The Three Segments of American Culture

It’s possible to understand, with some clarity, what’s before us. The writer and music historian Ted Gioia, who has emerged as one of the most trenchant cultural critics working today, has posited that 2024 will be the year the macroculture and the microculture go to war. Another astute cultural writer who publishes under the pseudonym Mo_Diggs has identified the mesoculture as what we most lack today, and what we might require to recover both stability and, eventually, sanity. All of this bleeds into the romantic upheaval that may be here already.

But what are the micro, the macro, and the meso? Why do they matter? What’s coming next? As someone who toggles between the macroculture and the microculture, and longs for the resurrection of the mesoculture, these questions are particularly pressing for me.

The Macroculture

Inherent in its name, the macroculture is still what most Americans think of today when they imagine who produces the music, the movies, the news, the books, all that content, to wield a dreaded term. Hollywood, of course, is the macroculture. Disney and Paramount reign above, along with tech giants like Amazon and Apple who have made significant incursions into the entertainment space. Spotify and Netflix are the macro streamers. The major record conglomerates, including Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group, belong here, as does all of legacy media. The Times and the Atlantic and the New Yorker are the macroculture, as is 20th Century Fox (Disney), Fox News, ABC News (Disney), ESPN (Disney), CNN (Warner Bros. Discovery), NBC, CBS (Paramount), and HBO (Warner Bros. Discovery). Corporate publishers and their imprints all belong, too. Size alone isn’t a determinant of what resides in the macroculture. Smaller newspapers and online publications, like Slate and Vox, can be considered macro in sentiment. Most magazines are the same way.

The macroculture is both extraordinarily wealthy and uniquely vulnerable. The second part of this formulation was not true until the twenty-first century, when the internet matured and obliterated, at once, several remarkably durable business models. When the macroculture was on sturdier financial ground, Americans benefited more, in part, because there was a greater degree of narrative diversity. Mainstream cinema could, at any given time, be composed of action films, rom-coms, high concept art films, historical epics, psychological thrillers, regular comedies, and original IP franchises. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, there were many types of tentpole films. As Hollywood grew vulnerable in the last decade and a half, as more and more consumers shifted to streaming and stayed home, the retread culture, which still strangles us today, emerged: superhero films, films based on video games, films owed entirely to ancient intellectual property. As good as Barbie was, this was the ultimate problem with Barbie, a doll first sold in 1959, a full decade before men walked on the moon. There is no new doll, no new flying hero or righteous mutant, no fresh IP. Thirty years ago, the macroculture cared far more about newness.

It is harder to generalize about book publishing because so many different kinds of books get published every year and the works, if marginalized by a public that mostly doesn’t read, can still be multifarious. But I’ll speak, in broad strokes, to the general culture of literary fiction, which held a kind of prestige in the twentieth century that it may never recapture again. When there had been less conglomeration in publishing, there were, arguably, a wider array of novels that would reach the broader public. Writers themselves could be regional, class-based, highly-educated, or completely bereft of elite formal schooling. Many more of them came from the working class. The moneyed coasts, East and West, always exerted the most pull, but there were many different schools and styles, even politics, taking root in the vast middle of the country. And it wasn’t just the middle: within coastal cities themselves, like New York and Los Angeles, tribunes for the alienated and the destitute could more readily emerge. Outsiders, like Samuel Delaney and Hubert Selby Jr. and Flannery O’Connor, still barreled their way into the macroculture and were even exalted there. I don’t want to idealize all of this too much—we are a less racist country today, and twentieth century publishing had many failures—but the discontent a reader might feel in the 2020s is connected to all the novels conceived, almost entirely, in one milieu: upper-middle class affluence within a fashionable metropolitan area. These worlds are usually white, but they don’t have to be, and what left-liberals never quite understand is that there is far more solidarity between a Black Swarthmore graduate and a white Swarthmore graduate than a white attorney from Grosse Pointe and a white Dollar General clerk in the Lansing exurbs. The literary novels that achieve widest distribution today are, with some exceptions, preoccupied with the struggles and neuroses of those wielding the most cultural capital.

The major record labels, meanwhile, doesn’t know how to break out big stars anymore. Taylor Swift won’t be supplanted. The A&R functionaries race desperately to the new stalwarts of the microculture like TikTok for hitmakers, throwing out record deals to anyone who seems to achieve a moment of virality. They don’t nurture talent or understand, really, how to distribute it outward. This is mostly—but not entirely—their fault; the internet wrecked every distribution channel imaginable, from the record store to the music magazine, and MTV has lost all relevance. Radio stations no longer distinguish themselves in any regional market. Drive through Chicago or Oakland or Buffalo and hear, quite literally, the same exact songs on any local affiliate, if you’re listening at all.

Much has been written on the fracturing of culture, of our dwindling consensus zones—no Friends or Seinfeld to gather around Americans every Thursday evening. For the macroculture, this has long been a challenge, and it will only get worse in the coming years. The theme here is struggle: most of the conglomerates and media properties aren’t as wealthy as they once were. The bleeding out of the large newspapers, the regional newspapers, and the digital insurgents alike is well-known, with an obvious enough culprit. The print advertising model was never replaced. What has been surprising, as we near the midpoint of this decade, is how some of the storied incumbents can’t even garner attention anymore. The 2010s riddle was how to monetize interest. More dire, for a vaunted institution like the Washington Post, is that half of its traffic has vanished since 2020. Traffic itself is quasi-worthless—I don’t monitor the traffic of this newsletter, for example, I simply care if more people sign up and whether they pay—but it is a barometer that can’t be ignored entirely.

It is not much sunnier at Spotify, which laid off 17% of its workforce. Apple’s stock is getting downgraded. CNN’s ratings are cratering, and it may merge with CBS News, which lags its competitors already. ESPN, once the king of the sports macroculture, has turned to an erratic microcultural star, Pat McAfee, to save them—and he plainly cannot.

