The Greatest Politician to Never Hold Public Office

In one of the most bizzare and brilliant scenes in American political history, Donald J. Trump last night declined the Republican nomination for President of the United States of America. Speaking to a packed convention center in Cleveland, Ohio where he had just been selected by an overwhelming majority of delegates, Mr. Trump took to the podium and began a speech that stunned the country and world at large:

"My fellow Americans, tonight I am going to tell you a story and talk about my vision for the future. This campaign began not as a... prank, but an experiment. An experiment to show the American people just how venal and divided and dysfunctional our current form of government is (gasps).

I am not qualified to be President (boos). No, I'm really not, and I don't mind telling you that. I don't have the experience in that system, and for that I am grateful. Very grateful. I'm a businessman, that is what I do: business. But I have to tell you, it's too hard these days for me to separate business from all the issues that are currently ruining this great country and running it into the ground. Issues that we have ignored or accepted far too long that are undermining our strength and killing our ability to compete on a global stage, and making us turn against each other."

Mr. Trump then went on to describe many of those issues, including: a broken political system that responds only to corporate lobbying and campaign contributions; breathtaking economic inequality, and widespread corporate criminality and tax cheating; a superficial media that vies mainly to see "who can bark the loudest"; an incoherent immigration policy that is as much a failure as our war on drugs; a dark cabal of government spying agencies with varying spying agendas; a country grounded in fear and economic insecurity, debt and technological disruption, with no safety net or mechanism for people who want to work to be able to do so; and a health care system that is neither affordable nor able to promote either health or care.

Mr. Trump said he had to be more extreme than he felt comfortable being during the campaign - painting issues in stark black and white - in order to get people's attention. Otherwise, "it's all noise and nuance, and nobody gets excited about that."

He then went on to say, "Look, I need qualified workers for my hotels, my golf courses, my other businesses, as does every business in this country. Where are we going to find those people when they can't afford to live near those businesses, commute to them, or even apply for them because they're working two, three jobs just to make ends meet? In the mean time, you have these CEOs making 20-30 million dollars a year (tax-free because they can afford offshore tax havens) lining the pockets of our politicians so that even more money will flow their way. It's despicable, and I know, because I've seen how the system operates - from the inside, and top to bottom. I've always said, 'tax me more', and I believe that. I can afford it, and I'll tell you what, so can all the other businesses in this country. If they can't, then they are not competitive, and who wants to keep subsidizing a bunch of losers? Eventually all the people drowning will realize how easy it is to capsize those few partying in the lifeboats."

In reference to his supporters, Mr. Trump encouraged them not to be disheartened. He told them they had made their voices heard and now had the responsiblity to follow up on his candidacy with real action rather than relying on one person to do the job. "It's not realistic to expect one person to change a dysfunctional system if that person has to work within the rules of that system" Mr. Trump stated. Toward that end, he revealed plans for a new organization - the Make America Great Foundation - to be headed by himself, that will hold politicians, government officials, corporations, and others accountable for their actions based upon a set of measurable criteria (yet to be revealed). He said he welcomes all Americans - of any political party - who want to influence change in a more direct way.

In effect, with the Make America Great Foundation, Mr. Trump explained that he hopes to create not only a Super PAC but a shadow government that will mobilize millions of people and dollars for its causes, and pay people for their levels of organizing and involvement. Mr. Trump was very candid about this in comments after the speech saying, "Look, bullies only respond to strength. If I have to create a bully to achieve what we want, then that is what I will do. We will have the best people, I guarantee it, because those people will be you. Remember 'We the People'?"

"And, remember, I can always run again."

As can be expected, Mr. Trump's exit from the 2016 Presidential race has created an immediate tsunami of relief, disbelief, dismay and political manuevering. While Mr. Trump did not endorse any of the remaining candidates, either Democrat or Republican, he did imply that any person selected in this next election will be a lame duck from the start, "Because they will have to deal with the Make America Great Foundation. They don't get to play inside ball with their cronies anymore."

Is Donald J. Trump the greatest politican to never hold public office? We'll see in the coming months.

by markk, Duck Soup | Read more:

Dancing to Prince

A surprise appearance by Prince, a month ago, for a memoir announcement at a Manhattan night club, had the satisfying elements you might imagine: brilliance, humor, otherworldliness, tardiness, costume changes, funkiness, eccentricity. He stood on a glass balcony above us, as if he’d descended to earth as an act of generosity. And, in fact, he had. “I literally just got off the plane,” he told us. “I’m going to go home and change and put some dancing clothes on.” He was already wearing what I’d consider dancing clothes: a purple-and-gold striped pajama suit. He put a huge pair of sunglasses on. “Now I can see,” he said.

Because of that strange and magical night, and because of the miracle that was Prince, it’s very hard to believe today’s news that he has died. His genius was hard enough to comprehend as he walked among us. Unlike other pop stars and celebrities—unlike other humans—he seemed not to have aged. And his apparent youthfulness, at age fifty-seven, didn’t appear to be because of effortful vanity. He seemed to actually not have aged—as if life’s usual rules didn’t apply to him.

