from the track. We were allowed to talk to him but were told not to make any recordings or transcriptions. When he spoke, it was notable how often he mentioned his father and how deeply-felt his political convictions were. Some people are totally different off the record, but Lewis was simply a more lively version of himself. I find him a fascinating figure. A lot of fans either love or hate him, see him, paradoxically, as both humble and arrogant. The word quiet is better. Not reserved, not shy, just quiet. He belongs to a special group of people. The ones I've met in life include the violinist Hilary Hahn and Pogačar, the Tour de France winner—human beings who walk the earth differently, with an aura that transcends it. He appeared perpetually relaxed, controlled and refined, both present with us in the room but on a higher plane within. We used to call this magnificence when we believed in kings. I don't know what we call it now. Excellence, maybe. The irony of parading someone incredible like that around in the backrooms of petrochemical executives is not lost on me. I was grateful that I got the opportunity to speak to Lewis Hamilton, someone I am not ashamed to say I admire. I would have preferred it if they let him go home and rest instead.

I learned more about myself on my trip to Austin than I did about F1. I learned that I'm the kind of person who would rather be right than happy, would rather stand in my ivory tower than frolic in the fields below. I experienced firsthand the intended effect of allowing riffraff like me, those who distinguish themselves by way of words alone, to mingle with the giants of capitalism and their cultural attachés. It is to give this anointed everyman a taste of the good life, to make them feel like a prince for a day, and that if they do this with enough scribblers they will write nice words and somehow ameliorate the divide between the classes. My hosts were nice people with faces. They showed us extraordinary hospitality. If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing. Like Lewis Hamilton? You can eat steaks that cost the same as your electricity bill and meet him again. You, too, can bask in the balding aura of Prince Harry and the fake glow of Instagram models. Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform. What I received wasn't a crash course in Formula 1—in fact, Formula 1 only became more mystifying to me—but journalism, as viewed by the other side. The great irony of the other side is that they need journalism. The petrochemical companies, deeply powerful institutions, need journalists to write about all the things they attach themselves to that are not being a petrochemical company. Formula 1, on a rapacious tangent for growth and new markets, needs journalists to spread the good word of the richest sport in the world. Unfortunately for the other side, journalism still remains a double-edged sword. Send me on an experience and I'll have an experience. Sadly, I suffer from an unprofitable disease that makes me only ever capable of writing about the experience I'm having. The doctors say it's terminal.

by Kate Wagner, Road & Track via The Wayback Machine |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

[ed. Great controversy after this story was killed by R&T for unknown reasons. See: The Road & Track Formula One Scandal Makes No Sense (This Week in Tabs). 

The Case for Getting a Life

This essay in The Cut is titled “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” and its first sentence is: “In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery,” so I can’t say I didn’t know what I was getting into. But Grazie Sophia Christie and an editor who remains unnamed but obviously despises her have created a classic hate-read of the kind I thought was extinct in these debased times. In thirty eight hundred intermittently grammatical words and as many unnecessary commas as possible Christie tells the story of her life as a twenty year old Harvard nymphet provocatively reading Lolita in the Harvard Business School library in order to bag an older man and graduate with her MRS degree, a tale so old she thinks she made it up.

I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out.

I swear that’s an actual quote. What the hell is a “flush ponytail?” Anyway her plan succeeds:

I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe…

After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

But, twist! When they met, she was twenty and he was a burned out, grizzled… thirty. When she said “older” she mostly meant “rich.” Now seven whole years later she’s ready to explore a philosophical territory made up of something like the negative space excluded by intersectional feminism and class solidarity. Recognizing that all too often it’s women’s labor that molds men into a shape women find appealing, Christie sees her proper role as the beneficiary of this labor, previously done by some now-used-up thirty year old hag. Not for her, the teaching of coasters! For her instead, the life of a robot girlfriend from classic sci-fi.

Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

This is an essay that dares to ask: “What if I made my whole life out of red flags?” The great irony of having time enough at last to “write full-time” is that when your rich husband funds your vanity lit mag, nothing will ever force you to learn how to write well.

