Why Did DoorDash Win?

The business school version of why DoorDash won is that they had the right strategy. They launched in the right markets, acquired the right restaurants, and designed the marketplace the right way.

The Silicon Valley hustle culture version is that they out-executed everyone else. They just shipped faster until they had better selection, a better product, and more reliable delivery.

The financial markets version is that they got lucky. Grubhub and Uber were both public and playing with a hand tied behind their back during the most pivotal moment in the fight.

The reality is that you can’t understand what happened without all three perspectives. Increasingly, success in every competitive market will require the right strategy, rapid execution, and good luck.

Strategy

Strategy turns on a few big decisions. For DoorDash, three of them really mattered.

The first was recognizing that owning delivery was the key to unlocking supply. Most restaurants can’t support the economics of running their own delivery fleet, so the Grubhub model of just routing orders to restaurants was bound to hit a wall.

DoorDash was the only company that launched with the business model that everyone now uses. The initial idea for Uber Eats was to load cars with fresh meals made at scale so they could be delivered as fast as possible. Postmates started with packages, not food.

DoorDash recognized the importance of logistics from the start. (...)

The second big decision was seemingly at odds with the first. Rule #1 of building a logistics business is to increase network density and thus driver utilization. This led everyone else to major city centers.

But DoorDash realized the suburbs were a better place to start. There, the alternatives to delivery were much worse, customers were more affluent, and average order values were higher. Customers immediately understood the value prop and spent enough to make delivery economics work.

Most importantly, no one else was in the suburbs yet. (...)

To win in a market, you can’t just be the market leader. You have to be the market leader by a lot. This creates a flywheel in which you have much more demand, which allows you to bring on more supply, which in turn compounds your demand advantage. Every market in food delivery was ultimately hard fought, but DoorDash’s initial wedge in the suburbs gave them an advantage no one else had.

Finally, DoorDash recognized that the most important thing was a wide selection of restaurants, even if that meant sacrificing other things that customers cared about, like delivery speed and price.

They realized that as long as they could deliver in about 40 minutes, there were limited gains from being faster. Uber tried to optimize for faster delivery, which led to the wrong decisions, including launching with the wrong business model in the first place.

DoorDash was also willing to initially make the service more expensive for consumers, which allowed them to give commission breaks to important restaurants to convince them to join. Uber instead wanted a flat customer fee, which required them to play hardball with restaurants. Later, DoorDash did begin to win on price (in particular through DashPass and lower markups on food items), but only once they had great selection.

Execution

DoorDash had the right strategy, and still almost failed.

They exploded out of the gate, raising a Series A from Sequoia in 2014. Legendary investor John Doerr effectively came out of retirement to lead their Series B in 2015 at a $600M valuation.

But then the music stopped. They were burning cash fast, and Tony couldn’t find a lead for their next round for six months. In 2016, Sequoia ultimately had to step in and lead their Series C at a $700M post-money valuation—a down round. By the end of 2017, they were almost out of money again and had to do a $60M bridge round just to keep the company alive.

Uber and Grubhub had much deeper pockets during this time. DoorDash only survived through incredible speed of execution.

by Dan Hockenmaier, Dan Hock's Essays | Read more:
Image: DonHock.com/Bloomberg/McKinsey/public financials

Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers Guitarist Goes Deep in New Memoir

Mike Campbell was the late Tom Petty’s chief lieutenant in the Heartbreakers during the 41 years of the band’s existence.

The guitarist co-produced several of the group’s albums as well as all three of Petty’s solo sets, and he co-wrote hits such as “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “You Got Lucky,” “Runnin' Down a Dream” and more. (He’s also helmed some posthumous releases, including “Live at the Fillmore 1997”).

Outside of the Heartbreakers, meanwhile, the Florida-born Campbell has amassed credits with Bob Dylan, Don Henley (co-writing “The Boys of Summer”), Johnny Cash, Jackson Browne, the Wallflowers, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, Chris Stapleton and a great many more.

Since Petty’s death in 2017, Campbell has toured with Fleetwood Mac and brought his side band, the Dirty Knobs, to the fore, releasing three albums and touring extensively with the quartet.

With that kind of track record Campbell, 75, clearly has stories to tell -- and he does, with great depth and detail, in his new book “Heartbreaker: A Memoir” (Grand Central Publishing).

Co-written with novelist Ari Surdoval (“Double Nickels”), its 464 pages are packed with behind-the-scenes specifics about his life and career that will please and surprise fans -- and make some guitar aficionados and studio nerds drool over its insights. It tracks his journey from an impoverished, single-parent upbringing to international stardom, ultimately triumphant despite hardships, setbacks and some tragedies along the way ...

What was the story you wanted to tell with “Heartbreaker?”

Campbell: I didn’t want to write a sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll book. ... the naughty, stupid things that every rock star writes about. I don’t find that very interesting. I wanted to talk about the creative energy for the songs and the personal relationships between me and my bandmates. And I wanted to show the struggle that it took to get where we got; it wasn’t just handed to us, and I wanted to tell the whole story -- how we started out really poor and sacrificed for many years before we saw any income. But mostly I wanted to touch base on the creative mystery of songs and where they come from and that sort of thing.

It doesn’t feel like you pull punches, though. You write about the good and the bad, the inner-band politics, people’s drug addictions. It’s very frank.

Campbell: Well, I wanted to be real, and I wanted to be truthful. I kind of set those boundaries at the beginning. I didn’t want to dwell on other people’s drug and alcohol problems, but they were there. It’s a fine line to walk. I wanted to respect them as people, and their families. I didn’t want to disrespect anybody or embarrass anybody. I tried not to be that guy. But I also wanted to let people look behind the curtain and see a little bit of what it was like being in a band like this. And aside from that I wanted to illuminate my relationship with my brothers in the Heartbreakers -- Tom especially, and Ben (Benmont Tench) and Stan (Lynch) and Ron (Blair). We all come from the South and we grew up in similar ways, and I wanted to show how special that brotherhood was. (...)

What kind of overall, rearview perspective did you get from writing this?

