Thursday, April 18, 2024
America’s Animal Shelters Are Overwhelmed
Monday mornings at the Mendocino Coast Humane Society, the northern California animal shelter where I work part-time, are chaotic.
The frenzied beeping of anesthesia monitoring equipment echoes as I dodge Coco, one of the resident shelter cats with a penchant for ankles, and tiptoe down a freshly mopped hallway with a bleachy smell that makes my eyes water.
A man in worn flannel and workboots waits at the front counter, face drawn; his elderly catahoula dog is waiting in the back seat of his car for an 11am euthanasia appointment. Somewhere in the clinic, a newly spayed dog is howling as she wakes.
I say good morning to Sierra, one of our animal care workers. Her partner, Michael, is tugging off his waders in the supply closet after hosing down our 26 kennels, hands rough from constant immersion in water. I swing open the door to the office, where the executive director, Judy Martin, is on the phone negotiating a transfer of 12 puppies from Covelo, a hamlet 77 miles east of us that has a growing dog overpopulation problem.
“Covelo has at least two roaming dog packs,” she says after hanging up, “running through people’s yards and killing pets. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a child.”
Last year, rescuers found a pair of Covelo litters under a decaying trailer. Two of the puppies were dead, rotting under piles of their living siblings. This was not the first time.
Coco, for example, came from Point Arena, a city an hour to the south of us, towards the far end of our service area. She was brought in with “a string hanging out of her rectum” which proved to be her intestines. Vet staff initially thought they might need to euthanize her due to the complexity of her case and the resources available, but she proved so sweet that they took a chance, tacking her intestines in place.
Last year, we took in 694 animals, from animal cruelty cases to unwanted litters, and we are drowning. We hear that animal care and control is telling people to leave found animals where they are because they don’t have the capacity to handle them. Those people turn to us or Inland Valley Humane Society, a foster-based rescue that is similarly inundated. As closed admission shelters, we can decide to turn animals away if we lack space, even though we strive to prevent it, knowing what may happen to those we do not accept.
The list of people waiting to surrender animals is always growing.
It is workers such as Sierra and Michael who make our services possible. They’re the unseen, unheralded heroes of animal sheltering across the country, a workforce on the frontlines of a pet overpopulation crisis that has been steadily building over the last four years.
Getting people to understand that crisis sometimes feels impossible. Most members of the public are only interested in one thing: euthanasia.
In 2023, 690,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in shelters across the US. For many members of the public, this calls to mind healthy, adoptable animals euthanized for space in open admission (so-called “kill”) shelters – those required to accept all animals, even if there’s no room. But shelters also have to cope with owner-requested euthanasias, behavioral problems and animals who are so sick or injured that a gentle death is the most positive outcome.
The issue we and many other shelters are facing is this: after a record low of 5.5 million in 2020, animal intakes are slowly increasing, and they aren’t leaving – in 2023, 6.5 million animals entered, and only a little over 6 million left. Animals are lingering for weeks, months and sometimes years in the shelter. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of animals waiting to get out of shelters increased by 177,000.
For us, these numbers have faces, such as Sophie (intake 8/11/22), Asia (4/14/23), and Annie (4/21/23). We’re also being hit by the tight job market, which makes it hard to hire and retain personnel, creating even more strain for staff: more animals, fewer people. (...)
Shelter workers are at the frontlines of this crisis, providing daily care to cats and dogs in environments ranging from capacious, well-funded private rescues to crowded municipal shelters where dogs bark frenziedly through rusting fences and cats coil, terrified, in small metal cages.
They aren’t doing this work for the money. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kennel attendants and animal care workers earn a median wage of $29,790, often with limited benefits. (...)
But logistical issues such as trying to make their paychecks match living expenses is only part of what deeply affects shelter workers. The same stories that go viral on social media for being sad are also sad for the workers caring for those animals, many of whom grow deeply attached to their charges and experience empathy for even the briefest lives. A kitten so beloved by the staff that they carried him around in a sling is buried under a plum tree outside the shelter.
Those lives do not blur together. We remember all of them.
Our surrender waiting list is bulging at the seams; after a man threatened to “throw them against the wall”, we hastily made room for Kiwi, Raspberry and Strawberry, three clearly feral kittens who huddle, traumatized and hissing, in the back of their intake kennel, exploding like popcorn if you open the door. The staff member who handled the intake was shaken, her hands trembling as she recounted the story.
Animal care workers like her are confronting a form of moral injury, in which they may struggle with being asked to do things that go against their consciences, or circumstances expose them to feelings of helplessness or betrayal. In open admission shelters, some are coping with the caring-killing paradox, described in 2005 in a study exploring the heavy impact of euthanasia on shelter workers, who may play with a dog in the morning and euthanize it in the afternoon. Both phenomena are associated with issues such as anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance use disorder as people struggle to process traumatic events.
The public, however, doesn’t see Sierra’s face falling as one of our permanent shelter cats, Oscar, gets sicker and sicker until the sad Friday afternoon when we have to euthanize him. Nor do they see Michael speaking animatedly on behalf of a dog with behavior issues.
“I hear about stories where shelter staff or managers get death threats because they’re euthanizing animals,” says Dr Kathleen Cooney, director of education at the Companion Animal Euthanasia Training Academy. She’s speaking to negative public attitudes about shelter workers, sometimes stereotyped as callous for the hard, dirty parts of their jobs.
Meanwhile, they experience the incredible emotional strain of “seeing the worst of the worst, the worst side of humans, having to see pets suffering”, says Jerrica Owen, executive director of the National Animal Care and Control Association (Naca), which is working to develop consistent professional standards and training in the field.
“Animal control officers are first responders,” Owen says, but ACOs don’t have the hero status of firefighters and paramedics. Instead, they’re treated like glorified janitors, ignoring the catastrophic mental health issues in the field, with animal care workers more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and experiencing high rates of burnout and so-called “compassion fatigue” because of the secondary and primary trauma they face in their work.
The frenzied beeping of anesthesia monitoring equipment echoes as I dodge Coco, one of the resident shelter cats with a penchant for ankles, and tiptoe down a freshly mopped hallway with a bleachy smell that makes my eyes water.
A man in worn flannel and workboots waits at the front counter, face drawn; his elderly catahoula dog is waiting in the back seat of his car for an 11am euthanasia appointment. Somewhere in the clinic, a newly spayed dog is howling as she wakes.
“Covelo has at least two roaming dog packs,” she says after hanging up, “running through people’s yards and killing pets. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a child.”
Last year, rescuers found a pair of Covelo litters under a decaying trailer. Two of the puppies were dead, rotting under piles of their living siblings. This was not the first time.
Coco, for example, came from Point Arena, a city an hour to the south of us, towards the far end of our service area. She was brought in with “a string hanging out of her rectum” which proved to be her intestines. Vet staff initially thought they might need to euthanize her due to the complexity of her case and the resources available, but she proved so sweet that they took a chance, tacking her intestines in place.
Last year, we took in 694 animals, from animal cruelty cases to unwanted litters, and we are drowning. We hear that animal care and control is telling people to leave found animals where they are because they don’t have the capacity to handle them. Those people turn to us or Inland Valley Humane Society, a foster-based rescue that is similarly inundated. As closed admission shelters, we can decide to turn animals away if we lack space, even though we strive to prevent it, knowing what may happen to those we do not accept.
The list of people waiting to surrender animals is always growing.
It is workers such as Sierra and Michael who make our services possible. They’re the unseen, unheralded heroes of animal sheltering across the country, a workforce on the frontlines of a pet overpopulation crisis that has been steadily building over the last four years.
Getting people to understand that crisis sometimes feels impossible. Most members of the public are only interested in one thing: euthanasia.
In 2023, 690,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in shelters across the US. For many members of the public, this calls to mind healthy, adoptable animals euthanized for space in open admission (so-called “kill”) shelters – those required to accept all animals, even if there’s no room. But shelters also have to cope with owner-requested euthanasias, behavioral problems and animals who are so sick or injured that a gentle death is the most positive outcome.
The issue we and many other shelters are facing is this: after a record low of 5.5 million in 2020, animal intakes are slowly increasing, and they aren’t leaving – in 2023, 6.5 million animals entered, and only a little over 6 million left. Animals are lingering for weeks, months and sometimes years in the shelter. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of animals waiting to get out of shelters increased by 177,000.
For us, these numbers have faces, such as Sophie (intake 8/11/22), Asia (4/14/23), and Annie (4/21/23). We’re also being hit by the tight job market, which makes it hard to hire and retain personnel, creating even more strain for staff: more animals, fewer people. (...)
Shelter workers are at the frontlines of this crisis, providing daily care to cats and dogs in environments ranging from capacious, well-funded private rescues to crowded municipal shelters where dogs bark frenziedly through rusting fences and cats coil, terrified, in small metal cages.
They aren’t doing this work for the money. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kennel attendants and animal care workers earn a median wage of $29,790, often with limited benefits. (...)
But logistical issues such as trying to make their paychecks match living expenses is only part of what deeply affects shelter workers. The same stories that go viral on social media for being sad are also sad for the workers caring for those animals, many of whom grow deeply attached to their charges and experience empathy for even the briefest lives. A kitten so beloved by the staff that they carried him around in a sling is buried under a plum tree outside the shelter.
Those lives do not blur together. We remember all of them.
Our surrender waiting list is bulging at the seams; after a man threatened to “throw them against the wall”, we hastily made room for Kiwi, Raspberry and Strawberry, three clearly feral kittens who huddle, traumatized and hissing, in the back of their intake kennel, exploding like popcorn if you open the door. The staff member who handled the intake was shaken, her hands trembling as she recounted the story.
Animal care workers like her are confronting a form of moral injury, in which they may struggle with being asked to do things that go against their consciences, or circumstances expose them to feelings of helplessness or betrayal. In open admission shelters, some are coping with the caring-killing paradox, described in 2005 in a study exploring the heavy impact of euthanasia on shelter workers, who may play with a dog in the morning and euthanize it in the afternoon. Both phenomena are associated with issues such as anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance use disorder as people struggle to process traumatic events.
The public, however, doesn’t see Sierra’s face falling as one of our permanent shelter cats, Oscar, gets sicker and sicker until the sad Friday afternoon when we have to euthanize him. Nor do they see Michael speaking animatedly on behalf of a dog with behavior issues.
“I hear about stories where shelter staff or managers get death threats because they’re euthanizing animals,” says Dr Kathleen Cooney, director of education at the Companion Animal Euthanasia Training Academy. She’s speaking to negative public attitudes about shelter workers, sometimes stereotyped as callous for the hard, dirty parts of their jobs.
Meanwhile, they experience the incredible emotional strain of “seeing the worst of the worst, the worst side of humans, having to see pets suffering”, says Jerrica Owen, executive director of the National Animal Care and Control Association (Naca), which is working to develop consistent professional standards and training in the field.
“Animal control officers are first responders,” Owen says, but ACOs don’t have the hero status of firefighters and paramedics. Instead, they’re treated like glorified janitors, ignoring the catastrophic mental health issues in the field, with animal care workers more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and experiencing high rates of burnout and so-called “compassion fatigue” because of the secondary and primary trauma they face in their work.
by SE Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Cassandra Young Photography/Courtesy Mendocino Coast Humane Society
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility
What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements. (...)
And this phenomenon has collided with another modern concern—what the writer and activist Cory Doctorow evocatively calls “enshittification.” The term speaks to a pervasive cultural sense that things are getting worse, that the digital products we use are effectively being turned against us. For example: Apart from its ad-stuffed streaming devices, Roku also offers a remote-control app for smartphones. In a Reddit post last month, a user attached a screenshot of a subtle ad module that the company inserted into the app well after launch—gently enshittifying the simple act of navigating your television screen. “Just wait until we have to sit through a 1 minute video ad before we can use the remote,” one commenter wrote. “Don’t give them any ideas,” another replied.
