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Singles got a bad name in the 1970s and have been blamed for many of society’s ills ever since, but they were revolutionaries in their own way. This century, we’ve witnessed significant growth in the unmarried population in America (and Europe and Asia), a shift that impacting the world. It’s taken hold in part because phones and apps and other tools of liberation have uncoupled living alone and loneliness.

Many social scientists believe this new normal is a poison pill for us culturally and economically, but Bella DePaulo, author of How We Live Now, argues the contrary in a Nautilus essay. She believes the modern living arrangements have made for stronger and better communities, with an untethered class of people who’ve improvised families and have the time and freedom to contribute to the world outside their homes. I tend to agree with her, but it would be great to know for sure since the answer could help us in creating smart policy. The opening:

When Dan Scheffey turned 50, he threw himself a party. About 100 people packed into his Manhattan apartment, which occupies the third floor of a brick townhouse in the island’s vibrant East Village. His parents, siblings, and an in-law were there, and friends from all times and walks of his life. He told them how much they meant to him and how happy he was to see them all in one place. “My most important family,” says Dan, who has been single his entire life, “is the family that I’ve selected and brought together.”

Dan has never been married. He doesn’t have kids. Not long ago, his choice of lifestyle would have been highly unusual, even pitied. In 1950, 78 percent of households in the United States had a married couple at its helm; more than half of those included children. “The accepted wisdom was that the post-World War II nuclear family style was the culmination of a long journey—the end point of changes in families that had been occurring for several hundred years,” sociologist John Scanzoni wrote in 2001.

But that wisdom was wrong: The meaning of family is morphing once again. Fueled by a convergence of historical currents—including birth control and the rising status of women, increased wealth and social security, LGBTQ activism, and the spread of personal communication technologies and social media—more people are choosing to live alone than ever before.

Pick a random American household today, and it’s more likely to look like Dan’s than like Ozzie and Harriet’s. Nearly half of adults ages 18 and older are single. About 1 in 7 live alone. Americans are marrying later, divorcing in larger numbers, and becoming less interested in remarrying. According to the Pew Research Center, by the time today’s young adults reach age 50, a quarter of them will have never married at all.

The surge of singlehood is not just an American phenomenon. Between 1980 and 2011, the number of one-person households worldwide more than doubled, from about 118 million to 277 million, and will rise to 334 million by 2020, according to Euromonitor International. More than a dozen countries, including Japan and several European nations, now have even larger proportions of solo-dwellers than the U.S. (Sweden ranks highest at almost 50 percent.) Individuals, not couples or clans or other social groups, are fast becoming the fundamental units of society.•

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In “Global Cities, Global Talent” a new Deloitte report that’s bullish on London and bearish on NYC because of the greater number of high-skilled jobs the former has recently added, perhaps the most worrying conclusion is that the hollowing out of low-skilled positions via automation may further exacerbate our increasingly middle-less economy. According to Deloitte, women may be particularly prone in this new normal.

The paper does note that “the difficulty of implementing the technology, social or political resistance or the relative human cost of labor versus investment in technology” may be the “real brakes on the pace of job automation.” It seems doubtful those things will be any type of long-term obstacle to automation, and it really shouldn’t be artificially restrained. But policy is going to have to answer many difficult questions in the next few decades to keep societies from irreparably fraying.

From Matthew Nitch Smith at Forbes:

One of the biggest accountancy firms in the world Deloitte released a report today entitled “Global cities, global talent” and it warned that “automation risks ‘hollowing out’ London’s lower paid jobs.”

However, at the same time it said 235,000 high-skill jobs have been created in London since 2013.

Basically, those working in lower paid jobs, mainly service and manufacturing sector jobs like cleaning, waitressing, and some factory work, are at the greatest risk of losing their jobs because robots are able to do it instead of them. 

The warning comes close after the World Economic Forum (WEF) warned that as many as five million jobs could be lost between 15 major and emerging economies by 2020 due to robots, automation, and artificial intelligence.

The British Retail Consortium also said that 900,000 jobs would be lost in retail across the country thanks, in part, to “robots.” It added that almost a third of stores would close by 2025. 