Prince moved in mysterious ways. He invented his own aesthetic, his own symbol, his own style of music. He was short and slim. He dressed in purple. He liked canes, pajamas, ruffles, scarves. He lived on a giant compound named after one of his songs, where he sometimes hosted mysterious, thrilling events with strict rules. (No cameras, no photos, no alcohol; he might play or he might not.) He was masculine and feminine and casually, frankly sexual. He was forever prolific. His music was deeply satisfying, with a sophistication that was both intellectual and physical. It got to us everywhere. (...)

“Purple Rain,” of course, was like a gift from the gods, and not just because of the churchly intro to “Let’s Go Crazy.” There was “When Doves Cry,” so smart and electrifying it was almost shocking. That fierce opening guitar lick, for starters, and then the beat—Prince’s beats! I’m going to cry—and then that weird, funky vocal, like a mouth harp or a rubber band, and then the minimal, irresistible melody, and the amazingly hilarious first line “Dig if you will the picture.” We dug it, all right. The picture he painted was erotic: “of you and I engaged in a kiss / the sweat of your body covers me.” Prince, with his pencil mustache, purple suits, frills, motorcycle, and talk of butterflies and doves crying, was wonderfully frank about his particular brand of eroticism; he was floridly creative in all directions, and he never seemed to consider downplaying his music’s sexuality in a culture whose mainstream was scandalized by “Like a Virgin” and baffled by Annie Lennox and Boy George. Watching him dance in the video for “When Doves Cry,” halved and doubled by a split-screen mirror effect, looking weird and freaky, was like watching him say, What am I? I’m this, I’m that. I’m a floating midriff, I’m an arm, I’m too fast and funky for you to comprehend. I look freaky and I don’t care. I know what I’m doing. That’s just who I am.

The whole album gave that impression: the wistful and warm-hearted “Take Me with U” (“You’re sheer perfection” / “Thank you!”), the sexually startling “Darling Nikki,” the gorgeous “Purple Rain.” Today, the opener, “Let’s Go Crazy,” has been on my mind the most. The whole song is a commanding celebration of life: an intense and wryly foreboding sermon that explodes into an ecstatic dance party. Its moral is to dance, because we could all die any day:

We’re all excited
But we don’t know why
Maybe it’s ’cause
We’re all gonna die
And when we do
What’s it all for?
You better live now
Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door

If you played “Let’s Go Crazy” at a middle-school dance in 1984, you could see this in action—a bunch of pubescent kids ferociously dancing their way to understanding what life is all about, in case we had somehow forgotten the lessons of “1999.” We’d stand around during the sermon part and then, when the beat kicked in—“In this life, things are much harder than the afterlife! This life, you’re on your own!”—we’d take those lessons to heart and frantically work them out on the dance floor.

by Sarah Larson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Wireimage.com.

Prince (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016)

[ed. A true genius.]

Against Activism

[ed. See also: It's an Outrage! See? Look How Outraged I Am!]

Unlike the term organizer, with its clear roots in trade union and labor politics, activist has murky origins. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has been quietly biding its time for over a century. Associated early on with German idealist philosopher Rudolf Eucken—who believed that striving is necessary to a spiritual life—it was then sometimes used to describe outspoken supporters of the Central Powers during the First World War. Eventually, the term came to signify political action more broadly, and though the precise path of this transformation remains to be traced by scholars more diligent than myself, it is clear that activism and activist have been in circulation with their current meanings for some time.  (...)

To be an activist now merely means to advocate for change, and the hows and whys of that advocacy are unclear. The lack of a precise antonym is telling. Who, exactly, are the non-activists? Are they passivists? Spectators? Or just regular people? In its very ambiguity the word upholds a dichotomy that is toxic to democracy, which depends on the participation of an active citizenry, not the zealotry of a small segment of the population, to truly function.

As my friend Jonathan Matthew Smucker, whom I met at Zuccotti Park during the early days of Occupy Wall Street, argues in a forthcoming book, the term activist is suspiciously devoid of content. “Labels are certainly not new to collective political action,” Smucker writes, pointing to classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, and socialist, which all convey a clear position on an issue. But activist is a generic category associated with oddly specific stereotypes: today, the term signals not so much a certain set of political opinions or behaviors as a certain temperament. In our increasingly sorted and labeled society, activists are analogous to skateboarders or foodies or dead heads, each inhabiting a particular niche in America’s grand and heterogeneous cultural ecosystem—by some quirk of personality, they enjoy long meetings, shouting slogans, and spending a night or two in jail the way others may savor a glass of biodynamic wine. Worse still, Smucker contends, is the fact that many activists seem to relish their marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their specialness, their membership in an exclusive and righteous clique, effectiveness be damned.

