Scent Makes a Place

In the late spring, the desert smells like chocolate. It’s fleeting, and it isn’t everywhere in New Mexico, but sometimes, walking in the scrubland, it suddenly hits: a sweetness shimmering through the air. At first, I didn’t know how to read this olfactory information, but now I can look for the source: yellow-petaled flowers with dark centers—chocolate daisies—blooming in the sun.

The American Southwest smells unlike anywhere I’ve lived before. It’s better than the woods of Maine; it’s far more fragrant. I didn’t expect that when I moved here. I’m a perfume collector, so I had smelled the desert through art before I smelled it in person. Through my experience sampling “Mojave Ghost,” “Arizona,” and “Desert Eden”—perfumes designed to evoke cactus flowers and conifers—I thought the mesas would smell dusty and musky, with a little green cypress thrown in. I was wrong.

Here, the plants hold their essences close to the stem out of necessity, only letting their oils free when it’s safe to do so, when they’re ready to be fertile. Here, the sand bakes under the sun and the fragile soil releases its secrets with each step. Here, even my dog’s urine is more potent, more fragrant on the wind, a louder yellow than I ever witnessed during our walks in Maine, blending uneasily with the grey rabbitbrush. It’s wetter and stranger than I ever anticipated—complex, elusive, fecund.

After a year in Santa Fe, I’ve finally started to scratch the surface of knowing this landscape. But the learning is slow and requires all my senses, including the one most often forgotten, what Hellen Keller called the “fallen angel” of the body. Unable to see or hear, smell became her primary way of reading the wider world; she lamented how that “most important” sense had been “neglected and disparaged” by the general populace, though she found it hard to communicate this knowledge to others. “It is difficult to put into words the thing itself,” she wrote. “There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.” (...)

I could list each note that sung with the pine, laying it out beat by beat. That’s how perfume companies do it: They give you the top, middle, and base notes. Sometimes this information is provided right on the packaging, though one still must sniff the nozzle to understand how they all come together. Language can only offer a loose approximation of a perfume, and a perfume can only offer a loose approximation of a natural smellscape.

The airy scent that follows rain is known as petrichor, and there are many forms. The petrichor in Singapore, for example, will be quite different from that of Reykjavik. The desert smells most intensely after a sudden summer downpour, when the plants release their oils, when the soil opens its pores to the sky. Nevertheless, perfumers have identified a common essence to petrichor: the chemical compound geosmin. It takes its name from the Greek words for “earth” and “smell.” In small amounts—and we are able to detect very small amounts of geosmin, down to 10 parts per trillion, akin to a stick of incense diffused through the entire Empire State Building—it smells familiar and musty, a little minerally, a little dirty, but in a nice way. In larger doses, it can come across mildewy and rank, like dirty laundry left in a damp basement. In nature, geosmin is produced by certain species of blue-green algae that live within soil, and is part of the fragrance bouquet that gets released into the air before, during, and after the high desert gets hit by rain.

For perfumers, the discovery and naming of geosmin in the 1960s was a boon, although it did take several more years to perfect the lab-synthesized version of the compound. It can be used in perfumery to add a muddy, petrichor scent to the bouquet. Since most fragrance houses don’t release a list of their chemical compounds, it’s not always easy to know when you’re smelling geosmin, but if you’re looking for a desert-inspired smellscape, there’s a good chance that synthetic petrichor will be part of the mix. (...)

But there are other ways to get a rainy desert scent, according to Cebastien Rose and Robin Moore, perfumers at the Albuquerque-based company Drylands Wilds. Unlike most perfumers, they don’t use synthetic odor molecules; their ingredients are derived from locally foraged plants, and through their work, they’ve become experts in the various scentscapes of New Mexico. Including greasewood, which is often considered a pest plant, a garbage scrub that needs getting rid of but is also responsible for an earthy, fresh Southwestern scent that wafts from its leaves. “Right before it rains,” explains Rose, “it opens all its stomata.” These “tiny mouths” are how the plant breathes, and as the rain begins to fall, the leaves release aromatic organic compounds called cresols, which smell a bit like coal tar and—thanks in part to their association with rainfall—a lot like a drenched desert.

“We’re obsessed with trying to capture that exact experience of being out here, walking the hills, smelling the piñon resin when it gets hot, smelling the ponderosa bark that wafts the air with vanilla,” Rose says. But it’s not enough to simply extract oils from the bark. It’s even difficult to capture a single tree in perfume form, says Rose. Plus, that wouldn’t reflect the experience of walking under the “giant, orange-barked trees. You wouldn’t get the oak moss, the soil, the place.” That, explains Rose, is where the “art of perfumery” comes in. The Dryland Wilds ponderosa perfume has yellow nutsedge, sweet clover, piñon, oakmoss, fir, and ponderosa. It contains extracts that mimic the dirt, resulting in a liquid that smells like a tree, yes, but is also intended to smell like a moment—a dry summer afternoon on the Atalaya trails, for instance. “We’ve had people cry after smelling it,” adds Moore. “One woman had lived in a ponderosa tree trying to protect old growth forest for a year, and for her, that hit was instantaneous.” (...)

Smell, as a sense, is dependent on so many variables—it can be affected by our previous experience, our current context, and our emotional or mental state. Something may smell “good” in one scenario and disgusting in another. How we judge a smell can be changed by the sounds we’re hearing, the temperature that surrounds us, the food we’re tasting, the colors we’re seeing. It’s a sense that shifts and slips, sometimes in predictable ways but sometimes in totally unexpected directions. (...)

Each smell is a distinct sensation, but together they are more than that. Smellscapes are part of place-making, the process by which a site becomes imbued with meaning and metaphor; a place is more than just the physical location. Places have history, lore, memory, and emotion all infused into them, and encounters we have with a place are participatory.

by Katy Kelleher, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Mike Hardiman/Shutterstock

[ed. Greatly undervalued. Whenever I go back to Alaska I'm definitely aware of how unique the air smells - primal and earthy, sharp and fresh. Same with the lush tropical slopes high above Hawaii's beaches, early at sunrise. In terms of manufactured smells, a wisp of Eau de London or Hai Karate (!) (which I haven't experienced in decades) can take me back in an instant to my first girlfriend and high school... over 50 years ago. Powerful stuff.]