The walls between the cultures can be porous. Many in the microculture still long for macro prestige and, perhaps, its cash. If not ignoring it altogether, the macrocultural players look upon the micro with a mixture of wariness and envy, wondering how they know little but retrenchment while the micro is booming. Individuals, like Joe Rogan, may shuttle from one culture to the other, and back again. Rogan first found fame as a comedian and host of Fear Factor, firmly situated in the macroculture. He then became far famous, and richer, in the microculture, launching one of the most popular podcasts in the world and streaming it on YouTube. The macroculture took notice: Spotify paid him more than $200 million, and he became the object of scorn—and genuine fascination—in the mainstream media. Rogan alienates liberals for a variety of reasons, but the greater story—one that still must play out—is how Spotify will not gain very much from pouring so much cash into Rogan. This has nothing to do with his views on Trump or Covid vaccines. It has everything to do with the reality that no individual, outside of a professional athlete, can be worth that much money to a company. Streaming itself is a dubious business model, one that will never deliver on its promised returns. When the deal is up, Rogan can take his mass audience and charge them to listen to him directly, sans Spotify. He’ll marinate in the microculture just fine.

The macroculture, it must be emphasized, is nowhere near collapse. I think it will transmogrify, not vanish. But it’s no longer growing. It’s the microculture that is expanding, often explosively.

This is not a value judgement, merely an expression of bare fact.

The Microculture

The cultural undercurrent, in the United States, of Israel’s war against Hamas and the ongoing, catastrophic siege of Gaza is the ideological cleavage between the old and the young. If you’re under thirty-five, you think Israel is an oppressor state, and the sins of Hamas are secondary to seventy-five years of colonialism. If you’re older, you might be disconcerted by the civilian casualties in Gaza but believe, ultimately, Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism—or, at least, Zionism itself is not evil.

TikTok has harbored the most pro-Palestine and anti-Israel sentiment, leading to accusations that the Chinese-run social media giant is catalyzing an entire generation against Israel through the manipulation of algorithms. Jewish celebrities fumed that TikTok could even be responsible, in some form, for the Hamas attacks. Much of this was simplistic thinking because young, left-leaning Americans don’t need social media to care about the bombing of Gaza. Hamas doesn’t need social media to hate Israel. But it is inarguable that TikTok, for the time being, platformed more anti-Israel voices because its success is built on decentralization: anyone can create a TikTok video and gatekeepers, theoretically, are nonexistent.

TikTok is best understood as one of the most famous and successful components of the microculture. Even if growth there is slowing and the metrics of virality can be nebulous, it is a platform that is, for now at least, capturing the greatest share of youth attention. It embodies the microculture because it is bottom-up, not top-down; macrocultural luminaries can be successful there, but popularity percolates differently, and its celebrities might be rich without the attendant trappings of the old macrocultural fame, that lost world of Empire. Instagram works similarly: it is owned by Facebook, a macrocultural titan, yet it is fueled entirely by the attention of the individual users who fill it, free of charge, with all of its content.

In terms of raw growth, the greater success story of the microculture might be the Google-owned YouTube. The top creators are perpetually expanding. MrBeast has soared past 100 million subscribers, with his rate of growth still increasing. Forty-three YouTube channels attract more than a half billion views a month. Stripe, the payment processor for most online transactions, including those on Substack, revealed that the so-called creator economy—those in the microculture using online platforms—has continually expanded over the last two years. In 2021, Stripe aggregated data from 50 popular creator platforms and found they had added 668,000 creators who received $10 billion in payouts. In 2023, those same 50 platforms had added over 1 million creators and paid out more than $25 billion in earnings.

The context here is the timeframe. The early 2020s were a bloodbath for macrocultural media. Other than, perhaps, the New York Times, there were no success stories. Disney stock plunged. Cable ratings evaporated. Post-Trump news traffic dried up. Netflix suddenly realized there was no pot of gold at the end of the streaming rainbow.

Images and video don’t rule the entirety of the microculture. What you are reading now, this Substack, belongs to the micro, as blogs did in the 2000s before they were subsumed by social media and larger websites or undone by the lack of dollars available to those who wrote for the web. Substack cannot replace the newspapers that have collapsed or replicate the alternative media ecosystem that has mostly been destroyed. What it does offer is a way for some to either make a comfortable living or a partial living writing or, absent that, at least hunt out a fresh audience bored by what the macroculture has been disgorging over the last few years. Stripe is what makes Substack, for writers like me, viable; it’s easy for those who want to support me to pay for what I write, thus solving the great dilemma of the old blogs, which could not, for the most part, convert readers into paying customers.

What’s intriguing about Substack is what’s intriguing about modern day YouTube: growth. Like any online platform, there is a tremendous divide between the enormously popular and the anonymous, but a Substack middle class is slowly taking root as newsletters continually add new readers. There is no such thing as a Washington Post-style crisis, of an audience evaporating. The opposite is true, with those who put the work in getting rewarded with new subscribers. Whatever the pace, the numbers keep going up, not down. A knock on Substack is that the macrocultural heavyweights who end up there merely replicate their success; this is partially true. Matt Taibbi was a fairly famous Rolling Stone correspondent, Matt Yglesias had a large social media following from two decades of blogging, and Bari Weiss had sinecures at the Times and Wall Street Journal. While all of that aids in success, none of it guarantees large audiences will follow. Some have leapt from the legacy media to Substack and found, in fact, they can’t make it entirely work. And other Substack titans had no fame before migrating over to the newsletter service. Heather Cox Richardson was a history professor and author at Boston College, known chiefly in academic circles. The aforementioned Ted Gioia, who is nearing 100,000 subscribers on his own Substack, was known to jazz enthusiasts but didn’t boast a significant social media presence or decades spent on cable television. Anne Kadet, a New York-based journalist, shot past 10,000 subscribers in two short years by conducting quirky interviews and cultural excavations that the macroculture would ignore. The thrill of Substack is the sheer diversity of voices: racial, ideological, cultural, and political. It is something of an underground press, diffuse and raffish and maybe more ambitious. If only it could all be fused together into a neo-Village Voice, stuffed into a news box every week.

In the last century, the macrocultural elites would try to glom onto, appropriate, or make a study of the microcultural equivalent of its day: the counterculture. Hollywood, the large publishing houses, and Madison Avenue were all deeply interested in the protest movements, the new rock music, and the aesthetics of the baby boomer set, in part because they wanted to ensure all of it could be properly commodified. And the creators within the macro, the mainstream, wanted to learn—they were interested in advancement and innovation for its own sake, the desire to reimagine what was possible. New Hollywood, postmodernist literature, and the rising sophistication of network television were all reflective of this shift. The counterculture strengthened the mainstream.