Campbell: It kinda made me feel old, to be honest (laughs), and to see how much I’ve done -- all the miles I’ve covered and the stages I stomped across and the records I worked on. There’s a lot, and I kept thinking, ‘Wow, I did all that? I guess I did.’ I got an overall sense of pride. I think the work is really good. I think the songs hold up and will hold up for a long time after I’m gone, ‘cause I think the quality of the work and the art is really strong, and I was really proud to revisit that.

It was interesting to read in “Heartbreaker” how much you would take blame on yourself when things were going wrong, or bad. Where do you think that comes from?

Campbell: That’s a therapist question. I think maybe if I dig deep and look at it, maybe my parents' divorce affected me in a very deep way, where my whole world was broken apart. Throughout my whole life I’ve tried to build a world that won’t break up, and keep it together -- my band and my marriage. So maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s genetics. I don’t really know the answer, but ... I’m still here doing it, so I think I’m dealing with it all right.

Did you get a boost from co-writing “The Boys of Summer” for Don Henley and have that be a hit? That was a pivotal moment that pushed you outside of and beyond the band.

Campbell: I think it gave me a lot of confidence, yeah; even Tom said at one point, ‘That song must’ve really been good for your confidence,' ‘cause I tend to be maybe a shy, reserved type of person. But having that song connect with Don and then connect with the whole world ... It’s an amazing song, and how lucky was I to have that pretty much be my first foray into writing outside of my band? It was truly just kind of a miracle. But it’s a great song, and I’m very proud of it. At that point in our career Tom was doing a solo record here and there and I was involved with that, and we were beginning to work outside the group a little bit -- but never to the detriment of the group. As a matter of fact, I brought that confidence back into the group. I think that’s a healthy thing.

Are you able to ever step back and look at everything you’ve done, and if so how does that make you feel?

Campbell: I say in the book, in different places, that while things are happening that are kind of over the top, I just look around and go, ‘How did I get here?’ When a song would come it’s like, ‘Why me? How did I get so lucky that this song just came out of the air to me, of all people?’ There have been a lot of those, ‘How did I get here?’ kind of moments.

There’s a great cast of characters in the book, as you mentioned before. Who’s the most surreal to think that you crossed paths with.

Campbell: Probably Bob Dylan. He is a mystery genius, a beautiful creature (laughs). He’s so enigmatic, but so brilliant. I’ve met a lot of my heroes, from George Harrison to Johnny Cash; they’re all intimidating and have the aura. And I try to learn from everybody I work with. But Bob has this special thing around him that’s intriguing ‘cause he’s so brilliant and he’s so mystical and so hard to read. But he’s so good. And he came across the band’s path when we were kinda at odds with each other, and he reminded us that, ‘Y’know, you got a good band. Keep it together. Don’t fight all the time. Just play.'

It seems like your relationship with George Harrison was meaningful, too -- you close the book with him, even.

Campbell: I think I speak a lot about him in the book ‘cause he’s a very special human being, and he made a profound impression on me as a person as well as a musician. For some reason he really liked me; he thought I was really good, which blew my mind. (laughs) Being around him was just very inspiring.

by Gary Graff, Cleveland.com |  Read more:

Image: Pinterest via

[ed. One of the most respected and versatile lead guitarists ever, always played just the right thing (and nothing more). See also: 'It Stung a Little Bit' Mike Campbell on How the Heartbreakers Navigated Tense Band Dynamics' (American Songwriter).]

The Rise of the Infinite Fringe

The past decade of politics, to put it bluntly, has been batshit. The past week of politics has been batshit. Heck, the past week of everything in the world that has anything to do with political decisions — diplomacy, trade, manufacturing, having a 401k, owning a car or a computer or a phone or a T-shirt — has been batshit.

But if you were asked to use a word that was not a swear, and were given about five minutes to calm down, a good second choice would be “disintegrated.” There’s no clear answer, however, as to why — why it seems like people are living in their own separate realities; why our leaders seem to operate via conflicting conspiracy theories and obscure philosophies; why it feels like a screaming, ephemeral electronic blob called the internet is actually running the world instead of the people supposedly in charge of it.

There is an actual, human person at the center of it, and his name is Robert Welch — a right-wing figure more influential than Alex Jones, QAnon, and Ronald Reagan combined. His influence is so silent, though, that you won’t find his content online: no podcasts, no livestreams, no social media accounts; no Mar-a-Lago selfies on Instagram or X posts defending the latest malpractice in the Trump administration. You might even have a hard time finding an image of his face because Robert Welch has been dead for nearly 40 years.

But he plays a critical role in modern American history, both for the story of his rise and the means of his decline. Back in 1958, during the height of the Red Scare, Welch, a wealthy candy magnate, joined forces with businessman Fred Koch (yes, the dad of those Kochs) to create the John Birch Society, a membership-only group meant to carry out their lifelong fight against communism in America. But unlike Joseph McCarthy, who razed Hollywood, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, which singled out federal employees, Welch thought that the most “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” was actually President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The list of alleged White House Soviets soon grew to include Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allen Dulles, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Harry Truman, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds (of course), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson, and so forth.

Despite being led by a man who thought the president was secretly a Soviet plant, the John Birch Society grew popular in the early 1960s — so popular, in fact, that it made up a significant portion of the growing American conservative movement. And none feared the Birchers more than William F. Buckley, the editor-in-chief of National Review, who was trying to mainstream this ideology inside the Republican Party along with presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater. Like his fellow ideologues, Buckley was terrified of the rise of communism and its attendant philosophies: socialism, moral relativism, and progressivism. (As he famously said, “A conservative is one who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”) Like Welch, a onetime friend, he feared that liberals sympathetic to these ideas would bring Soviet elements into the federal government. But as he wrote to a friend, there was a difference between the paranoid “unreality” of the John Birch Society and the informed suspicion of “responsible conservatives.” And that posed an existential problem: if Birchers were too visibly associated with conservatism — if Birchers were the first thing voters thought of when they heard the word “conservatism” — the Republican Party, already in a civil war between Northern moderates and traditional Southern conservatives, would view Goldwater as a liability and his movement as just a bunch of kooks.