Road to Manele
Image: markk

Image credit: misplaced

Wood Rose (Merremia tuberosa)

Image: markk

The Problem With Problem Sharks

The Problem With Problem Sharks (Nautilus)
Image: karelnoppe/Shutterstock
[ed. A few bad actors give all sharks a bad name. See also: First Evidence of Individual Sharks Involved in Multiple Predatory Bites on People (Society for Conservation Biology). Love this image.]

There Is Way Too Much Serendipity

As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry.

Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn’t actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem.

If we’re going to break our conditioning anyway, where do we start? How do you even come up with a new artificial sweetener? I’ve been wondering about this, because it’s not obvious to me how you would figure out what is sweet and what is not.

Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side:

I can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”. Most sweeteners were discovered in the 20th century, before high-throughput screening was available. So how did they proceed?

Let’s look into these molecules’ origin stories.

Aspartame was discovered accidentally by a chemist researching a completely unrelated topic. At some point, he licked his finger to grab a piece of paper and noticed a strong sweet taste.

Cyclamate was discovered by a grad student who put his cigarette on his bench, then smoked it again and noticed the cigarette was sweet.

(I know what you’re thinking. The kind of guy who lights up cigarettes in a chemistry lab and places them in the middle of uncharacterised compounds before taking them to his mouth again, must have died young of an interesting death. I checked – he proceeded to live to the old age of 87.)

Saccharine was discovered by a researcher who ate bread without washing his hands and noticed the bread was sweet.

Acesulfame K was also discovered serendipitously by a chemist licking his fingers, although the legends don’t specify the exact circumstances behind the finger-licking.

There’s an exception: sucralose was actually the fruit of rational, deliberate design. The researchers reasoned that, if you do slight modifications to sucrose, you could find a molecule that is no longer metabolized but still activates the sweetness receptors. So they started from the formula for sucrose, then made carefully-designed chemical modifications to the structure until –

Haha, just kidding:

While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to "test" a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to "taste" it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet.

It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.

I think this is a suspiciously high amount of serendipity. I see two options:

Super-sweet molecules like aspartame are commonplace – there are plenty of molecules hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, but we only know the few that were ingested by accident,

Super-sweet molecules are very rare, it’s just that chemists accidentally taste a lot of chemicals. Entire chemistry departments routinely taste the entire space of possible molecules, but they don’t notice unless the molecule has a strong taste. (...)

(There are a few other naturally-occurring low-calorie sweeteners, but they are uncommon and it’s not clear why they exist. My favourite is thaumatin, a protein involved in the immune system of a plant, who just happens to be 100,000 times more potent than sucrose. As far as I can tell, nobody knows why.)

Altogether, this illustrates the fact that it’s not common for our sweet receptors to get activated by small calorieless molecules, and chemists must have eaten a lot of weird things to find the synthetic sweeteners we currently use.

This is when things get out of control.

The big pharma tasting machinery

Hear me out: there are about 4000 clinical trials worldwide each year. Tasting is an important part of drug development – if anything, it may determine how the pill should be coated or whether to use a capsule. Therefore, several thousands of new compounds must be tasted by clinical trial participants every year.

Why didn’t we discover any new artificial sweetener this way? What are the chances that the top 5 most used synthetic sweeteners all come from chemists accidentally ingesting their works in progress, and not a single one from the cohorts of people tasting thousands of molecules all the time in controlled settings?

Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

There are more than 19,000 FDA-approved prescription drugs on the market, 40% of which are administered orally,

About half of Phase III clinical trials fail, and this is due to a lack of efficacy 60% of the time.

So, we can estimate that the number of inactive/non-toxic oral drugs that were tasted by people in Phase III trials is upwards of 4,000.

How many were sweet? I looked at clinical trials search engines and wasn’t able to find any report of a strong sweet taste (the only hit was dextroamphetamine-saccharate, which basically contains sucrose). And of course, zero of these 4,000 chemicals ended up being commercialized as artificial sweeteners.

Meanwhile, rule-breaking chemists accidentally found the five commercial molecules mentioned above. Therefore, chemists must have tasted at least 20,000 molecules to find all five of them, and that’s only counting the ones which were actually commercialized. That’s pretty impressive.

I hear your objections

What if pharma companies are scared to use a potential medicine as a culinary additive?
The estimate above only counts drugs that were found to be ineffective, but maybe they still had some activity, at least theoretical, and that doesn’t sound safe. However, it happened in the past that a drug developed for something ended up repurposed for something else entirely. A famous case is minoxidil, which was developed to treat ulcers, but ended up being used to prevent hair loss. So that doesn’t seem to be a huge barrier.

What if people have already fully optimized sweeteners and there’s no market for new ones?
Our current sweeteners are not bad – at least we’re not using straight-up motherfucking lead like in Ancient Rome – but they are not perfect either. First, all the sweeteners I know taste bad. Second, aspartame is (lightly) suspected to cause cancer. Third, people are looking for new sweeteners: there’s no lack of studies using in-silico screening or machine learning to find them.

What if participants don’t report it when they find a drug is delicious?
Clinical trials are usually very thorough when it comes to reporting side effects – remember the guy in the Moderna vaccine trial who was struck by lightning and they had to report it as a Serious Adverse Effect? But, fine, maybe people don’t report something as benign as a sweet taste.

In that case, here is something they cannot hide: a psychedelic trip.

High probability

Like aspartame, LSD was discovered by a chemist who ingested it by accident. LSD binds to serotonin receptors, which are also the target of highly-lucrative classes of antidepressants, anti-emetics, and anti-migraine medication. So you can imagine the massive number of serotonin analogues that the pharma industry has fed to clinical trial participants. But, unless they’re hiding things from us, none of these trials resulted in participants tripping balls. From this, I conclude that LSD-level psychedelic molecules must be exceedingly rare.

Just to be sure, I checked the FDA’s side-effect database – it doesn’t have a “walls are breathing” search term, but it has “visual hallucinations”. Most of the results are boring psychiatric drugs like zolpidem or bupropion, with limited recreative potential. I mean, yes, there is a case report of a 5-years-old seeing helicopters in her room after taking antibiotics, but I don’t think this has much street value.

