Two likely Democratic presidential contenders in 2020 have made quiet strides in recent years to bring into vogue a little-known policy that could reduce economic inequality — one that harnesses current law to expand workers’ ability to become owners in their place of employment.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have worked to advance legislation on employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, which are retirement vehicles that allow a business owner to sell their company stock to a trust co-owned by the company’s employees. The company typically purchases the owner’s shares with a loan, divides the shares among the staff, and then repays the debt annually with pre-tax payments from the company’s profits. When a worker leaves or retires, the company buys back that worker’s stock at fair market value, giving them a slice of the company’s capital earnings.
A bipartisan group of legislators first took up ESOPs in Congress in 1974, but when that generation of lawmakers retired, their successors did not embrace employee ownership with the same enthusiasm. The focus on deficit reduction, coupled with a few bad employee ownership scandals in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, led many otherwise receptive politicians to steer clear. Federal incentives for employee ownership began to dwindle, beginning under George H.W. Bush and continuing through the next three presidential administrations.
Last year, however, Sanders took up the mantle. He introduced legislation to expand state centers that provide training and technical support for establishing cooperatives and ESOPs, modeled off the successful Vermont Employee Ownership Center in his home state. Gillibrand also signed onto that legislation, which never made it through Congress.
This past summer, for the first time in more than two decades, Congress passed a pro-ESOP piece of legislation. Introduced by Gillibrand in the Senate and Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., in the House, the Main Street Employee Ownership Act makes it easier for small businesses to establish ESOPs and co-ops. It was included in the defense bill that President Donald Trump signed in August. (Another likely 2020 presidential contender, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced legislation this year for a different type of employee ownership. Known as co-determination, it would require companies with revenue over $1 billion to allow workers to elect at least 40 percent of their board of directors.)
Unlike conservatives, who have defended employee ownership on the grounds that it’s most certainly not socialism — indeed, it turns laborers into capitalists — liberals have taken to ESOPs because they strengthen worker power, boost worker income, and increase corporate transparency. Workers, the arguments goes, care as much about their employment as they do about corporate profitability, so they won’t advocate for a strategy that leaves them jobless, even if it is better for the short-term bottom line. “Simply put, when employees have an ownership stake in their company, they will not ship their own jobs to China to increase their profits; they will be more productive, and they will earn a better living,” Sanders said last year.
Some progressives have criticized ESOPs, with the argument that they are little more than tax breaks for corporations that don’t give workers real ownership of a company or a meaningful say in its management. ESOPs can also create tensions with traditional labor unions, as the latter seeks to organize workers, while ESOPs tend to blur the relationship between workers and owners.
Indeed, not many unionized ESOP companies exist. Some unions — like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Steelworkers — have been open to the idea. Others, “like the [United Automobile Workers], are inherently distrustful,” said Loren Rodgers, executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, a national nonprofit based in Oakland, California. “In the auto industry, the threat of strikes is really important, and it’s harder to get people to strike against something when that might hurt the value of the shares in their retirement account.”
More than 14 million current and former private sector workers have participated in ESOPs, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership. They work in almost every industry, from supermarkets, like the chain Publix, to policy research, like the firm Mathematica. About 7,000 companies today have the retirement plans. Research released earlier this year estimated that the average worker in an ESOP had accumulated $134,000 in retirement wealth from their stake.
Joseph Blasi, an economic sociologist who directs the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, has long championed ESOPs because he believes they benefit both workers and companies, and are a way to transfer wealth to the middle class. Blasi points to studies showing that workers at ESOP companies tend to earn 5-12 percent more in wages than those at traditionally owned companies, have retirement accounts that are 2.2 percent larger, and are far less likely to be laid off during economic downturns.
Sobering statistics about growing wealth inequality — like that the top 10 percent of households owns 80 percent of the financial assets, and the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined — underscore the need for economists, activists, and policymakers to figure out ways to counteract these trends.
“I’ve been working on them for over 40 years and only now have ESOPs become cool,” said Blasi.
A paper published this summer by a young economics researcher in Denmark has reinvigorated interest in ESOPs, as his findings suggest that the financial benefits of the retirement vehicle may be even greater than previously understood.
Esben Baek, who grew first interested in employee ownership after living in San Francisco and discovering pizza and bakery co-ops, pivoted from his traditional labor economics research to begin studying ESOPs in 2016.
Baek’s University of Copenhagen master’s thesis makes use of a previously untapped data source: the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. He found that ESOP participation boosted wages for U.S workers by nearly 13 percent, much more than the 8 percent figure ESOP researchers typically cite. Baek also found that male and female workers enjoyed near-equal economic gains under ESOPs, more so than other variables, like union membership or being married, on the panel survey. Baek is presenting his research at an ESOP conference in New Jersey next month.
Graphic: Esben R. Thomasen Baek
Douglas Kruse, a Rutgers University economist who studies employee ownership, was “thrilled and surprised” to learn of Baek’s work, he said, as it helps address a persistent issue that has plagued the ESOP community.
There have been many ESOP studies over the years, looking at things like productivity, employment stability, satisfaction, and organizational commitment. While the research has generally shown positive results, some economists have remained skeptical, because if workers have to decrease their wages and benefits in exchange for owning a piece of the company, then ESOPs would generally be considered too risky of a bet for workers to make.
Yet the existing empirical studies have suggested that isn’t the case; when scholars like Kruse and Blasi looked at cross-sectional and administrative data, workers who owned shares in their company also tended to have higher wages and benefits compared to those in non-ESOP companies. ESOPs appeared almost too good to be true, drawing skepticism from other economists about the underlying data.
“What Esben has done, the reason his data is especially good, is because with cross-sectional studies, maybe the workers are somehow better or they have higher credentials, and that’s why you see them receiving higher pay,” Kruse explained. “But with this national longitudinal data set, you can compare workers before and after joining the ESOP companies, and when you do, you see the pay goes up, and it appears to go down when they leave the ESOP.”
Kruse suggests this may be driven by the economic principle known as “efficiency wages,” in which ESOP companies recognize that paying higher wages on top of the employee-owned stock is really the most effective way to get more committed workers and boost productivity. “If a company establishes an ESOP but then cuts worker pay, then workers could start to see that as a financial risk,” Kruse explained. “Whereas if they get the ESOP on top of regular pay and benefits, then it’s like, ‘Hey, this company is doing well for me,’ and really helps create that sense of ownership and community.” Both Kruse and Baek agree that further research is needed to help explain what’s going on.
Aside from being a way to address inequality, the impending “silver tsunami” — the wave of baby boomer retirements expected over the next decade — is another reason ESOPs are gaining traction. According to a 2017 study by the worker ownership group Project Equity, 2.3 million businesses are owned by baby boomers who are approaching retirement, and these companies employ almost 25 million Americans.
While many of these business owners will fold quietly and sell their companies to competitors or private equity firms, ESOPs offer owners another alternative: selling the company to its workers. Advocates say this can help to better ensure that jobs remain in the local community, while still allowing the retiring owner to cash out. According to Project Equity, one-third of business owners over age 50 report having a hard time finding a buyer for their company. As a result, many just quietly close up shop, often without even considering selling their company to the staff.
But if ESOPs really can yield such positive results — for workers, owners, and local economies — why do they remain so obscure?
Most people have heard of 401(k) plans, a different kind of retirement vehicle authorized in 1978. Unlike ESOPs, employees pay for 401(k) stock through pre-tax wage deductions.
J. Michael Keeling, president of the ESOP Association, said 401(k) plans have been far more common among small businesses that offer retirement plans, because they require less overhead to administer properly. “Most nations have something like social security and a mandated retirement program every employer has to contribute to,” said Keeling. “But in America, retirement programs are voluntary, so businesses usually go for the cheaper option.” (According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, about 45 percent of all U.S. households have zero retirement savings.)
Most people with ESOPs also have 401(k) plans, a recommended best practice to reduce financial risk. It’s not good for workers to have their retirement savings wrapped up in the fate of a single company, as the Enron disaster of 2001 showed. “There’s no question in my mind that if a worker has holdings in an ESOP, they should have a separate, diversified 401(k),” said Blasi from Rutgers University. “What we say, though, is that workers who have both accumulate more for retirement than workers with just one.”
One study, published in 2010 using Labor Department data, compared roughly 4,000 ESOP companies to all other non-ESOP companies with 401(k) plans. The researchers found the net assets per ESOP participant to be 20 percent higher.
“We’ve got a marketing problem,” said Rodgers from the National Center for Employee Ownership. Rodgers’s group was founded in 1981 and has spent most of its time conducting research and connecting worker-owned companies with one another. Since 2010, though, the organization has been trying to play a bigger role in getting the word out.
Rodgers has a few theories for why ESOPs aren’t more well-known. Some of it he chalks up to the incentives of the business adviser world: If you’re a broker, like an investment banker or personal wealth adviser, the fees you take home at the end of the day would be higher if you encourage your client to sell their company to a private equity firm or another corporation, rather than their employees, he said. Financial advisers also tend to advise owners on things they know how to do themselves, and ESOPs are highly regulated, complex structures. “If you, as a CPA, advise a business owner to sell to their employees, you’re probably advising them on something you personally don’t know how to do,” said Rodgers.
From the owner’s perspective, selling one’s company to an outside firm is generally going to be a more lucrative option, and often easier, than creating an ESOP, Rodgers explained. “It’s hard to say no to more money, and it certainly can look easier, because you just sell your business and walk away.”
Further complicating things are several past ESOP scandals that haunt the field. One such incident occurred when United Airlines went bankrupt in 2002, leaving its employees with ESOP stock in the lurch. In some other cases, owners who sold their company to their employees had their businesses assessed at way too high of a value, so that when they sold their shares to an ESOP, they made off like bandits and left the workers paying an outsized loan. But the Labor Department has been cracking down on that overvaluation issue, and since 2014 especially, ESOP advocates say, worker safeguards have grown to be far more defined.
A number of groups have been ramping up efforts to educate the public and the business community about employee ownership. This past spring, Rutgers University approved the establishment of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, the world’s first research center of its kind. In 2016, the Pennsylvania Center for Employee Ownership, the nation’s first state center dedicated exclusively to promoting awareness of ESOPs and co-ops, was founded. Kevin McPhillips, the executive director, told The Intercept that he travels around talking to businesses and elected officials, trying to help get the ESOP and co-op message to owners who are beginning to plan for retirement. A few other state centers have long existed to provide technical assistance to worker-owned companies, like those in Vermont, Ohio, and Colorado.
It’s well past time for leaders to take the prospect of employee ownership more seriously, Blasi says. “It’s not a panacea, but neither is regulatory reform or raising the minimum wage.”
The post Could Expanding Employee Ownership Be the Next Big Economic Policy? appeared first on The Intercept.
The Intercept’s criminal justice coverage has long focused on wrongful convictions and the death penalty. 2018 was no exception. Our investigations into the unconstitutional policing, junk science, and prosecutorial misconduct that invariably contribute to the unjust incarceration of innocent people were joined by important work on predictive policing, voting rights, and the #MeToo movement.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones
By Liliana Segura, Jordan Smith
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By Jordan Smith
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By Alice Speri
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By Jamie Kalven
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By Liliana Segura
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The post Innocence Is No Defense: The Intercept’s 2018 Justice Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.
Dear Daily readers: This waning week of 2018 has been a maelstrom all its own. President Donald Trump landed in Iraq to visit U.S. troops stationed there. The avenues to asylum for migrant children arriving at the U.S. southern border continue to narrow. The U.S.-government shutdown continues, while markets swing down and up. An overnight tsunami has killed hundreds in Indonesia—the second major tsunami to hit the island in the past few months, adding to an expanding global tally of ever more unprecedented natural disasters.
In our final few newsletters of the year, we take stock of the year, in all its heartache and hilarity, its madness, its transcendence.
What to ReadThese are the silliest, most unique winter holiday rituals submitted by our readers
We asked you about your family’s unusual traditions, and you shared with us some truly wild ones. We illustrated some of our favorites. → Read on.
I used to write for Sports Illustrated. Now I deliver packages for Amazon (Austin Murphy)
“There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver.” → Read on.
