ElevenLabs is Building an Army of Voice Clones

My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.

I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.

It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body. 

Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare. (...)

ElevenLabs knew its model was special when it started spitting out audio that accurately represented the relationships between words, Staniszewski told me—pronunciation that changed based on the context (minute, the unit of time, instead of minute, the description of size) and emotion (an exclamatory phrase spoken with excitement or anger).

Much of what the model produces is unexpected—sometimes delightfully so. Early on, ElevenLabs’ model began randomly inserting applause breaks after pauses in its speech: It had been training on audio clips from people giving presentations in front of live audiences. Quickly, the model began to improve, becoming capable of ums and ahs. “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Staniszewski said. The big leap was when the model began to laugh like a person. (My voice clone, I should note, struggles to laugh, offering a machine-gun burst of “haha”s that sound jarringly inhuman.)

Compared with OpenAI and other major companies, which are trying to wrap their large language models around the entire world and ultimately build an artificial human intelligence, ElevenLabs has ambitions that are easier to grasp: a future in which ALS patients can still communicate in their voice after they lose their speech. Audiobooks that are ginned up in seconds by self-published authors, video games in which every character is capable of carrying on a dynamic conversation, movies and videos instantly dubbed into any language. A sort of Spotify of voices, where anyone can license clones of their voice for others to use—to the dismay of professional voice actors. The gig-ification of our vocal cords.

What Staniszewski also described when talking about ElevenLabs is a company that wants to eliminate language barriers entirely. The dubbing tool, he argued, is its first step toward that goal. A user can upload a video, and the model will translate the speaker’s voice into a different language. When we spoke, Staniszewski twice referred to the Babel fish from the science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—he described making a tool that immediately translates every sound around a person into a language they can understand. (...)

Elevenlabs’ voice bots launched in beta in late January 2023. It took very little time for people to start abusing them. Trolls on 4chan used the tool to make deepfakes of celebrities saying awful things. They had Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro making racist comments about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the tool’s first days, there appeared to be virtually no guardrails. “Crazy weekend,” the company tweeted, promising to crack down on misuse.

ElevenLabs added a verification process for cloning; when I uploaded recordings of my voice, I had to complete multiple voice CAPTCHAs, speaking phrases into my computer in a short window of time to confirm that the voice I was duplicating was my own. The company also decided to limit its voice cloning strictly to paid accounts and announced a tool that lets people upload audio to see if it is AI generated. But the safeguards from ElevenLabs were “half-assed,” Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at UC Berkeley, told me—an attempt to retroactively focus on safety only after the harm was done. And they left glaring holes. Over the past year, the deepfakes have not been rampant, but they also haven’t stopped. (...)

For Farid, the UC Berkeley researcher, ElevenLabs’ inability to control how people might abuse its technology is proof that voice cloning causes more harm than good. “They were reckless in the way they deployed the technology,” Farid said, “and I think they could have done it much safer, but I think it would have been less effective for them.”

The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said, referring to the company’s research efforts. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways.

In the basement of a Sri Lankan restaurant on a soggy afternoon in London, I pressed Staniszewski about what I’d been obliquely referring to as “the bad stuff.” He didn’t avert his gaze as I rattled off the ways ElevenLabs’ technology could be and has been abused. When it was his time to speak, he did so thoughtfully, not dismissively; he appears to understand the risks of his products and other open-source AI tools. “It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “We need to be quick.”

The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.

The conversation went on like this for a half hour, followed by another session a few weeks later over the phone. A hard question, a genuine answer, my own palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. I can’t look at ElevenLabs and see beyond the risk: How can you build toward this future? Staniszewski seems unable to see beyond the opportunities: How can’t you build toward this future? I left our conversations with a distinct sense that the people behind ElevenLabs don’t want to watch the world burn. The question is whether, in an industry where everyone is racing to build AI tools with similar potential for harm, intentions matter at all.

by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Daniel Stier for The Atlantic

Showing Off

According​ to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily reached by sea than by road. They called it Costa Smeralda, or the Emerald Coast.

The first building erected in the town of Porto Cervo was the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, which later moved to a marina behind a purpose-built breakwater. The Aga Khan, now 87, is still president of the board and oversees annual regattas at the yacht club sponsored by Rolex, Armani and other luxury brands. He owns several superyachts himself, all named after his favourite racehorses. The pride of the fleet is Alamshar, which is estimated to have cost £200 million to build. Powered by six gas turbine engines, it was intended to have a top speed of 65 knots, though the tabloids have relished the fact that engineering difficulties led to its being capped at ‘only’ 45 knots – which is still twice as fast as commercial freighters. The Aga Khan’s yachts are moored discreetly on various continents and are much featured in yachting magazines, often with the name of their owner omitted. Information about ownership can, however, be found in the pages of Tatler or on the message boards of Ismaili Muslims unhappy about their tithes being used to pay for the extravagant lifestyle of a man who is both their religious imam and the descendant of an aristocrat ennobled by both the Iranian and British monarchies.

The Aga Khan favours motor yachts, but another board member of the yacht club in Sardinia, a Sicilian lawyer by the name of Salvatore Trifirò, owns a glorious 33-metre sailing yacht called Ribelle (this might no longer be the case: the yacht was listed for sale last August at €16,500,000). Its carbon fibre and titanium hull was designed in the UK and built in a Dutch shipyard, with a teak and copper interior styled in Paris. Intended to be equally suited to cruising and racing, it won the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup regatta, along with multiple awards for both interior and exterior design. Unusually, photographs of it abound online. Most superyacht owners aren’t keen on giving photographers access to their living quarters, so we have to rely on snapshots of sweeping staircases, Louis XV furniture and marble fittings. Multibillionaires don’t tend to have great taste.

The ten biggest yachts in the world are all motor yachts, all of them owned by Gulf royals or Russian oligarchs...

The very biggest of these yachts, Azzam, commissioned in 2009 for more than half a billion dollars by the then president of the UAE, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, is 180 metres long. That’s as long as the Gherkin skyscraper in London is tall, and longer than a Royal Navy destroyer. The owners of these behemoths compete to fit them out with the most fantastical amenities. In addition to the de rigueur cinema, swimming pool and gym, Azzam has a ‘golf training room’. The late Omani sultan’s 155-metre Al Said has a concert hall with room for a fifty-piece orchestra. Sheikh Muhammad al-Maktoum’s eponymous Dubai (162 metres) accommodates a disco and a squash court. At 134 metres, Serene, the yacht owned by the Saudi enfant terrible, Mohammed bin Salman, is only the 24th largest in the world, but like Dilbar, owned by the Uzbek-Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, it has two helipads. It also has a room where snow machines produce four inches of the white stuff on demand. It’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with such a room. (Bin Salman is reported to have kept Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi on the yacht while he was deciding what to do with it.)

Dilbar is among dozens of multimillion-pound yachts owned by Russian plutocrats loyal to Vladimir Putin that were targeted by the US Justice Department’s KleptoCapture task force, formed in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (...)