While there are notable exceptions, many strands of contemporary activism risk emphasizing the self over the collective. By contrast, organizing is cooperative by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold, to build and exercise shared power. Organizing, as Smucker smartly defines it, involves turning “a social bloc into a political force.” Today, anyone can be an activist, even someone who operates alone, accountable to no one—for example, relentlessly trying to raise awareness about an important issue. Raising awareness—one of contemporary activism’s preferred aims—can be extremely valuable (at least I hope so, since I have spent so much time trying to do it), but education is not organizing, which involves not just enlightening whoever happens to encounter your message, but also aggregating people around common interests so that they can strategically wield their combined strength. Organizing is long-term and often tedious work that entails creating infrastructure and institutions, finding points of vulnerability and leverage in the situation you want to transform, and convincing atomized individuals to recognize that they are on the same team (and to behave like it).

Globally, we’ve seen an explosion of social movements since 2011, yet many of us involved in them remain trapped in the basic bind Rudd described. “Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used to be only one part of building a movement. It’s a tactic which has been elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy,” he lamented. “Most young activists think organizing means making the physical arrangements for a rally or benefit concert.” Add to this list creating a social media hashtag, circulating an online petition, and debating people on the Internet, and the sentiment basically holds. The work of organizing has fallen out of esteem within many movement circles, where a faith in spontaneous rebellion and a deep suspicion of institutions, leadership, and taking power are entrenched.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t times when rallies, concerts, hashtags, petitions, and online debates are useful—they sometimes are. The problem is that these events or tactics too often represent the horizon of political engagement. “I think it’s generally a good thing that large numbers of people have been inspired in recent decades to take action, and that developments in technology have made it easier for them to do so,” said L. A. Kauffman, who is putting the finishing touches on a history of direct action. “Divorced from a deliberate organizing strategy, all of this can just be a flurry of activity without much impact, of course, so we return to the need for our movements to recognize and cultivate organizing talent, and to support this work by treating it as work—e.g., by finding ways to pay people a living wage to do it.” To state what should be self-evident, people taking small concrete actions—signing a petition or showing up at a rally—are more likely to have a real influence when guided by a clear game plan, ideally one with the objective of inconveniencing elites and impeding their profits.

by Astra Taylor, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Laurie Rosenwald

Crisis in Brazil

The BRIC countries are in trouble. For a season the dynamos of international growth while the West was mired in the worst financial crisis and recession since the Depression, they are now the leading source of anxiety in the headquarters of the IMF and the World Bank. China, above all, because of its weight in the global economy: slowing output and a himalaya of debt. Russia: under siege, oil prices falling and sanctions biting. India: holding up best, but unsettling statistical revisions. South Africa: in free fall. Political tensions are rising in each: Xi and Putin battening down unrest with force, Modi thrashed at the polls, Zuma disgraced within his own party. Nowhere, however, have economic and political crises fused so explosively as in Brazil, whose streets have in the past year seen more protesters than the rest of the world combined.

Picked by Lula to succeed him, Dilma Rousseff, the former guerrilla who had become his chief of staff, won the presidency in 2010 with a majority nearly as sweeping as his own. Four years later, she was re-elected, this time with a much smaller margin of victory, a 3 per cent lead over her opponent, Aécio Neves, the governor of Minas Gerais, in a result marked by greater regional polarisation than ever before, the industrialised south and south-east swinging heavily against her, and the north-east delivering an even larger landslide for her – 72 per cent – than in 2010. But overall it was a clear-cut win, comparable in size to that of Mitterrand over Giscard, and a good deal larger, not to mention cleaner, than that of Kennedy over Nixon. In January 2015 Dilma – from this point we’ll drop the surname, as Brazilians do – began her second presidency.

Within three months, huge demonstrations packed the streets of the country’s major cities, at least two million strong, demanding her ouster. In Congress, Neves’s Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and its allies, emboldened by polls showing Dilma’s popularity had fallen to single figures, moved to impeach her. On May Day, she was unable even to give the traditional televised address to the nation: when her speech on International Women’s Day in March had been broadcast people banged saucepans and blew car horns, a form of protest that became known as panelaço. Overnight, the Workers’ Party (PT), which had long enjoyed by far the highest level of approval in Brazil, became the most unpopular party in the country. In private, Lula lamented: ‘We won the election. The following day we lost it.’ Many militants wondered if the party would survive at all.

How had it come to this? In the last year of Lula’s rule, when the global economy was still gripped by the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, the Brazilian economy grew 7.5 per cent. On taking office, Dilma tightened policy against risks of overheating, to the satisfaction of the financial press, in what looked like the kind of reinsurance policy Lula had himself taken out at the start of his first term. But as growth fell sharply, and world financial skies darkened once more, the government changed course, with a package of measures intended to prime investment for sustained development. Interest rates were lowered, payroll taxes cut, electricity costs reduced, loans to the private sector from private banks increased, the currency devalued and limited control of capital movements imposed. On the heels of this stimulus, halfway through her presidency, Dilma enjoyed an approval rating of 75 per cent.