Part of Doctorow’s enshittification thesis involves a business-model bait and switch, where platforms attract people with nice, free features and then turn on the ad faucet. Roku fits into this framework. The company lost $44 million on its physical devices last year but made almost $1.6 billion with its ads and services products. It turns out that Roku is actually an advertising company much like, say, Google and Meta. And marketing depends on captive audiences: commercial breaks, billboards that you can’t help but see on the highway, and so on.
Elsewhere, companies have infused their devices with “digital rights management” or DRM restrictions, which halt people’s attempts to modify devices they own. I wrote last year about my HP inkjet printer, which the company remotely bricked after the credit card I used to purchase an ink-cartridge subscription expired. My printer had ink (that I’d paid for), but I couldn’t use it. It felt like extortion. Restrictive rights usage happens everywhere—with songs, movies, and audiobooks that play only on specific platforms, and with big, expensive physical tech products, such as cars. The entire concept of ownership now feels muddied. If HP can disable my printer, if Roku can shut off my television, if Tesla can change the life of my car battery remotely, are the devices I own really mine?
The answer is: not really. Or not like they used to be. The loss of meaningful ownership over our devices, combined with the general degradation of products we use every day, creates a generally bad mood for consumers, one that has started to radiate beyond the digital realm. The mass production and Amazon-ification of cheap consumer goods is different from, say, Boeing’s decline of quality in airline manufacturing allegedly in service of shareholder profits, which is different from televisions that blitz your eyeballs with jarring ads; yet these disparate things have started to feel linked—a problem that could be defined in general by mounting shamelessness from corporate entities. It is a feeling of decay, of disrespect.
In some areas, it means that quality goes down in service of higher margins; in others, it feels like being forced to expect and accept that whatever can be monetized will be, regardless of whether the consumer experience suffers. People feel this everywhere. They feel it in Hollywood, where, as the reporter Richard Rushfield recently put it, the entertainment industry is full of executives “who believe the deal is more important than the audience”—and that consumers ultimately “have no choice but to buy tickets for the latest Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious—because they always have and we own them so they’ll see what we tell them to see.” People feel it in unexpected places such as professional golf: Recently, I was surprised to read an issue of the Fried Egg Golf newsletter that compared NBC Sports’ weak PGA Tour broadcasts to the ongoing debacle at Boeing. “Is there a general lack of morale amongst people right now?” the author wrote. “Does anyone take pride in their work? Or are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs?”
These last two examples aren’t Doctorowian per se: They are merely things that people feel have gotten worse because companies assume that consumers will accept inferior products, or that they have nowhere else to go. In this sense, Doctorow’s enshittification may transcend its original, digital meaning. Like doomscrolling, it gives language to an epochal ethos. “The problem is that all of this is getting worse, not better,” Doctorow told me last year when I interviewed him about my printer-extortion debacle. He was talking about companies locking consumers into frustrating ecosystems but also about consumer dismay at large. “The last thing we want is everything to be inkjet-ified,” he said.
Doctorow’s observation, I realize, is the actual reason I and so many others online are so worked up over a theoretical patent that might not come to fruition. Needing to do a hostage negotiation with your television is annoying—enraging, even—but it is only a small indignity. Much greater is the creeping sensation that it has become standard practice for the things we buy to fail us through subtle, technological betrayals. A little surveillance here, a little forced arbitration there. Add it up, and the real problem becomes existential. It sure feels like the inkjets are winning.
by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock[ed. Our politics and financiers have cobbled together a Frankenstein monster with one singular purpose: enhancing shareholder returns. Who cares what it means for society (I think we all know, there are millions of examples). But the money machine keeps on percolating, exploiting every available niche.]
Back in the day, a TV was a TV, a commercial was a commercial, and a computer was a computer. They have now been mixed into an unholy brew by the internet and by opportunistic corporations, which have developed “automatic content recognition” systems. These collect granular data about individual watching habits and log them into databases, which are then used to serve ads or sold to interested parties, such as politicians. The slow surveillance colonization of everyday electronics was normalized by free internet services, which conditioned people to the mentality that our personal information is the actual cost of doing business: The TVs got cheaper, and now we pay with our data. Not only is this a bad deal; it fundamentally should not apply to hardware and software that people purchase with money. One Roku customer aptly summed up the frustration recently on X: “We gave up God’s light (cathode rays and phosphorus) for this.”
Part of Doctorow’s enshittification thesis involves a business-model bait and switch, where platforms attract people with nice, free features and then turn on the ad faucet. Roku fits into this framework. The company lost $44 million on its physical devices last year but made almost $1.6 billion with its ads and services products. It turns out that Roku is actually an advertising company much like, say, Google and Meta. And marketing depends on captive audiences: commercial breaks, billboards that you can’t help but see on the highway, and so on.
Elsewhere, companies have infused their devices with “digital rights management” or DRM restrictions, which halt people’s attempts to modify devices they own. I wrote last year about my HP inkjet printer, which the company remotely bricked after the credit card I used to purchase an ink-cartridge subscription expired. My printer had ink (that I’d paid for), but I couldn’t use it. It felt like extortion. Restrictive rights usage happens everywhere—with songs, movies, and audiobooks that play only on specific platforms, and with big, expensive physical tech products, such as cars. The entire concept of ownership now feels muddied. If HP can disable my printer, if Roku can shut off my television, if Tesla can change the life of my car battery remotely, are the devices I own really mine?
The answer is: not really. Or not like they used to be. The loss of meaningful ownership over our devices, combined with the general degradation of products we use every day, creates a generally bad mood for consumers, one that has started to radiate beyond the digital realm. The mass production and Amazon-ification of cheap consumer goods is different from, say, Boeing’s decline of quality in airline manufacturing allegedly in service of shareholder profits, which is different from televisions that blitz your eyeballs with jarring ads; yet these disparate things have started to feel linked—a problem that could be defined in general by mounting shamelessness from corporate entities. It is a feeling of decay, of disrespect.
In some areas, it means that quality goes down in service of higher margins; in others, it feels like being forced to expect and accept that whatever can be monetized will be, regardless of whether the consumer experience suffers. People feel this everywhere. They feel it in Hollywood, where, as the reporter Richard Rushfield recently put it, the entertainment industry is full of executives “who believe the deal is more important than the audience”—and that consumers ultimately “have no choice but to buy tickets for the latest Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious—because they always have and we own them so they’ll see what we tell them to see.” People feel it in unexpected places such as professional golf: Recently, I was surprised to read an issue of the Fried Egg Golf newsletter that compared NBC Sports’ weak PGA Tour broadcasts to the ongoing debacle at Boeing. “Is there a general lack of morale amongst people right now?” the author wrote. “Does anyone take pride in their work? Or are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs?”
These last two examples aren’t Doctorowian per se: They are merely things that people feel have gotten worse because companies assume that consumers will accept inferior products, or that they have nowhere else to go. In this sense, Doctorow’s enshittification may transcend its original, digital meaning. Like doomscrolling, it gives language to an epochal ethos. “The problem is that all of this is getting worse, not better,” Doctorow told me last year when I interviewed him about my printer-extortion debacle. He was talking about companies locking consumers into frustrating ecosystems but also about consumer dismay at large. “The last thing we want is everything to be inkjet-ified,” he said.
Doctorow’s observation, I realize, is the actual reason I and so many others online are so worked up over a theoretical patent that might not come to fruition. Needing to do a hostage negotiation with your television is annoying—enraging, even—but it is only a small indignity. Much greater is the creeping sensation that it has become standard practice for the things we buy to fail us through subtle, technological betrayals. A little surveillance here, a little forced arbitration there. Add it up, and the real problem becomes existential. It sure feels like the inkjets are winning.
by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
How many times has it happened? You’re on your computer, searching for a particular article, a hard-to-find fact, or a story you vaguely remember, and just when you seem to have discovered the exact right thing, a paywall descends. “$1 for Six Months.” “Save 40% on Year 1.” “Here’s Your Premium Digital Offer.” “Already a subscriber?” Hmm, no.
Now you’re faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it’s not even that simple. It’s a monthly or yearly subscription—“Cancel at any time.” Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?
Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call “passive” news consumers—people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.
In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a “hard paywall” in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine’s website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that “must have” publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while “nice to have” publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that “information wants to be free.” But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.
Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.
I’d argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.
Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta’s answer to X, is “not going to do anything to encourage” news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. “My take is, from a platforms’ perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes—or eye-catching conspiracy theories. (...)
Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI’s ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news—and then tailor it to users—is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they’re cheap and profitable. For now, Google’s rankings don’t appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.
The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it? [ed. Yeah...except who decides what's newsworthy?]
Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. “We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,” a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don’t have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage—and its COVID Tracking Project—freely available to all.
During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”
by Richard Stengel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I'm all for getting rid of paywalls, but with so many workaround apps they're more a nuisance than anything else. And I understand the economic reasons. See also: Is it moral to lock writing behind paywalls? (Intrinsic Perspective) - which itself is behind a paywall, but makes the short case that bookstores are paywalls in a sense too (you want to read a book, you have to pay for it). But hey, if money is more important (and necessary) than wide disemination of your ideas, go for it. I'm not judging, it's your work.]
Now you’re faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it’s not even that simple. It’s a monthly or yearly subscription—“Cancel at any time.” Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?
Or do you tell yourself—as the overwhelming number of people do—that you’ll just keep searching and see if you can find it somewhere else for free?
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. “But it stands to reason,” he said, “that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they’re more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.” (...)
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. “But it stands to reason,” he said, “that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they’re more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.” (...)
Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call “passive” news consumers—people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.
In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a “hard paywall” in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine’s website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that “must have” publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while “nice to have” publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that “information wants to be free.” But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.
Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.
I’d argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.
Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta’s answer to X, is “not going to do anything to encourage” news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. “My take is, from a platforms’ perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes—or eye-catching conspiracy theories. (...)
Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI’s ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news—and then tailor it to users—is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they’re cheap and profitable. For now, Google’s rankings don’t appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.
The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it? [ed. Yeah...except who decides what's newsworthy?]
Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. “We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,” a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don’t have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage—and its COVID Tracking Project—freely available to all.
During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”
by Richard Stengel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I'm all for getting rid of paywalls, but with so many workaround apps they're more a nuisance than anything else. And I understand the economic reasons. See also: Is it moral to lock writing behind paywalls? (Intrinsic Perspective) - which itself is behind a paywall, but makes the short case that bookstores are paywalls in a sense too (you want to read a book, you have to pay for it). But hey, if money is more important (and necessary) than wide disemination of your ideas, go for it. I'm not judging, it's your work.]
Long Bombs and Short Pitches
[ed. These guys are good, and Tiger is an encyclopedia of golf knowledge. See also: this Tiger clinic with Freddy Couples on 50 yd. pitches.]
Shohei Ohtani’s Former Translator Accused of Stealing $16 Million
On Thursday, federal prosecutors formally charged Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime translator of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, with bank fraud stemming from what is described as the theft of more than $16 million from Ohtani’s bank account to support Mizuhara’s gambling addiction. It represents the latest turn in a scandal that has engulfed baseball’s biggest star in recent weeks and offers substantial new information in a saga that has seen dramatic revelations and even more dramatic reversals.