Automation on a mass scale has always been concern to economists and employees alike, but we’re now starting to get the sense that what was once in the realm of sci-fi is going to have a real, imminent impact on global cities like London.

So who should be worried?•

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For driverless cars, it’s really more a matter of when than if. They may not arrive en masse in the next ten minutes the way Elon Musk believes they will, but we’re at the beginning of what may be a relatively quick transition into a world of hands-free vehicles, which, if we’re smart and fortunate, will be EVs powered by electricity from solar sources. This new reality will be full of ethical, legal and philosophical questions, some of them extremely thorny. But that’s the future, and it isn’t far from now. In our age, we’ll get to experience for years–decades, probably–a variation of what it was like when horses and cars (uneasily) shared the roads and streets. In the new equation, we’re the horses.

From Martin Belam in the Guardian:

Our cities must have been dreadfully foul and smelly before the motor car. At the London Transport Museum they have a display of two horse-drawn vehicles. Pre-recorded voices make it sound like the model horses are chatting to each other, and there’s fake horse dung on the floor for extra giggles. Whole sub-industries flourished in clearing up the straw and excrement clogging up our 19th-century streets. It must have been particularly grim when it rained or snowed.

I thought about this exhibit while trying to cross the road the other day, waiting for a break in the relentless London traffic. I watched cars whizz by, spewing out fumes that we know are toxic, and burning fossil fuels that costs us millions to extract from the ground.

It struck me how awful and primitive that is going to look in a museum display in a hundred years’ time. People stuck in movable boxes polluting the air, taking up all the space in our cities. The display will calmly inform people that by the early 21st century, thanks to huge efforts expended on safety measures, only around four people every day died on the UK’s roads due to cars.

That is the way things are.

But technology is going to transform it over the next couple of decades, and we can see the endgame. We know we are going to get to a point where nearly every car is driverless, and uses some kind of rechargeable electric power rather than petrol engines.

There will be awkward decades where the modes of transport co-exist, as evidenced by the fact that one of Google’s self-driving cars just pranged a bus in the US. But what is the exception now will become the norm.•

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The names Benjamin Franklin and Jenny McCarthy don’t usually squeeze into the same sentence, but they did both make a similar stand 290 years apart: They were anti-Vaxxers.

We know well of the blonde celebrity’s inane crusade linking vaccinations and autism, but America’s key-and-kite man similarly stood strong against smallpox inoculations in the early 1700s. Just as confounding was that the witch-burning enabler Cotton Mather was on the right side, spearheading the successful experiment which provoked violent dissent. The caveat is that Franklin was a mere 16 at the time, though it does remind that we all need to constantly question our beliefs despite our intellects or qualifications or allegiances.

Mike Jay, a wonderful thinker (see here and here and here) has written about this strange moment in history in a WSJ book review of Stephen Coss’ The Fever of 1721, which looks at how this roiling controversy anticipated aspects of the American Revolution. An excerpt:

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.

“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.

News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

The crisis was the making of James and Benjamin Franklin’s New-England Courant, which stoked the controversy with denunciations of Mather that drew parallels between his “infatuation” with inoculation and his onetime obsession with witchcraft. But as the death toll mounted, the ban on inoculation collapsed under the weight of public demand.

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Like most who entertain top-heavy fantasies for reimagining the world, the sculptor and urban planner Hendrik Christian Andersen was a bit of a buffoon.

The Norwegian-American artist truly believed that if he could build a flawless city of beauty and learning that knew no nationalist bounds, the entire world would be inspired to perfection. Not only was it an asinine political fantasy, but it somehow led Andersen into the arms of the vulgar, murderous clown Benito Mussolini, a former drifter and agitator who had horrified the world in the 1920s by coming to absolute power in Italy. Il Duce, no doubt enamored with the pomposity of the project, promised the visionary the land and resources to realize his dream. The Shangri-La was ultimately never built, but the “soft-voiced idealist,” as the artist was described, was still speaking fondly of Mussolini into the middle of the 1930s. Andersen died in Rome in 1940, not living long enough to see his patron deservedly face the business end of a meat hook. An article in the June 19, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the proposed series of stately pleasure-domes.