A man dressed as Santa Claus visits patients at San Juan de Dios Hospital in Guatemala City on December 19, 2018. Alan Taylor has put together this gallery of festivities, observances, charity events, and quiet moments from around the world over the holiday season. (Photo: Johan Ordonez / AFP / Getty)“The separation was so long. My son has changed so much” (Jeremy Raff)
“If officials thought she had crossed the border for better work opportunities or family reunion or anything short of a life-and-death situation at home—she would most likely be deported. Quite possibly without Jenri.” → Read on.
The cruelty is the point (Adam Serwer)
“Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.” → Read on.
The Jews of Pittsburgh bury their dead (Emma Green)
“America has developed a mourning rhythm around mass shootings. The first reports hit Twitter, and then cable news. Stories, light on detail and long on familiar imagery like police trucks and do-not-cross tape, start to trickle out … It is day three of the after for Pittsburgh, but the mourning in the Jewish community has only just begun.” → Read on.
What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns (Heather Sher)
“I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?” → Read on.
Illustration by Glenn HarveyKanye West wants freedom—white freedom (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
“It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community.” → Read on.
The phantom reckoning (Megan Garber)
“How does the famous man, the sad victim of #MeToo’s chaos and wrath, feel about it all? What is his point of view, one really must ask? The women in all this question-asking are, meanwhile—shocking, predictable—distanced and blurred until, finally, they are simply written out of the story altogether. ” → Read on.
When I was in high school, I faced my own Brett Kavanaugh (Caitlin Flanagan)
“I told no one. In my mind, it was not an example of male aggression used against a girl to extract sex from her. In my mind, it was an example of how undesirable I was. It was proof that I was not the kind of girl you took to parties, or the kind of girl you wanted to get to know.” → Read on.
Illustration by Mendelsund / MundayThe 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy (Matthew Stewart)
“The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” → Read on.
Why are young people having so little sex? (Kate Julian)
“Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.” → Read on.
The worst is yet to come: a warning from Europe (Anne Applebaum)
“This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired.” → Read on.
This special edition of the Daily was compiled by Shan Wang. Concerns, comments, questions? Email swang@theatlantic.com
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Since Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly flew to Morocco to finalize Allied war plans with Winston Churchill and surprise American soldiers stationed in the country, American presidents have engaged in the well-worn tradition of meeting with troops in combat zones. Bill Clinton met with troops in the Balkans; George W. Bush and Barack Obama both visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; Bush spent Thanksgiving with Americans in Iraq months after the invasion of the country.
It is this precedent that President Donald Trump is following with his visit to Iraq on Wednesday.
The unannounced stop should stifle some of the criticism Trump received yesterday when he became the first president in 15 years not to visit with American forces either at home or abroad on Christmas Day. (It will not prevent the condemnation of his order last week to withdraw the U.S. military from Syria, a decision that prompted the resignation of his defense secretary, James Mattis.) Trump’s unannounced stop in Iraq, where about 5,000 U.S. troops are present, is his first visit to a combat zone, and it comes a week after he declared victory over the Islamic State. Iraq is the country where Trump’s counterterrorism strategy has had its greatest success: driving out ISIS, which controlled large swaths of the country, including Mosul, the second-biggest city. (Though, as I reported this year, the group has since made steady gains.)
[Read: The military has become Trump’s favorite prop]
But do such presidential visits, especially in the current age, serve any purpose? Trump himself expressed skepticism when he told an interviewer in October: “I will do that at some point, but I don’t think it’s overly necessary.” Trump’s own supporters have argued that the president stayed away from combat zones because his presence there would validate missions that he wanted to end. But as my colleague David Graham has noted, that argument doesn’t hold up. “Obama ran for president against the war in Iraq,” he wrote, “but still visited the troops and still pushed hard for them to (mostly) leave.”
Writing in The Atlantic this month, Eliot Cohen argued that “presidents need to visit the troops” in part to remind them “that they are not forgotten.” This argument has merit. There is little doubt that the U.S. can win a conventional war against any nation-state rival, but a presidential visit can provide a different kind of boost. After all, many soldiers go months without returning to the United States even as their compatriots go about their lives with little sense of the service that is being performed in their name. Events such as a presidential visit not only shed light on what it is the military is doing, but give personnel a much needed break from their otherwise regulation-bound lives.
Visits such as Trump’s to Iraq give a president the opportunity to be photographed and filmed with members of the military, which can help politically—Trump’s approval rating among active-duty troops has fallen slightly since he assumed the presidency, though they still support him at a rate higher than other Americans do. More important, the visits also allow him to talk with officers and enlisted men and women about their needs and their ideas for things that can be done better.
[Read: The tragedy of the American military]
A presidential visit to a war zone is also a way to show gratitude to those who have made sacrifices for their country. FDR’s visit to Morocco in 1943 was the first by an American president to a battle zone since the Civil War. He reviewed troops in Casablanca and Rabat, and was so moved by what he witnessed that, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, when he “returned home he wrote dozens of personal letters to the families of servicemen he met” as well as to the families of those who had died.
Ultimately, a presidential visit to a battle zone shows not only that the troops aren’t forgotten, but that the country honors their service. As Abraham Lincoln, who made more than a dozen battlefield visits during the Civil War, toured a field hospital in City Point, Virginia, doctors there tried to show him the facilities. He is said to have replied: “Gentlemen, you know better than I how to conduct these hospitals, but I came here to take by the hand the men who have achieved our glorious victories.”
One last photo look at this year’s Christmas and its many light shows, religious observances, charity events, and festivals that took place around the world. Gathered here are images from Australia, Japan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, England, Bolivia, the U.S., India, Indonesia, Italy, Israel, France, and many more countries.
Over the next week, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Ari Aster’s Hereditary. (Read our previous entries here.)
Ari Aster has made no secret of the fact that Hereditary, his debut film and one of the best-reviewed pieces of horror this year, was inspired by his own life. No, Aster did not (as far as I know) find himself at the center of a plot to restore a satanic demon to Earth. But he’s said in interviews that the movie’s wrenching family drama came from a personal place. “It’s easier for me not to go into detail. I was more pulling from feelings than experiences,” he said, also comparing his work to that of the British master of the kitchen-sink drama, Mike Leigh.
Hereditary is about a family that is gradually torn to shreds by an unspeakable force, one summoned by its enigmatic matriarch, Ellen, a grandmother whose funeral begins the film. Unbeknownst to viewers until later in the movie, Ellen is a worshipper of the evil spirit Paimon. She has planted the seeds for his earthly arrival first in the body of her daughter, Annie Graham (Toni Collette), and then in her granddaughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), both of whom are prone to behaving oddly (Annie sleepwalks, Charlie mutilates birds, and they both make disturbing art). Half an hour into the film, Charlie dies in a horrific freak accident that plunges her family into a suffocating grief.
In Hereditary, the Grahams’ dark past and the awful events of the present have been engineered by a dark energy beyond their control. As Annie begins to realize the extent to which her mother orchestrated all this misery to help move Paimon from Charlie’s body into that of her strapping son, Peter (Alex Wolff), she acts if she’s unraveling a conspiracy theory, ranting and raving to her husband (Gabriel Byrne) and son as they grow more afraid of her. It’s in Hereditary’s loopy final act that the film’s deeper ideas about the corruption of the family unit really began to sing for me—particularly in one largely silent scene in which any semblance of reality is destroyed for good.
[Read: The close-to-home horror of ‘Hereditary’]
Peter awakens in bed in the middle of the night, only dimly aware of just how bad things have gotten in the house. His father is dead, having been spontaneously engulfed in flames in the living room, and his grandmother’s corpse has been exhumed and is decaying in the attic. And his mother? Peter doesn’t realize it, but she’s perched in the upper corner of his bedroom, somehow hovering in the air, stuck to the wall and watching him. It’s one of Hereditary’s best and nastiest scares, because it takes the viewer a second to even realize she’s up there, hidden in the shadows.
“Mom?” Peter calls, not noticing. “Dad?” As he climbs out of bed, he finally turns around, as if sensing he’s being watched. Aster finally cuts to a close-up, over Peter’s shoulder, as Annie crawls out of her son’s field of vision just in time, skittering away like a centipede. It’s the beginning of the end for Peter, who is then lured downstairs for the family’s final, gruesome ritual. But the scene is also a truly chilling representation of how he has been haunted—without his knowing—since birth, cursed by his own bloodline.
His mother, who’s there to protect and love him, has been seemingly animated against him; he’s not even secure in his own room. When Peter goes downstairs and finds his father’s body, there Annie is again, clinging to the ceiling, like an oppressive entity that he can’t hope to escape. The horror trope of the haunted house, of course, plays on our fears that the place where we feel safest might turn against us. Aster’s idea is to take that dislocation and apply it to the idea of a haunted family—who might say they love you in one instant and try to kill you in the next.
There’s no image in Hereditary that better represents that ominous feeling than the slow, long shot of Annie on the ceiling, looking equally protective and malevolent as she watches her son sleep. Despite all the shocking gore, elaborate deaths, and satanic worship, that was the scene that unsettled me the most. Yes, Peter—and the rest of the Grahams—all meet extremely bitter ends. But it’s the foreboding, brutal buildup to those moments, and the sense that all this suffering is preordained, that makes Hereditary one of the most effective works of horror in recent years.
Previously: Annihilation
Next Up: Leave No Trace
LOS ANGELES—When Jerry Brown first took the oath as governor of California on January 6, 1975, he succeeded Ronald Reagan, who was still six years away from the White House. Gerald Ford was president, Paul VI was pope, the Watergate conspirators John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman had just been convicted, the Khmer Rouge was beginning its bloody rise to power in Cambodia, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at around 600 points, and Bradley Cooper had been born the day before.
It is no exaggeration to say that Brown’s tenure as governor of the Golden State—two disparate tours, separated by nearly 30 years, four terms and16 years in all—bookends virtually the entire modern history of California. He is both the youngest and oldest man in modern times to preside over his state, and five years ago he surpassed Earl Warren’s tenure as the longest-serving California governor. He leaves office next month, at 80, at the top of his game, California’s once-depleted coffers bursting with surplus, his flaky youthful reputation as “Governor Moonbeam” long since supplanted by his stature as perhaps the most successful politician in contemporary America.
[Read: Jerry Brown's political reboot]
A onetime seminarian who has never lost his quirky asceticism—in his first term, he slept on a mattress in a small apartment in Sacramento and rode around in a modest blue Plymouth instead of a limousine—he is fond of quoting poets and obscure philosophers and has lived by the Jesuit maxim “Age quod agis”—“Do what you are doing.” He famously dated Linda Ronstadt, but could be clueless about pop culture; in the summer of 1980, when billboards and T-shirts all over America were demanding, “Who shot J. R.?”—the smiling, so-bad-he’s-good villain of TV’s Dallas—Brown asked his press secretary, “Who’s J. R.?”
He was a dedicated environmentalist, promoting wind and geothermal energy before those technologies were in vogue, and a visionary when that quality was mocked in politics; indeed, the Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who tagged Brown with his lunar nickname (the governor had suggested California might launch its own communications satellite), could never have imagined that Brown would announce just this fall that the state was contracting for the launch of “our own damn satellite” to monitor global climate change. He was a socially liberal Democrat who embraced diversity when gay marriage was no more than a dream, but he was also wary of partisan orthodoxy and famously tight with a buck.
When he took office for the second time eight years ago, the state had a $27 billion deficit; now it has a dedicated rainy-day fund more than half that size, and a like amount in another one-time discretionary surplus for the coming budget year. In the past eight years, the state has added roughly 3 million jobs, refuting the canard that its tough environmental and labor regulations are impediments to growth. When he signed his last budget last summer, Brown was joined by legislative leaders—the oldest of whom was only 12 when he was first elected.
[Read: California’s record on climate change is a stark rebuttal to Trump]
“There are so many things that are going on all the time, even as we speak, that it’s hard to pick out ‘This is the one,’ or ‘That is the one,’” he told me in a telephone conversation the other day when asked to name his proudest legacy, nevertheless ticking off more than a few of those listed in the previous paragraphs. “I think it’s just a privilege to be in California, and to have been the governor these many years. It’s an unusual experience and very exciting, and, I think most people would agree, fairly productive and innovative. So I don’t know. I’m not one to sit around watching the movie of my own life as a source of pleasure. I can tell you, I thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing.”
Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University in Los Angeles (named for Brown’s father, who served two terms as governor from 1959 to 1967), said that the younger Brown’s greatest legacy was “proving that California was governable at a time when California’s image was under assault as the next Greece.”