Impounding superyachts has caused the US some headaches. In February, Reuters reported that the Amadea, a seized yacht allegedly belonging to Suleiman Kerimov, owner of Russia’s biggest gold-mining company, Polyus, costs $7 million a year to maintain. The Justice Department’s plan to auction it off is being challenged in the courts by Eduard Khudainatov, ex-CEO of Rosneft and not on the sanctions list, who claims that he in fact owns the boat. The Italian media have suggested that Khudainatov may technically also be the owner of the 140-metre, $700 million Scheherazade, impounded in May 2022 by port authorities in Tuscany. Scheherazade is also sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s boat’, or (according to the FBI) as ‘linked to Putin’ – the assumption being that Khudainatov or whoever has his name on its papers is a ‘straw owner’. When reporters from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently tried to film the yacht up close, the crew, still on board, sent a surveillance drone after them. The legal status of Amadea and Scheherazade is difficult to ascertain, thanks to the complex offshore shell companies that hide beneficial ownership. In other words, the offshore corporate registration system encouraged by global capital is doing what it was designed to do: protecting the assets of billionaires. (...)

Superyacht sales increased by 46 per cent in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the very rich looked to escape lockdown at sea. Two years ago the New York Times reported that shipyards were ‘struggling to keep up: the order book for superyachts is full until 2025’ – you would now be looking at a date closer to the end of the decade. Most of the American plutocrats who own yachts accumulated their billions in familiar business sectors: logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in Miami, close to the Caribbean yachting destinations where many also discreetly own private islands. On the West Coast, the yacht-owning Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses courtesy of handsome government contracts and lavish state subsidies, so their superyachts are paid for not just by the labour of those who work in the sector, but also by the average taxpayer. (...)

At the height of the Gilded Age, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class described expensive sports – epitomes of conspicuous consumption – as ‘activities deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess’. Sports with high capital outlays educate sportsmen with ‘arrested spiritual development’ in the virtues of economic value. Veblen names bullfighting, shooting and yachting as models for capitalist conquest, based as they are on the competitive planting of flags. One can imagine nerdy crypto billionaires revelling in the unfamiliar machismo their yachts allow them to display. But yachting as a metaphysics of affluence is also much more mundane. These sleek machines still produce emissions and rubbish. And lives below deck mirror the class politics of the much less glamorous service industry on land.

Very few crew members are employed directly by the yacht owners whose boats they maintain. Often only the yacht’s captain is a long-term employee of the billionaire, a bit like an estate manager at sea. The other crew members face short contracts and precarious employment without any benefits. Since the yachts winter in the Caribbean and summer in the Mediterranean, recruitment agencies hire people to sail the boats across the Atlantic while the owners fly over in their private jets. Just as on a cruise ship, the majority of crew members aren’t in charge of navigation or maintenance but are hospitality workers, preparing and serving food, dispensing massages, spa treatments and entertainment, cleaning and housekeeping. The old/new money divide – or the European/American chasm – that distinguishes types of owners has its own effect on the crew. The New York Times quoted a former yachtie on the difference: ‘The Europeans don’t know your name. You’re just there to serve them. Americans want to be your friend, they want to know where you went to college and they want to buy you drinks. Then they want you to work eighteen hours a day and tend to their six kids.’

by Laleh Khalili, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Images: SuperYacht Times; Dörries superyacht Arwen

[ed. I happened to stumble across a picture of a unique yacht a while ago (Sunreef Eco) and discovered that there's actually something called the SuperYacht Times. You can go down a rabbit hole looking at all the different yachts there, but also, I couldn't help but imagine the lifestyle and obscene excessiveness of owning one of these things. A mixture of curiosity and revulsion.]

Robert Crumb, 1994
via:

[ed. A documentary about him and his siblings (appropriately named "Crumb") is burned into my brain. Highly recommended, it shows in excrutiating detail the tension between creativity and dysfunction.]

Technology Crushing Human Creativity

A newly released ad promoting Apple’s new iPad Pro has struck quite a nerve online.

The ad, which was released by the tech giant Tuesday, shows a hydraulic press crushing just about every creative instrument artists and consumers have used over the years — from a piano and record player, to piles of paint, books, cameras and relics of arcade games. Resulting from the destruction? A pristine new iPad Pro.

“The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” a narrator says at the end of the commercial.

Apple’s intention seems straightforward: Look at all the things this new product can do. But critics have called it tone-deaf — with several marketing experts noting the campaign’s execution didn’t land.

“I had a really disturbing reaction to the ad,” said Americus Reed II, professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “I understood conceptually what they were trying to do, but ... I think the way it came across is, here is technology crushing the life of that nostalgic sort of joy (from former times).”

The ad also arrives during a time many feel uncertain or fearful about seeing their work or everyday routines “replaced” by technological advances — particularly amid the rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence. And watching beloved items get smashed into oblivion doesn’t help curb those fears, Reed and others note. (...)

Experts added that the commercial marked a notable difference to marketing seen from Apple in the past — which has often taken more positive or uplifting approaches.

“My initial thought was that Apple has become exactly what it never wanted to be,” Vann Graves, executive director of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, said.

Graves pointed to Apple’s famous 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh computer, which he said focused more on uplifting creativity and thinking outside of the box as a unique individual. In contrast, Graves added, “this (new iPad) commercial says, ‘No, we’re going to take all the creativity in the world and use a hydraulic press to push it down into one device that everyone uses.’”

In a statement shared with Ad Age on Thursday, Apple apologized for the ad. The outlet also reported that Apple no longer plans to run the spot on TV.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

by Wyatte Grantham-Philips, AP |  Read more:

Image: Apple/YouTube

[ed. Missed the mark? What mark was that? Unintentially revealing where they think technology is headed and how blinded by hubris and profit they are? See also: Watch Apple Trash-Compact Human Culture (Atlantic):]

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.

These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching. Once the destruction is complete, the press lifts back up to reveal that the items have been replaced by a slender, shimmering iPad.

The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it. (The ad is for the latest “Pro” model of the iPad, the price of which starts at $999 and goes as high as $2,299, depending on its configuration.) Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.

But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing. This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts. Apple is reportedly building its own large language model for its devices, and its CEO, Tim Cook, explicitly invoked AI in his comments about the new tablet—the iPad Pro features, he said, an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.” Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER. (...)

There is about a zero percent chance that the company did not understand the optics of releasing this ad at this moment. Apple is among the most sophisticated and moneyed corporations in all the world. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

But this time, it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.” Three reasons could explain why. First: Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity. Second, of course, is that this is a moment of great technological upheaval and angst, especially among artists, as tech companies build models trained on creative work with an ultimate goal of simulating those very people’s skilled output. It is easy to be offended at the ad’s implication, and it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.

The third-order annoyance is in the genre. Apple has essentially aped a popular format of “crushing” videos on TikTok, wherein hydraulic presses are employed to obliterate everyday objects for the pleasure of idle scrollers. Arguably, the company thought that copying this specific motif would be fun, but something is grim about Apple trying to draft off a viral-video format to sell units. It’s unclear whether some of the ad might have been created with CGI, but Apple could easily round up tens of thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and destroy it all on a whim. However small, the ad is a symbol of the company’s dominance.