But, far from picking up, the economy slowed from an already mediocre 2.75 per cent in 2011 to a mere 1 per cent in 2012, and with inflation above 6 per cent, in April 2013 the Central Bank abruptly raised interest rates, undercutting the ‘new economic matrix’ of Guido Mantega, the finance minister. Two months later, the country was swept by a wave of mass protests, triggered by higher bus fares in São Paulo and Rio but quickly escalating into generalised expressions of discontent with the quality of public services and, fanned by the media, of hostility to an incompetent state. Overnight, the government’s approval ratings halved. In response, it beat a retreat, starting cautionary reductions in public spending and allowing interest rates to rise again. Growth fell further – it would be nil in 2014 – but employment and wages remained stable. At the end of her first term Dilma waged a defiant campaign for re-election, assuring voters that she would continue to give priority to improving the living standards of working people, and attacking her PSDB opponent for planning to reverse the social gains of PT rule by slashing social benefits and hitting the poor. In the face of a continuous ideological barrage against her in the press, it was enough to give her victory.

Before her second term had even formally begun, Dilma reversed course. A spell of austerity, she abruptly explained, was required. The architect of the new economic matrix was dismissed, and the Chicago-trained head of the asset management division of Brazil’s second largest private bank installed at the finance ministry, with a mandate to curb inflation and restore confidence. The imperatives now were to cut social spending, curtail credit from public banks, auction state property and raise taxes to bring the budget back into primary surplus. Soon the Central Bank had hiked interest rates to 14.25 per cent. Since the economy had already stalled, the effect of this pro-cyclical package was to plunge the country into a full-blown recession – investment declining, wages falling and unemployment more than doubling. As GDP contracted, fiscal receipts fell, worsening the deficit and public debt. No government’s ratings could have withstood the speed of this deterioration. But the meltdown of Dilma’s popularity was not just the predictable result of the impact of recession on ordinary living standards. It was also, more painfully, the price of her abdication from the promises on which she was elected. Overwhelmingly, the reaction among her voters was that her victory was an estelionato, an embezzlement: she’d cheated her supporters by stealing the clothes of her opponents. Not just disillusion, but anger followed.

Half-hidden, the roots of this debacle lay in the soil of the PT’s model of growth itself. From the outset, its success relied on two kinds of nutrient: a super-cycle of commodity prices, and a domestic consumption boom. Between 2005 and 2011, the terms of trade for Brazil improved by a third, as demand for its raw materials from China and elsewhere increased the value of its principal exports and the volume of tax receipts for social expenditures. By the end of Lula’s second term, the share of primary commodities in the Brazilian export package had jumped from 28 to 41 per cent, and manufactures had fallen from 55 to 44 per cent; by the end of Dilma’s first term, raw materials accounted for more than half the value of all exports. But from 2011 onwards the prices of the country’s leading tradable goods collapsed: iron ore dropped from $180 to $55 a ton, soya from $18 to $8 a bushel, crude oil from $140 to $50 a barrel. Compounding the end of the overseas bonanza, domestic consumption hit the buffers. Throughout its rule, the core strategy of the PT had been to expand home demand by increasing popular purchasing power. That was achieved not only by raising the minimum wage and making cash transfers to the poor – the Bolsa Família – but by a massive injection of consumer credit. Over the decade from 2005 to 2015, total debt owed by the private sector increased from 43 to 93 per cent of GDP, with consumer loans running at double the level of neighbouring countries. By the time Dilma was re-elected in late 2014, interest payments on household credit were absorbing more than a fifth of average disposable income. Along with the exhaustion of the commodity boom, the consumer spree was no longer sustainable. The two motors of growth had stalled.

by Perry Anderson, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Miguel Schincariol/AFP/Getty Images via:

The Average 29-Year-Old

What is the typical life experience for an American on the verge of turning 30?

This is a hard question to answer, no matter who is asking. But it’s become especially difficult for an industry responsible with providing the answers: the national press. An irony of digital media is that the Internet distributes journalism, but it concentrates journalists. Jobs at media sites like The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, or Gawker are five-times more likely to be located in New York or Washington, D.C., than television-news jobs. The clustering force is only getting more centripetal: The share of reporting jobs in Los Angeles, NYC, and DC increased by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014.

It’s easy to imagine many downsides of this agglomeration, like the dissolution of local reporting, but a subtler risk is that well-educated journalists in these dense cities wind up with a skewed impression of the world, a “majority illusion” based on the extremely unrepresentative cross-section of the country that’s immediately around them. To be fair, being a reporter in Des Moines or rural Nebraska, while it provides a better view of Des Moines and rural Nebraska, doesn’t offer a universal window into the average experiences of all Americans, either. For that, one needs something else, like a national survey.

So, how useful that the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a report on the demographics of 29-year-olds in the U.S. As a 29-year-old reporting on the economy from New York, it was a particularly good orientation for me. The impression of young people in the U.S. today is warped: In trend pieces, the word Millennial has become shorthand for “a college-educated young person living in a city.” But this usage elides some critical details, for example that most people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s (a) didn’t graduate from college, (b) aren’t living in a city, and (c) generally hate being called “Millennials.”

Instead, the average 29-year-old did not graduate from a four-year university, but she did start college; held several jobs, including more than two in the last three years; is not as likely to be married as her parents at this age, but is still likely to be living with somebody; is less likely to own a home than 15 years ago, but despite the story of urban renewal, is more likely to live outside of a dense urban area like Brooklyn or Washington, D.C.