The 37-page complaint details a yearslong pattern of theft for nearly quadruple the amount Mizuhara had previously confessed to stealing. The money was allegedly used to pay off bookmaker Mathew Bowyer, with the first payments occurring in 2021. The complaint appears to support Ohtani’s claims, made during a press conference last month, that he was unaware of the payments and did not place any bets himself; online sports gambling is illegal in California, where Ohtani and Mizuhara live. Initially, Mizuhara had claimed that Ohtani had made the payments himself on Mizuhara’s behalf.
To call Mizuhara, who was fired by the Dodgers after initial reports of the payments emerged, merely a translator doesn’t paint the full picture. Since Ohtani moved to the United States in December 2017, he and Mizuhara were rarely seen apart. In addition to performing translating duties, Mizuhara was a jack-of-all-trades personal assistant, working as Ohtani’s porter, training partner, business manager, and chauffeur; they were widely described not just as employer and employee, but as best friends. Ohtani is famously ascetic and reclusive. For years, Mizuhara functioned as something like his buffer for all things not immediately related to a baseball diamond.
It adds a complex emotional element to the fraud charge: If Ohtani’s account of what happened and the charges in the federal complaint are accurate, this represents not just a massive swindle, but also something akin to personal betrayal. The complaint suggests that Mizuhara was all too aware of this fact, stating that he texted Bowyer in the days after the first reports of the payments emerged, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”
What We Know
Prosecutors say that Mizuhara began making wagers with Bowyer in September 2021 and placed approximately 19,000 bets between December 2021 and January 2024. The total amount of money involved is staggering: The complaint says that records of Mizuhara’s wagers “reflect total winning bets of $142,256,769.74, and total losing bets of $182,935,206.68.” This means that, in all, Mizuhara is alleged to have lost more than $40 million.
The numbers suggest that Mizuhara was making wagers at a dizzying rate. Prosecutors say that he placed an average of almost 25 bets daily for an average of $320,000 per day. Winnings were deposited in Mizuhara’s personal bank account, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara paid “at least” $15 million to Bowyer via wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account. Additionally, investigators found that Mizuhara had used Ohtani’s account to pay for things other than gambling, including more than $325,000 on eBay and the shopping platform Whatnot, which the complaint says was spent on more than 1,000 collectible baseball cards that prosecutors say Mizuhara intended to resell. The bank fraud charges against Mizuhara carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison and/or a maximum fine of $1 million.
Ohtani’s Involvement—or Lack Thereof
The complaint details how Mizuhara went to extreme lengths to pose as Ohtani and then hide the proceedings from him. Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara entered Ohtani’s bank account online and changed the settings to link the account with Mizuhara’s phone number and an anonymous email account connected to Mizuhara. On multiple occasions, Mizuhara was recorded making calls to Ohtani’s bank, falsely claiming to be the player in order to authorize wire transfers, prosecutors say, including one call during which he fraudulently claimed the funds were for a car loan. Per the complaint, Mizuhara bypassed Ohtani’s security questions during another call by relaying the player’s “biographical information.”
All of this seems to address some of the biggest questions surrounding the scandal to this point: Was Ohtani, who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, aware of the gambling debts? And if so, what was his involvement?
In an interview with investigators, Ohtani said the same thing that he did in his March 27 press conference: that he first learned of the alleged theft last month, when, following an address by Mizuhara to Dodgers players in English, Mizuhara met privately with Ohtani. During their conversation, the complaint says, the translator “disclosed to Victim A”—Ohtani—“for the first time that MIZUHARA had substantial debts from illegal gambling, and that MIZUHARA had been paying his bookmaker with funds” from Ohtani’s bank account.
A Homeland Security Investigations special agent fluent in Japanese “reviewed approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between Victim A and MIZUHARA between 2020 and 2024” that contained no mention of Bowyer or his associates and no mention of “odds, wagering, or any other reference which might indicate Victim A’s knowledge of MIZUHARA’s gambling with” Bowyer. Additionally, while investigators found gambling records for Mizuhara with MGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel, none of the companies had records under Ohtani’s name, and Ohtani’s browser history “did not contain any evidence that Victim A had ever accessed the gambling websites used by” Bowyer. In all, this supports Ohtani’s account that he had no knowledge of Mizuhara’s illegal gambling or debts and that he has not been active in gambling, illegal or otherwise, himself.
Apart from allaying the concerns around Ohtani’s potential involvement in the scheme, the complaint clears up another potential headache for Major League Baseball. Prosecutors say that they have found no evidence that Mizuhara placed any bets on baseball, nipping what had the potential to become a colossal scandal for the sport in the bud.
Among the complaint’s most shocking revelations is that prosecutors say Bowyer nearly revealed the alleged theft directly to Ohtani. In November 2023, Bowyer allegedly texted Mizuhara, “Hey Ippie, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.”
This suggests that Bowyer may have been physically pursuing Ohtani, who was living in Newport Beach. Whether or not Bowyer believed that Ohtani was aware of the wire transfers, the revelation that Bowyer might have been monitoring him is creepy at best and outright threatening at worst. “You’re putting me in a position where this is going to get out of control,” Bowyer texted Mizuhara in January 2024, according to the complaint. “If I don’t hear from you by the end of the day today it’s gonna [sic] be out of my hands.”
by Claire McNear, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration
To call Mizuhara, who was fired by the Dodgers after initial reports of the payments emerged, merely a translator doesn’t paint the full picture. Since Ohtani moved to the United States in December 2017, he and Mizuhara were rarely seen apart. In addition to performing translating duties, Mizuhara was a jack-of-all-trades personal assistant, working as Ohtani’s porter, training partner, business manager, and chauffeur; they were widely described not just as employer and employee, but as best friends. Ohtani is famously ascetic and reclusive. For years, Mizuhara functioned as something like his buffer for all things not immediately related to a baseball diamond.
It adds a complex emotional element to the fraud charge: If Ohtani’s account of what happened and the charges in the federal complaint are accurate, this represents not just a massive swindle, but also something akin to personal betrayal. The complaint suggests that Mizuhara was all too aware of this fact, stating that he texted Bowyer in the days after the first reports of the payments emerged, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”
What We Know
Prosecutors say that Mizuhara began making wagers with Bowyer in September 2021 and placed approximately 19,000 bets between December 2021 and January 2024. The total amount of money involved is staggering: The complaint says that records of Mizuhara’s wagers “reflect total winning bets of $142,256,769.74, and total losing bets of $182,935,206.68.” This means that, in all, Mizuhara is alleged to have lost more than $40 million.
The numbers suggest that Mizuhara was making wagers at a dizzying rate. Prosecutors say that he placed an average of almost 25 bets daily for an average of $320,000 per day. Winnings were deposited in Mizuhara’s personal bank account, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara paid “at least” $15 million to Bowyer via wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account. Additionally, investigators found that Mizuhara had used Ohtani’s account to pay for things other than gambling, including more than $325,000 on eBay and the shopping platform Whatnot, which the complaint says was spent on more than 1,000 collectible baseball cards that prosecutors say Mizuhara intended to resell. The bank fraud charges against Mizuhara carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison and/or a maximum fine of $1 million.
Ohtani’s Involvement—or Lack Thereof
The complaint details how Mizuhara went to extreme lengths to pose as Ohtani and then hide the proceedings from him. Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara entered Ohtani’s bank account online and changed the settings to link the account with Mizuhara’s phone number and an anonymous email account connected to Mizuhara. On multiple occasions, Mizuhara was recorded making calls to Ohtani’s bank, falsely claiming to be the player in order to authorize wire transfers, prosecutors say, including one call during which he fraudulently claimed the funds were for a car loan. Per the complaint, Mizuhara bypassed Ohtani’s security questions during another call by relaying the player’s “biographical information.”
All of this seems to address some of the biggest questions surrounding the scandal to this point: Was Ohtani, who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, aware of the gambling debts? And if so, what was his involvement?
In an interview with investigators, Ohtani said the same thing that he did in his March 27 press conference: that he first learned of the alleged theft last month, when, following an address by Mizuhara to Dodgers players in English, Mizuhara met privately with Ohtani. During their conversation, the complaint says, the translator “disclosed to Victim A”—Ohtani—“for the first time that MIZUHARA had substantial debts from illegal gambling, and that MIZUHARA had been paying his bookmaker with funds” from Ohtani’s bank account.
A Homeland Security Investigations special agent fluent in Japanese “reviewed approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between Victim A and MIZUHARA between 2020 and 2024” that contained no mention of Bowyer or his associates and no mention of “odds, wagering, or any other reference which might indicate Victim A’s knowledge of MIZUHARA’s gambling with” Bowyer. Additionally, while investigators found gambling records for Mizuhara with MGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel, none of the companies had records under Ohtani’s name, and Ohtani’s browser history “did not contain any evidence that Victim A had ever accessed the gambling websites used by” Bowyer. In all, this supports Ohtani’s account that he had no knowledge of Mizuhara’s illegal gambling or debts and that he has not been active in gambling, illegal or otherwise, himself.
Apart from allaying the concerns around Ohtani’s potential involvement in the scheme, the complaint clears up another potential headache for Major League Baseball. Prosecutors say that they have found no evidence that Mizuhara placed any bets on baseball, nipping what had the potential to become a colossal scandal for the sport in the bud.
Among the complaint’s most shocking revelations is that prosecutors say Bowyer nearly revealed the alleged theft directly to Ohtani. In November 2023, Bowyer allegedly texted Mizuhara, “Hey Ippie, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.”
This suggests that Bowyer may have been physically pursuing Ohtani, who was living in Newport Beach. Whether or not Bowyer believed that Ohtani was aware of the wire transfers, the revelation that Bowyer might have been monitoring him is creepy at best and outright threatening at worst. “You’re putting me in a position where this is going to get out of control,” Bowyer texted Mizuhara in January 2024, according to the complaint. “If I don’t hear from you by the end of the day today it’s gonna [sic] be out of my hands.”
by Claire McNear, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration
Monday, April 15, 2024
They're Looting The Internet
In America, 83% of adults use YouTube, 68% of them use Facebook and 47% of them use Instagram. Each platform boasts over two billion users and, over the last three years, Meta and Google have made over half a trillion dollars in revenue from advertising on these platforms.
I now want you to go on Facebook, scroll down, and see how quickly you hit an advertisement. In my case, after one post from a friend, I was immediately hit with an advertisement for some sort of food supplement, then a series of reels, then a suggested group called "Walt Disney Magic," followed by an ad, followed by a post from a friend.
On Instagram, I saw one post from a person I followed, followed by an ad for the same food supplement, followed by two posts from people I followed, followed by another ad. When I clicked an Instagram story, I saw one post from my friend before an ad for the very same food supplement, another two posts from a friend, and then an ad for a game that features a regular trope of the genre — footage of gameplay that isn't actually in the game. (...)
by Edward Zitron, Where's Your Ed At | Read more:
I now want you to go on Facebook, scroll down, and see how quickly you hit an advertisement. In my case, after one post from a friend, I was immediately hit with an advertisement for some sort of food supplement, then a series of reels, then a suggested group called "Walt Disney Magic," followed by an ad, followed by a post from a friend.
This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. (...)
Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return. And when you really think about it, they haven't provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of (mostly) unsupported and unpaid users. The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.
Yet the state of the internet is now far simpler: the cost of using free platforms is a constant war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer "search" Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter, in its prime, succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the internet actively manufactures our experience and interactions with others.
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. (...)
Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return. And when you really think about it, they haven't provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of (mostly) unsupported and unpaid users. The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.
Yet the state of the internet is now far simpler: the cost of using free platforms is a constant war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer "search" Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter, in its prime, succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the internet actively manufactures our experience and interactions with others.
