Emil Nolde, 1914
via:
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
via: Vinyl Artwork
[ed. French singer Lizzy Mercier Descloux, along with guitarist D.J. Barnes (Didier Esteban) formed the band Rosa Yemen in 1978. According to Wikipedia: self-taught as a guitarist, she expressed herself as a minimalist within the no wave genre, concentrating on single-note lines combined with wrong-note harmonies and funky rhythms. See also, for example: Decriptated (YT).]
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.
John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.
Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.
But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.
Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.
Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience—but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war—he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill,” he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.
Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis.
In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness—a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary.
The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.
Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.” The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.
II.
And what he wants to do is… well, honestly, not all that much. Carter’s governing style is less “bold visionary,” more “competent manager.” He appoints more minorities to civil service jobs, starts an early childhood development program, and passes a reorg that streamlines a bunch of governmental agencies, but mostly he thinks about running for president. Governors in Georgia are limited to a single term, and Carter has national ambitions. He commits privately to a presidential run only a year into his time in the governor’s office.
When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider.
Despite the fact that his gubernatorial campaign was premised entirely on obscuring his actual beliefs, he opens his presidential campaign with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” He runs an Obama-esque campaign, emphasizing his personal background and outsider status rather than any specific accomplishments. By the time he wins the primary, he has a huge polling lead over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who’s unpopular thanks to his recent pardon of Richard Nixon and the memory of that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One.
Carter then proceeds to squander almost his entire lead via a series of poor campaign decisions. First, he’s so overconfident that he refuses to prepare for his first debate with Ford, and completely bungles it as a result. He then sits for an interview with Playboy weeks before the election and, completely unprompted, mentions that he’s “looked on a lot of women with lust” in his life and “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” There’s a growing perception that Carter is, in the infamous words of one journalist, “a weirdo.” (...)
Although his lead shrinks consistently up through election day, Carter nonetheless manages to squeak out a narrow victory against Ford, 49.9 to 47.9%. Had just 10,000 voters in two states flipped their votes, Carter would have lost the electoral college. But they didn’t. And now, the weirdo has become the president.
by Max Nussenbaum, Slate Star Codex/CFB | Read more:
Image: Andy Warhol
John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.
Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.
Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.
Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience—but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war—he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill,” he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.
Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis.
In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness—a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary.
The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.
Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.” The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.
II.
And what he wants to do is… well, honestly, not all that much. Carter’s governing style is less “bold visionary,” more “competent manager.” He appoints more minorities to civil service jobs, starts an early childhood development program, and passes a reorg that streamlines a bunch of governmental agencies, but mostly he thinks about running for president. Governors in Georgia are limited to a single term, and Carter has national ambitions. He commits privately to a presidential run only a year into his time in the governor’s office.
When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider.
Despite the fact that his gubernatorial campaign was premised entirely on obscuring his actual beliefs, he opens his presidential campaign with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” He runs an Obama-esque campaign, emphasizing his personal background and outsider status rather than any specific accomplishments. By the time he wins the primary, he has a huge polling lead over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who’s unpopular thanks to his recent pardon of Richard Nixon and the memory of that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One.
Carter then proceeds to squander almost his entire lead via a series of poor campaign decisions. First, he’s so overconfident that he refuses to prepare for his first debate with Ford, and completely bungles it as a result. He then sits for an interview with Playboy weeks before the election and, completely unprompted, mentions that he’s “looked on a lot of women with lust” in his life and “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” There’s a growing perception that Carter is, in the infamous words of one journalist, “a weirdo.” (...)
Although his lead shrinks consistently up through election day, Carter nonetheless manages to squeak out a narrow victory against Ford, 49.9 to 47.9%. Had just 10,000 voters in two states flipped their votes, Carter would have lost the electoral college. But they didn’t. And now, the weirdo has become the president.
III.
You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout. Now, you’re the most powerful man in the world. What do you do next?