Meanwhile, the Psychonaut Wiki lists about a gazillion psychedelic compounds with cool names like LSM-775 (they even have one that smells like Pokémon cards – a drug taken only by the really cool kids). This is the result of extensive systematic testing by the stoner research community, most notably the Shulgin family.

Here’s the thing: among the many close analogues of LSD, most are less potent than the original LSD. Did Albert Hofmann hit the most powerful LSD variant on the first try, just by chance? More likely, chemists must also have exhausted a substantial part of all possible molecules in the configuration space around LSD. Generations of chemists must have routinely ingested all kinds of mild psychedelics, felt mildly in communion with the Universe, had a mild encounter with God, and went on with their research without telling anyone. LSD was just the only one strong enough to be noticed.

If you add the history of LSD to the history of artificial sweeteners, it follows that chemistry researchers are constantly tasting everything they touch, and I will believe that until someone gives me a better explanation.

by Malmsbury, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. The Wikipedia page on Alexander Shulgin is quite interesting.]

The Cruel Kids Table

The Cruel Kids Table (Intelligencer)
Image: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine

[ed. When you're young it's fun to be obnoxious. Eventually you grow up and mature if you want to be respected. Some never do.]

The Crisis Deepens With “Radical Constitutionalism”

[ed. I'm as tired as anyone having to read about the daily disintegration of our country and various assaults on our Constitution, but when you have an obvious coup in progress everything else begins to seem trivial. The essay referenced below by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith is particularly informative and definitely worth a read. Since Congressional Republicans have already surrendered their authority to stop this train wreck, it's left to the Supreme Court to stand as a last bastion of hope. But if they capitulate as well, or are just ignored outright then we truly are in a consitututional crisis. Then what?]

While many American presidents have tested the boundaries of their powers in discrete ways, few American presidents (outside the context of the Civil War or the world wars) have comprehensively pushed the exercise of their power to its absolute limit. The honor code has largely held.

Even the most corrupt president before Trump — Richard Nixon — pushed much of his imperial presidency from behind closed doors. He knew that if his misconduct came to light, he’d pay a steep price.

Trump is different. His defiance lies in plain view. There is no dignity. There is no restraint. There is only power.

The founders knew that not every president would be George Washington, and they built in the ultimate check on presidential power: an independent branch of government that could override and even remove the president. (...)

There’s one last federal check remaining: judicial review. The doctrine is so important that one can think of the founding as unfolding in three distinct phases. First, we ratified the 1787 Constitution, which established a republican form of government. Next, we ratified the Bill of Rights, to create explicit protections for individual liberty.

Finally, the Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison and established the principle of judicial review, the power of the Supreme Court to definitively declare the meaning of the Constitution and nullify any law or official act that contradicts it.

In theory, that last guardrail still stands. But as Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer argue in a chilling new piece in their newsletter, Executive Functions, Trump may not be using his executive orders to manufacture a series of test cases designed to check the limits of his power; he may instead be “seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.”

Goldsmith and Bauer argue specifically that the Trump administration may be attempting “to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.” (...)

As we watch unprecedented events unfold, it’s important to shift our political paradigm. I’ve been concerned for a long time that Trump and his MAGA movement have fully internalized the morality of the ends justifying the means.

That’s certainly still an element of Trumpism. It’s a universal temptation in politics and an almost omnipresent element of populism, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether the means are the ends. In other words, he’s not breaking the constitutional structure to achieve concrete policy goals; breaking the constitutional structure is the policy goal.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Arthur S. Aubry and DNY59/Getty Images
[ed. It's official. Russell Vought has now been confirmed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget.]

***

Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court?

Below we assess a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.

The third possibility sounds histrionic, which is not our usual posture. But it appears to be the view of Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is one of Trump’s “most influential advisers,” who will be voted on for confirmation in the Senate soon, and who will play a central role in Trump’s executive orders, if he hasn’t already.

Vought’s Views

In May 2023, Vought complained at a talk at the pro-Trump think tank, the Center for Renewing America, that Trump’s policies in the first administration were thwarted because “the lawyers come in and say it’s not legal, you can’t do that, that would overturn this precedent, there’s a state law against that.”

Vought added that legal objections to presidential policies are where “so much of things break down in our country.” He provided a specific example: “a future president says, ‘What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots,’ we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community . . . to come in and say ‘that’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Vought added: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal . . . .”

We cannot know if, or the degree to which, Vought’s theory of governmental legal advice is guiding the Trump administration’s executive orders. Yet Vought’s theory fits many of the known facts. And the OMB, as we will explain below, has a vital role in executive orders.

by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, Executive Functions |  Read more:

Image: Shealah Craighead

Bait and Switch

Top officials at the Education Department told staff members Wednesday that if they accept the Trump administration’s deferred resignation package, the education secretary may later cancel it and employees would not have any recourse, potentially leaving them without promised pay.

The Office of Personnel Management sent notices last week to federal employees that if they resign by Thursday, they could continue receiving pay and benefits until the end of September. The Trump administration hopes to get as much as 10% of the workforce to quit as part of a plan to shrink the federal bureaucracy.

 

But three Education Department officials told NBC News that Rachel Oglesby, the department’s new chief of staff, and Jacqueline Clay, its chief human capital officer, described significant caveats to the so-called Fork in the Road offer in an all-staff meeting held over Zoom on Wednesday. The officials did not want to be named for fear of retaliation.

The education secretary would be allowed to rescind the agreement, or the government could stop paying, and employees who took the deferred resignation package would waive all legal claims, the three officials said they were told in the meeting. The three employees say they have seen only sample resignation agreements so far and would need to agree to resign by Thursday evening before they could see the actual terms of their separations.

“It sounded like a commercial for a used car dealership, like, ‘Act now, one day only,’” said a department official who attended the meeting.

Spokespersons for the Education Department and the OPM said that was false, pointing to a memo that says the resignation offer’s “assurances are binding on the government. Were the government to backtrack on its commitments, an employee would be entitled to request a rescission of his or her resignation.”