The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don't contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in "quality," just "more," making them extremely poor arbiters of what "good" looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed as a service.
by Edward Zitron, Where's Your Ed At | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Links galore. The problem has gotten so big so fast that it's almost impossible to comprehend. I'm so glad I got off of all social media over a decade ago (although I do continue to use YouTube for instruction videos, and of course Google, but trying to give DuckDuckGo a go). And it's only going to get worse: Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI (Intrinsic Perspective).]
The Mechanic
Masters 2024: Generational excellence like Scottie Scheffler's is riveting, even when it seems boring
Scottie Scheffler is different, but you can be lured, for months and years, into thinking he's the same. Same talent, same person, as a dozen others that came before. His greatness sneaks up on you, and as late into the Scheffler Era as this past Sunday, you heard people call him boring; you heard them call his win boring. I think they're wrong, insofar as you can affix a label to that type of thing, but explaining why means explaining the difference, and how that difference is generational and therefore fascinating in ways that many of us watching the back nine at Augusta felt but couldn't name.
Moment 1: This is a memory from Rory McIlroy's brief existence as a killer, from Sunday at the 2014 PGA Championship in Valhalla. He was on the verge of winning his fourth major, and at the 10th hole, a tough par 5, he was the only player to hit the green in two and the only player to make eagle—an eagle he badly needed, trailing Rickie Fowler by three. But his second shot, a 3-wood, started low and left when he intended to draw it, which McIlroy readily admits. It gave him visions of a ball he had pulled OB on the same hole, with the same club, on Thursday. This time, though, the ball had a perfect fade, and came to rest seven feet from the green. It was the most important shot of his day, and it was lucky. He was celebrated that night as a steely-eyed closer, but the approach on 10 threw a kink into the juggernaut narrative, because, in order to win, he needed a big break.
But so what? This is golf. Everybody needs a big break when it comes to winning majors. Right?
Moment 2: From the press conference of Ted Scott, caddie to Scottie Scheffler, Sunday night at the Masters: (...)
It occurs to you then that Scottie Scheffler seems to be the one person in the world right now who doesn't need a big break to win. When he's in the hunt, it's everyone else who needs the break.
And even when they get the breaks, it doesn't seem to matter.
This is what’s called generational talent, and we haven't seen it in almost 20 years. Steve Stricker read the tea leaves when he picked Scheffler for the 2021 Ryder Cup—a decision that was richly rewarded—and starting in 2022, he was off to the races. The only hiccup was a few putting woes last year, but even that only served to highlight how remarkable his ball-striking had become—instead of winning, he was finishing third. When he fixed the putting, with help from a new coach and a bit of equipment advice from Rory McIlroy, he soared yet again to the top of the game, but this time he seemed more indomitable, more inevitable, more brilliant.
The sustained success of the last three years has officially made him the best professional golfer since Tiger Woods, a conclusion supported by analytics, the eye test, and every other metric you could dream up. With fewer majors, he has nevertheless leaped past Spieth, McIlroy, and Koepka in terms of pure ability. He doesn't have their legacy, yet, but if we're talking about peak performance, he's already surpassed them.
He's so much better than everyone else, which is a sentiment that is both commonplace—I saw it on Twitter over and over again—and revelatory. It's the thing you say because there is nothing else to say. You're left with the wild truth, which words can describe but never capture.
All of which is to say, nothing about what Scheffler is doing can possibly be boring if you appreciate golf and you appreciate excellence. It doesn't matter that the back nine turned into a blowout. It doesn't matter if his personality isn't quite what you want it to be—I personally think Scheffler is much smarter and more interesting than he's given credit for, but it's also true that he fits into a mold that you could call "American golfer" better than more singular personalities like Tiger or Phil ever did. It doesn't matter if he falls back on simple explanations or if he lives a simple life; the excellence speaks for itself. It's exciting for him.
This is why the experience of watching the Masters on Sunday was—at least for me—completely riveting even in the eventual absence of competitive drama. There's something irresistible about this kind of greatness, and it doesn't depend on whatever wild charisma inhabits the soul of a Jordan Spieth or Rory McIlroy in moments of high drama. This is more like reading about the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War; there's something a little grim and attritional about it all, but there's a reason his memoirs were a massive bestseller and remain highly regarded. You can't help but feel in awe of Scheffler when he hits his competitive stride.
Nobody can tell anyone else what should be exciting to them, but if Sunday at Augusta felt dull to you—as it did to some—it might be time to recalibrate how you're watching. Scheffler has reached a level we haven't seen since the greatest player in history was at his peak, and there's no sign that he's about to stop. But of course he will stop, just like Tiger stopped, and then the moment will have passed, and if you didn't appreciate it at the time—if the jaw didn't drop, if the eyes didn't open a little wider—you won't get a second chance.
But so what? This is golf. Everybody needs a big break when it comes to winning majors. Right?
Moment 2: From the press conference of Ted Scott, caddie to Scottie Scheffler, Sunday night at the Masters: (...)
It occurs to you then that Scottie Scheffler seems to be the one person in the world right now who doesn't need a big break to win. When he's in the hunt, it's everyone else who needs the break.
And even when they get the breaks, it doesn't seem to matter.
This is what’s called generational talent, and we haven't seen it in almost 20 years. Steve Stricker read the tea leaves when he picked Scheffler for the 2021 Ryder Cup—a decision that was richly rewarded—and starting in 2022, he was off to the races. The only hiccup was a few putting woes last year, but even that only served to highlight how remarkable his ball-striking had become—instead of winning, he was finishing third. When he fixed the putting, with help from a new coach and a bit of equipment advice from Rory McIlroy, he soared yet again to the top of the game, but this time he seemed more indomitable, more inevitable, more brilliant.
The sustained success of the last three years has officially made him the best professional golfer since Tiger Woods, a conclusion supported by analytics, the eye test, and every other metric you could dream up. With fewer majors, he has nevertheless leaped past Spieth, McIlroy, and Koepka in terms of pure ability. He doesn't have their legacy, yet, but if we're talking about peak performance, he's already surpassed them.
He's so much better than everyone else, which is a sentiment that is both commonplace—I saw it on Twitter over and over again—and revelatory. It's the thing you say because there is nothing else to say. You're left with the wild truth, which words can describe but never capture.
All of which is to say, nothing about what Scheffler is doing can possibly be boring if you appreciate golf and you appreciate excellence. It doesn't matter that the back nine turned into a blowout. It doesn't matter if his personality isn't quite what you want it to be—I personally think Scheffler is much smarter and more interesting than he's given credit for, but it's also true that he fits into a mold that you could call "American golfer" better than more singular personalities like Tiger or Phil ever did. It doesn't matter if he falls back on simple explanations or if he lives a simple life; the excellence speaks for itself. It's exciting for him.
This is why the experience of watching the Masters on Sunday was—at least for me—completely riveting even in the eventual absence of competitive drama. There's something irresistible about this kind of greatness, and it doesn't depend on whatever wild charisma inhabits the soul of a Jordan Spieth or Rory McIlroy in moments of high drama. This is more like reading about the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War; there's something a little grim and attritional about it all, but there's a reason his memoirs were a massive bestseller and remain highly regarded. You can't help but feel in awe of Scheffler when he hits his competitive stride.
Nobody can tell anyone else what should be exciting to them, but if Sunday at Augusta felt dull to you—as it did to some—it might be time to recalibrate how you're watching. Scheffler has reached a level we haven't seen since the greatest player in history was at his peak, and there's no sign that he's about to stop. But of course he will stop, just like Tiger stopped, and then the moment will have passed, and if you didn't appreciate it at the time—if the jaw didn't drop, if the eyes didn't open a little wider—you won't get a second chance.
by Shane Ryan, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Ben Walton
[ed. All true, which isn't to say he's isn't golf media's worst nightmare. A vanilla kind of guy with very little outward personality, God-loving, no drama, never prone to wild insane/impossible shots that viewers will likely remember for the rest of their lives, or that inspire younger generations. Just mechanically and emotionally gifted... surgical is a term I keep coming up with. The opposite of Seve, Tiger, Phil, Rory, Jordan, et al. that made the game not only exciting and beautiful to watch, but thrilling to see from an individual perspective. See also: Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution? (The Ringer).]
"How does the PGA Tour, apparently locked in a forever cold war with LIV, market the soft-spoken Texan, who has locked down a starring role by dint of his dominance? He is, in some ways, the actualization of the earnest-man-of-the-people-with-electric-game gimmick that was affixed to Phil Mickelson and heavily promoted in Mickelson’s early career until he turned out to be a David Mamet character. Scheffler seems like a genuine everyman, unlikely to be losing bazillions in betting anytime soon.
Affable and possibly a tad oafish, Scheffler doesn’t seem like a bully. He has nothing of Tiger’s borderline psychopathy or Phil’s above-it-all swagger or Brooks Koepka’s kick-your-ass-in-the-cafeteria jock-ness. But after watching him win week after week—this makes for three wins in his past four starts—I think he might be a bully just the same. On Sundays, he’s like an anaconda that slowly suffocates its prey. He’s undemonstrative to the point of signaling inevitability. His game seems to say: “I will continue to do unbelievable things until you agree I am the winner, and then we can go back to being friends.” You could argue that’s even scarier than Tiger’s legendary mindset. We’ve seen great champions such as Rory and Jordan Spieth bubble up and win a bunch of majors and then recede to merely being amazing. Scheffler may be different."
~ Scottie Scheffler Has Become Golf’s Most Pleasant Destroyer (The Ringer)
"How does the PGA Tour, apparently locked in a forever cold war with LIV, market the soft-spoken Texan, who has locked down a starring role by dint of his dominance? He is, in some ways, the actualization of the earnest-man-of-the-people-with-electric-game gimmick that was affixed to Phil Mickelson and heavily promoted in Mickelson’s early career until he turned out to be a David Mamet character. Scheffler seems like a genuine everyman, unlikely to be losing bazillions in betting anytime soon.
Affable and possibly a tad oafish, Scheffler doesn’t seem like a bully. He has nothing of Tiger’s borderline psychopathy or Phil’s above-it-all swagger or Brooks Koepka’s kick-your-ass-in-the-cafeteria jock-ness. But after watching him win week after week—this makes for three wins in his past four starts—I think he might be a bully just the same. On Sundays, he’s like an anaconda that slowly suffocates its prey. He’s undemonstrative to the point of signaling inevitability. His game seems to say: “I will continue to do unbelievable things until you agree I am the winner, and then we can go back to being friends.” You could argue that’s even scarier than Tiger’s legendary mindset. We’ve seen great champions such as Rory and Jordan Spieth bubble up and win a bunch of majors and then recede to merely being amazing. Scheffler may be different."
~ Scottie Scheffler Has Become Golf’s Most Pleasant Destroyer (The Ringer)
Married Role-Play
The Plumber
Husband: So, what seems to be the problem, Miss?
Wife: My drain is clogged. Clogged bad.
Husband: Oh, yeah? Well, let me see if I can un-clog it.
Wife: You really think this is a job you can handle?
Husband: There's no job I can't handle.
Wife: (scoffs)
Husband: What?
Wife: I'm just thinking about the porch you've been promising to stain for literally a year now.
Husband: Jesus, what the hell does the porch have to do with this?
Wife: It has everything to do with it!
Husband: You know what, unclog your own goddamned drain!
Wife: Stain the porch!
Doctor & Patient
Wife: Hi, doctor, thanks for seeing me on such short notice.
Husband: My pleasure.
Wife: Did I put this gown on right?
Husband: Looks good to me. Real good. So, where's your pain?
Wife: In my leg.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Higher.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Higher.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Do you feel anything?
Husband: Just that you didn't shave your legs. A little effort would have been nice, Karen.
Wife: Oh, fuck you.