Under the Jumbotron

On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies. There was also a library, which a paper sign taped to a tree designated the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, in honour of the Palestinian writer and teacher who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.

Alareer wrote his doctoral dissertation on John Donne. On YouTube, you can find him lecturing, in English, to his students at the Islamic University of Gaza. One lecture begins with a discussion of Horace’s Ars Poetica and the idea that a work of art must delight as well as instruct. ‘The term ‘metaphysical’,’ he explains a bit later, ‘means nothing,’ because it was foisted on poets like Donne by his critics, among them John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, whose assessments Alareer projects onto the whiteboard. The lecture builds to an analysis of Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’, which, Alareer explains, is a parody of Christopher Marlowe’s poem generally known as ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. When you parody something, Alareer says, ‘you try to offer the readers another possibility, of another worldview, a different world view, telling the people: hey, this isn’t the only thing ... there is something else.’

After his death, Alareer became widely known as the author of the poem ‘If I Must Die’, which asks its reader to build a kite in his memory and to fly it before a child whose father has been incinerated by a bomb, so that the child might imagine ‘an angel is there/bringing back love’. The day after the students set up their encampment at UCLA, it was announced that Alareer’s daughter Shymaa had been killed in an airstrike along with her husband and three-month-old son.

Among other things, the camp was a rebuke to the notion of doing business as usual when such brutality is being perpetrated on an enormous scale against human beings whose displacement, torture, unlawful detention and murder is bankrolled by the United States. Because they often invest their funds in weapons manufacturers whose missiles are falling on Gaza, or in companies with factories in the occupied West Bank, American universities are perceived as supporting Israel’s objective, which appears to be the wholesale extermination of the Palestinian people.

Students protesting against the war on Gaza on campuses across the US, from Columbia, where the encampments began, to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, have been clear that their primary aims are to pressure the US government to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and to pressure their universities and colleges to divest from any financial holdings with links to Israel. When it comes to divestment, they are drawing from a playbook established in the 1980s, when students convinced their schools to cut ties with companies operating in apartheid South Africa. As an antiwar campaign, the encampments recall protests against the Vietnam War, including the Student Strike of 1970, which grew significantly after the murder of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard.

The encampments are also a parody, in Alareer’s sense: emerging from within the university, they offer another possibility for what the university might be. One of the more potent images circulating from the encampments has been of a student holding a sign that reads ‘Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said If you don’t want me to use it?’ The protests have revealed that the American university, which operates more and more as a high-cost degree factory where humanities departments squirm on the chopping block, is still a place where people can learn what is true, and act on their knowledge. You cannot, in other words, expect young people to memorise and regurgitate history, economics, political science, moral philosophy and so on for their exams while prohibiting them from taking their education on the road.

Over the weekend, following the formation of the encampment, a large group of counter-protesters, few to none of whom appeared to be UCLA students, arrived on campus. They screamed, hurled racial slurs and sexual threats (‘I hope you get raped’) at the students, and opened a sack full of live mice – swollen, seemingly injected with some substance – on the ground near the camp. When the counter-protesters dispersed, they left behind a Jumbotron – a massive flat-screen TV, about ten feet high – in the middle of campus facing the encampment and surrounded by metal barriers. Paid security guards remained inside the barriers to protect the screen. For the next five days, the Jumbotron played, on a loop, footage of the 7 October attacks along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms. Mixed in among the clips were speeches by Joe Biden vowing unconditional support for Israel and ‘Meni Mamtera’, a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral earlier this year when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.

When I arrived on campus on Tuesday morning, to lead a class on Byron’s Don Juan, the sound from the Jumbotron was so loud it was impossible to hear myself think, let alone teach. I walked over with a colleague to take footage of the footage. You couldn’t ask for a better allegory: on one side, the encampment, full of young people risking their degrees, their future employment prospects and their physical and mental health to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza; on the other, a costly media machine, financed by D-list celebrities (who proudly posted their contributions on Instagram), unmanned except for a trio of hired guards who, when questioned, admitted they had nothing to do with the Zionist cause. (...)

At 11 p.m. on 30 April, a large group of men, mostly middle-aged, many wearing Halloween masks, arrived at the encampment carrying knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace, which they used to attack the unarmed students. They shot fireworks into the camp and used its plywood barricades to crush students into the ground. Footage from ABC News shows half a dozen counter-protesters punching and kicking a student. Videos from independent journalists and people on the ground captured calls for a ‘second Nakba’.

On the ABC newsreel you can hear a reporter shouting in disbelief: ‘Where are the police? Where is security? Where is authority here?’ The answer to the first two questions is clear: the police, as well as campus security forces, were there, but they did not intervene. Rather, for roughly five hours, they stood at a comfortable distance, laughing and occasionally chatting amicably with the mob, which was made up not only of self-professed former IDF soldiers but also several white nationalists, including members of the far-right Proud Boys, whose former leader was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol. Since white nationalists are, as a rule, hostile to Jews, it is worth asking why their assault on the encampment – which included a large number of Jewish students – has yet to be ruled antisemitic by the university administration. (...)

Most disturbing, however, are images that circulated on X (formerly Twitter) of snipers on the roof of Royce Hall, the building next to the encampment. The superintendent of the Indiana State Police confirmed that a sniper was called in for a pro-Palestine protest at Indiana University, and the New York Police Department has confirmed that an officer fired a gun – with real bullets – inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University during its raid on the building, which students had renamed Hind’s Hall in honour of six-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the Israeli military in early January. The general sentiment on campuses across the US is that it is only a matter of time before a student is killed, as at Kent State in 1970. This is a price that both the students and their universities, for very different reasons, seem prepared to pay.

The students, as they will tell you, are there for Gaza, where 90 per cent of schools, and all universities, have been destroyed. The university, meanwhile, is forced to confront the moral vacuity of its policies, which have in the end protected no one except extremists willing to join forces with neo-Nazis to safeguard Israel from criticism. It has no principles and no plan; it has ceded its authority to the mob. The students, along with the staff who have supported their cause, are now in a position to direct the future of an institution whose stewards have abandoned it.

by Anahid Nersessian, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Amy Katz/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy
[ed. See also: Ghosts of ’68 (NLR):]

What explains the scale of this response? The semester ends sometime between late April and mid-May. Why not wait the encampments out, negotiating and offering symbolic concessions to buy time? This is partly a reflection of the changes that universities, like many other institutions, have undergone during decades of neoliberalization. In the mid-1970s, Republicans identified public universities as a crucial source of anti-authoritarian sentiment and demanded a complete institutional overhaul. The subsequent process of privatization, which has made tuition prohibitive for most prospective in-state students, has been catastrophic for democratic principles and practices. With massive, untaxed endowments running into the tens of billions, universities have slowly morphed into public-private police-carceral states, catering to ‘customers’ and answering to benefactors and politicians, not students or faculty.