However, the memo includes a sample agreement that includes a clause that agency heads retain the sole discretion to rescind the deals and that employees waive the right to challenge them before the Merit Systems Protection Board "or any other forum.”

A sample deferred resignation agreement specific for Education Department employees includes similar language, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.

Across the federal government, pressure from the Trump administration to take the buyout offer has been mounting. In an email to federal employees Tuesday following up on the original buyout proposal, the OPM wrote: “Please note the Deferred Resignation program (‘Fork in the Road’) expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday February 6th. There will not be an extension of this program.”

More than 40,000 people have taken the buyout offer so far, according to a White House official, out of a federal workforce of over 2 million people.

There is deep concern among federal workers that the Trump administration’s buyout offer could turn out to be a bait-and-switch, with the government potentially failing to hold up its end of the bargain. Education Department managers’ comments only worsened those concerns, the three employees said. (...)

Some labor unions for federal workers have sued to stop the deferred resignation program, arguing that the Trump administration does not have legal authority to offer such buyouts. Federal government labor unions and Democratic state attorneys general have warned federal workers that they may never receive the promised resignation benefits and characterized the offers as an attempt to intimidate them into quitting.

Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO and head of the Small Business Administration in his first administration, to be education secretary. No confirmation hearing is scheduled yet.

by Tyler Kingkade and David Ingram, NBC News |  Read more:

Image: Erin Scott/Bloomberg via Getty Images file
[ed. All I can say is, if there were 40,000 people stupid enough to accept this 'offer', they deserve to exit government service. There'll be no tears shed when they eventually get shafted. And if by some miracle the process does run into roadblocks, they've essentially just raised their hands and said fire me anyway.]

The Enabling Act of 1933

The Enabling Act of 1933 (Ermächtigungsgesetz), officially titled Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (lit. 'Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich'), was a law that gave the German Cabinet – most importantly, the Chancellor – the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg, leading to the rise of Nazi Germany. Critically, the Enabling Act allowed the Chancellor to bypass the system of checks and balances in the government. 

[ed. Chancellor=President; Reichstag= Congress]

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, was appointed as chancellor, the head of the German government. On 27 February, the Reichstag building of the German parliament caught fire. Acting as chancellor, Hitler immediately accused the Communists of being the perpetrators of the fire and claimed the arson was part of a larger effort to overthrow the German government. Using this justification, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to enact the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree abolished most civil liberties, including the right to speak, assemble, protest, and due process. Using the decree, the Nazis declared a state of emergency and began a violent crackdown against their political enemies. As Hitler cleared the political arena of anyone willing to challenge him, he contended that the decree was insufficient and required sweeping policies that would safeguard his emerging dictatorship. Hitler submitted a proposal to the Reichstag that if passed would immediately grant all legislative powers to the cabinet, and by extension Hitler. This would in effect allow Hitler's government to act without regard to the constitution.

Despite outlawing the communists and repressing other opponents, the passage of the Enabling Act was not a certainty. Hitler allied with other nationalist and conservative factions, and they steamrolled over the Social Democrats in the March 1933 German federal election. Germans voted in an atmosphere of extreme voter intimidation perpetrated by the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) militia. Contrary to popular belief, Hitler did not win an outright majority in the Reichstag as the majority of Germans did not vote for the Nazi Party. The election was a setback for the Nazis; however, it was insufficient in stopping the ratification of the Enabling Act. In order to obtain the act's passage, the Nazis implemented a strategy of coercion, bribery, and manipulation. Hitler removed any remaining political obstacles so his coalition of conservatives, nationalists, and Nazis could begin building the Nazi dictatorship. Once the Enabling Act was introduced, it was hastily passed by the Reichstag and Reichsrat on 23 March 1933. Later that day, the Enabling Act was signed into law by President Paul von Hindenburg. Unless extended by the Reichstag, the act would expire after four years. With the Enabling Act now in force, the cabinet (in practice, the chancellor) could pass and enforce laws without legislative oversight.

The combined effect of the Enabling Act and the Reichstag Fire Decree transformed Hitler's government into a legal dictatorship and laid the groundwork for his totalitarian regime. By July, the NSDAP was the only legally permitted party in Germany. The Reichstag from 1933 onward effectively became the rubber stamp parliament that Hitler had desired. The German conservative elite, which included the vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, who miscalculated the true intention of the Nazis to monopolize state power, were soon marginalized by the Nazi regime. By mid-March, the government began sending communists, labor union leaders, and other political dissidents to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp.

The passing of the Enabling Act marked the formal transition from the democratic Weimar Republic to the totalitarian Nazi dictatorship. From 1933 onward, Hitler continued to consolidate and centralize power via purges and propaganda. In 1934, Hitler and Heinrich Himmler began removing non-Nazi officials together with Hitler's rivals within the Nazi Party, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives [ed. a series of straight up murders targeting political opponents]. Once the purges of the Nazi Party and German government concluded, Hitler had total control over Germany. Armed with the Enabling Act, Hitler could begin German rearmament and achieve his aggressive foreign policy aims which ultimately resulted in World War II. The Enabling Act was renewed twice but was rendered moot when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies in 1945, and was repealed by a law passed by the occupying powers in September of that year. The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany of 1949 stipulates that only bodies that are constitutionally endowed with legislative power may enact laws, so the German constitution does not allow the adoption of an enabling act similar to the one from 1933.

Background

After being appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for 5 March 1933. The Secret Meeting of 20 February 1933 was held between Hitler and 20 to 25 industrialists at the official residence of Hermann Göring in the Reichstag Presidential Palace, and was aimed at financing the election campaign of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).

The burning of the Reichstag was depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, and Hitler urged Hindenburg to pass the presidential Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree significantly curbed civil rights for German citizens and suspended freedom of press and habeas corpus rights just five days before the election. Hitler used the decree to have the office of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) raided and its representatives arrested, effectively eliminating them as a political force.