Anyway they’re planning to have children soon and that will obviously go splendidly. Nobody in history has ever been this twenty seven years old, and I can’t wait for the update six or seven years from now, when she starts to get her first glimpse of how very long life really is.

by Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs |  Read more:

Image: Celine Ka Wing Lau

[ed. Otherwise known as golddigging. Currently burning up the internet. See also: ah, to be young (idiots, continue)]

The Alpha King

I’d come that night for a talk by Nick Adams, a conservative influencer from Australia whose viral social media posts have earned him prominence in the MAGA movement. He’s been an official surrogate for Trump since the 2020 election, appearing on talk shows across the political spectrum to defend the ex-president with a pit bull’s determination. On his website, Adams calls himself “the Godfather of the ‘Alpha King’ movement,” inspiring his “3M+ social media followers to ‘level up’ in every aspect of their lives.” This event was a stop on his book tour for Alpha Kings, his seventh volume to date.

The “alpha king” ethos is a blend of Tucker Carlson and Tucker Max, with notes of Jordan Peterson thrown in. It is aggrieved and unequivocal. It is also really hard to take at face value. “I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night,” Adams wrote last year in a typical post. “I am pursued by copious amounts of women. I am wildly successful. I have the physique of a Greek God. I have an IQ over 180. I am extremely charismatic.”

Adams’ posts oscillate between standard right-wing grievance and absurdist, almost ritualistic celebration of masculine totems: Hooters, golf, football, steak, pounding “ice-cold domestics,” and chasing Sheilas (roughly, Australian bro-speak for “ladies”). In video diatribes, Adams holds forth on disloyal RINOs and “woke” gyms and fast-food chains, his Australian accent punctuating his varying levels of disgust, outrage, and zeal. But his most singular focus is on defending the natural rights of the traditionally hyper-masculine. (...)

Is Adams an overwrought activist or a deft satirist on an undercover mission? That question is a big part of the enigma. Let me call your attention to Adams’ posts about the joys of golfing with men, which soar past odes to male bonding and directly into gleeful homoeroticism. In one such story posted online, Adams writes of encountering Ricardo, “a fit young man with thick dark hair who looked to be of Latin descent.” Admiring the “tour stiff shafts in all his clubs,” Adams sensed that Ricardo was “searching for something”:

Yesterday morning after church, I went straight for the golf course for a quick solo round before the first games kicked off at 1. 

When I arrived, I went straight to the first tee box since I was sufficiently warmed up from my intense workout at the gym earlier in the morning. 

“Going for the course record again, Mr. Adams?” said Harvey, the Vietnam veteran who served as the starter at my home course. “Of course I am, Harv,” I said as I fastened my Cabretta leather golf glove, “but I’m all about speed today. I hope whoever you pair with me can play fast because I won’t be waiting around.” 

Harvey assured me that wouldn’t be an issue as he introduced me to Ricardo, a fit young man with thick dark hair who looked to be of Latin descent. I teed off first, as an alpha male always does. I took an aggressive, DeChambeau-esque line and striped my first drive over the trees and safely on the fairway a mere 100 yards from the green. 

Ricardo took a more conservative line but hit an excellent drive that landed well behind mine but still in the fairway. We played the first few holes very closely, trying to feel each other out. Observing his demeanor gave me the distinct sense that he was searching for something today. I checked out his equipment when he stopped to use the restroom at the halfway house. Tour stiff shafts in all his clubs and a complete set of Titleist T100 irons. Whatever he was looking for, it certainly was NOT his golf game. 

I paid careful attention to his swing. The boy had game, but then I noticed his hips weren’t moving with the same fluidity and power I would expect based on his shafts. “Eureka,” I whispered to myself. I had figured it out. He was carrying a burden. This young man needed some masculine guidance, and God dropped him right into my lap.

by Ezra Marcus, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Marcus Maddox
[ed. Satire or not, somebody's buying his book. See these Twitter/X posts: here and here. Hilarious.]

“Like me, I know that Nick appreciates the power of humor, when it comes to making a point,” Trump writes in the foreword to Alpha Kings, Adams’ new book. “Reminding young men of the importance of faith in God, hard work, sports, ambition, discipline, confidence, manners, and love of country is a very important task and Nick embraces that challenge with gusto, knowledge, and heart.”

