Para muita gente, o reconhecimento facial passou rapidamente de novidade tecnológica a vida real, com milhões de pessoas no mundo todo dispostas a ter seus rostos digitalizados por softwares de aeroporto, iPhones ou fazendas de servidores do Facebook. Mas pesquisadores do instituto AI Now, da Universidade de Nova York, emitiram um forte alerta não só contra o reconhecimento facial onipresente, mas também em relação ao seu parente mais sinistro: o chamado reconhecimento de emoção, tecnologia que afirma poder encontrar um significado oculto na forma do seu nariz e da sua boca e na maneira como você sorri. Se isso soa como algo retirado do século 19, é porque é mais ou menos por aí.
O relatório de 2018 do AI Now é um registro de 56 páginas de como a “inteligência artificial” – um termo abrangente que inclui uma miríade tanto de tentativas científicas para simular o julgamento humano quanto absurdos de marketing – continua a se espalhar sem supervisão, regulamentação ou escrutínio ético significativo. O relatório abrange uma ampla extensão de usos e abusos, incluindo casos de discriminação racial, vigilância policial e de como as leis de sigilo comercial podem ocultar códigos tendenciosos de um público com vigilância da IA. Mas o AI Now, que foi criado no ano passado para lidar com as implicações sociais da inteligência artificial, expressa no documento um receio quanto ao reconhecimento de emoção, “uma subclasse de reconhecimento facial que alega detectar coisas como personalidade, sentimentos íntimos, saúde mental e ‘envolvimento do trabalhador’ com base em imagens ou vídeos de rostos”. A ideia de ter seu chefe observando você por meio de uma câmera que usa aprendizado de máquina para avaliar constantemente seu estado mental é ruim o suficiente, embora a perspectiva da polícia usar “reconhecimento de emoção” para deduzir sua criminalidade futura baseada em “microexpressões” seja exponencialmente pior.
“A capacidade de usar reconhecimento facial e análise massiva de dados para encontrar correlações está levando a algumas alegações muito suspeitas.”Isso porque o “reconhecimento de emoção”, explica o relatório, é pouco mais do que a informatização da fisiognomia, uma cepa de pseudociência totalmente desacreditada e desmentida de outra época que afirmava que o caráter de uma pessoa podia ser discernido de seus corpos – e de seus rostos, em particular. Não havia razão para acreditar que isso fosse verdade na década de 1880, quando figuras como o desacreditado criminologista italiano Cesare Lombroso promoveram a teoria, e há ainda menos razões para acreditar nisso hoje. Ainda assim, é uma ideia atraente, apesar da falta de base em qualquer ciência, e as empresas centradas em dados aproveitaram a oportunidade para não apenas colocar nomes em rostos, mas para atribuir padrões de comportamento e previsões inteiras a uma relação invisível entre sua sobrancelha e nariz que só pode ser decifrado através do olho de um computador. Há dois anos, estudantes de uma universidade de Xangai publicaram um relatório detalhando o que alegaram ser um método de aprendizado de máquina para determinar a criminalidade com base apenas em características faciais. O artigo foi amplamente criticado, inclusive por Kate Crawford, do AI Now, que disse ao Intercept que se tratava de “frenologia literal… apenas usando ferramentas modernas de aprendizado de máquina supervisionado em vez de pinças”.
Crawford e seus colegas agora se opõem mais do que nunca à disseminação desse tipo de previsão algorítmica cultural e cientificamente regressiva: “Embora a fisiognomia tenha caído em desuso após sua associação com a ciência racial nazista, os pesquisadores estão preocupados com o ressurgimento de ideias fisiognômicas em aplicativos de reconhecimento de emoção”, diz o relatório. “A ideia de que os sistemas de inteligência artificial podem nos dizer o que um aluno, um cliente ou um suspeito criminal realmente está sentindo ou que tipo de pessoa eles são intrinsecamente está se mostrando atraente para corporações e governos, embora as justificativas científicas para tais alegações sejam altamente questionáveis, e a história de seus objetivos discriminatórios, bem documentada.”
Em um e-mail para o Intercept, Crawford, co-fundadora do AI Now e renomada professora de pesquisa na NYU, juntamente com Meredith Whittaker, co-fundadora do AI Now e cientista pesquisadora da NYU, explicou por que o reconhecimento de emoção é mais preocupante hoje do que nunca, referindo-se a duas empresas que usam aparências para tirar conclusões importantes sobre as pessoas. “Da Faception alegando ser capaz de ‘detectar’ se alguém é terrorista a partir de seu rosto até o HireVue registrando em massa candidatos a empregos para prever se eles serão bons funcionários com base em suas ‘microexpressões faciais’, a capacidade de usar reconhecimento facial e análise maciça de dados para encontrar correlações está levando a algumas alegações muito suspeitas”, disse Crawford.
A Faception tem pretendido determinar a partir da aparência se alguém é “psicologicamente desequilibrado”, ansioso ou carismático, enquanto a HireVue tem classificado candidatos a empregos na mesma base.
Como acontece com qualquer sistema computadorizado de julgamento e tomada de decisões automáticos e invisíveis, o potencial para se ser classificado, sinalizado ou etiquetado erroneamente é imenso com o reconhecimento de emoção, especialmente devido à frágil base científica: “Como uma pessoa descrita por esses sistemas contestaria o resultado?”, acrescentou Crawford. “O que acontece quando contamos com sistemas de inteligência artificial fechados para julgar a ‘vida interior’ ou o valor de seres humanos? Alguns desses produtos citam teorias profundamente controversas que são muito contestadas na literatura psicológica, mas que estão sendo tratadas como fato por startups de IA.”
O que é pior do que a má ciência julgar qualquer um dentro do alcance da câmera é que os algoritmos tomando essas decisões são mantidos em sigilo pelas empresas que os desenvolvem, a salvo de escrutínio rigoroso, por trás de um véu de sigilo comercial. Whittaker, do AI Now, destaca o sigilo corporativo como algo que confunde as práticas já problemáticas de reconhecimento de emoção: “Como a maior parte dessas tecnologias está sendo desenvolvida por empresas privadas, que operam sob as leis de sigilo corporativo, nosso relatório faz uma forte recomendação de proteções para denunciantes éticos dentro dessas empresas”. Tais denúncias continuarão a ser fundamentais, escreveu Whittaker, porque muitas empresas de dados tratam a privacidade e a transparência como um passivo, em vez de uma virtude: “As justificativas variam, mas a maioria [dos desenvolvedores de AI] nega toda a responsabilidade e diz que cabe aos clientes decidir o que fazer com ela”. Pseudociência em parceria com engenharia de computação de última geração com ausência de responsabilização. O que pode dar errado?
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Especialistas em Inteligência Artificial emitem alerta urgente contra reconhecimento facial appeared first on The Intercept.
In the first vote of the 116th Congress on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was one of just three Democrats who split with their party and voted against a rules package introduced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and backed by the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Ocasio-Cortez’s political career so far has been largely defined by her willingness to break from the pack, but her dissenting vote alongside just two others highlights the paradox of her position in the House: Her high-profile platform allows her to shape the national conversation, but the same energy that fueled her rise can be met with a very different reaction inside the walls of the Capitol.
The debate over the vote started Wednesday morning, when it became clear that the House rules package for the 116th Congress would include a fiscally conservative measure known as “pay-go.” A spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for progressives in the House to oppose it. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., was the first out of the gate, calling it “terrible economics” and promising to vote down the rules package. Ocasio-Cortez soon followed suit.
For a moment, it looked like a rebellion could brewing among the newly energized and organized left. Except it wasn’t. There was no stampede of opposition, and later that day, the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., put out a statement in support of the rules package, ending any real chance at a last-minute insurrection.
The next evening, when the package hit the House floor, just three Democrats voted it down: Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez were joined by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who has hinted at 2020 presidential aspirations.
Jayapal, who came to Congress as an organizer and has played a key role in shaping the progressive Democratic agenda on issues like immigration, said she was frustrated about how the debate was framed on social media, in newsletters, and in part by some outlets — this one included. The conversation, she said, lacked the full context of the ways in which the CPC had defanged pay-go.
The narrative that emerged “is so hurtful to the progressive movement because we got so much out of this,” Jayapal said. One result, she said, has been to take the focus off the CPC’s major organizing effort to pack powerful committees full of as many progressives as possible. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez are both angling to land some of those coveted spots, and their opposition to the rules package could make it harder for them to do so.
“There were lots of things in the rules package that we negotiated in that were really good, and it’s not that we caved on this, it’s not that we just decided we didn’t have the power to change it — it was really a strategic question about what is most necessary to move progressive legislation,” Jayapal told The Intercept.
Jayapal stressed that her criticism was not directed personally at her colleagues, with whom she is in agreement on the issues, but rather at the framing on social media and press coverage of the pay-go conflict. In the hectic final days of recess and the swearing-in, it can be difficult for a coalition to align on strategy, particularly with fast-moving debates.
Indeed, Pocan and Jayapal’s support for the package came after they negotiated with Pelosi and won significant concessions, including seats on powerful committees, the repeal of a rule that required a supermajority for tax increases, hardened rules around sexual harassment, and strengthened language around the War Powers Resolution, which will make it easier for the House to vote to put an end to U.S support for the war in Yemen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, administers the House oath of office to Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., during a ceremonial swearing-in on Capitol Hill on Jan. 3, 2019, during the opening session of the 116th Congress.
Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP
Pelosi has guaranteed that the House will hold a hearing on “Medicare for All,” Jayapal said, noting that critics who argued that pay-go will get in the way of that are wrong. Pelosi and Rep. Jim McGovern, chair of the House Rules Committee, have both said that pay-go can be waived in such circumstances. “The waiving we’ve been working on for a while with McGovern, but honestly we were trying to keep it kind of quiet, because not all of the conservative members know this, and now they’re saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to waive the rules? What do you mean?’” Jayapal said. “So sometimes I’m just like, come on people, let’s be strategic about some of this in terms of what we take on.”
The rules, waivers, and statutes involved in the legislative process can get confusing, so let’s pause for a primer. In 2007, when Pelosi first became speaker, she instituted the pay-go rule. In 2010, under pressure from Blue Dog Democrats, Pelosi made pay-go not just a rule, but a law, one that was also passed by the Democratic Senate and signed by President Barack Obama. The law allows the president to unilaterally sequester money if Congress passes a bill that isn’t paid for, but if a bill specifically bars the presidents from doing so, then the pay-go statute is rendered moot. When Republicans took over in 2011, they converted pay-go to “cut-go,” meaning that any new spending had to be matched with cuts elsewhere.
Because a statutory waiver would have been needed, regardless of the rules package, the smarter play in 2019 was to nail down a promise of rules waivers and fight on other fronts, Jayapal contended, allowing leadership to keep pay-go officially in the rules. Under a scenario after 2020, when Democrats will potentially hold the White House, changing the rule would take on more significance, she said. (On Friday, Jayapal introduced legislation — co-sponsored by Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna, and Pocan — to repeal the statutory pay-go rule.)
Despite her “no” vote, Ocasio-Cortez said she recognized the value of the CPC’s negotiations with Pelosi. “I think there are a lot of wins that we’ve had so far policy-wise,” she told The Intercept on Thursday, referring to the CPC wins in the package. “When you look at what’s considered a loss, whether it’s the select committee or whether it’s pay-go, I see them as short-term losses, because in the long run, what we’ve accomplished is we’ve put these issues on the map.”
The sudden burst of energy over pay-go, and the just as sudden collapse, brought into relief in the starkest way yet the paradox that is Ocasio-Cortez’s position in the House — she has as much influence outside Congress as anybody else she serves with. Her every tweet is a potential news cycle, and the routine happenings of her high school and college life get turned into fodder for conservative face-plants on disturbingly regular occasions. She has used that platform to shift the broader political conversation in ways previously unthinkable. For nearly two decades, Democrats have quietly grumbled that it’s just not possible to get people interested in doing something about climate change. Ocasio-Cortez sparked a national conversation about ambitious climate change legislation, which is now backed by 45 members of Congress and has become a litmus test of sorts for 2020 Democratic presidential contenders.
But inside the building, she is heavily outgunned. Aside from her close ally Khanna, the only member of Congress to endorse her primary bid (after also endorsing the incumbent), Ocasio-Cortez is strengthened by her “squad,” which includes insurgent Ayanna Pressley, who unseated a longtime Democratic incumbent in Massachusetts, and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, who won competitive primaries to replace Keith Ellison and John Conyers, respectively.
But even the squad broke with Ocasio-Cortez on the House rules package and supported Pelosi. The gap between the New York Democrat’s power outside the Capitol and the display of it on day one inside of it could hardly have been greater, and it’s an imbalance that simply can’t hold long-term. Something has to give; one side or the other will need to break or bend. It remains to be seen which one it will be.
As she was walking to the House chamber to be sworn in on Thursday, The Intercept asked Ocasio-Cortez how her view on politics and Congress had changed since she’d won her primary. “I think coming through this process from the background of organizing, and as an organizer, it really makes you think of the political process as – it really opens what that field looks like, of what change is possible. So it’s not just about whipping votes or getting someone to a yes or no — although all of those are critical elements of the job — but the other part of it is really shaping the landscape of what we think is possible,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Her first organizing effort in the halls of Congress began with the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats-led occupation of Pelosi’s office during orientation. Ocasio-Cortez and the activists demanded a select committee to craft legislation toward a Green New Deal. It sparked a national conversation that is still alive today, but the committee Pelosi ultimately created — unveiled in Thursday’s rules package — is weaker than one she created on the same issue in 2007.
But putting the climate on the map came at a cost — and here’s where the contradiction comes in — in that her proposal angered her colleagues, who furiously defended the turf of their respective committees, seeing themselves in competition with the proposed select committee. That hostility built upon already strong wariness on the part of her fellow lawmakers, who see in Ocasio-Cortez’s brand of people-powered, corporate-free politics a challenge to their own integrity or progressivism. She is a walking reminder to some Democrats of the space between their ideals and how they have come to practice politics — and they don’t appreciate the reminder. Indeed, incoming Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone flat-out refused to move an unrelated bill by Khanna, citing his public support for what he saw as a rival committee.