Today, the relationship is far more fraught. Most macrocultural operators remain befuddled by Substack, wishing it all would go away or drown in its mostly nonexistent problems. CNN, the Atlantic, and NPR won’t set up on Substack. And when media conglomerates do poach YouTubers or podcasters from the microculture, like in the cases of McAfee or Lilly Singh, they hope the amorphous formats of their prior productions can be jammed into the structured world of television. Macrocultural elites rarely, though, try to learn from the success of what’s churning below, or how rapid growth is still possible when so much of the mainstream seems to be contracting. The trouble, too, is that the tech behemoths rely on the microculture for their own survival, and no longer innovate themselves. The relationship is, if not vampiric, than feudal: Google controls YouTube, Facebook controls Instagram, Elon Musk controls X, ByteDance controls TikTok, and the creators themselves till the digital fields, tirelessly generating value for their bosses while hoping some of it gets kicked back to them. At some point, this tension will break out into the open, as all of these platforms, in various forms, try to demonetize or suppress the content they do not like. Palestinian voices will find TikTok less hospitable in the coming months and years. The new platforms Big Tech tries to create will not help, either. Threads cannot replace Twitter because it hates the written word.

The microculture, though, is not any ideal because it is still a realm of haves and have-nots. Most people are not MrBeast or even a sliver of a fraction of MrBeast. Most people cannot crowdfund $1 million for their fantasy novel. Most people cannot pay their rent with Substack or Patreon income. There is the risk, like with the oversaturation of podcasts, that too many creators will go begging in front of the same audiences and monetary returns will diminish.

The microculture is, too often, a hustle culture. Many artists, rightfully, would rather not hustle.

What we need is more than a macroculture and a microculture—what thrived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and is now dissipating.

The mesoculture.

by Ross Barkan, Political Currents |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War (Honest Broker).]

Bruce Springsteen

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

 

Around 10 p.m. on September 25, 2017, Tom Petty told the audience at the Hollywood Bowl, “We’re almost out of time,” and struck three D chords in quick succession. “We’ve got time for this one here.”

In six minutes Petty’s public career will be over. Petty and the Heartbreakers will finish the song, thunderously and to thunderous applause. Petty will wish a good night on his audience, and then he’ll linger on stage after the band retreats. Seven days later his life will be over.

But before that we have four minutes of music.

Just as Petty’s third D starts to decay, drummer Steve Ferrone counts the band in, and Petty and the Heartbreakers lock into the last song of their fortieth anniversary tour. Petty prowls the stage playing a white Fender Electric XII, and then he steps to the mic and belts out in his late-career, Dylan-esque sneer, “She was an American Girl / raised on promises.”

"American Girl,” the final track on the Heartbreaker’s first record and the last song he’ll ever sing in public, is as perfect a rock song as there is. “Raised on promises” could be the national motto. It should adorn our currency, the contemporary American English for “In God We Trust.” Not that the phrases are synonymous. A promise is probably a poor substitute for a god, but it’s what we’ve got if we’re lucky and realistic — promises and hope. At his best Tom Petty excelled at articulating promises and hope, fulfilled and fallow. One of the things that rock offers is triumphant hope. Rock in its triumph mode, regardless of what bittersweetness resides in the lyrics, is open windows, open roads, open vistas. In America, the image of the road itself is often linked to such aspiration, with opportunity just beyond the horizon, and reinvention obtained if you can find a better spot to call home. All you need is a soundtrack to hold you to your pace. Few did this kind of hope — and the attendant rages of desperation, anger, longing, passion — like Petty. It’s an ageless passion. Tracks like “Refugee,” “The Waiting,” “Running Down a Dream” feel as vital today as when they were recorded. Petty’s best music doesn’t age into dotage like so many of his contemporaries. The songs sound clean, fresh, and vibrant affirmations that even if things get sticky, it’s ultimately gonna be alright.

Which is how “American Girl” sounds at the Hollywood Bowl.

The Commonwealth of Petty goes bonkers for this song, of course. I dropped in on some shows during the 2017 tour, and the crowds were always the same, spilling beer, smiling, maybe getting prematurely red-eyed and a bit belligerent. It’s hard to responsibly generalize about Petty’s audience because it’s like generalizing America. Yes, it’s usually the white, middle-aged, or older, bulge of America, but you take the point. Despite the reality that in any collection of 20,000 individuals, people will hold fast to irreconcilable cultural tastes, political opinions, and moral commitments, and when the band tears into “American Girl,” the crowd, already euphoric, feels the electric thrill of shared rock ’n’ roll communion.

Throughout the band’s life, the Heartbreakers retained quite a bit of purity when it came to their stage shows. This gig could’ve been back at the Whisky a Go Go, except for the ever-present screens, several-stories high, displaying real-time footage of the band or other images. But, different images accompany “American Girl.”

What does the phrase “American girl” conjure in your mind? I’d wager that many of you think of a white girl. Mary Ann or Ginger, fresh-faced or sultry. The subcategory doesn’t matter as much as the likelihood that in most of your minds, your American girl is white.

Not for Petty, tonight. Just as he sings the song’s first lines about being raised on promises, the screens transition from abstract swaths of color into images of women. At first the screens show the stereotype: fresh-faced white women and the open road. But soon there’s an African American family, a Latina soldier, and Alexis Arquette, the transgender activist and actor who died from HIV-related complications in 2016. Images of dozens of women cross the screen, young and old, all ethnicities. As the song speeds toward its end, hundreds of snapshots cross the screen, growing smaller as they gain in number before dissolving into a cartoon rendering of the Statue of Liberty shrouded in the American flag. As the song ends, Lady Liberty’s torch and crown preside over the audience.

Now, we shouldn’t give Petty a round of applause for figuring out that not all women are white. But he did punctuate this tour and, however unexpectedly, his career, by playing one of his most durable creations against a backdrop that both asserts and celebrates America’s multiracial society.

Though the optimism about American racial harmony might have been naïve, and the message of solidarity and diversity delivered with a somewhat corporate accent, choosing to close the show with these images was not haphazard. I don’t think many fans ponied up for a Petty concert looking for a message. Petty frequently received plaudits for appealing across the aesthetic and political spectrum of rock ’n’ roll fans. There’s something for just about everyone. That has more to do with the muscularity of the music and the elastic way his best songs easily stretch to fit most anyone’s life. But Petty did also subtly engage in politics during his career, especially in the later years. And he learned about the power of rock ’n’ roll iconography the hard way.