Although they received five million more votes than in the previous election, the Nazis failed to gain an absolute majority in parliament, and depended on the 8% of seats won by their coalition partner, the German National People's Party, (DNVP) to reach 52% in total. To free himself from this dependency, Hitler had the cabinet, in its first post-election meeting on 15 March, draw up plans for an Enabling Act which would give the cabinet legislative power for four years. The Nazis devised the Enabling Act to gain complete political power without the need of the support of a majority in the Reichstag and without the need to bargain with their coalition partners. The Nazi regime was unique compared to its contemporaries, most famously Joseph Stalin's, because Hitler did not seek to draft a completely new constitution whereas Stalin did so. Technically the Weimar Constitution of 1919 remained in effect even after the Enabling Act, only losing force in 1945 when Germany surrendered at the end of World War II and ceased to be a sovereign state.

Preparations and negotiations

The Enabling Act allowed the National Ministry (essentially the cabinet) to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag. Because this law allowed for departures from the constitution, it was itself considered a constitutional amendment. Thus, its passage required the support of two-thirds of those deputies who were present and voting. A quorum of two-thirds of the entire Reichstag was required to be present in order to call up the bill.

The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD) were expected to vote against the Act. The government had already arrested all Communist and some Social Democrat deputies under the Reichstag Fire Decree. The Nazis expected the parties representing the middle class, the Junkers and business interests to vote for the measure, as they had grown weary of the instability of the Weimar Republic and would not dare to resist.

Hitler believed that with the Centre Party members' votes, he would get the necessary two-thirds majority. Hitler negotiated with the Centre Party's chairman, Ludwig Kaas, a Catholic priest, finalizing an agreement by 22 March. Kaas agreed to support the Act in exchange for assurances of the Centre Party's continued existence, the protection of Catholics' civil and religious liberties, religious schools and the retention of civil servants affiliated with the Centre Party. It has also been suggested that some members of the SPD were intimidated by the presence of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) throughout the proceedings.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

 Image: Adlebert public domain; NBC News

[ed. Starts slowly and builds momentum. Resistors wring their hands, pander, rationalize, and eventually capitulate refusing to see what's happening before their very eyes - until they're no longer needed and then just murdered (Night of the Long Knives). See also: Senate Confirms Russell Vought as Office of Management and Budget Director (NYT).]

America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace. (...)

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.

Nearly all other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. (...)

In 2017, the Trump administration and Republican congressional leadership tried creating a similar system in the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air-traffic controllers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The legislation also enjoyed support from unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and a bipartisan array of former officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation.

The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators, especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system—and the campaign contributions and pork-barrel opportunities that came with it. But the effort was doomed mainly because of opposition from private plane owners, who pay a pittance for the services they use. Though the legislation guaranteed that they would not be charged new user fees, their lobbyists scared enough lawmakers to quash it.

by John Tierney, City Journal |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

[ed. If there's any system ripe for AI transformation, I'd say this would be Candidate No.1 (Pentagon auditing, No.2). After all, isn't managing complex systems in real time, streamling flight operations, providing total situational awareness 24/7 all something AI could do easily, even while watching Jeopardy and polishing its nails? We'll see. There are detractors:]

***

.... should they maintain the status quo to please the lobbyists representing owners of corporate jets?

If that choice doesn’t sound difficult, then you don’t know the power that corporate jet-setters wield in Congress. They’re the consummate Washington crony capitalists: shameless enough to demand that their private flights be subsidized by the masses who fly coach, savvy enough to stymie reforms backed by Democratic and Republican administrations.

While the rest of the industrialized world has been modernizing air-traffic control, the United States remains mired in technology from the mid-twentieth century. Controllers and pilots rely on ground-based radar and radio beacons instead of GPS satellites. They communicate by voice over crowded radio channels because the federal government still hasn’t figured out how to use text messaging. The computers in control towers are so primitive that controllers track planes by passing around slips of paper.

The result: an enormous amount of time wasted by passengers, especially those traveling in the busy airspace of the Northeast. Because the system is so imprecise, planes have to be kept far apart, which limits the number of planes in the air—leaving passengers stranded at terminals listening to the dread announcements about “air traffic delays.” When they do finally take off, they’re often delayed further because the pilot must fly a zig-zag course following radio beacons instead of saving time and fuel by taking a direct route.

Maeve Brennan (Irish 1980), September, 2020, Oil on canvas

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The Mountain West’s Mega-McMansion Problem

The Mountain West’s Mega-McMansion Problem (The Nation)

The Kelly Parcel is a stunning 600-plus acres of wilderness on the edge of Grand Teton National Park. The land had been allotted to the state, a legacy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when the federal government allotted at least one square-mile parcel of land to Wyoming in every new township, essentially as a land trust that would hopefully accumulate value). Two years ago, the state decided to cash out, hoping to auction off the Kelly Parcel—ideally selling to the federal government, which would incorporate the land into the park system—for a sum in the region of $100 million. The state would then use the proceeds to fund schools, which urgently need the money: Wyoming has one of the smallest tax bases in the US, with no state income tax, no estate tax, no corporate income tax, low property taxes, and strictly limited sales taxes.

But having swung rightward as the political winds brought into power a leadership increasingly hostile to the idea of a redistributive, pro-environment government, the five-member State Board of Land Commissioners in the Office of State Lands and Investments (OSLI) opted not to sell to the National Park Service but instead to pursue the highest bids from the private sector, meaning the land would likely be converted into mega-mansions or into casinos, golf courses, and other playthings for the region’s super-wealthy.

Image: Michael Gäbler

Who Will Stop Elon Musk’s Coup?

The world’s richest man now has the power to override congressional spending decisions and access to private information about every US taxpayer. [ed. The gutlessness of this Republican Congress is astounding. I know which side they'd be on in 1938.] 

Elon Musk, often described as Donald Trump’s shadow president [ed. ie., brain], has quickly morphed into something much more dangerous: Trump’s co-autocrat. Hitherto, Trump’s biggest threat to American democracy came when he incited the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The event was typically Trump in that it was lurid, violent, theatrical, and televised. January 6, like Trump’s first term, demonstrated that he had the ability to menace democratic norms and spur on mayhem—but not to really control the ultimate operation of government.