“That’s a big deal in many ways,” Sonenshein adds. “Because it also plays into the partisan politics of the country, since the state was being held up as the poster child of what was wrong with progressive government. And it’s pretty hard to be a punching bag when you’ve got two reserve funds that are pretty gigantic, and a state that’s doing pretty darn well. It might not be the legacy he started out with 40 years ago, or that he necessarily wanted to have, but it’s a pretty big deal.”
[Read: Interview with California Governor Jerry Brown]
When Brown left office after his first two terms in 1983, having declined to seek reelection and having been defeated in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat, nearly 60 percent of voters disapproved of his job performance. His reputation had been damaged by quixotic 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, and his awkward ambivalence about Proposition 13, the state-ballot measure that capped property taxes at 1 percent of assessed valuation and permanently altered the state’s finances. But he was thinking outside the box in ways that seem striking now; in the 1980 campaign, challenging President Jimmy Carter, he opposed both Carter’s call for an employer mandate to provide catastrophic health-insurance coverage and Kennedy’s call for universal national coverage. Instead, he proposed tax credits for nonsmokers.
Back in private life, he studied Buddhism in Japan and spent time with Mother Teresa in India, returning to California to claim the brass-tacks job of chair of the state Democratic Party, helping to expand its donor base and grassroots-organizing efforts. Under the guidance of his longtime strategist, an eccentric, beret-wearing Frenchman named Jacques Barzaghi, he mounted one last presidential campaign in 1992 but lost the nomination to Bill Clinton after a bitter race. Then came the late-life practical apprenticeship that most analysts agree paved the way for the success of his second tour in Sacramento: eight years as mayor of Oakland, from 1999 to 2007.
“He finally was far [enough] outside the bubble of state politics and the governorship to look at what he was doing,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a retired professor of public-policy communication at the University of Southern California who has watched Brown’s entire career. “He himself said at one point when he was mayor of Oakland that he was finally understanding that the regulations that he had implemented as governor were hamstringing localities. He had to deal with them as a practical reality.”
In his first tour as governor, Brown was famously aloof, shunning the veteran pols who had adored his father, an ebullient, backslapping glad-hander of the old school. He also eschewed the normal routines and conventions of politics, and expected the young, talented staff he’d recruited to keep pace.
“He was all-consumed, and those in his immediate orbit had to be as well if they were going to do their job,” remembers Cari Beauchamp, now a noted film historian, who was Brown’s press secretary in the late 70s. “One New Year’s Eve at 10 p.m., he turned to me to ask, ‘Oh, did you have something planned?’ and I responded with a laugh, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’”
Pat Brown, who is credited with overseeing the massive state investment that transformed California in the 1950s and 60s, died in 1996 and, Jeffe says, the son has grown “more self-confident, more mellow, more broad-minded since the passing of his dad—that’s pop political psychiatry at its worst, but I can’t help thinking it.” Then there is Brown’s 2005 marriage to Anne Gust, a former senior executive at the Gap whom he’d dated for years and who became his most trusted speechwriter and strategist, first in his four-year stint as state attorney general and, since 2011, in the governorship. And along the way, he acquired a pair of dogs that friends say help keep him grounded.
Brown returned to the “Horseshoe”—the U-shaped suite of the governor’s offices in the Capitol—after a period of turmoil in California politics. Gray Davis, the Democrat incumbent who once served as Brown’s chief of staff, had been ousted in a recall election in 2003 by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was reelected to a full term in 2006. Four years later, battered by the 2008 recession and other troubles, Schwarzenegger’s once-high approval ratings were roughly equal to Davis’s at the time of the recall, and the electorate was primed for Brown’s brand of practical, tell-it-like-it-is politics and his hard-won experience. The Republican candidate, Meg Whitman, the founder of eBay, outspent him by more than three to one with her own money, but Brown won easily.
“You go through cycles when unorthodox politicians appeal to people, and he hit two of them,” says Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at Stanford University. “In his first tour, he had a period when he and governors like Mike Dukakis in Massachusetts were rejecting New Deal, big government solutions, and were for big ideas with smaller government, a kind of ascetic Democratic approach that was very much in vogue. Then we went through a period where that kind of outsider, outside-the-box stuff faded.” And then, Cain says, Brown caught another wave, distaste for “highly managed, highly groomed, highly coached, incredibly cautious politicians” (think Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton), and won his third term in 2010. “He had the unusual fate to catch the wave twice,” Cain adds.
Brown resumed the governorship just as voters passed a ballot measure eliminating the requirement for a two-thirds vote of the legislature to pass the state budget, and in 2012, he structured the budget so as to depend on passage of a ballot measure of his own, temporarily raising the sales tax by a quarter cent and imposing an income-tax surcharge on Californians making $250,000 a year. The measure passed comfortably and has since been extended, and has been key to putting the state back in the black. But the state’s finances remain too dependent on volatile personal income-tax revenues, which swell in boom times and contract when the bubble bursts. Brown also failed to crack the problem of underfunded pensions for state workers.
Two of Brown’s signature infrastructure problems remain unfinished—a pair of giant water tunnels under the Sacramento Bay Delta to improve conservation, and a high-speed rail line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco—and their ultimate fate is unclear. Just as unclear is how well Brown’s successor, Gavin Newsom, a much more conventional politician, will hold the line on fiscal discipline.
Brown is building a retirement house on Northern California ranch-land first settled by his great-grandfather during the Gold Rush, but he seems unlikely to fade from the scene. He has a $15 million campaign war chest that he says he will use to back ballot measures or other public campaigns on issues of concern to him, and he told me he’ll raise more before he’s done and will stay active. “You have to spend it,” he says. “Sooner or later, that money’s going to go out the door to issues, candidates.” There is every reason to believe he’ll remain a national and international leader on his signature issue of climate change as well. If it’s a poignant paradox that his advanced age all but disqualifies him as a presidential contender at just the moment that he may finally be an almost perfect candidate, he doesn’t dwell on it.
“I know a lot more about campaigning” now than when he last ran for president, he told me. “Probably could have run a better campaign in 1992 if I’d had ten more years of experience.” Does it bother him that the gerontological clock suggests his time has passed for a national campaign? “Well, I think it says that,” he allows, before adding drily, “Certainly those septuagenarians running around don’t seem to have any particular head start.”
In the end, the sheer longevity of Brown’s career has been its own reward. “Who’s had so many reinventions?” asks Miriam Pawel, whose history of the governor’s family, The Browns of California, was published this year. “That’s the terrific California part of it. He has this ability to reinvent himself, to focus on what he is doing in the moment. California is a place of newcomers and possibility, and yet it’s also interesting that there are families like his that go way back. I think that he really embodies in so many ways all of those very Californian characteristics, of reinvention, of possibility, of failure not being necessarily a bad thing. He really believes in California.”
After rising to MySpace fame in the mid-aughts, the singer-songwriter Kaila Yu amassed a following of nearly half a million fans on Facebook and 70,000 on Twitter and Instagram. Like all “influencers”—people who leverage a social-media following to influence others—Yu now makes her living monetizing her audience with branded content, promoting products and events through sponsored posts.
In July, she received an overture from a well-known influencer-management platform called Speakr, on behalf of the DNA-testing company 23andMe. It was offering her $300 for a Facebook post. “Somebody really likes you! One of our brand partners is running a campaign and we think you’re a perfect fit,” read the email from Speakr, which Yu shared with The Atlantic.
Yu agreed to the offer and coordinated with a Speakr account executive via email. Yu followed her directions to a T, and on the morning of July 25, she loaded up her Facebook page and posted the ad.
The next day, she requested payment. Six months and countless emails and phone calls later, Yu says she still hasn’t been paid for her work.
Speakr is one of the most notable and established influencer-management platforms, with clients such as Verizon, Sony, Ford, Nissan, Disney, Microsoft, and Universal Studios. It, like most influencer-management platforms, offers a simple service: sifting through the saturated influencer market to match stars with brands. Speakr is the middleman: The brand pays Speakr (or the brand pays an agency, which pays Speakr), and Speakr then distributes payment across a group of approved influencers, slicing and dicing the money to get maximum reach. For instance, the platform might pay 20 smaller influencers $500 each for a tweet, then pay five larger ones $1,000 each for an Instagram post, for a total influencer promotion ad buy of $15,000.
Unless you’re a top-tier influencer, you’ll almost never get paid before actually delivering work. Most influencers submit an invoice after the post goes up, and are theoretically paid soon after.
Speakr, however, stopped paying influencers early this year, say several influencers who themselves failed to receive payment after delivering work. Ten influencers on Speakr’s platform, some with more than a million followers, told me that they never received payment for the sponsored content they’ve posted, received only partial payment, or weren’t paid until months later, after issuing threats to take their problems public. Many others have posted publicly about not being paid.
[Read: Rising Instagram stars are posting fake sponsored content]
Wolftyla, who has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram and doesn’t reveal her real name, wrote in an email that Speakr currently owes her $1,500 for work she completed on July 19. Brianne Manz, a fashion and lifestyle influencer, did a campaign for Tropicana over the summer which she says she was never paid for. Zippy Sandler, a travel influencer, also did a campaign through Speakr in July and says she had not been paid by late fall.
Sarah Barlondo, a lifestyle influencer with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, told me she chased Speakr for months about a fee that to many would seem nominal. “It’s such a small payment, it’s ridiculous,” she said. In late October, she said, Speakr sent her just a portion of what she was owed via PayPal, and she gave up chasing the rest. “Even if it’s small, it’s your Metro card for the month,” she said.
One influencer went so far as to file a lawsuit. Speakr currently owes the 22-year-old influencer and former Vine star known as JoJoe $4,000, according to legal documents filed in small-claims court and reviewed by The Atlantic. JoJoe posted several videos to his Instagram story on May 21, 2018, promoting the Universal Music artist Kris Wu’s new single. According to his manager, Ray Hughes, on May 25, he was told that the payment was being processed and would be in his account shortly. As of December 12, he had still not been paid. After months of following up, Hughes discovered through a connection he had at Universal that the brand had paid Speakr back in June. After several more attempts to contact the company and obtain payment, Hughes took Speakr to small-claims court. The judge ruled in JoJoe’s favor, but JoJoe has yet to be paid.
The influencer-marketing industry is set to reach up to $10 billion by 2020, and as it has grown, influencer-management platforms and agencies have proliferated: More than 420 of them opened in 2017 alone. Influencer-management platforms are the primary way small to mid-level influencers find brand deals, yet the platforms and industry itself are highly unregulated. A 2018 survey conducted by The World Federation of Advertisers found that 65 percent of global advertisers plan to increase spending on influencer marketing in the next 12 months. But as money flows from brands through a network of agencies and platforms, sometimes the influencers themselves are left penniless.
While top-tier influencers usually have managers and agents and bookkeepers who can keep track of missing funds, the vast majority operate on their own, often without contracts or accounting software. “I didn’t sign a contract [with Speakr], but their site looked so professional,” Yu says. “A lot of times, I don’t sign contracts with brands for a quick post.”
It’s not uncommon for influencers to be signed up for more than five influencer-management platforms at once, and some are active on as many as 10. But with so many scattered campaigns and pending payments floating around, money can slip through the cracks. For all but the most organized influencers, it’s easy to forget about small brand work, such as a sponsored tweet posted months ago for $50. Barlondo said she almost forgot the company owed her at all.
“Influencers are not always good businesspeople,” says Jeremiah Boehner, who consults with brands about influencers. “They’re good at whatever made them an influencer.”
Even those who do remain on top of things can find themselves in a financial hole. “I’ve gotten paid same day and six months later,” says Nellie, an influencer who goes by the name Brooklyn Active Mama and doesn’t reveal her real name. “You have to be prepared to get paid at any time. It’s very difficult for an influencer; if you sign a $2,000 contract, you really never know when you’re going to get that money.” Still, she says, most platforms are communicative about the delay, or will issue partial payment up front as insurance. Nellie says that after working with Speakr to do a Twitter campaign for Pepsi, she had to harass the agency for eight months before receiving her $200 payment. (Pepsi did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Nellie hasn’t soured on management platforms altogether, though: She’s still registered on at least four others.
By many accounts, Speakr basically invented influencer marketing. In 2010, Marco Hansell, a digital strategist who previously worked with musicians such as John Legend and Ludacris, noticed that brands would pay large amounts of money for people with online followings to post about them. He used $20,000 to bootstrap a new company called twtMob (later, Speakr). Hansell told me that in its first year, the company generated $1.8 million in revenue.