In essential aspects, Petty’s final performance of “American Girl” repudiates and corrects his largest, most embarrassing misstep: his use of the Confederate Battle Flag during the 1985 tour in support of his sixth album, Southern Accents. In 2017 the stage set celebrated a vision of racial harmony; in 1985 the set deployed an embattled icon that many see as our primary homegrown symbol of race-based hatred. In much the same way that one of Petty’s final public gestures was in part a repudiation of the Confederate Flag, his career in the decades following Southern Accents was a decided rejection of his Southern Accents era’s persona and aesthetics.

Southern Accents was released in March 1985. Over the previous nine years, Petty and the Heartbreakers had released a series of successful records. All of these albums are good rock records. Some are great. But at that point, Petty’s catalog lacked any concerted, unified artistic statement, and Petty was at a crossroads. His impending crisis was more than boredom, though. Petty had all kinds of money and all kinds of fame, but he wanted to challenge himself artistically. Early in his career, when people still confused him for a punk rocker, Petty said that rock music was just “stupid shit.” For Petty most contemporary rock musicians — including himself — wrote and rewrote versions of the same love songs over three chord progressions. After 1982’s Long After Dark, Petty sought to challenge himself and his artistry, and he began working on a set of ideas which became a loose concept album about the American South. Southern Accents was intended as an artistic breakthrough. On paper the record sounds like a winner. With the aura of history promised by many of the songs, its sense of place, and an expanded palette of textures including horns and a string arrangement, Southern Accents seems as if it could be the career defining record Petty intended. And this is even before you consider the groundbreaking Alice in Wonderland–inspired video for the record’s first single, “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Although the album contains a few of Petty’s most accomplished songs, for reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the narcotic, Southern Accents didn’t stick the landing. (...)

The failure of Southern Accents is more than a lack of coherence and a crippling reliance on 1980s’ production gimmicks. I say this not because it doesn’t measure up to the rare few and almost objectively brilliant concept records in music history, like The Who’s Quadrophrenia. In fact, Southern Accents was always meant to be conceptually loose. Petty was not trying to create a fully formed rock version of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in forty minutes. He wasn’t striving for a robustly detailed “novel.”. In listening to Southern Accents and considering the remnants of Petty’s original idea, we find a record that is less a comprehensive story than a series of snapshots about life in the South. The songs comprising the thematic core of Southern Accents — “Rebels,” “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” “Southern Accents,” “Spike,” and “Dogs on the Run” — predominantly follows a single unnamed Southerner as he shambles through life embittered, drunk, antagonistic, but still hopeful and yearning for love and connection.

So, yes, the record presents as Southern, from the opening song “Rebels” to the Civil War–era Winslow Homer painting on the cover. That’s not the problem. Things get dicey because the South of Petty’s imagination endorsed rather blindly some of the most corrosive myths of American culture and history. Petty adopted a staggeringly uncritical stance toward commonplace historical misunderstandings of the South, and his record manages to be both too much and too little about the South. The album is deeply suffused with a long-standing, parochial, and miniaturized understanding of the American South. This is almost not Petty’s fault. It’s hard to nail down any region in a record, period, even for a consummate pop rock writer like Petty. And with all its historical burden, the South is nearly impossible to succinctly explore. Moreover, the thirty-five year old Petty who made Southern Accents had spent his adult life as a rock star, so he likely didn’t have the inclination to interrogate his vision of the South. But the result was that Southern Accents promotes an aggressively narrow conception of Southern identity. To put it bluntly, Petty’s South is the white South.

by Michael Washburn, Longreads |  Read more:
Image: YouTube/Rebels

How the World Ran Out of Everything

I'm Dave Davies. Do you remember how in the early months of the pandemic, you couldn't find toilet paper or cleaning products on store shelves? And then soon enough, all kinds of other products were hard to get, from building materials to exercise equipment to new cars because automakers couldn't get computer chips. Our guest today, New York Times correspondent Peter Goodman, has spent a lot of time rummaging through the wreckage of those disruptions in the supply chain, discovering things less well known, like the 1 billion pounds of harvested almonds that California growers couldn't get to foreign buyers because hard-pressed shippers were busy with more profitable traffic.

In his new book, Goodman explores the business decisions that left the economy vulnerable to a disruption like this and the erosion of government regulation over critical transport industries that left their capacity to move freight weak and brittle. All those issues, he says, were exacerbated by the corporate drive to maximize short-term profits. The ultimate threat to the supply chain, he writes, is unregulated greed. Peter Goodman is the global economics correspondent for the New York Times. His new book is "How The World Ran Out of Everything: Inside The Global Supply Chain." (...)

DAVIES: In April 2020, when all this - the pandemic really hit us, your wife was about to give birth to your third child, and she'd had a premature child in the second. So maybe a little more care and caution than a lot of parents would be expecting. And you write that she was unable to get some needed items, you know, rubbing alcohol, disinfectant wipes, backup baby formula. I mean, you were experiencing this as we all were. Just remind us of some of the dimensions of this breakdown in the supply chain, some of its really meaningful impact.

GOODMAN: Sure. I mean, it was cosmically bewildering. We were, you know, in London in lockdown, and my wife was pretty stoic about the fact that I couldn't be in the hospital for more than an hour. Her parents couldn't fly in from New York to look after the baby. But to then go online and look for hand sanitizer once we were home and discover there was nothing to be found. And then you couldn't even find the ingredients to make your own hand sanitizer, and, of course, this was true throughout much of the global economy, right? We didn't have personal protective gear for frontline medical workers who were dealing with COVID patients. We ran out of computer chips. We, of course, ran out of toilet paper. I'm sure everybody remembers that.

And there was just this sense that something kind of deep that we had all taken for granted, that we all agreed on, you know, that you could click on your button on Amazon or whatever e-commerce provider you liked and wait a few hours or a couple of days or whatever, and a truck would show up at your door. Well, now, even that had broken down in the middle of this public health catastrophe that was, of course, incredibly confusing. It was very disconcerting. 

DAVIES: Right. Right. You know, there's a guy whose story runs through the book, a fellow from Mississippi named Hagan Walker, who had a startup company called Glo, and his efforts to produce and get a product that was really important to his business is kind of illustrative of some of what was going on in the supply chain. What did he make?