The first answer is, you micromanage to a spectacular degree. Alone among all presidents since Truman, Carter refuses to appoint a Chief of Staff. He then immediately demonstrates why he needs one by involving himself in a comical number of minor decisions, including personally deciding which magazine subscriptions his speechwriting team should get, cutting down on the amount of food served at breakfast with congressional leaders, and canceling car service for his staff because it’ll save $92,000 of the $409 billion federal budget. Oh, and he also insists that all White House thermostats be set at 65° (55° at night), though this last mandate is eventually rescinded when the staff—some of whom are so cold they’ve been typing with gloves on—rebel.
The charitable interpretation of these decisions is that, in the wake of Watergate, Carter wants to emphasize that he and his staff are servants of the American people. The uncharitable interpretation is that Carter is an obsessive egomaniac who believes there is no situation that won’t be improved by his personal involvement.
The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing. (...)
Somehow, he does all of this while having one of the worst relationships with Congress of any modern president. Some of the conflict is personal: Carter is the anti-LBJ in that he hates dealmaking and is perpetually unwilling to compromise. Deep down, he sees the dirty business of politics as inherently sinful, and he doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just do the right thing, especially when he’s explained to them at great length why it’s the right thing to do. He has huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but they relate to each other with barely veiled contempt. (It doesn’t help that Carter is the complete personal antithesis of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a classic old-school Irish Democrat who loves back-slapping, cutting deals, and being a part of the Establishment Carter ran against.) Carter repeatedly vetoes bills passed by his own party because he has minor issues with them. At one point, he petulantly vetoes a $37bn defense bill because he thinks one specific item in it, representing less than 2% of the total, is a waste of money.
You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout. Now, you’re the most powerful man in the world. What do you do next?
The first answer is, you micromanage to a spectacular degree. Alone among all presidents since Truman, Carter refuses to appoint a Chief of Staff. He then immediately demonstrates why he needs one by involving himself in a comical number of minor decisions, including personally deciding which magazine subscriptions his speechwriting team should get, cutting down on the amount of food served at breakfast with congressional leaders, and canceling car service for his staff because it’ll save $92,000 of the $409 billion federal budget. Oh, and he also insists that all White House thermostats be set at 65° (55° at night), though this last mandate is eventually rescinded when the staff—some of whom are so cold they’ve been typing with gloves on—rebel.
The charitable interpretation of these decisions is that, in the wake of Watergate, Carter wants to emphasize that he and his staff are servants of the American people. The uncharitable interpretation is that Carter is an obsessive egomaniac who believes there is no situation that won’t be improved by his personal involvement.
The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing. (...)
Somehow, he does all of this while having one of the worst relationships with Congress of any modern president. Some of the conflict is personal: Carter is the anti-LBJ in that he hates dealmaking and is perpetually unwilling to compromise. Deep down, he sees the dirty business of politics as inherently sinful, and he doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just do the right thing, especially when he’s explained to them at great length why it’s the right thing to do. He has huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but they relate to each other with barely veiled contempt. (It doesn’t help that Carter is the complete personal antithesis of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a classic old-school Irish Democrat who loves back-slapping, cutting deals, and being a part of the Establishment Carter ran against.) Carter repeatedly vetoes bills passed by his own party because he has minor issues with them. At one point, he petulantly vetoes a $37bn defense bill because he thinks one specific item in it, representing less than 2% of the total, is a waste of money.
But some of the conflict is structural. To his credit, Carter is one of the first politicians to see that the post-New Deal consensus is fraying. Economic growth is slowing, inflation is rising, union membership is declining, all of which means that the traditional Democratic way of doing things—launching new federal programs, catering to interest groups, and accepting some waste and inefficiency as a cost of doing business—is on its way out, even if the old-school Dems don’t realize it yet. Really, Carter is less of a Democrat and more of a 1920’s-style Progressive Republican in the model of Teddy Roosevelt: focused on efficient, rational government, non-ideological problem-solving, and ethical stewardship.
Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.
The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.
To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.
Flush with confidence from his Panama Canal victory (his canalchemy? his Panamachievement?), Carter decides he should continue tackling foreign policy problems other people think are impossible. And there’s one obvious candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. Every single one of his advisors tells him this is a huge mistake and he definitely shouldn’t get involved, but knowing Carter, this only makes him want to do it more. His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way.