At Columbia, whose endowment is $13.6 billion, students must pay $90,000 per year plus travel expenses – a dramatic rise since the 1980s. Administrative posts and salaries have increased relative to faculty ones, and the number of non-tenured staff has grown steadily. Nationally, three-fourths of faculty are non-tenured and therefore do not have academic freedom. The privileged minority of tenured faculty did nothing to fight this trend, nor did they participate in adjunct efforts to unionize, since the current system enables them to take research leave and sabbatical. Now tenure itself – under attack from Republican politicians, trustee boards and university administrations – seems unlikely to survive. Recent years have seen an upswell of labour activism among graduate students and adjunct faculty, some of whom have managed to win collective bargaining rights, but they are a long way from re-democratizing the academy.

Another crucial factor is the influence of so-called ‘shot callers’: a donor class of billionaires, often working through politicians or board members, with the power to force institutional changes or get people fired by threatening to withhold funding. As universities have become more like corporations, whose primary duties are to their shareholders, administrators have become increasingly pliant before donors and their representatives. Presidents can be forced to resign even when they have strong support from students and faculty, as at Harvard; or, conversely, they can ignore significant internal opposition because they have outside backers, as at Columbia. (One of the main shot callers there is Democratic donor Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who responded to the protests by revoking a donation and taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers which denounced ‘antisemitic hate’ and demanded greater ‘protection’ on campuses.) 

Coffee Shop Horrors

[ed. It took me a minute to realize that's Elle from Elle and Toni. She also has a rap on fonts.]

40 Fingers

[ed. One of my favorite songs. I'd be pretty psyched too if I had these guys' skills. See also: Message in a Bottle. And, the original by EW&F.]

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Millions of killer culverts lurk beneath North American roadways, strangling populations of migratory fish. Now with a nationwide project, the United States is trying to fix them.

Every year, hundreds of muscular, sea-bright fish—chum salmon, chinook, coho, steelhead—push into the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean, swim over 200 kilometers upstream, and turn left into Hardy Creek. They wend through rocky shallows shaded by alder and willow, cold water passing over flared gills. Plump with milt and eggs, they pump their tails furiously, striving for the graveled spawning grounds in southern Washington State where they’ll complete their life’s final, fatal mission.

And then they hit the railroad.

In the early 1900s, Hardy Creek was throttled by BNSF Railway, the United States’ largest freight railroad network. When the company built its Columbia River line, engineers routed Hardy Creek under the tracks via a culvert—a 2.5-meter-wide arch atop a concrete pad. The culvert, far narrower than Hardy Creek’s natural channel, concentrated the stream like a fire hose and blasted away approaching salmon. Over time, the rushing flow scoured out a deep pool, and the culvert became an impassable cascade disconnected from the stream below—a “perched” culvert, in the jargon of engineers.

“It’s an obvious barrier,” says Peter Barber, manager of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s habitat restoration program. “A fish would be hard-pressed to navigate through that culvert.”

The strangulation of Hardy Creek is an archetypal story. Culverts, the unassuming concrete and metal pipes that convey streams beneath human-made infrastructure, are everywhere, undergirding our planet’s sprawling road networks and rail lines. Researchers estimate that more than 200,000 culverts lie beneath state highways in California alone, nearly 100,000 in Germany, and another 60,000 in Great Britain. In Europe, they thwart endangered eels; in Australia, they curtail the movements of Murray cod. In Massachusetts’ Herring River, snapping turtles lurk in culverts to devour passing fish, largely preventing herring from spawning. Taken as a whole, these obstacles are a major reason that three-quarters of the world’s migratory fish species are endangered.

Compared with dams, however, culverts have historically escaped public attention; most people drive over them every day without noticing. “I used to tell people I assess culverts,” recalls Mark Eisenman, a planner at the Alaska Department of Transportation. “They’d say, what the hell’s a culvert?”

In 2022, however, the US Federal Highway Administration launched a US $1-billion program to replace culverts that block oceangoing fish on streams like Hardy Creek—among the largest pots of money ever devoted to these humble pipes. Fixing the countless barriers that underlie infrastructure, according to Barber, is “one of the best ways to restore our salmon runs locally.” But given the sheer scale of the culvert crisis, even a billion dollars will only go so far. Can we repair our faulty culverts while there’s still time to save sea-run fish? (...)

In 2021, the United States’ culvert-funding shortfall caught the belated attention of politicians. That November, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2-trillion package that included money for everything from high-speed rail to electric vehicle charging stations to basic highway repairs. Tucked deep in the law’s thousand-odd pages was a section that attracted little media coverage, but had immense consequences for fish: the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program. (...)

Mud Creek also illustrates another deficiency of culverts: they frustrate human movements as well as fish migration. Several times a year, says Golden, incoming storm surges overwhelm the Mud Creek culvert and gush onto Montague Island Road, damaging its surface and denying locals access to their homes. This is an increasingly common predicament. Culverts, already the Achilles heels of road networks, are becoming even more vulnerable as the climate changes. They’re swamped by king tides, clogged by landslides, and battered by deluges; during 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, roughly 1,000 culverts washed out in Vermont alone, closing many roads. The same enlarged culverts that help fish are also less liable to get plugged by debris or inundated by storm surges. “We can address a maintenance need, a fish passage need, and a resilience need, all at the same time,” Golden says.

Perhaps the most powerful virtue of culvert replacement is that it fundamentally reconnects land and sea. Fish-blocking culverts are forces of disunity that prevent anadromous fish from contributing their oceanic phosphorus and nitrogen to forests, and starve marine predators dependent on healthy stocks. In western Washington’s King County, for example, culverts within the Bear Creek basin have curtailed populations of chinook salmon, a key food source for Puget Sound’s beleaguered killer whales. A grant of nearly $7-million will allow the county to replace three inadequate Bear River culverts—and, with luck, restitch the torn linkages between marine and terrestrial environments.

“We’re allowing those ocean nutrients to once again go up the watershed,” says Evan Lewis, who leads the county’s fish passage restoration program. “Salmon are self-propelled bags of fertilizer.” (...)

Around the world, other countries are also kicking lousy culverts to the curb. In France, faulty culverts have been torn out for the sake of Atlantic salmon and brown trout; in New Zealand, they’ve been removed for smelt, eels, and torrentfish. In British Columbia, home to more than 90,000 fish-blocking culverts, a host of conservation groups and government agencies is developing a strategic plan to remove the most egregious blockages. The United States is leading the charge, but its $1-billion culvert replacement program is no piscine panacea. The Washington State Department of Transportation recently estimated that it would cost around $7.5-billion to deal with the hundreds of fish-blocking culverts it’s required to fix on behalf of Indigenous tribes—to say nothing of perhaps 20,000 more on roads owned by counties, towns, and private entities.