“They kind of came on the scene when there weren’t other influencer-marketing companies in general,” Taylor Nikolai, a marketer and social-media influencer who runs several Twitter accounts with a collective 10 million followers, told me. “They were basically the first ones doing only influencer marketing. At the time, there wasn’t even a word for influencers.”
[Read: Instagram has a massive harassment problem]
By the time platforms such as Vine and Instagram took off around 2014, twtMob was working with stars such as Christian DelGrosso, Logan Paul, and Jake Paul. For many influencers, the first time they got paid to post about a product was through twtMob. In October 2014, the company rebranded to Speakr. From 2012 to 2016, it raised at least $4.5 million through four funding rounds. “Hundreds of influencers make $10,000 to $20,000 a month [on Speakr]. Thousands can make a few thousand [dollars] a month,” Hansell claimed at the time.
And for years, influencers did make real money on the platform. Nikolai said that he earned a healthy five-figure sum per year through twtMob and later Speakr, by posting sponsored tweets about Samsung and several movie studios. “They facilitated well-paying sponsorships, and I always got paid,” Nikolai said.
Since then, Speakr has continued to grow. In 2016, the company signed a lucrative partnership deal with Time Inc., which launched an influencer network “powered by” Speakr. “Why we chose Speakr is because they’re really smart ... They have an edge there in their space, and they give us that edge in our space, as well,” Regina Buckley, Time Inc.’s senior vice president of digital business development, said at the time. (Time Inc. did not respond to several requests for comment.) 2017 saw the company’s profile rise even further, and Hansell became a go-to quote for reporters writing about his growing industry. In one private Facebook group in which influencers discuss deals, Speakr was mentioned as a reliable platform.
According to influencers who spoke with me, the trouble with the company started between late 2017 and spring 2018. Suddenly, checks weren’t coming on time. Brandi Jeter Riley completed a campaign for Speakr in December 2017 and expected to receive payment within 30 days, she says. By April, the money still hadn’t arrived, so she resorted to tweeting at Hansell. “Hello! Congrats on being a 7-Figure #ecommerce company! Could you please help me get paid for a program that I did with you all in December?” she tweeted on April 24. She also emailed the company and took to Facebook, leaving a one-star review on Speakr’s page. “Speakr has not paid me for services I provided in 2017. They are not responsive to emails. For a company that needs influencers to support their business, they certainly don’t seem to value us,” she wrote. Finally, on April 30, she says the company rendered payment.
As the months went on, more influencers began to have issues. Some, like JoJoe, were told by a Speakr account executive that payments would be arriving shortly, only to receive radio silence when they tried to follow up. Erin Sullivan, an outdoors-focused influencer with 65,000 followers on Instagram, tweeted in early September that she had yet to receive payment for a campaign she did months ago. Ariane Andrew, an Instagram fitness star with more than 800,000 followers, posted a tweet promoting 23andMe in July for $750 and says she also had not been paid by September. Last week, she finally received the $750 she was owed, but says that at this point she feels entitled to more given the time she spent trying to track down her money. (23andMe did not respond to a request for comment.)
[Read: Instagram is the new ]evite
Jason Horton posted a tweet about the movie Second Act in July for $100. He told me he was only paid in November after “escalating my emails to the point where I was going to show up at their office.” All in all, he spent hours of his time tracking down his money. “It was a lot of work,” he said. “A lot of checking back ... I did the work in a very timely way, so I expect to get paid in a timely way.”
We have to stop letting folks take advantage of us, y’all. Like... seriously. I don’t want to be on Twitter tweeting at brands about unpaid invoices (hey, @speakr ), but if they don’t respond via email, what should I do?
— Brandi Jeter Riley (@BrandiJeter) April 26, 2018Cassie Garcia, a lifestyle influencer, also did work for Speakr over the summer. By November 5, she says she hadn’t been paid. “It’s like pulling teeth to get a straight answer from @speakr,” she tweeted at the time.
In a private Facebook group in which influencers discuss brand deals, several influencers attempted to band together and try to spread the word that Speakr was not a reliable company to work with anymore. Some members of the group say they warned others about the company via private DMs, but aside from a handful of tweets, the majority of influencers stiffed by Speakr have remained silent.
Because influencers rely on their public image to make money, most are highly wary of anything that might be considered controversial. They don’t want to appear to be difficult to work with and accidentally jeopardize other brand deals. None of the influencers who did speak publicly about Speakr ever did so on their main platform: Instagram. “You don’t want to show other clients that you are creating drama or have them think you’re going to call them out that way if something happens,” Barlondo said. She herself tweeted only when she realized she wasn’t the only person in her position.
By mid-December, the backlash against Speakr had peaked. The company had stopped posting on Instagram and Twitter months ago, the account executive who served as many influencers’ main point of contact left the company in October, and some influencers say they planned to simply give up on ever getting paid.
That an agency could go bankrupt overnight and leave a slew of unpaid influencers in its wake is not out of the realm of imagination. Just last month, some of YouTube’s top creators were blindsided when a multichannel network called Defy Media collapsed. According to The Verge, hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars that were supposed to go to the YouTube creators in Defy’s network are still missing, and many YouTubers might never be paid.
When Speakr staff became unresponsive, Yu and some other influencers assumed Speakr was doomed to meet a similar fate.
When reached for comment in December, Hansell was adamant that the company was fine. “There’s nobody that won’t eventually get paid,” he said. “It’s not a scenario where we’re trying to scheme around or weasel out of this thing; we’re trying to get everyone paid ... My integrity is something I hold high. We got put into an unfortunate situation that now we’re attempting to rectify, and are asking everyone to bear with us.”
According to Hansell, Speakr is not in danger of going bankrupt, but it did get into some serious financial trouble this year.
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Because Speakr acts as a middleman between brands and influencers, the company frequently fronts a lot of money. Say a brand uses Speakr to facilitate a $10,000 brand event in Miami with 10 top influencers. Not only does Speakr front the $10,000, but it also pays for all the influencers’ expenses related to the campaign, only later invoicing the brand separately. Expenses for flights and hotel rooms for a group of influencers traveling on a brand promotion can sometimes run as high as $50,000 or more. While Speakr pays this higher sum up front, it’s only making money on the $10,000 activation.
“We end up in an area where we’re floating money as a middleman while chasing money,” Hansell said. Because Speakr didn’t have enough cash on hand to cover all the costs it fronted, the company took out loans, which it then owed interest on: “It becomes this mounting thing that starts creating a larger issue.”
To maintain some relationships as the company scaled, Hansell said Speakr also “started bending the rules, paying people early, then we ended up in a place with more capital out than in.” The company also used money from some campaigns to pay influencers from past campaigns who were still owed payment, Hansell said.
Speakr says that the company has been left waiting as long as more than 180 days as money trickled down from a brand to an agency to Speakr. Sometimes, if a client isn’t happy with a result, it will refuse to pay for the campaign altogether, leaving Speakr to foot the bill. Clients can cut budgets midway through a campaign.
Boehner says none of these issues is uncommon in the influencer industry. He once worked on a campaign for a major cellphone company where the client refused to pay because a porn star had retweeted a sponsored tweet by one of his influencers, something he had no control over.
But other industry experts give Speakr less leeway. After all, the company has been around for years, and this payment structure is not new. Balancing the books is just part of doing business, says Jonathan Saeidian, the founder and CEO of the marketing agency Brenton Way. “Who in their right mind just goes and pays influencers ahead of time?” he says. “That’s just not how things work.”
But for Speakr, whose business was built mostly on the backs of midsize to micro influencers, that is how things worked for many years. Hansell said that things cracked partly because influencer marketing has exploded, and there was suddenly a lot more money than he was used to managing running through his company. He said that if there’s one lesson others in his space should learn, it’s, “don’t grow. If you just stay a midsize business, it becomes manageable,” he said. “Had we done that, there would have never been that end balance. When those numbers get larger, the reality comes into play.”
Now Hansell is left cleaning up the mess. The company raised more money in November, which Hansell said is being put toward squaring up with influencers. Speakr also revamped its finance team and instituted new financial controls over clients, “so we don’t end up holding the bag and looking like the bad guys,” he said. He admitted that the company had been lax about collecting from clients in the past, saying that it’s hard to negotiate with major brands who “are the big 800-pound gorillas” and can usually dictate terms of payment or take their business elsewhere. “Influencers have no idea the type of time and waiting we go through on the client side,” he said.
Hansell said he wanted the influencers left in purgatory to know that for the past few months he had even ceased taking a salary, and that his sole focus was keeping the company alive. “We’re fighting for these influencers and the survival of our business,” he said.
Shortly before midnight on December 19, following an inquiry from The Atlantic, Speakr did blast out the closest thing any influencer has gotten to a direct apology. Some with outstanding balances received a message from the Speakr finance team titled, “We hear you. We’re sorry. We’re making it right.” The messages contained partial payments, sent via PayPal, and a promise that “over the next 2 weeks our finance team will reach out to you individually to clarify the time frame of when to expect your outstanding balance to be completely on track.”
Other influencers received a more overt mea culpa from Hansell. “I just want to personally apologize for the inconvenience and lack of strong communication that has happened in dealing with your payment issues ... we made mistakes along the way but learned how to fix and prevent situations like this from ever happening again,” he wrote to several influencers.
Not everyone is accepting the apology. “Personally, I understand clients pay late, but at least answer my emails, show some respect,” Barlondo said. “Tell me you’re so sorry, tell me you’re going to get it done. I would have waited.”
“I would be shocked if I ever received a full payment,” Yu says. “I don’t know what partial payment means, but it could mean one dollar. A lot of people really needed that money, and I’m outraged over that. This is a job for so many people, and you’re stealing from their pockets,” Yu says.
To Riley and others who spent hours of their time hunting down payment, it all feels like too little, too late. “Influencers deserve to be treated with respect,” she says. “Being ignored by the CEO let me know that I am dispensable to the company. When I finally was paid, there was no apology, no follow-up. I’m not going to help someone make money who doesn’t care about me.”
Barlondo added that after her experience with Speakr, she likely won’t work with another influencer-management agency. “Next time Walmart wants to work with me,” she said, “they need to talk to me directly.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria is controversial partly because of the possible consequences for the country’s Kurdish minority. “Among the biggest losers are likely to be the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped and relied on to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” The New York Times editorialized. “Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, considers many of the Kurds to be terrorists bent on destroying his country. In recent days he has vowed to launch a new offensive against them in the Syrian border region.”
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Tommy Meyerson, a veteran of the Syria campaign, argues that “the Kurdish-led civil administration does the heavy lifting of guarding hundreds of ISIS’ most dangerous foreign fighters,” asserts that the West “owes them a debt,” and warns that a Turkish invasion into territory they hold “would force Kurdish forces to pull back from the front lines against the remnant of ISIS, allowing the jihadists to regroup and proliferate.”
Joost Hiltermann has more on the Kurds’ grim options. And Noam Chomsky, the leftist academic and outspoken critic of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, has said it makes sense for the United States “to maintain a presence which would deter an attack on the Kurdish areas.”
Proponents of U.S. withdrawal ought to acknowledge and grapple with the fate of the Kurds, as Michael Brendan Dougherty and Stephen Walt do. That Turkey is reportedly massing troops along the border near territory held by Kurdish forces only increases the urgency of the matter. Perhaps there is some action America can take to prevent a slaughter, some leverage it can exert on an ally’s behalf, some time it can buy them.
But Syria hawks who insist that the United States ought to remain in the country indefinitely to avoid an immoral betrayal of the Kurds are neither acknowledging nor grappling with the full ramifications of their position—nor are they facing up to their part in any betrayal that occurs.
[Kori Schake: Trump just messed up the one thing he did better than Obama]
For the foreseeable future, Turkey will be hostile to Syrian Kurds and strong enough to vanquish them militarily if it so chooses. If it is a betrayal for the U.S. to pull out while those conditions hold, that would seem to imply an American presence in the country for years or even decades.
But neither Congress nor the public favors the indefinite occupation of Syria to protect its Kurds from hostility by the Turkish government. Recall that Congress failed to pass an authorization to use military force in Syria even when ISIS was orders of magnitude stronger there than it is today. Would Congress or the public have approved an agreement whereby Kurdish forces helped us fight ISIS and we agreed in return to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Syria as long as Kurds there faced danger? Of course not.