GOODMAN: So he made these novelty cubes that light up when they're dropped in water, and this started off as a thing you could sell to bars, the bartender could look down the bar and see who needed a refill because the light went off. And then he discovered that - he heard from somebody whose child was autistic and bath time had been really just a difficult time. And somebody dropped one of these cubes in the bath, discovered that the child was transfixed by this, and that generated this idea to make these bath toys.

And when I met Hagan Walker, he had recently gotten a deal with "Sesame Street." He was making these Elmo and Julia - that's another character - themed bath toys, using factories in China to make these cubes and shipping them in the first shipping container - it was the first time he'd ever had an order big enough to fill a whole 40-foot shipping container, these, you know, boxes that are like the workhorses of the global economy. And so I ended up tracking this one container from this factory in China to his warehouse in Mississippi, and it was a harrowing journey.

DAVIES: Right. This was a make-or-break thing for his, you know, emerging company. One of the things that's interesting is that when it was time to decide how he would find someone to manufacture these little figurines. He wanted to do it in the United States. He really wanted to have jobs here. He couldn't seem to manage that. Why?

GOODMAN: So much of the productive capacity had shifted overseas and specifically to China. So, you know, Hagan Walker's in his college town, Starkville, Miss., where he got a degree in engineering, and he likes the idea of keeping the business in the country. But as he calls around, he discovers, one place can make these steel plates he needs, the kind of molds for his product. But it's 12 times the cost of China. Another place has a slightly lower cost, but it turns out they're just farming the work to China and capturing a cut for themselves. Then at one point, he wants to make this kind of - imagine a children's pop-up book, like that kind of packaging for his product, and he has a meeting with somebody in the States who says, this is just so complicated. You know, you just have to have this made in China.

DAVIES: This is illustrative of what's happened in recent decades where China has emerged as this huge manufacturing power. The numbers are really striking. Chinese companies were making 80% of the world's air conditioners, 70% of the mobile phones. And this drew a lot of criticism from Donald Trump and others, you know, the Chinese are eating our lunch. The balance of trade is terrible. You say if this was a crime, what was happening with the trade imbalance, it was an inside job, right? Meaning what?

GOODMAN: That the reason why so much productive capacity is shifted to China, why so many factory jobs end up in China, is because of what American and other Western corporate executives decided was in their best interest. I mean, they had been perpetually on the prowl for ways to cut costs. They liked the idea of getting out from under labor unions. Unions were effectively banned in China. They like the idea that you could make your own rules. You didn't like an environmental regulation, you needed a big piece of land, as long as you cut in a local communist party official, you could do your deal. And ironically, as I argue in the book, maybe one of the greatest joint ventures in the history of global capitalism is that between Walmart, the world's largest retailer, and the People's Republic of China, this entity that comes out of a peasant-led rebellion in the name of Marxism. And this becomes really the center of the global economy for a time, making goods at an enormous scale.

So what we failed to do in the States was apportion the bounty of trade, and that's why we've had this backlash. I mean, we have had a consumer bonanza from this trade. Prices have gone down. We've got consumer choice. It's been very good for the investor class. It hasn't been good for a couple million workers who lost their jobs and who've largely been abandoned. But yes, that part is an inside job.

DAVIES: And you have a moment where you describe visiting a global procurement center for Walmart in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Describe what you saw and what it tells us?

GOODMAN: Yeah, this was 20 years ago. What I saw was this waiting room full of the kinds of uncomfortable chairs that you'd see in an elementary school, you know, this sort of all-in-one desk chairs. People drinking tepid cups of tea out of these little plastic cups, sitting for hours and hours for their chance to go pitch a Walmart buyer on their products. And Walmart engineered this so that, you know, you would get your turn. Oh, you make Christmas trees, you make microwave ovens...

DAVIES: And these are Chinese manufacturers saying, hey, we want your business.

GOODMAN: These are Chinese - that's right. These are Chinese manufacturers saying, we can satisfy your demand for cheap goods. And Walmart would say, well, OK, here's the price we're willing to pay, and the Chinese factory reps would know full and well if they don't meet that price, even if that's a price that's so low, that they're going to have to squeeze labor, they're going to have to take shortcuts on workplace and environmental standards. They're going to have to get some credit to go get the materials. Well, they know that out there in the waiting room are representatives for all of their competitors, and somebody out there is going to be desperate enough for cash right now, and they'll take the terms of the deal.

DAVIES: Wow. So we have this situation where these hundreds and hundreds of, you know - thousands of factories all over China are making this stuff, and American investors and other investors are making a lot of money from it, and American consumers are getting really cheap goods. And one of the things, of course, that makes it work is cheap transport. These container ships, these 40-foot containers and these - I mean, the vessels that do these, some of them are as long as the Empire State Building is high. They can...

GOODMAN: Right.

DAVIES: ...Take - what? - tens of thousands of containers at a time, right? How cheap does it get to be to ship your stuff?

GOODMAN: Well, it gets to the point where, you know, as the CEO of Columbia Sportswear put it to me at one point, it feels like it's free. Like, you don't even have to think about it. I mean, the container standardizes shipping.

So, you know, before the shipping container comes along in the 1950s, loading and unloading any kind of cargo vessel is this excruciating, dangerous, grueling process. You know, we're going to put the barrel of chemicals over there. We got to figure out how to fit in the big side of beef over here, and it's very much a jigsaw puzzle.

And once the shipping container comes along, you can load factory goods or really anything into this standard-size box. That box can be lifted up by crane. It can be put on the back of a truck. It can be hoisted onto rail. It can be lifted onto the ship.

So that makes everything cheaper and quicker, and it invites these CEOs of publicly traded companies who are scouring the globe for the cheapest possible place to treat factories in China as if they might as well be in Ohio or Dusseldorf or wherever. You know, as long as a ship comes calling somewhere, and you got road and rail connections, it's all just one big grid, and it largely works that way, except when there are shocks.

DAVIES: Right. The other element of this, which sets up the disaster we experienced in the pandemic, is a change in management practices that dealt with how companies, both manufacturers and retailers, handle the inventory, how many goods they have on hand. You want to explain this?