The program is also limited by geography. Although the only culverts eligible for funding are those that obstruct sea-run fish, many landlocked species also migrate. In the Great Lakes region alone, perhaps 250,000 culverts confound suckers, pike, brook trout, and other freshwater denizens. These fish won’t benefit from federal largesse, yet they need help as surely as any coho or chum.

by Ben Goldfarb, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang
[ed. In Alaska, culverts were a major headache. We had staff at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game who spent years assessing impacts on fish populations, trying to find solutions (scientifically, politically, economically) to mitigate the damage they cause. Here are a few examples of their effects: creating impenetrable barriers to fish passage when debris gets washed downstream and lodged at their openings; becoming perched several feet above streams due to discharge scouring from flood events (or initial bad engineering); designed too narrow so that water velocities exceed the swimming capabilities of young fish (fire hose example); and frequently becoming magnets for predators (including humans) who find pooled fish in a single location easy pickings. Migrating salmon are famous for their spawning imperative and endurance - I did a fish survey in Anchorage one time that found coho salmon fry upstream of a culvert that stretched half way across the city under numerous roads, business parks and subdivisions - over a quarter mile long. But, only a handful of fish could have survived that gauntlet, and I didn't find many fry in that sample. This is a massive problem, not only because there are so many culverts in fish streams (in various stages of disrepair), but also because replacing or retrofitting them is usually prohibitively expensive (tearing up roads, installing bridges or larger culverts, etc). Nevertheless, I'm glad to see some effort is finally being made to recognize the problem. Every little bit helps.]

hans hARTwig Jung, The new Moog modular synthesizer in the sales room

via:

Jeff Stanford, Run! 2024

via:

[ed. AI depiction of Dorothy and Toto running for home ahead of the cyclone.]

The World Has Abandoned Realism

In one of my favourite passages from the book, you write, “Art challenges orthodoxy… Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly and to renew our world would wither and die.” In Britain today it feels that art is under attack. It’s seen as a kind of luxury.

Yeah, it is. I remember back in my dim and distant past in advertising, there was a campaign on behalf of a glass manufacturer, of which the slogan was “Imagine life without glass”, and it showed photographs of environments from which all the glass had been removed – buildings with no windows, tables with nothing to drink out of, etc. And I say the same thing: imagine life without art. Imagine a world with no music, with no visual art, no street art, no graffiti, no films, etc. No TV. What kind of a life would that be? And when you start thinking like that, you can see how it’s actually essential to our daily lives, whether it’s a political cartoon or a billboard with a picture on it, or a work of great transcendent genius in music. We all need it every day, and to think of it as some kind of frippery is to misunderstand the nature of human society.

~  Salman Rushdie: “The world has abandoned realism”

Image: Beppe Giacobbe

Living In the Bones

At first there is just the too-dark flicker, a void of color in the green. Along the river, muscular willows pack the shore to the waterline. Alders root in the drier soil of the cutbank, holding their branches nearly in parallel with walls of earth that rise ten, fifteen, sometimes fifty feet over the water. Where the banks end, the land plateaus, rolling out under the sky with a cover of black spruce, their trunks narrow from the effort of growing in permafrost. The peak of Arctic summer in the north Yukon is just beginning to tilt toward autumn yellow and red. (...)

In the sun the temperature is in the low fifties, but in the open boat the wind is frigid, piercing layers of parka and the canvas I have pulled to my chin. The lull of the engine makes it easy to fall into reverie, disassociating from numbing fingers and stiffening muscles by retreating into the story-house of the mind. But many years of Stanley’s company has taught me to pay attention; no tale should keep you from watching. A ripple on the water may signal a submerged branch. A dense shadow among the shrubs might be a bear.

Change in a pattern in the land is no danger if you see it in time. (...)

Back on the river, the pattern breaks again: a sudden sense of being in shade, although the sun is bright. The bank to our left, rising fifty feet above us, has split and caved in on itself. A vast gouge remains, the solid darkness of soil stripped of growth. Half the river channel is blocked by an earth-berg, large as a small house, the trees that were once its surface half underwater. There is a strong odor of decay. Layers of dead plants and lichens in the permafrost, their decomposition long deferred by cold, lie open to warmth and rot. Stanley slows the boat, easing us through the narrows.

It is the largest collapse we have passed, but not the first. Early in the day we saw a slumped shore, which seemed unremarkable, as rivers always erode and shift their beds. Then we passed another. And another. Banks had lost all coherence, like a bag of flour slashed open. Dark loam spilling down and dissolving into the river. Over the gunwale, passing the most recent slump, I see birch branches swaying in the current. The leaves are still green.

Up the river, more. The sun is swinging low and westerly: we need to make camp soon. The land is low and flat, much of it covered in muskeg too wet for sleeping. Geese rise before us, honking their complaints at our disruption. Two bald eagles keen from a thermal. Shadows under the bank lengthen. At a turn in the river, almost a corner, Stanley pulls to shore. We clamber out of the boat, awkward in our layers and life jackets. Thirty feet or so above the river is a dry place. Under tall spruce, a scattering of cranberries. This will do, Stanley says.

We slip and pant and swear our way up the steep, muddy bank to set the tent. A wall tent requires making a frame, like a three-dimensional stick drawing of a house, out of spruce poles. I hold them at right angles while Stanley does the knots. With the skeleton in place, we hang the canvas tent from the center pole, Stanley whistling through his teeth, and tie out the sides. I cut spruce branches to cover the floor. Stanley retrieves a small metal stove from the boat and rigs the pipe. With more slipping, we haul the rest of our kit into the tent: two axes, two rifles and a shotgun, sleeping bags, caribou hides, spare boots, a crosscut saw, a bag of ammunition, a purple Rubbermaid tub filled with food, backpacks with clothes. There is camping and then there is living somewhere, just not permanently. (...)

All moose begin as stone.

The taiga’s pulse of winter freeze and summer thaw grinds rock into dust, as do the rasp-tongues of glaciers high in some mountains. Streams suspend this silt in their waters and feed it into rivers; rivers flood, coating their shores in a slick of young soil. Willows push out sprouts, their roots drawing nutrients from the mud into new leaves rich in phosphorus and calcium. From rock-born elements, willows condense the raw stuff of bone and flesh. You might not think so by looking at it, but the green gauze of foliage is dense with protein. Moose gorge, stripping catkins as the snows melt, using their flexible noses and lips to select new leaves. A bull grows forty or fifty pounds of new bone in his antlers each summer; a yearling will add nearly the same to lengthen her femurs and widening scapulae. A grown cow sets no antlers but must nourish the bones and tissues of her fetal calves.

The moose we kill is among her willows, standing in the reddening dusk. In her second year, with no calf, she is alone. We come to her two days after making camp. The first morning dawns to a wet inch of snow on the tent roof. We spend a long morning by the stove, Stanley sipping coffee from a metal bowl—cools faster, he explains—and talking, pulling back the tent flap now and then to watch the river. No moose. By noon the sun is warm. We head upriver. No moose. After an hour, Stanley cuts the engine and we drift back toward camp. Flat land wide under the sky, the horizon pricked by the knotty tops of spruce.

And more eroded banks. In places, a carpet of mosses and berry roots hang a fraying edge over the maw of absent earth. The erosion is most common in the direct exposure of southern and eastern slopes. “No one pays enough attention to this,” Stanley says, gesturing at the slump. “Look at how cloudy this water is. All that erosion ends up in the river. It’s bad for the fish. It’s bad for everything that eats the damn fish. We eat the damn fish. But erosion isn’t exciting. Everybody wants the icebergs melting.” We fall silent then, drifting on the current.

It is simpler to tell the end of the moose, for it is clear why she dies. Her body will feed us and others back in town. Stanley slows the boat and brings out his rifle. I take the wheel. He sights her in the scope at fifty yards. Her ears prick in alarm.