Part of what Ocasio-Cortez has been so good at since arriving in Washington is educating the public – introducing people outside of Congress to arcane but crucial levers of power at work, such as the way she exposed elements of freshman orientation as little more than corporate propaganda.
But, said Jayapal, the organizing effort needs to be fully thought about at every step, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t breed cynicism and limit progress. It requires recognizing that different people respond to different approaches differently, and that while social media pressure sometimes works, in other cases, a direct, educational approach might work better. “Before I came to Congress, I didn’t know what pay-go was. If somebody just said, this is a bad idea and anybody who votes for something that has it is a sellout, I might’ve believed it, but I think it’s our job as members to try to educate people about the different ways to think about this. And the fact that all but three people voted for this rules package — including some really progressive members — should tell people that there’s a lot more to this story than just pay-go is bad, therefore vote against the rules package.”
Outside pressure is still important, she argued. “I’ve been arrested three times for civil disobedience because I think that there are times when that’s appropriate, but you’ve got to pick the right strategy for the right time, and you’ve got to pick the right fight — and we can disagree about what those right fights are — but to somehow believe that the entire Progressive Caucus is wrong on this and two people are right, I think is a disservice to the issue and to the strategy and frankly, to the overall movement,” she said.
Those types of communication kinks can be worked out over time, but if every win Ocasio-Cortez notches on the outside, elevating an issue and reshaping the conversation, simply creates more distance between her and her colleagues on the inside, organizing an effective progressive majority is impossible, and even getting the dozen to two dozen members needed for a solid progressive sub-caucus would be difficult.
But it’s not that simple, as the groundswell of support Ocasio-Cortez has experienced on the outside has yet to be fully felt on the inside. Why, after all, did Jayapal and Pocan even have to contend with Democrats such as Pelosi who wanted pay-go in the rules package, not because it’s already in statute but because they think it’s the right thing to do?
It’s a relic of the 1980s, when Democrats lived in fear of being branded tax-and-spenders, and a reminder that time has long lagged far behind the institution of Congress. It’s the lack of the sense of urgency in the halls of power that Ocasio-Cortez is so eager to take down. The United Nations has given humanity roughly 12 years to turn its fossil fuel-based economy around, which climate scientists say can only be accomplished on a wartime footing. Politics have moved awfully fast the last few years, but perhaps not fast enough yet.
The post Behind the Pay-go Battle Is a Central Contradiction That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Her Allies Will Need to Resolve appeared first on The Intercept.
Keeping It 2100: Climate-change updates can sometimes feel like one dire prognostication after another, but today came a morsel of not-as-awful news: An ominous prediction from two years ago that quickly melting glaciers in Antarctica will destroy the homes of 150 million people by 2100 looks to be less likely than the researchers initially thought. Still, the revised figures don’t make the necessity of addressing climate change any less acute: According to a recent UN report, governments aren’t doing anywhere near enough to fend off the worst effects of climate change.
Mr. Mayor: 2019 may have just begun, but 2020 is already here, as a phalanx of Democrats look to soon join Elizabeth Warren in announcing presidential runs. But amid all the senators and governors and representatives and Cabinet secretaries eying a bid, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is the lone chief executive of a city—and he would be the first active mayor to run for president since 1972. That raises the question of how Garcetti can balance a presidential campaign with the mountain of responsibilities involved with managing the country’s second-largest city.
What to Watch and Read: The Golden Globes are this Sunday, as the Hollywood glitterati congregate in what marks the start of the winter awards season. Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg are hosting—a somewhat random pairing that nevertheless is devoid of the drama of the Academy Awards hosting fiasco. In the Trump era, children’s books are getting political, and Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories From Great Britain shows that what’s old is new again: It’s a compilation of late-19th- and early-20th-century stories and fables that are “plain-language, kid-friendly introductions to socialist politics.”
Snapshot
The best part of Instagram now isn’t the photos. It’s the comments section, reports Taylor Lorenz. When did the text part of the image-driven social platform become so lively, delightful, and a place to make real connections? (Photo from Shutterstock)Evening ReadAre the denial of racism and the denial of climate change really just cut from the same cloth? “I feel how climate scientists probably feel when they hear Trump and others disbelieve what their scientific community says is beyond disbelief,” Ibram X. Kendi writes:
All this disbelief rests on the same foundation: the transformation of science into belief. It is a foundation built from the economic, political, and ideological blocks that stand the most to lose from the aggressive reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions and racial inequities.
These defensive voices engage in the same oratorical process, attack the credibility of scientists, disregarding their consensus and reducing their findings to personal beliefs.
The effect: Science becomes belief. Belief becomes science. Everything becomes nothing. Nothing becomes everything. All can believe and disbelieve all. We all can know everything and know nothing. Everyone lives as an expert on every subject. No experts live on any subject. Years of intense and specialized training and research and reflection are abandoned, like poor Latino immigrants, like the poor body of our planet.
Instead of trained racial researchers, individuals decide whether they are racist, whether their ideas are racist, whether their policies are racist, whether their institutions are racist. Instead of trained climate researchers, individuals decide whether that worst-ever natural disaster, whether that record temperature, whether that rising sea level is caused by climate change.
What Do You Know … About Culture?1. Who is hosting this Sunday’s 2019 Golden Globes?
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. Bandersnatch, a surprise episode of this Netflix series released recently, offered viewers choose-your-own-adventure with branching story lines.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. This romantic-drama series, which premiered on Oprah Winfrey’s television network, was canceled in the wake of assault allegations against its co-executive producer, Salim Akil.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg / Black Mirror / Love Is
Poem of the WeekHere’s an excerpt of “The Lather,” by David Barber, from our September 1995 issue:
So let tar bleed from telephone poles,
Let engine blocks ooze rainbow slicks
And bike chains jam with caked-up gunk—
He's heard his father say one scoop will cut
Through any crap, no matter what,
Just work the lather good, keep at it.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Friday, January 4, the two-week mark of the government shutdown. The longest previous shutdown spanned 21 days under President Bill Clinton, from 1995 to 1996. Here’s what we’ve been keeping an eye on today:
On and On and On: During a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, President Donald Trump said that the government shutdown could go on for “months or even years.” More on the shutdown below.
Emergency Exit: In a press conference after the meeting, Trump said that he’s considered declaring a national emergency to build his border wall without congressional approval. More from The Atlantic’s January/February issue below.
Born to Run: The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, is in the final stages of deciding whether to run for president. More from Edward-Isaac Dovere below.
Have you or people you know been impacted by the federal government shutdown? We want to hear from you. Reply to this email or send us an email here.
— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
The Atlantic Reports
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House after meeting with lawmakers about border security. He was accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)
Will the Government Ever Reopen? (Russell Berman)
“[Trump] predicted the shutdown would be ‘over sooner than people think.’ But in the next breath, he said he was girding for a lengthy fight. ”→ Read on.
What the President Could Do If He Declares a State of Emergency (Elizabeth Goitein)
“Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him.” → Read on.
How to Run for President While You’re Running a City (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
“The tension between his day job and his presidential ambitions may soon come to a head: Garcetti has said he’d decide by the end of 2018, and make an announcement either way by the first quarter of 2019. But this month, right in the middle of what’s expected to be a rush of candidate announcements, he’s facing a potential teachers’ strike that could shut down city schools.” → Read on.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Dick Durbin, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speak with reporters after meeting with President Donald Trump about border security at the White House. (Evan Vucci / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticTrump Is Making It Easier to Get Away With Discrimination (Adam Serwer)
“Conservatives have long sought to eliminate disparate-impact regulations. In Donald Trump, a real-estate baron whose company was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people, they finally found an eager champion.” → Read on.
The Truth About the Soviet War in Afghanistan (Gregory Feifer)
“Compared with Donald Trump’s bizarre ramblings on Wednesday, however, the Kremlin’s Marxism-colored delusions seem minor. His mischaracterization of the Soviet war contained no single scrap of truth, let alone logic. It was issued to justify an Afghanistan policy that risks undermining the very few gains almost two decades of Western-led effort have produced by ignoring lessons from both the Soviet and NATO-led campaigns.” → Read on.
Democrats Are Wrong About Defense Spending (Reihan Salam)
“It is a safe bet we will hear further calls for curbing the Pentagon’s putatively bloated budget from Warren and others in the weeks and months to come. But it would be a mistake to heed them.” → Read on.
After Natural Disasters, Workers Rebuild—And Face Exploitation (Jessica Kutz, High Country News)
How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker)
While Federal Workers Go Without Pay, Senior Trump Administration Officials Are Poised to Get $10,000 Raises (Lisa Rein and Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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In response to the Family section’s piece about unusual holiday traditions, The Atlantic’s Culture desk has come up with a challenge for readers: If you were going to create a new holiday altogether, what would it be? To get the creative juices flowing, some potential ideas include a National Stress-Bake Day, Resolution Revision Day, and Turn Off the Internet Day. If you have an idea for a day that doesn’t quite yet exist, you can submit it here.
There’s a lot of decision making that goes into choosing a first name for children, but immigrants often have to grapple with another consideration: whether the name sounds “American” (often code for “white”) enough. Several studies have found that white people treat people with anglicized names more favorably than people with more non-white-sounding names, says the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker. He unpacks how immigrants have historically been pressured to assimilate into the U.S., and how that pressure continues to affect people’s name choices.
HighlightsFor those who have envied the hordes of people who congregate in Times Square to watch the New Year’s Eve ball drop, it’s worth noting that a lot of these revelers are wearing diapers because of the lack of available restrooms. The Atlantic senior editor Julie Beck makes the case for staying in on New Year’s Eve instead of going out to bars or gathering in public places—options that are all but guaranteed to be chaotic and expensive.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader asks about how to move past resentment of a mother-in-law who was hospitalized during the reader's wedding party and "ruined" the weekend.
Lori’s advice: Try to focus on the positive things that happened during the wedding, and make sure to have a conversation about this with your husband.
I don’t know if he shares your sentiments or perspective, or what his relationship is like with his mother. Remember that the goal of the day was to get married to the person you love, which you two accomplished. Now comes the part that’s far more important than a single weekend or party: the rest of your marriage.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
On Rottnest Island, off the coast of western Australia, a peculiar marsupial has captivated the hearts of Instagram users worldwide—and supported a booming tourism economy. The quokka, a close cousin of the kangaroo, rocketed to internet fame when tourists began taking selfies with the animal, which is unafraid of humans and appears to smile for pictures.
“They are like living teddy bears,” filmmaker David Freid, who made a short documentary about the mammals and the attendant social-media sensation, told The Atlantic. “When you see one, it's a bonafide heart-melter.”
Freid said he had made enough films about “important” subjects and needed a reprieve from working with heavy material. “As a fan of absurdity, and the lengths to which us humans will go to achieve it, this seemed like as good a topic as any for a film,” he said. “And, I think, if a quokkumentary were to be made, we were the team to do it.”
According to National Geographic, rottnest is Dutch for “rat’s nest,” named by a “Dutch sea captain who observed the animals there in the early 1700s and dubbed them ‘a kind of rat as big as a common cat.’” While on the island, Freid saw many tourists attempting to take selfies with the creature, which is considered vulnerable to extinction due to its disappearing habitats.
“I learned just how far people would go to get a good, unique selfie,” Freid said. “An entire economy of social-media influencers have to churn out an alarming number of increasingly interesting selfies in order to keep the attention of their followers.”
“But I'm not judgmental about this,” he added. “We all do what we can to get by.”
The longest-ever shutdown of the federal government lasted 21 days.
To hear President Donald Trump talk on Friday afternoon, that record—set at around this time 23 years ago, during the Clinton administration—could soon be demolished. During a two-hour meeting that both parties acknowledged was contentious, the president told Democratic leaders that the current partial shutdown of federal departments and agencies could stretch on for “months or even years” if they do not yield on funding for his southern-border wall, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters.
Trump confirmed making the threat—“I absolutely said it,” he boasted—during his own, much lengthier press conference about an hour later, digging in on the border impasse even as he directed Vice President Mike Pence to lead talks with a team of congressional negotiators over the weekend. “I don’t think it will, but I am prepared,” Trump said in the Rose Garden outside the White House, where he was flanked by Pence, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and the top two Republicans in the House.
The White House meeting, followed by the dueling press conferences, seemed to be more spectacle than substance: The stalemate that shut down the government on December 22 seems no closer to a resolution, and the two parties appear to have made no discernible progress despite hours of in-person, high-level talks and a transfer of power to Democrats in the House. Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered little hope for a quick agreement during their brief appearance before reporters.
Trump’s message, meanwhile, was dizzyingly dissonant. He tried to present a rosier picture of the situation even as he simultaneously threatened to keep the government shuttered indefinitely and suggested that he could declare a national emergency to have the wall built without congressional approval. At one point, he said he had “a great meeting” with Pelosi, Schumer, and other congressional leaders. He predicted the shutdown would be “over sooner than people think.” But in the next breath, he said he was girding for a lengthy fight. “If we have to stay out for a very long period of time, we’re going to do that,” Trump declared. Regarding an emergency declaration, he said, “We can call a national emergency and build it very quickly, and it’s another way of doing it.”
The president also shrugged off concerns about the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who will go without paychecks for the duration of the shutdown. Despite polls showing that a plurality of the public blames him for the closures, Trump claimed that most federal workers supported his demand for wall funding. “I believe a lot of them want to see border security and they’re willing to give it up,” the president claimed. He ignored questions asking him for evidence or details backing up his assertion. At another point, he said a former president had told him he regretted not building a wall during his time in office. Trump did not say which one. The only living Republican ex-president is George W. Bush, who signed legislation authorizing fencing at the southern border but who has never publicly voiced support for Trump’s proposed wall.
Friday’s White House meeting came a day after Democrats reclaimed the House majority and installed Pelosi as speaker for the second time. Within hours of taking over, they passed two bills aimed at reopening the government, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said neither will get a vote in the Senate, because they lack Trump’s support.