Wife: My drain is clogged. Clogged bad.
Husband: Oh, yeah? Well, let me see if I can un-clog it.
Wife: You really think this is a job you can handle?
Husband: There's no job I can't handle.
Wife: (scoffs)
Husband: What?
Wife: I'm just thinking about the porch you've been promising to stain for literally a year now.
Husband: Jesus, what the hell does the porch have to do with this?
Wife: It has everything to do with it!
Husband: You know what, unclog your own goddamned drain!
Wife: Stain the porch!
Doctor & Patient
Wife: Hi, doctor, thanks for seeing me on such short notice.
Husband: My pleasure.
Wife: Did I put this gown on right?
Husband: Looks good to me. Real good. So, where's your pain?
Wife: In my leg.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Higher.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Higher.
Husband: Here?
Wife: Do you feel anything?
Husband: Just that you didn't shave your legs. A little effort would have been nice, Karen.
Wife: Oh, fuck you.
Husband: Fuck you! (...)
The Pool Boy
Wife: Manuel, you must be so hot out here.
Husband: SÃ.
Wife: Want to come in for a glass of lemonade?
Husband: SÃ.
Wife: I made too much, and I'm alone in here. All alone.
Husband: SÃ.
Wife: It's only 3:15, so my kids won't be home until ... dammit! We have to pick up the kids at 3:30.
Husband: Los niños?
Wife: Stop it, Phil! We really have to pick them up.
Husband: I thought you said we had time!
Wife: Sorry if I'm the only one who pays attention to the kids' schedules.
Husband: I bought a mustache for this!
by Colin Nissan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Louis Debenham/Getty
Sunday, April 14, 2024
The Masters’ Oldest Caddie
Tommy Fleetwood hung back a little, easing his gait, the way friends do. Gray Moore shuttled along, trying to keep up, but resigned to his own speed. Sometimes it’s tough to tell which side his limp favors, right or left. The hobble sure seems painful.
It was a little after 4 o’clock on Friday. Fleetwood and Moore were completing their 26th hole of the day, up and down and around Augusta National, where the hills and slopes rise and fall and the fairways are shaped like whalebacks. It’s one of the most demanding walks in golf, but one they both know and one they’re making together this week. It was the duo’s second day in the 88th Masters Tournament, the result of circumstances no one wants but that have to be maneuvered.
Because maybe that’s what it’ll take to win.
Fleetwood, 33, has played 33 career majors. Back in 2019, when his hair was even longer, he was a 20-something with two solo runner-up major finishes. The breakthrough felt inevitable. Now it’s 2024 and everyone is still waiting, no one more so than Fleetwood, a curious player who isn’t especially long, isn’t especially strong but is obviously a world-class talent.
For the past eight years, Fleetwood has navigated professional golf with a shadow that could cover Augusta’s 14th green. His caddie, Ian Finnis, is 6 feet 6. He has arms like fire hoses and looks like he should star opposite Jason Statham. Their partnership goes back to their teenage years along the English coastline, just outside Liverpool. As a 15-year-old, Finnis caddied for Fleetwood in major amateur events like the British Amateur, the English Amateur and the Lytham Trophy. As an adult, he was the best man in Fleetwood’s wedding.
Fleetwood estimates that Finnis, known around professional golf as “Finno,” has been on his bag in all but one event in the past eight years. The lone event he missed was for the birth of a child. The partnership has survived everything but is now navigating some hard realities. Since December, Finnis has suffered complications from an illness that has finally forced him to step away. The decision was made for Finnis to return home and rest following The Players Championship in March, miss one event — last week’s Texas Open — then return for Fleetwood’s eighth career Masters appearance.
As this week arrived, though, Finnis was still home in Liverpool. The Telegraph reported he is suffering from a chest infection.
Which is why, earlier this week, Jesse “Gray” Moore strolled over to Terry Holt, a Champions Tour caddie who works for former Masters champion Mike Weir, and asked, “So am I the oldest one here or are you?” Holt laughed, eyed up Moore and said, “Well, I’m 65.”
“Welp, I got ya by a few,” Moore said.
With a gray goatee and a voice at a whisper, Moore, 70, has spent parts of 30 some-odd years at Augusta National, we think. The details are loose. Augusta National club rules restrict any and all employees from commenting on anything regarding the club, but we know for sure he looped this course for years before eventually working his way into the club’s caddie office, handling training and scheduling duties. He hasn’t walked on every blade of grass, but he at least knows how each bends.
In 2017, entering their first Masters, Fleetwood and Finnis were linked up with Moore to answer all their requisite questions and he joined them for a practice round. As the years went by, he turned into their advance scout, sharing what he knew about any changes being made to the course. Because players in the Masters field who are not former champions have to go through certain club protocols to play the course before tournament week, including needing to use one of their caddies, Fleetwood always used Moore for those early-season practice rounds while Finnis followed along.
It’s called local knowledge, and Moore has it by the barrel. He was born and raised in Augusta, growing up playing Augusta Municipal Golf Course, and later became the city course’s assistant pro. According to longtime Augusta Chronicle writer David Westin, Moore didn’t exactly give lessons but more so made sure the place stayed open.
Augusta Municipal, known locally as “The Patch,” is about 7 miles from Augusta National, out near the regional airport, across the street from American Legion Post 205, where bingo is scheduled for every Thursday. There, Ira Miller, the course general manager, said Moore is a modern throwback to another era, back when local caddies were required to be used by Masters participants. Now lionized in history, the Black caddies of Augusta National became an institution, from Jim “Big Boy” Dent to Ike “Stabber” Choice to Tommy “Burnt Biscuits” Bennett. The club controversially lifted its locals-only rule in 1982, making way for pros to bring their preferred caddies.
Moore, who is White, represents a time when the town still had its place in the tournament field.
“He’s a pretty good guy,” said Bobby “Cigarette” Jones, an 84-year-old Patch regular and former Augusta caddie in the heyday. “And he’s a good card player.”
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
[ed. Masters Sunday. Tommy's my favorite but a little too far back I think, unless he has an amazing round. We'll see. [UPDATE]: Scheffler wins again...zzzz.]
It was a little after 4 o’clock on Friday. Fleetwood and Moore were completing their 26th hole of the day, up and down and around Augusta National, where the hills and slopes rise and fall and the fairways are shaped like whalebacks. It’s one of the most demanding walks in golf, but one they both know and one they’re making together this week. It was the duo’s second day in the 88th Masters Tournament, the result of circumstances no one wants but that have to be maneuvered.
Because maybe that’s what it’ll take to win.
Fleetwood, 33, has played 33 career majors. Back in 2019, when his hair was even longer, he was a 20-something with two solo runner-up major finishes. The breakthrough felt inevitable. Now it’s 2024 and everyone is still waiting, no one more so than Fleetwood, a curious player who isn’t especially long, isn’t especially strong but is obviously a world-class talent.
Fleetwood estimates that Finnis, known around professional golf as “Finno,” has been on his bag in all but one event in the past eight years. The lone event he missed was for the birth of a child. The partnership has survived everything but is now navigating some hard realities. Since December, Finnis has suffered complications from an illness that has finally forced him to step away. The decision was made for Finnis to return home and rest following The Players Championship in March, miss one event — last week’s Texas Open — then return for Fleetwood’s eighth career Masters appearance.
As this week arrived, though, Finnis was still home in Liverpool. The Telegraph reported he is suffering from a chest infection.
Which is why, earlier this week, Jesse “Gray” Moore strolled over to Terry Holt, a Champions Tour caddie who works for former Masters champion Mike Weir, and asked, “So am I the oldest one here or are you?” Holt laughed, eyed up Moore and said, “Well, I’m 65.”
“Welp, I got ya by a few,” Moore said.
With a gray goatee and a voice at a whisper, Moore, 70, has spent parts of 30 some-odd years at Augusta National, we think. The details are loose. Augusta National club rules restrict any and all employees from commenting on anything regarding the club, but we know for sure he looped this course for years before eventually working his way into the club’s caddie office, handling training and scheduling duties. He hasn’t walked on every blade of grass, but he at least knows how each bends.
In 2017, entering their first Masters, Fleetwood and Finnis were linked up with Moore to answer all their requisite questions and he joined them for a practice round. As the years went by, he turned into their advance scout, sharing what he knew about any changes being made to the course. Because players in the Masters field who are not former champions have to go through certain club protocols to play the course before tournament week, including needing to use one of their caddies, Fleetwood always used Moore for those early-season practice rounds while Finnis followed along.
It’s called local knowledge, and Moore has it by the barrel. He was born and raised in Augusta, growing up playing Augusta Municipal Golf Course, and later became the city course’s assistant pro. According to longtime Augusta Chronicle writer David Westin, Moore didn’t exactly give lessons but more so made sure the place stayed open.
Augusta Municipal, known locally as “The Patch,” is about 7 miles from Augusta National, out near the regional airport, across the street from American Legion Post 205, where bingo is scheduled for every Thursday. There, Ira Miller, the course general manager, said Moore is a modern throwback to another era, back when local caddies were required to be used by Masters participants. Now lionized in history, the Black caddies of Augusta National became an institution, from Jim “Big Boy” Dent to Ike “Stabber” Choice to Tommy “Burnt Biscuits” Bennett. The club controversially lifted its locals-only rule in 1982, making way for pros to bring their preferred caddies.
Moore, who is White, represents a time when the town still had its place in the tournament field.
“He’s a pretty good guy,” said Bobby “Cigarette” Jones, an 84-year-old Patch regular and former Augusta caddie in the heyday. “And he’s a good card player.”
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
[ed. Masters Sunday. Tommy's my favorite but a little too far back I think, unless he has an amazing round. We'll see. [UPDATE]: Scheffler wins again...zzzz.]
Saturday, April 13, 2024
On Coming to Terms With a Near-Death Experience
I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What it’s Like to Survive.
Spring in Montana is a season of waiting, trapped in a limbo of rotten snow and inaccessible trails. It makes me feel desperate: a rare warm day followed by another sleet storm, the high-octane days of summer still impossibly far away.
In May 2019, I was crawling out of my skin. The high-elevation north-facing trails were still sheets of ice and the south-facing trails were shoe-sucking mud. I was so sick of my gym routine that I’d sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes, willing myself to go inside.
I’d moved to Montana from the northeast nearly a decade before, drawn to lofty mountains to reinvent my tame life in suburban New Hampshire. I immediately began compiling a résumé of outdoor activities: I learned to mountain bike, became a strong climber, checked peaks off my list, and worked as a horseback guide. Backcountry recreation was the social currency and my value hinged on accepting every invitation, so I did my best to learn everything.
But no matter how many skills I picked up, my struggles with asthma meant I often fell behind. I was the last one to the top of the switchbacks, watching my lean, muscled friends vanish over the ridge as I sucked air through a windpipe that felt like a crumpled straw.
I made up for those cardio challenges with an uncanny ability to reject fear. I volunteered to go first on intimidating climbing routes, humming to stay calm as I gripped miniscule edges and pressed my feet against glassy slabs of rock. I fell often, once catching my leg behind the rope and flipping upside down, my head ringing as I smashed into the wall. My belayer called up in a panic and offered to lower me, but I was already pulling myself up the rope before I’d stopped swinging. My self-worth banked on being the most fearless, camping in winter storms, grabbing the reins of the horse who had thrown me, pulling pebbles out of my knees and joking about how hard I’d hit the ground.
That frenetic activity level of summer and winter made spring’s dullness harder to bear. I craved movement in the backcountry and the social life that came with it. Kadin texted me one of those afternoons when I was flopping around the climbing gym mats delaying my workout. He was a climbing partner, decently good friend, river guide, and enough of an enigma that I wasn’t sure whether I had a crush or he just had enough mystique to seem appealing.