                                                                  ~ Forward, by Donald Trump

Beyoncé

[ed. I've never been much of a Beyoncé fan, but I do appreciate her talent. That said, her new country album is terrific:]

"The immediate head-turners on Cowboy Carter are the reinterpretations of two of pop’s most enduring classics: the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” The former, a straight-ahead cover, is an opportunity to showcase the divine voices of Adell, Spencer, Roberts, and Kennedy. The latter is a little more distinctive: Beyoncé adds new lyrics to the original, transforming it into the kind of fiery rebuke that would fit right in on Lemonade. As if to ward off skepticism from country purists, Beyoncé’s “Jolene” is introduced by Parton herself, who nods to “Sorry” in a spoken word interlude: “You know that hussy with the good hair you sang about? Reminded me of someone I knew back when, except she has flamin’ locks of auburn hair, bless her heart. It’s just hair of a different color, but it hurts just the same.” (...)

Cowboy Carter features A-list guests from the world of country and beyond—Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Post Malone—but the most surprising collaboration on the album is “II Most Wanted,” featuring occasional cowgirl Miley Cyrus. What makes “II Most Wanted,” produced by indie stalwart Shawn Everett, fascinating is that it’s a pure, old-fashioned duet, which is something of a rarity for Beyoncé: When she has collaborated with other vocalists over the past few years, she’s tended to draft them in for a verse or some ad-libs and little more. In the style of a classic country duet, Cyrus trades verses with Beyoncé before harmonizing with her on the chorus. As two of contemporary pop’s most powerful voices, they could have easily tried to out-diva each other—but the resulting track is tastefully restrained."

~7 Takeaways From Beyoncé’s New Album "Cowboy Carter" (Pitchfork)

[ed. See also: this review of the entire album: "Cowboy Carter" (Pitchfork)

Secrets of Japanese Urbanism: Why Japanese Cities Are Such Nice Places to Live

Briefly, I attributed the awesomeness of Japanese cities to:

• Zoning that tells you what you can’t build in an area, instead of what you can build, which allows most areas to have shops and restaurants

• Zoning that forces shops and restaurants to be smaller in more residential areas

• Policies to promote small, independent retail businesses over large ones

• Public safety

• Noiseproofing and noise ordinances

• Excellent trains

• Nice public spaces

That list was, of course, pretty reductionist. You could implement those same policies elsewhere in the world, and while you might get a really awesome city, it would still be very different from Tokyo. There’s a huge amount of historical context involved in how Japanese cities became the way they are — events like World War 2, planning choices, cultural preferences and aesthetic style, business and government institutions, broader economic policies, and so on. (...)

Zakkyo buildings

Most of the iconic photos you see of Tokyo involve a whole bunch of colorful densely packed electric signs running up and down the front of narrow buildings. For example:

These are called zakkyo buildings. The word roughly translates to “miscellaneous”. They contain a whole bunch of small retail businesses — restaurants, bars, retail outlets, schools, health care offices, whatever. Sometimes there are dozens of these in a single building. None of the businesses are related to each other; you just rent out a space in a zakkyo.

The distinctive look of a zakkyo building — and from whole streets of zakkyo buildings packed together — comes from Japanese architectural codes. Building tall-ish, narrow buildings was a way to maximize usable floor space within the rules of the postwar period. Japanese laws also allow for a lot of different types of businesses to coexist in any given space — there are basically no regulations on serving alcohol. Some buildings also have external elevators and/or staircases, which makes it easy to get up to a top-floor store from the street.

But perhaps most importantly, Japanese regulations were and are very lenient about allowing a bunch of electric signs, including signs that hang out into the street. Even as Simon and Garfunkel were decrying the “neon god” of urban modernity, Japan was embracing a libertarian approach to small business. Putting a restaurant on the 4th floor of a building often only makes sense if you can inform passing pedestrians that there’s a restaurant up there — which means having a big glowing sign.

Add these all up, and it made economic sense to cram a whole bunch of small businesses into the upper floors of buildings in the city center. So Japan did. And in doing so, it created one of the world’s most distinctive and beautiful modern urban landscapes, even as other cities’ old-fashioned aesthetic preferences caused them to restrict electric signage. Now people come from all over the world to take pictures of Tokyo’s beautiful streetscapes.