Trump’s challenge, however, may be wavering Republican support. Seven GOP lawmakers in the House sided with Democrats on one of the bills to reopen the government, and two Republican senators, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, have called for votes on legislation even if it lacks funding for a wall. McConnell was noticeably absent from Trump’s Rose Garden press conference despite attending the meeting that preceded it.
The majority leader has signaled that he’ll follow Trump’s lead on the negotiations rather than pit his members against the president. So far, a president who likes setting records is leading his party fast toward another one, however dubious an achievement it might be.
There is a vast conspiracy against Kevin Hart, Kevin Hart thinks. “That’s an attack,” the comedian told Ellen DeGeneres, during a bewildering appearance on the host’s talk show Friday. Hart was speaking about giving up the Academy Awards hosting gig after renewed backlash from his past gay jokes. “This was to destroy me. This was to end all partnerships, all brand relationships, all investment opportunities, studio relationships, my production company, and the people that work underneath me. This was to damage the lives that have been invested in me. It’s bigger than just the Oscars.”
It had better be bigger than the Oscars to justify what a fuss he’s made about the situation. The award show’s ratings have been declining for a while, and each year’s host is often quickly forgotten. Yet Hart has talked about his in-then-out-then-maybe-in-again relationship to the hosting gig with the gravity typically reserved for international conflict, and DeGeneres—now trying to reunite Hart and the Academy—has presumed to host a Camp David summit. Really, though, it’s a tale about celebrity cluelessness, arrogance, and the troubling trend of dismissing all online criticism, of any validity, as “trolling.”
On Ellen, Hart said he’s long dreamed of hosting the Oscars, but the internet quickly ruined his “glory” in December by flagging offensive things he said in the past. A 2009 tweet by Hart called someone a “fat faced fag,” and a 2010 one said someone’s profile picture resembled “a gay bill board for AIDS.” The comedian’s 2010 standup routine focused on his fear that his son wouldn’t be straight, a sentiment reflected in another tweet that said, “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I'm going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.’”
[Read: Neil Patrick Harris might be the host the Oscars (and viewers) need]
That his was arguably the most destructive kind of homophobia—encouraging parents to reject and abuse their kids in exactly the manner that contributes to high rates of LGBT teen suicide—was widely noted.
A sincere apology in response to the current-day rehashing might have defused things. But Hart’s initial reaction to calls for his firing came instead in a self-pitying Instagram post that began, “Stop looking for reasons to be negative,” and spoke vaguely about his growth into a better person over the years. “What’s understood should never have to be said. I LOVE EVERYBODY.....ONCE AGAIN EVERYBODY.” The next day, he did say sorry to gay people—in the same statement in which he announced he was walking away from the Oscars job.
On Ellen, Hart related his side of that saga. His first impulse was to ignore the backlash, and his second was to get mad. The world was ignoring that he had repeatedly apologized before, including in “a very, very heavy junket where I was asked questions about homophobia based on those tweets” in 2012 and during the promotional tour for the 2015 comedy Get Hard, a movie that was widely criticized as gay-bashing. Apologizing yet again, he felt, would just add fuel to the fire.
I’ve emailed Hart’s PR firm for help finding the apologies to which he’s referring. As far as I can tell, they’re not online. What is online is a 2015 Rolling Stone article in which he explained the source of his fears about having a gay son and said, “I wouldn’t tell that joke today, because when I said it, the times weren’t as sensitive as they are now.” That’s not an apology. There’s also a Get Hard Q&A in which he defends an arguably homophobic bit by saying, “funny is funny.” That’s not an apology. There’s also a 2014 interview in which he said he doesn’t joke about gay people anymore because, “I don't want that problem. I don't want any enemies.” That’s not an apology. In fact, each statement implies a jab at LGBT folks: You’re snowflakes.
DeGeneres has now inserted herself into the situation as a character witness for Hart, giving a full hour of her show to lobby him to take the Oscars job back. She said she called the Academy and they’d like to have him. She also said, referring to his homophobic jokes, “As a gay person, I am sensitive to all of that. You’ve already expressed that it’s not being educated on the subject, not realizing how dangerous those words are, not realizing how many kids are killed for being gay or beaten up every day. You have grown, you have apologized, you are apologizing again right now. You’ve done it.”
Then she added, “Don’t let those people win. Host the Oscars.”
Those people—oof. In one breath she went from articulating the legitimate gripes of gay folks to dismissing all of them as haters and losers. This is how discourse short-circuits, how reasonable calls to show some empathy get hijacked into tribal warfare and incoherent rhetoric about “mob mentality.” It’s simply true that real people, not amorphous axe-grinding masses, are hurt by attitudes like the ones Hart expressed in his jokes. Some black writers, for example, have pointed out that his comments about parenting really do remind them of their own male relatives—which makes DeGeneres’s spectacle of absolving him all the more presumptuous.
Meanwhile, it’s Hart who’s showing the true snowflakian fragility by totally losing his cool at the suggestion that he still has amends to make. “I don’t have a homophobic bone in my body,” he told DeGeneres, using the clichéd defense of racists who get caught in the act. The notion of bones as possibly being hateful or not belies a broken logic: It’s about who you are, not what you do or say. When in fact one of the most pernicious ways homophobia is weaponized is through conduct.
Despite what Hart claims, the only coherent, widely circulated apologies from him arrived after the Oscars backlash, in the same instance when he made the ultimate martyr move of quitting the show. The “very, very heavy junket” and other instances where he allegedly said sorry before have not surfaced, even though he presumably has a team of image-handlers to make them go viral.
So what’s changed in the last month to necessitate an intervention from DeGeneres? After she finished pleading with him to return to the Oscars—an offer he said he would go home and think about—she asked what else he wanted to discuss. Hart named his new movie: “The Upside. January 11. Excited about that.”
A wild encounter in Scotland, a lunar landing made by China, the 116th Congress begins in the U.S., Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is sworn in, New Year celebrations in Australia, surfing in Hawaii, snow on the Grand Canyon, ice castles in Utah, and much more
Apple, a smartphone company that also makes computers, lost almost 10 percent of its stock value yesterday after the company lowered its earnings projections. Just a few months ago, the company became the first to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. Now it’s worth about $675 billion, having shed almost a third of its value since its summer high.
In a lengthy letter to shareholders explaining the change in expectations, Apple CEO Tim Cook mostly blamed China: The country has been a huge market for Apple, and quarterly sales there missed targets, a situation made worse by a U.S. trade war with the country.
But that’s not the whole story. Cook also revealed that “some developed markets”—that probably means the United States and Europe—were seeing lower iPhone upgrade rates. More people chose to replace their existing phones’ batteries or just keep older devices for longer, given the high price of the hardware and the decline of wireless-carrier subsidies. In other words, more people are hanging onto their phones rather than buying new ones.
Apple still sells a lot of hardware and makes a lot of money—$84 billion for the quarter that just ended, according to Cook’s new guidance. But that revenue had been growing so much, for so long, investors had the expectation that it would continue, whether from iPhone sales or something else just as big that Apple would invent and bring to market. But nothing is as big a product as the iPhone, and the global market has reached a point where almost everyone who wants or needs a smartphone has one already.
[Read: The iPhone is dead. Long live the rectangle]
For years, the excitement the smartphone generated seemed unstoppable. Apple keynotes, which were really just glorified product announcements, felt like concerts or sporting events. So much of ordinary life took place on these rectangles—work, photos, socialization, dating, play, entertainment. And the technology that facilitated those conduits for that intimate contact with the wider world evolved so fast and so deliberately, it felt electric.
And then it didn’t anymore. Smartphones domesticated and became ordinary and necessary accoutrements of everyday life. People still love them, but they are also exhausted by them. By their grip on time and attention, but also on their wallets. Who needs a new iPhone every year or two? Increasingly, nobody does. And that’s both a victory for Apple, which has made the smartphone the single, most important change in 21st-century life, and a huge problem for a company expected to amass ever-greater profits from their sales.
But perhaps the solution to that problem isn’t to sell more iPhones, or even to replace those sales with something new. Maybe it’s time Apple made smartphone life better, rather than just unceasing.
Every year, some people need a new car. But taken together, car sales in America have remained steady since 1970, declining a bit in the 2000s and experiencing a bigger dip after the Great Recession.
That’s because cars won. They became a part of American daily life, for better and worse. That could change if cities suddenly invest in transit and walkability, or if new services like ride-on scooters and autonomous cars change personal transit. But until then, a car is just a car. You use it to get around. You buy a new one (or a new, used one) when your old one breaks down or no longer suits your needs.
What you don’t do is buy a new one every year or two. Even on a lease. A car is often a necessity, but that doesn’t make auto manufacturers high-growth companies producing record-breaking profits year after year, like Apple and Google and Facebook. Instead, at their best, those businesses are blue-chips—large companies with reliable track records for success, whose financial performance tracks a generally reliable market. Insurance companies, banks, airlines, consumer packaged goods, automakers—and, now, perhaps, smartphone manufacturers. As the Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Mims put it last year, phones are like cars now: “there is absolutely no reason to upgrade unless your old one no longer does what you need.”
[Read: Five ways to look at Apple’s surprise bad news]
Critics have warned that Apple needed new innovations to account for the inevitable plateau in its smartphone business. But that need makes a couple big assumptions. First, that companies like Apple should sustain high growth rather than transitioning from novelty to stability. And second, that a company like Apple is even capable of multiple hits as big as the iPhone.
Apple was already an outlier among high-value technology businesses. It makes most of its profits selling electronic devices, whereas other top tech companies, like Google and Facebook, make money from digital advertising. The latter model is also running out of steam: The ad racket is a high-margin business, but that market might be plateauing, a risky proposition for companies that generate almost all their revenue from selling ads.
Microsoft and Amazon offer a different model for success. Their approaches look pretty boring by comparison, but they might represent the mold that Apple will follow as it acclimates to flat smartphone growth.
Microsoft, which went public in 1986, grew slowly until the 1990s. During that decade, its stock increased about fifty-fold thanks to the PC boom before withdrawing after the dot-com crash. The company receded into the background during the 2000s, the decade of Apple, Google, Facebook. It had become staid and dull, out of sync with the contemporary technological situation. Even so, Microsoft performed admirably, selling operating-system and productivity software, providing business services, and selling devices like the Xbox. Revenue and earnings were reliable, and the company paid generous dividends to its shareholders. It became a blue-chip.
By 2013, Microsoft’s stock price started to grow again, eventually doubling its dot-com value by the end of 2018. It did so through innovation, but innovation of a fairly modest novelty compared to its competitors. Microsoft pushed into mobile computing and cloud services, for one, moving Office online and offering it as a service to organizations. It added a tablet hardware product, the Surface, and standardized Windows across PC and tablet platforms. It stabilized its share of the video-game console market. It bought Skype, LinkedIn, Visio (a popular block-diagramming software), and Mojang (makers of Minecraft). Other acquisitions, like picking up Nokia’s flagging phone business, didn’t work out so well, but overall Microsoft has thrived. As Apple sunk to under $675 billion in market value in the wake of its downgraded earnings outlook, Microsoft was the most valuable company in the world.
That state of affairs suggests a different path to long-term value, through periods of substantial growth interspersed with the sustained support of a mature, diversified business. That’s what Amazon looks like, too: an online retail giant that also boasts successful business units in home-automation, streaming media, ad services, manufacturing, and cloud computing (Amazon Web Services now accounts for more than 10 percent of the company’s revenue). Those successes were hardly driven by the purity of visionary innovation; each one came along at different times, as Amazon recognized market opportunities in which it had a unique ability to capitalize.
And though it’s easy to forget, that’s what Apple’s history looks like, too: the personal computer in 1977, the user-friendly computer in 1984; the computer as interior design in 1998; the portable music player in 2001; the smartphone in 2007; the tablet in 2010. Each of these devices created a new market, even if Apple wasn’t the first or only company to realize them—in most cases, it was copying or building upon prior ideas, making them viable and desirable for a mass market.
But the iPhone was entirely different from those other products—and from anything else ever made, too. It became the most successful consumer product of all time. That success brought enormous profits to Apple, along with outsized expectations. Apple had been roughly doubling iPhone unit sales for years. The idea that Apple would replicate the iPhone’s success with a quick succession of follow-up products was probably always a daft one. The iPad hardly even counts as a different product line from a smartphone or a laptop. The Apple Watch has shown promising results, but it remains mostly a mediator for the smartphone. Airpods are great, but it’s hard to see them replicating the iPhone’s success.
[Read: Apple is worth one trillion dollars]
As Microsoft and Amazon indicate, long-term success often looks far more boring than triumphs driven by innovation. Making an office suite work online, as Microsoft did, or selling the infrastructure that Amazon’s ecommerce business runs on, as AWS does, are hardly exciting prospects for investors or consumers. But they offer enough value to produce reliable, stable growth.
Some might criticize Apple for failing to deliver on wholly new products, like its long-rumored car. Given the enormous pile of cash the company has on hand, some kind of R&D miracle might seem inevitable. And those who long for a design and lifestyle miracle as monumental as the iPhone might hope that this slump will push Apple to double down on big ideas.
But a careful read of Tim Cook’s letter to shareholders suggests the opposite. Instead, Cook seems poised to double down on boring services, like the kind that have helped Microsoft and Amazon. Once iPhones reach market saturation, Apple is far more likely to enjoy greater profits from selling add-ons for those devices to the customers committed to the platform. Apple Music offers one example, as does iCloud, a subscription that has become a begrudging necessity as families need to back up and store photos from their Apple devices. Apple has tried to turn the iPhone itself into a service, via the iPhone Upgrade Program, which takes a monthly fee and allows users to get a new device every year or two—Cook’s letter indicates a desire to make that service more appealing, too. There’s also been chatter about a Netflix-style Apple subscription program for newspapers and magazines, a service that Apple might be uniquely positioned to offer.