Moose have many ways of evading danger: running, or hiding where they can smell and hear threats approach, or swimming. Some will even charge. This moose stands her ground, stamping once, shaking out her long neck and jutting her nose into the wind.

Then comes a sound like the air splitting: the contained explosion of the bullet echoing off the water. The moose’s front knees buckle. She bows, then shudders to the earth.

Doing right by her carcass takes hours. Just as there is no ease in killing, there is labor in gratitude, and an acute sense of our dependence on this animal. We cut willows to lay in a clean bed beneath the dark form. Spread a new tarp in the boat to hold the meat. Sharpen knives. It is skilled work to peel skin from flesh, to sever bones from each other at the joint, to skim around bundles of deep-red muscle. Stanley tells me where to hold a leg or pull taught the edge of hide as he peels it back. The fur under my fingers is damp from the wet grass. The air smells of blood and crushed plants, and occasionally the thick rot of digestion. The minerals moose consume in plant tissue feed colonies of bacteria in their gut, which, in turn, moose metabolize for protein. A moose rumen contains an entire microscopic world.

I take a turn skinning, crouched over and sweating. I am not fast or more than barely competent. We will be hungry soon, so I hand the knife back to Stanley and gather dry brush to make a fire; fetch a pot from the boat and fill it from a small stream. Stanley cuts strips of fat and muscle, which I add to the pot. In an hour we will have boiled meat. (...)

I had no words until we came back from hunting the first moose I saw die. Stanley sent me to bring the tongue and belly fat to an Elder named Tabitha, who lived across the dusty street. Tabitha scared me a little; my incompetence and foreignness felt acute in her presence. But that afternoon I could say: “We went upriver for moose. It was a bull. Can I make you boiled meat?” Even I could boil meat. We would boil more than one pot together. (...)

Now, Stanley and I pause to eat boiled meat. Alone, without this moose, we would be lesser, and hungry. Carrying the parsed carcass to the boat, Stanley groans under the weight of the shoulders and haunches. I follow with the carefully cleaned stomach, the sheets of ribs. Before we head back to camp, I wash my hands in the creek that veins down through the shoreline grasses. The water is reddish; there is iron in the land’s bones, and the tannic acid spruces release as they decay in the damp muskeg leeches trace metal from bedrock. Wolf prints rim the stream. More than one, it seems, from their interlaced patterns. Perhaps they came during their own hunt, stopping to drink where the water pools. Down the sloping bank, the stream gurgles as it joins the river, a capillary merging with an artery sunk in the flesh of the landscape.

by Bathsheba Demuth, Emergence |  Read more:

Image: Sarah Gilman
[ed. Moose hunting's usually a grind - hard and sweaty, mosquito infested, and, if you're lucky, rewarded with packing hundreds of lbs. of bloody moose meat sometimes miles through swamps and dense alder in bear country. Definitely Type 2 if not Type 3 fun.]

When Buying a Home Is Treated as a National Security Threat

After years of living in dorms and subpar apartments, Lisa Li could not wait to close on her new home.

The one-bedroom condo in Miami’s financial district had a view of the river, was in a safe neighborhood and, Ms. Li heard, had neighbors who were much like her — less party, more chill. So Ms. Li, a 28-year-old who came to the United States 11 years ago as a college student from China, put in an offer, had her bid accepted and began ordering furniture.

Then things took a sharp turn. At the last minute, the title company raised concerns about a small United States Coast Guard outpost near South Beach a few miles away. Her purchase, the company said, might run afoul of a new Florida law that prohibits many Chinese citizens from buying property in the state, especially near military installations, airports or refineries.

Under the law, Ms. Li could face prison time, and the sellers and real estate agents could be held liable. The deal collapsed.

“The whole experience was very hurtful and tiring,” Ms. Li said in a recent interview at a cafe in Miami, where she is still renting. “I just feel that, as someone who has lived and worked in this country for many years, and as a legal taxpayer, at the very least I should have the ability to buy a home that I can live in.”

More than three dozen states have enacted or are considering similar laws restricting land purchases by Chinese citizens and companies, arguing that such transactions are a growing threat to national security and that the federal government has failed to stop Chinese Communist Party influence in America.

Florida’s law, which went into effect in July, is among the furthest reaching. In addition to barring Chinese entities from buying agricultural land, it effectively prohibits most Chinese individuals without a green card from purchasing residential property. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the measure just before launching his Republican presidential campaign, warning voters that China represented the biggest threat to the United States.

“Today, Florida makes it very clear: We don’t want the C.C.P. in the Sunshine State,” Mr. DeSantis said last year. (...)

The Florida law restricts “foreign principals” from six other “countries of concern,” like Venezuela and Cuba, from owning property. But the most onerous restrictions — and harshest penalties — are specifically aimed at Chinese citizens.

The law was part of a broader package passed by the Florida Legislature last spring that included a bill restricting the state’s public universities and colleges from offering research positions to students from China and other countries. That law is also being challenged in court.

“The deeper that you look under the hood, the deeper that you see China has been clandestinely going after land grabs in the United States,” said State Representative David Borrero, a Republican from the Miami area who was one of the sponsors of the land law. “We can’t just have that in our backyard.”

Mr. Borrero disagreed with critics who said the property bill was discriminatory. “Our national security interests come first,” he said. (...)

State lawmakers have been especially worried about Chinese investment in agricultural land and territory near military installations, fearing that China could throttle America’s food supply or use the land as a spy post. Chinese interests own less than 1 percent of foreign-held agricultural land in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

National security experts said that the specific threat posed by Chinese people owning homes has not been clearly articulated. (...)

“There’s no evidence that Chinese homeownership poses harm to national security,” said Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups that brought the suit.

Mae Ngai, a professor of history and Asian American Studies at Columbia University, said the Florida law recalled the alien land laws from the early 20th century, which effectively prohibited Asian immigrants from buying farmland and, in some cases, homes in many states.

“They saw Asians as an alien invasion that was going to take over America,” Ms. Ngai said.

by Amy Qin and Patricia Mazzei, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martina Tuaty for The New York Times
[ed. Just when you think the Republican party can't get any lower, they find a way to exceed all expectations. Can't keep up with who or what I'm supposed to hate this week. See also: Let’s All Take a Deep Breath About China (NYT):]

"When you are constantly anxious, no threat is too small. In January, Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, introduced legislation that would ban imports of Chinese garlic, which he suggested could be a threat to U.S. national security, citing reports that it is fertilized with human sewage. In 2017, scientists at McGill University wrote there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if it was, it’s common practice to use human waste, known as “biosolids,” as fertilizer in many countries, including the United States. (...)

Last summer, several Republican lawmakers cried foul over the “Barbie” movie because a world map briefly shown in the background of one scene included a dashed line. They took this as a reference to China’s “nine-dashed line,” which Beijing uses to buttress its disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. According to Representative Jim Banks, this is “endangering our national security.” The map in the movie is clearly fantastical, had only eight dashes and bore no resemblance to China’s line. Even the Philippine government, which has for years been embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, dismissed the controversy and approved the movie’s domestic release. (...)