For his second term, Trump has tried to make amends for that failure by recruiting true believers who share his passion for subduing the government, including running roughshod over the system of checks and balance. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who specializes in taking over large companies and remaking them in his image, has been Trump’s most important ally in this agenda, acting as considerably more than an aide. In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that

Musk vowed to unilaterally cancel hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of government grants after apparently gaining access to review the US Treasury’s vast payments system, a move that prompted the sudden resignation of one of the department’s most senior officials.

The world’s richest man, who bankrolled Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and was tasked by the president with running the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on his social media site X that he was “rapidly shutting down…illegal payments” after a list of grants to Lutheran organisations was posted online.

This is a remarkable power grab on Musk’s part, because he’s a private citizen who is still overseeing his vast fortune even as he claims authority to unilaterally slash government funding. Further, Musk is doing this on behalf of DOGE, which The New York Times accurately describes as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.” In fact, DOGE is not a real department authorized by Congress but merely the fiat creation of an executive order signed by Trump. DOGE is an advisory group that is usurping power the Constitution grants to Congress alone. Last week, Trump issued a memo to freeze federal funding for government programs such as Medicaid and SNAP, only to retreat in the face of both popular protest and an adverse court decision. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the power of the purse, while the president is obligated to “faithfully execute the laws.” Trump’s attempt to arrogate the power to not spend money already allocated by Congress thus constitutes “impoundment”—a practice forbidden by long-standing practices and court decisions.

Waleed Shahid, a Democratic Party strategist and member of The Nation’s editorial board, distilled with bracing clarity the breathtaking scope of Musk’s power grab:

Not with tanks in the streets or militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy. In just the past few days, Musk’s hand-picked agents have seized control of Treasury’s 6 trillion payment system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the General Services Administration (GSA)—institutions that, together, function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government…. In any other country, experts would call it state capture, a textbook coup.

Because Musk and his DOGE minions have strong-armed their way into the offices of the Treasury, OPM, GSA, and USAID, they have access to an astonishing body of public data. Musk can, for example, find the Social Security number of any American citizen and also what funds (if any) they receive from the government. (...)

What’s scandalous is Musk’s nebulous status as both a private citizen and presidential crony, which has allowed him access to data that that can easily be abused. Coming from Silicon Valley, Musk knows that data is power. Now he has access to the full data set of the federal government, which he is both hoarding to himself and preventing the public from seeing (many government websites have already been shuttered, allegedly as a temporary measure during the Trump/Musk riorganizzazione, including public health sets and Census data).

Most disturbingly, Musk and his DOGE team have no proper congressional authorization. (...)

The end goal of the coup is to give Trump and Musk control over the spigot of Treasury spending: in other words, control over the heart of the federal government that ensures the flow of money. In a post on Monday morning, economist Nathan Tankus assembled alarming reporting that makes clear Musk and his DOGE team are working toward control of Treasury’s computer network system. Tankus spells out the new power this would give Trump and Musk:

Without political control of the payment’s heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.

Is anyone prepared to end this coup? In an earlier post, Tankus noted that describing an action as unconstitutional does little good if the system of checks and balances breaks down. Paraphrasing Joseph Stalin’s famous quip about the powerlessness of moral leaders such as the pope, Tankus asks, “…and how many divisions does the Constitution have?” There are likely to be court challenges, some of which will roll back parts of Musk’s coup. But the courts are a fickle—and in any case nondemocratic—remedy. Musk’s abuse of power is a massive encroachment on congressional power, but there is little reason to expect Congress will fight back.

Congressional Republicans have shown themselves to be abjectly servile to Trump, which makes remedies such as impeachment moot. Nor do Democrats at this moment have any fighting spirit. Instead, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has adopted the stance that it is best to keep the Democrats’ powder dry for future battles. Schumer told The New York Times, “We’re not going to go after every single issue. We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights.” It’s a bit distressing that even in this fantasy scenario, Schumer is not imagining rallying the public to counter Trump’s destruction of democracy. Instead, Schumer daydreams about Democrats tying themselves to the metaphorical train tracks, which he apparently believes (all evidence to the contrary) will excite the mercy of the Republicans to stop the train. This is the dream life of the willfully self-defeating—people whose only hope is that the bully will at some point get tired of beating them up.

by Jeet Heer, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Angela Weiss/Getty Images
[ed. Same question everybody else is wondering: who elected this guy? Whatever he paid to fund Trump's re-election campaign has provided dividends beyond his wildest dreams (well, maybe not... who knows what megalomanics dream of, but for sure nothing to do with the Constitution). Wonder what Elon will do with all that data now in his possession? Whether he sticks around or not (I can't imagine Trump playing second fiddle much longer), he'll have it all, with no accountability to anyone but himself. I envision high density storage devices blazing away as we speak. See also: Ten Days That Screwed the World (Nation); and this horrifying all-encompassing report: Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government). All aided by his band of good little Nazis: The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks (NYT):]

***

For those lucky enough not to remember, the Coalition Provisional Authority was the administration that George W. Bush and his team put in place after charging heedlessly into Iraq, convinced that it would be easy to remake a government about which they knew next to nothing. It was full of right-wing apparatchiks, some barely out of college, who were given enormous responsibilities. Six people initially hired for low-level administrative jobs after sending their résumés to the conservative Heritage Foundation were assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. A social worker who’d served as director at a Christian charity was put in charge of rebuilding the health care system.

Meanwhile, 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi government workers, many of whom had joined the Baath Party only to get their jobs in the first place, were fired. Schools went without teachers. As Syrus Solo Jin wrote in Time, budget blunders by overwhelmed novices meant that the police weren’t paid on time. The de-Baathification that Vance wanted to emulate is widely seen as a disaster that contributed to the deadly chaos and instability that followed America’s invasion. (...)

Soon after taking over, they created a crisis by shutting down huge segments of federal government spending, though they restarted at least some payments after a judge slapped them with a court order. Late Friday, Elon Musk seized control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars and houses sensitive data about millions of Americans. Some of the people helping him take over the government — who include, as Wired reported, a half dozen engineers between the ages of 19 and 24 — appear to be even less experienced than the neophytes who staffed the C.P.A. in Iraq.