But zakkyo buildings have a benefit that goes way beyond aesthetics. When you can stack a bunch of retail businesses vertically, you can cram a whole lot of retail into a very small part of a city. Those retail centers — think of central Shibuya, Shinjuku, etc. — become very crowded with foot traffic.

But that allows more residential areas of the city to be leafy and quiet, even if they’re only a few blocks away! It takes only a few minutes’ walk from the intersection above to reach a quiet backstreet lined with houses.

In dense cities where retail is largely confined to the first floors of buildings, the retail has to be much more spread out throughout the city. This means that if you’re going shopping, you have to walk or take a train long distances in order to see a whole bunch of different stores. It also means that a lot of people’s apartments are located above noisy retail outlets and crowded streets.

In other words, NYC and other dense cities could use some zakkyo buildings. Allow external electric signs and easy street access to top floors, and you allow retail to concentrate vertically instead of having to sprawl across the city. You get the benefit of incredible variety for shoppers, even as you spare a lot of people’s apartment buildings the sounds of tramping feet, shouting voices, delivery trucks, and slamming car doors.

Also, it just looks pretty darn cool. (...)

Japan’s secret sauce is small business

Greater Tokyo has 160,000 restaurants. The New York City metropolitan area has 25,000. The Paris metropolitan area has only 13,000. Tokyo has a larger population, but even after accounting for that, it has well over twice the variety of eating establishments that NYC has. Most of these are small businesses rather than big chains. This turns out to be essential not just to Japan’s excellent urbanism, but to Japan’s middle class as well.

Most of Emergent Tokyo is dedicated to discussing Japan’s unique commercial spaces — yokocho, undertrack arcades, and so on. (...)

For every single one of these cases, the story is the same. The space thrives because of high commercial density — a massive variety of businesses packed into a small area. As I wrote in my previous post, commercial density is massively under-discussed. It allows for variety — in Japan, when you go out to eat, there are a million restaurants to choose from, and they’re all near each other. When you go clothes shopping, there are a million little boutiques to try, and they’re all near each other. This massively enhances the shopping experience.

But it’s not just variety; it’s uniqueness. If you went into a zakkyo building and everything was just an Olive Garden, a Starbucks, or a 24 Hour Fitness, it would get pretty boring after a while. The romance of urban Japan is that there are always a bunch of completely new places to discover, and so it’s always worth walking around and discovering stuff.

And that couldn’t happen unless there were a huge number of people who wanted to start small businesses. Every single commercial space that Emergent Tokyo talks about — the yokocho, the zakkyo, the undertrack arcades — depends on a bunch of small businesses wanting to locate there. If that demand isn’t there, the spaces will either go unfilled or be filled by chains. And without the small business associations to band together and resist redevelopment pressures, Japan’s most iconic urban spaces will eventually be turned into boring corporate malls — not because of the disembodied evils of capitalism, but simply because without small businesses, there’s not much to do with that space except put a boring corporate mall there. (...)

Besides making urban environments pleasant and exciting, it seems to me that small business owners provide a crucial constituency for many of the essential ingredients of Japanese urbanism.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Jaison Lin; Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Lorde

[ed. Do we really need another Take Me to the River cover? Sure (if it's like this). See also: Talking Heads’ Original Lineup on Stop Making Sense, Their Early Days, and the Future (Pitchfork).]

Why Is the Best Vodka From Costco?

Tony Abou-Ganim is drinking vodka during our call, even though it’s 10 a.m. in Las Vegas, where he lives. The “modern mixologist,” as he calls himself, alternates sips from two custom-designed tasting glasses, one vodka, then the other vodka, swishing the liquors around in his mouth to really get a feel for them.

The two vodkas on the menu were of the same brand name but had different countries of origin, different makers, different base ingredients—and Abou-Ganim could tell. I hadn’t outright asked him to taste-test them, but I had been hoping he would. He much preferred the French-made vodka to the American-made one, and that’s not just snootiness. He’s a big fan of other American vodkas, like the now-ubiquitous Tito’s. (He knows Tito.)