If their intent had not been clear enough, the cover literally said “AGAINST TRUMP” in gilt gold letters

Over the course of several years, Buckley ran a tireless campaign against the Birchers, both in his private conversations with Republican Party leaders, politicians, and writers and donors, and in dozens of editorials, columns, and essays in National Review, which, at the time, had over 44,000 subscribers. His anti-Bircherism was so thorough that he even spent time writing antagonistic letters back to subscribers who had canceled their publications over his stance. (He wrote a lot of letters: Birchers made up a large percentage of the Review’s readership, to say nothing of the Review’s donors.) The Birchers’ influence on the right slowly began to wane, relegating them to the edges of the party, nowhere close to influencing the agenda being rapidly adopted by the Republican mainstream. (Welch did himself no favors by writing an essay in 1966 declaring that communism was an Illuminati plot dating back to the time of ancient Sparta, alienating the slightly fringier right-wing magazines that still ran his work.) By the time Welch died in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president, the right-wing intelligentsia controlled the GOP, and the few thousand remaining Birchers were calling Earth Day a Leninist plot and claiming that chemical compounds extracted from apricot pits could cure cancer. Buckley, now the de facto intellectual voice of the Republican Party, was hailed as the ultimate conservative gatekeeper — a man who could successfully push right-wing nutjobs out of the Republican Party and cultivate a serious movement based on Values and Principles.

And that was the fate of poisonous conspiracy theories back then. If a ludicrous idea started building momentum, the ringleader and their affiliates would get pushed out of an organization, then another one, and another one, before being deemed so poisonous that society in general would exile them to some tract of rural land to farm beets and / or start a cult. If they were still interested in spreading their ideas, their options were limited to the physical media they could afford to purchase — a monthly pamphlet sent through the mail, a ham radio, or a sign on the side of the road. Barricaded from the tightly controlled mass communication networks of print distribution and broadcast signals that informed the nation and the leaders they chose, they were forever stuck on the fringes.

That was where “crazy” used to die.

For the next five decades, National Review maintained its power in the Republican Party as the arbiter of what was considered acceptable conservative thought. True, they’d gained new competitors over the years, whose dominance in nonphysical media could reach massive audiences faster than a magazine could go to print. Rush Limbaugh could rile millions of Americans listening to him on AM radio, Newt Gingrich could pontificate about Bill Clinton on C-SPAN, Matt Drudge could change the George W. Bush agenda with the right hyperlink, and Fox News could hyperventilate about Waco or jihad or Barack Obama for hours. But National Review was written by smart, serious people. This print magazine was for the thinkers who generated the ideas that the broadcasters could spread and the politicians could enact. And National Review was, by 2015, horrified at Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican Party.

by Tina Nguyen, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Verge staff

The Epic Cinematic Sci-Fi Art of Paul Chadeisson 

via:

[ed. More at the link.]

The Great Elephant Migration in Houston

The Great Elephant Migration in Hermann Park. How the 100 sculptures got to Houston. (Houston Chronicle)

Images: Brett Coomer

[ed. Very cool (and apparently for sale).]

The cows (female elephants), bulls (male elephants), tuskers (male elephants with tusks) and a few little calves arrived in Houston earlier this spring. And they're for sale: prices range from $8,000 for babies to $26,000 for tuskers with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Hermann Park Conservancy.

"They're all based on real elephants, and they all have names," shared Roslyn Bazelle Mitchell, conservancy board chairman. "We got the largest tusker making his debut in Houston; his name is Matt." (...)

They're made from dried Lantana plants and weigh between 800-900 lbs. a piece. Placing and securing all 100 took roughly five days. "You can touch them," Mitchell said. "Just don't climb on them."

An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.

When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.

When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.

When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.

The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar — think of Blockbuster Video, the pay phone and other early victims of the digital transition. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.

This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.

That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.

Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.

Mere eccentricity doesn’t guarantee survival: There will be forms of resistance and radicalism that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends. But normalcy and complacency will be fatal.

And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction. 

The Fatal Progression

But first we have to understand what we are experiencing.

It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. For shopping and selling, the online store supplants the mall. For reading and writing, the short paragraph and the quick reply replace the book, the essay, the letter.

Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. There are forms of intellectual and scientific work that were impossible before the internet annihilated distance. Remote work can be a boon to family life even if it limits other forms of social interaction. The online popularity of long podcasts might betoken a retreat from literate to oral culture, but it’s at least counterexample to the general trend of short, shorter, shortest.

But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point.

But this substitution nonetheless succeeds and deepens because of the power of distraction. Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. Swipe-based online dating is less likely to find you a spouse, but it still feels much easier than flirting or otherwise putting yourself forward in physical reality. Video games may not offer the same kind of bodily experience as sports and games in real life, but the adrenaline spike is always on offer and there are fewer limits on how late and long you can play. The infinite scroll of social media is worse than a good movie, but you can’t look away, and novels are incredibly hard going by comparison with TikTok or Instagram. Pornography is worse than sex, but it gives you a simulacrum of anything you want, whenever you want it, without any negotiation with another human being’s needs.

So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation.

Then, finally, as local embodied experience becomes less important than virtual alternatives, the power of substitution and distraction feeds a sense that real-world life is fundamentally obsolete.

Online life allows for all kinds of hyper-intense subcultures and niches where this sense of obsolescence is less of an issue. But for the average internet surfer, the normie afloat in the virtual realm, digital life tends to elevate the center over the peripheries, the metropole over the provinces, the drama of celebrity over the quotidian.

The result is a landscape where national politics seems incredibly important and local politics irrelevant; where English can seem like the only language worth knowing and an American presidential election feels like an election for the presidency of the world; where the life of small countries and local cultures seems at best anachronistic; where the celebrity influencer half a world away takes the place in your mental space that friends and neighbors used to occupy.

All this means that even though reality is in fact more real than the virtual world, people may still feel disappointed when they re-enter the everyday after marinating in the digital — the potential mates are less beautiful than the Instagram models, the stakes of a local mayor’s race less significant than whatever Donald Trump is doing now.