But all of that is probably not enough to make up for declining iPhone sales. Especially since sales aren’t really declining from indifference or disruption—it’s just that the marketplace is saturated, the devices are excellent, and nobody needs to pay as much for one as often as Apple would like, and as the market seems to have assumed they would.
Apple’s earnings warning stripped $67 billion from the company’s market cap and dragged the whole Dow Jones Industrial Average down 600 points. That’s partly because Apple’s surprise performance issues a warning for the global economy, and not just in China.
As my colleague Alexis Madrigal noted, that worry stems partly from the fact that growth in American companies has become so reliant on overseas markets—not to mention the fact that growth itself is expected without end. If that growth falters, it spells trouble for the economy in the short term. But the obsession with growth also privileges the accrual of corporate wealth over the improvement of quality of life.
One of the saving graces of blue-chip companies that sell toothpaste and cars and, now, smartphones, is that they provide something else, too: stability over time. Apple’s a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a stock-market index that was built to track blue chips, those companies that are supposed to do well in good times or bad, over the long haul. Google and Facebook are not components of the Dow, but Apple and Microsoft (and Intel, IBM, and Cisco) are. As trade war looms and the stocks enter what looks like the end of the longest bull market in history, maybe the American economy—and the soul of its people—don’t really need another gizmo like the iPhone, around which their lives might be redesigned anew. Maybe they just need the lives they have, contorted though they’ve been by the smartphone, to enjoy responsible, long-term support and maintenance. The iPhone is here to stay. Imagine if Apple could make that state of affairs feel like a comfort, rather than a burden.
One of the scariest scenarios for near-term, disastrous sea-level rise may be off the table for now, according to a new study previewed at a recent scientific conference.
Two years ago, the glaciologists Robert DeConto and David Pollard rocked their field with a paper arguing that several massive glaciers in Antarctica were much more unstable than previously thought. Those key glaciers—which include Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier, both in the frigid continent’s west—could increase global sea levels by more than three feet by 2100, the paper warned. Such a rise could destroy the homes of more than 150 million people worldwide.
They are now revisiting those results. In new work, conducted with three other prominent glaciologists, DeConto and Pollard have lowered some of their worst-case projections for the 21st century. Antarctica may only contribute about a foot of sea-level rise by 2100, they now say. This finding, reached after the team improved their own ice model, is much closer to projections made by other glaciologists.
It is a reassuring constraint placed on one of the most alarming scientific hypotheses advanced this decade. The press had described DeConto and Pollard’s original work as an “ice apocalypse” spawned by a “doomsday glacier.” Now their worst-case skyrocketing sea-level scenario seems extremely unlikely, at least within our own lifetimes.
Yet their work—and the work of other sea-level-rise scientists—still warns of potential catastrophe for our children and grandchildren. If every country meets its current commitment under the Paris Agreement, the Earth will warm about 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century compared with its pre-industrial average. In their new research, DeConto and his colleagues say that there’s a tipping point, somewhere between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of temperature rise, after which the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will slip into rapid and shattering collapse.
[Read: ]A radical new scheme to prevent catastrophic sea-level rise
Their new research also raises the marginal risk of disaster. Officially, the Paris Agreement aims to keep global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, though many experts consider that goal fanciful. And even in that extremely optimistic scenario, West Antarctica still switches into unavoidable collapse about 10 percent of the time, according to the new research.
Their short-term revisions also barely change their long-term forecast of West Antarctic disintegration. If emissions keep rising, they warn that global sea level could rise by more than 26 feet by 2300.
These new results have not yet been peer-reviewed. DeConto, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, presented them to other scientists last month at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest annual conference of Earth scientists in the world. He and his colleagues declined to comment for this story in keeping with an academic custom not to discuss new work with the press before its publication.
The new results inform one of the biggest outstanding questions—and most fervent debates—concerning how climate change will reshape our world: How much will the seas rise, and how fast will that upheaval occur? DeConto and several other American glaciologists—including Richard Alley, a professor at Penn State and a co-author of the new research—represent something like the vanguard of that discussion. They champion an idea called “marine ice-cliff instability,” or MICI, which maintains that West Antarctic glaciers will eventually crumble under their own weight. By the middle of next century, they warn, this mechanism could send ocean levels soaring at a rate of several feet per decade. For reference: Along the U.S. East Coast, the Atlantic Ocean has risen by only about a foot over the last 12 decades.
While “marine ice-cliff instability” might be clunky, the idea is cinematic. It holds that warm ocean waters will eventually chew away the floating ice shelves that gird Antarctic glaciers today. With these ice shelves gone, the glaciers will stand naked on the seafloor: towering, fragile cliffs of ice. Imagine a 300-foot-tall shard of sapphire rising from the ocean and stretching for miles in both directions, and you will have a sense of the awesome prospect of this new geography. You will also have a sense of its dangerous physics, because ice cannot support itself at such heights. As MICI kicks in, those sapphire walls will crack, buckle, and begin rapidly birthing hundred-foot splinters of frozen freshwater into the sea. And thus the oceans will rise.
Other researchers find this possible future somewhat fantastic. “We, as European modelers, are slightly more skeptical of the marine-cliff idea,” Frank Pattyn, a glaciologist at the Free University of Brussels, told me. “It has not been observed, not at such a scale.”
Yet even MICI’s skeptics agree: Our understanding of sea-level rise is rapidly growing more ominous. In its last major report, in 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that oceans could rise two feet by 2100 if greenhouse-gas emissions continue on a worst-case trajectory. That number will almost certainly worsen in the IPCC’s next report, which is due in 2021, Pattyn said. “We are facing sea-level rise that is obviously going to be higher in the mean than what the IPCC’s ‘Fifth Assessment Report’ showed,” he said.
“Nobody’s debating that sea-level rise is happening. It’s back to how much, how fast,” Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me. Even the most optimistic scientists have recently increased their low-end estimates, she said. “It’s healthy to have this debate.”
[Read: ]After decades of losing ice, Antarctica is now hemorrhaging it
There is only one place in the world where MICI is definitely happening: Jakobshavn Glacier, on the west coast of Greenland. (Locals call it Sermeq Kujalleq.) In the 19th century, Jakobshavn was a long river of ice that snaked out of its fjord to meet the surrounding, frozen bay. Now, the bay rarely freezes, and Jakobshavn has retreated miles back into its canyon, forming a tall, brittle cliff face that regularly births icebergs as tall as a house. (Some of those icebergs are so enormous that they get stuck leaving the fjord.) All that ice has to come from somewhere: These days, Jakobshavn empties ice from the center of Greenland twice as quickly as it did during the last century.
Last month, in a large hall at the same AGU conference, several hundred researchers gathered to see a set of presentations billed as a series of updates on new glacier and ice models. It was far closer to a proxy debate on the ice-cliff question. Several of the talks had “marine ice-cliff instability” in the title, and I had heard more than one group of glaciologists gossiping about it days in advance.
Alley, the Penn State glaciologist, addressed the sapphire-colored elephant in the room immediately after taking the dais. As he sees it, it’s just common sense that Antarctic glaciers will develop problematic ice cliffs. The Jakobshavn Glacier, only a few miles wide, has not significantly changed the rate of global sea-level rise. Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, on the other hand, is more than 30 miles wide. It holds enough ice to raise sea levels worldwide by about five feet. “What we’ve always relied on is that unzipping one fjord does not affect the global ocean,” Alley said. “What’s different is that here and here and here”—he pointed to glaciers in West Antarctica—“unzipping one fjord will matter a lot.”
In this scenario, he warned, “We will not have analogues … We are going to move outside the instrumental data that we use to calibrate our models.”
Then came the skeptics. Dan Martin, a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, argued that his and his colleagues’ work showed that ice cliffs might simply be a product of running a computer model of ice physics at a too-low resolution. Eric Larour, a physicist at NASA, presented the possibility that the physics of the Earth itself might slightly counteract some rapid ice-cliff collapse. As the ice sitting on West Antarctica melts, the bedrock below it will bounce back up.
“When ice melts or thins, you can think that the Earth [below it] is going to rebound,” he said. That bedrock will rise, lifting the glacier partly out of the water. Such a mechanism could buy humanity some time, he said, giving us a “23 to 30 year delay” in the total collapse of West Antarctica. This effect might hold off the collapse of West Antarctica until 2250 or 2300, but then the ice sheet would disintegrate as fast as ever.
The meeting arrived at no clear conclusion. “It still doesn’t look good,” Brad Lipovsky, an Earth scientist at Harvard, told me. “That’s what I saw in the talks today. We’re still seeing that sea-level rise is going to be a major problem for coastal communities around the world.”
MICI remains a young idea, first proposed only six years ago. It need not be rejected simply because scientists haven’t arrived at hard conclusions yet, Fricker, the Scripps glaciologist, said. Marine ice-cliff instability remains a worrying possibility: a low-chance, high-danger tail risk of climate change. It’s just one of the many gambles that humanity is placing on its own future—and it’s not even the only mechanism that could cause West Antarctica to collapse. Researchers are also investigating another mechanism, “marine ice-sheet instability,” that could target some of the same fragile glaciers.
“It might not happen,” Fricker said. “But if there’s a chance that it could happen, then shouldn’t you involve that in your planning? If you’re hosting a picnic and it might rain, you don’t necessarily move the whole event, but you probably do make a Plan B. If you’re planning a city … you might as well keep this in the back of your mind.”
“This. Is. Awesome.”
A commentator on The Titan Games, watching Spandex-clad humans engaged in feats of superhuman strength, channeled the same, simple thing I’d been thinking while viewing the premiere of the show on Thursday evening: It was awesome. And NBC’s latest entry in the expanding category of televised muscletainment was especially compelling the way I’d happened to experience it. Earlier in the evening, flipping around the channels, I’d settled, as I do so often by default and habit, on an athletic competition of a different sort: a collection of disembodied heads, battling each other on CNN. The Titan Games may be a show in which every production element is aimed at making the momentary suffering of its contestants, as they struggle and sweat and grunt through challenges like the Herculean Pull and the Cyclone, vicariously palpable for viewers. But given the quiet despair of the skirmishes on offer on the news channels, watching all this purposeful pain was, in its context, a massive relief.
The Titan Games is a little bit American Ninja Warrior, a little bit American Gladiators, a little bit American Grit—with added elements, thrown in for good measure, of the Olympics and the Crossfit Games and The Hunger Games and The Wall and Iron Chef and Legends of the Hidden Temple. (That last one enters the proceedings through the ultimate objective of the game: defeating the vertical obstacle course the show has dubbed “Mount Olympus”—a process that requires contestants to extract a massive Titan Games logo, an unwieldy object the show calls “The Relic,” from a cement-covered enclosure called the “Titan Tomb.”)
The show’s premise, despite an approach to ancient Greek symbology so chaotically insouciant that even Robert Langdon would cower before it, is straightforward: Contestants face off against each other in pairs, women against women and men against men, competing in challenges involving things like the hammering of cement, the scaling of walls, and the dragging of assorted heavy objects. The winner of each pairing—typically, the first person to complete the assigned activity or series of activities—advances to compete against another winner, the two of them racing through the assorted obstacles of Mount Olympus. (The obstacles involve scaling revolving cylinders on a steep incline, and cranking weights, and punching holes in a faux-brick wall. Taken together, one of the show’s commentators says, they “will test your heart and challenge your spirit.”) Win that ultimate contest, and the players become Titans.
It’s a process—pairings, victors, more pairings, more victors—that occurs several times during each episode, with the repetition made fresh, Olympics-style, by the backstories the show highlights from each athlete. At the end of the season, The Titan Games will name one woman and one man as its champions: everyday people elevated to membership in the show’s “Team of Titans” through hard work, determination, and the god-making capabilities of reality television.
If that sounds, in its contours, extremely familiar, it is because there are approximately 5,000 other shows like The Titan Games already in existence, on American television and far beyond. And it is also because The Titan Games is unapologetically derivative of every last one of them. (Mount Olympus, the heart-tester and spirit-challenger that, a show announcer avers, “has been specially designed to test all aspects of athleticism,” has its counterpart in the Endurance Platform of Fox’s American Grit. And in the Elimination Tower of NBC’s STRONG. And in the Mount Midoriyama of NBC’s American Ninja Warrior—itself a spin-off of the Japanese show Sasuke.)
What makes The Titan Games meaningfully different from its wide collection of predecessors and competitors, however, is its central god-maker: The show is hosted by Dwayne Johnson, The Rock—“DJ,” the show’s co-hosts call him—who functions at once as a master of ceremonies, a mentor to the contestants, and a behind-the-scenes executive producer. The show’s Thursday premiere repeatedly emphasized the idea that Johnson designed the Titan challenges himself, based on his own intensive workouts: The path to Titanhood, here, is to follow in the footsteps of the original deity.
The show’s infusive reliance on Johnson, a polymathic performer whose legendary charisma seems always to be in beast mode, makes The Titan Games compelling almost in spite of itself. His presence on the show strikes a balance between winking camp—in the premiere, as Johnson strides out into the arena that has been Titan-ized for the occasion, fireworks shoot from the ground as if the set itself is unable to contain its giddiness at his arrival—and extreme earnestness. “Who's gonna work harder, run faster, dig deeper?” Johnson asks at one point. “Heroes aren’t born, they’re made, here on The Titan Games,” he says at another.
Johnson talks a lot about strength—bodily fortitude, on shows like The Titan Games, always doubles as a metaphor for power of a more figurative strain—and also about respect, and hard work, and deep dedication, and self-actualization. The contestants’ abbreviated backstories function as fables of perseverance: There’s a woman whose sister defeated cancer, who built her body in honor of the sibling who fought for hers. And a father who has worked to become stronger and faster in the hopes of serving as a role model for his young son. And a grandmother who wants to prove to the world—and to herself—that age can confer strength rather than deplete it.
Willpower, as both cause and effect, is a constant theme of the show. Look into the massive, quasi-Olympian goblets of flame that surround the Titan Games set, and you might see, swirling in the fire, ideas—often inspiring ideas, sometimes uncomfortable ideas—about the brute capabilities of human desire. “This comes down to who wants it more,” Johnson says solemnly to the camera, as Ayonna, a physical therapist, and Emily, a mixed martial artist and masseuse, battle it out in a kind of aerial tug-of-war in the center of the Titan arena.