Here are several more details from the BLS report (and some similar surveys) about 29-year-olds:

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Ricardo Moraes / Reuters

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Pets Allowed

[ed. See also: Concept Creep: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm]

What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who drive cars with handicapped license plates, the parents who use a phony address so that their child can attend a more desirable public school, the customers with eleven items who stand in the express lane. The latest group to bend the law is pet owners.

Take a look around. See the St. Bernard slobbering over the shallots at Whole Foods? Isn’t that a Rottweiler sitting third row, mezzanine, at Carnegie Hall? As you will have observed, an increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments, cohabiting with them in animal-unfriendly apartment buildings and dormitories, and taking them (free!) onto airplanes—simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being. No government agency keeps track of such figures, but in 2011 the National Service Animal Registry, a commercial enterprise that sells certificates, vests, and badges for helper animals, signed up twenty-four hundred emotional-support animals. Last year, it registered eleven thousand.

What about the mental well-being of everyone else? One person’s emotional support can be another person’s emotional trauma. Last May, for instance, a woman brought her large service dog, Truffles, on a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. At thirty-five thousand feet, the dog squatted in the aisle and, according to Chris Law, a passenger who tweeted about the incident, “did what dogs do.” After the second, ahem, installment, the crew ran out of detergent and paper towels. “Plane is emergency landing cuz ppl are getting sick,” Law tweeted. “Hazmat team needs to board.” The woman and Truffles disembarked, to applause, in Kansas City, and she offered her inconvenienced fellow-passengers Starbucks gift cards.

In June, a miniature Yorkie caused a smaller stir, at a fancy Manhattan restaurant. From a Google review of Altesi Ristorante: “Lunch was ruined because Ivana Trump sat next to us with her dog which she even let climb to the table. I told her no dogs allowed but she lied that hers was a service dog.” I called the owner of Altesi, Paolo Alavian, who defended Trump. “She walked into the restaurant and she showed the emotional-support card,” he said. “Basically, people with the card are allowed to bring their dogs into the restaurant. This is the law.”

Alavian is mistaken about that. Contrary to what many business managers think, having an emotional-support card merely means that one’s pet is registered in a database of animals whose owners have paid anywhere from seventy to two hundred dollars to one of several organizations, none of which are recognized by the government. (You could register a Beanie Baby, as long as you send a check.) Even with a card, it is against the law and a violation of the city’s health code to take an animal into a restaurant. Nor does an emotional-support card entitle you to bring your pet into a hotel, store, taxi, train, or park.

No such restrictions apply to service dogs, which, like Secret Service agents and Betty White, are allowed to go anywhere. In contrast to an emotional-support animal (E.S.A.), a service dog is trained to perform specific tasks, such as pulling a wheelchair and responding to seizures. The I.R.S. classifies these dogs as a deductible medical expense, whereas an emotional-support animal is more like a blankie. An E.S.A. is defined by the government as an untrained companion of any species that provides solace to someone with a disability, such as anxiety or depression. The rights of anyone who has such an animal are laid out in two laws. The Fair Housing Act says that you and your E.S.A. can live in housing that prohibits pets. The Air Carrier Access Act entitles you to fly with your E.S.A. at no extra charge, although airlines typically require the animal to stay on your lap or under the seat—this rules out emotional-support rhinoceroses. Both acts stipulate that you must have a corroborating letter from a health professional.

Fortunately for animal-lovers who wish to abuse the law, there is a lot of confusion about just who and what is allowed where. I decided to go undercover as a person with an anxiety disorder (not a stretch) and run around town with five un-cuddly, non-nurturing animals for which I obtained E.S.A. credentials (one animal at a time; I’m not that crazy). You should know that I am not in the habit of breaking (I mean, exploiting) the law, and, as far as animals go, I like them—medium rare.

The first animal I test-drove was a fifteen-pound, thirteen-inch turtle. I tethered it to a rabbit leash, to which I had stapled a cloth E.S.A. badge (purchased on Amazon), and set off for the Frick Collection.

“One, please,” I said to the woman selling tickets, who appeared not to notice the reptile writhing in my arms, even though people in line were taking photos of us with their cell phones. I petted the turtle’s feet. “Just a moment,” the woman said. “Let me get someone.”

“Oh, my God,” I heard one guard say to another. “That woman has a turtle. I’ll call security.”

“Is it a real turtle?” Guard No. 2 said to Guard No. 1. Minutes passed. A man in a uniform appeared.

“No, no, no. You can’t take in an animal,” he said.

“It’s an emotional-support animal,” I said.

“Nah.”

“I have a letter,” I said.

by Patricia Marx, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic

Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic

[ed. I have another theory. Maybe readers are just disgusted wtih all the rewarmed, dumbed down, clickbaiting bullshit articles and ads littering up those sites? You think? For example, I never go to this site or this one anymore because they just assualt my eyes and tax my patience.]

The business of online news has never been forgiving. But in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic.