That letdown creates a special political problem for liberal democracy, which depends on egalitarian ideas about the importance of the common person, the ordinary citizen. It encourages a fashionable antihumanism, an impulse to justify suicide and expand euthanasia, and a general sense of personal and cultural futility that’s especially apparent when you visit the geographic locales that are aging and depopulating fastest. There’s a palpable feeling in these places that history once happened here, but that now it’s happening only in America and inside your phone — so why would any people bother to build a future for themselves in provincial Italy or rural Japan, or on Caribbean islands outside of the resorts, or in the Balkans or the Baltics?

All of this describes our trajectory before artificial intelligence entered the picture, and every force I’ve just described is likely to become more intense the more A.I. remakes our lives. You can have far more substitution — digital workers for flesh-and-blood colleagues, ChatGPT summaries for original books, A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends and companions. You can have far more distraction — an endless stream of A.I.-generated content and entertainment and addictive slop from a “creator” whose engine never tires. And you will absolutely have a stronger sense of human obsolescence or superfluity — economic and social, artistic and intellectual — if A.I. travels just a little bit farther along its current lines of advance. It’s as though all the trends of the digital era have been building up to this consummation of its logic.

How much survives?

Nothing I’ve described is universal: Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books.

But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884)

[ed. See also: The collapse is coming. Will humanity adapt? (MIT Press).]

Mt. Hood morning
via: markk

Supermarket Salmon

via:

[ed. Friends don't let friends eat farm-raised Atlantic salmon. Alaska wild stock, only.]

Saving Potlucks One JPEG At A Time

At the beginning of the pandemic when the lockdowns started, Jennifer Hasegawa was feeling anxious and disconnected, as we all were. Far away from the Hilo community where she grew up, Hasegawa looked around her San Francisco apartment for some sort of comfort or inspiration. Her gaze landed on an old red cookbook held together with a rubber band, “More of Our Favorite Recipes” published in 1964 by the Maui Home Demonstration Council. Those recipes represented Hawaii to her. It represented family and community and a sense of well-being.

“I remembered that I’d meant to scan the book before the book eventually disintegrated into powder. And I thought, maybe I should scan it and put it online somewhere,” Hasegawa said. “I wondered if anyone else even cared about these books or if it was just me.”

She reached out to a group of friends she met in high school — Kris Kaneshiro Stanton, Michelle Saito and Joy Nishie. They had been on the Hawaiʻi State Student Council together, a leadership program for civic-minded teens. She asked her friends what they thought of her project. They loved the idea and they each had vintage cookbooks of their own that they wanted to share. “The first book I added, the red book, I scanned on an old printer/flatbed scanner I had around the house. The printer was broken, but the scanner still worked — just barely.” Hasegawa said.

The website Hasegawa and her friends created, Kau Kau Chronicles, now has recipes from dozens of out-of-print Hawaiʻi cookbooks that were published by community groups, schools, and as office projects. The most visited cookbook is the oldest one, The Hilo Woman’s Club Cookbook, published in 1937. Hasegawa wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in old Hawaii recipes, but now the site gets around 50,000 visits a year with 176,000 page views.

Many of the recipes from the old books contain the name of the person who contributed the recipe, so the site serves as a kind of historical record of the “who’s who” of a particular time and place. This makes the content feel personal and special. It’s pretty exciting to find the recipe for a cake your relative used to bake with your relative’s name on it.

Grape juice chiffon pie

Anyone is welcome to contribute recipes or share a vintage cookbook. Directions for how to send in recipes are listed on the site. All it takes is a cell phone camera and an email address.

“From the start of the project, I tried to defy my usual perfectionist tendencies. Getting as many cookbooks preserved as quickly as possible is more important than all of the files being in the same format and with a minimum resolution,” Hasegawa said. “Having Aunty’s cascaron recipe in a slightly blurry JPG is better than not having it at all.”

One happy surprise the group discovered through their work is that the beloved collection of Honpa Hongwanji Hawaiʻi Betsuin cookbooks dating back to the 1970s are still available for sale. Instead of posting those recipes, there’s a link from the Kau Kau Chronicles site to purchase the books directly from the church.

“This is a strict rule we have, which is that if a cookbook is still being sold by the original publishing organization, we don’t share it because it is still a source of income for the organization,” Hasegawa said.

There is also a Kau Kau Chronicles Facebook Group with over 7,000 members where people share recipes and stories and help each other track down something they remember eating at a party long ago. It’s all very congenial and wholesome, something you don’t see much of on social media these days.

That commitment to good-natured sharing goes back to that old red cookbook and the feelings it inspired. It was part of a collection of recipe books that chronicled an abiding aloha in the community that seemed much more present generations ago.

“I think they are the first books that managed to really capture the recipes of a golden age of food in Hawaiʻi,” Hasegawa said. “The recipes are half foods from ‘the old country’ and half foods from ‘the new country.’ You can see recipes for nishime, lau lau, vinha D’alhos, kau yuk and cascaron right alongside recipes for Swedish meatballs, French dressing, beef stroganoff and sauerbraten. I love seeing this juxtaposition.

by Lee Cataluna, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Kau Kau Chronicles; Grape Juice Chiffon Pie
[ed. So good. Thank you ladies, all.]

Harry M. Mamizuka Invitational

For generations of swimmers in Hawai‘i, Harry M. Mamizuka was more than a coach — he was a mentor, a disciplinarian, and a second father to many. His lessons extended far beyond the pool, shaping young athletes into responsible adults with the values of hard work, perseverance, and integrity.

On April 26-27, the 43rd Annual Harry M. Mamizuka Invitational will once again celebrate his enduring impact, bringing together hundreds of swimmers from across the islands to compete at the K. Mark Takai Veterans Memorial Aquatics Center in Waipahu.

This meet is not just a competition — it is a community event, a tribute, and a reminder of what youth sports should be about. It continues the work that Mamizuka dedicated his life to: giving young swimmers, regardless of background, the opportunity to challenge themselves, push their limits, and grow as individuals.