It’s an intoxicating promise—wanting, after all, is one muscle Americans are typically happy to exercise—and it helps to explain why The Titan Games has joined so many other profoundly similar shows on the American television screen. (It also helps to explain why there will be more to come: Last year, MGM Television announced that it will be bringing back American Gladiators, the original pageant of the muscle industrial complex, for the 2019–2020 season.)
But The Titan Games is appealing for other reasons, as well: It offers, for one thing, a display of strength during a time that has made many people feel weak. It implies the promise of control in a moment that has manifested, in so many ways, as its own wide-scale tug-of-war. It taps into the rise of ideas that conflate the notion of bodily wellness with an assumption of moral goodness: the Prosperity Gospel, essentially, rewritten for the age of Planet Fitness. The Titan Games and its fellow shows, which are self-conscious celebrations of the capabilities of the human body, offer a marked shift from earlier shows that, under the guise of self-improvement, ultimately revelled in the shaming of bodies. (The Biggest Loser, that other NBC product, hovers smoke-like over the fiery pageantry of The Titan Games.)
Yet The Titan Games and its fellow shows serve not merely as timely revisions of earlier failures. They also work as a broader kind of corrective to the shows that, night after night, offer competitions of a much different variety: the talk shows, on CNN and other networks, that call themselves “news” but render, much more often, simply as talking heads butting heads. The Titan Games, for all its absurdist pageantry—I cannot stress enough how many controlled explosions have been involved in the making of this show—is in the end extremely unambiguous: Its rules are clear, its premises are simple, and its victories are refreshingly incontrovertible. Ready, set, go: There’s struggle and there’s sweat, and one person goes a little faster and pulls a little more weight, and that person is crowned the winner. The end. There may be an excess of fireworks in the Titan arena, but there is no room for argument within its walls—no space for lies or alternative facts or fake news or actuallys—because bodies, used in this way, do not allow for excuses or explanations. They simply do, and some do a little more than others, and that is the difference between a Titan and everyone else.
The body, The Titan Games and its fellow shows understand, is a fact unto itself. And that, in this time of anxiety about truth and its depleting strength, is its own kind of argument. “Prove that you can conquer my mountain,” Johnson tells his competitors, “and you join my team of Titans.” In a cultural moment that is so wearying—so unrelenting—in its ambiguities, the athletic competition, with all its pomp and camp and spectacle, does the thing so many other entertainments will not, or cannot, do: It offers viewers an escape into certainty.
Since the mandarin duck appeared in Central Park last fall, his unexpected presence has stirred up many questions: Where did he come from? Why is he so hot? Can such beauty survive in our garbage world? And, for the linguistics nerds out there, where do mandarin ducks get their name?
Yes, true, mandarin ducks are native to China, where Mandarin is the official language. But the word “mandarin” has a more roundabout origin. It does not come from Mandarin Chinese, which refers to itself as putonghua (or “common speech”) and China, the country, as zhongguo (or “Middle Kingdom”). It doesn’t come from any other variant of Chinese, either. Its origins are Portuguese.
[Read: The world’s most musical languages]
This one word encapsulates an entire colonial history. In the 16th century, Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to reach China. Traders and missionaries followed, settling into Macau on land leased from China’s Ming dynasty rulers. The Portuguese called the Ming officials they met mandarim, which comes from menteri in Malay and, before that, mantrī in Sanskrit, both of which mean “minister” or “counselor.” It makes sense that Portuguese would borrow from Malay; they were simultaneously colonizing Malacca on the Malay peninsula.
For centuries, Europeans’ impressions of China filtered largely through the Portuguese. The 16th century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, for instance, was Italian, but he arrived in China through Portuguese Macau. Following the twisty logic of colonialism, when he attempted to transpose Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet, he made use of both Italian and Portuguese, comparing the sounds of individual characters to the sounds of Portuguese and Italian words. Even today, “linguists go to town and try to figure what Chinese would have sounded like at the time,” says David Moser, author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language. “They could use as a clue the way Matteo Ricci wrote the Portuguese.”
Over time, the Portuguese coinage of “mandarin” took on other meanings. The Ming dynasty officials wore yellow robes, which may be why “mandarin” came to mean a type of citrus. “Mandarin” also lent its names to colorful animals native to Asia but new to Europeans, like wasps and snakes and, of course, ducks. And the language the Chinese officials spoke became “Mandarin,” which is how the English name for the language of billions of people in China speak still comes from Portuguese.
But words have a way of collecting just-so origin stories, and Chinese speakers have sometimes retroactively given a Chinese origin to “mandarin,” says Moser. It sounds similar enough to mandaren, a phrase that could mean “important Manchurian.” The rulers of China’s last dynasty, the Qing, were from Manchuria, so it make sense if you squint at it. “But it’s not true,” says Moser. “Mandarin” has a distinctly non-Mandarin origin.
“Mandarin” is what linguists call an exonym, an external name for a place, people, or language. And exonyms often tell of a history of how cultures met, fought, and interacted. Many English names for continental European cities derive not from the local language but from French—probably a legacy of the Norman conquest of England. For example, English and French both use Cologne for Köln, Florence for Firenze, Prague for Praha, and Belgrade for Beograd.
In other cases, says the lexicographer Grant Barrett, exonyms arise because two places have a relationship that predate current national boundaries. For example, adds linguist Anatoly Liberman, we use “Germany” from the Latin Germania. In French, the name is Allemagne from a group of tribes called the Alemanni; in Finnish, Saksa from the Saxons. Germany (Deutschland in German) only became a unified country in 1871, long after other Europeans had adopted their own names for the place, based on different peoples who once lived there.
From the vantage-point of English speakers, many of the exonyms for non-European places and languages come filtered through the languages of former colonial powers. Bombay and Ceylon, for example, also come from the Portuguese, whose empire once sprawled through Asia. The names imposed by colonial powers can be controversial, of course; Bombay and Ceylon have since officially changed their names to Mumbai and Sri Lanka. The name “Mandarin” still endures, perhaps because its origin is more obscure or because China has enjoyed warmer relations with Portugal than with other European countries. As for the mandarin ducks, they also live in Portugal now.
Last night I mentioned the latest Trump-appointment rumor: that the successor at the Pentagon to James Mattis, Marine Corps combat veteran and retired four-star general, might be James Webb, Marine Corps combat veteran and, among other distinctions, a former secretary of the Navy in a Republican administration and U.S. senator as a Democrat.
My argument was that it would be good for the country if Webb somehow ended up in this position, but (given the track record of people serving under Trump) probably a nightmare for Webb himself.
What I didn’t ask is: Why would Donald Trump be interested in the first place? Given his recent experience with one independent-minded Marine Corps figure who had a strongly established pre-Trump identity and record, why would he be looking for another?
Readers have volunteered insights on this point. First, from a reader who was a constituent when Webb was senator from Virginia, and who has long experience in foreign-affairs branches of the U.S. government. This reader writes:
As substantial a case as your post makes for James Webb as Secretary of Defense, Donald Trump and his supporters may be less interested in the qualities you cite than in some other points about Mr. Webb:
-- When Webb dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary in October 2015, he asserted that the Democratic party had moved away from "'millions of dedicated, hard-working Americans,'" and he pointedly refused to say that he was still a Democrat.
-- In November 2016, Webb denounced affirmative-action policies as an illegitimate expansion into "reverse discrimination" of the slavery-oriented intention of the Thirteenth Amendment. He also suggested that white working-class voters believed that "Democrats don't like them."
-- In February 2017, he condemned the Democratic party for embracing "identity politics" and moving "very far to the left," and by doing so lost "the key part of their constituency," He also made clear that he did not vote for Hillary Clinton and refused to rule out having voted for Trump.
-- As a Senator, while Webb supported immigration reform in principle, he also prioritized "securing the border" over all other immigration issues -- something that clearly fits Trump's current agenda.
It's easy to understand why Webb might be the best choice for Secretary of Defense that Trump is likely to make.
It's also easy to understand why Webb might seem so appealing -- for reasons that have little to do with the background you describe.
I can imagine that Jim Webb—who, for the record, I’ve long considered a friend though we see many issues differently—might dispute this or that aspect of the reader’s summary of his views.
But I think everyone would agree that, from his (successful) Senate run in 2006 through his (unsuccessful) presidential run 10 years later, Webb has been a voice for the group conventionally assumed to have moved from the Democratic base to the Republicans’: mainly white, mainly rural, culturally conservative Americans who feel themselves on the losing end of this era’s economic divides. For more on this, see Webb’s book Born Fighting, and his response on behalf of the Democratic party to George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2007. A notable aspect of that speech is that the Democrats chose Webb to deliver their televised message when he was a brand-new senator, only a few weeks into his term.
And from another reader in the D.C. area, also with long military and intelligence-world experience:
Here are three points [about how the choice of Webb] could help the Republic:
1 It is insane for the President to continue with an Acting SecDef that is a direct representative of the military-industrial complex with no substantive military experience.
2 Webb is confirmable and confirmable quickly.
3 Because Webb is in harmony with the President's views and capable of drawing down expensive forces, reducing support to dictators, and eliminating some of the 50% waste that characterizes every aspect of DoD, he will free up resources for the President's domestic priorities including the wall and infrastructure.
I still put this subject in the “more interesting than likely” category. But it’s a more positive possibility than most of the other administration news these days, and I thank the readers for these elaborations.
The Trump administration stands ready to fulfill a long-standing dream of insurance companies, big banks, and many conservative legal scholars: making it safe to enact policies that are neutral in theory, but that have unequal effects in practice.
On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the administration intends to roll back regulations that bar discrimination on the basis of “disparate impact.” In particular, Trump officials have their eyes on regulations that prevent discrimination in housing. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has already pulled back on investigations into such matters.
The concept is relatively simple, but controversial: Disparate-impact regulations prohibit actions that have the effect of discriminating against particular groups, not just those that are intended to do so. Disparate-impact regulations make it possible to attack prejudice on a systemic scale rather than addressing individual acts alone. Less dramatic than a wall on the southern border and quieter than the travel ban, the reported effort to roll back such regulations across the federal government could have a profound effect on those groups and individuals historically denied opportunities simply because of their race or background. It is an approach consistent with the misguided belief that efforts to fight discrimination against historically marginalized groups, even mere accusations of prejudice, are worse than the prejudice itself.
Conservatives have long sought to eliminate disparate-impact regulations. In Donald Trump, a real-estate baron whose company was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people, they finally found an eager champion.
[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]
“The Trump administration has been systematically undermining civil rights and efforts to address racial discrimination,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division under Obama. “Disparate-impact liability can uncover disguised discriminatory intent and/or unconscious prejudices. And unconscious bias can have the same effect as overt bias: It can undermine equal opportunity.”
Disparate-impact discrimination is not a simple question of discrete outcomes; on their own, divergent results do not prove discrimination. Rather, the regulations prohibit behavior that would discriminate if there are other ways to achieve the desired objective, or if there’s no valid interest being pursued. When the federal government alleges discrimination on the basis of disparate impact, such as in mortgage lending or homeowner’s insurance, it performs a regression analysis to prove that, all other things being equal, discrimination is at play. The idea is to prevent such regulations against discrimination from being gamed.
In the early 2000s, landlords in St. Paul, Minnesota, alleged discrimination on the part of the city, which had insisted that their apartments have basic amenities such as heat and pest control. Their claim was that the new regulations would drive up the cost of housing or put them out of business, which would have a disparate impact on their minority tenants. One civil-rights advocate called it a scheme to assert a “fundamental right under the Fair Housing Act to put minorities in crappy housing.” Financial institutions and insurance companies argue that the regulations make otherwise innocent or benign business decisions illegal, even when companies aren’t taking cynical advantage of them.
The Supreme Court ultimately issued a 5–4 ruling in a separate case upholding disparate-impact discrimination regulations under the Fair Housing Act, but the opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. He has since been replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, who angrily warned the left at his confirmation hearing that “what goes around comes around.” Opponents of disparate-impact rules might prevail, given a second day in a Trumpified high court. Without such regulations, illegal discrimination, even on a grand scale, is simply a matter of finding a plausible pretext.
[Read: Is this how discrimination ends?]
“On-the-record discriminatory comments made by officials still happen, but are exceedingly rare,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “The broader disparate-impact standard allows us to challenge and remedy policies that are seemingly benign but have a discriminatory effect on disadvantaged groups as a result of long-standing, historical, intentional discrimination.”
There are essentially two cases against disparate impact—one philosophical and one financial.
Conservative legal experts have long opposed disparate-impact standards wherever they have been applied, arguing that demonstrating discrimination should require proving malicious intent. Different outcomes, they argue, are simply reflective of different behaviors and capabilities. But intent can be difficult to prove, while effect can be drawn from public data. Without disparate-impact standards, governments and private institutions can discriminate as long as they successfully hide their intent to do so.
It’s the same logic that was on offer in the Supreme Court’s approach to the Trump administration’s ban on travelers from seven countries, five with Muslim majorities: Despite the president’s public statements displaying his intent to discriminate against Muslims, the final version of the executive order didn’t mention religion, and so according to the high court’s conservative bloc, the order wasn’t discriminatory.
As a young attorney in the Justice Department, the author of that opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, opposed adding an “effects test” standard to the Voting Rights Act, despite the long history of state governments deploying superficially race-neutral voting devices designed to disenfranchise black voters. During the Obama administration, Senate conservatives tried to gin up a scandal over the Justice Department’s settling of housing cases that right-wing legal groups were hoping to bring to the Supreme Court, to give the justices the chance to scuttle the Fair Housing Act’s disparate-impact regulations. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has rolled back regulations designed to prevent schools from punishing black students more harshly than white students.