Still, many now say that the United States would be betraying our allies if we leave. It’s reasonable to ask, given the positions of Congress, the president, and the public: Who took on that ostensible obligation on the nation’s behalf? What gave them the right to do so? What other checks are they writing? And is there anything that the public can do to stop them?
Opponents of an indefinite U.S. presence in Syria object in part because the longer U.S. troops stay, the greater the risk that our forces are drawn into an unplanned fight, like the four-hour battle between Russian mercenaries and U.S. commandos, but one that spirals into a larger, potentially catastrophic war between nuclear-armed states. That would be a daunting risk under any circumstances. And the risk is only heightened by Trump’s erratic streak, lack of foreign-policy experience, and penchant for impulsive risk taking that sometimes ends in bankruptcy.
“The world hoped that an Axis of Adults could constrain the juvenile in the Oval Office, but such naive expectations have been dashed repeatedly,” the Syria hawk Max Boot wrote. “Syria offers the latest example of the futility of expecting that lower-level officials can consistently save the world from the commander in chief … Trump does whatever he wants. It could be based on what he had for breakfast or there could be something more sinister going on.” But if Trump is at best an out-of-control juvenile, and plausibly the knowing pawn of America’s enemies, as Boot contends, then isn’t the U.S. safer withdrawing its troops than leaving them stationed in a powder keg, where a misstep by an unfit commander in chief could bring about a global disaster?
Susan Rice, who served as a national-security adviser in Barack Obama’s administration, wrote: “The president couldn’t care less about facts, intelligence, military analysis or the national interest. He refuses to take seriously the views of his advisers, announces decisions on impulse and disregards the consequences of his actions. In abandoning the role of a responsible commander in chief, Mr. Trump today does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary.”
[Hassan Hassan: Trump shouldn’t withdraw troops—he should rebrand]
Wouldn’t it be better for a guy like that to preside over troops who are stateside with their families rather than deployed in a volatile war zone that he doesn’t understand, even as he shows a new willingness to micromanage?
The stance many foreign-policy hawks are taking is akin to granting that a reckless incompetent has temporarily taken over as on-duty surgeon and insisting that the hospital proceed with its brain operations anyway.
Now, it may be that there’s a persuasive case for staying in Syria a bit longer, until some specific, achievable, near-term goal is accomplished that improves the prospects of America’s Kurdish allies without incurring a greater risk of a world war or doing more damage to the rule of law or the democratic will or unduly endangering the lives of American troops. If so, let’s hear that plan.
Instead, most Syria hawks offer no alternative withdrawal date or evidence that the Kurds will be safer if our forces withdrew in one or five years. And there is good reason to think that part of the reason some hawks want to stay is to thwart Iran’s ambitions for the foreseeable future.
Even those Syria hawks are still right to fear for the Kurds, help make Americans aware of their plight, and urge reflection on U.S. obligations and a withdrawal’s likely effect, if any, on American credibility. And Syria doves are right to fear that the Kurds are being used as a pretext to advance a forever war in the Middle East and to guard against it.
Syria hawks ought not to invoke the Kurds to call for an indefinite U.S. deployment without addressing (among other things) the unfitness of this commander in chief to preside over a volatile occupation, the risks of wider war, the danger to our troops, the lack of an authorization to use military force in Syria, the illegality of staying in Syria to fight with Iran, and the damage done when any faction helps sever the constitutional mechanisms that keep war subject to democratic accountability.
What’s more, Syria hawks ought to reflect on their role in any future betrayal that Kurdish people in Syria suffer at the hands of the United States.
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I don’t know whether cooperating to fight ISIS, a common enemy, necessarily conferred an American obligation to protect the Kurds from Turkey. But if representations of that sort were made to Kurdish forces, they were irresponsible promises that could not be reliably kept by whoever made them. Any such promises were made without the backing of Congress or the citizenry in a conflict the U.S. entered without significant debate. It was always easy to see that the American public would eventually sour on having “boots on the ground” in Syria. Only a reckless gambler would’ve wagered that the public would tolerate an indefinite occupation as long as Syrian Kurds faced any danger.
Syria hawks pressed for American boots on the ground anyway. And they got their way in part because they were willing to proceed in spite of a public that was largely ignorant of the intervention—a public likely to stay ignorant longer because foreign allies were minimizing U.S. troop needs and casualties. To urge an intervention despite those factors is to dramatically increase the likelihood of an unpopular deployment, a populist backlash to it, and withdrawal before hawks find it prudent. If anyone told Syrian Kurds that America would always have their backs, that person behaved irresponsibly and probably dishonestly.
Often, the seeds of foreign-policy betrayals are planted at the outset by proponents of interventions who press ahead without adequate buy-in. If hawks are as averse to leaving erstwhile allies in tough positions as they purport to be, they ought to refrain from inserting the United States into future wars of choice without very solid backing from Congress and the public. Those who urge wars of choice absent those marks of legitimacy and relative sustainability all but guarantee that the U.S. will break with some of its battlefield allies, as it has done at least since Vietnam, even when doing so leaves those allies in a very dangerous lurch.
While that is always terrible, overeager interventionists sometimes put the U.S. in a position where the only alternatives are even more terrible. That is plausibly the case in Syria—it is impossible to know for sure.
The practice of paying children an allowance kicked off in earnest about 100 years ago. “The motivation was twofold,” says Steven Mintz, a historian of childhood at the University of Texas at Austin. “First, to provide kids with the money that they needed to participate in the emerging commercial culture—allowing them to buy candy, cheap toys, and other inexpensive products—and second, to teach them the value of money.”
These days, American children on average receive about $800 per year in allowance, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Kids, though, are usually not receiving money for nothing—the vast majority of American parents who pay allowance (who themselves are a majority of American parents) tie it to the completion of work around the house.
Parents’ preference for this setup has spawned an array of apps that let them dole out allowance money once chores are completed, and even pay for an individual chore. Homey, an app that’s effectively a digital chore chart, allows parents to issue payouts upon visual confirmation of finished chores and is used by 100,000 families. A similar app called BusyKid, which launched earlier this year and is used by 25,000 families, also lets children invest in the stock market with their allowance money. (These apps are just two of many new digital tools, including RoosterMoney, Current, and goHenry, for managing children’s money and teaching them about personal finance.)
[Read: How to land your kid in therapy]
Recently in The Washington Post, a writer distilled the argument for per-chore compensation in an article headlined “I Pay My Kids to Get Dressed, Do Homework and More. It’s the Best Decision I Ever Made.” A mother of two children with ADHD, she found it tremendously effective to induce her kids to stay on task with small payments of a dime or a quarter; she suggested other parents might find it effective to do the same. “In behavioral psychology, this is called positive reinforcement,” she wrote. “And it works.”
Does it? A range of experts I consulted expressed concern that tying allowance very closely to chores, whatever its apparent short-term effectiveness, can send kids unintentionally counterproductive messages about family, community, and personal responsibility. In fact, the way chores work in many households worldwide points to another way, in which kids get involved earlier, feel better about their contributions, and don’t need money as an enticement.
Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University who studies families, is skeptical of the idea of paying kids on a per-chore basis. “How sustainable is it if you’re going to pay a child a dime for each time he picks up his clothes off the floor?” she says. “What are you saying—that you’re owed something for taking care of your stuff?”
Luthar is not opposed to giving allowances, but she thinks it’s important to establish that certain core chores are done not because they’ll lead to payment, but because they keep the household running. “It’s part of what you do as a family,” Luthar says. “In a family, no one’s going to pay you to tie your own shoes or to put your clothes away.” Whatever the approach, she adds, it’s important to acknowledge that parenting is confusing and exhausting work, and it can be difficult to broker household labor agreements without ever resorting to bribery of some sort.
Luthar’s suggested approach to allowance is compatible with the regimen that the New York Times personal-finance columnist Ron Lieber outlines in his book The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money. He advises that allowance be used as a means of showing children how to save, give, and spend on things they care about. Kids should do chores, he writes, “for the same reason we do—because the chores need to be done, and not with the expectation of compensation … Allowance ought to stand on its own, not as a wage but as a teaching tool.”
This argument has its critics. Many parents may scoff at a system that tells kids the world will spit money out at them on a regular basis in exchange for nothing at all; in households that aren’t upper middle class or wealthier, such an arrangement might offend. (Lieber does account for this in his book, suggesting that parents who object to his methods might consider paying kids only for chores that solve problems they themselves identify in the household, or for periodic one-off tasks like washing a car or painting a room.)
Heather Beth Johnson, a sociologist at Lehigh University who studies families and wealth inequality, aligns more with the Lieber school of chore compensation (or lack thereof). “When we pay [kids] to do things that humans have always had to do as participants of communities and families,” she says, “it sends them some sort of a message that they are entitled to [an] exchange for these things,” as opposed to a message that they’re part of a household team and should contribute accordingly.
Johnson considers the chores-for-allowance agreement to be of a piece with a broader custom in upper-middle-class households of paying children for things like doing well in school or taking care of siblings. She says that this sort of compensation can give kids the sense that they’re entitled to rewards for fulfilling basic responsibilities. “This isn’t happening in poor families,” she says. “They’re not like, ‘If you take care of your cousins, I’m going to pay you for it.’ It’s just expected that you would take care of your cousins if your cousins needed taking care of.”
Johnson’s children—14-year-old twins and a 10-year-old—do not get an allowance. But they do get spending money from their mother as needed, as well as regular conversations about the work it takes to run a house. “Maybe my kids are just really strange,” she says, “but I really don’t have to say it more than once—I say, ‘Empty the trash,’ and they do it.”
But considering the way chores are undertaken around the world, it might be the allowance-earners who are the strange ones. David Lancy, a former professor of anthropology at Utah State University, has studied how families around the world handle chores, and he has observed a development of responsibilities in less well-off societies that looks little like the American way.
After about 18 months on the Earth, Lancy explained to me, children almost universally become eager to help their parents, and in many cultures, they’re brought in to the processes of doing housework. They may be incompetent little things, but they can learn quickly by watching. “Praise is rare,” Lancy says, “as the principal reward is to be welcomed and included in the flow of family activity.” Gradually, their responsibilities get ratcheted up according to their abilities and strength; they may start by carrying messages or small objects, and work their way up to food preparation or caring for siblings. “In effect, they ‘own’ a suite of chores which they carry out routinely without being told,” Lancy says. And they don’t assume they’ll be paid an allowance.
In an email, he made clear how this contrasts with American norms: “In our society—and I’d extend this to most modern, post-industrial nations—we actually deny our children’s bids to help. We distract them with other activities, we do our chores (meal prep) when they’re napping, we convey that their ‘helping’ is burdensome and, not surprisingly, the helping instinct is extinguished. Hence, at 6 or 7 when we think they’re ready to start doing chores or at least taking care of themselves and their ‘stuff,’ they’ve lost all desire to help out.”
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2018” coverage here.
2018 was a year whose realities sometimes seemed to approach the dystopias and dramas of fiction, as stories of family trauma, environmental disaster, and sexual assault played out on the world stage. The books our writers and editors were drawn to this year include many that illuminate these struggles and inequities, whether in the form of visceral sonnets, lyrical history, or dizzyingly surreal detective yarns. But they also reach past political themes to the most intimate and universal of stories: a cross-continental meditation on transitory love, a warm and funny account of aging, a timeless reinvention of an ancient myth, and an absorbing deconstruction of faith, to name a few. Our list isn’t definitive or comprehensive, but guided by individual interests and tastes. Below, you’ll find essays, poetry, three striking fiction debuts, the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and more.
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper
St. Martin’s PressEloquent Rage has sometimes been grouped, given its topic, with Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her, as one of a trio of excellent explorations of the capabilities of feminine—and feminist—anger. But Cooper’s work, as her subtitle suggests, is a more specific celebration of the power of black feminism. Eloquent Rage, in that sense, is just as aptly in league with world-shaking works such as Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism and bell hooks’s Killing Rage: Ending Racism. Cooper, a professor at Rutgers and a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, is a scholar, and Eloquent Rage, accordingly, is also deeply erudite: As Cooper uses her own experience to crystallize broader ideas about politics and culture and sex and pain and anger—as she discusses Sandra Bland and Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton and so many other sources of eloquence—she also blends genres. Here are theory and history and essay and memoir, combined so seamlessly that it becomes difficult—and entirely beside the point—to tell where one ends and the others begin. It is the personal is political, rendered as literature, and it is, on top of everything else, deeply enthusiastic about its subjects, the women who live and move in the tensions Cooper lays bare. As she writes, “I have always lingered over stories of women who lead, women who know what they want out of this world, and women who demand that others respect them and recognize their magic.”