A Coach Who Built More Than Champions

Born and raised in Hawai‘i, Harry Mamizuka understood the struggles many local kids faced — especially those from working-class families. He knew that swimming, like life, required discipline, consistency, and self-belief.

Mamizuka coached at Pālama Settlement, McKinley High School, and Mānoa Aquatics, where he founded the club to make swim training accessible to youth from all walks of life.

He was known for his no-nonsense coaching style, setting high expectations for his swimmers, but always balancing it with deep care and unwavering support.

Even after a life-changing accident in 1989 left him paralyzed, Mamizuka remained dedicated to the sport, coaching from his wheelchair on the pool deck. His resilience and commitment became a lesson in itself: setbacks do not define us — our response to them does.

Through the years, many of his swimmers have gone on to receive college scholarships, become coaches, teachers, and leaders in their communities — all carrying forward the values instilled by Mamizuka.

Why This Event Matters

Hawai‘i has a rich history of producing elite swimmers, from Olympians to collegiate champions. But events like the Mamizuka Invitational are about more than just competition. They serve as:

• A Platform for Young Athletes. Many swimmers use this meet as a stepping stone to qualify for regional and national competitions.

• A Community Gathering. Families, coaches, and former athletes come together to celebrate Hawai‘i’s swimming tradition.

• A Tribute to a Local Hero. The event keeps Mamizuka’s legacy alive, inspiring new generations to uphold his values of discipline and perseverance.

middle, second row

This year’s invitational will feature a full lineup of age-group races, where young competitors — some as young as 9 years old — will swim alongside seasoned high school athletes hoping to post personal bests and qualify for bigger meets.

Beyond the races, the event serves as a reminder of the impact a single individual can have on a community. Mamizuka’s influence continues not just through the competition that bears his name, but in the countless swimmers he coached, many of whom now return as parents, coaches, and mentors themselves.

Keeping Harry Mamizuka’s Spirit Alive

The Mamizuka Invitational is more than a swim meet. It is a testament to one man’s belief that sports can transform lives. It is a celebration of young athletes, a gathering of families and mentors, and a reminder that in sports — and in life — hard work, resilience, and community support make all the difference.

As we approach April 26-27, let’s take a moment to reflect on what events like these truly mean — not just for the swimmers, but for Hawai‘i as a whole. When we support youth athletics, we are investing in the future of our islands, helping to shape the next generation of leaders, athletes, and community builders. (...)

Let’s make this year’s meet not just about competition, but about continuing a legacy that has uplifted generations of Hawai‘i’s youth.

by Kanekoa Crabbe, DeRoy Lavatai, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Gov. Neil Abercrombie/2013. Hawaii Swimming Hall of Fame
[ed. Love this. Mami (as he was known to everyone back then) was my assistant football and head swimming coach for 3 years in high school. As much as he was known for his swimming acumen, he was probably best known for his creative swearing and dirty joke telling. I mean the guy had no peers. Plus, the most outrageous stories you could imagine (actually, never imagine), mostly about his sexual exploits. I wanted to go to McKinley high school in Honolulu because all my friends were going there, the best public school in Hawaii, and that's where I'd practiced when I was playing Pop Warner football. But, because I lived out of district, the only way I could do that was to apply for a district exception, and the only excuse my folks and I could come up with was to claim that I wanted to swim (the high school I was supposed to go to didn't have a pool at the time). And it worked! Anyway, after my first football season wrapped up Mami found me and told me to get my ass up to the pool. I told him...no, no, that was just an excuse... I'm really not a swimmer. But no excuses. Get up there! So for the next three years I swam on the varsity swim team under his abuse guidance. Those practices were so brutal, worse than football, sometimes two a day, the first at 6 am before school started (in a freezing, heavily chlorinated pool outside), the second for two hours after school. He was such a funny and unpredictable guy, but had a malevolent temper that could explode at any time. You did not want to be on his bad side (or find out he'd had a bad day at work). Nevertheless, we all loved him, and vice versa. Deeply missed.]

What Are the Best & Worst-Case Tariff Scenarios?

Last Monday, I discussed the consequences of chaos. While the purposes of the new tariff policy were not well explained – some of the goals were muddled and unclear – it seems a large part of the problem was the roll-out. It was ham-fisted, opaque, and amateurish. That amplified the initial market reaction, with a lot of volatility and a significant drawdown.

Consider how the Federal Reserve preps markets in advance for any significant change in policy: They warn that a change is coming several meetings in advance; we see shifts in the dot plot; there are discussions about their favored metrics (PCE vs CPI?). Numerous Fed Presidents fan out to speak in formal, academic environments where they discuss the coming changes. After weeks and weeks, the policy change comes. There is a press conference with the Chairman, and after a month, the meeting minutes come out—a very smooth, well-oiled process.