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When Bill Maher belatedly learned 3D printers would be able to produce plastic guns that were fully operational but untraceable, he impetuously suggested we ban all plastic, which showed an ignorance of both the printers and of society in general, which would grind to a halt if the material was suddenly banished.

Misunderstandings about the machines aren’t without precedence: In the 1970s, those who half-interestedly glanced at the windows of a Byte Shop probably thought personal computers might be good for saving recipes or doing light bookkeeping, but it’s not likely the majority divined the breadth of the PCs’ applications. 3D printers are in an analogous position today. They may be Etsy-ready tools, but the truth is they’re positioned to revolutionize manufacturing and medicine.

In a WSJ column, Christopher Mims explains how carbon-fiber 3D-printing can deliver the “strength of metal for the cost of plastics.” An excerpt:

Not long ago I held the product of such a potentially game-changing technology in my hands—a small, intricately detailed component for a valve. It looked like the shell of a nautilus from an alien planet. With its combination of lightness, strength and finish, the component felt very much like the future. And not just the next five years, but the next 50.

The object I held was unusual for two reasons: what it was made of, and how it was made.

It was made of carbon fiber, a man-made material used in airplanes, race cars and wind turbines that is stronger, ounce for ounce, than steel or aluminum. But it is expensive, and surprisingly labor intensive to make, requiring workers to cut, layer and mold sheets of plastic infused with carbon fiber—an oddly 18th century approach to making a 21st century material.

This carbon-fiber component had been made on a 3-D printer, a gadget more often associated with spitting out plastic novelties.•

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The bodies of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria (1863 - 1914) and his wife Sophie lie in state after their assassination at Sarajevo. Original Publication: People Disc - HM0513 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Speaking of Stephen Wolfram, the scientist recently did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit, addressing the topic of whether it’s possible to create a computational model of history. At first blush, it would seem impossible, understanding how many things can seemingly turn on a single incident or accident. Wolfram acknowledges he doesn’t have an answer, though he won’t dismiss it out of hand. After all, biology, which is capable of being mapped, is itself a type of history.

An excerpt:

That’s an interesting issue: is there a “theory of history” or is too much of it accidental? There clearly are some aspects of history that can be modeled, and indeed people have used my kinds of models to do this. (Think e.g. computational agents in a market, social system, etc.)

Biology gives us another example of a historical record … where perhaps more has been played out than in human history. One of the things one can ask is whether the organisms that exist are a consequence of particular historical accidents … or whether they’re somehow theoretically determined, e.g. by filling out a space of all possibilities. I was somewhat surprised to discover, at least in the particular cases I looked at (e.g. http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-8.6 ) that there was a lot of predictability in the set of possible organisms.

Does something similar apply to human history? I don’t know. I suspect we haven’t had enough independent societies etc. etc. to see the same kind of phenomena as in biology. I note that in Wolfram Language (and Wolfram|Alpha) we now have a lot of historical country data … and it’s remarkable to watch the evolution of the countries of the world with time: it looks remarkably “biological,” and perhaps amenable to theory.•

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At Gizmodo, Matt Novak poses an interesting question: “Has Donald Trump Ever Used a Computer?” 

My best guess would be “yes,” that he Googles himself in the wee hours of the morning when too bloated on bacon cheeseburgers too sleep, growing furious at blogs that mock him. And is it really possible this man is unfamiliar with Internet porn?

I think the better query might be this one: “Has Donald Trump Ever Read a Book?” I’m more worried about his ignorance in regard to this much earlier tool. He certainly doesn’t have any in his home, and he’s paid other people to write ones published under his name. I feel fairly certain that this man has no paper cuts on his freakishly stubby fingers. 

Two excerpts follow, the first from Novak’s post and the second from Lawrence Summers’ essay about the specter of a Trump Presidency.

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From Novak:

There is no technological test for the presidency in the United States. A hypothetical President Trump would not be required to use a computer nor a smartphone. But it’s 2016. The future president of the United States will confront myriad issues involving the average American’s use of technology. And if you’ve never touched a computer in your life, it seems hard to imagine how Trump might relate to things as trivial as “information overload” or as important as mass government surveillance.