The French vodka has notes of vanilla and caramel—dare he say, a crème brûlée taste? A nice acidity with notes of lemon, citrus, and white pepper on the back, he told me, evoking an instant “saliva drip.” Although the American didn’t cut it for him, the experts at the New York Times’ Wirecutter full-throatedly endorsed it. According to those taste-testers, it has subtle hints of citrus and rose and the texture is silky.

These careful, artful descriptions surprised me: Discussions of tasting notes, mouthfeel, and terroir are often deserved for fine wines and expensive whiskeys. Certainly not vodka, which, as many a college student has determined, is best when nearly invisible.

Also surprising? The humble point of purchase of these vodkas. To try them yourself, you’ll need to journey past the window selling $1.50 jumbo hot dogs, past the 83-inch 4K-resolution TVs, past the brilliant-cut diamond engagement rings, and past the 36-roll family packs of Scott toilet paper. These are Kirkland Signature vodkas, house spirits of the big-box superstore Costco.

What makes Kirkland’s vodkas so tantalizing is not merely that they’re a grocery store steal—priced between $10 and $25 for a cartoonish 1.75 liters of spirit, with no other size options. It’s that these spirits come with a mixed-in spice of intrigue, mystique, and lore. Connoisseurs (and anyone who puts them to a taste test, really) consider them legitimately good. Kirkland Signature American Vodka was not merely in the Wirecutter review for the best vodka, which was written by Haley Perry, a former bartender. It earned the top spot, a “unanimous favorite.”

Rumors have long abounded that Kirkland vodka is simply a dressed-down version of the most gussied-up mass-market vodka: Grey Goose. This isn’t the case, but the rumor itself, which has been swirling for nearly two decades—at least—leads us to a better understanding of a world in which the two could plausibly be confused. Because we live in that world. As the Kirkland saga exemplifies, vodka is both firmly lodged in American consumption and woefully misunderstood.

Vodka has been popular in Europe—namely, Poland and Russia and Sweden—for generations and generations. But in the past century, it has had a transcendent rise here in the U.S. and, since 1976, has been the bestselling spirit in the country. In 2023 Americans bought $7.2 billion worth of vodka, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. That’s more than whiskey, cognac, gin, and rum. Tequila and mezcal are on the rise, but they still sit in second place, with $6 billion in sales.

But vodka, for its long history as a commercial juggernaut, has also become something of a punchline in the drinking and bartending communities. Abou-Ganim, who wrote the 2013 book Vodka Distilled, recounted a trip to an Oakland cocktail bar where he was surprised to find its menu completely lacking in vodka-based options. He asked the mustachioed twentysomething bartender whether the establishment carried vodka at all.

“Yes, we carry two,” the bartender said to him. “And in my opinion, that’s two too many.”

There’s an underlying paradox in vodka that might explain its status among the nation’s snootiest imbibers: No one seems quite sure whether it’s supposed to taste like nothing or whether it’s supposed to taste like something.

by Scott Nover, Slate |  Read more:

Image: LeMusique/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Costco.

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

“The Caring Hand,” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber. Photo by Kris Graves (Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery, Alabama)

Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South (New Yorker)

[ed. See also: The Transatlantic Slave Trade: 500 Years Later, Are We Still Slaves? (The Washington Informer).]

Jacob’s Dream

MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius

Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s, winner of the Phoenix New Times Best Gluten-Free Restaurant award in 2015. Despite a protracted hunger strike and 317 days isolated in a cell, Jacob’s prison sentence of forty-one months for obstruction of an official proceeding on January 6, 2021, had been shortened owing to good behavior, and he was let out about a year early on supervised release.

It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective. “People are brainwashed by the elites and their propaganda networks,” he said. “Mass hypnosis, bro.”

He had agreed to meet with me on a number of conditions, including:

1. That I mention Dr. Royal Raymond Rife, the American inventor of an oscillating beam-ray medical technology that, according to Jacob, is a cure for cancer that has been quashed by the government, the military, and pharmaceutical giants; and

2. That I call attention to the existence of a clean, free, wireless, and renewable energy source powered by the earth’s magnetic field that was discovered by Nikola Tesla but suppressed by the government because such a technology would make the existing energy grid obsolete, and thus threaten the rule of the globalists and their corporate monopolies.