Whatever the final tariff situation, the White House can clearly learn from the communication strategies the Federal Reserve has perfected.

~~~

We are not privy to the discussions inside the Oval Office. We are left looking at the many false starts and feints, the on-again, off-again nature. We can only observe that the players appear to be mercurial and unpredictable. Whatever comes next seems random and driven by individual whims—or the bond market vigilantes.

Rather than try to guess the impact, I prefer to wargame various scenarios to discern potential outcomes, each with a varying likelihood of occurrence. While there are many gradations, let’s work with three: Best-, Worst-, and Middle-case scenarios.

These map out not merely a variety of outcomes but the paths taken to get there—via the impact on consumer spending, corporate CapEx, hiring, etc. Think of this as the discounting function of the markets, assessing a range of corporate revenues and profits over the next four quarters.

The market volatility has been a real-time attempt to assess those probabilities. A sudden 10% drop in the price of U.S. equities implies a significantly lowered set of revenues and profits the following year.

Let’s consider those three potential outcomes:

Best Case Scenario

We have been told to “Take the president seriously, but not literally.”

Let’s do just that, starting with the unknowns: Is this temporary or permanent? Was this an opening salvo, a negotiating tactic, or an attempt at a complete realignment of global trade? Will there be lots and lots of one-on-one side deals with individual countries? Can we reach a “reasonable set of accommodations globally?” Are we half or two-thirds of the way through any adjustments, or is this merely the start?

I imagine a best-case scenario as some more downside to come, but all of this turns out to be a savvy negotiating tactic, and a wide range of deals get cut.

The old regime of Pax Americana remains (mostly) in place, and some of the worst offenses of China – protectionism, theft of intellectual property, hacking corporate America, and the unfair treatment of overseas investors – get modified.

The US remains the global economic, military, and political leader. Many countries are unhappy, but it’s in their (and our) best interest to work these things out.

Everybody saves face, the markets eventually find their footing, and we avoid a recession. Later in the year, encouraged by improving CPI data and minimal economic disruption, the FOMC resumes its rate-cutting regime.

Let’s put a 10-20% likelihood this occurs.

Middle Scenario

This gets worse before it gets better.

Numerous regional alliances form – we see that already in the Pacific Rim countries. Despite their long history of animosity and regional conflicts going back millennia, Japan, China, and South Korea band together. They recognize that this upending of prior relationships threatens all of them. They negotiate a trade alliance to protect themselves against the US. Similar things happen in Europe and elsewhere (South America + Mexico?). These regional alliances develop, giving them the heft to negotiate regional deals with the U.S.

Some damage gets done to the US economy and trade relations. We’ve already seen consumers begin to freeze travel and spending plans in place. The backlash includes boycotts of the US and its goods. Travel from Canada to the US has fallen off 75% already.

On the corporate side, companies hold off on big CapEx spending, building new plants, investments, and hiring. “Hey, we don’t have any clarity as to what the new rules are gonna look like, so we will just sit tight to avoid making any big mistakes.”

Before 2025 ends, a mild recession begins. New Treasury issuance does not go great, and the cost of financing the United States’ deficits soars. Lots of good will, accumulated over the 8 decades since World War Two, is dissipated.

It’s a painful self-own, not quite as bad as the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or even Brexit, but still an unforced error, recession, and loss of positive momentum caused by a risky undertaking with poorly defined goals amateurishly implemented.

It’s bad, but we have survived worse: The Great Depression, WW2, Watergate, the 1970s Oil Embargo, September 11, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our middle case is painful, but not as disruptive as that laundry list of annus horribilis.

Perhaps Congress finally reclaims its tariff authority. Maybe the next president, POTUS 48, can repair some of the worst of this. A lot of global ass-kissing, rewinds, and generosity, and we restore our prior advantageous trade relations and standing.

The middle scenario is a 40-60% likelihood.*

Worst Case Scenario

The end of Pax Americana and the global world order that have been in place since the end of WW2.

The consumer and corporate freeze that led to a mild recession this year turns into a deeper Stagflationary recession. Parts and materials become hard to find. Key components are missing, in many ways, it becomes reminiscent of the pandemic supply chain woes.

As the Economist magazine observed, this is the biggest economic self-error in a century, it leads to an international realignment. Europe looks inwards and towards itself and decouples from the United States as best as it can. The dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency. Financing our deficits becomes absurdly expensive.

Inflation soars, and standards of living collapse. This leads to a global recession. Unemployment rises, Employment, Spending and Wages all fall. We have sticky, stubborn stagflation, a very unpleasant economic scenario. Global GDP drops, as do standards of living around the world fall as things go off the rails.

We were the military, economic and political leader around the world, only we no longer are. Think United Kingdom after the fall of British Empire – still around, but poorer and much less respected/feared than before.

We’ve frittered away so much good will: We helped stop disease around the world. We’ve raised literacy levels everywhere, reduced poverty in so many places. We fought HIV in Africa, and Malaria all around the world. That leadership is now gone, and ultimately so much good from it simply dissipates.

Bad. Things. Happen.

This is the worst case scenario, and honestly, I personally have a hard time imagining its worst repercussions. Ben Hunt is better able to go dark like that, and his take last week – Crashing the Car of Pax Americana – fleshed out the worst-case scenario better than I can.

The worst scenario is a 10-20% likelihood.

To give you an idea of how reckless this is, that’s about a single spin of a six-shooter in Russian Roulette with the entire United States $28 trillion economy at stake…

by Barry Ritholz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: USA Today via

What's That Got to do With the Price of Eggs?

[ed. Get in losers, we're going losing.]

Looks like American breakfast isn’t saved after all. Sorry everybody!

I reported on declining egg prices for FT Alphaville this month. This was a fun story, because a big jump in US imports from Turkey and Mexico helped drive at least some of the decline. It also landed right as the White House (briefly) decided to slap super-high tariffs on a bunch of stuff, including food products that can’t really be grown here.

Egg prices did fall, so the story wasn’t wrong. But it only happened for wholesale buyers, which means food companies, bakeries, restaurants, and presumably grocery stores.

The price of fresh eggs at the grocery store — what regular people pay — still hasn’t dropped, according to the latest CPI report. It actually increased in March. Whoops!

So why hasn’t the decline in wholesale egg prices shown up at the grocery store?

It was definitely a big one! The USDA data shows a 63% drop, before prices started to creep higher again ahead of the Easter holiday:

And the jump in imports was also pretty big, going by our most recent data (from February):

And yes, the total amount imported was low compared to the total amount of eggs that Americans eat.

But eggs are a commodity — you can basically substitute any egg for any other egg, notwithstanding what homesteaders say about the superiority of fresh eggs from a home flock. (I might learn about that soon, so uhhhhhh wish me luck, lol, yikes.)