GOODMAN: Yeah, sure. So Toyota, at the end of the second world war, pioneers this notion that's come to be known as just-in-time manufacturing or lean manufacturing, and the idea is fairly simple and sensible. It's the end of the second world war. Capital is very limited. Japan's dealing with the devastation of the war. They don't have that much developable land.

So Toyota says, well, instead of running our operations the way Ford did in the heyday of mass assembly in the States - just making as much stuff as you possibly can and letting salespeople figure out how to sell it - let's just make as many cars as we need to replenish those that are being sold. Let's get our suppliers to give us the parts and the materials we need right when we need them on the assembly line.

And this is very effective. It's very useful. And then along comes financialization, you know, the paramountcy of the shareholder interest and consultancies like McKinsey, who essentially say to the corporate executive ranks, lean manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing - this is a way for you to just slash your inventory. Take the savings. Instead of sticking all these parts and extra products in warehouses as a hedge against troubles that aren't going to happen, you know, right now, probably, give the money to yourselves through executive compensation, you know, as a reward for being brilliant enough to hire McKinsey. Give it to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. That makes share prices go up, and everybody's happy.

And when one day, there is a shock and you run short of inventory, well, that'll be somebody else's problem. But by then, you know, you'll be presumably sleeping in a hammock on some beach hoisting a cocktail.

by Dave Davies, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Ian Taylor/Unsplash

Kate Bush (feat. Donald Sutherland)

Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema (Guardian);

w/ pictures.]

Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara and a dancer rehearse the ballet Voice of Desert as part of the Montpellier dance festival at the Théâtre de l’Agora
Image: Sylvain Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

via:

Are These Really ‘the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’?

To be media literate these days is to understand that no ranked list, whether it is the “100 Greatest Drummers of All Time” or the “35 Cutest Dog Breeds to Ever Exist,” should be taken too literally. We all know that the cuteness of the Maltipoo and the awesomeness of Keith Moon are matters of opinion.

When it comes to parsing the annual dining survey known as The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, though, you really have to open your mind. Forget asking whether these establishments are the best in the world. The bigger question is: Are they restaurants?

Consider some of the highest-ranking winners from this year’s edition, which was announced Wednesday night in a ceremony at the Wynn Las Vegas that began with feathered and painted dancers twirling light sticks to electronic dance music on a darkened stage.

Gaggan, in Bangkok, was named not just the ninth-best restaurant in the world but the single best restaurant in Asia. The chef, Gaggan Anand, greets diners at his 14-seat table facing the kitchen with “Welcome to my … .” completing the sentence with a term, meaning a chaotic situation, that will not be appearing in The New York Times.

What follows are about two dozen dishes organized in two acts (with intermission). The menu is written in emojis. Each bite is accompanied by a long story from Mr. Anand that may or may not be true. The furrowed white orb splotched with what appears to be blood, he claims, is the brain of a rat raised in a basement feedlot.

Brains are big in other restaurants on the list. Rasmus Munk, chef of the eighth-best restaurant in the world, Alchemist, in Copenhagen, pipes a mousse of lamb brains and foie gras into a bleached lamb skull, then garnishes it with ants and roasted mealworms. Another of the 50 or so courses — the restaurant calls them “impressions”— lurks inside the cavity of a realistic, life-size model of a man’s head with the top of the cranium removed.

Now, among the 50 Best are a number of establishments where they let you see a menu written in real words and order things you actually want to eat. Some of these, like Asador Etxebarri in Spain and Schloss Schauenstein in Switzerland, are hard to reach. Nearly all are very expensive. Still, there are places on the list where a relatively normal person might eat a relatively normal dinner and go home feeling relatively well-fed.

But the list is dominated by places that normal people can’t get into, where the few diners who will go to almost any length for reservations will go home feeling bloated and drunk. They are not restaurants, or not just restaurants. They are endurance tests, theatrical spectacles, monuments to ego and — the two most frightening words in dining — “immersive experiences.”

Whether the World’s 50 Best seeks out these spectacular spectaculars or has simply been hijacked by them is impossible to tell. The list’s website is a model that should be studied by anyone who wants to arrange words that sound important and don’t mean anything.

On the subject of what it takes to win the attention of the 1,080 “independent experts” who make up the organization’s voting body, the website has this to say: “What constitutes ‘best’ is up to each voter to decide — as everyone’s tastes are different, so is everyone’s idea of what constitutes a great restaurant experience. Of course, the quality of food is going to be central, as is the service — but the style of both, the surroundings, atmosphere and indeed the price level are each more or less important for each different individual.”

Well, that clears up that.

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and its spinoff awards, by now almost too numerous to count, weren’t always so rarefied. In the early years, when the list was being published by Restaurants magazine, the editors saw it as a kind of anti-Michelin, and took pride in recognizing spots that would never, ever make Michelin’s little red guidebooks. 

No. 1 on the list that year, though, was the Spanish restaurant El Bulli, which set a standard for kitchen experimentation, highly manipulated food, restless change and marathon tastings to which the highest end of the business is still in thrall. The more famous the list became, the harder it was for a place like Carnivore to land a spot. Nobody much noticed, because the game that El Bulli played was starting to become the only one that mattered.

Today the list is dominated by tasting-menu restaurants, and every year those menus seem to get longer and more unforgiving. There are more courses than any rational person would choose to eat, and more tastes of more wines than anyone can possibly remember the next day. The spiraling, metastasizing length of these meals seems designed to convince you that there’s just no way a mere 10 or 15 courses could contain all the genius in the kitchen.

One well-traveled diner told me about a recent, four-hour meal at Disfrutar, in Barcelona — No. 1 this year. He said he was “blown away” and at the same time he never wants to go back. “It was an assault, and not fun,” he said.

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images

Willow

[ed. Daughter of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. Appreciate the complexity here, vs most stuff on the charts these days.]

A&P

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before. 

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. 

She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty. 

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was. 

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-foodbreakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinkscrackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct. 

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint." 

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April. 

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something. 

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three realestate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years. 

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it. 

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, six packs of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice I've often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute. 

Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in icecream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stenciled on.

"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.

Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing." 

"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here." 

"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency. 

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?" 

I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking. 

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow. 

"Did you say something, Sammy?" "I said I quit." 

"I thought you did." 

"You didn't have to embarrass them." 

"It was they who were embarrassing us." 