Jacob believes he has been sent to earth to combat wicked forces such as Warner Bros. and MGM. He believes in the clear and present danger of a global ring of slave-trading, adrenochrome-swigging Clintonistas. He would also like to lift the ban on psilocybin mushrooms. And he’s been doing the work for a long time—for “millennia,” he told me. “I have reincarnated on this planet numerous times throughout the ages.”

Jacob is as apt to paraphrase Shirley MacLaine as WikiLeaks Vault 7 or Alex Jones, which is why I had reached out to him. He is Exhibit A of the widely reported observation that MAGA, QAnon, and the broader conspiratorial mishmash draw substantial support from the consciousness-raising, om-chanting, sound-healing, joint-toking, crystal- and chart-reading crowd, the long-haired hippies who half a century ago were lumped together with the fellow travelers of the left, but have been reincarnated two generations later as pivotal elements of the Trump coalition. Jacob and his cosmic vibrations epitomize that political reversal. Perhaps, I thought, there was something in his belief system that could explain how the self-evident truths that guided the foundation of American democracy had lost their way in the wilderness.

I figured the tattoos would be a good place to start. As he was perusing Picazzo’s menu, I mentioned the marks on the backs of his hands. They were planets, pyramids, and runes, he said—the alphabets native to early Germanic and Norse peoples. The massive dark blots on his shoulder took six and a half hours. “My reality—what I thought was reality—was ripping at the seams right in front of my closed eyelids,” he said, recalling the ordeal. “I was seeing the quantum particles.”

He was also tripping on mushrooms. (...)

His biological father spent most of Jacob’s youth in jail and played no role as a parent. His stepfather, whom he calls his dad, committed suicide.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “when one has not had a good father, one must create one.” Carl Jung ratified the idea of the fantasy father in 1919, when he labeled the concept an “archetype,” by which he meant a mental compendium of mythic, legendary, and fairy-tale fathers all wrapped up into one enormous daddy issue.

Jacob, who was born in 1987, came of age in the wake of Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book published in 1990 about modern man’s alienation from heroic male archetypes that spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a seminal work of the mythopoetic men’s movement. Like Jacob, Bly served in the Navy. Like Jacob, Bly’s father was an alcoholic. Like Jacob, Bly was interested in Old Norse mythology—in particular, the epic tales of the principal Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain mystical knowledge, subjected himself to nine days and nights of torture. He lanced himself with a spear and hung upside down from Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree that connects the nine realms of the universe, a tattoo of which lies over Jacob’s heart.

In the era of Iron John, “manosphere” membership required bongos, sweat lodges, hugging, weeping, and throwing spears at boars. Today, it’s about getting buff, buying liver-enzyme pills online, and keeping a paleo diet. (...)

I nodded, and we sat in silence for a while. A waiter appeared, smiling in a vague, embarrassed sort of way. He seemed to have recognized Jacob and was ready to stand at attention.

But The Shaman’s thoughts had roamed far from the realm of gluten-free food. “The most evil things happen when a person believes that they are anonymous, when they’ve covered their face,” he mused after some time. “Whether it be with war paint, or whether it be with a mask.” Which struck me as odd, because at the Capitol on January 6, Jacob had painted his face. He had covered his head with a coyote-tail headdress and topped it off with buffalo horns. Holding his staff and megaphone, he sat his ass down in the presiding officer’s chair.

Now he looked me square in the eye.

“You’re paying, right?”

For the record, The Shaman ordered his pizza topped with artichoke hearts, basil, chicken, and mushrooms.

In court, Jacob’s lawyer told the judge that his client would not kill an insect, that he was picked on as a child and bullied as a teenager. After high school, he joined the Navy and found himself aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, a floating apocalypse-in-waiting, bristling with surface-to-air missiles, Super Hornet fighter jets, Prowler radar jammers, and Seahawk helicopters. It was the same ship aboard which John Frankenheimer filmed scenes for Seven Days in May, the 1964 black-and-white classic in which Kirk Douglas plays Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, who uncovers a plot against the United States government masterminded by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was the first movie of its kind, ushering in what became a standard in Hollywood thrillers after the Kennedy assassination: the deep state conspiracy.