For commodities, an unexpected change in supply, even at the margin, can move prices noticeably. The decline in egg prices was also probably fueled by a decline in wholesale demand. It seems reasonable to think fewer people are buying eggs at Waffle House because of its 50c-per-egg surcharge. If they’re buying eggs to make at home instead, that could boost retail demand for eggs.

Beyond that, though, how do we explain the difference in egg prices between consumer and wholesale buyers?

Let’s suspend our cynicism — at least for a moment — and try to come up with a reasonable explanation besides price gouging I mean, uh, greedflation, er, nevermind, monopoly power, wait OK, let’s call it pricing dynamics that arise from inelastic demand.

Maybe this is simply a consequence of how consumer inflation is measured? Maybe the BLS’s survey logged the price of a dozen eggs on March 1, when prices were still high, and called it a day?

Nope!

... Most of the news stories about egg prices have mentioned Cal-Maine, the only egg producer that’s publicly traded. But their stories mention revenues, which doesn’t really address the central issue here, which is profitability. If Cal-Maine couldn’t provide competitively priced eggs because it was spending big replenishing its flocks after losses from avian flu, its sales would still be fine, but profits would suffer. The company owns 14% of the US’s layer hen flock, according to its latest quarterly report, so it could presumably move the needle (remember, commodities are priced on the margin).

But uh, check out the column on the far right, from its latest investor presentation:

That shows it earned $10.38 per share (diluted) in the quarter ended March 1. That’s 82% more per-share profit than it made for the full year of 2024. It’s already on track to exceed its per-share annual profit from 2023.

by Alexandra Scaggs, The Hedge |  Read more:
Image: Alexandra Scaggs for The Hedge. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Cal-Maine Foods.]

[ed. So it begins. Never let a good tariff disaster go to waste. See also: What I Didn’t Know About the Egg Industry Horrified Me (NYT).]

Eve's Diary

SATURDAY.—I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing. Very well; I will be very watchful now, and if any day-before-yesterdays happen I will make a note of it. It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM—an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.

Then if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it? No, I think not; I think the rest of it is part of it. I am the main part of it, but I think the rest of it has its share in the matter. Is my position assured, or do I have to watch it and take care of it? The latter, perhaps. Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy. [That is a good phrase, I think, for one so young.]

Everything looks better today than it did yesterday. In the rush of finishing up yesterday, the mountains were left in a ragged condition, and some of the plains were so cluttered with rubbish and remnants that the aspects were quite distressing. Noble and beautiful works of art should not be subjected to haste; and this majestic new world is indeed a most noble and beautiful work. And certainly marvelously near to being perfect, notwithstanding the shortness of the time. There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others, but that can be remedied presently, no doubt. The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme—a very great loss; it breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If we can only get it back again—

But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it; I know it because I would do it myself. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful, and that it would not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person and that person didn't know I had it. I could give up a moon that I found in the daytime, because I should be afraid some one was looking; but if I found it in the dark, I am sure I should find some kind of an excuse for not saying anything about it. For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six; I would never go to bed; I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them.

Stars are good, too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed, last night, I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me; then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good. Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I couldn't hit the other one, though I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could have held out a little longer maybe I could have got one.

So I cried a little, which was natural, I suppose, for one of my age, and after I was rested I got a basket and started for a place on the extreme rim of the circle, where the stars were close to the ground and I could get them with my hands, which would be better, anyway, because I could gather them tenderly then, and not break them. But it was farther than I thought, and at last I had to give it up; I was so tired I couldn't drag my feet another step; and besides, they were sore and hurt me very much. (...)

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

I was afraid of it at first, and started to run every time it turned around, for I thought it was going to chase me; but by and by I found it was only trying to get away, so after that I was not timid any more, but tracked it along, several hours, about twenty yards behind, which made it nervous and unhappy. At last it was a good deal worried, and climbed a tree. I waited a good while, then gave it up and went home.

Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.

SUNDAY.—It is up there yet. Resting, apparently. But that is a subterfuge: Sunday isn't the day of rest; Saturday is appointed for that. It looks to me like a creature that is more interested in resting than in anything else. It would tire me to rest so much. It tires me just to sit around and watch the tree. I do wonder what it is for; I never see it do anything.

They returned the moon last night, and I was SO happy! I think it is very honest of them. It slid down and fell off again, but I was not distressed; there is no need to worry when one has that kind of neighbors; they will fetch it back. I wish I could do something to show my appreciation. I would like to send them some stars, for we have more than we can use. I mean I, not we, for I can see that the reptile cares nothing for such things.

It has low tastes, and is not kind. When I went there yesterday evening in the gloaming it had crept down and was trying to catch the little speckled fishes that play in the pool, and I had to clod it to make it go up the tree again and let them alone. I wonder if THAT is what it is for? Hasn't it any heart? Hasn't it any compassion for those little creature? Can it be that it was designed and manufactured for such ungentle work? It has the look of it. One of the clods took it back of the ear, and it used language. It gave me a thrill, for it was the first time I had ever heard speech, except my own. I did not understand the words, but they seemed expressive.

When I found it could talk I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk; I talk, all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.

If this reptile is a man, it isn't an IT, is it? That wouldn't be grammatical, would it? I think it would be HE. I think so. In that case one would parse it thus: nominative, HE; dative, HIM; possessive, HIS'N. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else. This will be handier than having so many uncertainties.

NEXT WEEK SUNDAY.—All the week I tagged around after him and tried to get acquainted. I had to do the talking, because he was shy, but I didn't mind it. He seemed pleased to have me around, and I used the sociable “we” a good deal, because it seemed to flatter him to be included.

WEDNESDAY.—We are getting along very well indeed, now, and getting better and better acquainted. He does not try to avoid me any more, which is a good sign, and shows that he likes to have me with him. That pleases me, and I study to be useful to him in every way I can, so as to increase his regard.

Extract from Adam's Diary

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

by Mark Twain, Project Guttenberg | Read more:
Images: Lester Ralph

David Dee Delgado