We have documentary evidence of Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio all using tablets, smartphones, and PCs. Somehow Trump has mastered the high-tech demands of running a 21st century presidential campaign without ever using those technologies first-hand. He’s on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—all set up for him and controlled by his lackeys. Frankly, I’m not sure whether to be impressed or horrified.

I guess, of all the things to be horrified over regarding our future president, his technological prowess might be the least of our worries.•

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From Summers:

The possible election of Donald Trump as President is the greatest present threat to the prosperity and security of the United States.  I have had a strong point of view on each of the last ten presidential elections, but never before had I feared that what I regarded as the wrong outcome would in the long sweep of history risk grave damage to the American project.

The problem is not with Trump’s policies, though they are wacky in the few areas where they are not indecipherable. It is that he is running as modern day man on a horseback—demagogically offering the power of his personality as a magic solution to all problems—and making clear that he is prepared to run roughshod over anything or anyone who stands in his way.

Trump has already flirted with the Ku Klux Klan and disparaged and demeaned the female half of our population. He vowed to kill the families of terrorists, use extreme forms of torture, and forbid Muslims from coming into our country. Time and again, he has claimed he will crush those who stand in his way; his promised rewrite of libel laws, permitting the punishment of The New York Times and Washington Post for articles he does not like, will allow him to make good on this threat.

Lyndon Johnson’s celebrated biographer, Robert Caro, has written that while “power doesn’t always corrupt…[it] always reveals.” What will a demagogue with a platform like Trump’s who ascends to the presidency do with control over the NSA, FBI and IRS?  What commitment will he manifest to the rule of law? Already Trump has proposed that protesters at his rallies “should have been roughed up.”

Nothing in the way he campaigned gave Richard Nixon a mandate for keeping an enemies list or engaging in dirty tricks.  If he is elected, Donald Trump may think he has such a mandate.  What is the basis for doubting that it will be used?•

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If our species is fortunate (and wise) enough to survive deep into the future, we’ll continually redefine why we’re here. I doubt anyone would want people in 2325 to subsist on currency paid to them for piecing together fast-food sandwiches. Those types of processes will be automated and everyone will hopefully be working on more substantial issues. 

The problem is, we really don’t need humans doing that job right now. And pretty soon, we won’t need delivery drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, bellhops, front-desk agents, wait staff, cooks, maintenance people and many other fields, a number of them white-collar positions that were traditionally deemed “safe.” In addition to figuring out what our new goals need to be, that type of technological unemployment could bring about a serious distribution problem. If the transition occurs too quickly, smart policy will need to be promptly deployed.

In the Edge piece “AI and the Future of Civilization,” Stephen Wolfram tries to answer the bigger question of what role humans will play as automation becomes ubiquitous. The scientist believes our part will be to invest the new machines with goals. He says “that’s what humans contribute, that’s what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals.”

The opening:

Some tough questions. One of them is about the future of the human condition. That’s a big question. I’ve spent some part of my life figuring out how to make machines automate stuff. It’s pretty obvious that we can automate many of the things that we humans have been proud of for a long time. What’s the future of the human condition in that situation?

More particularly, I see technology as taking human goals and making them able to be automatically executed by machines. The human goals that we’ve had in the past have been things like moving objects from here to there and using a forklift rather than our own hands. Now, the things that we can do automatically are more intellectual kinds of things that have traditionally been the professions’ work, so to speak. These are things that we are going to be able to do by machine. The machine is able to execute things, but something or someone has to define what its goals should be and what it’s trying to execute.

People talk about the future of the intelligent machines, and [whether] intelligent machines are going to take over and decide what to do for themselves. What one has to figure out, while given a goal, how to execute it into something that can meaningfully be automated; the actual inventing of the goal is not something that in some sense has a path to automation.

How do we figure out goals for ourselves? How are goals defined? They tend to be defined for a given human by a small history of their cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are something that are uniquely human. It’s something that almost doesn’t make any sense. We ask, what’s the goal of our machine? We might have given it a goal when we built the machine.•

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Has there ever been a biography written about Alvin Toffler, the sociological salesman whose pants are forever being scared off? I don’t see one on Amazon. I’d love to know what it was about his life that positioned him, beginning in the 1960s, to look ahead at our future and be shocked. There’s always been a strong sci-fi strain to his work, though it’s undeniably important to think about how science and technology could go horribly wrong. By imagining the worst, perhaps we can avoid it. Likewise it’s vital to realize that exploring these uncharted frontiers may be key to saving us from extinction.