This month, Mashable, a site that had just raised $15 million, laid off 30 people. Salon, a web publishing pioneer, announced a new round of budget cuts and layoffs. And BuzzFeed, which has been held up as a success story, was forced to bat back questions about its revenue — but not before founders at other start-up media companies received calls from anxious investors.

“It is a very dangerous time,” said Om Malik, an investor at True Ventures whose tech news site, Gigaom, collapsed suddenly in 2015, portending the flurry of contractions.

The trouble, the publishers say, is twofold. The web advertising business, always unpredictable, became more treacherous. And website traffic plateaued at many large sites, in some cases falling — a new and troubling experience after a decade of exuberant growth.

Online publishers have faced numerous financial challenges in recent years, including automated advertising and ad-blocking tools. But now, there is a realization that something more profound has happened: The transition from an Internet of websites to an Internet of mobile apps and social platforms, and Facebook in particular, is no longer coming — it is here.

It is a systemic change that is leaving many publishers unsure of how they will make money.

“With each turn of the screw, people began to realize, viscerally, that this is what it feels like to not be in control of your destiny,” said Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who left the company in 2007.

Audiences drove the change, preferring to refresh their social feeds and apps instead of visiting website home pages. As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites. Sales staffs at media companies struggled to explain to clients why they should buy ads for a fragmented audience rather than go to robust social networks instead.

Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.

The power shift was made clear last week as the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage for the company’s annual developer conference. He stood in front of a diagram outlining an audacious 10-year expansion plan, which included several features to help keep people inside Facebook’s world instead of following links out.

by John Herrman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chang W. Lee

​The Six Elements of an Effective Apology

There are six components to an apology – and the more of them you include when you say you’re sorry, the more effective your apology will be, according to new research.

But if you’re pressed for time or space, there are two elements that are the most critical to having your apology accepted.

“Apologies really do work, but you should make sure you hit as many of the six key components as possible,” said Roy Lewicki, lead author of the study and professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

In two separate experiments, Lewicki and his co-authors tested how 755 people reacted to apologies containing anywhere from one to all six of these elements:

1. Expression of regret

2. Explanation of what went wrong

3. Acknowledgment of responsibility

4. Declaration of repentance

5. Offer of repair

6. Request for forgiveness

The research is published in the May 2016 issue of the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. Lewicki’s co-authors were Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State, and Beth Polin of Eastern Kentucky University.

While the best apologies contained all six elements, not all of these components are equal, the study found.

“Our findings showed that the most important component is an acknowledgement of responsibility. Say it is your fault, that you made a mistake,” Lewicki said.

The second most important element was an offer of repair.

“One concern about apologies is that talk is cheap. But by saying, ‘I’ll fix what is wrong,’ you’re committing to take action to undo the damage,” he said.

The next three elements were essentially tied for third in effectiveness: expression of regret, explanation of what went wrong and declaration of repentance.

The least effective element of an apology is a request for forgiveness. “That’s the one you can leave out if you have to,” Lewicki said.

by Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State University | Read more:
Image: Ohio State University

Infrastructure: The Movie

[ed. Forward to 17:15 if you just want to see the movie, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing. See also: Hail the maintainers.]

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The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans

Since 2013, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer—five books, hundreds of articles published, a number of awards and fellowships, and a small (very small) but respectable reputation. You wouldn’t even know it to look at my tax return. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper-middle-class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn’t know it to talk to me, because the last thing I would ever do—until now—is admit to financial insecurity or, as I think of it, “financial impotence,” because it has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and ministers to individuals with financial issues. “Much more likely.” America is a country, as Donald Trump has reminded us, of winners and losers, alphas and weaklings. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation—even a form of social suicide. Silence is the only protection. (...)

Financial impotence goes by other names: financial fragility, financial insecurity, financial distress. But whatever you call it, the evidence strongly indicates that either a sizable minority or a slim majority of Americans are on thin ice financially. How thin? A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didn’t have enough liquid savings to replace a month’s worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said they’d worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses. A similar study conducted by Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University, Peter Tufano of Oxford, and Daniel Schneider, then of Princeton, asked individuals whether they could “come up with” $2,000 within 30 days for an unanticipated expense. They found that slightly more than one-quarter could not, and another 19 percent could do so only if they pawned possessions or took out payday loans. The conclusion: Nearly half of American adults are “financially fragile” and “living very close to the financial edge.” Yet another analysis, this one led by Jacob Hacker of Yale, measured the number of households that had lost a quarter or more of their “available income” in a given year—income minus medical expenses and interest on debt—and found that in each year from 2001 to 2012, at least one in five had suffered such a loss and couldn’t compensate by digging into savings.