via:

Thoughts

 "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

― Leo Tolstoy

***

---As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer:

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.

People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, or invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes:

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

The young and privileged are particularly prone to this. They don’t have to worry about money, nor do they have homes or families of their own, so they have nothing to lose, and nothing to conserve. This gives them both the need to find struggles and the luxury to be radical. [ed. See also: Entertain Yourself (LARB); and, The West is bored to death (New Statesman).]

***

I see the show downs, slow downs, lost and found, turn arounds. The boys in the military shirts. I keep my eyes on the prize, on the long fallen skies. And I don't let my friends get hurt. All you back room schemers, small trip dreamers. Better find something new to say. Cause you're the same old story. It's the same old crime. And you got some heavy dues to pay.  - Steve Miller Space Cowboy

***

Getting what we want, not what we want to want: it could be the slogan of our times - Unknown

***

"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."
- John Wooden

***

At equilibrium, the evolutionary race is not only to the big and aggressive, but also to a certain number of the small and sneaky.

- Psychologist David P. Barash

How We All Became Clint Eastwood

Is This the Dominant Personality Type of Our Time?

Filmmaker Sergio Leone once explained why Clint Eastwood was a perfect actor for his movies. Eastwood’s portrayal of a cowboy, he explained, “only had two expressions: with hat and no hat.”

That might sound like criticism, or even mockery. But Leone needed a hero who presented a mask to the audience. In Eastwood, he found someone who did that naturally—as part of his acting style.

But Leone got lucky.

At least eight different actors—from Henry Fonda to Steve Reeves—turned down the role of the nameless stranger who destroys an entire Wild West town in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). With no better options, he hired an unproven film actor who possessed an extremely narrow range of facial and vocal expression.

That turned out to be just what he needed. But some people think this is terrible acting.

Talk show guest Ray Liotta left everyone in stunned silence when he said that Clint Eastwood was the most overrated actor of his generation. But Liotta doubled down—turning to the audience and saying: “I don’t give a sh-t.”

Even so, it’s hard to criticize Eastwood—because this flat style of acting became so pervasive in subsequent years. His detached, emotionless on-screen persona has served as a role model for countless heroes and villains.

Just think of all those Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where the dialogue became famous because it was delivered so mechanically. Or consider Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—a performance praised by experts for its authentic portrayal of a psychopath. Or even Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad, who became more emotionless and detached with each passing season.

After Eastwood, this exact same playbook worked for both heroes and villains. An extreme example is Terminator 2—where both the good guy (Schwarzenegger) and bad guy ( a T-1000 killer robot) battle to see who can achieve the most expressionless persona.

But the defining villain of this style remains Darth Vader. Eastwood had a face like a mask, according to Leone, but Darth Vader wears a literal mask. Not only can’t you see his face, but you aren’t even allowed to hear his natural voice—which has been processed to sound as inhuman as possible.

Clint Eastwood, for his part, continued to work variants on this character type—making millions of dollars in the process. In his career-defining Dirty Harry films, he showed that he required no cowboy hat to work this trope—although he repeats the gimmick of using up all six bullets that was so effective in the closing scene of A Fistful of Dollars.

No, Eastwood didn’t invent deadpan acting. But it had originally been done for laughs—most famously by Buster Keaton. In fact, the first use of the word “deadpan” in print (from 1915) refers specifically to Keaton.

Often the deadpan role went to the so-called “straight man” in comic duos—Martin (for Lewis), Abbott (for Costello), Rowan (for Martin), Smothers (for Smothers), etc. But these flat sidekicks were as necessary as the punchline in creating comic effects.

This deadpan demeanor was intrinsically funny, because any person with so little personality is weird, and makes us laugh.

Before Eastwood, we only see a few hints of this style in dramatic or action films, for example James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause or Sean Connery’s James Bond. But they both seem positively giddy compared with Eastwood’s cold and wooden demeanor.

I call this the “Man without Personality”—and it’s almost always a man. When psychologists studied this character type, they identified 126 movie characters of this sort, and only 21 were female.

So let’s give credit to Glenn Close (in Fatal Attraction) and Sharon Stone (in Basic Instinct). But they are far outnumbered by male cinematic psychopaths with flattened personalities—such as Kevin Spacey (in The Usual Suspects) or Daniel Day-Lewis (in The Gangs of New York) or Anthony Hopkins (in The Silence of the Lambs).

Sometimes these characters are actual machines (as in Terminator or RoboCop or 2001: A Space Odyssey). But even when they are made of flesh-and-blood, they retain obvious robotic elements.

It’s disturbing how much pop culture has fallen in love with these mechanical figures. But even worse, in the world of Zero Personality, all moral values become irrelevant.

That was true even for Eastwood’s debut as the unnamed stranger back in 1964. He does two good deeds during the course of the film—but at the cost of killing (directly or indirectly) most of the citizenry during the course of 90 macabre minutes.

What a bizarre story to tell. And it raises obvious questions:

Where did this personality type come from? And how did it become so popular? (...)

Americans needed decadent Europeans to blaze the trail. We were too optimistic. But they had seen evil, up close and personal. And had stories to tell.

Alfred Hitchcock—an émigré himself—was the only other influential source for this character type in Hollywood films. But Hitchcock turned to psychotics for horror and repulsion, not audience acclaim.

And even Hitchcock knew the European philosophical roots of this personality style. In his underrated masterpiece Rope (1948) he even introduces a Nietzschean professor (played by Jimmy Stewart, of all people!).

He returned to this character type in Psycho (1960)—but, once again, for horror not heroism. And audiences were shocked. Even though there is little graphic violence on screen, the public found this film deeply disturbing—to a degree that Hitchcock himself never matched, before or after.

Then, over the course of just a few years, this murderous psycho went from villain to hero.

By the time we get to Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974)—both starring Leone alums—audiences are actually cheering and clapping when the sadistic and expressionless protagonist commits cold-blooded murder. [ed. John Wick]

And here’s the scariest part of the story.

We’ve all become Clint Eastwood today.

Okay, maybe not everybody. But the main forums of public discourse on social media are filled with flat emotionless people who flare up into anger at the slightest provocation.

None of us saw this coming with the rise of the Internet. At least, I didn’t—nor did I hear anyone else predict the eventual effects back in the mid-1990s.

But maybe we should have anticipated it.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: Warner Bros./Paramount

[ed. See also: Subversively Human: A Conversation with Ted Gioia (Image Journal); and, Psychiatrists Declare No Country For Old Men Character As Most Realistic Portrayal Of A Psychopath (Unilad).]

Kazuaki Koseki. Himebotaru, a firefly native to the Yamagata prefecture of Japan

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