About six months into his assignment, the ship psychologist diagnosed him with schizotypal personality disorder, an incurable condition characterized by social isolation, limited reactions to social cues, and sometimes a penchant to dress unusually. He received what the military calls a “general discharge, under honorable conditions,” in 2007, and returned to his mother’s house in Phoenix.

The living room here has an ornamental equine vibe—lit by a horse lamp, wall adorned with images of horses—except for the bookshelf, where what might have been a cowboy hat has been replaced by a Trump hat. Martha Chansley doesn’t subscribe to cable television. She believes that the buffalo is a “mystic” animal. When a reporter and camera crew from FOX 10 Phoenix descended on her house after her son had been taken into custody, she noted another mystical bond, this one with Donald Trump: “We are a part of him, and he is a part of us.”

“My mom was always kinda into woo-woo,” Jacob admitted.

After being discharged from the Navy, he remembered how he had once happened upon a CD in his mother’s car. The plastic case showed a bald and bearded hippie who had been dismissed from his psychology assistant professorship at Harvard because of his research on psychedelic drug therapies.

“I was like—oh, okay, that’s interesting.”

What The Shaman had stumbled across was a set of lectures given by Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert. Four years after his dismissal from Harvard, Alpert had traveled to India and changed his name to Baba Ram Dass. Four years after that, he published a book called Be Here Now, which sold two million copies and became a counterculture bible for Steve Jobs, Wayne Dyer, and George Harrison.

“I was awestruck,” Jacob said.

by Frederick Kaufman, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Pep Montserrat

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Adaptation Channels the Book’s Spirit But Not Its Brilliance

In his 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu created a fascinating world where cutting-edge particle physics, VR gaming, and Chinese history played crucial roles in shaping humanity’s response to an imminent planet-wide threat. It also seemed unfilmable. The depth of the book’s ideas about cultural memory and the complexity of its central mystery made The Three-Body Problem feel like a story that could only work on the page.

That hasn’t stopped streamers from trying, and last year, Tencent debuted its own live-action, episodic take on Liu’s book. Netflix spent a fortune putting 3 Body Problem in the hands of executive producers David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Their adaptation is leaner and more diverse than the book in a way that makes it a very different kind of story. Often, it’s a good one — and very occasionally a great one — that works as an introductory crash course to the basic ideas key to understanding the larger concepts that shape Liu’s later books.

But rather than confronting the sophistication of the book, Netflix’s main priority with 3 Body Problem seems to be selling it as the next Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss’ last series). And while it’s easy to understand why the streamer might want that, it’s hard not to see the show as a flashy but stripped-down version of the source material.

3 Body Problem involves a constellation of distinct narratives spanning multiple decades and generations. But at its core, the show is a compelling thriller about how the sins of humanity’s past come to shape its future. In a world where the scientific community has been rocked by an alarming wave of mysterious suicides, private intelligence officer Clarence Shi (Benedict Wong) and a group of researchers get swept up in a race to save the planet from destruction.

As a former agent of both MI5 and Scotland Yard, Clarence is no stranger to shadowy plots. But he’s vastly out of his depth in the worlds of cutting-edge theoretical physics and materials engineering. Meanwhile, scientist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is also navigating uncharted waters as she struggles to make sense of what’s happening to her peers and why many experiments involving particle accelerators are going wrong. The panic of the present day pushes Jin to reconnect with her four best college friends, and the dynamic of the reunited “Oxford Five” inches closer to revealing a world-ending threat.

Given the structural complexity of Liu’s books, it isn’t surprising that Netflix’s 3 Body is streamlined in a much more linear fashion that makes it feel like Lost-style mystery-within-a-mystery you’re figuring out alongside Clarence. But it’s actually in 3 Body Problem’s core group of characters that you can most clearly see the steps Benioff, Weiss, and Woo took to rework Liu’s ideas for a more global audience.