At Camp David, as with the Panama Canal, Carter reveals himself to be a masterful negotiator, which only makes his constant inability to successfully negotiate with Congress all the more infuriating. When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
Anyway, after two weeks of nonstop conversation between the three countries’ teams—during which negotiations almost fail more than once—they reach a deal. Essentially, the broad outlines are: 1) Egypt will officially recognize Israel and end the state of war between the two countries and 2) Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank and transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza. The Camp David Accords, as they’re known, are a phenomenal success, putting the region on a path straight to the utopia it is today: a prosperous, conflict-free Middle East in which democracy and human rights flourish and the Palestinian people have full self-determination.
Sike! Obviously, that doesn’t happen. The Camp David Accords are seen as a triumph at the time, but in the long run, the picture is more mixed. The first part of the deal holds up, even after Sadat—who ends up becoming quite close with Carter—is assassinated by fundamentalists just a few years later. But the Israelis immediately welch on the second part of the deal and continue building settlements. Today’s Israel has more than 20x the number of settlers as it did then, making the intensity of the Carter/Begin dispute seem depressingly quaint in retrospect.
Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.
The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.
To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.
Flush with confidence from his Panama Canal victory (his canalchemy? his Panamachievement?), Carter decides he should continue tackling foreign policy problems other people think are impossible. And there’s one obvious candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. Every single one of his advisors tells him this is a huge mistake and he definitely shouldn’t get involved, but knowing Carter, this only makes him want to do it more. His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way.
At Camp David, as with the Panama Canal, Carter reveals himself to be a masterful negotiator, which only makes his constant inability to successfully negotiate with Congress all the more infuriating. When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
Anyway, after two weeks of nonstop conversation between the three countries’ teams—during which negotiations almost fail more than once—they reach a deal. Essentially, the broad outlines are: 1) Egypt will officially recognize Israel and end the state of war between the two countries and 2) Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank and transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza. The Camp David Accords, as they’re known, are a phenomenal success, putting the region on a path straight to the utopia it is today: a prosperous, conflict-free Middle East in which democracy and human rights flourish and the Palestinian people have full self-determination.
Sike! Obviously, that doesn’t happen. The Camp David Accords are seen as a triumph at the time, but in the long run, the picture is more mixed. The first part of the deal holds up, even after Sadat—who ends up becoming quite close with Carter—is assassinated by fundamentalists just a few years later. But the Israelis immediately welch on the second part of the deal and continue building settlements. Today’s Israel has more than 20x the number of settlers as it did then, making the intensity of the Carter/Begin dispute seem depressingly quaint in retrospect.
Image: Andy Warhol
Monday, April 8, 2024
Ray Troll: 'A Look Inside My Brain'
Around the same time, a Troll friend and fellow artist, Juneau-based William Spear, had begun selling enamel pins of his paintings. He suggested that the two collaborate, with Troll providing a piece that could be sold as wearable art to tourists traveling through Southeast Alaska.
Digging through his work, Troll returned to his salmon drawing, changed the caption to “Spawn Till You Die,” tweaked the image and offered it to Spear. “I did a very reduced version of it for the pin,” he recalled. “But the pen and ink drawing, I made it into a T-shirt. And the rest is kind of history.”
Troll’s T-shirts quickly became popular farther down the coast in Seattle, where musicians in that city’s then-nascent grunge scene started wearing them onstage. From there the shirts and the drawing spread across the country and Troll was on his way to international renown. “If there’s one thing I might be known for when I’m dead and gone,” he said, “it would be that image.”
More than three decades later, that drawing, wildly popular in Alaska, has provided both the title and cover art for a career retrospective recently published by Clover Press. “Spawn Till You Die: The Fin Art of Ray Troll” contains more than 200 examples of his now iconic drawings and paintings, which blend scientifically accurate depictions of living and extinct animals with surreal scenery, pop culture references, psychedelic colors, zany humor and endless puns. “You’re looking inside my brain when you go through this book,” he said.
by David James, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Images: Ray Troll
[ed. An Alaskan institution.]
Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.
But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.