Employees at the General Services Administration, which manages office space, transportation and technology for the federal government, told Wired that Edward Coristine, a recent high-school graduate who spent three months at Musk’s company Neuralink, has been on calls where “workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.” Another young member of Musk’s team, a software engineer named Gavin Kliger, sent out an email to USAID employees informing them that the headquarters has been closed and they shouldn’t come in; Musk said that he’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

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Grammys 2025: Best Jazz Instrumental and Performance Nominees

Lakecia Benjamin Phoenix Reimagined (Live ) FT John Scofield, Randy Brecker , Jeff Tain Watts

“Beyond This Place” — Kenny Barron featuring Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Johnathan Blake, Immanuel Wilkins and Steve Nelson

What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?

From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on.

Whatever thoughts past writers have had about the virtues of attention, pessimists would argue that the problem is different now. It’s as if we’re not reading books so much as the books are reading us. TikTok is particularly adept at this; you just scroll and the app learns—from your behavior, plus perhaps other information harvested from your phone—about what will keep you hooked. “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, What did we bring to the world?” Tony Fadell, a co-developer of the iPhone, has said. (...)

It’s been fifteen years since Carr’s “The Shallows.” Now we have what is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre, “The Sirens’ Call,” by Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor. Hayes acknowledges the long history of such panics. Some seem laughable in hindsight, he concedes, like one in the nineteen-fifties about comic books. Yet others seem prophetic, like the early warnings about smoking. “Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?” Hayes asks.

Great question. If we take the skeptics seriously, how much of the catastrophist’s argument stands? Enough, Hayes feels, that we should be gravely concerned. “We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and conversing reasonably under these conditions is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he makes is thoughtful, informed, and disquieting. But is it convincing?

History is littered with lamentations about distraction. Swirling lights and strippers are not a new problem. What’s important to note about bygone debates on the subject, though, is that they truly were debates. Not everyone felt the sky was falling, and the dissenters raised pertinent questions. Is it, in fact, good to pay attention? Whose purposes does it serve? (...)

This situation is, in some sense, our fault, as the whole system runs on our own choices. But those choices don’t always feel free. Hayes distinguishes between voluntary and compelled attention. Some things we focus on by choice; others, because of our psychological hardwiring, we find hard to ignore. Digital tools let online platforms harness the latter, addressing our involuntary impulses rather than our higher-order desires. The algorithms deliver what we want but not, as the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, “what we want to want.”

Getting what we want, not what we want to want: it could be the slogan of our times. Hayes notes that it’s not only corporations that home in on our baser instincts. Since social-media users also have access to immediate feedback, they learn what draws eyeballs, too. Years ago, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West had hardly anything in common. Now their pursuit of publicity has morphed them into versions of the same persona—the attention troll. And, despite ourselves, we can’t look away.

The painful twist is that climate change, the thing we really ought to focus on, “evades our attentional faculties,” Hayes writes. “It’s always been a problem,” the writer and activist Bill McKibben told him, “that the most dangerous thing on the planet is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and doesn’t actually do anything to you directly.” Global warming is the opposite of Kanye West: we want to pay attention but we don’t.

The trouble is “attention capitalism,” Hayes argues, and it has the same dehumanizing effect on consumers’ psyches as industrial capitalism has on workers’ bodies. Successful attention capitalists don’t hold our attention with compelling material but, instead, snatch it over and over with slot-machine gimmicks. (...)

What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. A.D.H.D. diagnoses abound, but is that because the condition is growing more prevalent or the diagnosis is? U.S. labor productivity and the percentage of the population with four years or more of college have risen throughout the Internet era. (...)

After decades of the Internet, the mediascape has still not dissolved into a froth of three-second clips of orgasms, kittens, and trampoline accidents, interspersed with sports-betting ads. As the legal scholar Tim Wu argues in “The Attention Merchants,” the road to distraction is not one-way. Yes, businesses seize our attention using the shiniest lures available, but people become inured and learn to ignore them. Or they recoil, which might explain why meditation, bird-watching, and vinyl records are in vogue. Technology firms, in fact, often attract users by promising to reduce distractions, not only the daily hassles—paying bills, arranging travel—but the online onslaught, too. Google’s text ads and mail filters offered respite from the early Internet’s spam and pop-ups. Apple became one of the world’s largest companies by selling simplicity.

Besides, distraction is relative: to be distracted from one thing is to attend to another. And any argument that people are becoming distracted must deal with the plain fact that many spend hours staring intently at their screens. What is doomscrolling if not avid reading? If people are failing to focus in some places, they’re clearly succeeding in others. (...)

Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers.

What’s going on? The media theorist Neil Verma, in “Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession,” describes the era of TikTok’s rise as beset by “obsession culture.” Online media, by broadening the scope of possible interests, have given rise to an unabashedly nerdy intellectual style. Verma focusses on the breakout podcast “Serial,” whose first season, in 2014, followed the host for hours as she pored over the details of a fifteen-year-old murder case. But deep dives into niche topics have become the norm. The wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan runs marathon interviews, some exceeding four hours, on ancient civilizations, cosmology, and mixed martial arts. A four-hour video of the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson dissecting the design flaws of a defunct Disney World hotel has eleven million views (deservedly: it’s terrific). Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed. (...)

We blame the Internet for polarizing politics and shredding attention spans, but those tendencies actually pull in opposite directions. What’s true of culture is true of politics, too: as people diverge from the mainstream, they become obsessional and prone to scrambling down rabbit holes. Following QAnon takes the sort of born-again devotion that one expects of a K-pop fan. Democratic Socialists, vaccine skeptics, anti-Zionists, manosphere alphas—these are not people known for casual political engagement. Some may be misinformed, but they’re not uninformed: “Do your own research” is the mantra of the political periphery. Fragmentation, it turns out, yields subcultural depths. Silos are not shallows. (...)