This is overt racism, and while not the majority opinion, it is concerning that so many Americans are blurring the line between the Chinese government and people of Chinese ethnicity, mirroring the language of our politicians.

China is a formidable geopolitical rival. But there is no world in which garlic, “Barbie” or a tutoring site poses meaningful threats to American national security. Labeling them as such reveals a certain lack of seriousness in our policy discourse."

Wilf Perreault, It's Magic, 2022
via:

[ed. Eerie how closely this resembles the alley behind my old house in Alaska.]

No One Buys Books

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.

Bestsellers are rare

In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

Q. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period?

A. My understanding is that it was about 50.

Q. 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?

A. Yes.

-- Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.

Turns out, they agree!

Every year, in thousands of ideas and dreams, only a few make it to the top. So I call it the Silicon Valley of media. We are angel investors of our authors and their dreams, their stories. That’s how I call my editors and publishers: angels… It’s rather this idea of Silicon Valley, you see 35 percent are profitable; 50 on a contribution basis. So every book has that same likelihood of succeeding.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

Those unicorns happen every five to 10 years or so.

We’re very hit driven. When a book is successful, it can be wildly successful. There are books that sell millions and millions of copies, and those are financial gushes for the publishers of that book, sometimes for years to come… A gusher is once in a decade or something. For instance, I don’t know if you know the Twilight series of books? Hachette published the Twilight series of books, and those made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of time.

Right now the novels of Colleen Hoover are topping the bestseller lists in really, really huge numbers and the publishers of those books are making a lot of money. You probably remember The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo… Or the Fifty Shades of Grey series. So once every five years, ten years, those come along for the whole industry and become the industry driver that’s drawing people into bookstores because there is such a commotion about them.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

Big advances go to celebrities

They spent a lot of the trial talking about books that made an advance of more than $250,000—they called these “anticipated top-sellers.” According to Nicholas Hill, a partner at Bates White Economic Consulting, 2 percent of all titles earn an advance over $250,000. (...)

Because they are so lucrative, Gallery Books Group focuses its efforts on trying to get celebrities to write books.

75 percent [of our] acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, the “celebrity adjacent,” etc. That way, we can control the content…. We are approaching authors and celebrities and politicians and athletes for ideas. So it’s really we are on the look out. We are scouts in a lot of ways…

— Jennifer Bergstrom, SVP, Gallery Books Group (...)

It’s all about the backlist

If new books typically don’t sell well, well that’s why publishing houses make their revenue from their backlist.

I would actually expect a book that is selling 300,000 units in a year is probably going to sell at least 400,000 or 500,000 over its life once you get backlist in there too.

Our backlist brings in about a third of our annual revenues, so $300 million a year roughly, a little less.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

The backlist includes all of the books that have ever come out. Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins, points out that their backlist includes bibles (an $80 million business), coloring books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, magic trick books, calendars, puzzles, and SAT study guides. It also includes perennial bestsellers like Don Quijote, Steven King’s Carrie, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—these books continue to sell year after year.

Popular children’s books are cash cows selling huge amounts of copies year after year and generation after generation.

Sometimes children’s books will be three generations, people have been buying them over and over again, and so that backlist catalog is really, really important to pay for the overhead of your publishing teams and then also to take the risks on the new books. So without a backlist I think it’s very hard to compete with these big books.

— Brian Murray, CEO, HarperCollins (...)

A “Netflix of Books” would put publishing houses out of business

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?

Technically, it does exist. Kindle Unlimited is the largest, followed by Scribd. Audible isn’t quite all-access, but then Spotify got into audiobooks and made them so. But none of these players have quite taken off the way Netflix or Spotify has. That’s for one reason: The Big Five publishing houses refuse to let their authors participate.

Q. No books are found on Kindle Unlimited? Because you think that’ll be had for the industry?”

A. We think it’s going to destroy the publishing industry.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

He’s right. No one would purchase a book again.

We all know about Netflix, we all know about Spotify and other media categories, and we also know what it has done to some industries… The music industry has lost, in the digital transformation, approximately 50 percent of its overall revenue pool.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

There’s one reason.

Around 20 to 25 percent of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80 percent of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers. If they got all-access, the revenue pool of the industry is going to be very small. Physical retail will be gone—see music—within two to three years. And we will be dependent on a few Silicon Valley or Swedish internet companies that will actually provide all-access.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

The publishing industry would die, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet writers would get their books read way more.

And I think it’s on its way. Spotify has already started publishing audiobooks, and my money is on Substack for eventually publishing written books!

by Elle Griffin, The Elysian |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Floored by these numbers (and process in general). More at the link.]

via: misplaced

Let's Play Dead

Surely the most absorbing—and, more importantly, deranged—take on the story of Anne Boleyn that you shall ever read.

There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do.

Let’s make it so she can’t escape.

Let’s seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off.

*

It takes two swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn’t happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it’s a touch long-winded, and no one’s paying him any attention. And she’s dead, so it’s especially beside the point.

The ministers dither in the courtyard, chancing last looks, murmuring, Exquisite mouth, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.

Henry will return to the body later, when everyone is gone and what’s left of her has been moved to the chapel. He will stand on the threshold, halfway between one momentous decision and the next. He will kneel on the dais beside her severed head and lay one ornately rubied hand along her frigid cheekbone. Maybe he will stay five minutes. Maybe he will stay 35. Maybe he will cry softly, but it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t a nosy patron around to commission an oil painting for the textbooks, and it doesn’t matter because she’s dead, she’s still very, very dead.

He will leave as furtively as he came, wiping his hand on his smock. Anne’s headless body and bodiless head will be left to their own devices, her blood blackening, thickening on the ground, the gristle of her neck tougher with every minute. The clock ticks. Night falls.

It is her head that speaks first. It says, “Is he gone?”

Her body spasms, maybe a shrug, or maybe just a reflex.

Her head opens its eyes and looks this way, that way. It says, “It’s over? It really worked?”

*

We don’t need to stick around while her body crawls its way to her head and fits itself back together. Every excruciating inch of the stone floor is a personal coup, and every inch lasts the whole span of human history. It is slow. It is clumsy. The head falls off a couple of times. The body is floppy with atrophy. There is a lot of blood. She probably, definitely cries. It does not befit a queen.

*

He is reading the Saturday paper, still in his shirtsleeves, when she breezes in the next morning. The horizon of the paper lowers to the bridge of his nose. He is a man who wears his tension in the way of a beautifully tuned piano, and in this moment he vibrates at a bewildered middle octave.

“Anne,” he says, at an absolute loss.

“Henry,” she says, the picture of politeness.

She sits at the table. Not a hair out of place, not a leaky vein in sight. She butters her toast in four deft strokes. A servant steps out from the shadows to fill her teacup to the brim. It’s all very serene, domestic. If it takes her a few tries to put her toast back on the plate, or if he dabs his napkin with a little extra violence, well, who can say. She slurps her tea, which they both know he hates. He hoists his newspaper back up. Like this, they go on.

*

Of course she knows what comes next. Let’s not fib.