A passage about genetic engineering, a fraught field but one with tremendous promise, from a 1978 Omni interview with Toffler conducted by leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione:

Omni:

What’s good about genetic engineering?

Alvin Toffler:

Genetic manipulation can yield cheap insulin. It can probably help us solve the cancer riddle. But, more important, over the very long run it could help us crack the world food problem.

You could radically reduce reliance on artificial fertilizers–which means saving energy and helping the poor nations substantially. You could produce new, fast-growing species. You could create species adapted to lands that are now marginal, infertile, arid, or saline. And if you really let your long-range imagination roam, you can foresee a possible convergence of genetic manipulation, weather modification, and computerized agriculture–all coming together with a wholly new energy system. Such developments would simply remake agriculture as we’ve known it for 10,000 years.

Omni:

What is the downside?

Alvin Toffler:

Horrendous. Almost beyond our imagination, When you cut up genes and splice them together in new ways, you risk the accidental escape from the laboratory of new life forms and the swift spread of new diseases for which the human race no defenses.

As is the case with nuclear energy we have safety guidelines. But no system, in my view, can ever be totally fail-safe. All our safety calculations are based on certain assumptions. The assumptions are reasonable, even conservative. But none of the calculations tell what happens if one of the assumptions turns out to be wrong. Or what to do if a terrorist manages to get a hold of the crucial test tube.

A lot of good people are working to tighten controls in this field. NATO recently issued a report summarizing the steps taken by dozens of countries from the U.S.S.R. to Britain and the U.S. But what do we do about irresponsible corporations or nations who just want to crash ahead? And completely honest, socially responsible geneticists are found on both sides of an emotional debate as to how–or even whether–to proceed.

Farther down the road, you also get into very deep political, philosophical, and ecological issues. Who is to write the evolutionary code of tomorrow? Which species shall live and which shall die out? Environmentalists today worry about vanishing species and the effect of eliminating the leopard or the snail darter from the planet. These are real worries, because every species has a role to play in the overall ecology. But we have not yet begun to think about the possible emergence of new, predesigned species to take their place.•

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Oliver Morton’s excellent The Planet Remade encourages earthlings to use every tool in the shed, even geoengineering, in combating climate change. Some blanch at willfully messing with mother nature, but we already knowingly tamper with the environment in large-scale ways with chemical fertilizers, fossil fuels, etc.

Many hopeful of colonizing Mars like to similarly to think outside the box–outside the dome–and try to figure out how humans might make it in outer space without living permanently indoors and/or stuffed inside of spacesuits. For the foreseeable future, the challenge of terraforming an entire planet, or even a good chunk of one, seems untenable. If our species or some variation of it persists long enough, however, the seemingly impossible may become plausible.

From Matteo Ceriotti at The Conversation:

The final requirement for a space colony will be keeping the climate habitable. Atmospheric composition and climate on other celestial bodies are very different to Earth’s. There is no atmosphere on the moon or asteroids, and on Mars the atmosphere is made mainly of carbon dioxide, producing surface temperatures of 20°C down to -153°C during winter at the poles, and an air pressure just 0.6% of Earth’s. In such prohibitive conditions, settlers will be limited to living inside the isolated habitats and strolls outside will only be possible using spacesuits.

One alternative solution may be to change the planet’s climate on a large scale. We’re already studying such “geo-engineering” as a way to respond to Earth’s climate change. This would require huge effort but similar techniques could be scaled and applied for example to other planets such as Mars.

