The Mystery of Business Casual

The first time I tried on a pair of Allbirds sneakers, I was in the brand’s San Francisco boutique, sitting on a gently curved wooden stool designed to tip forward in aid of shoe-changing. The stool was created by the same people who design the start-up’s shoes, and it made me feel the same combination of familiarity and irritation: Do we really need tech to disrupt the established technology of stools and sneakers?

My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.

Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.

In theory, I should be the brand’s ideal customer: I hate uncomfortable shoes, I work in an office with a vaguely casual dress code, and I’ve owned several pairs of Roshe Ones. I’m a member of the digital creative class in which Allbirds has found its most dedicated market, which includes the Silicon Valley tech workers often characterized as the brand’s biggest fans. When I look around at work or in my neighborhood in New York City, I often spot a pair.

Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”

Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp. (...)

As I tried on sneakers in the San Francisco Allbirds shop, I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. I looked for the sense of aesthetic doom that critics assured me the shoes’ popularity promised. Instead of the suffocating sameness or joyless efficiency that critics have ascribed to the shoes, I saw just a small, conventional boutique in which a handful of customers ranging from teen boys to female retirees were trying on sneakers.

Tim Brown, Allbirds’ co-founder, seems aware of—and chafed by—the insinuation that his shoes are boring, or only for tech bros. “I actually think there is excitement in the simplicity and calmness, which belies an enormous amount of work,” he says of the design. He also says that women have always made up the majority of Allbirds’ customers.

I was having trouble remembering what so many fashion people found threatening. Upstairs from the shop, in an impromptu studio, some Allbirds employees were photographing the simple sneakers against an Instagram-friendly peachy background with giant Monstera leaves as props. On the feet of the young women who worked in the office, the shoes were free of the jarring, swagless business-athlesiure aesthetic I’d always associated them with.

Fashion’s acceptance of Allbirds, like Uggs, Birkenstocks, Crocs, and Tevas before it, has started to seem both inevitable and, at worst, completely fine. All it takes for any particular shoe to make the crossover is for some already-cool people to decide it should. (Case in point: New Balance sneakers are currently having a moment.)

by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Allbirds

[ed. I have a couple (Allbirds). They're great. I still like my Goodwill Puma's the best.]

Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again.

People concerned about privacy often try to be “careful” online. They stay off social media, or if they’re on it, they post cautiously. They don’t share information about their religious beliefs, personal life, health status or political views. By doing so, they think they are protecting their privacy.

But they are wrong. Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.

There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.

The basic idea of data inference is not new. Magazine subscriber lists have long been purchased by retailers, charities and politicians because they provide useful hints about people’s views. A subscriber to The Wall Street Journal is more likely to be a Republican voter than is a subscriber to The Nation, and so on.

But today’s technology works at a far higher level. Consider an example involving Facebook. In 2017, the newspaper The Australian published an article, based on a leaked document from Facebook, revealing that the company had told advertisers that it could predict when younger users, including teenagers, were feeling “insecure,” “worthless” or otherwise in need of a “confidence boost.” Facebook was apparently able to draw these inferences by monitoring photos, posts and other social media data. (...)

It is worth stressing that today’s computational inference does not merely check to see if Facebook users posted phrases like “I’m depressed” or “I feel terrible.” The technology is more sophisticated than that: Machine-learning algorithms are fed huge amounts of data, and the computer program itself categorizes who is more likely to become depressed.

Consider another example. In 2017, academic researchers, armed with data from more than 40,000 Instagram photos, used machine-learning tools to accurately identify signs of depression in a group of 166 Instagram users. Their computer models turned out to be better predictors of depression than humans who were asked to rate whether photos were happy or sad and so forth.

Such tools are already being marketed for use in hiring employees, for detecting shoppers’ moods and predicting criminal behavior. Unless they are properly regulated, in the near future we could be hired, fired, granted or denied insurance, accepted to or rejected from college, rented housing and extended or denied credit based on facts that are inferred about us.

This is worrisome enough when it involves correct inferences. But because computational inference is a statistical technique, it also often gets things wrong — and it is hard, and perhaps impossible, to pinpoint the source of the error, for these algorithms offer little to no insights into how they operate. What happens when someone is denied a job on the basis of an inference that we aren’t even sure is correct?

Another troubling example of inference involves your phone number. It is increasingly an identifier that works like a Social Security number — it is unique to you. Even if you have stayed off Facebook and other social media, your phone number is almost certainly in many other people’s contact lists on their phones. If they use Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp), they have been prompted to upload their contacts to help find their “friends,” which many people do.

Once your number surfaces in a few uploads, Facebook can place you in a social network, which helps it infer things about you since we tend to resemble the people in our social set. (Facebook even keeps “shadow” profiles of nonusers and deploys “tracking pixels” situated all over the web — not just on Facebook — that transmit information about your behavior to the company.)

by Zeynep Tufekci, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alexis Beauclair

Ichiro
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Typography 2020: A Special Listicle for America

Presidential-campaign typography took a big step up in 2008, when Barack Obama adopted the then-new Gotham font for his campaign. (Though for his re-election campaign, he had serifs added.) This led to the rise of Gotham throughout the United States. But especially in political campaigns, where the geometric sans has become typographic shorthand for #winning. (...)

Interestingly, one of Obama’s few bipartisan successes was inducing Republicans to use Gotham too: in 2016, it was chosen by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump (well, the no-cost Gotham knockoff Montserrat). (...)

The Democratic Field: April 2019

I wasn’t impressed by any of the websites, none of which exceeded the high end of mediocre—what you might find in an $18/month Squarespace plan.

• Of course, there were a ton of Gothamesque geometric sans serifs.

• The candidate who was most successful stoking my curiosity with design was Kirsten Gillibrand.

• I was surprised that the long-shot candidates weren’t taking more chances with their websites—what the hell have they got to lose? Though I suppose Julián Castro, whose site was as boring as any, was nevertheless the most competent.

• Among current front-runner-ish candidates, Kamala Harris was the worst underperformer, with Beto O’Rourke second worst.

• Overall worst in show: Cory Booker, who apparently decided to run for president on a Monday, crowdsourced his website on Tuesday, and launched it on Wednesday. Unbearable.

For those who think it trivializes our political process to judge candidates by their typography—what would you prefer we scrutinize? Qualifications? Ground into dust during the last election. Issues? Be my guest. Whether a candidate will ever fulfill a certain campaign promise about a certain issue is conjectural.

But typography—that’s a real decision candidates have to make today, with real money and real consequences. And if I can’t trust you to pick some reasonable fonts and colors, then why should I trust you with the nuclear codes? (...)