In a sense, what attention alarmists seek is protection from a competition that they’re losing. Fair enough; the market doesn’t always deliver great results, and Hayes is right to deplore the commodification of intellectual life. But one can wonder whether ideas are less warped by the market when they are posted online to a free platform than when they are rolled into books, given bar codes, and sold in stores. It’s worth remembering that those long nineteenth-century novels we’re losing the patience to read were long for a reason: profit-seeking publishers made authors drag out their stories across multiple volumes. Market forces have been stretching, squashing, spinning, and suppressing ideas for centuries. Realistically, the choice isn’t commodified versus free but which commodity form suits best.

For Hayes, what makes the apps awful is that they operate without consent. They seize attention using tricks, leaving us helpless and stupefied. Yet even this argument, his most powerful, warrants caution. Our media have always done a weird dance with our desires. Although Hayes argues for the profound novelty of our predicament, the title of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” alludes to a Homeric tale from antiquity, of songs too alluring to resist. This isn’t always unwelcome. Consider our highest words of praise for books—captivating, commanding, riveting, absorbing, enthralling. It’s a fantasy of surrendered agency. (“A page-turner”: the pages turn themselves.) Oddly, the thing we deplore in others, submission, is what we most want for ourselves.

The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.

by Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: David Plunkert

[ed. A nice cogent rebuttal to the attention deficit argument recently making the rounds. To better understand the default proposition, see: Attention is Power (and the Problem) (NYT/DS).] 

The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

You’re passionate. Purpose-driven. Dreaming big, working hard, making it happen. And now they’ve got you where they want you.

No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. Novels have been written about less, but no one is on LinkedIn for the prose. Recently, I visited the site after years of being away. A college classmate and talented artist was posting about the balancing act of being an “effective solopreneur”; a former business contact was sharing his professional journey, with the moral “don’t be afraid to change direction”; a person identifying as “ex-Meta” encouraged hopeful Meta interviewees to “show real connection to the mission and motivation”; a director at a multinational brewing company that was hiring wrote, “Our mandate is to dream, challenge, question and provoke.”

When did people start talking like this? LinkedIn’s style of sanitized professional chatter—to say nothing of the robust cottage industry that exists to support it, from branding strategists and career coaches to software programs designed to generate shareable, safe-for-work content—is of a piece with mantras like “do what you love,” “follow your passion,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living.” (The linguistic trend extends beyond the domain of yoga classes and L.E.D. signage in co-working spaces; a recent Times article described Luigi Mangione, the twenty-six-year-old accused of murdering the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, as possessing “an entrepreneurial spirit” in college, because he resold Christmas lights.) This discourse around work can seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon. But a new book, “Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America” (Harvard), by Erik Baker, argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism.

Baker is a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, an associate editor of The Drift, and a freelance writer for various publications (including this one). He sees his book as a corrective to “conventional histories of midcentury American culture,” which he believes overemphasize bureaucracy and conformism. As a study in intellectual history, “Make Your Own Job” is less concerned with the chronological development of American entrepreneurship than with the idea of it—the ways in which “ordinary people have thought about their working lives” and how entrepreneurialism has become a value unto itself. Baker aims to track the anxieties and desires of a society undergoing epochal transitions and the evolution of what he calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive, and that operates on the level of personality. It is present in the pervasive compulsion to work harder, longer hours and to feel adrift or even “devoid of purpose” when there isn’t enough work—or the “right” work—to do.

The entrepreneurial work ethic, Baker writes, meets a “fundamental ideological need” by addressing a central tension of American capitalism: most people need to work to earn a living, but well-paid, stable, and fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of intensifying economic inequality, when many of the jobs on offer are precarious, underpaid, and spiritually deadening, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal. Entrepreneurialism is “tenacious,” Baker maintains, in part because it has the power to “metabolize discontent with the present order of work.” It suggests the possibility of liberation or relief—an exit, or a workaround. The ethic, he also notes, tends to be popular during periods of acute unemployment. The result is too many people working much too hard because there’s just not enough work.

Before the entrepreneurial work ethic became widespread, in Baker’s account, what predominated was the “industrious work ethic,” in which labor of any kind was considered a moral good, and framed in terms of stoicism and duty. The industrious work ethic applied to workers in mills and on Henry Ford-style assembly lines, and echoes of it could be seen in middle-class “organization men,” who were loyal to their employers, and received loyalty in return. Workers submitted to a company, whether I.B.M. or General Motors, and slotted themselves into bureaucratic structures that discouraged risktaking and did not reward individualism. This orientation toward work was buffered, in part, by strong labor unions and a relatively sturdy social safety net. 

If the industrious work ethic advanced a certain kind of “static moralism,” Baker writes, the entrepreneurial work ethic was “a dynamic philosophy of personal development.” The notion that one’s unique personality could be transmuted into prosperity and opportunity had broad appeal at a time of economic instability and cultural transformation. Baker identifies a number of practices and traditions from the first half of the twentieth century as embodying entrepreneurialism, from New Thought, an influential spiritual movement that championed the transcendence of the mind over material reality, to direct-selling networks. (“Now you are in business for yourself,” Avon told its salespeople.) But the industrious work ethic prevailed well past the mid-century mark, with many workers accepting mental or physical drudgery in return for security and predictability; it was not until the later decades of the century that the entrepreneurial work ethic came into full force. Though entrepreneurial capitalism might have been a bit onerous in its implicit mandate to both generate opportunities and fulfill them, it was also presented as a more creative, even kinder alternative to the industrial capitalism that preceded it. (...)

In 1997, Peters published an essay in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You,” in which he coined the phrase “personal branding.” “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.,” he wrote. “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” The marketing campaign for Me Inc. had to be relentless. “Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you’ve got,” he wrote, encouraging readers to “nurture your network.” There was no room, in this vision, for employees who did their jobs but didn’t blow their bosses’ minds. The same year, another article in Fast Company—“Free Agent Nation,” by Daniel H. Pink, a former speechwriter for Vice-President Al Gore—celebrated the rising number of freelance workers as a new movement. No matter that many were casualties of downsizings, facing a leaner corporate world: Pink preached freedom, modernity, and “a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.”

by Anna Weiner, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. A convenient philosophy. Pretty soon everyone will be some kind of hustler, influencer, transient or taskrabbit.]

The Frog and the Serpent (c. 1480)
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[ed. Making the pond great again.]

Shotei Watanabe, “Blue Birds”
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