He asked if I had a kayak.
I responded right away. Yeah, an old river runner. You looking to get out this week?
My kayak was a 15-year-old Wave Sport Frankenstein I’d picked up at a pawn shop the year before. I’d spent that summer paddling the reservoir south of town, occasionally running a calm section of the Madison River. The boat was narrow and prone to tipping. I planned to take a roll clinic the following summer, as I was determined to gain aptitude in yet another outdoor sport—just enough to feel confident on beginner whitewater.
The section of the Gallatin River that Kadin wanted to run was near my house, easily accessible and less intimidating than anything in the canyon. Despite being an open section of water, it was still technically early-season conditions, ice cold and scattered with hazardous deadfall. I accepted the invitation immediately.
I didn’t consider whether or not I was comfortable paddling that stretch. Along with the desire to keep up with my peers, my ability to assess risk was skewed after years of narrow backcountry escapes, a well-documented phenomenon where your risk perception shifts after successfully navigating unpredictable situations. From outrunning lightning storms to losing the trail to tackling climbs well above my grade, I’d encountered plenty of tenuous scenarios and always figured it out, scraping by without too much damage.
The Adventure Experience Paradigm describes this well; it uses a simple line graphic to show the interplay of risk and competence. When the risk is low and the skills are high, the person is toward the bottom of the chart in the “realm of exploration and experimentation.” When competence and risk are balanced, the participant is in the middle, and when risk exceeds competence, the outcome can be catastrophic. The more experience someone has with navigating risky situations, the more confident they become, skewing the variables. My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination. (...)
My boat wasn’t cooperating the instant I dropped into the river. The water was too fast and unpredictable. Every time I tried to adjust course, I was buffeted by the current. I scolded myself to paddle like I knew how, but this wasn’t the type of kayaking I was used to—my reflexes were slow and instincts incorrect. My boat’s slim bow dipped and rose, and I flexed my legs against the thigh braces in an attempt to stabilize. An icy splash of water streamed down my jacket. I knew I shouldn’t be on the water.
I was desperate to be off the river but I also wasn’t in control. That realization turned into panic as I was catapulted forward in the current, glancing sidelong at the bank rushing by and knowing I didn’t have the skills to eddy out. Too much was happening too quickly. The spray skirt felt like a vise around my waist.
A wave hit me in the face and I gasped, swiping a hand across my eyes as I heard Kadin yell behind me.
“Stay to the left! Maggie, the left!” he shouted.
I turned to hear him better, and when I looked forward I had dropped into a trough and the current swept me to the right.
I blinked to clear water from my eyes and saw why Kadin had yelled to stay left. I was heading right toward a massive strainer, topped by a downed tree at head height. It was as thick as my torso, the gnarled root ball creating a dam for a jagged pile of broken logs.
I threw my arm out and collided with the tree with a sickening whack. Before I could take a breath, my boat flipped and I was underwater.
Oh no, I thought. I am in so much trouble.
It was silent underwater, yellowish-green and brighter than I would have thought. Fist-sized rocks bouncing next to my head were the only indication of how fast I was moving.
You’re moving, which means you’re not pinned against the strainer. Get air. You have to roll.
I’d never practiced rolling a kayak—the roll clinic was still on my long list of goals—but I knew to snap my hips into the side of the boat and leverage with the paddle. My boat was built to roll, but I had no muscle memory to draw from to actually execute the move. I also had no paddle—it had been ripped from my hands when I hit the tree.
I threw my hips into the side of my boat. It rocked a few inches, then settled back.
I fought panic. Try again, you need to get air.
I threw my hips harder into the side of the boat. Nothing. The effort took energy and energy took oxygen. A countdown started in my head. I only had a few minutes to get out of the boat. How long had I been underwater?
Wet exit. Pull the spray skirt.
I frantically felt for the grab loop, but I was upside down and disoriented. When I found it after wasting more precious seconds, I leaned back and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. More seconds went by. My heart started thudding more rapidly and I felt that familiar aching burn when you stay underwater too long.
A thought came into my head, momentarily paralyzing me: these might be your last few minutes.
My clumsy gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at the edges of the neoprene trapping me in the boat. As I realized I couldn’t release the spray skirt that way either, panic, regret, and sorrow flooded my brain.
Please no. Please don’t let it end like this.
This is where my brain split into two tracks running at the same time: a sadness track and an action track.
The sadness track focused on my family. My parents and three younger siblings all still lived in the Northeast. They supported me but didn’t understand my drive to keep pushing, and they continuously begged me to be careful. I thought about my mother, wracked with nerves whenever I’d casually recount another close call. I thought about my dad. His cancer had just relapsed; my family was already suffering. My drowning would destroy them.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for my family, I made a mistake and I wish I hadn’t come here and I’m sorry.
The action track said: keep trying until it’s over.
by Maggie Slepian, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Diana Robinson Photography (Getty Images)
[ed. I had something like this happen to me. My girlfriend and I were canoeing a fast water stream and hit a big sweeper broadside, immediately spilling both of us into icy cold water. The current that pushed us up against the tree's dense tangle was strong enough that we could barely move and it kept pushing us under. I held on with one arm and grabbed my gf with the other, eventually push/pulling her high enough so that she could climb up on a branch and finally pull herself up along the half submerged trunk. But she couldn't help me and I kept edging further out into the river hoping to get around the end of the submerged tree or at least find a less tangled location, but the current kept getting stronger the further out I went, and the harder it became to hang on. Finally, barely able to keep my head above water, the only option seemed to be to get under the tree and hope it wasn't tangled limbs all the way down. I exhaled one last time and let the current push me under, quickly sinking and pulling myself down along an underwater branch toward the bottom. Suddenly I felt a rock and pushed hard to get through the remaining tangle. It worked, and I popped up on the other side, eventually floating downstream to a nearby sandbar. Close call, with all the elements of ignored risk as related in this story. In fact, in Alaska, it's a pretty common cause of death - underestimating risk and overestimating abilities (otherwise, how would you know your limits?). My friend and former colleague Brad Meiklejohn with The Conservation Fund has written an excellent book covering this and other topics called The Wild Trails. Here's a conversation (YT).]
In May 2019, I was crawling out of my skin. The high-elevation north-facing trails were still sheets of ice and the south-facing trails were shoe-sucking mud. I was so sick of my gym routine that I’d sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes, willing myself to go inside.
But no matter how many skills I picked up, my struggles with asthma meant I often fell behind. I was the last one to the top of the switchbacks, watching my lean, muscled friends vanish over the ridge as I sucked air through a windpipe that felt like a crumpled straw.
I made up for those cardio challenges with an uncanny ability to reject fear. I volunteered to go first on intimidating climbing routes, humming to stay calm as I gripped miniscule edges and pressed my feet against glassy slabs of rock. I fell often, once catching my leg behind the rope and flipping upside down, my head ringing as I smashed into the wall. My belayer called up in a panic and offered to lower me, but I was already pulling myself up the rope before I’d stopped swinging. My self-worth banked on being the most fearless, camping in winter storms, grabbing the reins of the horse who had thrown me, pulling pebbles out of my knees and joking about how hard I’d hit the ground.
That frenetic activity level of summer and winter made spring’s dullness harder to bear. I craved movement in the backcountry and the social life that came with it. Kadin texted me one of those afternoons when I was flopping around the climbing gym mats delaying my workout. He was a climbing partner, decently good friend, river guide, and enough of an enigma that I wasn’t sure whether I had a crush or he just had enough mystique to seem appealing.
He asked if I had a kayak.
I responded right away. Yeah, an old river runner. You looking to get out this week?
My kayak was a 15-year-old Wave Sport Frankenstein I’d picked up at a pawn shop the year before. I’d spent that summer paddling the reservoir south of town, occasionally running a calm section of the Madison River. The boat was narrow and prone to tipping. I planned to take a roll clinic the following summer, as I was determined to gain aptitude in yet another outdoor sport—just enough to feel confident on beginner whitewater.
The section of the Gallatin River that Kadin wanted to run was near my house, easily accessible and less intimidating than anything in the canyon. Despite being an open section of water, it was still technically early-season conditions, ice cold and scattered with hazardous deadfall. I accepted the invitation immediately.
I didn’t consider whether or not I was comfortable paddling that stretch. Along with the desire to keep up with my peers, my ability to assess risk was skewed after years of narrow backcountry escapes, a well-documented phenomenon where your risk perception shifts after successfully navigating unpredictable situations. From outrunning lightning storms to losing the trail to tackling climbs well above my grade, I’d encountered plenty of tenuous scenarios and always figured it out, scraping by without too much damage.
The Adventure Experience Paradigm describes this well; it uses a simple line graphic to show the interplay of risk and competence. When the risk is low and the skills are high, the person is toward the bottom of the chart in the “realm of exploration and experimentation.” When competence and risk are balanced, the participant is in the middle, and when risk exceeds competence, the outcome can be catastrophic. The more experience someone has with navigating risky situations, the more confident they become, skewing the variables. My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination. (...)
My boat wasn’t cooperating the instant I dropped into the river. The water was too fast and unpredictable. Every time I tried to adjust course, I was buffeted by the current. I scolded myself to paddle like I knew how, but this wasn’t the type of kayaking I was used to—my reflexes were slow and instincts incorrect. My boat’s slim bow dipped and rose, and I flexed my legs against the thigh braces in an attempt to stabilize. An icy splash of water streamed down my jacket. I knew I shouldn’t be on the water.
I was desperate to be off the river but I also wasn’t in control. That realization turned into panic as I was catapulted forward in the current, glancing sidelong at the bank rushing by and knowing I didn’t have the skills to eddy out. Too much was happening too quickly. The spray skirt felt like a vise around my waist.
A wave hit me in the face and I gasped, swiping a hand across my eyes as I heard Kadin yell behind me.
“Stay to the left! Maggie, the left!” he shouted.
I turned to hear him better, and when I looked forward I had dropped into a trough and the current swept me to the right.
I blinked to clear water from my eyes and saw why Kadin had yelled to stay left. I was heading right toward a massive strainer, topped by a downed tree at head height. It was as thick as my torso, the gnarled root ball creating a dam for a jagged pile of broken logs.
I threw my arm out and collided with the tree with a sickening whack. Before I could take a breath, my boat flipped and I was underwater.
Oh no, I thought. I am in so much trouble.
It was silent underwater, yellowish-green and brighter than I would have thought. Fist-sized rocks bouncing next to my head were the only indication of how fast I was moving.
You’re moving, which means you’re not pinned against the strainer. Get air. You have to roll.
I’d never practiced rolling a kayak—the roll clinic was still on my long list of goals—but I knew to snap my hips into the side of the boat and leverage with the paddle. My boat was built to roll, but I had no muscle memory to draw from to actually execute the move. I also had no paddle—it had been ripped from my hands when I hit the tree.
I threw my hips into the side of my boat. It rocked a few inches, then settled back.
I fought panic. Try again, you need to get air.
I threw my hips harder into the side of the boat. Nothing. The effort took energy and energy took oxygen. A countdown started in my head. I only had a few minutes to get out of the boat. How long had I been underwater?
Wet exit. Pull the spray skirt.
I frantically felt for the grab loop, but I was upside down and disoriented. When I found it after wasting more precious seconds, I leaned back and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. More seconds went by. My heart started thudding more rapidly and I felt that familiar aching burn when you stay underwater too long.
A thought came into my head, momentarily paralyzing me: these might be your last few minutes.
My clumsy gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at the edges of the neoprene trapping me in the boat. As I realized I couldn’t release the spray skirt that way either, panic, regret, and sorrow flooded my brain.