But after the FAA cleared Boeing to deliver its first 787s to customers around the end of 2011, one of Swampy’s old co-workers says that McNerney’s henchmen began targeting anyone with experience and knowledge for torment and termination. One of Swampy’s closest colleagues, Bill Seitz, took a demotion to go back west. A quality control engineer named John Woods was terminated for insisting inspectors thoroughly document damage and repair performed on composite materials, which were far less resilient than steel. Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions. “Everyone from Everett started dropping like flies,” remembers a former manager at the plant.
“There’s a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that,” the manager recalled. “The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.”
The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,” through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising. This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database. Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.
Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered. He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.
Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
by Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect | Read more:
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.
But after the FAA cleared Boeing to deliver its first 787s to customers around the end of 2011, one of Swampy’s old co-workers says that McNerney’s henchmen began targeting anyone with experience and knowledge for torment and termination. One of Swampy’s closest colleagues, Bill Seitz, took a demotion to go back west. A quality control engineer named John Woods was terminated for insisting inspectors thoroughly document damage and repair performed on composite materials, which were far less resilient than steel. Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions. “Everyone from Everett started dropping like flies,” remembers a former manager at the plant.
“There’s a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that,” the manager recalled. “The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.”
The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,” through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising. This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database. Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.
Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered. He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.
Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
by Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect | Read more:
Image: Gavin McIntyre/The Post and Courier via AP
[ed. Oh, and guess what? Just yesterday: Engine cover of Southwest Boeing plane falls off during takeoff (WaPo).]
[ed. Oh, and guess what? Just yesterday: Engine cover of Southwest Boeing plane falls off during takeoff (WaPo).]
Sunday, April 7, 2024
How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.
In late 2021, OpenAI faced a supply problem.
The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. system. It needed more data to train the next version of its technology — lots more.
So OpenAI researchers created a speech recognition tool called Whisper. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. system smarter.
Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube’s rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are “independent” of the video platform.
Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The team included Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who personally helped collect the videos, two of the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4, which was widely considered one of the world’s most powerful A.I. models and was the basis of the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.
The race to lead A.I. has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times.
At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.
Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its A.I. models, five people with knowledge of the company’s practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators.
Last year, Google also broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company’s privacy team and an internal message viewed by The Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its A.I. products.
The companies’ actions illustrate how online information — news stories, fictional works, message board posts, Wikipedia articles, computer programs, photos, podcasts and movie clips — has increasingly become the lifeblood of the booming A.I. industry. Creating innovative systems depends on having enough data to teach the technologies to instantly produce text, images, sounds and videos that resemble what a human creates.
The volume of data is crucial. Leading chatbot systems have learned from pools of digital text spanning as many as three trillion words, or roughly twice the number of words stored in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which has collected manuscripts since 1602. The most prized data, A.I. researchers said, is high-quality information, such as published books and articles, which have been carefully written and edited by professionals.
For years, the internet — with sites like Wikipedia and Reddit — was a seemingly endless source of data. But as A.I. advanced, tech companies sought more repositories. Google and Meta, which have billions of users who produce search queries and social media posts every day, were largely limited by privacy laws and their own policies from drawing on much of that content for A.I.
Their situation is urgent. Tech companies could run through the high-quality data on the internet as soon as 2026, according to Epoch, a research institute. The companies are using the data faster than it is being produced.
“The only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data,” Sy Damle, a lawyer who represents Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said of A.I. models last year in a public discussion about copyright law. “The data needed is so massive that even collective licensing really can’t work.”
Tech companies are so hungry for new data that some are developing “synthetic” information. This is not organic data created by humans, but text, images and code that A.I. models produce — in other words, the systems learn from what they themselves generate.
OpenAI said each of its A.I. models “has a unique data set that we curate to help their understanding of the world and remain globally competitive in research.” Google said that its A.I. models “are trained on some YouTube content,” which was allowed under agreements with YouTube creators, and that the company did not use data from office apps outside of an experimental program. Meta said it had “made aggressive investments” to integrate A.I. into its services and had billions of publicly shared images and videos from Instagram and Facebook for training its models.
For creators, the growing use of their works by A.I. companies has prompted lawsuits over copyright and licensing. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft have said using the articles was “fair use,” or allowed under copyright law, because they transformed the works for a different purpose.