You could think of this as a liquidity problem: Maybe people just don’t have enough ready cash in their checking or savings accounts to meet an unexpected expense. In that case, you might reckon you’d find greater stability by looking at net worth—the sum of people’s assets, including their retirement accounts and their home equity. That is precisely what Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of wealth in America, did. Here’s what he found: There isn’t much net worth to draw on. Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation—down 85.3 percent from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, down 63.5 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and down 25.8 percent for the third, or middle, quintile. According to research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the typical household, one at the median point of wealth distribution, was $87,992 in 2003. By 2013, it had declined to $54,500, a 38 percent drop. And though the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 certainly contributed to the drop, the decline for the lower quintiles began long before the recession—as early as the mid-1980s, Wolff says.

by Neal Gabler, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Hugh Kretschmer

The Beach Girl Behind the Beach Boys

Early in 2015’s Love & Mercy, a film based on the life of Brian Wilson, a foxy blonde in cat’s-eye sunglasses addresses the Beach Boys leader. “Hey, Brian? I think you might have screwed up here,” she says, gesturing to the sheet music with her pencil. “You’ve got Lyle playing in D, and the rest of us are in A major. How does that work? Two bass lines in two different keys?”

As she often was in real life, that blonde bassist Carol Kaye is the lone woman in the studio, and the only female member of an informal, unheralded lineup of talent — drummers, guitarists, percussionists, piano, and horn players — that you hear on the Beach Boys’ legendary Pet Sounds. She’s also on a jukebox’s worth of hit songs from the ’60s: Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba,” Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” to name a few.

Mostly, these musicians were jazz players brought in from Los Angeles’s teeming nightclub scene to lend their chops to the recordings of rock bands, some of whom (like the Monkees) rarely touched an instrument inside a studio. So, dramatic liberties aside, it’s unlikely that “How does that work?” was a phrase uttered by the now 81-year-old Kaye, whom Wilson and Quincy Jones have called the greatest bassist in the world.

And yet, because so few people know her name, it’s all too easy to fictionalize a woman who made such a big and influential noise while working in the shadows, and in a nearly all-male world.

Kaye never exactly expected to be remembered. Most session musicians thought they were creating ephemeral pop hits, not lasting touchstones. “Music up to that time had a life span of about ten years,” says the chatty, gray-haired Kaye, speaking from the sofa in the living room of her home on a warm day in early April, her white poodle mix Rusty beside her. “We’re shocked those songs lived on.”

Legacies are complicated affairs. As anyone who shares success with other people knows, collaboration and dispute tend to go together. For instance, session drummer Hal Blaine claims he, Kaye, and their colleagues were known as the Wrecking Crew, a sobriquet he came up with after older studio hacks expressed a concern that these firebrands would “wreck” the music industry with their faddish rock. As nicknames go, the group’s is pretty badass — except, according to Kaye, it’s an ex post facto bit of mythmaking from Blaine. “We were never called that,” she says bluntly, and it bugs her that the term has stuck. (...)

The work became regular. One day a bassist was a no-show, Kaye switched instruments, and after that she was first call — the highest compliment you can bestow upon a session musician. Kaye estimates she was making the equivalent in today’s dollars of almost $10,000 per week by 1965. She booked so many dates that she would lay down on her case to catch a few minutes’ sleep. Fellow musicians’ “wives would come down to the studio, and I’d joke, ‘I slept with your husband today!’ ” she says.

Kaye’s second husband didn’t approve of her job’s late hours, and he especially didn’t like it when she was playing with black musicians, which was often — the late virtuoso drummer Earl Palmer was a close friend. So one night, Kaye came home late from a session for Ike Turner, who had paid the crew in cash, and woke her husband up by dumping the money on the bed. “That’s what the ladies of the evening got back then,” she says with a grin. Kaye divorced him not long after, got a live-in nanny, and said, “Screw it, I’m working.”

Even in retrospect, Kaye doesn’t necessarily see that kind of career-oriented attitude as feminist. Honing her craft in jazz clubs, where women weren’t an anomaly, she didn’t consider gender an issue, so whenever she was treated to an insult, Kaye would hurl it right back with a “Well, you play good for a guy.”

It got to be so that if she couldn’t make a date, producers asked other bassists for “the Carol Kaye sound,” which she says boils down to clean lines, perfect timing, and hard picking that let her “dance on top of the beat,” which she does most gloriously on “Good Vibrations.”

by Phoebe Reilly, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images

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Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care

[ed. Doesn't it get fatiguing? All that energy spent every day trying not to get screwed or manipulated by somebody? Landlords, credit card companies, doctors, lawyers, hospitals, banks, airlines, insurance agencies, contractors, cable companies, phone companies, car salesmen, tech companies, politicians, and on and on and on...? (and that's not even counting Ex's) It's the picture of modern day life -  the monumental effort expended by everyone just to not get screwed or manipulated by somebody... day in and day out.]

Four years ago, I sold my company to Google and joined the ranks there. I spent my last three years there as Product Philosopher, looking at the profound ways the design of screens shape billions of human lives — and asking what it means for them to do so ethically and responsibly.

What I came away with is that something’s not right with how our screens are designed and I left Google to tell the public what they should know about this. I’m writing this to help you understand why you should care, and what you can do about it.

Why does this matter? Billions of us turn to smartphones every day. We wake up with them. We fall asleep with them. You’re looking at one right now.