Please no. Please don’t let it end like this.
This is where my brain split into two tracks running at the same time: a sadness track and an action track.
The sadness track focused on my family. My parents and three younger siblings all still lived in the Northeast. They supported me but didn’t understand my drive to keep pushing, and they continuously begged me to be careful. I thought about my mother, wracked with nerves whenever I’d casually recount another close call. I thought about my dad. His cancer had just relapsed; my family was already suffering. My drowning would destroy them.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for my family, I made a mistake and I wish I hadn’t come here and I’m sorry.
The action track said: keep trying until it’s over.
by Maggie Slepian, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Diana Robinson Photography (Getty Images)
[ed. I had something like this happen to me. My girlfriend and I were canoeing a fast water stream and hit a big sweeper broadside, immediately spilling both of us into icy cold water. The current that pushed us up against the tree's dense tangle was strong enough that we could barely move and it kept pushing us under. I held on with one arm and grabbed my gf with the other, eventually push/pulling her high enough so that she could climb up on a branch and finally pull herself up along the half submerged trunk. But she couldn't help me and I kept edging further out into the river hoping to get around the end of the submerged tree or at least find a less tangled location, but the current kept getting stronger the further out I went, and the harder it became to hang on. Finally, barely able to keep my head above water, the only option seemed to be to get under the tree and hope it wasn't tangled limbs all the way down. I exhaled one last time and let the current push me under, quickly sinking and pulling myself down along an underwater branch toward the bottom. Suddenly I felt a rock and pushed hard to get through the remaining tangle. It worked, and I popped up on the other side, eventually floating downstream to a nearby sandbar. Close call, with all the elements of ignored risk as related in this story. In fact, in Alaska, it's a pretty common cause of death - underestimating risk and overestimating abilities (otherwise, how would you know your limits?). My friend and former colleague Brad Meiklejohn with The Conservation Fund has written an excellent book covering this and other topics called The Wild Trails. Here's a conversation (YT).]
Friday, April 12, 2024
3- Body Problem TV Series: For and Against
(Warning: Spoilers below.)
[ed. There seems to be quite a stark divide among viewers of Netflix's recent tv special 3-Body Problem (and also those who've read all three volumes of the book vs. those who haven't) - FWIW: I *have* read all three and enjoyed No. 2 The Dark Forest the best. Here's my general take on the tv show: yes, they took some massive liberties with the story (like splitting one character into multiple versions, ie. the "Oxford Five". The obvious DEI involvement in casting. The unexplained shadowy government agency/entity overseeing and controlling events. The over-the-top destruction of a container ship with microscopic, indestructable nanowires, etc. You can read more below. But! I also found the show to be pretty faithful to the general theme of the books, and mostly coherent (I imagine) to anyone who hadn't read them and absorbed all the various complexities (and there are many, many complexities). In other words, I found the tv show enjoyable despite it's numerous liberties and inconsistencies. So anyway, here are a couple reviews - for and against. If you haven't seen the show and are planning to, just move along and come back later if you're still interested. This'll all make more sense then.]
For:
Against:
Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling.
First, my background: I went to technical film school, and, between the ages of 19 to 26 or so, I made it a personal mission to see *every* movie that came out in every theater in my region (first Phoenix, then L.A.). I made an exception for The Barney Movie (although I never quite felt right about deliberately breaking that streak), and certain special-interest releases (Christian propaganda, etc). After seeing a movie, I'd read professional reviewers, like Ebert, for further education. I usually wrote my own reviews on Livejournal.
In other words, while I am not a professional critic, I certainly had the viewing-and-reflection habits of a professional critic, and thus I tend to have broadly similar standards and tastes of a professional, not-ideologically-captured critic.
Which is why I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review. The choice to relocate the story from China to England had dire consequences on the believablity of a story which requires draconian government control, a China-sized government infrastructure and resources, and a culture of isolationism.
The show attempts to recreate the CCP's draconian power by imagining an unnamed British shadow agency to whom all other agencies and government officials unquestioningly defer. They are fully empowered to do CCP-esque things like send a heavily armed strike force to arrest everyone at a peaceful semi-religious gathering of 100+ people with no probable cause, to commandeer military personnel and equipment at whim, to detain people indefinitely with no probable cause, to access and monitor people's home security cameras, internet and phone communication, to straightforwardly murder 1000+ people *including children* living on a retrofitted container ship in pursuit of a MacGuffin, and do it *IN THE PANAMA CANAL*, in broad daylight, like *TEN MINUTES AFTER A CRUISE SHIP GOES BY* and surely like *TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE NEXT SHIP IS SCHEDULED TO COME ALONG,* without said large-scale murder and extremely visible carnage being noticed and investigated by the Panamanian, American, or any other government.
The issue of scale and isolationism is likewise just as absurd; I routinely laughed out loud at the scenes of a dozen British scientists formulating an elaborate nuclear powered space probe plan to gain intelligence about a coming alien invasion without any seeming awareness of, or intention to, consult with NASA, Elon Musk, the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Administration, etc about said plan. There is even a speech about how these people in the room are so very critical to future, and the show certainly seems to want the audience to believe that the future of the species depends on these people in this room, particularly our protagonist, and and no one else executing their plan.
Not until said plan was fully formed, anyway, at which point Shadow Government Guy picks up the phone and tells an American, "Hey, we have a plan and you're going to go along with it, we gotta borrow Cape Canaveral and your nuclear bombs."
There are almost as many other problems with the script as there are scenes across all the episodes. In one scene, a human who's been having phone calls with the aliens (or the aliens' AI) for decades reads the story of Little Red Riding Hood, at which point it the alien starts asking questions like, "why did Little Red Riding Hood want to get eaten by the wolf" and eventually asks enough questions that the human realizes that the aliens *don't understand the basic concept of deception,* lying, fiction, and presumably metaphor, exaggeration, figures of speech, etc. due to their form of instant psychic communication.
First, how did this not come up sooner after decades of chats? This is the very first time the human is reading the alien a work of fiction which prompts the alien to ask a couple of illuminating questions?
Second, bullshit, because the aliens (or their AI, which would of course be a reflection of their knowledge) have built an advanced video game for humans, which would require the aliens/alien AI to be capable of imagining and envisioning things that aren't real and didn't happen, and thus capable of fiction.
Third, bullshit again, because in the very first communication with the aliens, an alien tells a human, "don't try to reach out to us again, our civilization sucks," and when the human does it anyway, the next aliens are like, "hey, we're great and come in peace."
Fourth, bullshit again-again, the aliens/AI later take control of every screen on the planet to tell all humans, "YOU ARE BUGS," which stands in stark contrast to Shadow Government Guy definitively stating in one of the strategy meetings *after* this event, "we know the aliens can't lie" as an expository rule of this particular universe.
Then there are the hundreds of little details which are just wrong, like a 40 million dollar estate which includes a business and homes being liquidated and distributed into the bank account of one of its heirs within two days; the existence of a somewhat dilapidated bungalow perched in perfect isolation over a deserted beach by what sure looks like the White Cliffs of Dover, an inability to track a helicopter and a general lack of awareness about a retrofitted container ship with a 150ft satellite dish perched on its deck (is that even seaworthy for a transatlantic crossing?), an extremely high-value target in tremendous danger of assassination being escorted into the UN building through the front door and then getting shot in a bullet-proof jacket by a sniper who doesn't bother to reload and try again, despite said character being very obviously unharmed and with an unprotected head, and on and on and on.
And then there are all the other more ephemeral problems of the series; disastrously awful casting choices, laughably inept visual effects sequences, flat cinematography, a score which is somehow intrusive *and* boring at the same time, and on and on and on.
With the exception of perhaps one or two well-acted scenes and one well-written scene, the entire show is just...utter...clownshoes.
So I ask...*how?* How can anybody watch this show and not notice these glaring, unforgivable errors?
Errors which purportedly cost $20 million dollars an episode to produce?
And no, critics are not supposed to "shut their brains off and just enjoy" a given work of art; their whole job is to analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them.
"It doesn't have to be good" is never an excuse.
First, my background: I went to technical film school, and, between the ages of 19 to 26 or so, I made it a personal mission to see *every* movie that came out in every theater in my region (first Phoenix, then L.A.). I made an exception for The Barney Movie (although I never quite felt right about deliberately breaking that streak), and certain special-interest releases (Christian propaganda, etc). After seeing a movie, I'd read professional reviewers, like Ebert, for further education. I usually wrote my own reviews on Livejournal.
In other words, while I am not a professional critic, I certainly had the viewing-and-reflection habits of a professional critic, and thus I tend to have broadly similar standards and tastes of a professional, not-ideologically-captured critic.
Which is why I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review. The choice to relocate the story from China to England had dire consequences on the believablity of a story which requires draconian government control, a China-sized government infrastructure and resources, and a culture of isolationism.
The show attempts to recreate the CCP's draconian power by imagining an unnamed British shadow agency to whom all other agencies and government officials unquestioningly defer. They are fully empowered to do CCP-esque things like send a heavily armed strike force to arrest everyone at a peaceful semi-religious gathering of 100+ people with no probable cause, to commandeer military personnel and equipment at whim, to detain people indefinitely with no probable cause, to access and monitor people's home security cameras, internet and phone communication, to straightforwardly murder 1000+ people *including children* living on a retrofitted container ship in pursuit of a MacGuffin, and do it *IN THE PANAMA CANAL*, in broad daylight, like *TEN MINUTES AFTER A CRUISE SHIP GOES BY* and surely like *TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE NEXT SHIP IS SCHEDULED TO COME ALONG,* without said large-scale murder and extremely visible carnage being noticed and investigated by the Panamanian, American, or any other government.
The issue of scale and isolationism is likewise just as absurd; I routinely laughed out loud at the scenes of a dozen British scientists formulating an elaborate nuclear powered space probe plan to gain intelligence about a coming alien invasion without any seeming awareness of, or intention to, consult with NASA, Elon Musk, the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Administration, etc about said plan. There is even a speech about how these people in the room are so very critical to future, and the show certainly seems to want the audience to believe that the future of the species depends on these people in this room, particularly our protagonist, and and no one else executing their plan.
Not until said plan was fully formed, anyway, at which point Shadow Government Guy picks up the phone and tells an American, "Hey, we have a plan and you're going to go along with it, we gotta borrow Cape Canaveral and your nuclear bombs."
There are almost as many other problems with the script as there are scenes across all the episodes. In one scene, a human who's been having phone calls with the aliens (or the aliens' AI) for decades reads the story of Little Red Riding Hood, at which point it the alien starts asking questions like, "why did Little Red Riding Hood want to get eaten by the wolf" and eventually asks enough questions that the human realizes that the aliens *don't understand the basic concept of deception,* lying, fiction, and presumably metaphor, exaggeration, figures of speech, etc. due to their form of instant psychic communication.
First, how did this not come up sooner after decades of chats? This is the very first time the human is reading the alien a work of fiction which prompts the alien to ask a couple of illuminating questions?
Second, bullshit, because the aliens (or their AI, which would of course be a reflection of their knowledge) have built an advanced video game for humans, which would require the aliens/alien AI to be capable of imagining and envisioning things that aren't real and didn't happen, and thus capable of fiction.
Third, bullshit again, because in the very first communication with the aliens, an alien tells a human, "don't try to reach out to us again, our civilization sucks," and when the human does it anyway, the next aliens are like, "hey, we're great and come in peace."
Fourth, bullshit again-again, the aliens/AI later take control of every screen on the planet to tell all humans, "YOU ARE BUGS," which stands in stark contrast to Shadow Government Guy definitively stating in one of the strategy meetings *after* this event, "we know the aliens can't lie" as an expository rule of this particular universe.
Then there are the hundreds of little details which are just wrong, like a 40 million dollar estate which includes a business and homes being liquidated and distributed into the bank account of one of its heirs within two days; the existence of a somewhat dilapidated bungalow perched in perfect isolation over a deserted beach by what sure looks like the White Cliffs of Dover, an inability to track a helicopter and a general lack of awareness about a retrofitted container ship with a 150ft satellite dish perched on its deck (is that even seaworthy for a transatlantic crossing?), an extremely high-value target in tremendous danger of assassination being escorted into the UN building through the front door and then getting shot in a bullet-proof jacket by a sniper who doesn't bother to reload and try again, despite said character being very obviously unharmed and with an unprotected head, and on and on and on.
And then there are all the other more ephemeral problems of the series; disastrously awful casting choices, laughably inept visual effects sequences, flat cinematography, a score which is somehow intrusive *and* boring at the same time, and on and on and on.
With the exception of perhaps one or two well-acted scenes and one well-written scene, the entire show is just...utter...clownshoes.
So I ask...*how?* How can anybody watch this show and not notice these glaring, unforgivable errors?
Errors which purportedly cost $20 million dollars an episode to produce?
And no, critics are not supposed to "shut their brains off and just enjoy" a given work of art; their whole job is to analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them.
"It doesn't have to be good" is never an excuse.
via: Christina the StoryGirl (ACX)
Thursday, April 11, 2024
With a Strat You Can Rule the World
Celebrating its 70th birthday this spring, the Strat – or Fender Stratocaster – may now be the most recognisable musical instrument of all time. It is almost certainly the bestselling guitar, loved by legions of riffing stars. “The Strat is as sturdy and strong as a mule,” Keith Richards once said, “yet it has the elegance of a racehorse. It’s got everything you need, and that’s rare to find in anything.”
Bonnie Raitt got her first one in 1969, buying it on the street at 3am after a gig. She has played it at every one of her shows since, and it was pivotal to her 13 Grammy wins. “There’s just a tone that doesn’t happen with other guitars,” she says. “It’s all about that middle pickup – you just can’t beat it.”
Radio repair man turned inventor Leo Fender could not possibly have known what he was starting when he began designing the Strat in the early 1950s. Perhaps because he wasn’t a guitarist, he approached the design differently, with an eye on not just manufacture but also repairability. Hence the bolt-on, rather than glued-in, neck. He had hit the mark a few years earlier with the Broadcaster, later renamed the Telecaster due to a legal wrangle with rival manufacturer Gretsch. He also designed the Fender Precision bass. Both were instant successes, popular with western swing bands, but the Telecaster was and remains a slab-like, utilitarian workhorse – two pickups, no nonsense. And as much as musicians loved its sound, they often complained that its square edges dug into their ribs and banged their hip bones.
The Strat, with its neatly nipped navel and two-horned cutaways, is probably what first comes to mind when anyone hears the words “electric guitar”. Millions of players have learned on a Strat – whether made by Fender, its budget Squier imprint, or one of the numerous companies producing copies. Many others dream of owning a top-of-the-range model from the Fender custom shop, costing a five-figure sum. Then there are the secondhand Strats with one previous famous owner. The black 1969 model that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall went under the hammer for almost $4m, in aid of a climate change charity.
So what does a Strat sound like? Anything you want. You can get a taste of its range on all these tracks: Misirlou, Apache, Nowhere Man, Little Wing, Smoke on the Water, Comfortably Numb, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Last Nite, and I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.
Blues maestro Joe Bonamassa has one of the world’s largest guitar collections, including many museum-grade vintage Strats as well as the Howard Reed, the first black Strat. “Talk about Leo Fender getting it right the first time!” he says of the man whose small California company changed the world. “Very little has changed between 1954 and now,” he adds. “It’s essentially been the same guitar for 70 years.”
Indeed, there have been only a handful of alterations. In 1956, alder replaced ash for the body, while rosewood fretboards arrived in 1959. Tone knobs have changed shape, lacquer has been improved, wiring has been tinkered with and necks have morphed. But a Strat has always been a Strat.
“Fender are in a weird business,” says Bonamassa, whose favourite is his 1955 “Sunburst” Strat, nicknamed Bonnie. “Imagine being the CEO of Ford and your core business is making a car that looks the same as the one you made in the 1950s. And your customers don’t want improvements like satnav or electric engines. Guitar companies are selling nostalgia – but also something that’s timeless so it stays relevant. If you have some creativity, ingenuity and a little chutzpah, you can rule the world with a Strat.”
“My favourite term for this is ‘colouring inside the lines’. The Strat exists – and there are things you can tinker with inside that. It’s what Leo Fender did and it’s what we continue to do. What’s fascinating is that it has never become a relic. That’s down to new bands coming along and blowing up the music scene with a 70-year-old design. The Strat is reinvented with each generation.”
For all its instant recognisability today, the Strat that Fender first designed was basically a glorified Telecaster. But the arrival of designer and engineer Freddie Tavares changed that. He took inspiration from the two-horned Precision bass while adding innovative touches including the gamechanging tremolo bridge – incorrectly named since the pitch-shifting effect the short metal arm creates is actually vibrato. Three pickups and advanced switching offered greater tonal variation than almost any other guitar on the market, while curves, contours and chamfers were added in all the right places, meaning the Strat sits on the hip and clings to the body more like an item of clothing than a musical instrument. (...)
When the Stone Roses were recording their eponymous debut album in 1988, the producer John Leckie was unimpressed with the thin sound coming from John Squire’s Gretsch Country Gentleman, so rented him a Strat. “I ended up buying it,” says Squire. “It was a battered pink one – and it was a great guitar.”
Squire says he’s not a collector, although, while he’ss speaking to me by phone from his home, there are four Strats around him. His favourite is a candy apple red that can be seen in the video for Just Another Rainbow, the recent single from his collaboration with Liam Gallagher. This 2012 masterbuilt 57 reissue is “all over” their new album: Squire says if could get away with it, it would be the only guitar he’d play. “They’re like a Swiss Army Knife,” he says. “They can do everything. There’s a sound in there that reminds me of Hendrix’s less ferocious moments. I think of them like a pair of brogues – something that just doesn’t need any more refinement.” (...)
Leo Fender sold his company to media giant CBS in 1965. While collectors covet pre-takeover instruments, citing a drop in quality under CBS, the company increased sales by 30% in its first year, and 45% the year after, taking the electric guitar to dizzying new heights. After a steady decline in sales in the 1970s and 80s, though, CBS sold the firm to a group of investors, including employees in 1985. These days, Fender is largely owned by Servco Pacific. As a private company, it doesn’t release sales figures, but Norvell nods when I suggest there could be millions, possibly tens of millions, of Strats in existence. It was also reported that the pandemic years saw Fender’s best ever sales, suggesting there is still plenty of appetite for this 70-year-old classic.
[ed. Eh, not really a fan. Great guitars, just kind of generic. Glad the article mentions Freddie Tavares, the unsung Hawaiian hero responsible for many important contributions.]
Bonnie Raitt got her first one in 1969, buying it on the street at 3am after a gig. She has played it at every one of her shows since, and it was pivotal to her 13 Grammy wins. “There’s just a tone that doesn’t happen with other guitars,” she says. “It’s all about that middle pickup – you just can’t beat it.”
The Strat, with its neatly nipped navel and two-horned cutaways, is probably what first comes to mind when anyone hears the words “electric guitar”. Millions of players have learned on a Strat – whether made by Fender, its budget Squier imprint, or one of the numerous companies producing copies. Many others dream of owning a top-of-the-range model from the Fender custom shop, costing a five-figure sum. Then there are the secondhand Strats with one previous famous owner. The black 1969 model that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall went under the hammer for almost $4m, in aid of a climate change charity.
So what does a Strat sound like? Anything you want. You can get a taste of its range on all these tracks: Misirlou, Apache, Nowhere Man, Little Wing, Smoke on the Water, Comfortably Numb, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Last Nite, and I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.
Blues maestro Joe Bonamassa has one of the world’s largest guitar collections, including many museum-grade vintage Strats as well as the Howard Reed, the first black Strat. “Talk about Leo Fender getting it right the first time!” he says of the man whose small California company changed the world. “Very little has changed between 1954 and now,” he adds. “It’s essentially been the same guitar for 70 years.”
Indeed, there have been only a handful of alterations. In 1956, alder replaced ash for the body, while rosewood fretboards arrived in 1959. Tone knobs have changed shape, lacquer has been improved, wiring has been tinkered with and necks have morphed. But a Strat has always been a Strat.
“Fender are in a weird business,” says Bonamassa, whose favourite is his 1955 “Sunburst” Strat, nicknamed Bonnie. “Imagine being the CEO of Ford and your core business is making a car that looks the same as the one you made in the 1950s. And your customers don’t want improvements like satnav or electric engines. Guitar companies are selling nostalgia – but also something that’s timeless so it stays relevant. If you have some creativity, ingenuity and a little chutzpah, you can rule the world with a Strat.”
“My favourite term for this is ‘colouring inside the lines’. The Strat exists – and there are things you can tinker with inside that. It’s what Leo Fender did and it’s what we continue to do. What’s fascinating is that it has never become a relic. That’s down to new bands coming along and blowing up the music scene with a 70-year-old design. The Strat is reinvented with each generation.”
For all its instant recognisability today, the Strat that Fender first designed was basically a glorified Telecaster. But the arrival of designer and engineer Freddie Tavares changed that. He took inspiration from the two-horned Precision bass while adding innovative touches including the gamechanging tremolo bridge – incorrectly named since the pitch-shifting effect the short metal arm creates is actually vibrato. Three pickups and advanced switching offered greater tonal variation than almost any other guitar on the market, while curves, contours and chamfers were added in all the right places, meaning the Strat sits on the hip and clings to the body more like an item of clothing than a musical instrument. (...)
When the Stone Roses were recording their eponymous debut album in 1988, the producer John Leckie was unimpressed with the thin sound coming from John Squire’s Gretsch Country Gentleman, so rented him a Strat. “I ended up buying it,” says Squire. “It was a battered pink one – and it was a great guitar.”
Squire says he’s not a collector, although, while he’ss speaking to me by phone from his home, there are four Strats around him. His favourite is a candy apple red that can be seen in the video for Just Another Rainbow, the recent single from his collaboration with Liam Gallagher. This 2012 masterbuilt 57 reissue is “all over” their new album: Squire says if could get away with it, it would be the only guitar he’d play. “They’re like a Swiss Army Knife,” he says. “They can do everything. There’s a sound in there that reminds me of Hendrix’s less ferocious moments. I think of them like a pair of brogues – something that just doesn’t need any more refinement.” (...)
Leo Fender sold his company to media giant CBS in 1965. While collectors covet pre-takeover instruments, citing a drop in quality under CBS, the company increased sales by 30% in its first year, and 45% the year after, taking the electric guitar to dizzying new heights. After a steady decline in sales in the 1970s and 80s, though, CBS sold the firm to a group of investors, including employees in 1985. These days, Fender is largely owned by Servco Pacific. As a private company, it doesn’t release sales figures, but Norvell nods when I suggest there could be millions, possibly tens of millions, of Strats in existence. It was also reported that the pandemic years saw Fender’s best ever sales, suggesting there is still plenty of appetite for this 70-year-old classic.
by Andy Welch, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bonnie Raitt; Robert Knight Archive/Redferns[ed. Eh, not really a fan. Great guitars, just kind of generic. Glad the article mentions Freddie Tavares, the unsung Hawaiian hero responsible for many important contributions.]
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