Before the book’s story in present-day China really gets going, Liu spends quite a bit of time in the past in order to give you a better grasp of the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist movement to purge society of capitalists and intellectuals. It’s the Party’s reversal of these horrifying policies — instead embracing academia and scientific research — that sets China on a path to become a global superpower. And as the book moves into the present, that historical context helps you appreciate why a sudden and sustained spike in inexplicable scientist suicides would prompt the government to deploy counter-terrorism operatives to investigate.

In the novel, much of the early mystery is rooted in the fact that its characters — like offputting former detective Shi Qiang (often referred to as “Da Shi”) and nanomaterials specialist Wang Miao — are solving it in isolation. Netflix’s answer to Da Shi, Clarence, is now British and a softer, more contemplative presence than his curmudgeon literary counterpart. The show also splits Wang’s character into the Oxford Five, an ethnically diverse group of friends consisting of Jin, research assistant Saul (Jovan Adepo), nanotech expert Auggie (Eiza González), physics teacher Will (Alex Sharp), and snack magnate Jack (John Bradley).

Making characters fumble in the darkness on their way to solving the puzzle of Three-Body was one of the many ways Liu mirrored, on a microscopic level, the book’s larger ideas about the power of collaborative efforts versus the control that comes from individual decision-making. But because the show’s Oxford Five are all friends (and former lovers in some instances) who quickly begin working together, relationships drive the plot forward more than its existential puzzle. These changes bring a new level of interpersonal drama to Netflix’s show that isn’t present in the book, especially for Auggie, who’s haunted by visions of a glowing countdown that seems to be seared onto her retinas. Dividing Wang into five distinct characters emphasizes the idea that there’s power in looking at complicated problems from a diverse array of unique perspectives.

But because the Oxford Five are all based on a single character and spend so much time talking each other through theories about what’s going on, scenes focused on them often feel the show taking a moment to spell out plot points in ways that feel clumsy and inorganic. This is less the case when 3 Body Problem shifts its focus to the past and zeroes in on the life of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a promising young astrophysicist whose entire world is upended by the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like in the book, 3 Body Problem truly begins with Ye and how the personal choices she makes — all informed by her experiences as a survivor of the Revolution — have an incalculable impact on the future at a worldwide scale.

In both the book and Netflix’s adaptation, Ye’s story is a powerful one that contextualizes the present in important ways. But the show is less willing to dwell in it. Rather than consider the political and personal effects of the Revolution, the series commits to being a thinky but easily digestible chronicle of the world readying itself for war. (...)

Meanwhile, the show invests in the messy lives of the Oxford Five and their flirtations with a futuristic piece of technology that plunges its wearer into an unimaginable world of riddles, mathematics, and roleplaying. The headset also gives the show a way of stepping outside the confines of the detective genre and into an otherworldly space that has the recognizable markers of science fiction, like planets with multiple suns. Smartly, 3 Body Problem balances out some of that predictability by placing many of its most imaginative, impossible set pieces in the game where the uncanny combo of Netflix’s signature visual look and an inordinate amount of shiny VFX. And it actually works as a plus rather than a minus here because of how unsettling playing the game is supposed to feel.

There are at least a few truly breathtaking action sequences unevenly sprinkled throughout 3 Body Problem’s first season. But for all their terrifying beauty, they’re not quite enough to keep the show from feeling like Netflix’s adequate attempt at distilling a literary masterpiece into eight hours of television. 

by Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge | Read more:

Image: Netflix/The Ringer

[ed. Precisely. See also: 3 Body Problem’s Failure of Imagination (TNR); The Real Issue With Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (The Atlantic), and, The ‘3 Body Problem’ Exit Survey (The Ringer).]

The Waterboys

Now he's brought down the rain 

And the Indian summer's reign is through

In the morning you'll be following your trail again

Fair play to you

You ain't calling me to join you 

And I'm spoken for anyway 

But I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

Your beauty is familiar 

And your voice is like a key 

That opens up my soul 

And torches up a fire inside of me 

Your coat is made of magic 

And around your table angels play 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

Somebody left his whisky 

And the night is very young 

I've some to say and I've more to tell 

And the words will soon be spilling from my tongue

 

I will rave and I will ramble 

I'll do everything but make you stay 

Then I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away...