Cory Booker

The weird layout in the screenshot is exactly as I found it, and the popups refused to be dismissed. The display font Conductor has potential. But there’s no design concept to speak of (no, “red, white, and blue” doesn’t cut it). The execution is totally inept. Cory, it was nice of you to hire your second cousin. But seek professional help. You’re trailing the pack.

Tulsi Gabbard

I like the simplicity of the concept. The flat color field is arresting, even if it makes the candidate look like a flight attendant on Tulsi Airlines. I don’t like the take-perfectly-nice-font-and-chop-off-the-corners wordmark, a trend that has been done to death (and if you’re going to bother, why not chop off the L so it can sit closer to the S?) Text is Neue Swift; display is Harmonia Sans.

John Hickenlooper

It could be worse. But it still looks more like he’s starting an outdoor-clothing label, not running for president. Like other candidates, Hickenlooper evokes Obama’s use of Gotham (with the similar Proxima Nova, though Proxima predates Gotham). The deep purple is unexpected—Colorado is politically “purple”, is that the idea?—though pairing two intense colors doesn’t provide much versatility.

Jay Inslee

The typography makes it look like a pharmaceutical ad—Ask your doctor if Inslee™ is right for you. Jay Inslee wants to give you lots of colors: American red, white, and blue, and a lighter blue, and then a couple shades of green, I suppose to connote that he cares about the environment. Another candidate evoking Obama’s Gotham typography (this time with Montserrat).

by Matthew Butterick, Practical Typography |  Read more:

Images: Democratic campaign sites.

A World Built on Sand and Oil

Oil and sand are not often commodities conjoined in discussions of global trade. The first is the motive engine of industry and transportation, fuel for heating and illumination, the spirit that animates much global politics. Even when priced cheaply—as I write, the price of oil hovers around fifty dollars per barrel (or just under four hundred dollars per ton)—it is considered precious. Humble, ordinary, oft-overlooked sand is, by contrast, the second most consumed good in the world by volume after water. It makes concrete and glass and electronics possible. According to the UN Environment Programme, at least fifty billion tons of sand (often measured in aggregate with gravel) are used annually, in contrast with four billion tons of oil. But sand is not often thought of as valuable: its trade is more domestic than global, and its market price per ton is under nine dollars in the United States and far less than that in the rest of the world.

But there are similarities, too. While China is the biggest consumer of both products, the United States follows close behind as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil and the third-largest user of sand. Depending on its market price, crude oil is often the first or second most exported good in the world by value. Today’s relatively low prices put crude oil exports in second place, after automobiles. At the end of 2015, the U.S. government rescinded a forty-year ban on the export of crude oil from the States, and since then the country has aggressively reentered the global oil market, becoming the world’s third-largest exporter of petroleum and its refined products, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. (Despite being the largest oil producer, the U.S. is not the world’s largest exporter, because it consumes most of what it produces.) The vast majority of the trade in sand is domestic, and the U.S. and China extract the sand they need for construction and industry from their own territories. The world’s biggest importer of sand, however, is Singapore, which uses a great volume of the stuff in its frenetic projects of land reclamation.

The two commodities converge in one other regard. Their commodification and trade hold mirrors to global inequalities and ecological plunder. Both are produced over eons, the one a product of fossilization of prehistoric flora and fauna, the other the debris of rocks’ encounter with wind and water. Both tar and dirt symbolize inferior material. And yet the moment at which they became pivotal to industrialization and urbanization, rocks are blasted, wells are drilled to sepulchral depths, rivers are dredged, beaches are bulldozed away to enable the transformation of these natural resources into commodities. The inexorable proliferation of oil and sand on the global circuits of trade tells us about the shape-shifting ways of production, colonial forms of exploitation, and our reckless wrecking of the global environmental commons. It is about how the commodification of prosaic everyday things affects lives here, now, and half a world away.

If you look around you, you will inevitably see objects, places, things containing sand. Sand is dredged out of a riverbed or a seafloor in one place and poured into the shallows in another place to conjure land out of the sea. Sand and gravel are used in the making of concrete, today the most widely used building material in the world. Mixed with tar, sand and gravel constitute asphalt. The silica in sand is extracted to manufacture all grades of glass, as well as semiconductors and integrated circuits used in electronics. Even hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires sand. The urbanization of the world, the meteoric growth in the production of electronics, and the expansion of the use of glass in everything from windows and fiberglass to screens for automobiles and electronics all have increased the demand for sand. But the largest consumer remains the construction industry.

Throughout human history sand and gravel have been used to raise buildings, pave roads, and make glassware. Monumental structures of ancient times—the Great Wall of China, Roman aqueducts and amphitheaters, and ziggurats and pyramids in Mesopotamia and the Americas—used either early versions of concrete (blending some adhesive with sand and gravel) or fired mud bricks made from a mixture of sand and clay. The massive blocks of stone for the pyramids in Egypt were dragged into place on beds of sand. Glass-cutting techniques were employed in the Sassanian Empire, and glass windowpanes made from sand quartz and ash were known in Roman Alexandria nearly two thousand years ago, though they were opaque, small, and thick. (Until the early modern period, glass panes were—like many other technologies—reserved for elite sacred and profane institutions: cathedrals, jami’ mosques, and grand administrative buildings.) (...)

The trade in sand and gravel as commodities in their own right began in earnest in the twentieth century. The efflorescence of modernist concrete architecture with large windows and the later fashion for glass cladding in ever-expanding cities demanded concerted and organized trade in sand, rather than the accidental use of ballast. And with the invention and upward spiral in the usage of electronics at the end of the twentieth century, the search for industrial-quality sand became more urgent.

Not all sand is created equal. The fine sand of the desert, stretching for miles across the arid climates, has been eroded by wind, becoming too uniform in size and too even in shape to make good concrete. Concrete is manufactured by mixing cement with a larger proportion of sand; unevenly sized and shaped grains of sand better facilitate the adhesive effect desired of cement. The grains of water-eroded sand are irregular in shape and dissimilar in size and thus ideal for making concrete. As the demand for concrete has skyrocketed and technologies for making it have improved in the past fifty years, the world has grown famished for sand. Residential and commercial buildings, agglomerations of skyscrapers, and sprawling exurbs all devour concrete. Land reclamation requires pouring dredging by-products, sand, and concrete blocks into the sea, creating property ex nihilo. Islands such as Bahrain and Singapore have pushed their landmass further into the sea through this process. A 2014 Financial Times investigative report showed that a secretive investment vehicle owned by Bahraini royals was granted deeds to undersea plots of land; after reclamation these became coveted and expensive ground for the development of luxury hotels and commercial buildings. By some accounts China has used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. did in all of the twentieth century. If concrete requires at least twice as much sand as cement, then the volume of sand involved in producing billions of tons of concrete today boggles the mind. (...)

In late 2016, Phnom Penh Post reporters noted a discrepancy in Cambodia’s trade with Singapore: the latter’s customs records showed $750 million of sand imported from Cambodia, but the government of Cambodia reported exporting only $5 million. Cambodia had banned the unregulated export of sand in 2009, and the difference between the two amounts indicated the misreporting of illegally stripped sand dredged from Cambodia’s fast-depleted rivers.

The smuggling and illegal mining of sand at beaches and rivers of the global south work a bit like piracy. People whose livelihoods are destroyed by exploitation and debt work for a pittance to haul away sand from their own habitations. They are paid by corporations and businessmen in air-conditioned offices far away from the sites of despoliation. The profit margins are widest when the cheap sand is alchemized into a desirable commodity on the global trade circuits.

Countries with long coastlines and rich riverine topographies have become prey to other states and their own profit-seeking businessmen ravening for sand. Legal and illegal miners have stripped the rivers of Myanmar and Cambodia of their sandy riverbeds and sandbanks, dramatically changing flow patterns in rivers. The modified quality and volume of the sediments in such rivers make previously bountiful ecosystems inhospitable to agriculture and fishing. Turbulence in sand-poor rivers erodes riverbanks, destroys infrastructure, including dikes and bridges, and submerges riverside villages. Beaches in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Morocco have disappeared overnight as bulldozers and trucks load their sands for use on other shores. Indonesia, an archipelago of between 17,500 and 18,500 islands (the actual number is a matter of dispute), has seen whole sand atolls disappear through illegal mining. Environmental scientists Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper enumerate the effects of such mining in their book The Last Beach: shorelines wearing away, destruction of coastal fauna habitats, eradication of dunes and the flora that grow on them. Coastlines are more exposed to rising sea levels, tsunamis, hurricanes, and the natural roiling of the seas in storms. Building dream palaces of capitalism in one corner of the world leaves another bereft of its beaches and agricultural fecundity.

by Laleh Khalili, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Michael Chapman

Probably Not the Best Beer in the World

What went through Orson Welles’s mind, I wonder, when he first growled the line “Probably the best lager in the world” into a microphone? He may have been pondering his fee. He may have reflected on how well suited his distinctive gravelly voice was to the slogan’s understated confidence. It may have made him fancy a drink. It probably didn’t make him think that Carlsberg was probably the best lager in the world, because it probably isn’t. And last week its manufacturers admitted it.

In fact, they launched a new slogan: “Probably not the best beer in the world. So we’ve changed it.” This marketing admission raises a few questions, the first of which is: “How likely is it to be the best this time?” I mean, they’ve been calling their previous version “probably the best” for 46 years. It doesn’t feel like they’re adherents to a rigorously self-doubting approach to product development.

Other questions include: “How long have they been thinking this?”, “Do they now think it was probably never the best beer in the world, or that it probably used to be?” and: “If it used to be, has it got worse, or have other beers got better?” Also: “Why the change from ‘lager’ to ‘beer’ in the new line?” That’s raising the bar. What if Carlsberg actually was the best lager in the world, just not the best beer? I reckon the world’s best beer probably isn’t a lager, but that’s my subjective view. I prefer pale ale.

The new version of Carlsberg, which the firm is convinced is better than the old one and consequently has a higher probability of being the best in the world, is not a pale ale, it’s another lager. Specifically a pilsner. Even more specifically a “Danish Pilsner”, but hopefully it’ll still be made in Northampton notwithstanding Brexit. And who among us really is withstanding Brexit? But maybe the pressure for Carlsberg not to seem too in-your-face Danish is off now that it’s been supplanted as the official beer partner of the England men’s football team by Budweiser. That’s the American one, not the Czech one, so at least it speaks English!

Meanwhile Carlsberg is extremely proud of itself. “Carlsberg UK has launched its most ambitious and honest consumer facing campaign ever in a bid to drive reappraisal of its flagship beer brand,” it boasts on its website. “The value of brand honesty to consumers is more powerful than ever,” James Joice of Fold7 (one of Carlsberg’s “agency partners”) is quoted as saying. “But it is still rare to see brands hold their hands up when they don’t live up to their promise. Carlsberg has not only been brave enough to do this, but have done something about it.” He’s so impressed he’s pluralised the company mid-sentence.

It’s certainly been a ballsy relaunch. It started with Carlsberg’s Twitter feed actively promoting a bunch of consumer tweets slagging off their old lager. They said it tasted “like stale breadsticks”, “cat piss” and the “rancid piss of Satan”, and was “like drinking the bathwater your nan died in”.

Having thrown the dead nan out with the bathwater, the firm moved on to extolling the virtues of the revamp, which has been “rebrewed from head to hop”, and comes with exciting trimmings such as a stemmed glass, a stylish fount (the thing you attach to a bar for the beer to come out of) and more environmentally friendly packaging. All in all, according to Carlsberg UK’s website, “Initial research indicates that 59% of UK lager drinkers prefer the taste of the new crisper, Carlsberg Danish Pilsner over the current UK No 1 mainstream lager.”

I hope, for Carlsberg’s sake, that the public isn’t losing its taste for understatement as well as for Satan’s rancid piss, because that’s a fairly slight claim. 59% – so most, but not overwhelmingly most – prefer the new Carlsberg, not to their favourite beer, or all other beers, but to “the current UK No 1 mainstream lager”. The internet is unclear as to which lager that is, but according to the Carling website, it’s Carling. So it’s probably Carling. Carlsberg’s painstakingly developed new beer is probably a drink that 41% of people like less than Carling. Wow.

by David Mitchell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Carlsberg

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What is Freedom?

Today I gave a talk to the Alabama College Democrats on the subject of “freedom.” They were a delightful group with excellent questions and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. Below is the prepared text of the speech, though the actual delivered version had a number of improvised digressions. 

I have been asked to talk about what freedom is, which is just about the most difficult possible question you could have asked me to answer. Several thousands years of political philosophy haven’t sorted it out so I doubt I am going to successfully answer it today in a few minutes. But I can give you a few thoughts on some ways that the contemporary left thinks about freedom and why they are useful.

In fact, the left perspective on freedom actually starts with the fact that freedom is a difficult concept rather than an easy one. If I was a free market libertarian, it would be quite easy for me to tell you what freedom is. Freedom is when nobody physically attacks you or touches your stuff. That freedom is secured through a minimal government: A government that devotes itself to making sure that violent crime is punished and that property rights are protected and that contracts are enforced. Often, this idea of freedom is credited to John Stuart Mill, with his principle that the only legitimate use of government power is to prevent people from doing harm to each other. If you accept this idea, then this question of what freedom is isn’t really interesting or complicated: Freedom means being left alone by the government. There. We’ve solved it.

The left, however, has always looked on this idea of freedom as somewhat ridiculous, because it leads to situations that seem distinctly un-free to be described as completely free. If I am a poor migrant who signs up for indentured servitude, and I have to work long hours for low pay or be sent back to my country of origin, and I am sexually harassed and bullied by my boss, and I spend each night in a crowded worker dormitory, miserable and desperate, it seems grotesque to say that I have freedom. And yet if we accept freedom from government coercion as the only important kind of freedom, then people who have almost no meaningful choices in their lives are still considered as free as you can possibly be, purely because they are not being threatened with jail by the government. (...)

Contractual arrangements may be voluntary, but if you are pressured into them by despair, then that voluntariness is a farce. If I offer to throw you a life preserver while you are drowning, on the condition that you give me 5 percent of your income for the rest of your life, it is difficult to call this “voluntary.” You did not have a real choice. If people don’t have any viable alternatives, then they are not really free.

This understanding has led leftists to develop a much richer idea of freedom, an idea that takes people’s life experiences as its starting point rather than a thin and theoretical kind of bare contractual freedom. So if you have to sell your house to pay a family member’s medical bills, yes, it’s true that you made the choice voluntarily, that you could have just said “sorry, kid” and let them die. But our choices are structured by our circumstances, and our circumstances are structured by the political and economic systems we live in, and those systems are in turn structured by decisions that are made by people with power. You face that choice to sell your house or let your parent/child suffer because you do not live in one of the many countries where this choice doesn’t exist. The diabetics who try to raise money for insulin on GoFundMe face a choice of whether to crowdfund or risk death because that is the choice that everyone else has chosen to offer them.

In criticizing the Supreme Court’s campaign financing cases, we on the left often say that “money isn’t speech,” that free speech doesn’t mean you can just spend as much as you like to speak. But I actually think we should frame it a little differently: In important ways, money confers freedom. Money gives you the capacity to actually act. The more money I have, the more things I can do. I can speak more if I have more money, because I can amplify my voice. I can be Rupert Murdoch and buy media outlet after media outlet and blast whatever message I choose into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. Money is speech, and how free your speech is always depends on the amount of money you have. If I am an ordinary person with a job, not only might I not be able to afford to blast my message out, but I might be fired if I say anything too controversial, even outside of work. I regularly edit people’s political writing for publication, and a lot of them have asked me to use pseudonyms, because they’re worried that even things they say off the clock when they’re outside of work could cause them to lose their jobs. In the United States, the law generally does not protect you from being retaliated against over your speech by employers. You are “free” to speak, in that it is legal, and they are “free” to fire you afterwards. Everyone has maximum freedom, which some people think is wonderful, but the end result is that since power and wealth are very unevenly distributed, some people have a lot more freedom than others.

One of the most important aspects of leftist thought is its insight that “power” is more than just the government putting people in jail. Power relationships are everywhere: an employer who harasses employees, but those employees can’t quit their jobs because they’re worried the employer will punish them by giving them a bad reference or retaliating against them. Abusive partners who make the other person afraid of losing love and support, and wield the power they have to withhold those things to coerce the other person into putting up with behavior they shouldn’t have to put up with. Bullies at school, telemarketers who take advantage of old people’s confusion and loneliness. These situations do not involve the use of physical force, they involve other kinds of manipulation and coercion. (...)

Inequality itself is a restriction on freedom. When some people have billions of dollars, and others have zero dollars, the ones with billions of dollars can control the lives of the others. My friend the economist Rob Larson has an excellent book called Capitalism vs. Freedom, and in it he shows how the accumulation of extreme wealth in some hands serves to destroy freedom. In fact, he says, it causes the whole negative liberty/positive liberty freedom-from/freedom-to distinction to kind of break down. For instance, when Martin Shkreli’s pharmaceutical company hiked the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750, people could be driven into poverty to pay to survive. They are certainly not free to act but they are also not free from the consequences of self-interested corporate decision-makers.

Here’s another example. If we take platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there is an argument to be made that they make us more free. Look at all the things you can post! The magazine I work for, Current Affairs, has built an audience in large part because of Facebook and Twitter. We post our articles there, people share them, people read them. Complete freedom. Voluntary transactions. Wonderful. But it’s also the case that as almost all information starts flowing through these monopolistic corporate platforms that are the only game in town, you become dependent on them and they serve as completely unaccountable decision-makers about which speech is acceptable. If Mark Zuckerberg were to wake up one morning and decided that he didn’t like what was printed in Current Affairs, that he wanted to bump us down the algorithm, it could destroy our business, because we’re dependent on people finding out about us through these platforms.

Conservatives often complain that their free speech is being restricted by this or that social media platform. And on the one hand, it’s ironic, because they’re the ones who believe corporations should be able to do whatever they please in a free market. But on the other hand, they’re not wrong that this is what you get when corporations become gatekeepers. You get “private tyrannies”—institutions whose decisions have major consequences in the world, but that ordinary people do not get a vote in. You can choose whether or not to use Facebook, but you don’t get to vote on who you think should be in charge of Facebook. And in a situation where everyone is using Facebook, and your business depends on it, the binary choice of whether or not to participate doesn’t mean very much. (...)

This is one reason that it’s very important to talk about democracy and freedom together. Democracy is when ordinary people get to participate in government decision-making, it’s not done by unelected autocrats. And one definition of freedom that has been proposed is that “freedom is participation in power,” that is that freedom and democracy should be considered either the same thing or closely tied. And we can see what this would mean when we think about the company town versus the democratic town. In the company town, the rules are made from above, in the democratic town they’re made from below. And the difference between those two places is that one is free and the other is not. You are free when you help make the rules that bind you. Wikipedia, for instance, is a far freer platform than the others in a certain way, because the users actually deliberate together over decisions. There are still rules, but those rules are discussed and enforced through democratic processes. There are appeals. It’s all completely transparent. Because people are part of a community decision-making process, they are freer.

Saying that participation is freedom raises a number of problems still. If the group makes a bad decision, over your objections, are you free because you participated? The fear with democracy is always “tyranny of the majority,” though I think for the most part this can be mitigated by robust procedural impediments to trampling on dissidents. (With a Bill of Rights, for instance.) There is no such thing as perfect freedom, but the ability to control your circumstances and be part of the political and economic decisions that affect you seems an important precondition of liberty.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Live Commentary on the Žižek-Peterson Debate.]

Italian Beef Braciole is So Good It'll Make You Cry

There’s really no way to sugar coat the truth here. Italian Beef Braciole is a time and labor-intensive recipe. It also requires some skill with knots and butcher’s string. This is definitely a special occasion dish–something to serve for Christmas dinner, or some other holiday dinner, or for an especially fancy Sunday. It’s one of those dishes that simmers on the stove top for hours, requiring you to hang out in the kitchen most of the day. And around the holidays that can be really fun, or horrible depending on your temperament. In fact, I’d say that if you really like to eat great food, but don’t really like to cook, then this isn’t the recipe for you. On the other hand, if you’re the type who doesn’t balk at the prospect of making a few hundred ravioli by hand (i.e., someone with the patience of an Italian grandmother), you may as well have a pot of braciole simmering while you’re working.

So why go to all of that trouble? Because Italian Beef Braciole is so good it’ll make you want to cry. It’s extraordinarily delicious. A lot of love goes into a dish like this, and you can definitely taste it.

WHAT IS ITALIAN BEEF BRACIOLE?

Like many Italian dishes, people have very passionate and strongly held opinions about what braciole is and how it’s properly made. Of the myriad versions and local variations available, there is only one way to properly execute the dish and all other ways are unthinkable. And why is this one version the correct way? Because that’s how your nonna makes it. I love that. I love the idea that the world’s authority on Italian cuisine is someone’s grandmother.

Even the name is open to contention. In Italy these little packets of meat are called involtini (in fact, I have a recipe for eggplant involtini right here). Braciole, a word of Sicilian origin, is what they’re referred to primarily by Italian-Americans.

The authority of your nonna aside, there is much variation in this dish. Basically, a braciole is a piece of very thin meat (beef, pork, chicken, and in Sicily even fish) filled with a cheese filling and either tied into a roll or secured with toothpicks. They’re pan fried and then placed in a sauce to simmer until done. The sauce also varies.

Even the size of the braciole is variable. Some versions use a large sheet of beef, spread with a lot of filling. When wrapped up, they look almost like little rolled roasts. Apparently there are also very tiny braciole in Sicily that would fit on a toothpick like an hors-d’oeuvre.

I should also admit that Italian Beef Braciole is a bit of an indulgent dish for yours truly. One typically doesn’t eat a lot of red meat on the Mediterranean diet. That said, one of the great things about the Mediterranean diet–one that makes it easy to stick with–is that there isn’t much that’s totally off limits. Red meat and cheese is a rare treat, and totally acceptable within limits.

My version is based in part on Yotam Ottolenghi’s Puglian recipe (Puglia is a town in the heel of the Italian boot), and in part on Hal Licino’s version. I recommend reading Hal’s recipe because he harbors the very kind of passionate and strongly held opinions about braciole that I described above (he calls his “The Best Braciole on Earth”!). It’s a delightful read.

HOW TO MAKE ITALIAN BEEF BRACIOLE

Here is a list of pointers for making this recipe. It’ll help you avoid a few of the pitfalls I ran into when I made mine.

• You’re going to end up pounding out thin sheets of beef until they’re very thin, so you can roll up a filling inside. Unless you have mad knife skills, I suggest asking your butcher to thinly slice very lean the beef for you (I used top sirloin myself, and I did the knife-work myself, and my knife skills are far from mad).

• I suggest investing in a meat mallet or meat hammer to pound out the beef. You could use a claw hammer I suppose, but you run the risk of bashing a hole in your meat. Then your filling will leak out, and we don’t want that. And incidentally, if you ever form a Scandinavian death metal band, I also recommend that you name that band Meat Hammer.

• You’re also going to need to tie those little beef rolls. There’s a chef’s trick to that, if you don’t have any experience in this area. Here’s a handy YouTube video that’ll show you how. If this seems too fussy to you, jam some toothpicks through your braciole and call it good (of course your filling will probably leak out, and we really don’t want that).

• If you make smaller braciole like I did, you’ll find that you really can’t get a lot of filling inside. That being the case, you need less filling that you may think. I ended up with more than half of my filling left over (and FYI, I adjusted the amounts in my recipe so you don’t have the same problem). Oh, and in case you’re wondering what I did with the leftover filling, I made these delicious Eggplant Involtini. 

• You need to stir the sauce obsessively so it won’t stick. Not constantly mind you. You’re not making risotto here. Just often. Be vigilant, like Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. This stuff simmers for hours. I came close to scorching mine a few times but caught it just in time.

• Finally, I topped my dish with a classic lemon, garlic, and parsley gremolata. I’m not sure what your nonna would think of that. Gremolata is a Milanase concoction, so I’ve probably committed a grave culinary sin. At any rate, it’s not part of most of the recipes I reviewed. But let me tell you this: the gremolata cranks this dish up to eleven. Give it a try.

by Steve Heikkila, Slow Burning Passion |  Read more:

Image: Steve Heikkila

[ed. I also added spinach in the filling. They really are that good (especially the sauce).]

Web 2.0

In terms of Web 2.0's social impact, critics such as Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their actual talent, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas. Keen's 2007 book, Cult of the Amateur, argues that the core assumption of Web 2.0, that all opinions and user-generated content are equally valuable and relevant, is misguided. Additionally, Sunday Times reviewer John Flintoff has characterized Web 2.0 as "creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels... [and that Wikipedia is full of] mistakes, half-truths and misunderstandings".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

[ed. Perhaps why music (and so many other things) suck these days. See also: below.]

My Dinner With Andre

Making American Schools Less Great Again

Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35 million budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.

Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative -- will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.

This is the third time in my 14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval, disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I classroom studio -- built to fit a maximum of 35 students -- had more than 50 of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to draw, so we worked in the halls.

During that semester I taught six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful parts of the job -- connecting with students, providing one-on-one support, helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs, not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community -- simply fell by the wayside.

I couldn’t remember my students’ names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments we’re supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I normally try to give my students. I couldn’t listen because there wasn’t time.

On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America’s supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school.

And keep in mind that what’s happening in my school and in Oregon’s schools more generally is anything but unique. According to the American Federation of Teachers, divestment in education is occurring in every single state in the nation, with 25 states spending less on education than they did before the recession of 2008. The refusal of individual states to prioritize spending on education coupled with the Trump administration’s proposed $7 billion in cuts to the Department of Education are already beginning to make the situation in our nation’s public schools untenable -- for both students and teachers.

Sitting in that conference room, listening to my capable and dedicated boss describe our potential return to a distorted reality I remembered well made me recoil. Bracing myself for the soul-crushing grind of trying to convince students to buy into a system that will almost by definition fail to address, no less meet, their needs -- to get them to show up each day even though there aren’t enough seats, supplies, or teachers to do the job -- is an exercise in futility.

The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.

Teachers as First Responders

Schools are loud, vital, chaotic places, unlike any other public space in America. Comprehensive public high schools reflect the socioeconomic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup of the population they serve. Each school has its own particular culture and ecosystem of rules, structures, core beliefs, and values. Each also has its own set of problems, specific to the population that walks through its doors each day. Coping with the complexity and magnitude of those problems makes the job of creating a thriving, equitable, and productive space for learning something akin to magical thinking.

The reflexive blame now regularly heaped on schools, teachers, and students in this country is a misrepresentation of reality. The real reason we are being left behind our global peers when it comes to student achievement has to do with so much more than the failure to perform well on standardized tests. Our kids are struggling not because we’ve forgotten how to teach them or they’ve forgotten how to learn, but because the adults who run this society have largely decided that their collective future is not a priority. In reality, the tattered and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure of our national system of social services leaves schools and teachers as front-line first responders in what I’d call a national crisis of the soul.

So it’s no surprise to me that teachers, even in the reddest of states, have been walking out of their classrooms and demanding change. Such walkouts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia have reflected grievances more all-encompassing than the pleas for higher pay that have made the headlines. (And in so many states, they are still being paid less than a living wage.) Demands for just compensation are symbolic and easy for the public to grasp. The higher pay won through some of those walkouts represents an acknowledgement that teachers are being asked to do a seemingly impossible job in a society whose priorities are increasingly out of whack, amid the crumbling infrastructure of the public-school system itself.

The idea that the real world is somehow separate from the world inside our schools and that issues of inequality, poverty, mental health, addiction, and racism won’t impact the capacity of our students to thrive academically sets a dangerous precedent for measuring success. Assuming that the student living in a car, not a home, should be able to stay awake during a lecture, that the one returning from a week in a psychiatric ward should be able to instantly tackle a difficult math test, and that the one whose undocumented father was just picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should have no problem concentrating as her teacher diagrams sentences in English is a grand delusion.

Why Prioritizing School Funding Matters

There is a large disconnect between the lip service paid to supporting public schools and teachers and a visible reticence to adequately fund them. Ask almost anyone -- save Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- if they support teachers and schools and the answer is probably “yes.” Bring up the question of how to actually provide adequate financial support for education, however, and you’ll quickly find yourself mired in arguments about wasteful school spending, pension funds that drain resources, sub-par teachers, and bureaucratic bloat, as well as claims that you can’t just continue to throw money at a problem, that money is not the solution.

I’d argue that money certainly is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning. Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.

The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on a staggering tax cut for the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the well-being of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?

However, since federal school contributions add up to only a small percentage of local and state education budgets, all blame can’t go there. In Oregon, for instance, restrictions placed on property taxes in the 1990s artificially limited such revenue, forcing the state to start relying heavily on income taxes to keep schools afloat. Corporations are an important source of income for states. Yet, though corporate profits in the U.S. rose by $69.3 billion to an all-time high of more than $2 trillion in the third quarter of 2018, over the last 40 years the states’ share of income-tax revenue has fallen to half what it was in the 1970s.

by Belle Chesler, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: via

How to Help Someone With Depression

"I've started cutting my wrists,” my friend said on the phone one night. “I’m not eating. I don’t want to be alive.” We’d had many phone calls about her depression at this point; her parents knew, I had talked for hours on the phone with her childhood friend to compare notes, and she was on medication and seeing a therapist. We had been through so much together, but on this one particular call, I didn’t know what else to tell her. “That’s not good, and I don’t want you to do that,” is all I could think to say, and I felt a void in my lungs — as if all the air had been sucked out of my chest. “I’m so sorry, I want you to get better.” I left for college a few weeks later and found myself texting rather than calling her back, waiting days and then weeks to respond to her texts so that our friendship slowly melted away. We were, by the time she tried to commit suicide, out of touch except for birthdays: She always remembered mine. I always forgot hers.

Now I’ve experienced depression myself, and I have a handful of friends in various stages of depression, including one who has repeatedly called late at night asking me to “talk her off the ledge.” So many people around me are stressed out or on antidepressants, and I’ve wondered: How do you actually help someone with depression while remaining calm and grounded yourself? What should the follow-up texts and phone calls and agonizing weeks or months of recovery look like so you make the person feel better and not worse? What, in short, would a therapist advise here?

What follows is an exhaustive guide with evidence-based strategies and word-for-word scripts sourced from depression experts: things you can say and do if someone tells you they’re struggling or that they want to hurt themselves.

If you’re depressed: Send this story to people who care about you so they can know how to really help you. If you’re a friend (or family member, spouse, or co-worker) of someone who is depressed: Know it’s not entirely up to you to help them get better. But there is so much you can do, say, and know about depression to keep the relationship and your own well-being intact.

Depression, Defined

What is depression? What are the signs and symptoms?

Major depression is a mood disorder that causes someone to feel persistently sad for a long time (at least two weeks), and of the many symptoms, the most common signs you’ll recognize in friends are their being less social or less interested in things they usually like to do. A depressed friend might decline your invitations to meet up, cancel plans again and again, or ignore calls or texts. In person, that friend might snap at you, drink excessively, get upset about the smallest things, or seem more anxious, irritable, flat, and just really negative and down.

“Friends can sometimes take that personally and feel very impatient and frustrated, like, I don’t want to hang out with this person so much anymore,” says Dr. Laura Rosen, a clinical psychologist and the author of When Someone You Love Is Depressed. “That’s something people need to notice. If you feel different when you’re with them, depression might be going on.”

“Hey, I’m Worried About You”

How should you ask if someone is depressed? What should you say?

The wrong way to start the conversation is by focusing vaguely on how the person seems emotionally, which can sound accusatory, such as: “You’ve been so down/stressed/anxious/irritable lately … what’s going on? Are you okay?”

Open-ended questions are better, experts say, such as:
“How are you doing lately?”
“Are you struggling with anything? Can I help you?”
“You just don’t seem like yourself lately. Is everything okay?”

“Focus on specific behaviors so your friend doesn’t feel judged,” says Valerie Cordero, co-executive director of Families for Depression Awareness. “You want to try as much as possible to not put them on the defensive, and give them an opportunity to respond.”

Examples include:
“You used to love our nights out, but it seems like you’re not interested in coming anymore. Is something going on? Do you want to talk about it?”

“I know you got a raise recently, which probably came with a bunch of new responsibilities, and I’ve noticed you seem stressed out. Do you think you might be depressed?”

See what your friend is willing to share. If they don’t want to talk about it, or if they brush you off, just say, “I’m here for you,” and move on to another topic. (...)

What to Say to Someone Who Is Depressed

How do you tell the person that things will get better?

Don’t say:
“You have so much going for you.”
“Just know that I care about you.”
“Come on, stop being so down.”
“Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t drink so much or sleep all day?”

The first example suggests you know more about their situation than the depressed friend does. The others instill guilt and shame. In general, it’s better to avoid giving advice that suggests specific ways a friend should change thoughts or behavior — the only true advice you can give is that the friend should talk to a doctor and therapist, and you can encourage your friend to continue reaching out to you and other friends and family when that person needs someone to listen. Instead, say something like:

Do say:
“It makes sense to me that you’re just really not feeling like yourself.”

“You feel really miserable right now, but you have to remember it will get better. I know that. I can promise you that.”

Rather than giving the person a pep talk, these examples reflect back what you’re hearing and offer specific ways you might help. “What I hear from depressed people is that to have somebody say get over it is not very helpful and actually really annoying,” says Rosen. “It’s more helpful to say, ‘I can see what a hard time you’re having, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to see you through this. You probably don’t believe this, but it will pass. I know it feels really bad.’”

by Catie L'Heureux, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Head of a Woman, 1911, Alexej von Jawlensky

Bill Evans

Bill Evans (Miles, Charlie, McCoy, Duke, Monk, Art, Sonny, Trane, Bud... my favorite was always Bill).  

Unplugged: Is the Guitar Solo Dead?

About two minutes into “Outta My Head,” from the new album Free Spirit by pop-R&B star Khalid, a strange, foreign sound bubbles to the song’s shiny disco-pop surface. It’s a squiggly, pitchy thing that echoes the melody for about 15 seconds before receding into the background.

Could it be … yes, it’s a guitar solo!

The solo on Khalid’s album, played by John Mayer, is a way for the genre-hopping Khalid to show off his omni-directional vision. But in 2019, there’s no denying that the flashy guitar-breakout moment, one of the most prominent and primal components of rock & roll, is an increasingly endangered species. On the most recent releases by the leading mainstream rock and/or rock-adjacent groups of our era—Imagine Dragons, the 1975, Twenty One Pilots—you’ll hear plenty of rubbery beats and programming but barely any guitar, much less anything close to traditional shredding. And while elements of rap-rock, Nineties alt-rock and emo occasionally show up in modern pop, hip-hop and R&B, guitars rarely do. When you do hear a break on a pop record—Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” for instance—you’re more likely hearing some type of synthesizer or keyboard.

Tellingly, the few recent guitar-hero moments that have made a mark in the culture have been on film, not record. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury pushes Gwilym Lee’s Brian May to improve on his original guitar break in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” urging him to put his “body into it.” The sight of a man standing in front of his amps, perfecting every note of his solo, feels even older than rock itself; it’s like you’ve watching a ritual from ancient Egypt.

Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born is set in today’s musical world, but Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine may as well be operating in the ’70s alongside Queen. With his self-serious, man-of-the-wilderness air, Maine already feels like a ghost from rock past, especially compared to the music and look of Lady Gaga’s more stylized Ally. Maine’s increasing irrelevance is rammed home when he and his band play some sort of outdoor festival and launch into their metallic rocker, “Black Eyes.” Bloated and oozing flop sweat, Maine drops his head and breaks into a guitar solo, pulling angry, sputtering notes out of his strings. One supposes such violent manhandling of his instrument is meant to symbolize his inner pain, but the scene also screams out: This dude is so over that he’s even playing a guitar solo.

For much of the previous sixty-plus years, starting with moments like Scotty Moore’s piercing twang on Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel,” the guitar has been part of rock’s DNA. Some of the instruments responsible for those sounds can be seen up close in “Play It Loud,” a newly opened rock-instruments exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On display are the guitar Jimi Hendrix used for his beautifully ravaged shredding of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, the red-painted one Eddie Van Halen employed for “Eruption,” and the various instruments Jimmy Page used for part on “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” Yet the mere fact that those instruments are behind glass in a museum exhibit only reinforces the sense that the guitar solo as a musical or cultural force has peaked.

In the realm of mainstream rock and pop (and not metal, where the solo still reigns, and country, where guitar players are allowed to show off now and then), it’s hard to pinpoint when guitar breaks began to spiral downward. For a while, it felt as it every pop hit (most notably “Beat It”) had a solo, which lent it a certain cred. Certainly the alt rock scene of the ’90s thrust the first stake in its body. Kurt Cobain allowed himself a solo in “Come as You Are,” and Billy Corgan made plenty of rock critics employ the phrase “peels off a solo.” But textures and splattery, unshowy moves were more prominent than the plastic flashiness of the hair metal scene grunge and alt-rock had supplanted, mirroring the often messy, complicated emotions in the lyrics of artists like Cobain and Corgan. (From what I remember during the few times I saw Nirvana, Kurt would never even walk to the front of the stage during his individual part.) The guitar parts on records by bands like Pavement added a new level of irony to the solo, and when hard-rock came back during the early ’00s in the form of nu-metal, the riffs on songs by Korn or Deftones were often even more damaged and mangled than Cobain’s playing.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the guitar solo would outlive its usefulness. After all these years and innovations, what can it offer? What hasn’t already been done, from Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan? But the rise of hip hop, dance music and modern pop cemented the solo’s irrelevance. In those genres, guitars are often sampled or used for rhythmic patterns, but solos are largely non-existent. (...)

Beyond sonics, it’s hard not to think that the tradition is a cultural relic, as well as a musical one: Is there anything more male and (largely) white than a guitar solo? Then again, at this year’s Grammys, two women staked their claim to the tradition with genuine guitar-hero moments. During their live performances, both Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and R&B artist H.E.R. let fly with solos that were succinct and tasteful, the opposite of garish or macho.

Clark’s approach to guitar is less ostentatious and more textural; her lead lines and occasional solos don’t announce themselves so much as blend into the arrangements, fitting for someone whose guitar influences include the more subtle likes of Robert Fripp and Marc Ribot. “Every few years someone says guitar is dead,” she said last year. “… And it’s just simply not the case. It’s going to get reinvented and the cycles are going to continue. The guitar is never going to die or anything.” The solo may never dominate the way it once did, just like rock itself, but with the aid of people like Clark, it may yet escape a premature burial.

by David Browne, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Personally, I think it might be the quality of the music these days more than the instrument.]

Amazon’s Slow Retreat From Seattle

Long before Amazon erected gleaming glass domes in downtown Seattle—and before Amazon was even named Amazon—Bellevue, Washington, was the site of the company’s headquarters. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, lived in the small King County city, and, in typical tech-leader fashion, laid the groundwork for what would become the largest e-commerce company in the world right there in his garage.