“At its worst, the intent standard reflects the comforting belief among too many that discrimination is perpetuated by villainous characters who use racial slurs, or at the very least the view that discrimination should only be deemed illegal if it emanates from the evil hearts and minds of perpetrators,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “More importantly, the effects standard reflects a recognition that acts that perpetuate discrimination are not cleansed simply by benign intentions.”
[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court’s green light to discriminate]
But there are also strong financial incentives at work here, particularly for the banking and insurance industries. Both industries have a history of discriminatory behavior that has profoundly shaped the character of American society—from banks not lending or offering subprime credit to black Americans to insurance companies simply refusing to offer their products to black customers or even to whites who lived in integrated neighborhoods (“incompatible racial groups,” in the Federal Housing Authority’s lingo).
For decades, those practices were embedded in American public policy, which explicitly upheld racial segregation. Throughout most of the 20th century, the federal government and private companies worked together to maintain segregation in the North and South, depriving millions of black Americans of the traditional route to wealth and prosperity while laying the foundation for a prosperous white middle class. The efforts to remedy that discrimination, compared with the scale of the harm done, have been timid and meager.
“Once de jure segregation was established, African Americans and whites were not affected similarly by subsequent race-neutral policies,” wrote Richard Rothstein in his history of segregation in housing. “Several seemingly ‘race-neutral’ programs have reinforced the disadvantages of African Americans that were initially created by race-conscious housing policy.”
After the 1960s, many of those discriminatory practices continued, and new ones developed as firms used technological advances to find new ways to discriminate—and to make money doing so. Disparate-impact regulations proved an effective tool for fighting discrimination in an era when it was—at least until recently—considered impolite to be overtly racist.
“The insurance industry has a long history of contributing to disinvestment and redlining in communities of color. Although some of its most egregious tactics have been curbed through litigation, including disparate-impact litigation, new practices are emerging,” said Clarke. “Elements within the insurance industry seem to believe that they have a profit interest in avoiding judicial scrutiny of their policies and practices.”
During the Obama administration, the civil-rights division of the Justice Department extracted heavy fines from firms such as Countrywide, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo for things such as charging minority borrowers higher rates than they were entitled to do and steering them into subprime loans, practices that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Similarly, insurance companies continue to charge customers who live in predominantly minority neighborhoods higher prices for home or car insurance. It is expensive to be poor, and it is expensive to be a person of color. It is particularly expensive to be both.
“There is a rather elaborate process for undoing regulations of this sort, and you can best believe that we do not intend to allow this without a fight,” said Ifill.
Rolling back disparate-impact regulations has two salutary effects, from the point of view of Trump and his allies: It makes things right in the world by ensuring that more white people are not unjustly accused of discrimination, and it helps the rich get richer by gouging those who are trying their best to make ends meet. Anyone who suffers from that probably has it coming: You should have been born white, or you should have been born rich. And if you’re neither? You probably didn’t vote for Trump anyway.
Whether your resolutions for 2019 involve tackling your most persistent demons or simply finishing all the books you’ve started, the new year is a good time to turn over a new leaf. John Kaag finds an antidote to both modern ennui and self-improvement platitudes in the epigraph of Friedrich Nietzsche’s graduate dissertation, while Karen Swallow Prior writes that the very process of thoughtful reading can build skills for living a better life—as many of the characters in Jane Austen’s novels learn.
Michelle Obama’s memoir about the punishing tasks of political life also includes her heartfelt reflections on personal struggles. The Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy reckons with the implications of large- and small-scale suffering in life and music. And the novelist Scott Spencer explains how Rudyard Kipling found a way to transform grief and guilt into art.
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out.
Check out past issues here. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
How to live better, according to Friedrich Nietzsche
“Nietzsche knew that if philosophy can serve as therapy, it’s by delivering an electric jolt to the soul.”
📚 HIKING WITH NIETZSCHE: ON BECOMING WHO YOU ARE, by John Kaag
A former first lady’s uncommon, requisite resolve
“It’s not surprising that Michelle Obama would have felt overwhelmed by the unrelenting negativity hurled at her and her daughters during her husband’s campaigns and presidency. What is startling about Becoming, however, is her willingness to admit to—and detail—these moments of doubt, of fear, of anxiety.”
📚 BECOMING, by Michelle Obama
The Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy says it’s okay to be okay
“He’s spoken out against the archetype with which he got tagged: the tortured artist. His memoir is now, on some level, a 304-page takedown of that cultural myth.”
📚 LET’S GO (SO WE CAN GET BACK), by Jeff Tweedy
How Rudyard Kipling turned his guilt into fiction
“He was a man who glorified war without ever having fought in one—and that’s where you get into the intense mix of grief and shame that Kipling surely brought to this story. ”
📚 “THE GARDENER,” by Rudyard Kipling
📚 RIVER UNDER THE ROAD, by Scott Spencer
What Jane Austen’s novels teach readers about reading—and living better
“For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.”
📚 NORTHANGER ABBEY, by Jane Austen
📚 PERSUASION, by Jane Austen
📚 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jane Austen
📚 ON READING WELL: FINDING THE GOOD LIFE THROUGH GREAT BOOKS, by Karen Swallow Prior
Last week, we asked you to tell us about particularly memorable literary party scenes. Karen, a reader in Vancouver, British Columbia, recommends “Babette’s Feast” by Isak Dinesen, in which “Babette awakens the dinner guests from their humdrum lives.” Elizabeth Rambo, of North Carolina, describes a scene in Dorothy Dunnett’s Checkmate, in which “Dunnett captures every ridiculous detail and disaster of the feast and entertainment, where too many people crush into an inadequate space, painted decorations are still dripping, and members of the nobility have had to lend their own serving dishes and flatware to accommodate the King’s ‘invitation.’ Somehow everyone gets out alive!”
What stories of self-reinvention, resolve, and renewal do you think everyone should read? Tweet at us with #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. The book she got from her Secret Santa last week is Autumn, by Ali Smith.
Comments, questions, typos? Email rosa@theatlantic.com.
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When Ashley, a 16-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, scrolls through Instagram, her eyes barely skim the photos and videos that take up the majority of space in her feed. She double-taps anything she sees from her close friends, but the main thing she cares about is the comments below each pic. “Comments are the easiest to communicate. It’s just the easiest way to find people with similar interests,” Ashley said. In fact, she met her best friend in the comment section of an Instagram niche-meme account last year. After noticing some particularly witty comments, she clicked on the girl’s profile, followed her, and began starting conversations in the comment section of her Instagram photos. The two hit it off, and they’ve been tight ever since.
For years, comments on Instagram were secondary to the photo and video posts that make up the app’s main feed. But recently, Instagram comment sections have begun to eclipse the photos they sit below.
Over the past year and a half, the Instagram account @commentsbycelebs has ballooned to nearly 1 million followers by documenting celebrities’ most notable Instagram comments. It has spawned a network of copycat comment accounts, many of which have thousands of followers. Part of the rise in comment culture on Instagram is due to product changes made by the platform. In August 2017, Instagram added threaded comments, making it easier for people to have coherent conversations. And in the spring of 2018, the company instituted an algorithm that surfaced noteworthy comments from celebrities, athletes, influencers, and verified accounts.
[Read: Instagram is the new Evite]
It wasn’t always easy to find the like-minded on Instagram. Discovery is core to the Instagram experience and part of the reason the platform has grown to more than 1 billion monthly active users. The Instagram Explore tab, which features an endless tile of Instagram posts aligned with your interests, is great for helping users find more posts and accounts to follow. Explore is where you go to find cool stuff, but not necessarily where you go to meet new people.
The comment section is increasingly where connections are made. One recent post by the YouTube star Emma Chamberlain features more than 19,000 comments. Lots are from kids simply reacting to her photo, but there are also two girls bonding over having the same type of glasses, young women sharing info on what they’re wearing, and others discussing mental health.
Some teenagers turned to the comment section of the teen heartthrob Noah Centineo’s photos to solicit other young people with depression to join their group chat. “I’ve seen comments where it’s like, ‘If you’re LGBT, reply to this, and I’ll add you to a group chat,’ or ‘If you’re taking AP Physics right now, reply so we can help each other,’” Ashley said. “Comments [on Instagram] just make it really easy to find people with similar interests to you. When you read a comment, you can tell what someone’s personality is. You can pick, like, Oh, do I want to interact with this person or not?”
In other words, in a sea of tightly curated identical Instagram photos, comments allow you to express your personality, thoughts, and feelings in a way that photos can’t. This is especially true for celebrities.
“It’s one thing for Ryan Reynolds to post a hilarious picture, but it adds a whole other element to it when Blake Lively comments something witty on it,” said Emma Diamond, a co-founder of Comments by Celebs. Reynolds, Chrissy Teigen, John Mayer, Kevin Hart, Kate Beckinsale, and Halle Berry are all prolific Instagram commenters, regularly interacting in the comment section of their own photos and those of others. Comments by Celebs’ other co-founder, Julie Kramer, said Instagram’s comment section acts as a natural watering hole for people with shared interests.
[Read: The teens who rack up thousands of followers by posting the same photo every day]
For an increasing number of accounts, a feed post is really just a vehicle for starting a comment thread. So-called same-pic-every-day accounts, which post the exact same photo every day, may seem boring, but their appeal is not the images posted to their feed; it’s the discussions that happen below them. “Make friends in the comments. Tell something about urself and reply to others,” one Instagram account that posts photos of wholesome stars daily wrote to its followers. More than 2,500 people responded, most of whom appear to be teens. “I love photography and soccer,” one high schooler wrote. Thirty-three users replied, saying they shared his interests. Several asked him to check out their own photography Instagram accounts; one offered to connect him with a friend who also liked to take photos so they could meet up.
Saloni Punatar, a 21-year-old who runs @commentsbyindiancelebrities, one of many Instagram accounts not affiliated with @commentsbycelebs that surfaces noteworthy comments, said comments are how she’s made many close friends. “Insta used to be predominantly a visual platform, but since comments evolved in 2017, it just changed the way the whole thing works,” she said. “People like talking to each other … There are some content creators; they know young people will be up at midnight. So they’ll comment on something like, ‘Let’s talk about this movie tonight.’ People start tagging TV shows people should watch. Everyone just connects in the comments.”
Ethan Kleinberg, an ad-agency copywriter, co-founded an athlete-focused comments account because he noticed that athletes’ comments to one another on Instagram often revealed a lot about team dynamics. “You get a deeper dive into team chemistry,” he said. You can also get inside information from comments. Kleinberg pointed to the time when LeBron James commented on a post by the Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. “People thought that meant his son might choose Duke,” Kleinberg said.
As with any trend on the internet, brands have also begun to recognize the power of Instagram comments. “Wendy’s comments a lot in general,” Kleinberg said. “On one ESPN post, someone tagged Wendy’s, and they just kept responding and responding.” Pizza Hut is also a repeat offender. Kleinberg predicts that more brands will jump on the comment train in 2019. “You can post yourself, but if you comment [on someone else’s post], there’s a greater chance your voice will be heard. It puts you into the conversation,” he said.
Comment sections are also giving rise to other creative behaviors. Over the past few months, comment sections in the accounts of huge celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Logan Paul have been flooded with the Moyai emoji, which looks like a stone-carved Easter Island head. This coordinated effort is organized by Rowan, a 14-year-old in Pennsylvania who leads the “Dum Dum gang,” a group of thousands of people, mostly teenagers, who engage in “comment raids” of big accounts.
Rowan recognized early how powerful comment sections can be for garnering attention and new followers. He coordinates the raids through his meme account @zuccccccccccc, which has more than 315,000 followers, and a dedicated raid account called @dumdumraiders. The Dum Dum gang’s goal, Rowan said, is to dominate the top comments of notable accounts with Moyai emoji heads. It’s funny for him and other teens in the know to watch people get confused about a nonsensical emoji. “Most meme accounts are run by high schoolers. A lot of humor is just, like, very high school–esque,” he said. Since the Dum Dum gang’s newfound notoriety, Rowan said he’s noticed other groups carrying out similar comment raids.
As attention on comments grows, more people are also using them to gain attention for themselves. “Recently there’s been a lot of self-promo in the comment section, I guess because people read the comments, so it helps get them noticed,” Rowan said.
Harassment in the comment section is an issue. The comment sections of celebrity posts can quickly devolve into unrelated fights about politics. Women, especially those who are outspoken about social-justice issues or feminism, receive an outsize number of hateful comments. The platform rolled out more comment-control options last year, allowing users to mute specific words or turn off the comment sections of specific pictures, to combat this type of behavior.
But still, Instagram’s comment wave doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. One positive aspect of Instagram’s accidental sideways-scrolling feed test was that comments were easier to view when posts were consumed individually. That may be a sign that the platform itself knows its future is in the comments, and not in the pictures they accompany.
Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, some progressive parents (and savvy publishers) have turned to children’s books as a kind of palliative political education for the young during uneasy times. Among the recent offerings in this vein, there’s Jill Twiss’s A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a defense of same-sex marriage and a satire of the children’s book written by Charlotte Pence, the vice president’s daughter, about the Pence family’s pet rabbit. There’s All Are Welcome, by Alexandra Penfold, a gentle and yet pointedly utopian portrait of a school day when children of all races and religious backgrounds assist one another in their tasks with kindness and tolerance. And of course, there’s Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted, an illustrated homage to glass-ceiling shatterers such as Sally Ride, Sonia Sotomayor, and Hillary Clinton, the author’s mother. Oppositional politics, in other words, is now available in colorful, digestible tracts for even the youngest readers.
But if attempts to steer children toward politics through literature feel somewhat of-the-moment, they aren’t new: More than 100 years ago, British socialists undertook a similar, if decidedly more militant, project. A new book, Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories From Great Britain, exhumes several dozen fables and stories that first appeared in late-19th- and early-20th-century socialist magazines. The collection—edited by Michael Rosen, a British children’s author, political columnist, and (as it happens) the son of communists who fended off marching fascists at the Battle of Cable Street—contains an assortment of moral tales, mysteries, and reworkings of traditional folk legends by a variety of authors. Intended to educate and inspire children and adults alike, these stories, Rosen writes in his introduction, “reveal the fault lines and viewpoints that ran through the world of socialists then, but which persist today.” As plain-language, kid-friendly introductions to socialist politics, they are at once intriguing historical artifacts and, in a few cases, striking allegories that remain pertinent now, even on the other side of the Atlantic.
[Read more: The dark morality of fairy-tale animal brides]
Though there’s currently no socialist movement in the United States comparable to the one that existed in the United Kingdom at the dawn of the 20th century, Bernie Sanders’s unexpectedly popular 2016 presidential campaign helped spark a resurgence of interest in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist group in the country. The organization reached 50,000 members in September 2018 and includes a crop of young politicians such as the Virginia House of Delegates member Lee Carter and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Many Millennials, in particular, have lost faith in capitalism, as the economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession has been characterized by enormous inequality, more than $1 trillion of student debt, and a labor market becoming more reliant on gig and low-wage work. While on paper the country has recovered from the downturn, those gains have mostly gone to the topmost income brackets, while the majority of working people continue to contend with stagnant (or even declining) wages and rising costs of living.
The stories in Workers’ Tales were, of course, written in a very different historical and economic context, and more than a few of them—the parable venerating the labor of woodcutters, for instance—haven’t quite managed to transcend it. At the same time, the best of the stories aim broadly to upend the presumption of capitalism as the natural and rightful order of society, and thus feel surprisingly timeless in ways that are, by turns, delightful and depressing.
In one such story, a colony of monkeys gathers a stockpile of nuts and turns to their leaders, the Wise Ones, to determine how best to divide the harvest among the group. After setting aside the bulk of the nuts for themselves, the Wise Ones dole out the remainder among the other monkeys, granting some of them 20 nuts apiece, some 10, some five, and others none at all. When the monkeys that have been allotted 20 nuts complain that the Wise Ones have hoarded far more for themselves, the Wise Ones remind them that they should be grateful for having more than monkeys with only 10—and so on down the line. Finally, when the monkeys with no nuts at all demand a share, the Wise Ones claim they are trying to steal from the others, causing the monkeys with nuts to attack those with nothing. Though racial animus isn’t an explicit part of this story, the Wise Ones’ exhortations to the monkeys in the middle to direct their economic resentment downward rather than upward nevertheless recall the racially inflected bootstrap rhetoric of America’s modern right wing, which frequently castigates “welfare queens” and “illegal immigrants” for ripping off hardworking taxpayers.
Other tales attempt to pull back the curtain on money as nothing more than a social construct. The story “The New Shilling” takes the perspective of an anthropomorphic piece of silver that, perplexed that workers must trade him for their necessities, sermonizes that as money has no inherent value, he would be better off as a button, an item that’s both functional and decorative. Likewise, in the story “A Terrible Crime,” a group of townspeople discovers that a recently deceased wealthy man has been printing counterfeit money and distributing it to the idle rich, who use the money to purchase the townspeople’s labor. First they’re outraged at this forgery; then they begin to wonder what, exactly, distinguishes his money from the “real” kind. “Why, then, curse Forgery without at the same time cursing Rent, Profit, and Interest?” one enlightened citizen asks.
At points, tales like these can start to feel glib—after all, it’s not as if capitalism would immediately vanish if everyone simply opened their eyes to the lie of money. Even so, as the growing number of proponents of modern monetary theory would attest today, there is a certain truth to the idea that money is only what we make of it. Under a fiat system like the United States’, the value of currency is determined by regulation; in theory, the government could simply create more money to fund the social services that conservatives often claim are out of the national budget.
The stories that document the growing pains of the socialist movement, including its squabbles over the utility of electoral politics, have present-day corollaries as well. In the collection’s opening story, “An Old Fable Retold,” a group of chickens gathers to debate which sauce they should petition to be cooked in come Christmastime, scoffing at the naive idealism of a young chicken that pipes up to ask why they must be killed and eaten at all. It’s a send-up of self-defeating reformism that, from the perspective of the members of the American left campaigning today for single-payer health care and tuition-free education, might easily describe the lukewarm pragmatism of Democratic Party centrists. Then there’s “The History of a Giant,” in which a giant named Labour discovers that while his associates Liberal and Tory both profess to have his interests at heart, usually around election time, neither group will let him propose legislative changes in Parliament that might actually improve his lot in life. (Again, the average American worker today might say the same of Democrats and Republicans.) The only solution, Labour comes to understand, is an independent party.
In 1893, the same year “The History of a Giant” was published, socialists in the U.K. did in fact establish the Independent Labour Party, which merged with other groups in 1900 to become what is now the Labour Party. But since then, whatever socialist revolution was under way has stalled, particularly following the rise of neoliberalism through the 1980s and the turn to New Labour under Tony Blair. This historical distance occasionally casts a pall on Workers’ Tales. For instance, “The May-Day Festival in the Year 1970,” originally published in 1911, portrays a socialist future in which happy citizens, now living in a world free of want, reflect upon the rampant poverty and despotic bosses of the bad old days of capitalism. Though clearly meant to be inspiring, the tale now feels wildly off the mark: By the end of the actual 1970s, Margaret Thatcher had become prime minister. She would famously go on to institute mass privatization and austerity programs in the name of stimulating the free market, and would also oversee the violent suppression of the coal miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985, which marked the death knell of a militant labor movement in the U.K.
Given this history, how useful, exactly, were and are political fairy tales? To be sure, literature has a track record of occasionally inspiring important reforms. At the turn of the 20th century, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle sparked a public outcry in the U.S. that led to the Meat Inspection Act and other bills. In the U.K., Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, published around the same time as the stories in Workers’ Tales, led to a wave of animal-welfare activism around the treatment of carriage horses. The stories in Workers’ Tales, as Rosen notes in his introduction, can’t directly claim such success; instead, their value lies in the fact that they were the product of—rather than the catalyst for—vibrant and optimistic political organizing.
This, perhaps, is where the stories are most dissimilar to the politically minded children’s books of today, which tend not to be embedded in robust movements but instead seem to want to conjure them. In a fractious political climate, it’s understandable that anxious parents are attempting to summon a kinder future by whatever means they can, including exposing their children early on to books that espouse values of social justice. But even as some of the stories in Workers’ Tales find new relevance in the current age of economic polarization, their particular historical context might also serve as a reminder that cultural production can only complement, not replace, the work of politics. As a socialist might say, it’s more often the case that material conditions shape culture than the other way around.
The Democrats seeking their party’s 2020 presidential nomination will surely disagree about a great many things, such as the wisdom of Medicare for all, whether to embrace a Green New Deal, and how far to go when raising taxes. One emerging consensus, though, is that, as Senator Elizabeth Warren recently argued in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, “the Pentagon’s budget has been too large for too long.” Together with a number of rival presidential aspirants, including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkley, and Bernie Sanders, she voted against the 2019 defense budget, which authorized an impressive-sounding $716 billion in spending.
It is a safe bet we will hear further calls for curbing the Pentagon’s putatively bloated budget from Warren and others in the weeks and months to come. But it would be a mistake to heed them.
First, it must be said that the U.S. defense establishment is badly in need of reform, and there is no question that defense planners have been guilty of egregiously wasting taxpayer dollars. There is a great deal of wisdom in Warren’s critique of the Pentagon, such as when she warns against “mindlessly buying more of yesterday’s equipment and allowing foreign countries to dominate the development of critical new technologies” and calls instead for “investing in cutting-edge science and technology capabilities at home.” I couldn’t agree more.
When Warren insists that “it’s time to seriously review the country’s military commitments overseas,” including in Afghanistan and Iraq, she clearly speaks for a large number of Americans who see little point in prolonging the U.S. military presence in either country, Defense Secretary James Mattis’s objections notwithstanding. And she is right to lament the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, which stems at least in part from underinvestment in the State Department and federal agencies devoted to fostering growth and stability in regions that might otherwise give rise to costly conflicts. All of this can be true—and yet, we’d still be foolish to pursue deep cuts in military expenditures.
[Read: The Democrats keep capitulating on defense spending]
Even if the U.S. were to adopt a more restrained military posture, as we should, especially regarding more peripheral interests, meeting the demands of great-power competition is almost certain to grow more expensive rather than less in the near future. The diffusion of advanced military technologies, and particularly of so-called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) battle networks, means that U.S. military forces no longer enjoy unchallenged superiority in every theater.
The increasing lethality of the Chinese and Russian militaries is not license for military spending to grow without limit. U.S. fiscal and human resources are limited, and the Pentagon won’t and shouldn’t be spared the making of hard choices. But if we intend to preserve our network of alliances and security guarantees in Europe and the western Pacific—something that can’t be taken for granted in the Donald Trump era, to be sure, but that Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other leading lights of the U.S. center-left maintain they favor—it is going to cost us. And any savings we’d realize from ending our presence in Syria or Afghanistan won’t make much of a dent.
And why is that? Isn’t it the case that U.S. military spending dwarfs that of China and Russia? Sanders often observes that, as he stated in an October address outlining his foreign-policy vision, the U.S. spends more on its military “than the next 10 nations combined,” China and Russia included. One can quibble with Sanders’s calculation, but his larger point is well taken. It is true that the U.S. spends more than its potential rivals. It is also true, however, that the U.S. sets out to do much more than its potential rivals. Foreign militaries that focus exclusively on using force in a single theater are able to concentrate their resources, which might allow them to achieve local superiority over a U.S. military that, while far more capable in aggregate, must divide its attention across a number of theaters. This wouldn’t be a problem if, say, the U.S. swore off exercising military force anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere, but this would represent a revolutionary shift in U.S. foreign and defense policy that is roundly rejected by the Democratic mainstream.
[Peter Beinart: NATO doesn’t need more defense spending]
So long as the U.S. is committed to projecting military power at great distance from its own territory, its expeditionary forces will be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis rival powers operating closer to their home turf. Durable alliances are essential to addressing this disadvantage. If our goal is to prevent China or Russia from dominating their neighbors, it helps to have U.S. troops forward-based in potential flash points so they’re capable of blunting an enemy’s advance, giving war-winning forces time to gather over the horizon.
Since the end of the Cold War, many Americans have come to see the presence of U.S. forces in allied countries as a gesture of solidarity, which can itself deter foes and reassure friends. But forward-deployed forces are only reassuring if they have meaningful war-fighting capability, and as Elbridge Colby and Jonathan F. Solomon argue in their fittingly titled essay “Avoiding Becoming a Paper Tiger,” the U.S. and its allies have allowed the survivability and war-fighting capability of their forward-deployed forces to deteriorate. That, in turn, has made it more likely that rival powers might try their luck by launching limited attacks designed to shred the credibility of U.S. security guarantees, attacks that could prove enormously destabilizing. Dissuading mischief-making along these lines will—you guessed it—require increased investment.
There is another reason U.S. military spending is so high, one that will be exceptionally difficult for Democrats in particular to confront. According to the political scientist Lindsay Cohn, the U.S. military finds itself in a benefits trap. One of the chief ways the U.S. military attracts and retains high-quality personnel is by offering benefits that are more generous than those available elsewhere in the labor market. This recruitment strategy doesn’t work nearly as well in market democracies with more expansive welfare states, where the lure of health care, child care, education, and retirement benefits just isn’t the same. It is no coincidence that most European NATO allies stuck with conscription long after it was phased out in the U.S., and a dire shortage of military staffing has prompted Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s heir apparent, to muse about bringing it back.
[Read: The tragedy of the American military]
But in the U.S., where the idea of conscription has been anathema for decades, a relatively generous suite of in-kind benefits has been an essential part of the civil-military contract, and it has contributed to dramatic increases in personnel costs in recent years, which are set to accelerate further. Cut all the waste, fraud, and abuse you’d like (I’m with you), and you’ll still have to deal with rising health expenditures for U.S. service members and their dependents. Crack down on unscrupulous defense contractors (seriously, please do), and military pension benefits will still grow more difficult to sustain. To contain the Pentagon’s budget without drastically retrenching the U.S. role in the world would mean, at a minimum, sharply reducing future military benefits. Leaving aside the practical implications of doing so for maintaining an all-volunteer force, such a proposal would strike most Americans, who rightly celebrate military service as selfless, as offensive on its face.
Dovish left-wingers have tended to be more vulnerable to charges of being insufficiently concerned about the welfare of service members and veterans than hawkish right-wingers, as galling as that must seem to those in the former camp, who see themselves as keeping military personnel out of harm’s way. Insofar as debates over the Pentagon’s budget become debates about military pay and benefits, expect them to become more treacherous for the revitalized left, not less.
And that is why I suspect that in the event a Democratic president is inaugurated come 2021, a possibility that would be foolish to discount, U.S. military spending will continue its upward drift on her or his watch, and the world will be better for it. I look forward to the commissioning of the U.S.S. Eugene V. Debs.
In October, Ed Yong described how humans have damaged the phylogenetic and functional diversity of other mammals: “The story of mammals,” he wrote, “is one of self-destruction.”
I found this article very eye-opening, and it made me feel deeply sad that humans have had such an enormous negative impact on this beautiful planet. I feel like a lot of people aren’t fully aware of the impact we have, and it’s important to bring awareness to these subjects. It’s devastating and hard to imagine millions or even billions of years of evolution completely destroyed in such a small amount of time. I wish there was more I could do as a human being to help these animals and protect them from further extinction. I honestly don’t believe humans are any more special or deserving of life than any other species. We are all the same, and I think the biggest change would come if we, as a whole, could fully understand that and respect the Earth in a new way.
Lindsey Hodgson
Hamilton, Canada
Yong’s article was well written and provided some powerful, albeit grim, facts for me to digest. I noted the comment at the end regarding the political will necessary to make major changes, but the question I have is what is the most impactful action or purchase or choice(s) that individuals can make to change the tide, at least a little bit?
Shauna Burnell
Kelowna, Canada
Mr. Yong’s article on phylogenetic diversity brought to new light the need to reduce the human population. Why does our species spend so much time on conservation efforts to save other species but never address how reducing our footprint in an effective way—population reduction—will significantly reduce the impact we have on other species?
JK Keck
East Lyme, Conn.
Mammals will recover? Recover to what?
Evolution just pushes mindlessly forward and there is no right or wrong result. The trilobites once dominated, now they’re gone. You could say they had a good run. The dinosaurs once dominated, now they’re gone. You could say they had a good run. The same will be true for tigers, elephants, and us. We have destroyed, or will destroy, all of our competitors and consume all potential prey. And then we’ll be gone too. And it can be said we had a good run.
Is it human arrogance to think we can subdue the Earth, live in balance with the environment, and overcome the evolutionary forces that created us and our environment? Or is it human arrogance to think we can take control of evolution and decide the winners and losers?
Kevin Hopson
Vancouver, Canada
Robert Poulk wrote: Its been known for ages that beavers’ timber felling and dam building radically changed the ecology of the entire Mississippi Valley but nobody is calling beavers out and shaming them for their complete disregard for future inhabitants or for refusing to change their destructive behaviors. Why? Because beavers, unlike humans, have never shown the slightest interest in the collateral damage of their actions. Also, unlike humans, beavers have never once come up with new and amazing things nobody ever thought of to deal with the unanticipated side effects of their growth and prosperity.
Of course, unlike beavers, humans have never faced being killed off because some other creatures thought they made cool hats …
David Canavese wrote: IF they recover.
Worth remembering -- this isn't just a modernity issue -- its a human species issue. We've been hacking away at the mammalian evolutionary tree for a long, long time. #extinction https://t.co/fA7uHEr0nX
— Andrew Schroeder (@simulacrandrew) October 15, 2018Sobering. So thankful for the bright lights among the human population working to turn things around. https://t.co/PeBy6vKJbb @TheAtlantic @extinctsymbol #conservation
— Allison W (@BirdMama) October 21, 2018About halfway through “The Downsizers,” the third episode of the new Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, the 11-year-old Kayci Mersier and her 12-year-old brother, Nolan, are sorting through gigantic piles of clothing, piece by piece. They bid a grateful farewell to the things they no longer wear, and let others—the ones that “spark joy”—know they will be happily worn in the future. “You’ve done so much good for me; I thank you for that,” Nolan tells a jacket, giving it a little hug before setting it down. “You know ya girl isn’t going to get rid of you,” Kayci assures a colorful T-shirt. When Nolan encounters a neglected striped hoodie he’d forgotten about, he exclaims, “How have I not worn you before? You give me so much joy!”
The full episode reveals the Mersier siblings to be lovely and conscientious kids, but their enthusiasm and thoughtfulness in this moment have a guiding force: the world-renowned guru of home organization, Marie Kondo. Standing with the whole Mersier family in the kids’ bedroom, Kondo affirms the sentiment that’s at the heart of this ritual and of her “KonMari” method: “Gratitude is very important.” It’s not a concept that tends to loom large in American home- and personal-makeover shows, but its towering presence in this binge-worthy streaming series marks a welcome change of pace.
Kondo achieved worldwide fame in 2014 when her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, was translated into English and published in the United States, where it became a New York Times best seller and sold more than 1.5 million copies. With the 2016 publication of her follow-up, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up, Kondo’s books have now sold more than 11 million copies in 40 countries. Which is to say, her “life-changing magic” is well known. Many of the families who welcome Kondo into their home on Tidying Up announce when they meet her that they can’t wait for her to work wonders on their clutter. When this happens, she is quick to let them know—in the nicest possible way—that they themselves will be working the magic.
If not exactly supernatural, Kondo’s effect on people is transformative, and that’s because her attitude is rooted in empathy rather than in judgment or in a prescriptive approach to outward appearances. Chatting with her interpreter, Marie Iida, on the walk from the car to the front door of her clients’ home at the beginning of each episode, Kondo finds something genuinely nice to say about every house before entering. She cuts a singular figure: Sporting a neat haircut with bangs and wearing pink lipstick, she dresses in a uniform of white tops, colorful skirts, black tights, and black ballet flats, which don’t seem to hinder her efforts even when she leaps onto a kitchen counter to tackle a tall cabinet.
A still from an episode of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo (Netflix)Kondo notices what each family cares about right away. Within minutes of arriving at the Mersiers’ home, she inquires about their love of music, pointing out all the instruments in the apartment. She then formally introduces herself to each house, and in some episodes gathers the whole family with her to silently thank the house for sheltering them, and for its cooperation as they begin their KonMari endeavor. During this ritual, Kondo’s clients are silent and hold hands, some almost tearful, visibly moved by the experience.
When visiting a grieving widow in Episode 4, Kondo makes a beeline for an antique carousel horse, noting that the house seems to be full of fun. In doing so, she deftly acknowledges the thing that’s so hard for her client Margie to say: Her late husband was good-humored and whimsical, and the process of sorting through and giving away his possessions—for instance, the collection of Hawaiian shirts that anticipated a retirement full of adventure and travel—terrifies her like the prospect of a second death. Seeing Kondo’s joy at hopping on the horse (which she’s only permitted to do because she’s 4 foot 8), Margie visibly relaxes. Barely saying a word, Kondo communicates to her client that it’s okay to keep enjoying things while making way for a new future.
In the introduction to each episode, Kondo states her mission: to “spark joy in the world through cleaning.” Her method is deceptively simple. She has clients begin with clothing, move on to books, then paper documents, then komono, which means “miscellaneous” in Japanese and encompasses the kitchen, bathroom, garage, and other objects. Then they finish up with the final category, which is sentimental items. There’s something about the way in which Kondo explains the goals of her exercises that gets her clients to open up. This is the key difference between Tidying Up and most other reality shows: There’s no sense of competition, and the ostensible makeover at the heart of every episode simply involves regular people becoming happier and more at ease in their own home. Kondo doesn’t scold, shame, or criticize. Things spark joy or they don’t, and it’s fine either way.
The families whom Kondo visits—all of whom live in the Los Angeles area—range from newlyweds and the parents of toddlers to empty nesters and retirees. They hail from an array of ethnic backgrounds; some are well heeled and others live modestly, but none are full-on hoarders, nor are any of them extremely rich or desperately poor. Kondo isn’t dealing with people who appear to need serious psychiatric help or whose homes are legitimately unsafe or unsanitary—a key difference between this show and the popular A&E series Hoarders, which aired from 2009 to 2013. Tidying Up also doesn’t address the topic of generational trauma and the way it can shape people’s relationships with their possessions, which Arielle Bernstein wrote about for The Atlantic in 2016. Kondo’s clients are merely (sometimes profoundly) stuck: Short on time or long in denial, they’re either frazzled parents trapped in a Sisyphean rut with laundry or older folks overwhelmed by decades’ worth of clutter.
The genius of Kondo’s approach is that she cares not at all about renovation or decor. Her clients’ homes might be stylish or drab, spacious or cramped, but she treats them all the same: Every newly tidied room gets the same gasp of delight that signals Kondo’s pride in the family’s accomplishments. The host never suggests adding an accent wall or some trendy shiplap to spruce things up. Instead, she shares her clients’ joy at finding space and reconnecting with meaningful heirlooms. In Episode 2, in which Kondo helps Wendy and Ron Akiyama sift through mountains of vintage baseball cards, Christmas decorations, and clothes, the couple unearth Ron’s father’s diary, which includes an entry from the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor and chronicles the family’s experience at an internment camp during World War II. In the garage, the couple finds a huge collection of beautiful antique kokeshi dolls, which are turned on a lathe and brightly painted, and which Wendy didn’t even realize they owned. Now in the cleared-out garage, the dolls have a place of honor, and a tangible piece of the Akiyama family’s history can be enjoyed.
Though she never comes out and says it, Kondo clearly believes that most people have way too much stuff. In this way, her ethos resembles that of the legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams, who is the subject of a new documentary by the Helvetica director Gary Hustwit. Rams doesn’t mince words about the threat consumerism poses to our planet: “The world 10 years from now will be a completely different place,” he says in the film’s trailer. “There is no future with so many redundant things.” The jam-packed closets, garages, and cabinets of Kondo’s clients perfectly illustrate Rams’s point: Americans’ collective denial about cheap goods, impulse purchases, and thoughtless accumulation is literally choking our homes and our world. That’s why Kondo begins by instructing her clients to put all of their clothes on the bed. When confronted with the enormity of the pile, they’re shocked, and then they become motivated to make careful decisions about what they really want to keep and what they can part with.
[Read: “We are all accumulating mountains of things”]
Feeding that internal motivation, rather than offering direct instruction, seems to work. In Episode 8, “When Two (Messes) Become One,” Kondo is working with a newlywed couple who just bought a condo, and one spouse, Alishia, finds herself at an impasse with a dress her late grandmother bought for her years ago. While sorting her clothing, Alishia notes that the dress no longer fits, but she’s torn because it connects her to a happy memory. Somehow, she feels that she should part with it. Kondo then throws Alishia a curveball: “The point of this process,” Kondo says through her interpreter, “isn’t to force yourself to eliminate things; it’s really to confirm how you feel about each and every item that you possess.” In other words, You do you. With the pressure eased, Alishia feels ready to say goodbye to the dress, which someone else will now be able to enjoy, knowing that she has room for other keepsakes to remind her of her grandmother—and a well-organized closet of clothes that fit.
The other essential point that pervades Tidying Up but mostly goes unarticulated is that home organization is historically women’s work. In many of the families featured on the series, the moms are the ones shown leading the charge to clean. Still, Kondo’s approach short-circuits this dynamic somewhat not by pointing out the gender disparity (the word feminism is never uttered), but rather by insisting that every member of the family take responsibility for their own stuff. Nolan Mersier, the preternaturally wise tween from Episode 3, sums it up this way: “I want to learn where I should put things, but at the same time, I kind of like my mom having to know where everything is, because I don’t have to think about it as much.” It’s as good a summary of “worry work” as any.
Kondo’s strategy isn’t explicitly tied to correcting gender imbalances, but this can be a beneficial outcome of a process that prompts clients to find empathy in unexpected places. The host worked as a shrine maiden in Japan during college, and there are elements of the KonMari technique that borrow from Shinto beliefs, specifically the notion that inanimate objects are bearers of kami, or divine essence—in the same way that plants, animals, and people are. That’s why Kondo taps piles of old books to “wake them up,” folds clothes so that they can rest more comfortably, and asks her clients to thank pieces of clothing for their service before setting them aside. Paradoxically, the exercise of cultivating empathy for the things that surround us, rather than encouraging materialism, seems to lead Kondo’s clients to also have empathy for one another, and for themselves.
In July 2016, Kiyomi Murakumo of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium was giving a pregnant tawny nurse shark an ultrasound, when she saw the unmistakable outline of a moving baby shark.
It’s not unusual to see a shark swimming around. It’s far more unusual when that shark hasn’t been born yet. And in this case, the unborn shark wasn’t just fidgeting—it swam from one of its mother’s two uteri to the other.
“When [Kiyomi] told me about it, I asked her to repeat herself,” Taketeru Tomita, the aquarium’s shark expert, told me. “I couldn’t believe my ears.”
Okinawa Churashima FoundationMurakumo’s experience wasn’t a one-off. Tawny nurse sharks grow up to nine feet in length but have a docile temperament, which makes them easy to work with. Over the next two years, the team found evidence of these in utero migrations in three pregnant females.
Sometimes, a single embryo would show up in the right uterus during one scan, and in the left one during the next. One female had four embryos inside her, sometimes split evenly between her uteri and sometimes all on one side. And on several occasions, the team actually caught the embryos swimming over, at a leisurely pace of three inches per second.
[Read: The sharks that live to 400]
This is one of several discoveries that contradict the idea of embryos as immobile entities, incapable of anything more than gently moving their limbs or heads. For example, turtle embryos can shift around inside their cramped eggs to snuggle up against the warmest sides.
The babies of the sand tiger shark are also mobile—for more sinister reasons. After these sharks mate, several fertilized eggs settle in each uterus. The first embryo to hatch, still inside the mother, will always attack, kill, and cannibalize the other eggs. These unborn sharks are active enough that Stewart Springer, the first biologist to discover their behavior, was bitten by one while sticking his finger into the birth canal of a recently caught female.
This grisly behavior gives sand tigers an invaluable head start in life. After gorging themselves on their siblings’ nutritious bodies, the surviving embryos—one per uterus—get unchallenged access to a steady supply of unfertilized eggs that their mothers release. On this diet, they grow at an exponential rate. By the time they’re born, they’re already three feet long, and invulnerable to many predators.
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The tawny nurse shark embryos don’t cannibalize their siblings, but like the grey nurses, they also eat unfertilized eggs released by their mothers. That’s probably why they move between uteri. They’re foraging for eggs while still inside the womb—a useful skill, especially when other embryos share the same space. “Instead of the embryos eating one another, they appear to be competing,” says Toby Daly-Engel, a shark expert at the Florida Institute of Technology. “That’s just the coolest thing ever.”
Opportunities to uncover the surprises hiding inside sharks are only getting scarcer, though. The tawny nurse shark is classified as vulnerable, and like many sharks, it’s in decline. Its flesh and fins are used as food, and its skin is turned into leather. Even thriving populations have problems: At the Bikini Atoll, once the site of much nuclear testing, many tawny nurse sharks are born with a missing dorsal fin.
“This one obscure species can teach us so much,” Daly-Engel says. “The information is out there, but it’s at risk.”
No one knows if pregnant females from other shark species are also full of active, competitive babies. Certainly, few scientists have the ability to even check. Murakumo and Tomita could do so only with a bespoke ultrasound machine that they co-developed with a company that makes underwater cases for cameras. “The embryonic behaviors of live-bearing sharks are still almost unknown,” Tomita said. “Every discovery is unexpected.”
For example, in the female with four embryos, one of them briefly stuck its head out of its mother’s cervix. The team noticed its fleeting foray into the outside world on their ultrasound, and then saw its face sticking out of the female with their own eyes. What was it doing?
“It’s the mystery,” Tomita said. “We would like to know, too.”
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