I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grandmother's, and I know she would have been pleased. 

"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said. "I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute. 

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt. 

I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

by John Updike, Littonton Public Schools |  Read more (pdf):

Image: via

[ed. Also included: A Clean Well-Lighted Place (Ernest Hemingway); The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin); and, Girl (Jamaica Kincaid).]

Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa

I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one.

But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well.

 

In his portrait, gracefully curled back hair and expressive eyebrows sit above two wide eyes that communicate a kind of amused resignation. It is the face of someone watching from afar as a trivial misunderstanding blossoms into a full-fledged argument.

His name, I learned, was Yukichi Fukuzawa. And an English translation of his autobiography happened to be available in main stacks of the University of Tokyo library.

Fukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Osaka in 1835. He is often described as a Japanese Benjamin Franklin. But with his knack for popping up at moments of great historical importance he also slightly resembles a Japanese Forrest Gump. When Japan opens its ports to American and European ships, he’s there. When Japan makes its first diplomatic missions abroad, he’s there. And when you dive into the history of Japan’s modern institutions—the police force, the universities, the banking system, the press—Fuzukawa is there as well.

He is most famous for translating, distilling, and disseminating Western knowledge in multiple fields through books such as An Encouragement of Learning and An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. But it is his autobiography, published just two years before his death in 1901, that offers the most comprehensive record of his life and thought.

We are lucky to have the book at all. As one of Fukuzawa’s students says in the preface, for years he rebuffed requests to set down his life story in writing. But when a visiting foreign dignitary began asking him some questions about his early childhood and education, Fukuzawa summoned a stenographer to record his answers. The book we have is an edited transcript of that impromptu oral history. And—as I found to my great surprise—it’s absolutely hilarious.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: ACX uncredited

The WA GOP Put It In Writing That They’re Not Into Democracy

Political forecasters called it that the state Republican convention would feature turmoil ending in endorsements of the most extreme candidates, all to match the party’s current MAGA mood.

Among the jilted was the Republican front-runner for governor, former Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was left putting out an APB for the GOP.

“The party’s been taken hostage,” he told The Spokesman-Review.

But there was another strain to the proceedings last weekend that didn’t get much attention. Political conventions are often colorful curiosities; this one took a darker turn.

The Republican base, it turns out, is now opposed to democracy. Their words, not mine, as you’ll soon see.

After the candidates left, the convention’s delegates got down to crafting a party platform. Like at most GOP gatherings in the Donald Trump era, this one called for restrictions on voting. In Washington state, the delegates called for the end of all mail-in voting. Instead, we would have a one-day-only, in-person election, with photo ID and paper ballots, with no use of tabulating machines or digital scanners to count the ballots. All ballots would be counted by hand, by Trappist monks.

OK, I made up the monk part. I did not make up the part about banning the use of machines to count votes. All in all it would make voting less convenient and harder, by rolling it back at least half a century.

But then the convention veered into more unexpected anti-democratic territory.

A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”

We don’t? There are debates about how complete of a democracy we wish to be; for example, the state Democratic Party platform has called for the direct election of the president (doing away with the Electoral College). But curtailing our own vote? The GOPers said they hoped states’ rights would be strengthened with such a move.

Then they kicked it up a notch. They passed a resolution calling on people to please stop using the word “democracy.”

“We encourage Republicans to substitute the words ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ where previously they have used the word ‘democracy,’ ” the resolution says. “Every time the word ‘democracy’ is used favorably it serves to promote the principles of the Democratic Party, the principles of which we ardently oppose.”

The resolution sums up: “We … oppose legislation which makes our nation more democratic in nature.” (...)

It’s a hybrid system, a representative democracy, with the people periodically voting for elected leaders to do that legislating work for us. During much of our lifetimes the debate in this arena has been: How can representative democracy be made more representative? How can more voices be heard?

It’s jarring to hear a major political party declare that they’re done with that. They’re not even paying it lip service. You can’t get any blunter than “we oppose making our nation more democratic.”

Not everyone at the convention agreed with those sentiments, though they were strongly outvoted. Some of the delegates seemed to have contempt for voting and voters — at least when they come out on the losing end of it.

“The same people who select the baboons in Olympia are the ones selecting your senators,” said one delegate in remarks to the convention hall.

A party platform is a statement of principles; it has little to no chance of being implemented. So it’s tempting to ignore it. Or wish it away, as Reichert is trying to do, by suggesting the real party is out there somewhere having been abducted by impostors.

When people say “democracy itself is on the ballot” in this election, though, I think this is what they’re talking about. (...)

For years now, since Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, some Republicans have been on the defensive about charges they’re flirting with anti-democratic impulses or authoritarianism.

A while back, this newspaper ran an Op-Ed from a leading conservative, the editor of the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru. He argued that despite Trump’s attempts to block the transfer of power, and the party largely backing him up on that, the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. It’s become a myth that Democrats hold about Republicans, he suggested. It’s similar, he argued, to the misconceptions Republicans have that Democrats are committing mass election fraud.

“Republicans aren’t against democracy,” was the headline of that Op-Ed.

Well a few years have passed, and now they’re putting it in writing.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times

[ed. Unbelievable. And if that's not chilling enough, Idaho republicans recently approved a bunch of other assaults on female choice and self-determination by crafting a party plank called “Defining Human Personhood”, which states that life begins from the moment of conception, or when sperm joins egg. The “intentional taking of human life” after that point is murder. 

“We support the criminalization of all murders by abortion within the state’s jurisdiction,” the platform says. Which basically includes in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and appears to also favor bringing women up on murder charges if they have an abortion — or even if they use some post-conception birth control measures such as the morning after pill."

~ See: Once again, GOP puts its extremism in black and white (Seattle Times).]

St. Vincent

 

[ed. Her newest. Nice. Full album here.]

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud On the Future of Streaming

Today, I’m talking with Anjali Sud, the CEO of Tubi. Tubi is a free and very rapidly growing streaming TV platform — the company just announced that it has 80 million monthly active users, and according to Nielsen, it had an average of a million viewers watching every minute in May 2024, beating out Disney Plus, Max, Peacock, and basically everything else save Netflix and YouTube. All of those streaming service price hikes are driving people to free options, and Tubi is right there to catch them.