After its 1994 launch, Amazon got out of the garage quickly, moving across the lake to fill 630,000 square feet of office space in Seattle by 2001. Since then, the company has rapidly expanded downtown, growing to occupy 19 percent of all prime Seattle office space, according to a 2017 analysis by the Seattle Times. Today, according to company figures, its campus spans 8.1 million square feet.

But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for this cost with higher taxes, the company’s eyes have been wandering. In February, Amazon announced that it would back out of a downtown Seattle office tower it had once planned to fill with 3,500 to 5,000 employees. And this month, Geekwire reported that the company would be relocating an entire division from Seattle back to where it all started: Bellevue.

The move comes shortly after Amazon announced it would abandon plans to build another headquarters in New York City, while moving forward with its 25,000-employee campus outside Washington, D.C. in the smaller enclave of Crystal City, Virginia.

Amazon has long fancied itself an urban enterprise. Unlike Apple or Google, whose original corporate campuses cling to the emptier outskirts of big cities, Amazon’s downtown campus has only grown more integrated into Seattle’s cityscape. “I think it’s pretty much indisputable that urban campuses relative to suburban campuses are better,” Bezos said in a 2014 shareholder meeting. “Because there’s much less commuting and much less fuel burned.” Besides, he added, Amazon employees “appreciate the energy and dynamism of an urban environment.”

In a confluence of recent moves, however, Amazon is spreading out, and shrinking away from the biggest downtowns. Bellevue is hardly the suburb it used to be—Expedia and T-Mobile are both headquartered there, and Amazon itself employs 700 Bellevue workers, to Seattle’s 45,000. Still, it boasts a “small-town” feel, per its tourism website, and its population is only 140,000 to Seattle’s 700,000-plus.

Amazon’s pivot may simply reflect practical considerations. But it also has profound political implications.

Seattle’s downtown has evolved dramatically in the years since Amazon moved in, gripped today by an exorbitantly expensive housing market and a growing homelessness crisis. But Bellevue isn’t much better: With median home prices of about $922,000, according to Zillow, it’s pricier than Seattle’s median of $730,000 and Crystal City’s, which is closer to $680,000.

And the urban problems Amazon would escape outside of Seattle are ones that citizens have blamed Amazon for creating, worsening, and refusing to help correct.

Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. Amazon opposed the bill, threatening to stall expansion into one downtown office building and stop construction on another if it passed. The city managed to push through a shrunken version of the tax last May, which would have collected $47 million, only to reverse it a month later after a campaign of resistance from Amazon and other business interests. (...)

In Bellevue, Amazon may find less of the political opposition that’s mounting in Seattle, and that followed it into New York. “I think Amazon has been looking for opportunities where they wouldn’t be under the control of Seattle city council anymore,” said Redfin’s Fairweather.

Indeed, Amazon highlighted Bellevue’s agreeable business climate in its statement on the move. “It’s a city with great amenities, a high quality of life for our employees, and fantastic talent—and it’s recognized for its business-friendly environment,” said a spokesperson. King County submitted its own application to win HQ2 in 2017, signaling its desire to take on more Amazon employees even then.

Now, Bellevue’s mayor, John Chelminiak, is ready to welcome them with open arms. “As a community we’ve worked hard to anticipate this type of positive growth downtown, and Amazon is a natural fit,” he said in a statement.

That it’s so easy for Amazon to move to another location instead of reckoning with its home base may be part of the reason it felt so empowered to spar with the Seattle council, says Sawant.

“The logic of capitalism will follow it to the last dollar,” she said. “As long as there is another city, another state, another country where people are less empowered—more desperate for jobs on any terms—the corporations will do what they need to do for their bottom line, which is to maximize as much profit as possible for the major shareholders.” (...)

A spokesperson for Amazon said that there are “several thousand” employees on the worldwide operations team that’s scheduled to move starting this month, and fully relocate by 2023. One of the major concerns residents express when faced with an influx of tech jobs to smaller cities like Bellevue—and one of the fears some New Yorkers expressed when Amazon was slated to move in—is that housing prices will rise, displacing current residents. Bellevue’s housing prices are already high, and with “a big chunk of [Amazon’s] Seattle corporate footprint” relocating, Fairweather says, they are likely to get higher.

But Amazon’s move comes as Microsoft plans to invest $500 million in grants and loans for affordable housing assistance in the region. Some of it will target homeless residents, and $250 million of it will incentivize developers to build low-income housing. Another $225 million will go towards building housing for families in suburbs like Redmond and cities like Bellevue, earning $62,000 to $124,000 a year. While Microsoft’s goal may have been to create workforce housing for its own employees, says Fairweather, those starter-home loans could be the sweet spot for Amazon employees, too.

“What might happen is that these housing units that Microsoft initially intended to be for teachers or police officers or more middle-income earners is actually going to end up being bought up and bid up by more tech workers in the area,” said Fairweather. “I don’t know if Bellevue is going to be on a largely different trajectory than Seattle.”

by Sarah Holder, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren/AP
[ed. Virus in a petri dish.]

Juan Gris, Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth, 1915
via:

Five Lies Our Culture Tells

Four years ago, in the midst of the Obama presidency, I published a book called “The Road to Character.” American culture seemed to be in decent shape and my focus was on how individuals can deepen their inner lives. This week, in the midst of the Trump presidency, I’ve got another book, “The Second Mountain.” It’s become clear in the interim that things are not in good shape, that our problems are societal. The whole country is going through some sort of spiritual and emotional crisis.

College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.

Here are some of them:

Career success is fulfilling. This is the lie we foist on the young. In their tender years we put the most privileged of them inside a college admissions process that puts achievement and status anxiety at the center of their lives. That begins advertising’s lifelong mantra — if you make it, life will be good.

Everybody who has actually tasted success can tell you that’s not true. I remember when the editor of my first book called to tell me it had made the best-seller list. It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.

The truth is, success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.

I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment. If I can have just one more victory, lose 15 pounds or get better at meditation, then I will be happy.

But people looking back on their lives from their deathbeds tell us that happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. It is found by defeating self-sufficiency for a state of mutual dependence. It is found in the giving and receiving of care.

It’s easy to say you live for relationships, but it’s very hard to do. It’s hard to see other people in all their complexity. It’s hard to communicate from your depths, not your shallows. It’s hard to stop performing! No one teaches us these skills.

Life is an individual journey. This is the lie books like Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” tell. In adulthood, each person goes on a personal trip and racks up a bunch of experiences, and whoever has the most experiences wins. This lie encourages people to believe freedom is the absence of restraint. Be unattached. Stay on the move. Keep your options open.

In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don’t ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here? They respond to some problem or get called out of themselves by a deep love.

By planting themselves in one neighborhood, one organization or one mission, they earn trust. They have the freedom to make a lasting difference. It’s the chains we choose that set us free.

by David Brooks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times