New technologies always reshape society, and it’s always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason. Socrates worried that the technology of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they [would] not use their memories.” We worried that newspapers would make people stop talking to each other on the subway. We worried that we would use television to “amuse ourselves to death.”

“And see!” people say. “Nothing bad happened!” Isn’t humanity more prosperous, more technically sophisticated, and better connected than ever? Is it really that big of a problem that people spend so much time staring at their smartphones? Isn’t it just another cultural shift, like all the others? Won’t we just adapt?

Invisibility of the New Normal

I don’t think so. What’s missing from this perspective is that all these technologies (books, television, radio, newspapers) did in fact radically change everything, we just don’t see it. Each replaced our old menus of life choices with new ones. Each new menu eventually became the new normal — “the way things are” — and, after our memories of old menus had faded into the past, the new menus became “the way things have always been.”

Consider that the average American now watches more than 5.5 hours of television per day. Regardless of whether you think TV is good or bad, hundreds of millions of people spend 30% of their waking hours watching it. It’s hard to overstate the vast consequences of this shift– for the blood flows of millions of people, for our understanding of reality, for the relational habits of families, for the strategies and outcomes of political campaigns. Yet for those who live with them day-to-day, they are invisible.

So what best describes the nature of what smart phones are “doing” to us?

A New “Perfect” Choice on Life’s Menu

If I had to summarize it, it’s this: our phone puts a new choice on life’s menu, in any moment, that’s “sweeter” than reality.

If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.

And this new choice fits into any moment. Our phone offers 5-second choices like “checking email” that feel better than waiting in line. And it offers 30-minute choices like a podcast that will teach you that thing you’ve been dying to learn, which feels better than a 30-minute walk in silence.

Once you see your phone this way, wouldn’t you turn to it more often? It always happens this way: when new things fill our needs better than the old, we switch:

• When cheaper, faster to prepare food appears, we switch: Packaged foods.
• When more accurate search engines appear, we switch: Google.
• When cheaper, faster forms of transportation appear, we switch: Uber.

So it goes with phones: when it gives us a new choice that’s “sweeter” than being with ourselves or our boring surroundings — we switch.

But it also changes us on the inside. We grow less and less patient for reality as it is, especially when it’s boring or uncomfortable. We come to expect more from the world, more rapidly. And because reality can’t live up to our expectations, it reinforces how often we want to turn to our screens. A self-reinforcing feedback loop.

And because of the attention economy, every product will only get more persuasive over time. Facebook must become more persuasive if it wants to compete with YouTube and survive. YouTube must become more persuasive if it wants to compete with Facebook. And we’re not just talking about ‘cheap’ amusement (aka cat videos). These products will only get better at giving us choices that make every bone in our body say, “yeah I want that!”

So what’s wrong about this? If the entire attention economy is working to fill us up with more perfect-feeling things to spend time on, which outcompete being with the discomfort of ourselves or our surroundings, shouldn’t that be fantastic?

Maybe it’s that “filling people up,” even with incredible choices on screens somehow doesn’t add up to a life well lived. Or that those choices weren’t what we wished we’d been persuaded to do in the bigger sense of our lives.

As each player in the Attention Economy invents more and more persuasive tactics to keep people hooked, persuasiveness goes up and agency goes down. Maybe we are “choosing,” but we are choosing from persuasive menus driven by companies who have different goals than ours.

And that begs us to ask, “what are our goals?” or how do we want to spend our time? There are as many “good lives” as there are people, but our technology (and the attention economy) don’t really seem on our team to give us the agency to live according to them. 

And it’s about to get a lot worse.

by Tristan Harris, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited

This Electronic Tattoo Turns Your Skin Into a Screen

[ed. Don't try to resist. You know it's coming... and it's not going stop at patches.]

Putting clock-radio-style numbers on your skin might not seem all that desirable. But these flashing digits are the proof of concept for a new electronic skin. In theory, "e-skins" like the one described Friday in Science Advances could be used for everything from monitoring vital signs to making wearable electronics a whole lot more wearable.

Lots of researchers are working on "smart skins." The idea is to package electronic sensors into a super-thin, super-flexible material — so thin and flexible that the user could wear it like a temporary tattoo. Recently, one research group even made a functional smart skin out of office supplies, such as Post-it notes and foil, showing that the whisper-thin electronic sensors need not be made from expensive materials.

Creating smart skins that include display screens is the ultimate goal: This would allow hospitals to monitor the vital signs of their patients with a simple stick-on patch. And in your day-to-day life, you could have the capabilities of a smartwatch in the palm of your hand — or wherever else you wanted them.

"The advent of mobile phones has changed the way we communicate. While these communication tools are getting smaller and smaller, they are still discrete devices that we have to carry with us," study author Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo said in a statement. "What would the world be like if we had displays that could adhere to our bodies and even show our emotions or level of stress or unease? In addition to not having to carry a device with us at all times, they might enhance the way we interact with those around us or add a whole new dimension to how we communicate."

by Rachel Feltman, Washington Post | Read more:
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Electile Dysfunction

The inability to become aroused over any candidate for POTUS, put forth by either party.
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