Anjali joined Tubi as CEO last September. This is actually her second time on Decoder. The last time she was on the show, she was the CEO of Vimeo, which means she has a pretty broad view of what’s going on with video on the internet and streaming in general. And we got into it — the streaming industry is basically in a moment of turmoil right now, as a bunch of huge investments in content did not result in the rapid subscriber or revenue growth most of these companies predicted.

Tubi’s model is different: it licenses content that’s already made, lets people watch it for free, and supports itself with advertising. But that means it’s competing for ad dollars across the attention economy online: not just Netflix, but TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and everything else. I wanted to know how Anjali was thinking about that, especially since the social platforms don’t spend any money on content at all.

Anjali’s plan is to make Tubi feel like a more premium home for better work from all of those creators. It just launched something called “Stubios,” which allows fans to vote on creator projects that Tubi will fund — basically setting up a YouTube- or TikTok-to-Tubi pipeline.

But all of that costs money, too: Anjali recently said that Tubi isn’t yet profitable, “but it could be,” and we really took a deep dive into that. Where does the money come from for a streamer that doesn’t have subscriptions? How much is it? How can you get more? And what will it take to make Tubi profitable?

One note before we start: you’ll hear us say “connected TV” a lot in this conversation, which just refers to TV programming that’s coming from the internet. Traditional broadcast or cable TV was one-way: it came into your house, and that was that. Connected TV excites the whole industry because they get data back and can do everything you’d expect with it: targeted ads, viewer metrics, personalized recommendations, and so on.

Okay, Tubi CEO Anjali Sud. Here we go.

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Tubi

[ed. Fascinating interview about the business and metrics of streaming (if you can get past all the jargon).]

Spreadsheet Superstars

It’s happy hour in Las Vegas, and the MGM Grand casino is crawling with people. The National Finals Rodeo is in town, the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament is underway, the Raiders play on Sunday, and the U2 residency is going strong at the giant Sphere, so it seems everyone in every bar and at every slot machine is looking forward to something. (And wearing a cowboy hat.) Even for a town built on nonstop buzz, this qualifies as a uniquely eventful weekend.

But I’d wager that if you wanted to see the most exciting drama happening at the MGM on this Friday night, you’d have to walk through the casino and look for the small sign advertising something called The Active Cell. This is the site of the play-in round for the Excel World Championship, and it starts in five minutes. There are 27 people here to take part in this event (28 registered, but one evidently chickened out before we started), which will send its top eight finishers to tomorrow night’s finals. There, one person will be crowned the Excel World Champion, which comes with a trophy and a championship belt and the ability to spend the next 12 months bragging about being officially the world’s best spreadsheeter. Eight people have already qualified for the finals; some of today’s 27 contestants lost in those qualifying rounds, others just showed up last-minute in hopes of a comeback.

The room is set up with four rows and three columns of tables, each one draped in a black tablecloth and covered in power strips, laptops, and the occasional notepad. There’s a long table with coffee in the back, and over the two days we’ve been in this room, carts have occasionally wheeled in with cookies, queso dip, and at one point, surprisingly delicious churros. The unofficial dress code is business casual, the overall vibe somewhere between summer camp and business conference.

Now the room is quieter, more focused. 26 of the contestants are furiously setting up their workspaces. They plug in their computers, clean up their areas, and refill their beverages. A number of players reach into their bags and pull out an external mouse and keyboard — everyone in the room has strong opinions on brands and features, but all agree that what you really need is a keyboard with function keys separate from media keys, and then to turn those media keys into more function keys so you can work even faster.

And then there’s me. I’m the 27th competitor, and I’m both the only person in the room using a Mac and the only person who has no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last two days in this room with this group, as they’ve taught each other new Excel tricks and compared notes on the state of the art in the world’s most important piece of software. They’ve been debating VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP and teaching each other how to use the MOD function. I’ve been desperately trying to get my app to update on the MGM’s Wi-Fi.

At 6PM on the dot, Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization hosting these championships, takes the modular stage in the ballroom. He loads an unlisted YouTube link, which begins explaining today’s challenge, known as a “case.” It’s a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.

The Potions Master case, like so many of the puzzles conquered by these competitive Excelers, is not particularly complicated. This is a flashier, faster, deliberately more arcade-y version of spreadsheeting, more like trying to win 10 simultaneous games of chess on easy mode rather than painstakingly taking on a grandmaster. If you like, you can solve the whole thing manually: figure out when the white number gets too high, count the total points until that spot, then double-check it because it’s a lot of numbers, and eventually answer the first question. That’s my strategy, and I think I get it right. Now there are 119 more, worth a total of 1,500 points, and it’s quickly clear I’m not going to finish in the 30 minutes we’ve been allotted.

While I’m squinting into my 13-inch screen and carefully adding 1s and 3s, the other 26 contestants are whirring through their spreadsheets, using Excel’s built-in formula and data visualization tools to organize and query all that data. Everyone in the room seems to have their own way to chew through the ingredient lists and spends the first few minutes turning a mess of numbers and letters into real, proper capital-d Data. They start answering questions a half-dozen at a time, while I’m still checking my mental math.

Almost everybody who participates in competitive Excel will tell you that the app itself will only get you so far. If you can’t hack the puzzle or figure out what you’re trying to do, it can’t make something out of nothing. Your brain will always matter more than your software. But if you really know how to make Excel sing, there’s simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense.

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword — exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year’s competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it’s all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It’s a game. Now it hopes to become a sport.

I’ve come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing — a company’s sales, a person’s lifestyle, a region’s political leanings, a race car — and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want — the reality is you’re still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they’re doing it in Vegas.

You really can’t overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. “Electronic spreadsheets” actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. “I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers,” he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then.

Bricklin’s software, eventually called VisiCalc, gave many people their first good reason ever to buy a computer. In 1996, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called VisiCalc the first of two “explosions that propelled the industry forward” and said spreadsheets were the driving force behind the success of the Apple II. A generation later, a competitor called Lotus 1-2-3 became a key app for the IBM PC. By 1985, after briefly dabbling with a program called Multiplan, Microsoft announced a powerful spreadsheet app of its own, called Excel. At the time, it was an app for Apple’s Macintosh, which was flagging in sales; both Apple and Microsoft thought the best way to compete was with spreadsheets. They were right.

Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel “the best consumer product we ever created.”

by David Pierce, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited