second only to oil in the rankings of the world’s most valuable trading commodity—changed how the brain functions and how people think because coffee gave us coffee houses: the first public centers of malcontents, political dissent and rebellion. A natural question would be: why would coffee houses be more politically dangerous than taverns?

In the summer of 2006 I had a short career servicing and repairing espresso machines for Phoenix Coffee. (I learned a lot but, mea culpa, all did not end well.) As part of my coffee education I read Anthony Wild’s Coffee: A Dark History, arguably the bible of coffee. Wild addressed the tavern vs. coffee house question on page 55:

On the face of it, taverns and coffee houses were both potentially places where political dissent could arise, being meeting places where open debate between strangers was inevitable. However, it is the nature of coffee to clarify and order thought, and in the nature of alcohol to blur and confuse it. A tavern might generate heated discussions, but it is likely that the contents of the debate would have been forgotten by the following day.

Adam Gopnik, writing in One More Cup Of Coffee for The New Yorker, examines a book that focuses on this aspect of coffee: Shachar Pinsker’s A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture. Pinsker’s book is pointedly European, political and distinctly post 17th century. Gopnik describes the book as:

…a close empirical study of an abstract political theory. The theory, associated with the eminent German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, is that the coffeehouses and salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped lay the foundation for the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers.

Democracy, yes, but also Socialism, Communism and the revolutions that would rock the 19th and early 20th centuries. Pinsker focuses on European Jewry but, at least as far as I can tell from Gopnik’s review, does not talk about coffee’s prior influences on Judaism such as the drinks influences on the mystics of Safed. He also doesn’t seem—in discussing the creation of social spaces—how coffee houses pulled Jews out of the social space of the synagogue and into secular space. Gopnik writes:

When social spaces were created outside the direct control of the state (including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society could start to flourish in unexpected ways. This was visible in the spread of café life through European cities, Pinsker observes, in the nineteenth century and afterward. It wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government. For Jews, with their constant habit of self-expression and their distant dream of self-government, the café was an especially inviting space.

These were spaces where members of the newly created Reform stream of Judaism (as well as a growing cadre of secular/political Jews) could pass and mingle with the general population. What intrigues me is how Pinsker focuses on place, on individual cafés, like the Café Griensteidl in Vienna. Gopnik writes:

In Vienna, the Café Griensteidl proved a magnet for “malcontents and raisonneurs,” with bentwood chairs and plenty of reading light and newspapers on sticks. The still extant Café Central had an interior like a miniaturized San Marco, with hallucinatory Byzantine columns and swooping enclosing spandrels and squinches. (The fin-de-siècle modernist writer Peter Altenberg listed his address as “Vienna, First District, Café Central.”) Yet in its prime it was a “place of politics,” and crowded with émigré revolutionaries. A famous story had Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, being warned that a great war might spark a revolution in Russia. “And who will lead this revolution?” he scoffed. “Perhaps Mr. Bronshtein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronshtein took the name Leon Trotsky, and did.

For Jews, Pinsker argues, the investment in the café as a social institution was, across Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly intense. The great cafés were “thirdspaces,” neither entirely public nor entirely private; they were escape zones where, contrary to the theme from “Cheers,” people often didn’t know your name, or what shtetl you hailed from. A patriotic Polish writer could meet other Polish patriots at a Warsaw café, read the papers, make plans, share poems, or just decide to flee to Paris. A Jewish writer in the same café had first to decide just how Polish to appear, and just how Jewish to remain. This affected how he dressed and whom he sat with, but also which language he wrote in, Yiddish or Polish, and what he chose to write about as he sat there.

I earlier called Pinsker’s perspective pointedly European, but his narrative does travel west, to New York City.

[I]n New York, as café culture was exported, the model of the central café in which all kinds come together often gave way to the neighborhood café that belonged to a subsect, usually on the political left. Emma Goldman, as a young Russian immigrant, found herself at home in New York when she arrived at a Lower East Side café that was well known as an anarchist hangout. The melting pot of New York, curiously, produced the most distinct and separate crucibles, each annealing the complexities of identity into political causes. In every case, you could see your life in a single commercial space.

How different all this is in the 21st century. Did the activist that would occupy Zuccotti park first meet in coffee houses? Why do I not think that question would apply to Trumpenistas? Do Emma González and David Hogg, too young for bars, drink espressos? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tended bar, but did she hang out in coffee shops?

And dare I ask, is Starbucks—whose former chairman and billionairethinks he can run the United States of America the way he ran the ubiquitous purveyor of bad coffee adult milkshakes—the anti-café?

Bonus No. 1: When the boots wear out, will anyone be ready to listen?

Just as I have never known a world without television and my father never knew a world without radio and his father never knew a world without the phonograph, my students have not know a time when the Internet, cellphones, email and social media were not at their fingertips 24/7/365. This is their reality. Their norm.

One of my favorite thinkers and neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writing in The Machine Stops for The New Yorker, thinks about what all that might mean. He looks at another kind of digital divide:

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. [Emphasis mine, JH] Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

I don’t have to think too hard to know which half was which. Instant information is a barrier to learning. If a student can answer a question by asking Siri or Alexa, write the answer down and call their homework done, they have accessed the information but failed in gaining knowledge. That’s just now how, as Sacks can tell us, the brain works. He continues:

Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story The Machine Stops, in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology,

I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?

This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.

Me too, Oliver, me too.

Elsewhere…

Of late The New Yorker has been running a single, humor page under the banner Shouts & Murmurs. I have not been particularly impressed, but Colins Stokes’ Signs That Something Might Be Going Around the Office. Here are my top three:

Your co-workers are avoiding the drinking fountain and the vending machines. Instead, they’re stockpiling water and food under their desks and defending their stores with surprising force.

and…

Someone who says he’s from what sounds like the “Center for Febreze Control” has left a lot of strange, garbled voice mails.

and…

As a team-building activity, some of the interns have banded together to construct a blockade in the room with all the printers. They’ve also collaborated on a sign warning people not to enter if they’ve “caught the sickness.”

Bonus No. 1: There is so much that is quite dreadful so here are some things that are nice.

Libertarians are all about personal responsibility and not letting the government rob them of their hard earned cash until they need to suck at that government teat. Most famously, their darling Ayn Rand drew social security benefits and now Ralph Nader outs Kentucky’s junior senator Randal Howard Paul for much the same.

Nader, in Rand Paul’s Call—Reality vs. Rigidity, writes:

Two contemporary stories about Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) illustrate the disconnect between one’s ideology and personal experiences. Imagine a fierce opponent of regulation being saved in a crash by government-mandated seat belts and air bags and the ensuing cognitive dissonance.

In the case of Rand Paul, MD (ophthalmology) the two experiences came almost at the same time. Last month Senator Paul went to the Shouldice Hernia Continue Reading »

Writing in ENOUGH EVIDENCE—I ASK FOR A GUILTY VERDICT…, I commented on the state of affairs in Iraq following the turning of the nth corner in our game of Whack-A-Mole with ISIS. This morning I continue to delved deeper in Ben Taub’s excellent Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge for The New Yorker.

As I often am when thinking and writing about revolutionaries, I am reminded of the prophetic speech delivered by Leslie Nielsen in his role as the names sake of one of my ancestors. The Swamp Fox was right and Taub echoes the point when he writes:

The Islamic State has been mostly destroyed on the battlefield, but the war is far from over. Air strikes cannot kill an idea, and so it has fallen to Iraq’s fractured security, intelligence, and justice systems to try to finish the task. But, insofar as there is a strategy, it seems almost perfectly crafted to bring about the opposite of its intent. American and Iraqi military officials spent years planning the campaign to rid Iraq of ISIS, as if the absence of the jihadis would automatically lead Iraq toward the bright democratic future that George W. Bush’s Administration had envisaged when U.S. forces invaded the country, in 2003. But ISIS has always derived much of its dangerous appeal from the corruption and cruelty of the Iraqi state.

Cruelty and corruption have thwarted every doomed effort by the United States to be President Ronald Reagan’s shining city upon a hill…. Why would be expect the outcome to be different in the 21st century? Empire always has consequences. Just ask the Brits. In our imagined War On Terror, however, we have added a third category to Nielsen’s land, home and country: religious sectarianism. Taub continues:

Thousands of men and boys have been convicted of ISIS affiliation, and hundreds have been hanged. But, according to the senior intelligence official, these cases represent only a small fraction of the total number of detainees. “A few of the suspects are sent to court, but only to maintain the illusion that we have a justice system,” he said.

Suspects are tried under a law that makes no distinction between a person who “assists terrorists” and one who commits violent crimes on behalf of an extremist group. The conviction rate is around ninety-eight per cent. Family members of the accused rarely show up to watch the hearings, out of fear that they will be detained, too. It’s not uncommon for relatives to be rounded up by the security forces and sent to remote desert camps, where they are denied food, medical services, and access to documents. “We’re deleting thousands of families from Iraqi society,” the official told me. “This is not just revenge on ISIS. This is revenge on Sunnis.”

Nine years ago, two C.I.A. officers walked into an Iraqi prison and saw a hallway filled with hooded men, about to be executed for supposed affiliation with Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that gave birth to ISIS. “We were hammering A.Q.I., but the Iraqi government was just rounding up Sunnis,” one of the C.I.A. officers recalled. “And, for a moment, it worked.” But, instead of releasing the innocents, the Iraqi government sentenced them to death. “So, of course, they came back,” the officer said, of Al Qaeda in Iraq. “What do you expect? You literally killed their dads.”

We are no strangers to religious sectarianism. We’ve killed thousands of our own—to understand just a part, read up on your Mormon history—for that reason. Add into that mix our history of ethnic cleansing as exemplified by President Andrew Jackson ejection of Indians from lands coveted by his supporters, and you don’t have to wonder why the official line about why the people in the region hate us is that they hate our freedom.

The reality is far more grim and indefensible.

The U.S.-led coalition decided to leave open the west as a kind of escape valve; this would allow ISIS members to be picked off as they fled into the desert, toward Syria.

A year and a half after the battle, Mosul’s Old City is still in ruins, and unexploded bombs regularly kill people. Ten million tons of rubble remain.

What followed was the most intense urban combat since the Second World War. Air strikes pummelled villages and towns in Mosul’s periphery, so ISIS contracted its territory, retreating to the city, along with thousands of civilians. “They told us that the Iraqi security forces would kill the men and rape the women,” a young woman from the village of Shirqat told me. “We trusted ISIS more than the Iraqi state.” Other villagers, who had spent years awaiting liberation, were loaded onto buses at gunpoint by ISIS fighters, and packed into Mosul’s front-line neighborhoods, to be used as human shields. In the ensuing months, the jihadis murdered hundreds of people who tried to escape, and hung bodies from electrical pylons.

Taub continues in his long-read to detail the atrocities and injustices he found in the wake of the expulsion of ISIS, but this vignette, again brought me up short. He writes:

In Baghdad, the relentless pace of trials struck me as so incongruous with the lack of evidence, the certainty of convictions, and the severity of sentences that I began to wonder whether judges had access to secret intelligence reports that they weren’t sharing in court. One evening, I visited the office of Munir Haddad, a magistrate who presided over the trial of Saddam Hussein. It was a troubled proceeding—defense lawyers were assassinated, and the Prime Minister pressured judges into issuing a death sentence—but, compared with the ISIS trials, Haddad said, “I believe the process was reasonably transparent. Saddam had lawyers. Only six or seven people were executed. These days, in terrorism courts, at least twenty-five people are sentenced to death every single day.”

Haddad lit a cigarette and threw his legs over an elegant wooden chair. Ali Shimari, a handsome young lawyer, sat next to him. Haddad left the bench years ago; he and Shimari now work as a team, defending terrorism suspects whom they believe to be innocent. That morning, Shimari had sat through the same hearings that I had. “Everything that the judge saw, the lawyers saw, too,” he said. “There’s usually no evidence, just the confession.”

I asked Shimari if the arbitrary nature of the trials frustrated him. “What can I do?” he replied, shrugging. “I’m a defense lawyer. I can’t tell the judge to pay attention. You can try once or twice, but it has no effect.”

Haddad laughed. “We are not in America,” he said. “It’s not possible to argue with the judge, because if you do he’ll just take it out on your client. As a lawyer, you just have to accept the humiliation.”

I asked Haddad whether, as a former judge in Iraq’s highest-profile tribunal, he believed that judges see their role as meting out a kind of cosmic justice, even if the truth lies beyond the kinds of evidence that can plausibly be collected. “ISIS has so many victims,” he said. “There have to be convictions.”

When I read that quote, my mind flashed to Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory. Those executed were not guilty, but rather sentenced by lots because there had to be executions.

We never learn. Taub continues:

Thaer Abd Ali al-Juboori, the spokesman for the Ministry of Justice, told me much the same thing. “Human-rights groups focus on the rights of suspects, but what about the rights of the victims and their families?” he said. “We have undergone thousands of terrorist attacks. There is immense public pressure on the judicial authorities.” He continued, “9/11 left three thousand people dead. The whole world obsessed over this attack. We cried for your innocent deaths. But, here in Iraq, we have had a terrorist death toll that has exceeded that by a factor of a hundred. Where is the sympathy that we have shown to the victims of 9/11? This is what Iraqis are upset about. We fight terrorists every day, on behalf of the rest of the world. And no one cares about our suffering.”

Caring is not the issue. What is happening in Iraq is not justice, but revenge driven by rage to make somebody fucking pay, damn it! And regardless of our role in all of this, we, the American people, are being held accountable for what is done in our name. When next that revenge driven by rage strikes here we will not be able to cite our freedom as the cause.

Where does all this take us?

In some camps, humanitarian workers offer aid in exchange for sex. Many women are pregnant from having been raped by the security forces or from having sex to feed themselves and their children. Although the fighting has ended, “these camps are meant to stay,” the N.G.O. director said. “If you are ten years old now, and you have no food, no assistance, and your mother has to prostitute herself to survive, and the whole of Iraqi society blames you because you were close to ISIS—in two, three, four years, what are you going to do? It’s clear. The seeds for the next conflict are all here.”

And the beat goes on…

Bonus No. 1: Bankers are never going to be punished for their dead-eyed corruption.

Bonus No. 2: CNBC scrubs Sherrod Brown’s capitulation to Wall Street–almost.

One of my favorite recordings of classical music is the 1987 compilation of Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax playing Ludwig von Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano. The liner notes remark: With the exception of J.S. Bach’s solo sonatas, Beethoven’s five sonatas were the first significant contributions to the cello literature. But, quoth Radar O’Reilly: Ah, Bach.

This morning I’m listening to Yo-Yo’s latest recording of those Bach sonatas on his Six Revolutions CD. Alex Ross, writing in Yo-Yo Ma’s Days of Action for The New Yorker, ledes:

The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the National Cathedral. The Day of Action took place in Anacostia, the historic African-American neighborhood in southeast D.C.

What caught my attention was Ma’s demonstration of the old saw: Time flies when you’re having fun.

When you’re interested in something, time goes really quickly. When you’re bored, it goes really slowly.” He got out his cello to illustrate the point. First, he played a bit of Mark O’Connor’s wistful Appalachia Waltz. It was not what the students needed at the end of a long school day. When Ma asked, “How long did that feel?,” the skeptic answered, “Too long.” Students guessed that the piece had lasted fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five minutes. In fact, it had been a little over a minute. He then launched into the Gigue of Bach’s C-major Suite—robust, driving music that Ma brought off with his usual precision and élan. “Sounds great,” a boy wearing a hood over a cap said. It still felt long, but not as long.

This might have been the cue for Ma to sing Bach’s praises, but he never mentioned the composer’s name. Instead, he led the students in a simple meditation exercise, taking slow, deep breaths for a minute. “I get really anxious when I play sometimes,” he said. “This makes me feel a little safer.” The experiment prompted some giggling, but one student allowed that he felt better afterward. “A lot of us don’t feel safe in a lot of situations,” Ma told them. “Your breath is one thing you can control. One minute is something you can control. You don’t have to believe me. In fact, I don’t want you to believe me.” He challenged them to test his theory at home.

As Ma went on to his next destination—a town-hall meeting at the Anacostia Playhouse—he reflected on the session with the students. “I’m using music to get at something more basic,” he said. “You have to try to meet kids where they are, so they can jump up one step. I’m trying to give them a couple of tools to handle the enormous stress I know they’re under. Maybe because I am this visitor from another planet I can give them a message in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t hear. Pretty cool how they responded to the Bach, right? The guy’s still got it.”

Now that’s education.

Bonus No. 1 Fear makes us smaller, culture makes us larger…

Bonus No. 2: The immense power of saying “no” to hegemony.

Neil Cavuto did his best to keep a straight face on his Fox Business show when he interviewed Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson. He broke down, however, when his guest made the assertion that healthcare is only a temporary reprieve and that he was guaranteed eternal healthcare by Jesus. This is the ultimate, 2,000+-year-old con by the 1 Percent.

We humans occupy a specific niche in Earth’s grand ecosystem. In the taxonomy of life we are grouped in: the Kingdom, Animalia; the Phylum, Chordata; the Class, Mammalia; the Order, Primates; the Family, Hominidae; the Genus, Homo and finally, the Species, Homo Sapiens. (there is also an informal subspecies category for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but, as I’m fond of telling my students, there is no category Race.)

Mammals are known for their ability to endure excruciating pain in the short-term in order to preserve life in the long-term. Thus an animal caught in a trap may gnaw off a limb so as to escape the trap. Humans have shown—by the likes of Aron Ralston and others—that they too are capable of doing the same. What constitutes short-term and long-term is, of course, a matter of relativity. For anyone who believes in an eternal afterlife, a few score years of pain and suffering must be insignificant and protecting that eternal reward (by adhering to the rules stipulated by a religious hierarchy invested in maintaining the existing structure supporting those with the most wealth and power) would be paramount.

When those with wealth and power—like Robertson with his paltry few millions—seek to protect their earthly wealth by promising rewards after death, they are disingenuous in the extreme. To suggest that people don’t need healthcare because because of a fantasy reward is flat out evil. Robertson, of course, enjoys gold-plated healthcare. He’s in no hurry to die and pass over to his eternal reward by neglecting his temporal body.

Bonus No. 1: The Destruction of Matt Taibbi. (Via Mano Singham.)

Bonus No. 2: (Update at 1217 on 8 February) Seth Meyers takes a few shots at duck hunter as well.

While he acknowledged all the accolades and Oscar tips for Alfonso Cuarónt’s Roma upfront, Mano Singham did not enjoy the film. Mano is someone who’s opinions on culture I find dependable and much in sync with my own. That’s a big reason—with so much to read/see/listen to and so little time–why I haven’t seen the movie. (And yes, I do have Netflix.)

Back in December Mano wrote:

I found it tedious and somewhat pointless, with some scenes, such as the one where they all go to someone’s estate for Christmas, stitched together that seemed to serve no larger purpose in the narrative. I have admitted before that when it comes to films, I am definitely not in the category of a highbrow viewer and this film left me as mystified by its reputation as did Phantom Thread last year, though that was far more boring and pretentious, with its high society fashion context. At least this film had characters with whom one could empathize.

Last evening I read Anthony Lane’s Alfonso Cuarón Bears Witness to Peril with “Roma” in The New Yorker and grew intrigued. Lane points to a particular scene that he thinks is a pivotal moment dividing those who like the movie and those who don’t. He writes:

Not everyone will be seduced by “Roma,” and those who resist it will point to this crucial scene. Is it not too pat, fusing the personal crisis with a public upheaval and wringing meaning out of mere coincidence? Indeed, is the entire movie not stacked with fancy visual rhymes: the airplane high in the sky, for instance, that is mirrored in a flood of soapy water at the start and repeated in the final shot, or the two boys dressed as astronauts—the rich one, in his silvery costume, tramping through the woods, and the poor one, with a plastic bucket for a helmet, parading through a slum? And, if the echo implies that all children, whatever their social origins, are as one in their dreaming, is that not proof of the film’s political complacency? Though the mayhem outside the furniture store refers to a real event (the Corpus Christi Massacre of June, 1971, in which scores of demonstrators died), Cuarón makes no attempt to explain it, and nothing is more telling than the sight of Cleo glassed off from the scenes of revolt, as if they were beyond her comprehension. How can she, an indigenous member of the rural working class, find succor and satisfaction—even love—in fulfilling the needs of the upper bourgeoisie? Why must she kiss their kids good night?

I still haven’t seen the movie, I may watch it this week sometime, but I think I understand where Lane is taking his review. He continues:

All those charges are valid. Nothing will be fomented by the film. The bridling wrath of the underclass that we find in Italian neorealism—“I curse the day I was born,” is the hero’s cry in Bicycle Thieves (1948)—is wholly absent, and there’s not a whisper of the anarchistic mischief practiced by Buñuel in Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), in which the aging patriarch kneels down to unfasten the boots of a bored underling. Yet here’s the thing: “Roma” is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more

I fully recognize that I may hate the movie, but after reading Lane’s piece, I feel I ought to at least give Roma a chance.

Bonus No. 1: Roma, the trailer…

Bonus No. 2: #TCMthoughts–50’s America’s lost anti-rich, anti-war, anti-cop DNA.

I believe all writers have manuscripts that they never want to see the light of day, even after they’re (the writer, not the manuscript) dead. Some, like Kafka, go so far as to arrange for a close friend to collect and burn everything after they’re dead. But we can’t do the burning ourselves. We find deleting our darlings difficult enough, but burning whole manuscripts?

The horror is unimaginable!

There is a rationale for the practice, however, and in contemporary literature, I can think of no better example than Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, the book, while rejected multiple times, that would become the framework for her famous To Kill A Mockingbird. Watchman was what Charles Johnson called an apprentice novel. We all have them, we can’t burn them and we don’t want anyone to ever read them. For good reasons.

Casey Cep, writing in The Contested Legacy of Atticus Finch for The New Yorker, provides a perfect basis for the practice.

(Before I get down to Cep’s article, I must say that her first sentence—Only Jesus made his father more famous.—is one of the best I’ve read in a while.)

The contested legacy centers on who Lee’s fictional hero really was. Was he the man Lee wrote of in Mockingbird or was he the villain she wrote about—and then kept in a box—in Watchman? Cep writes:

Fictional characters walk off the page all the time, generally as cautionary tales, like Pollyanna or Walter Mitty, but Atticus has inspired legions of lawyers, been memorialized with a public sculpture, had professional-achievement awards and a nonprofit organization named after him, and been invoked admiringly by Barack Obama, who quoted one of the character’s folksy fatherisms in his farewell address as President: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

A telling point here, and one that I make time and time again to young writers, is that behind every great writers there is an even greater editor. Lee’s was Tay Hohoff. But for Hohoff, Watchman would have gathered dust and Mockingbird would have not seen the light of day.

Realistic or not, the early, overtly racist Atticus of “Watchman” was rejected by nearly every publisher that met him. Tay Hohoff, an editor at J.P. Lippincott, decided to take a chance on Lee, but encouraged her to abandon the didactic, abrasive scenes between adults and focus on the manuscript’s endearing childhood scenes. For two years, Hohoff helped Lee create “To Kill a Mockingbird”: a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist and narrator, Scout—along with Jem and their summer sidekick, Dill—learns that she has misjudged the local outcast, Boo Radley, even as others in the town misjudge Tom Robinson. The novel is set exclusively during the Great Depression, leaving the civil-rights movement to hover in its margins, never overtly clashing with any character, including Atticus.

Clearly, Lee had good reasons to follow Hohoff’s guidance and when the work was done, to see that Watchman went away. Cep continues.

Like any legal precedent, though, Atticus has faced challenges and dissents, and lately his status as a hero has seemed perilously close to being overturned. Criticisms of his accommodationist racial politics, his classism, and his sexism went mainstream a few years ago, after the publication of an earlier novel by Lee, “Go Set a Watchman,” which gave us an older Atticus, and a less admirable one: a grownup Scout came home to Alabama from New York City to find that, in his dotage, her beloved father was opposing the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and attending meetings of a white-supremacist group.

No fictional character is ever created ex nihilo. A writer can only write from what they have experienced, but the beauty of fiction is that writers are not limited by fact. We shade and twist and extrapolate and wonder what if? This is how we make sense of the world. Yes, Lee was writing about her father, but Atticus Finch was not Amasa Coleman Lee. Amasa left the starting block, but Atticus crossed the finish line.

Let this be a cautionary tale for all writers.

¹Why, you may well ask, do I used euphemism instead of pejorative (which I also really, really hate)? Because the pejorative in contention here—nigger—is both a pejorative and a euphemism. Nigger is (as are all pejoratives) a euphemism for nothing.

On the topic of euphemisms: I hate them. I hate them because, like George Carlin, I think they hide the truth. Also, like Professor Phillip Adamo, I think that some words carry such heavy baggage that they out not to be used, but they can be mentioned.

Adamo was suspended from his job teaching history at Augsburg University because, in an Honors class where he discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, nigger raised its ugly head. According to Colleen Flaherty, writing in Too Taboo for Class? for Inside Higher Ed,

Bonus No. 1: Then there’s Lenny Bruce. along with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.

Bonus No. 2: Yes, Cameo is a thing.

Bonus No. 3: From Ross Perot to Brexit–via ignored swastikas.

When I first began writing Absent Son, my historical novel set in Charleston, South Carolina following the American Civil War, I made the decision—with the help of John Gregory Brown—to write the novel as a 19th century novel. That made the task harder, but in the end, more satisfying. To that end I have been reading as much writing from the period as I can find.

One such is Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Edward Davidson. Why Poe?

I had three reasons for selecting Poe. First, I was woefully unread in his works. Second, one of my favorite students, when asked to suggest authors for another student to read, put Poe at the top of his list and the third reached back to my own high school years when for a few months I was an old-school movie usher for Marietta’s Colony Theater where I saw the same movies once a night for four nights and then three or four times each on Saturday and Sunday with cartoons and occasionally a short before the feature.

The short before one movie (I think it might have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was a recitation of Poe’s Annabel Lee. I think that was the first time I ever heard a poem professionally recited. The experience—especially repeated more than a dozen times—was enlightening.

The first poem in Davidson’s book is Tamerlane.

Kind solace in a dying hour!
    Such, father, is not (now) my theme—
I will not madly deem that power
        Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
        Unearthly pride hath revell’d in—
    I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can k hope—Oh God! I can—
    Its fount is holier—more divine—
I would not call thee fool, old man,
    But such is not a gift of thine.

Know thou the secret of a spirit
    Bow’d from its wild pride into shame.
O! yearning heart! I did inherit
    Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again—
O! craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
Th’ undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness—a knell.

I have not always been as now:
The fever’d diadem on my brow
    I claim’d and won usurpingly—
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
    Rome to the Caesar—this to me?
        The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
        Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
    The mists of the Taglay¹ have shed
    Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven—that dew—it fell
    (Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me—with the touch of Hell,
    While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,
    Appeared to my half-closing eye
    The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar
    Came hurriedly upon me, telling
        Of human battle, where my voice,
    My own voice, silly child!—was swelling
        (O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

The rain came down upon my head
    Unshelter’d—and the heavy wind
    Was giantlike—so thou, my mind!—
It was but man, I thought, who shed
    Laurels upon me: and the rush—
The torrent of the chilly air
Gurgled within my ear the crush
    Of empires—with the captive’s prayer—
The hum of suiters—and the tone
Of flattery ‘round a sovereign’s throne.

My passions, from that hapless hour,
    Usurp’d a tyranny which men
Have deem’d, since I have reach’d to power;
        My innate nature—be it so:
    But, father, there liv’d one who, then,
Then—in my boyhood—when their fire
        Burn’d with a still intenser glow,
(For passion must, with youth, expire)
    E’en then who knew this iron heart
    In woman’s weakness had a part.

I have no words—alas!—to tell
The loveliness of loving well!
Nor would I now attempt to trace
The more than beauty of a face
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,
Are—shadows on th’ unstable wind:
Thus I remember having dwelt
Some page of early lore upon,
With loitering eye, till I have felt
The letters—with their meaning—melt
To fantasies—with none.

O, she was worthy of all love!
Love—as in infancy was mine—
‘Twas such as angel minds above
Might envy; her young heart the shrine
On which my ev’ry hope and thought
    Were incense—then a goodly gift,
        For they were childish—and upright—
Pure—as her young example taught:
    Why did I leave it, and, adrift,
        Trust to the fire within, for light?

We grew in age—and love—together,
    Roaming the forest, and the wild;
My breast her shield in wintry weather—
    And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d,
And she would mark the opening skies,
I saw no Heaven—but in her eyes.

Young Love’s first lesson is—the heart:
    For ‘mid that sunshine, and those smiles,
When, from our little cares apart,
    And laughing at her girlish wiles,
I’d throw me on her throbbing breast,
    And pour my spirit out in tears—
There was no need to speak the rest—
    No need to quiet any fears
Of her—who ask’d no reason why,
But turn’d on me her quiet eye!

Yet more than worthy of the love
My spirit struggled with, and strove,
When, on the mountain peak, alone,
Ambition lent it a new tone—
I had no being—but in thee:
    The world, and all it did contain
In the earth—the air—the sea—
    Its joy—its little lot of pain
That was new pleasure—the ideal,
    Dim, vanities of dreams by night—
And dimmer nothings which were real—
    (Shadows—and a more shadowy light!)
Parted upon their misty wings,
        And, so, confusedly, became
        Thine image, and—a name—a name!
Two separate—yet most intimate things.

I was ambitious—have you known
        The passion, father? You have not:
A cottager, I mark’d a throne
Of half the world as all my own,
        And murmur’d at such lowly lot—
But, just like any other dream,
        Upon the vapour of the dew
My own had past, did not the beam
        Of beauty which did while it thro’
The minute—the hour—the day—oppress
My mind with double loveliness.

We walk’d together on the crown
Of a high mountain which look’d down
Afar from its proud natural towers
    Of rock and forest, on the hills—
The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers
    And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,
    But mystically—in such guise
That she might deem it nought beside
    The moment’s converse; in her eyes
I read, perhaps too carelessly—
    A mingled feeling with my own—
The flush on her bright cheek, to me
    Seem’d to become a queenly throne
Too well that I should let it be
    Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapp’d myself in grandeur then,
    And donn’d a visionary crown—
        Yet it was not that Fantasy
        Had thrown her mantle over me—
But that, among the rabble—men,
        Lion ambition is chain’d down—
And crouches to a keeper’s hand—
Not so in deserts where the grand
The wild—the terrible conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look ‘round thee now on Samarcand!²—
    Is not she queen of Earth? her pride
Above all cities? in her hand
    Their destinies? in all beside
Of glory which the world hath known
Stands she not nobly and alone?
Falling—her veriest stepping-stone
Shall form the pedestal of a throne—
And who her sovereign? Timour—he
    Whom the astonished people saw
Striding o’er empires haughtily
    A diadem’d outlaw—

O! human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
Which fall’st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc wither’d³ plain,
And failing in thy power to bless
But leav’st the heart a wilderness!
Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound
And beauty of so wild a birth—
Farewell! for I have won the Earth!

When Hope, the eagle that tower’d, could see
    No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly—
    And homeward turn’d his soften’d eye.
‘Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev’ning mist,
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits hearken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.

What tho’ the moon—the white moon
Shed all the splendour of her noon,
Her smile is chilly—and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one—
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown—
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty—which is all.

I reach’d my home—my home no more—
    For all had flown who made it so—
I pass’d from out its mossy door,
    And, tho’ my tread was soft and low,
A voice came from the threshold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known—
    O! I defy thee, Hell, to show
    On beds of fire that burn below,
    A humbler heart—a deeper wo—

Father, I firmly do believe—
    I know—for Death, who comes for me
        From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
        Hath left his iron gate ajar,
    And rays of truth you cannot see
    Are flashing thro’ Eternity—
I do believe that Eblis⁴ hath
A snare in ev’ry human path—
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trelliced rays from Heaven
No mote may shun—no tiniest fly
The light’ning of his eagle eye—
How was it that Ambition crept,
    Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
    In the tangles of Love’s very hair?

¹The mountains of Belur Taglay are a branch of the Immaus, in the southern part of Independent Tartary.
²After the battle of Angoria that Tamerlane made Samarcand his residence. It became for a time the seat of learning and the arts.
³A hot dust-laden wind from the Libyan deserts that blows on the northern Mediterranean coast chiefly in Italy, Malta, and Sicily.
⁴Satan.

Bonus No. 1: If you prefer, you can listen to the poem.
Bonus No. 2: Why Finland has the best education system in the world.
Bonus No. 3: I am the canary in Sherrod Brown’s cage.

That the Russians in 2013 could record a video of a future President of the United States watching Russian prostitutes urinate on the bed once shared by the then President and his wife, would not have given George Orwell pause. Even in 1948, the KGB, the secret police of the Soviet Union, routinely photographed, recorded, filmed and followed visiting dignitaries.

Orwell’s prophetic masterwork, 1984, grips the minds of those paying attention 70 years after the books publication and 34 years past the title’s sell-by date. Yet, we pay less and less attention. So much so that in 1984—the year I graduated from college—Orwell’s Big Brother made an appearance in a Superbowl commercial that was meant to disprove Orwell but has had (especially in light of the latest revelation about Apple’s iPhone) the opposite result.

Edward Snowden showed us around the time of the yellow rain in Moscow, that our devices were following, listening and watching us more than we were listening and watching them. Five years later, not much has changed except our devices have become exponentially better at keeping tabs on us and we’re doing little to rein them in. In his book, Orwell set the stage this way:

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

And the whole plot hangs on a bit of archtechural abnormality that allows Winston Smith to believe he’s exempt.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

David Owen, writing in Should We Be Worried About Computerized Facial Recognition? for The New Yorker, starts out in a happy place talking about dairy cows in Ireland—I do love me some Kerrygold Irish butter—but four pages in goes dark. At one point, Owen loops through the Appleverse:

In October, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, while speaking at a privacy conference in Brussels, said, “Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

How different that view is from the 1984 commercial. Cook has reason to sound a warning, even when his company is a culpable in all this.

In 2012, the New York Police Department implemented what it calls the Domain Awareness System, which it developed in partnership with Microsoft (and from which it earns a royalty when other cities adopt it). The system uses thousands of public-facing surveillance cameras, including many owned by private businesses. One afternoon in September, I sat on a bench in front of One Police Plaza, the N.Y.P.D.’s headquarters, with Clare Garvie, who is a senior associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology, at Georgetown Law School, in Washington. From where we were sitting, I could see two cops in a brick security booth. Like most bored people nowadays, they were staring at their phones, but their inattention didn’t matter, because the plaza was being watched by a dozen or so building-mounted cameras, most of which looked like larger versions of the ones that Cainthus uses on cows: dark domes that resembled light fixtures. I asked Garvie what the police were doing with whatever the cameras were recording, and she said there was no way to know.

I would strongly suggest that we do know this: that whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing it to make us safer. Owen continues.

“The N.Y.P.D. has resisted our efforts to get any information about their technology,” she said. It was only after the center sued the department that it began to receive documents that it had initially requested more than two years earlier. By contrast, San Diego publishes reports on the facial-recognition system used by its police and holds public meetings about it. Last year, the Seattle City Council passed a comprehensive ordinance requiring disclosure of the city’s surveillance technologies; this year, it voted to physically dismantle a network of video cameras and cell-phone trackers, installed in 2013, that was like a smaller version of the Domain Awareness System. But most big cities don’t reveal much about what they’re up to, and no federal law requires them to do so. Chicago and Los Angeles are as secretive as New York, and have put off attempts by Garvie’s group, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations to learn more.

Garvie is thirty-one. She majored in political science and human rights at Barnard, earned a law degree at Georgetown, and stayed on, after graduation, as a law fellow. In 2016, she was the lead author of The Perpetual Line-?Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, a study whose title refers to the fact that many states allow police departments to search their databases of mug shots and driver’s-license photos. Garvie doesn’t doubt that facial recognition has legitimate uses in law enforcement, just as wiretaps and personal searches do. But misuse is inevitable. “Right now, quite literally, there’s no such thing as face-recognition abuse, in one sense, because there are really no laws governing its use by police,” she said. If your face appears in an accessible database, as it probably does, you’re effectively a suspect every time it’s searched.

Back in the Spring of 1984, when I was editor of what become the Fall issue of Athens magazine (now Southeast Ohio Magazine) the dean of my college nearly shredded the whole press run because we printed a photo of a professor who was arrested during Ohio Universities annual Halloween Bacchanalia. Cooler heads prevailed and the issue was distributed, but I mention this just because journalists have been dealing with the mugshot issue for decades. Digital photography and the Internet have changed that game, but there are solution out there.

Garvie and her colleagues have written a fourteen-page model bill intended to regulate the use of facial-recognition technology in law enforcement. Among many other things, it would require the custodians of arrest-photo databases to regularly purge images of people who are not later convicted of whatever act it was that prompted their arrest. Their first version of the bill was published in 2016; no legislature has adopted it.

Compare that track record to that of ALEC. We are not, so far, winning this fight because the technology is too valuable to those at the top.

Faces, unlike fingerprints or iris patterns, can easily be recorded without the knowledge of the people they belong to, and that means that facial recognition can be used for remote surveillance. “We would be horrified if law-enforcement agents were to walk through a protest demanding that everybody show their identification,” Garvie said. “Yet that’s what face recognition enables.” Computer-vision systems potentially allow cops and employers to track behaviors and activities that are none of their business, such as where you hang out after work, which fund-raisers you attend, and what that slight tremor in your hand (recorded by the camera in the elevator that you ride to your office every morning) portends about the size of your future medical claims.

Orwellian enough for you? Owen concludes:

A man who helped to develop the N.Y.P.D.’s facial-recognition system has said that when he was with the police department he enhanced surveillance photos by, for example, using Photoshop to replace suspects’ closed eyes with other people’s open eyes, creating what he once called “a second opportunity to return a match.” Garvie told me, “Eyes are incredibly important to a face identification, and here they were using someone else’s. It’s like taking half of a latent fingerprint and drawing in the rest.”

Both Garvie and Buolamwini believe that some uses, such as the incorporation of real-time facial identification into police body cameras, should be banned entirely. Body cams have generally been viewed as a valuable check on violence by cops—and as a backup for cops who’ve been wrongly accused—but the dangers are huge, they said. Garvie told me, “In most face-recognition systems that exist today, there is a human analyst somewhere who is given time to look at the photos and determine whether they represent a similar individual. But with body cams the technology itself becomes the final arbiter. An alert goes into a headset or a mobile device, and an officer with a gun has a moment to decide whether or not there is a threat to public safety.” Last year, Axon—the leading manufacturer of body cams, formerly known as Taser International—bought Dextro and Misfit, two startups in computer vision and artificial intelligence. In April, the Algorithmic Justice League and the Center on Privacy and Technology were among the signers of an open letter to Axon’s artificial-intelligence ethics board, urging, among other things, that the company not include real-time facial recognition in its body cams. Buolamwini told me, “Decisions to end lives are too precarious to be left to artificial intelligence. And, given what we know about the current state of the technology, it’s absolutely irresponsible.”

Ya think?

Here’s a simple action—one I’m taking this morning—forward the link to The Center on Privacy & Technology’s model legislation to: your state’s Congressional delagation (two senators and one representative) and the your governor, attorney general, state senator and state representative. Ask them why no one is championing this legislation. This is the email I sent to senators Brown and Portman, Rep. Gonzalez, Gov. Dewine, AG , Ohio Sen. Dolan and Ohio Rep. Patton. (Please note the Brown is the only Democrat on that list.)

Good morning,

Control of our technology and our rights to privacy are slipping away as further evidenced by the revelation of Apple’s Face Time bug.

I write this morning to encourage you to consider this Model Face Recognition Legislation (https://www.perpetuallineup.org/model-legislation) from the Center on Privacy and Technology, at Georgetown Law School.

Thank you for your time.

Jeff Hess

Let me know in the comments if you hear anything back.

Bonus No. 1: Can you spot the danger?

Bonus No. 2: No we don’t.

January was not a good month for President Donald John Trump. He got put in his place—albeit, only momentarily—by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and now faces a looming deadline on 15 February that he will have great difficulty dodging. The House of Representatives seems to be on a high, but I don’t think this is a time to cut them any slack.

Ralph Nader agrees and reminds us of his 12-points published at the beginning of the 116th Congress. Nader, in Demand Critical Congressional Hearings–Long Overdue, Avoided or Blocked, writes:

Earlier this month I wrote a column listing twelve major redirections or reforms that most people want for our country (see: “It’s Your Congress, People!” Make it work for you!). All of which require action by Congress—the gate-keeper. Now Congress must hold informative and investigative public hearings to inform the media and to alert and empower the people.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office explains a Congressional Hearing as follows:

“A hearing is a meeting or session of a Senate, House, joint, or special committee of Congress, usually open to the public, to obtain information and opinions on proposed legislation, conduct an investigation, or evaluate/oversee the activities of a government department or the implementation of a Federal law. In addition Continue Reading »

If you took Psychology 101 in college, you remember the five stages of grief and the five levels in the hierarchy of needs. (The reason for five in each is another discussion.) Everything else is a gauzy haze befitting all 101 classes. Both theories play a major role in understanding the visceral fight over climate change. The first applies to the fossil-fuel industry

The second pertains to the the 99.99 percent of humanity struggling—oddly seen in the government workers here in the United States frequenting food pantries during our recent shutdown—to get by. Elizabeth Kolbert reporting in Coal for Christmas at the U.N. Climate Conference for The New Yorker touched a nerve when, in the middle of her piece, she wrote:

…just as the session in Katowice was getting under way, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, suspended plans to raise that nation’s gasoline and diesel-fuel taxes. The increase had been intended to speed the transition to cleaner cars; the postponement came in response to violent protests by the so-called “yellow vest” movement. Demonstrators complained that Macron was worried about the end of the world, while they were worried about the end of the month. [Emphasis mine. JH]

The Trump Administration, meanwhile, has already made plain its intention of undermining the whole [Conference Of the Parties] process. Last week, the Administration basically flipped off negotiators in Poland by unveiling not one but two new schemes for promoting fossil-fuel use. The first was a proposed rollback of an Obama-era rule that effectively blocked new construction of coal-fired power plants. (The rollback was presented by the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist.) The second was a plan to open some nine million acres of public lands in Western states to oil and gas drilling by sweeping aside protections for the greater sage grouse. Environmentalists—justifiably—labelled this move a “giveaway” to the fossil-fuel industry. As the Times noted, it would “open more land to drilling than any other step the administration has taken.”

Ironically, the actions of both presidents were interpreted by their national majorities as directly opposite of their intents. In the first case, French citizens were focused on the next 30 days and not on the next 30 years. In the second case, American citizens think that the president did what he did to keep their gas prices low, not to put more money in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry.

In both cases, as long as most people live, at most, at Level Two—safety needs, security—on Maslow’s pyramid, they won’t have energy to think past the next paycheck. I have to wonder if this is the real reason that the 1 Percent fight so vehemently against Socialist Principles: they fear that once the peasants move upward on the pyramid that the Phrygian caps will come out that the tumbrels will roll.

Another pyramid issue that has come to the fore since the rise of Black Lives Matter and the heroic actions of Colin Kaepernick is the current third wave of civil rights protests. Superbowl LIII has been politicized, in no small part, because of these protests and the role that the city hosting the game, Atlanta, plays in the mythos of African American history and culture.

Louisa Thomas, reporting in Michael Bennett’s Political Football, goes back to the beginning of the season to set the stage.

When “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before the first game of the 2018 N.F.L. season, between the Atlanta Falcons and the Philadelphia Eagles, the defending champions, in September, Michael Bennett knew that he was being watched. Football fans, and sportswriters, were waiting to see if the narrative of another year would be dominated not by division rivalries but by the debate over players who protested racial inequality during the national anthem.

What Bennett did that day, and why he chose that action, is history now, but the pyramid issue and the access to the highest levels of the pyramid, roll on.

Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who had begun the protests, in 2016, was the star of a new Nike commercial that was set to air during the game. (The tagline: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”) But Kaepernick had been out of the league since the end of that season—he has sued the owners, alleging collusion—and, Nike campaign aside, rarely spoke publicly. Bennett, a defensive end for the Eagles, was one of the most recognizable players to keep the protests going in his absence.

What pisses (mostly white) people off about the protests is that they buy into the trope that only politicians—and people like themselves—are allowed to have political opinions. Movie, television and sports stars should shut the fuck up and just do what they’re paid to do: provide entertainment. Gawd forbid that a provocateur like Bennett should speak out. Thomas continues:

Bennett has always been candid about politics. In 2015, after his teammate Richard Sherman critiqued the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, Bennett, unprompted, politely detailed his disagreements with Sherman at a press conference the next day. He wrote a statement expressing solidarity with the women’s strike on International Women’s Day; he is an avid reader of the academic and activist Angela Davis. [Later in the article, Thomas wrote:

Bennett lingered in front of his locker, which was filled with a messy pile of cleats and stacked with books: The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by the sociologist Harry Edwards, who has advised Kaepernick; Soul of a Citizen, by the activist Paul Rogat Loeb. He gave Chris Long, whose locker was now next to his, his copy of Martin Buber’s Good and Evil.]

But, in the year since he began protesting, in August, 2017, the political has become increasingly personal, and he has been reminded what it can mean to be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. That month, he was handcuffed in Las Vegas by police officers with weapons drawn, during what the officers believed was an active-shooter situation—an instance, Bennett maintains, of racial profiling. A few weeks later, a doctored photograph that had Bennett dancing in the Seahawks’ locker room with a burning American flag went viral. In March, he was indicted on a felony charge for allegedly pushing an elderly woman as he made his way onto the field after the 2017 Super Bowl, an accusation that he emphatically denies. In April, he published a memoir, called Things That Make White People Uncomfortable….

The Kirkus review of the book begins: An outspoken activist athlete practically dares readers to think of professional football and its players in the same way again after finishing this book.

I wouldn’t take that dare.

Bonus No. 1: The key to winning victories against big oil? Perseverance.

Bonus No. 2: Deaf Lives Matter with Nyle DiMarco.

Bonus No. 3: Captain America Quits in Protest in New Marvel Comic.

This is a story of hope and magic and venal greed for power. What cynically began as a project to help wounded warriors became a march to wound even more. Raffi Khatchadourian, writing in How to Control a Machine with Your Brain for The New Yorker, explains through the experiences of Andrew Schwartz, and Jan Scheuermann.

Schwartz is a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Scheuermann has been paralyzed from the neck down for 18 years as a result of spinocerebellar degeneration, a rare ailment that ruins lines of communication between the brain and the spine.

There is a tremendous amount of background text in first seven pages of Khatchadourian’s piece, but I want to leap ahead to the eighth page where he describes Scheuermann’s transformation:

Schwartz met Scheuermann only briefly in the early interviews. The project for Revolutionizing Prosthetics involved a large team, including postdocs, a neurosurgeon, and experts on assistive technology. He was close to achieving a career-long ambition, but he was too preoccupied with the details to dwell on it. “Think about going to the moon,” he told me. “You have all these guys worried about scheduling and mechanics. You are more concerned with the minutiae, how everything is going to fit together.” The transition to human trials had brought many unknowns—from new equipment and more complex surgery to the inexperience of the researchers who had joined him. He said, “We had no guarantee we had the skill and capability to get this to work in a human.”

In February, 2012, after months of preparation, Scheuermann was ushered into a hospital room to be prepped for surgery. “Several people greeted me, and I’m sure that behind their masks, they were smiling,” she later recalled. “But I could not see their smiles; I could only see bright lights, gowned and masked figures, and trays of medical equipment. The solemnity of what was about to happen finally hit me.”

The successful implantation of a Utah array requires tremendous precision. After lasers were used to make a 3-D scan of Scheuermann’s head, a location was marked; part of her scalp was shaved, and the neurosurgeon—Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, who had operated on Schwartz’s animals—cut back a flap of skin. With a drill, she began to cut around the site. Bone shavings piled up around the bit, like snow.

While the surgeon opened Scheuermann’s skull, the Utah arrays were kept on a tray nearby. They were four millimetres square—no wider than a “W” on this page—and manufactured from a block of silicon that had been sliced, chemically treated, and then etched in acid, until the surface resembled a minuscule bed of nails. Each studded square had been shipped to Pittsburgh with its pedestal, made from titanium: the plug port that would be mounted atop Scheuermann’s head. They were tethered together by a cable of ninety-six gold wires, one for each electrode.

Tyler-Kabara carried over a set, and carefully screwed the pedestal into the skull, while the array hung from a ball of beeswax mounted on Scheuermann’s scalp. Once the pedestal was attached, she placed the array face down on the naked cortex, with the microelectrodes poised to penetrate the brain. To push it in by hand risked damaging the tissue or misdirecting the device; a ballistic entry was necessary. A pneumatic injector the shape of a wand was positioned precisely atop the implant. With a forceful blast, it would shoot the array in at twenty-five miles per hour. The shot had to be timed to Scheuermann’s respiration. With each breath, her brain was rising and falling, as it floated in the shifting spinal fluid in her skull, and it was crucial to implant when the cortex rose to maximum height.

Tyler-Kabara asked one of the Pittsburgh researchers on the Revolutionizing Prosthetics team to press the button. Everyone paused, to internalize the rhythm of Scheuermann’s brain movements. Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

[snip]

The following morning, the pain subsided, and she asked for a handheld mirror, so she could see herself. Protruding from the top of her head were the two pedestals: cylinders reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster, each the diameter of a quarter, and capped to prevent moisture from getting into the contact points. Scheuermann vowed to embrace them. She told herself they were instruments of exploration, and named them Lewis and Clark.

Don’t worry about the terms in the above. You should read the whole piece to grasp the technical details. I focused on the human right now.

As Scheuermann and Schwartz entered the testing phase of Lewis and Clark, two bits leapt out at me. First:

When we observe an action, our brains often respond to the behavior as if it were our own: if you watch a person use a screwdriver, some of the neurons in your motor cortex will appear to fire as if you were driving in the screw. (The motor cortex is often very active when we read. [Emphasis mine, JH])

And, second:

With training, a person can gain volitional control over the firing of a single neuron to accomplish a goal.

Clearly, the Bene Gesserit (see Page 6: #2 Know thyself) know what they are talking about.

Two pages later, Khatchadourian begins to reveal the dark side:

In the nineteen-sixties, José Delgado, a Spanish neuroscientist at Yale University, had designed a radio-controlled electrode that could be implanted deep inside an animal’s brain. With conditioning, Delgado found, the probe could be used to diminish aggressive behavior in monkeys. In 1964, he travelled to Spain and implanted his electrode in a bull; then, theatrically, he faced down the animal in a bullfighting arena, with nothing but a matador’s red cape and a handheld radio switch that controlled the device. As the bull charged, he activated the implant, dramatically causing the animal to appear to lose interest in him. Later, Delgado used the electrodes on psychiatric patients. According to Scientific American, “With the push of a button, he could evoke smiles, snarls, bliss, terror, hunger, garrulousness, lust.” In a book titled “Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society,” Delgado imagined a utopia of machine-modulated cognition. One critic, testifying before Congress, described it as a harbinger of “technological totalitarianism.” It was evident that such technology could be misused. After the race riots of the late nineteen-sixties, two Harvard neurosurgeons proposed that neural electrodes could be used to quell social violence. In 1972, a Tulane psychiatrist used them to try to create “heterosexual arousal” in a gay man.

Weaponizing the technology became—perhaps always was—the ne plus ultra of the research.

In Schwartz’s view, Scheuermann had demonstrated far more sophisticated brain control with the robotic arm; by comparison, flying the airplane, using only two degrees of freedom, was scientifically empty, epitomizing the theatrical showiness that he had long avoided. But officials at [Applied Physics Laboratory] were ecstatic. In addition to the Mooney, Scheuermann had flown the simulated F-35, though with greater difficulty. “Jan Scheuermann was able to fly,” McLoughlin told me. “She embodied that plane. That’s really powerful—really powerful.”

At [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], Geoff Ling screened a video of Scheuermann flying, and described it in momentous terms. The experiment, he believed, prefigured evolutionary changes to the human organism. “Don’t you understand what has happened?” he told me. “We just got rid of the confines of our bodies. That is taking mankind to another level, brother! Can you imagine a body with four arms? Can you imagine having two more eyes? The body we have been given is a biological thing. We could totally break free of it.”

And swarms of drones danced in DARPA’s heads. They wanted Ender Wiggins.

But the scientists at Pittsburgh resisted, arguing that, unlike the flight tests in virtual reality, which offered insight into how a paralyzed person could access a computer, commanding physical drones in a distant and uncontrolled setting was likely to yield little scientific information of value. Furthermore, it could violate ethical commitments to oversight boards, and divert lab time from the project’s core mission: assistive technology for the impaired. “They said, ‘That is not academic research,’ ” McLoughlin told me.

DARPA and A.P.L won.

Soon afterward, A.P.L. demanded that the hardware that processed data from the Utah arrays be returned. While the university scrambled to acquire replacements, A.P.L. pushed ahead with brain-controlled aviation.

They were done with Scheuermann.

Soon after her pedestals—Lewis and Clark—were removed, her husband and children took her to the movies. “The sun was shining on the hillside across the river, highlighting the glorious colors of autumn,” she wrote. “I was just basking in the company of my family and my beautiful day. I remember thinking how beautiful life was, and how blessed I was. Then, in the twenty-minute drive home, it happened. I went from that blissful happiness to being a sobbing, blubbering mess. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the loss of Lewis and Clark and what their absence meant. It meant I would never control Hector again. It was all over. I might visit the lab, but I would never again be hooked up, would never again make Hector move. The full measure of that loss hit me, and I cried.” Scheuermann yearned to see the arm one last time, to speak to it. “I had to tell him that I would miss him, and I knew he would miss me. I thought that Hector needed to hear that we had had a wonderful time together, but that it was all right for him to have a good time with someone else now, and to achieve new things with that person. I didn’t want Hector to feel that he was betraying me by making a connection with a new subject. As I thought this over, I realized what I really needed was to tell myself all that.”

In our history from the what my father called the M1 Bone, has humanity failed to turn any technological innovation to the purposes of oppression and death. Is it any wonder that, if they indeed exist and know of us, that the rest of the universe will keep us confined to our creche until we have destroyed ourselves?

Bonus No. 1: Social Media in 2020 will be a wasteland of capital.

In what I can only describe as the most ignorant statement to flow from a any U.S. president: President Donald John Trump said tweeted: In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming (sic)? Please come back fast, we need you! Is he blaming Ridgeley and Michael?

Meanwhile, from someone who knows what he’s talking about, Bill McKibben, reflecting in How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet for The New Yorker, writes:

Thirty years ago, this magazine published The End of Nature, a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

More appropriately the era ought to be referred to as the world unmade by humanity. Fuck Shiva: We are the virus that has become death, the destroyer of worlds, because, McKibben continues:

In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out.

I’ll be wormfood before the end, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (see Bonus No. 1) and her cohort won’t and they see the heat wave on the near horizon. But so far, McKibben writes: We will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it. He later quotes Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book Retreat from a Rising Sea, who wrote:

We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.

We are rapidly approaching that Monty Python moment. because we’ve been buying the lies from the evil fucks in the fossil fuel industry.

Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.

I first learned about global warming in 1969. The fossil fuel mother fuckers put it all down on paper eight years later.

In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.

Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2 detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

McKibben puts this bow on Exxon’s evil plan:

The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they used his NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall.

Fast forward to 1997 and Kyoto, Japan:

On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control.” [Emphasis mine, JH]

He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade earlier. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Exxon is far from the only Blofeld here, but the fossil fuel giant is the bellwether. Beginning the penultimate section of his reflection, McKibben writes:

Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book [I’ll give anyone $100 for documentary proof that Trump ever read the book, JH], said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to… everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.

The Virtue of selfishness and the gospel of government is bad, solidarity is a trap and taxes are theft.

Yeah, that’s the Republican Party.

Bonus No. 1: This is my first real natural disaster and it sucks.

There is no practical difference between putting a .22 caliber or a .45 caliber bullet in someone’s brain. Yes, the former is neater than the latter, but the victim cannot be more dead in one case than the other. The idea of arming an intercontinental ballistic missile with a tactical warhead is ludicrous and dangerous. We are now officially in Stranglovian territory.

If we detonate a battlefield nuclear weapon there is a 100 percent chance that the survivors will find a way to respond in kind. At that point escalation becomes nearly impossible to prevent.

Julian Borger, reporting in US nuclear weapons: first low-yield warheads roll off the production line for The Guardian, writes:

The US has begun making a new, low-yield nuclear warhead for its Trident missiles that arms control advocates warn could lower the threshold for a nuclear conflict.

The National Nuclear Security Administration announced in an email it had started manufacturing the weapon at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Texas, as ordered by Donald Trump’s nuclear posture review last year.

The NNSA said the first of the new warheads had come off the production line and that it was on schedule to deliver the first batch–an unspecified number referred to as “initial operational capability”–before the end of September.

The numbers are not hard to guess. 14 Trident-capable submarines each carrying 24 submarine-launched ballistic missiles capable of lofting up to 12 (100-475 kt) warheads each equals 4,032 warheads under the control of just 28 (Captain and Executive Officer, see Crimson Tide) naval officers. Having more than one missile per sub, with more than one crippled warhead each would make no sense unless you were hell bent on a nuclear holocaust, so 14 warheads—one per sub—with maybe a further seven as backup in the depot.

The warhead size speculated at is a 5 kt (kilo tons equivalent of TNT) device. That is the size of the nuclear warheads on the Terrier surface-to-air missiles I’m most familiar with. If you’re crazy enough to build and deploy that size warhead, you don’t put it on an SLBM, you put it on a cruise missile. Why? Two words: spy satellites.

The Soviets and the Chinese will see an SLBM launch within seconds. They’ll know (roughly) where the missile is headed, but they will not know what the payload is. In short, they’ll go batshit and give very serious thought to retaliating while they still have missile to retaliate with. (If you believe either country would accept our word that the target was some third party, you’re already batshit crazy. Think about it. If you were president of the United States, would you believe that message from either Russia or China?) Hello…! WW III.

If we detonate a battlefield nuclear weapon there is a 100 percent chance that the survivors will find a way to respond in kind. At that point escalation becomes nearly impossible to prevent.

The nuclear weapons budget is likely to be an important battlefield in the struggle between Trump and congressional Democrats. The president is increasingly surrounding himself with Reagan-era nuclear hawks, including John Bolton, his national security adviser and who pushed for the INF to be jettisoned. Bolton’s new deputy, Charles Kupperman, once argued a nuclear war could be won “in the classical sense” if one side emerged the stronger, even if there were tens of millions of casualties.

Speaking to reporters last week, former defence secretary William Perry, an arms control advocate, said he was less worried about the number of nuclear warheads left in the world than by the return of cold war talk about such weapons being “usable”.

“The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons–which I haven’t heard that being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years – is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing,” Perry said.

“That’s a very dangerous belief.”

No shit, Sherlock.

When he sent the Great White—the ships were actually painted white—fleet to circumnavigate the glove in 1907-08, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim was Walk softly and carry a big stick, not, as President Donald John Trump seems to believe, lurch around like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster waving your little stick.

Whoever came up with this idea is ignorant and certifiable.

Sometime in the late ’90s—I think it was 1997—I read a biography of Sir Issac Newton in which was described a book on fluid mechanics that he had read as a boy. I was intrigued and sought a copy of the book. I was astonished to discover that the rare books room in the Cleveland Public Library had a 17th-century copy. I had to see it.

I called ahead to the library and made an appointment for the next day. I took a bus downtown and when I arrived found the book, in an archival box, waiting for me along with a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the pages from contamination by my touch. I spent perhaps two or three hours gently leafing through a book that had inspired one of our great geniuses. I kept the gloves and they now rest draped over my reproduction (you can see them in the upper left of this photo) of a self-portrait by humanity’s greatest genius: Leonardo da Vinci.

That time at the library was magical, but until yesterday—reading Do Proteins Hold the Key to the Past? by Sam Knight—I didn’t realize just how magical.

The subhead to the New Yorker piece sets the state: New methods are allowing a group of scientists to reëxamine the world’s libraries and archives, in search of the hidden lives of authors.

Knight’s narrative begins with a 13th century bible.

In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library’s distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo. Melloni slid the lid off the box. Inside was a yellow silk scarf, and wrapped in the scarf was a thirteenth-century Bible, no larger than the palm of his hand, which was falling to pieces.

The Bible was “a very poor one,” Melloni told me recently. “Very dark. Very nothing.” But it had a singular history. In 1685, a Jesuit priest who had travelled to China gave the Bible to the Medici family, suggesting that it had belonged to Marco Polo, the medieval explorer who reached the court of Kublai Khan around 1275.

Melloni wanted to restore the book and better understand its history, but was loath to allow any invasive, or destructive, testing regardless of how minute a sample might be needed. This was where the story, for me, grew fascinating.

In addition to standard conservation tools, like ultraviolet photography and infrared spectroscopy, which is used to study pigments, the experts there suggested proteomics. “It was the first time I heard the word ‘proteomic’ in my life,” Melloni recalled.

Proteomics is the study of the interaction of proteins in living things.

Every physical book I’ve ever read, every book anyone has ever read—without the benefit of those white, cotton gloves—retains a tiny chemical bit of the reader. Proteomis allows us to study those touches.

Proteomics aims for completeness. The proteome of a single human cell, which might contain billions of proteins, is sometimes compared to an atlas. It can guide geneticists or drug companies to early markers of a disease, or to the precise mechanism of aging, or to promising targets for cancer treatment.

Under the right conditions, proteins can survive for millions of years. In recent years, proteomic studies of art works and archeological remains have yielded biological information of startling clarity, revealing gossamer-thin layers of fish glue on seventeenth-century religious sculptures and identifying children’s milk teeth from pits of previously unrecognizable Neolithic bones. In 2008, researchers were able to sequence the proteins of a harbor seal that remained on the surface of six-hundred-year-old cooking pots found at an Inuit site in northern Alaska. Three years later, chemists found a hundred and twenty-six different proteins in a mammoth femur.

Accessing those biological traces without damaging the bit of history under scrutiny was a hurdle that Gleb Zilberstein, an inventor who works out of Rehovot, Israel, leaped. Knight continues his story:

He is a fan of Umberto Eco’s work on semiotics, which proposes multiple ways to interpret a text, and he had often wondered about the chemical interaction between an author and the pages on which he works. “Each person wants to understand cultural life things through the prism of his experience,” Zilberstein told me. “My experience is tools for analytical chemistry.”

Inspired by another chemist: Pier Giorgio Righetti, known in the world of proteomics for his work on electrophoresis, a process that helps to sort molecules by size and by electrical charge, Zilberstein had been struck by an idea.

His latest startup was a project to develop plastics with charged ions on their surface which would draw microbes and bacteria off other substances. He wanted to use the technology in food and drinks packaging. Zilberstein wondered if it could also be applied on works of art. In theory, researchers could use the charged plastics to remove proteins—in fact, almost any chemical—from an artifact without destroying part of it in the process. Even the most treasured documents and canvases could be analyzed for tantalizing traces that might remain on or near their surface: sweat, saliva, or signs of disease; evidence of an artist’s diet, drugs, even DNA. “You can find out what you ate, how you hurt, how the author was treated,” Zilberstein told me.

What they discovered together opened another universe.

“It is the irony of history that the most obvious things are the least discussed,” Patrick Boner, a visiting scholar at the Catholic University of America, who has written a book about Kepler’s astrology, said. “The way that people conceptualized time, remedies, health, even their bathing—all these kinds of things that are very routine—were very informed by things like astrology and alchemy.”

When I sent Righetti and Zilberstein’s Kepler draft to Boner, he told me he already knew their work, from their plague paper. “It’s opening a door,” he said. “The thing I appreciate about this project is how much more lies beyond any kind of written records.” Kepler once wrote, of his own search for knowledge in the movements of stars and matter and unimaginable things, rather than in the lessons of the printed word, “It is as though I had read a divine text, written into the world itself, not with letters but rather with essential objects, saying: ‘Man, stretch thy reason hither, so that thou mayest comprehend these things.’ ”

If I were a young student today, still participating in annual science fairs, this would be my next project. My father, perhaps inspired by Indiana Jones-like serials he watched on Saturdays as a boy, had wanted to be an archeologist. Combining Chemistry—I sure my Chemistry teacher Barry Guinn would have loved the exploration—with archeology would have been fascinating.

Any Science Fiction aficionado worth their salt know that Robot orginated with Karel Čapek’s 1920 Science Fiction play R.U.R. Robota, plural Roboti, is Czech for forced labor. (Sexbots came a little later in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.) While we pretend to pretty up our robots and make them look cute, they’re still forced labor.

Patricia Marx, writing in Learning to Love Robots for The New Yorker, initially goes for the cute, but comes around to the deeper issues when she writes:…

it is predicted that, by 2030, between thirty and forty-seven per cent of our jobs will become theirs. Elon Musk, who recently managed to lose his job as chairman of Tesla to a human, believes that a guaranteed universal income is the only solution to the inevitable mass unemployment. This will also mean more time to play with robots.

Really? That’s what the inevitable mass unemployment means? This is where Marx’s piece gets dark, and lonely, and sad.

For most of the night, the adults sat around the island counter in the kitchen, drinking wine and dissing the robots. “They make me feel more lonely, because they are faking affection,” Iris Smyles, a novelist, said. “Not to take this to a lofty place, but do you remember Sartre’s essay about essence and existence? What’s distasteful about these creatures is that they seem to exist without a specific function except to love or be loved. If they made pasta, too, that would be an improvement.” In the living room, Olivia Osborne, age fourteen, loudly and repeatedly enunciated, “Ku-ri! Play your fa-vo-rite song!,” to no avail. “It’s like talking to someone who only mildly understands English,” her friend Fiona Brainerd, also fourteen, said, adding, “Something’s wrong if you spend more time trying to get a robot to do something than it takes to do that thing.” As Rodney Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot and the inventor of the Roomba’s software control system, recently wrote to me via e-mail, “The physical appearance of a robot makes a promise about its capabilities. If that promise is not met by the reality of what it can do, then there will be disappointment.”

Of one of the robots at the party—Paro, a furry baby harp seal (with a $6,400 price tag), Marx writes:

I had the robot on a short-term loan from its maker, Takanori Shibata, an engineer from Tokyo whom I’d met with the day before in the lobby of the Hilton Times Square. Shibata was in the country for a series of meetings, including one with NASA, which he was trying to sell on the idea of including his stuffed animal on the mission to Mars, so that it can keep the astronauts company. “I wanted to develop a robot that enriched our lives psychologically, the way animals do,” he told me, opening a travel trunk that contained Paro and its charger—an electric baby pacifier that comes with a warning label that it is not for human use.

Paro was a hit at the party.

In the kitchen, the adults deemed Paro especially disturbing, and not only because its control switch is located under its tush. “It’s too needy,” Laurie Marvald, the manager of the music band AJR, said, noting that its constant motion felt like an attention-getting ploy to compel you to stroke it. “It would make me depressed and lonely by reminding me of the friend I don’t have,” Sarah Paley, a poet, said. “At least a bad date isn’t programmed to like you,” Smyles agreed.

In the next room, the seal was being doted on. “I like Paro the most, but sometimes I forget it’s a robot, and when I realize I’m having a reaction to it like it’s alive, it’s creepy,” Fiona said, almost perfectly describing the state for which the robotics professor Masahiro Mori, in 1970, coined the term uncanny valley.

There is a reason that the Japanese have an edge over the rest of the world in dealing with Mori’s concept.

According to Shunsuke Aoki, the forty-year-old C.E.O. of the Tokyo-based startup Yukai Engineering, the Japanese are more receptive than Americans to the concept of robots as friends and helpmates. “In Japan, we believe there are spirits in all objects, even man-made ones, and we feel harmony with them,” Aoki told me, referring to animism, a key component of the ancient religion of Shinto. Yukai Engineering is the maker of Qoobo ($149), a souped-up, purring pillow that is supposed to look like a cat in repose, with its round fluffy body in “husky gray” or “French brown,” and a tail that wags responsively, like a metronome gone berserk. Qoobo has no head, because, Aoki said, “this shape is designed for cuddling, and a head would get in the way.”

In contrast to Shintoism, Judeo-Christian theology suggests that, by begetting artificial life, you create false idols, who, inexorably, will decide to make your life miserable by destroying it. Take heed from the golem, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Mickey Mouse’s enchanted brooms, Dolores in “Westworld”—or, indeed, from try-hard Jibo.

How can any creature birthed or built that brings joy be evil incarnate? This is the question that can creep out the hardiest. On her last day with Paro, Marx takes to the streets of New York to watch people watch her and Paro.

At the table next to ours, a woman in her forties on furlough from her job as a pastry chef on a cruise ship looked up from her book to stare at Paro squirming in my lap. “I know it’s not real, but it’s having a real effect on me,” she said. She asked to hold it, caressing its cushiony paw. The cruise ship doesn’t allow pets. “It would definitely bring me comfort,” she said. Paro blinked, then turned its head toward her and gave her what seemed like a come-hither look. “It’s what I want in a pet—something that says ‘Love me, want me, feed me!’ ” she said. “It would bring me joy. False joy, but I’d appreciate it anyway.”

Paro and I made our way to the subway, where we sat next to an old, frail-looking man wearing a green parka. Paro’s head rested on the man’s leg, which seemed to enchant him. He fixed his eyes on the seal, tentatively petting it and softly calling it “Beauty.” If Paro belonged to him, the man told me in a Russian accent, “I would take care of it and it would take care of me.” What would he name it? “Arna,” he said. “The name of my late wife.” Before leaving the car, he leaned over and gently kissed Paro’s forehead.

All things considered, Paro—even at $6,400—seems like a better deal, to me, than popping a Soma.

Bonus: Rumors swirl Armond Budish will resign, not serve 2nd full county executive term.

All that separates the Iraqi system of sentencing citizens to death and any one of Dante Alighieri’s levels of Hell as portrayed in his Inferno is that in Iraq, those responsible have not yet figured how to make the personal hell of the sufferers last for all eternity. I can’t bring myself to call this a Justice system, those presiding Judges or the participants Officers of the Court.

Ben Taub, writing in Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge for The New Yorker, describes a scene that would make Dante jealous.

Shortly after ten o’clock, three judges in long black robes shuffled into Courtroom 2 and sat at the bench. Suhail Abdullah Sahar, a bald, middle-aged man with a thin, jowly face, sat in the center. There were twenty-one cases on his docket that day, sixteen related to terrorism. He quietly read out a name; a security officer shouted it down the hall to one of his colleagues, who shouted it to the guard, who shouted it into the cell. Out came a young man named Ahmed. A security officer led him to a wooden cage in the middle of the courtroom. Judge Sahar accused him of having joined ISIS in Qayyarah, a small town south of Mosul.

“Sir, I swear, I have never been to Qayyarah,” Ahmed said.

Sahar was skeptical. “I have a written confession here, with your thumbprint on it,” he said.

“Sir, I swear, I gave my thumbprint on a blank paper,” Ahmed replied. “And I was tortured by the security services.” Sahar listed Ahmed’s supposed jihadi associates; Ahmed denied knowing any of them.

“Enough evidence,” the prosecutor said. “I ask for a guilty verdict.”

Ahmed had no lawyer, and so Sahar called upon an elderly state attorney named Hussein, who was seated in the gallery, to spontaneously craft a defense. Hussein walked over to a lectern, repeated from memory what Ahmed had said, and, without requesting his release, concluded with a plea for “mercy in his sentencing.”

Ahmed wept as he was led out of the room. His trial had lasted four and a half minutes.

The next suspect insisted that he had been arrested by mistake—that his name was similar to that of someone in ISIS. A private defense lawyer explained that his client had confessed to ISIS affiliation under torture—he had a medical examination to prove it—but none of the judges appeared to be listening. As the lawyer spoke, they cracked jokes, signed documents, and beckoned their assistants to collect folders from the bench. Sahar yawned. The trial lasted eight minutes.

The third suspect was a twenty-three-year-old from a village near Mosul, charged with ISIS affiliation and arrested while in a displaced-persons camp.

“When did you join ISIS?” Sahar asked.

“I didn’t join,” the suspect replied.

“Then why did you thumbprint this confession?”

“They blindfolded me and made me do it.”

“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said.

The suspect’s defense lawyer carefully explained that regional intelligence reports showed that the suspect had been mistaken for someone with a similar name. In terrorism trials, the mere presence of a private defense lawyer can signal the suspect’s likely innocence; most lawyers refuse to take on ambiguous cases, out of fear that the security services will harass them for perceived links to the Islamic State. (Last year, Iraqi courts issued arrest warrants for at least fifteen defense lawyers and charged them with ISIS affiliation.) But, as the lawyer spoke, the judges tended to administrative tasks. The trial was over in nine minutes. “I hate ISIS—they blew up my house!” the suspect shouted, in tears, as he was led out of court.

By noon, Sahar had presided over ten trials, involving twenty suspects. The courtroom lost power twice, but Sahar kept going in the dark, skimming documents by the light of his cell phone. The final case before lunch involved three defendants, all badly injured. As they limped into the courtroom, a security officer put three plastic chairs in the cage. The last suspect to appear was a bald, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, named Louai; he was hunched over a pair of short wooden crutches, and moved as if one of his legs were paralyzed and his vertebrae were no longer aligned. Courtroom 2 was silent, except for the sounds of him struggling toward the cage.

Sahar questioned the other suspects first. One, named Haidar, who wore a back brace, said that he had been mistakenly arrested for a car-bomb attack, in 2014, and that in the course of an interrogation, to make the torture stop, he had started naming random people, including Louai. Judge Sahar then called upon Louai, who rose from his chair and gripped the cage to support himself. “I went to sell my car in the market,” he said. “Then Haidar called me, and I was ambushed, arrested.” He spoke in an urgent, high-pitched tone, but he stuttered and slurred his words; during interrogations, he said, officers had beaten him so badly that he suffered a blood clot in his brain. “They also broke my back!” he shouted. “They broke my feet and hands! I can barely walk!”

“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said. It was the only phrase she uttered in court that morning.

Haidar’s lawyer noted that there was no witness and no material evidence, and that his request for a medical examination, to prove that Haidar had been tortured, had been rejected. Louai’s lawyer explained that Louai’s confession had been coerced and made no sense: he had said that he remotely detonated the car bomb, when, in fact, the police had concluded that it was a suicide attack.

Louai had spent four years in pretrial detention, and, during the two or three minutes allotted to his defense, the judges had been talking among themselves. “I haven’t seen a judge until now!” he shouted.

“Take them out,” Sahar said. A security officer opened the cage. It took Louai nearly two minutes to limp to the door. Sahar took a lunch break, then ordered his execution.

And we wonder why they hate us.

Bonus No. 1: Watch The Backstory: Ben Taub on the future of Iraq, following the Islamic State’s defeat in Mosul.

Bonus No. 2: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Earlier this month Ralph Nader lamented the passing of a corporate leader: Herb Kelleher. This week Nader remembers another member of the 1 Percent who wasn’t a bad guy but rather someone that Nader—and possibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (See Bonus No. 1 at the bottom of this story)—approved of.

Nader in John C. Bogle: Renaissance Money Manager for the People and More, writes:

The accolades were uniformly respectful for the honest, innovative, and unyielding defender of shareholder/investor rights–the late John C. Bogle–the founder of the now giant Vanguard Group of mutual funds. Writers took note of his pioneering low-cost, low-fee investing and mutual funds tied to stock-market indices. Index funds, tied to such indices as the S&P 500, now total trillions of dollars.

Bogle abhorred gouging by the money managers. He would add up their fees–seemingly small at less than 1 percent a year–and show how over time they could cut the cumulative return by 50 percent or more. That’s why he set up Vanguard in 1974, which by holding down costs and fees has begun to push the rest of the smug industry to be more reasonable. Vanguard now has over $5 trillion in managed assets.

He could have become as rich as Edward Johnson III–his counterpart at Fidelity Investments, who is worth over $7 billion. Instead, Bogle organized Vanguard as a mutual firm, not a stock firm, owned by its investors. Bogle’s fortune, at the time of his passing last week, was estimated at $80 million after a lifetime of giving away Continue Reading »

When I forwarded Jill Lapore’s Does Journalism Have a Future? to Roldo Bartimole and Sam Allard this morning, I included a note saying that we have no one to blame but ourselves because we knew in 1981 that the Internet was coming for our jobs and we did nothing to prepare. [Update at 0806 on 27 January: the internet isn’t looking so hot either.]

Some of us have been playing Paul Revere for nearly two-score years and we still don’t have any idea what Journalism will be a year from now. Lapore sets the table this way:

Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.” And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.

Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that’s risen from the ashes of the dead news. “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,” Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, writes in Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. “There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the New York Times, writes in Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse.

This last, of course, why I sent the story to both Roldo and Sam. After 50 years Roldo is out of the game, but Sam is just beginning his career and I have to wonder how he sees his future. (For my part, I got out of Journalism in the mid-’90s for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was, even at 14.4 baud, I knew that print was on the way out.

I had a long conversation with one publisher about the future when I was still an editor and his query, “yeah, but how will you get advertisers to pay for it? That was the mindset, and when the Internet began offering better-targeted advertising options, well… Lapore continues:

Next came the dot-coms. Craigslist went online in the Bay Area in 1996 and spread across the continent like a weed, choking off local newspapers’ most reliable source of revenue: classified ads. The [Telegraph & Gazette, formerly the Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette] tried to hold on to its classified-advertising section by wading into the shallow waters of the Internet, at telegram.com, where it was called, acronymically, and not a little desperately, “TANGO!” Then began yet another round of corporate buyouts, deeply leveraged deals conducted by executives answerable to stockholders seeking higher dividends, not better papers. In 1999, the New York Times Company bought the T&G for nearly three hundred million dollars. By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned. And only one out of every hundred American cities that had a daily newspaper was anything other than a one-paper town.

Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts—online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free. News aggregators also drew display advertisers away from print; Facebook and Google swallowed advertising accounts whole. Big papers found ways to adapt; smaller papers mainly folded. Between 1994 and 2016, years when the population of Worcester County rose by more than a hundred thousand, daily home delivery of the T&G declined from more than a hundred and twenty thousand to barely thirty thousand. In one year alone, circulation fell by twenty-nine per cent. In 2012, after another round of layoffs, the T&G left its building, its much reduced staff small enough to fit into two floors of an office building nearby. The next year, the owner of the Boston Red Sox bought the newspaper, along with the Boston Globe, from the New York Times Company for seventy million dollars, only to unload the T&G less than a year later, for seventeen million dollars, to Halifax Media Group, which held it for only half a year before Halifax itself was bought, flea-market style, by an entity that calls itself, unironically, the New Media Investment Group.

So far, fingers crossed, knock-on-wood, I still have access to not one, but two local weeklies: The North Royalton Post and The Royalton Recorder. How long they’ll last is anyone’s guess but both have digital editions.

With the table set, Lapore gets down to the meat and potatoes.

In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited—has changed, including in ways that have made possible the rise of fake news, and not only because of mergers and acquisitions, and corporate ownership, and job losses, and Google Search, and Facebook and BuzzFeed. There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?

Ah, that’s the question I’ve been asking for 40 years. Lapore’s very sad answer is not news, not journalists, not even readers; he answer—and I agree here in 2019—is eyes/ears on the ads, and that’s death because fake news is better, and nearly cost free, at delivering customers than Journalism ever could be. There’s nothing new about fake news and President Donald John Trump is hardly the first president to take advantage of the trope. Lapore notes that:

In 1969, Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, delivered a speech drafted by the Nixon aide Pat Buchanan accusing the press of liberal bias. It’s “good politics for us to kick the press around,” Nixon is said to have told his staff. The press, Agnew said, represents “a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history,” consisting of men who “read the same newspapers” and “talk constantly to one another.” How dare they. Halberstam waved this aside as so much P.R. hooey, but, as has since become clear, Agnew reached a ready audience, especially in houses like mine.

Spiro who? “The press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1970, but “no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew’s personality, nor the impact of his speeches.” No scholar of journalism can afford to ignore Agnew anymore. In On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News, the historian Matthew Pressman argues that any understanding of the crisis of journalism in the twenty-first century has to begin by vanquishing the ghost of Spiro T. Agnew.

Ah, History.

I have a minor nit to pick with Loper when she starts talking about BuzzFeed and its primary revenue source: what she (probably following the lead of BuzzFeed—others) calls native advertising, an Orwellian term horrible enough to raise the dead. She writes:BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed’s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors…

The term I grew up with was blowjob. Lying to readers and making them think that advertiser-sponsored-written bullshit was an act of prostitution as blatant as dropping to your knees and sucking the advertiser’s cock. To steal the line from an old joke: “We know what you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.” Blowjobs apparently played a role in Abramson’s departure from the Times.

In March, 2014, the Times produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in “the art and science of getting our journalism to readers,” a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. …Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates.

My newspaper—one which I do pay an annual subscription to—is The Guardian. Unlike the paper’s many competitors, it has a cushion: philanthropic trust established in 1936, that allows the paper to maneuver, change and grow. From 1995 (about when I was getting out of print journalism) through 2014 Guardian Editor Alan Rushbridger sought to turn the beast onto a different path.

The Guardian, founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821, has been held by a philanthropic trust since 1936, which somewhat insulates it from market forces, just as Jeff Bezos’s ownership now does something similar for the Post. By investing in digital-readership research from the time Rusbridger took charge, in 1995, the Guardian became, for a while, the online market leader in the U.K. By 2006, two-thirds of its digital readers were outside the U.K. In 2007, the Guardian undertook what Rusbridger calls “the Great Integration,” pulling its Web and print parts together into a single news organization, with the same editorial management. It also developed a theory about the relationship between print and digital, deciding, in 2011, to be a “digital-first organization” and to “make print a slower, more reflective read which would not aspire to cover the entire waterfront in news.”

Rusbridger explains, with a palpable grief, his dawning realization that the rise of social media meant that “chaotic information was [I would say lies and rumors were] free: good information was expensive,” which meant, in turn, that “good information was increasingly for smaller elites” and that “it was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.” He takes these circumstances as something of a dare: “Our generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost [I would have deleted the almost here, JH] everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.”

Taking anything for granted is how we got here. Every assumption, every maxim, every reality we think we know, must be constantly questioned and requestioned.

The new normal is that there is no normal.