— Megan Garber
Sabrina, Nick Drnaso
Drawn & QuarterlyThe first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Sabrina is the kind of tale whose visual simplicity belies how viscerally disturbing it is. (Suffice it to say that everyone I know who has read this book told me it gave them awful dreams.) Nick Drnaso has created a minimalist horror story that functions as a gutting critique of a modern media environment choked with misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. A young woman named Sabrina goes missing. Her disappearance and the revelations that follow trigger not only a deep grief among those who knew and loved her, but also a kind of mass hysteria throughout the United States. Following a familiar pattern, Sabrina’s case mutates from an unspeakable human tragedy into a political symbol—fuel for a brand of insatiable paranoia kept alive by reckless commentators and denizens of online forums. Drnaso’s buildup is patient, his artistic style understated. Entire pages go by without someone speaking. Characters browse the internet or listen to the radio or sit quietly in a room. People are rendered plainly—pinpricks for eyes, a wisp of ink for mouths—so that any remotely exaggerated expression feels like a jump scare. This is a book that, because of Drnaso’s immense talent and the stubbornness of the ugly realities depicted, never quite leaves you.
— Lenika Cruz
Less, Andrew Sean Greer
little, brown and companyLess is a novel about a midlife crisis, but it’s also the most warmhearted, joyous, delightful analysis of the subject that anyone could dream of. Arthur Less, the hero, is facing 50, with a failed relationship he needs immediate geographic distance from, a middling career as a writer (“All you do is write gay Ulysses,” an ex tells him), and a particular genius for self-deprecation (“How dreadful,” he thinks, “if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink”). In a flash of inspiration, Less decides to RSVP “yes” to every literary invitation sitting on his desk: a creative-writing seminar in Germany, a festival in Italy, a conference in Mexico, a Christian writing retreat in India. As he traverses the world, he suffers various pitfalls and humiliations, all detailed by Andrew Sean Greer in wincingly funny prose. But Less also compels you to care deeply about Arthur himself, with his unflinching courage and his bruised, oversized heart.
— Sophie Gilbert
Florida, Lauren Groff
Riverhead BooksIn her collection of stories set in a state that comes across as both alien and too horribly human, Lauren Groff uses bewitching language to bring Florida to life, as a weird, reptile-ridden, post-apocalyptic Eden. Spanish moss dangles “like armpit hair,” while humans seek refuge in strange and unruly places. A recurring voice among the stories is that of a writer, like Groff—a Florida transplant with two sons (also like Groff) whose anxiety pervades the text, turning the world around her into a ghastly fearscape, even when it feels oddly like home. In other tales, two girls are abandoned on an island and quickly turn feral, a woman sees visions while waiting out a hurricane, and a student slides into homelessness. Groff finds beauty in the most unlikely scenes, with her own “imperfect and unwilling bargain” with Florida spurring phrases and moments that are indelible.
— S. G.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes
Penguin BooksTerrance Hayes writes with the kind of urgency that demands undivided attention. In 2015’s How to Be Drawn, the poet drew on his fluency as a visual artist to map “TROUBLED BODIES,” “INVISIBLE SOULS,” and “A CIRCLING MIND,” as he titled the collection’s three sections. His latest, released in June, ties together 70 brutal and gorgeous poems that all bear the same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” In some of the deftly constructed sonnets, Hayes ponders love: I am my mother’s bewildered shadow. / My lover’s bewildering shadow is mine. In others, he meditates with astonishing clarity on the stakes of interpersonal interactions under hostile conditions: I ain’t mad at you, / Assassin. It’s not the bad people who are brave / I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid. The poems were all written within the first 200 days of the Trump presidency, but American Sonnets never feels gimmicky or trite. “The hysteria of being multiplied & divided,” a line from one of Hayes’s most disembodying poems, animates the poet’s writing, and it’s hard to look away.
— Hannah Giorgis
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
Algonquin books“Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied.” So Celestial writes in the first of many letters to Roy, the man she’d been married to for a year and a half before he was imprisoned for a crime she knows he didn’t commit. That grammatical distinction—between a violation that just is and one that is imposed by an invisible force—is at the heart of Tayari Jones’s magnificent novel, An American Marriage. The book’s premise may call to mind, especially this year, another devastating story about a young black couple whose bright future is extinguished by some combination of indifferent fate and a racist criminal-justice system. But in setting Roy free early on, An American Marriage asks a horrifying question: What if the resolution is the start of a new nightmare? Jones unspools just how nebulous the traumas of a single wrongful conviction can be for everyone involved; she moves between the perspectives of Roy, Celestial, and their friend Andre, whose connection with Celestial deepens into something fierce and real that frightens all three. Over 306 pages, this love triangle takes on an impossible shape: Its edges are somehow both sharpened (each character has a clearly defined position) and softened (no one is an obvious villain). The explosive drama that follows serves to validate a brutal truth: that reversing an injustice can’t rewind time or rebottle pain or reclaim love. But it can, the novel insists, make way for a new kind of peace.
— L. C.
The Incendiaries, R. O. Kwon
Riverhead booksThe neat trick of The Incendiaries, a book consumed by the validity and the orthodoxy of religion, is that it sweeps readers so absorbingly into the stories being told that you might forget to question their reliability. R. O. Kwon provides three separate narratives in her debut novel about a campus cult involved in a shocking act: Will, a student at Edwards College who’s recently lost his religion; Phoebe, a former pianist whose mother died in a car accident; and John Leal, a barefoot guru who claims to have once been imprisoned in a North Korean labor camp. Not one is entirely trustworthy. As the three accounts unspool, you have to selectively try to piece them together to make sense of everything, like a modern-day St. Jerome assembling the Bible. Kwon considers vast themes like faith, grief, and deception with precision, and her imagery is sparingly beautiful, conjuring a world where it’s all too easy to be taken in.
— S. G.
These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore
w. w. nortonThe world is precarious and time is precious and those things being what they are, I can think of no stronger endorsement than this: These Truths is 932 pages long—and, reader, I didn’t want it to end. That’s in part because Jill Lepore’s history, sweeping its way from pre-Columbian America to the decidedly post-Columbian era of Donald Trump, is so lyrically told. (Who else but Lepore would think to describe James K. Polk as having “eyes like caverns and hair like smoke”?) The poetry, though, is without romance: These Truths is productively clear-eyed, rejecting the easy mythologies that so often populate wide-ranging works of history and exploring America, instead, as the product of chaotic and human and therefore often excruciatingly preventable contingencies. Here are some of the most urgent and defining truths of the current moment—among them inequality, partisanship, nationalism, and, in particular, racism—told in reverse, Metacom to Cotton Mather to Andrew Jackson to Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray to Phyllis Schlafly to Barack Obama to so many others, figures familiar and less so. People who, treading the vast American landscape, bent the arc of history.
— M. G.
The Feral Detective, Jonathan Lethem
ecCo pressFiction being a bit of a slow cousin to actuality—at least three years behind the news, as a rule—the novels of the Trump era should be coming in a steady wave by the end of 2019. None of them, however, will be quite like The Feral Detective, Jonathan Lethem’s 11th novel and his first detective story since 1999’s wonderful Motherless Brooklyn. The warping sensations of Election Night 2016, the mangled instantaneous awareness of having plunged through the ice of the looking glass and into a reversed republic, are this book’s steady state.
Perhaps to secure the dislocation, Lethem writes first-person in the voice of a woman: Phoebe Siegler, a freaked-out New York Times journalist drawn into the tingling spaces of the American West by the search for a runaway teen. In the desert, the world of the so-called “Beast-Elect,” the Supreme Tangerine, discloses itself: tribalism, hyperreality, naked-lunch America. There’s a lot of action around California’s Mount Baldy, because the runaway teen is a Leonard Cohen fan, and the monastery on Mount Baldy is where Cohen (whose death, two days before the election, seemed part of the general dilapidation of consciousness) would do his Zen thing. There is some superb writing about dogs. And there is a witty, rueful, reluctantly oracular voice telling us the new story of ourselves.
— James Parker
The Carrying, Ada Limón
Milkweed EditionsThe line “Imagine you must survive without running?” stopped me up as I read “Ancestors,” an entry in Ada Limón’s latest poetry collection. Into that open-ended, strangely hopeful query is baked the quandary of how to be on this Earth while also harboring a crushing grief. Limón’s poems in The Carrying are threaded with this tension. They are preoccupied, to a great extent, with a particular strain of desire and loss: struggles with fertility, as well as the societal bias toward motherhood. Limón ponders, with wonder, the dandelion, “a flower so tricky it can reproduce asexually, / making perfect identical selves, bam, another me, bam, another me.” She writes tenderly about bodies: the scarred one of her mother and those of dead animals she passes on the road. Crows and beetles pop up repeatedly, as important to the world of these poems as its human figures. Limón, a powerful writer whose Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, uses the straightforward language of deeply felt experience in The Carrying and urges readers to do that trickiest of things: to consider, even countenance, dueling emotions at once.
— Jane Yong Kim
Circe, Madeline Miller
Little, Brown and CompanyIt’s been a rich few years for classical stories retold by characters on the margins. In 2012, Madeline Miller published The Song of Achilles, the story of the Trojan War written from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’s companion. Her follow-up, Circe, is a stunning novel narrated by literature’s first witch, a character who features only briefly in The Odyssey, but whose story, Miller proves, is epic in its own right. The daughter of the sun god, Helios, and a nymph, Circe is banished to an island after she turns the naiad Scylla into a monster. Alone, and immortal, she begins to practice witchcraft, honing her powers for solace and self-protection. “I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow,” Circe recalls. “I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands.” With Circe, Miller fleshes out a fascinating character whose desires, battles, and spirit make her feel newly liberated, and timeless.
— S. G.
After the Winter, Guadalupe Nettel
coffee house pressGuadalupe Nettel’s third book to be translated into English examines solitude in all its pleasing and miserable facets, as well as the pull of human connection that can draw isolated people—at least temporarily—into more communal orbits. Fashioned as a dual narrative, After the Winter follows two such characters: There’s Claudio, a troubled, dislikable man who appreciates the “silence, order, and cleanliness” of his New York City apartment only as much as the convenience of a female “body that lets itself be grabbed.” And there’s Cecilia, a Mexican expat in Paris who has a predilection for cemeteries and lives her days in a “ghostly state,” except when she’s engaging in a kind of “compulsive espionage” on her neighbor. That the two cross paths, and then part, midway through their individual story arcs is integral to the novel’s formal conceit. The pair’s unlikely affair (presented archly via “Cecilia’s Version” and “Claudio’s Version” chapters) will not be the most substantive one of each other’s lives. Previous relationships haunt the characters’ interior monologues, and woven into Nettel’s confident, empathic lines is the sad certainty that the author has explored in her other works: that life, let alone love, is fleeting.
— J. Y. K.
There There, Tommy Orange
knopfTo call the Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange’s debut novel “engrossing” would be a wild understatement. There There envelops the reader whole, weaving together history, identity, and intergenerational memory with rapid prose. The novel follows 12 characters as they travel to the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange maps the struggles of “urban Indians … the generation born in the city,” with shrewdness and compassion. He traces his characters’ contemporary conditions back to their historical roots; nothing is a coincidence. The book is unflinching, its characters’ arcs at times devastating. There There, with its palpable commitment to revering Orange’s inspirations and forerunners, functions as both an engaging story and a record of trauma.
— H. G.
The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani
Penguin BooksThe Perfect Nanny begins with an atrocity, stated simply. “The baby is dead,” Leila Slimani writes. “It only took a few seconds.” The story, inspired by the unthinkable murder of two children in New York by their nanny, is relocated to Paris by Slimani, a Franco-Moroccan writer who uses her innately and immediately distressing setup to prod anxieties about working motherhood, class, and the strange emotional intimacy embedded in taking care of someone else’s children. The novel, told from the perspective of both the children’s mother and caregiver, tries to imagine how such an event could have happened—to flesh out the details and the conflicts that might help such a contradictory story make sense. It gets close. One of the more resonant elements in The Perfect Nanny is how it portrays two women both continually suppressing their instincts, out of the simple need to get through the day.