She is seized from her bed some weeks later, in a state of drowsy dishabille, the wardens bristling with royal braid. This night will have the consistency of a dream. The palace swims in sound and darkness. The youngest one, the boy or man who grips her arm with one rubbery fist and studiously avoids her gaze, reminds her of the sons she has lost in the womb. She wants to tell him, Don’t worry, the thing you’re afraid of, the girl, the job, the rising cost of real estate in London, it will all work out someday—you’ll see, it all comes to pass, but he is leading her to her death, so it seems a bit impolite.

The cooks are baking down in the kitchen. The yeasty comfort of this aroma, which reminds her of the seam of volcanic heat that escapes when she cracks a fresh loaf, of a day opening beneath her, is too much. She shuts her nostrils. Her silk nightgown flaps at her ankles. When she can, she reaches out and touches the walls, the radiators, the edges of doorframes. Reminding herself that she is here, now, she is alive, that this dream is all too real. She can’t falter yet. There’s work to do.

A gibbet stands in the courtyard beneath a lonesome moon. They thread the noose around her neck with genteel care, snugly, even though the youngest one quakes every time his skin makes contact with hers. Up in the turret window, she sees Henry watching at a distance, as he does best. A coward in his big-boy breeches.

It is a quick death. The noose is tight. The drop is long. No one’s trying to be cruel here. One person cries out but is quickly silenced. The wardens double-check, triple-check to make sure she’s properly dead this time. From the courtyard to the turret, they flash a thumbs-up to Henry. He lets the curtain fall. This time, he does not visit her tenderly. It is done.

The wardens will return to their card games, all except the youngest one, who will mourn her without meaning to. He will simmer with sorrow for hours until, without warning to himself or others, he punches a wall so hard he fractures most of the knuckles in his right hand, leaving a fist-size whorl of buckled plaster as a signature.

And when she wakes up, hours later, on a slab of wintry marble in the royal morgue, it’s with a broken neck and very little air in her lungs. She adjusts her neck the way she might correct a crooked hat—difficult without a proper mirror, but she manages. She tightens the belt on her flimsy nightgown and slips through the haunted halls, pausing only when she reaches the king’s chambers. She doesn’t knock. She doesn’t crow or look for consolation, although the pang is there, and it feels unstoppable. Instead, with great effort, she continues on to her apartments, where she goes right back to bed. She is wiped and the throb in her neck is telling her to conserve strength. But most of all, it is such a trivial insult to him, so small, so vicious, to fall asleep as soundly as she does this night.

*

For a time, it is quiet. Henry waits. He consults his advisers, who are just as baffled. He tries to get his head around the situation, but at least he has the good grace to do it far from her.

You will want to hear that Anne takes solace in these precarious days, so let’s say that’s true: She takes that trip she always meant to, an ethereal island resort where every day the indigo waters whisper Get out, get out while you still can and the jacarandas whistle a jaunty tune of existential dread. She cashes in her many retirement portfolios, she doesn’t so much throw parties as fling them, handfuls of bacchanalia into those feverishly starlit nights.

Or: She digs her heels deep into the Turkish carpets of her palatial apartments and doesn’t budge. In the bruised hours between dusk and midnight, she feels a joy so grandiose that it fills the empty canals and sidewalks within her. She takes to promenades around the gardens, drinking in the virtuous geraniums in their neat rows and the slightly ferocious hedge maze with its blooming thistles and uncertain corners. She grows sentimental about centipedes and spiders and wasps and belladonna and ragwort and nettles and every other hardscrabble weed, every pernicious pest. I’m still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I’m still here.

The joy of the narrow escape is that it unfurls into hours, hidden doors that lead to secret passages of days, even if those days are numbered, even if she knows it. None of it is hers and it’s all she’s got. She loses herself, like a woman in a myth, unstuck in borrowed time, unraveling with possibility.

And yes, maybe she feels a few inches of gratitude for the armistice he has granted her. And yes, of course, the waiting days smother her, the twinned knowing and not-knowing what happens after, imagining Henry at every turn, cartoony with rage or puzzlement, but what is she to do?

*

After that, he drowns her himself. And who could blame him? If you want a job done right, you’d better know the end of this sentence. He comes upon her in the bath. He wraps his hands around her bare shoulders and thrusts her beneath the bathwater. Soap bubbles and air bubbles bloom in multitude. An artery in his skull skitters wildly. The water fights. The walls steam with tension.

She tries to thrash away from him, of course. She tries to defend herself, of course. But he’s six foot two, built like a linebacker, and she is not. There is nothing more complicated here. He is not the first man to do this, or the wealthiest, or the angriest. He certainly isn’t the last. As they say, it’s a tale as old as time.

Eventually the water stills. Her body floats. He sits on the brim of the tub, head bowed, the cuffs of his doublet dripping, his fingers pruning a gentle shade of violet. Up close, murder is a messy business, decidedly unroyal, too much flesh and screaming. He sits in wait—for how long, who knows. When the surface moves again and she sits up, feral-eyed and vomiting bathwater, he sighs.

“What do we do with you?” he says, not so much a question as a regret. And she has no answer, of course she has no answer.

*

It is he who helps her out of the tub, although she resists. He hands her the bathrobe, courteously studying the mosaic of the floor while she covers up. He helps her back to her rooms. (...)

*

Henry is learning.

He gets crafty. He invents the portable long-barreled firearm.

Then he invents the firing squad. Then he invents acute ballistic trauma. Then he sends his wardens to find her.

But while he’s busy doing all that, she’s been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The telephone. The 911 call. First-response teams. Modern-day surgery. Organ transplants. Crash carts. Gurneys. Subsidized medicine. She improvises like it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

It is ugly, obviously. There is quite a lot of blood and gore and spattered internal organs. But she lives. Still, she lives.

*

Lest you think it’s all maudlin garden strolls and gallows touched by moonlight, let’s admit that Anne and Henry still have their moments. Like the time a scullery maid starts a stovetop fire and trips the palace-wide alarm. All around the castle, the sprinkler systems kick in, first in the kitchens, then in the great hall, and then everywhere, misting porous manuscripts, Brylcreemed foreign dignitaries, the throne room, everyone on their toilets, Henry’s collection of vintage cameras, and Anne in her finest silk pajamas, snoring over her watercolors. Still very much not dead.

She escapes to the nearest balcony. And as she wrings her ruined shirt and her hair in futility, a window creaks open and who should climb through but Henry, his arms filled with soaking scrolls almost as tall as himself. He sees her sodden in her night-clothes and begins to guffaw.

She says, “That’s not very kingly,” feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.

He says, “Well, you don’t look especially queenly,” and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.

“The gossip magazines are going to love this look,” she says.

“Easy fix,” he says. “Here.” He sweeps up to the balcony’s edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she’s immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.

“You need more width,” she says, with all the calm she can summon.

He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn’t say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can’t help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it’s there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the twinkle in his eye.

“What’s your plan here?” she says.

“Trickery,” he says, not missing a step. “Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength.”

You may be thinking that this would be an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. But he’s still the size of a world-class heavy-weight boxer, and she is still most decidedly not. And yes, she’s eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?

by Senaa Ahmad, LitHub | Read more:
Image: via