More than 10,000 trade groups, authors, companies and others submitted comments last year about the use of creative works by A.I. models to the Copyright Office, a federal agency that is preparing guidance on how copyright law applies in the A.I. era.
Justine Bateman, a filmmaker, former actress and author of two books, told the Copyright Office that A.I. models were taking content — including her writing and films — without permission or payment.
“This is the largest theft in the United States, period,” she said in an interview.
by Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson and Nico Grant, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jason Henry for The New York Times
[ed. Read the whole thing. Of course it's illegal. Arrogantly so. It's part of Tech's ethic - move fast, ask for permission/forgiveness later. Congress needs to get off their lazy, self-absorbed asses and do some fast moving themselves (ha!). Big Tech have simply become modern day robber barons. See also: OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4 (The Verge).]
The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. system. It needed more data to train the next version of its technology — lots more.
So OpenAI researchers created a speech recognition tool called Whisper. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. system smarter.
Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube’s rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are “independent” of the video platform.
The race to lead A.I. has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times.
At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.
Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its A.I. models, five people with knowledge of the company’s practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators.
Last year, Google also broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company’s privacy team and an internal message viewed by The Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its A.I. products.
The companies’ actions illustrate how online information — news stories, fictional works, message board posts, Wikipedia articles, computer programs, photos, podcasts and movie clips — has increasingly become the lifeblood of the booming A.I. industry. Creating innovative systems depends on having enough data to teach the technologies to instantly produce text, images, sounds and videos that resemble what a human creates.
The volume of data is crucial. Leading chatbot systems have learned from pools of digital text spanning as many as three trillion words, or roughly twice the number of words stored in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which has collected manuscripts since 1602. The most prized data, A.I. researchers said, is high-quality information, such as published books and articles, which have been carefully written and edited by professionals.
For years, the internet — with sites like Wikipedia and Reddit — was a seemingly endless source of data. But as A.I. advanced, tech companies sought more repositories. Google and Meta, which have billions of users who produce search queries and social media posts every day, were largely limited by privacy laws and their own policies from drawing on much of that content for A.I.
Their situation is urgent. Tech companies could run through the high-quality data on the internet as soon as 2026, according to Epoch, a research institute. The companies are using the data faster than it is being produced.
“The only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data,” Sy Damle, a lawyer who represents Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said of A.I. models last year in a public discussion about copyright law. “The data needed is so massive that even collective licensing really can’t work.”
Tech companies are so hungry for new data that some are developing “synthetic” information. This is not organic data created by humans, but text, images and code that A.I. models produce — in other words, the systems learn from what they themselves generate.
OpenAI said each of its A.I. models “has a unique data set that we curate to help their understanding of the world and remain globally competitive in research.” Google said that its A.I. models “are trained on some YouTube content,” which was allowed under agreements with YouTube creators, and that the company did not use data from office apps outside of an experimental program. Meta said it had “made aggressive investments” to integrate A.I. into its services and had billions of publicly shared images and videos from Instagram and Facebook for training its models.
For creators, the growing use of their works by A.I. companies has prompted lawsuits over copyright and licensing. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft have said using the articles was “fair use,” or allowed under copyright law, because they transformed the works for a different purpose.
More than 10,000 trade groups, authors, companies and others submitted comments last year about the use of creative works by A.I. models to the Copyright Office, a federal agency that is preparing guidance on how copyright law applies in the A.I. era.
Justine Bateman, a filmmaker, former actress and author of two books, told the Copyright Office that A.I. models were taking content — including her writing and films — without permission or payment.
“This is the largest theft in the United States, period,” she said in an interview.
by Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson and Nico Grant, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jason Henry for The New York Times
[ed. Read the whole thing. Of course it's illegal. Arrogantly so. It's part of Tech's ethic - move fast, ask for permission/forgiveness later. Congress needs to get off their lazy, self-absorbed asses and do some fast moving themselves (ha!). Big Tech have simply become modern day robber barons. See also: OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4 (The Verge).]
Saturday, April 6, 2024
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.
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.
[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."]
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.
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."]
Friday, April 5, 2024
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)]
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