— S. G.
Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires
atria booksNafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, Heads of the Colored People, is a vivid, sometimes unnerving tapestry of emotion. In each tale about characters with fraught relationships to their racial identities, Thompson-Spires toys with humor to disarming effect. The author’s winks begin with the first line of the introductory story: “Riley wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair—which he worked with gel and a blow-dryer and flatiron some mornings into Sonic the Hedgehog spikes so stiff you could prick your finger on them, and sometimes into a wispy side-swooped bob with long bangs—and he was black.” At times her knowing ribs are uncomfortable; in some scenes, they soothe. Heads of the Colored People is particularly mischievous in its exploration of the fissures among black people: upper-middle-class academics, private-school attendees, the author’s own readers. She writes with verve and acuity about the self-perpetuating chasms that privilege creates. Each story is the equivalent of a raised eyebrow, somehow pleasurable even if you find yourself on the receiving end.
— H. G.
His Favorites, Kate Walbert
scribnerAt just 150 pages long, His Favorites, Kate Walbert’s third novel, is impossible to put down. It is by no means an easy read. The narrator is a 15-year-old girl who is wrestling with twin traumas: an accident that killed her best friend, and the abuse of a predatory teacher. In retelling events that read as nearly inevitable and exploring power dynamics that currently saturate the news landscape, Walbert achieves something remarkable: She renders the very unexceptional nature of sexual assault and institutional stonewalling as freshly horrifying. Along the way, she creates a striking psychological portrait of grief and illuminates the arcane details of private-school campuses and teen girls’ friendships with surprising humor. The result is a book that’s gutting, and generous, and unforgettably real.
— Rosa Inocencio Smith
Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, Heather Widdows
Princeton University PressThe word beautiful shares a root with bene, the Latin for good. That’s in one way an inconsequential thing, a simple etymological quirk; in another way, though, it explains a lot about beauty’s ability to impose itself, as a mandate, on people’s lives—particularly the lives of women. Beauty as goodness made manifest: It’s an assumption that is summoned every time a thin body is treated as a sign of a strong will, every time taut skin is considered to be evidence of hard work, every time a cosmetics company insists that you should buy the elixir because “you’re worth it.” But definitely don’t take my word for it. Take the words, instead, of a philosopher. Heather Widdows, in Perfect Me, considers the far-ranging implications of attractiveness rendered in the imperative, giving beauty itself, in the process, the rigorously intellectual treatment it deserves. The book, an academic title with mass-market implications, considers beauty as a construction, racialized and gendered; beauty as a constriction, often punishing and occasionally cruel; and beauty as a goal that remains, for most, persistently out of reach. Perfect Me is a treatise that often reads, fittingly, as an indictment—a book that recognizes all the ways people are taught, still, to judge books by their covers.
— M. G.
The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer
RiverheadTo begin The Female Persuasion is to feel immersively transported back into the mindset of a young woman just starting to figure things out. Which, it turns out, is a pretty mortifying and uncomfortable place to be (especially if you’ve tried hard to forget most of it). Meg Wolitzer’s 11th novel is about the relationship between Greer Kadetsky, an 18-year-old college student at the book’s outset, and Faith Frank, an elder stateswoman of feminism who becomes a mentor to the shy but ambitious Greer. Faith is the founder of Bloomer, a well-respected but increasingly irrelevant magazine; when it folds, she recruits Greer to work for her new project, a company called Loci, which runs the kind of expensive and ambitious conferences that are frequently derided for their particular brand of tote-bag feminism. The Female Persuasion is a funny, thoughtful work that’s both painfully familiar and notably deft in its consideration of the debates modern feminism fosters, and the question of how women can strengthen their own voices without silencing others.
— S. G.
Red Clocks, Leni Zumas
little, brown and companyAt the beginning of the year, when I reviewed Red Clocks, the idea of America outlawing abortion felt more outlandishly dystopian than it does now, with Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” heading to the governor and another justice who’s opposed to abortion rights installed on the Supreme Court. The most striking thing about Leni Zumas’s book is how it captures the ordinariness of how the world might change for women, without warning. Through the accounts of four female narrators living in small-town Oregon, Zumas explores the consequences—big and small—of living in a woman’s body. One of her characters, Ro, is a writer who’s trying to conceive after IVF has been outlawed; another is a pregnant teenager who’s flat out of options, facing a “pink wall” at the Canadian border and a government that charges girls seeking abortions with conspiracy to commit murder. Thrust into an anachronistic society almost overnight, the women in Red Clocks find themselves drawing on old ways to help one another.
— S. G.
This article contains mild spoilers for Vice.
The central conundrum of Dick Cheney’s political and historical identity is the gulf between the malevolence of his public persona (snarling, dark, relentless) and the mildness of his private personality (wry, relaxed, understated). It’s a dichotomy that Adam McKay tackles head-on in Vice, his tragicomedy of a biopic about the 46th vice president of the United States.
The darkness is all there in the film: cinema verité footage of torture and Abu Ghraib and the aerial bombardment of Baghdad; the secret energy task force; the bald assertion of executive power and a creed of realpolitik so hardheaded as to be heartless—all served up in a tone that veers from wild satire to dead-serious drama.
But Cheney’s softer side is on full display, too (as when he coaches his non-cook wife, Lynne, on how to make boxed macaroni and cheese). And McKay, who both wrote the screenplay and directed the film, never lets viewers forget for a moment that his protagonist has a loving family and a beating heart—even if by the end of the story (after transplant surgery) that heart is no longer his own.
I covered the Cheneys—Dick, Lynne, and their daughters, Liz and Mary—during the second Bush administration for The New York Times, and, 12 years ago, wrote a profile of the vice president for Vanity Fair. Then as now, the gap between his Darth Vader image and the Ward Cleaver vibe he gives off in person is hard to reconcile, but McKay does his damnedest. What’s more, he plays off the sympathetic, even gentle, private man to compel attention to what he clearly views as Cheney’s monstrous public acts. The father who says just the right thing when his daughter comes out as gay is also the vice president who may or may not have consulted his boss before issuing orders to shoot down one of the hijacked planes on 9/11.
“The more I read about him as a father,” McKay told me recently in his West Hollywood office, “and the fact that he does the shopping and the cooking—like, he really does do the shopping and the cooking—and how close and tender he is with his daughters and the fact that he’s still crazy about his wife … That’s what kind of drew me into this, because I really started looking at it as a uniquely American story. A story of a guy who had a bumpy beginning, wanted to make his way, wanted to make his wife proud, wanted to climb the ladder.”
The movie covers Cheney’s rise from his troubled days as a high-voltage power lineman when he’d flamed out of Yale, waking up surrounded by chunks of vomit after a drunken night, to his career breakout as the youngest White House chief of staff in history (for Jerry Ford), to his ultimate perch as the second (or was it the first?) most powerful man in the world. Beside him through it all—kicking his ass when he needs it, holding his hand when he earns it—is his ferociously smart and ambitious high-school sweetheart turned wife, without whom one senses, in the film as in real life, he might never have made it out of Casper, Wyoming, at all.
Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney and Christian Bale (right) as Dick Cheney in Vice (Annapurna Pictures)To watch Christian Bale in yet another one of his uncanny, shape-shifting performances in the title role is to forget that you are not watching Cheney himself. The set jaw, the monosyllabic utterances, the cocked head, the crooked smile—all reflect a characterization that is neither a stand-up comic’s impression nor an actor’s impersonation but somehow the very personification of Cheney, even if the transformation took so much prosthetic makeup that, McKay joked at a recent advance screening, the actor had to be placed in a medically induced coma to apply it. (By contrast, Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell’s George W. Bush border on caricature.)
In this film, however dark his deeds, Cheney is never less than human and always three-dimensional. Early on, McKay says, he saw the love story of Dick and Lynne as the emotional hook of the film, and he sees their “big scene” in the moment that Cheney, newly arrived as a young aide to Rumsfeld in a tiny office in the Nixon White House, calls Lynne and asks her to guess where he is. He has come a long way from his youthful flameout. Perhaps just as important is the pivotal scene in which the Cheneys’ younger daughter, Mary, jilted by a high-school girlfriend, tells them she is gay. Lynne is upset and emotional, worried about the hard life Mary will face; Dick just hugs her and tells her he loves her and wants her to be happy. (McKay says the dialogue is drawn almost word for word from Mary’s memoir. But the film also undercuts this paternal sensitivity in a scene set years later, when Liz is running an unsuccessful primary campaign for the Senate from Wyoming in 2013 and is goaded by her GOP rival into denouncing gay marriage—and by extension betraying her sister—with her father’s nodded assent. It’s an invented moment that McKay concedes is based only on informed supposition.)
Reporters who covered Cheney as George H. W. Bush’s defense secretary in the late 1980s used to tell me that he reminded them of their fathers: mid-century American men who never complained and never explained, just did their jobs, and McKay and Bale capture this quality in spades. By the same token, Amy Adams, who plays Lynne Cheney from her 20s to her 70s, told the audience at the screening I attended that her character reminded her of her own grandmother, in her determination to get out of her stultifying hometown and make something of herself. Unlike her husband, whose default attitude on many subjects has always seemed to be live-and-let-live, Lynne, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities with a Ph.D. in British literature, has long been a fierce culture warrior, defending the classical canon and denouncing political correctness.
Asked at the screening how the film affected her view of the Cheney family and the Cheney legacy, Adams gave a complex answer. “As an actor,” she said, “I always feel it’s settled. I can’t judge my character. So I had to let go of whether I agree with her opinions or not. I had to let go of it all. And so I have a different understanding of what may have motivated her … It doesn’t change how I feel about them. It changes the way that I approach them. But I get very defensive of Lynne and I don’t think that’s a popular view, so it’s hard to say.”
I know enough about the Cheneys to suspect that they’ll loathe this film, if they so much as watch it at all. But if they’re honest, they’d have to admit that it gives them their due as fully rounded people, pursuing the right course as they see it, objections be damned. It is, as McKay put it at the screening, “all very complicated and uncomfortable and I felt by the end that’s exactly what it should be.” McKay’s exploration of the Cheneys’ private, softer side—their easy banter at the family dinner table, for example—in no way minimizes the darkness, even ruthlessness, of the vice president’s public deeds. It just makes the whole picture harder to square, which may be the goal.
In our conversation, McKay, who confesses that he sometimes finds himself tearing up at the film’s conclusion, elaborated on the point. “Now, whenever I see him, I feel sad,” he said. “I feel like he gave it away. I feel like he had this special thing. He had this family. He had moments of serving the country. He could have really called himself a public servant for a long time. And now you just see him and he just seems semi-empty, and he’s defending his legacy … It made me very sad for him. It made me very sad for our country, and obviously it made me sad for the fallout of what was done. And I never expected that.”
Indeed, the film can’t help but make one wish that Cheney had never been vice president at all. About halfway through, there is a fake end-credits sequence that imagines Cheney’s public career had stopped after his service as the first George Bush’s defense secretary, when he was one of the restrained architects of the Gulf War, and, the faux sequence suggests, could content himself with breeding Labrador retrievers in retirement. But happy endings are only for Hollywood, and as the latest news from Afghanistan shows, the Dick Cheney Story, in all its dark and human complexity, remains unfinished.
When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election in October to the consternation of the country’s traditional political elite, commentators were sharply divided about the implications. Some warned that Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who has openly expressed admiration for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, presented a clear and present threat to democracy. Others argued that Brazil’s strong institutions, including its aggressive press and fiercely independent judiciary, would rein in his authoritarian tendencies.
The fight over Bolsonaro echoes the academic debate over so-called populist figures around the world. Some scholars have warned that populists tend to be phenomenally corrupt, perpetuate their hold on power by delegitimizing the opposition, and inflict lasting damage on their countries’ democratic institutions. Others, including the historian Niall Ferguson, have suggested that populist governments are usually so incompetent that they prove short-lived. Yet others, including the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, have emphasized the positive potential of populism, and insinuated that critics of these movements are simply defenders of the failed status quo.
Right now, the four most populous democracies in the world are ruled by populists: Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, Joko Widodo in Indonesia, and Bolsonaro in Brazil. That makes it rather important to know which scholars are correct: Either democracy is in the midst of an unprecedented global retreat, or we’re witnessing a salutary course correction in which citizens are finally holding global elites to account for their failures. (Or, if Ferguson is right, nothing much will change.)
The most obvious way to settle this urgent matter is to look at the impact that populist governments have actually had on democracies in the past. To that end, we constructed a comprehensive database of populist governments. Doing so was an inherently fraught exercise: If you ask three scholars about the nature of populism, you are liable to get five different answers. Besides, populism is not like a light switch that is either on or off; some leaders exhibit certain (but not all) classic characteristics of populism.
Here’s how we formed our list: We selected 66 leading peer-reviewed journals in political science, sociology, and regional studies; identified all articles published in these journals on the subject of populism, as well as political leaders linked with populism; then vetted each potential case study, consulting with country and regional experts. Populist governments, in our working definition, are united by two fundamental claims: (1) Elites and “outsiders” work against the interests of the “true people,” and (2) since populists are the voice of the “true people,” nothing should stand in their way.
Ultimately, we identified 46 populist leaders or political parties that have been in power across 33 democratic countries between 1990 and today, giving us the ability to settle the theoretical debate about the tension between populism and democracy in a rigorous, empirical way, on a global scale, for the first time. The results were alarming: Populists are highly skilled at staying in power and pose an acute danger to democratic institutions.
On average, ordinary democratic governments remain in office for a brief span of time: three years. Six years from their first election, four in five non-populist governments have already been booted from power. Populist governments, by contrast, manage to sustain their hold on power for a significantly longer stretch; on average, they hold on for about six and a half years, or more than twice as long as their non-populist rivals.
Populists aren’t just more likely to win reelection once or twice; they are also much more likely to remain in power for well over a decade. Six years after they are first elected, populist leaders are twice as likely as non-populist leaders to still be in power; twelve years after they are first elected, they are more than five times as likely.
Arguably, these findings are not, in themselves, all that concerning: The longer survival rate for populists may simply reflect their efficiency or popularity. But among populist leaders who entered office between 1990 and 2015, only a small minority left office as a result of the normal democratic process.
In fact, only 17 percent of populists stepped down after they lost free and fair elections. Another 17 percent vacated high office after they reached their term limits. But 23 percent left office under more dramatic circumstances—they were impeached or forced to resign. Another 30 percent of all populist leaders in our database remain in power to this day. This is partially a function of the recent rise of populism: Thirty-six percent of those populist rulers who still remain in power were elected over the past five years. But even more of them have been in office long enough to raise serious concerns: About half have led their country for at least nine years.
The most important issue, however, is neither how long populists stay in office nor even how they ultimately leave, but what they do with their power—and, in particular, whether their tenure causes what political scientists call “democratic backsliding,” a significant deterioration in the extent to which the citizens enjoy basic rights.
Here, too, our findings were sobering, to say the least: In many countries, populists rewrote the rules of the game to permanently tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. Indeed, an astounding 50 percent of populists either rewrote or amended their country’s constitution when they gained power, frequently with the aim of eliminating presidential term limits and reducing checks and balances on executive power.
To participate in politics in a meaningful way, a country must have freedom of the press, so that citizens can make informed choices; protect civil liberties, so that citizens are free to voice their preferences and organize around their interests; and maintain political rights, so that most adults have the right to participate in free and fair elections. On all of these counts, populist governments fall short. Controlling for the many ways in which countries that elect populists may be different from countries that do not—including per capita income, recent economic performance, a country’s history with democratic institutions, and civil conflict—we found that populist rule is associated with a 7 percent decline in freedom of the press, an 8 percent decline in civil liberties, and a 13 percent decline in political rights.
[Read: The next populist revolution will be Latino]
Overall, 23 percent of populist governments initiate democratic backsliding, defined as at least a one-point drop in a country’s democracy score as defined by the Polity IV project. By comparison, only 6 percent of non-populist governments are responsible for this kind of deterioration. In all, a populist government is four times more likely than a non-populist one to damage democratic institutions. (And it is likely that we’re under-counting actual cases of democratic erosion because of status-quo bias in organizations that measure the robustness of democracies. Despite ample evidence of the erosion of rule of law and media freedoms in Hungary and Poland, for example, Polity IV had not yet registered democratic backsliding in these countries as of 2017.)
But are all populists equally dangerous? According to thinkers like Mouffe, scholars need to draw a sharp distinction between left-wing and right-wing populists. While right-wing populists victimize unpopular minorities and weaponize public anger for illicit goals, left-wing populists are supposedly far more likely to correct elite failures on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. The best response to right-wing populists, according to this camp, is not a preference for parties and candidates that respect long-standing democratic rules and norms—but rather the election of left-wing populists.
The data do not bear out this argument. Since 1990, 13 right-wing populist governments have been elected; of these, five brought about significant democratic backsliding. Over the same time period, 15 left-wing populist governments were elected; of these, the same number, five, brought about significant democratic backsliding. This suggests that left-wing populists are not likely to be a cure for right-wing populism; they are, on the contrary, likely to accelerate the speed with which democracy burns out.
In any case, traditional ideological measures may not do a particularly good job of capturing the nature of these movements. Also since 1990, 17 populist governments have come to power that cannot be easily classified as either left- or right-wing. Once again, five of these governments initiated democratic backsliding, suggesting that ideological hue is less important a predictor of the damage a government is likely to inflict on democratic institutions than the extent to which it is populist.
Populists often get elected on a promise to root out corruption. In Brazil, Bolsonaro soared in popularity by riding public anger against the “Carwash” scandal, a giant scheme of kickbacks from construction contracts that implicated much of the country’s political class, including the ex-president Luiz Inácio da Silva. In Italy, the populist Northern League has long railed against corrupt politicians in “thieving Rome.” In the United States, President Trump famously vowed to “drain the swamp.”
[Read: How Democrats killed their populist soul]
But far from draining the swamp, most populists have, as the economist Barry Eichengreen put it, simply replaced the mainstream’s alligators with even more deadly ones of their own. In fact, we found that 40 percent of populist heads of government are ultimately indicted for corruption. Since many populists amass sufficient power to hamper independent investigations into their conduct, it is likely that this figure actually underestimates the full extent of their malfeasance.
This suspicion is corroborated by a second piece of information: Our data show that populist governments have led their countries to drop by an average of five places on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Some cases are far more extreme than that: Venezuela, for example, dropped by an astounding 83 places under the leadership of Hugo Chávez.
Since populists often thrive on anger about all-too-real shortcomings—elites who really are too remote, political systems that really are shockingly corrupt—it is tempting to hope that they can help rejuvenate imperfect democracies around the world. Alas, the best evidence available suggests that, so far at least, they have done the opposite. On average, populist governments have deepened corruption, eroded individual rights, and inflicted serious damage on democratic institutions.
But it is also crucial to note what our results do not show. First, as advertisements for financial products so often put it, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. It is possible that changing circumstances, like the ideological evolution of populist movements or the growing influence of social media, make it either more or less likely that populist governments will undermine democratic institutions in the future.
Second, it is as yet unclear how easily the experience of past populist governments, which have mostly been concentrated in middle-income countries with some recent experience of authoritarian rule, will translate to rich countries with long democratic traditions. Thanks to the strength of its civil society and the widespread commitment to constitutional order, the United States, for example, may prove better able to withstand a populist president.
Finally, averages say little about individual cases. Citizens of countries that are governed by authoritarian populists should certainly be concerned that similar governments have eroded checks and balances in a large number of cases. But that is a reason to fight rather than a reason to grow fatalistic.
Candace Thille’s mother, who had an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in mathematics, always told her that all work is honorable work, as long as you set a high standard for yourself. Her father, an electrical engineer, was the one who emphasized the importance of education: “The most important thing you can learn,” he’d tell her, “is how to teach yourself new things.”
When Thille was 11, her father quit his job working in missiles and space at Lockheed. Her parents were pacifists, and her father realized he was building systems that were being used in war. “So everybody in the family started working doing all kinds of different things to help financially support the family,” she said.
Thille has worked at Stanford University and is now Amazon’s director of learning services. I recently spoke to Thille about creating macramé plant hangers, following one’s passion while paying the bills, and lifelong learning. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Lola Fadulu: What sort of work did you start doing when your father quit his job?
Candace Thille: I started doing house cleaning and babysitting. And then I was 15 when I got my first real job, which was working in retail at an arts-and-crafts store. In the arts-and-crafts store, I also learned started teaching macramé classes. Macramé is essentially the art of knot-tying to create artwork. A real popular thing was to create macramé plant hangers. I actually started my own business when I was 15, creating macramé plant hangers and selling them through the local plant shops. In building these macramé plant hangers, the knotting was fine with me, but cutting hundreds of pieces of yarn for each plant hanger was really tedious. So I built a wheel whose circumference was exactly the length of the yarn piece that I needed. I could quickly put the yarn on this wheel, spin it around, and then make a single cut off one side of the wheel. So then I'd have my hundreds of pieces of yarn, at the length I needed to build my plant hangers.
Fadulu: Were you drawn to that job because you had a passion for crafts and arts?
Thille: No, that job was because it was a job.
Fadulu: Could you tell me about one or two jobs you worked in college that were the most memorable?
Thille: One of them was I worked in the library in the government documents division. What was memorable about that was that it was so boring. Figuring out how to make something that is so fundamentally tedious and boring tolerable, because I needed the job. That was one.
And then the other extreme was I also had a job as peer sex educator, which was through Cal Hospital on campus at Berkeley. My job was to go out into the dorms and other student-living situations and hold value-clarification conversations about sexuality and decision-making about sexuality. And that job was a blast because you're a teenager or in your twenties and you're out there talking with people about sex, but also helping.
Fadulu: After college what did you do?
Thille: I graduated from UC Berkeley, and I actually immediately moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because I was following my then-boyfriend who was in medical school in Pittsburgh. I was in a position where I was in a new place, and I needed to get a job to help financially support myself.
My first job out of college was working at a bakery and retail. I wore a pink polyester dress and my hair up, and most of the other people who worked in the bakery were 60 or 70, little old ladies. I did that, though, because we needed income.
But then I also volunteered at the local rape crisis center called Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. The reason is that I was and am a feminist, and was very much into empowering women. I started volunteering there, and shortly after I started volunteering there, their education program coordinator went out on maternity leave, and so I stepped in as the education program coordinator. Then she decided not to come back, so it was my job.
Then I totally expanded the program, and I developed trainings for hospital staff on how to do evidence collection and how to support a person who's been sexually assaulted. I developed and conducted trainings for the local police, and then the county, and then the state police, on how to interview and support people who had been sexually assaulted. Then I developed and delivered education programs kindergarten through high school in schools all over Allegheny County on child sexual abuse. So I had to redirect people’s attention away from the stranger-danger stuff that they were teaching to help getting children skills around the fact that there’s a higher probability that they might be sexually abused by people that they know.
[Read: The experiment in irresponsibility]
Fadulu: How did you go from those positions to Amazon?
Thille: When I was still in my early 20s, I moved back to the Bay Area and took a temp job as a bookkeeper. I taught myself bookkeeping because the temp rate for bookkeepers was better than the temp jobs for receptionist—but I would take any temp job that came up. I started as a half day temp receptionist fill-in at a small management consulting company that focused on leadership development and worked at that company for 18 years, starting as the half day receptionist and working my way up to vice-president and managing partner. It was at that company where I first designed a blended e-learning experience on coaching. I saw the potential for using technology and the affordances of the science of human learning to accelerate human learning, which ultimately has become my field of research and practice and passion. Following that passion did not come without a cost. The first year I worked at Carnegie Mellon, where I founded and directed the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), my total annual income was less than what I had paid in federal income tax the year before as a VP and partner in a corporate consulting firm.
Fadulu: You now have experience in both higher education, having worked at Stanford, and the business side, as the director of learning sciences at Amazon. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what's important for young people to know about the skills they'll need for the future?
Thille: I think there's a lot of pressure on young people who feel they have to be perfect immediately. Nobody is. I think the world would actually be a lot better if we were all a lot more humble and didn't feel like we have to present as perfect all the time. What's interesting is how the world of work is being changed by technology. We used to think about computers or technology only doing things that we would directly instruct the computer to do, just faster. The sort of work that we are always imagining being displaced by technology would be predictive, repetitive work. But now with machine learning, I think a challenge in our time is to continuously examine how we use machines and the large amounts of data to augment human decision-making—really exploring where the boundaries are between when a machine and when a human makes decisions.
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