Possible methods include bioengineering organisms to convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to oxygen, or darkening the Martian polar caps to reduce the amount of sunlight they reflect and increase the surface temperature. Alternatively, a large formation of orbiting solar mirrors could reflect the light of the sun on specific regions such as the poles to cause a local increase in temperature. Some have speculated that such relatively small temperature changes could trigger the climate to take on a new state with much higher air pressure, which could be the first step towards terraforming Mars.•

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Donald Trump, the political offspring of Mayor McCheese and Benito Mussolini, isn’t so singular among Republican politicians for the things he thinks but for saying them in such a brazen manner. The Gingrich-Atwater-Rove soft, coded language of bigotry helped GOP politicians to victory in a whiter America, but it never returned the nation to a mythical past as it had promised. The party leaders never intended to. Family values and the other hokum they were selling wasn’t important to the power brokers. It was just a useful means to fire up the base and gain control for the financial good of a sliver of the country.

Tired of being disappointed, the bedrock of the party has turned to a vulgar clown reluctant to disavow the KKK. But Trump stands on the shoulders of many of those very conservatives who express shock and disbelief at his rise. They were the ones who’ve spent decades cultivating anti-government attitudes and racial divisiveness and obstructionism and conspiracy theories. The question now is whether the hideous hotelier’s rise will be the party’s comeuppance or all of America’s.

From Martin Wolf at the Financial Times:

What is one to make of the rise of Donald Trump? It is natural to think of comparisons with populist demagogues past and present. It is natural, too, to ask why the Republican party might choose a narcissistic bully as its candidate for president. But this is not just about a party, but about a great country. The US is the greatest republic since Rome, the bastion of democracy, the guarantor of the liberal global order. It would be a global disaster if Mr Trump were to become president. Even if he fails, he has rendered the unthinkable sayable.

Mr Trump is a promoter of paranoid fantasies, a xenophobe and an ignoramus. His business consists of the erection of ugly monuments to his own vanity. He has no experience of political office. Some compare him to Latin American populists. He might also be considered an American Silvio Berlusconi, albeit without the charm or business acumen. But Mr Berlusconi, unlike Mr Trump, never threatened to round up and expel millions of people. Mr Trump is grossly unqualified for the world’s most important political office.

Yet, as Robert Kagan, a neoconservative intellectual, argues in a powerful column in The Washington Post, Mr Trump is also “the GOP’s Frankenstein monster.” He is, says Mr Kagan, the monstrous result of the party’s “wild obstructionism,” its demonisation of political institutions, its flirtation with bigotry and its “racially tinged derangement syndrome” over President Barack Obama. He continues: “We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of ‘angry’ people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past seven-and-a-half years”.

Mr Kagan is right, but does not go far enough.•

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in awe of the work the New York Times has done this election season. Yes, I was angry about an early NYT interview with Donald Trump that painted him as a slightly irreverent great-uncle rather than holding him to his racist, fascistic noises, but the daily reports from the trail have been balanced, thoughtful and provocative (in the best sense of the word).

One of the key figures in the coverage has been Maggie Haberman, an excellent journalist who identifies important issues and writes about them from interesting angles. Just yesterday, she published a smart piece about Trump’s reliance on conspiracy theories he unearths by noodling around online. There’s some question as to whether the Times’ stellar work–and facts, in general–are permeating our Reality TV culture, but the news organization has held up its end of the bargain.

Haberman took time from her Super Tuesday for a Reddit Ask Me Anything. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Of the reporters I read, it seems you and the staff at the NYT were the most measured/cautious to not treat Trump as a “joke” candidate. Did you have any inkling early on that Trump was unlike other burnout candidates a la Herman Cain? To that point, I’m amazed that there are still skeptics within the media and particularly within the GOP that Trump can somehow be stopped — save a brokered convention — as he’s now polling nationally at 49%.

Maggie Haberman:

Hi there – nice to meet you again! Since the first debate I have not thought treating Trump like a “joke” was advisable, given where he was in the polls and given his ability to command media and survive controversies that would have killed other candidates. I also never thought he was a boom-and-bust candidate like Cain because he was a known commodity well ahead of the 2016 campaign cycle. He’s spent years being broadcast into homes of millions of people on The Apprentice, where he sat in a leather chair and looked, well, leaderly. That said, I did not think he would be as dominant as he is now and was skeptical that he could hold this plurality win. I did not think even in November that he was likely to be the nominee. And I misread early on, when he first got in, how strong he would be.

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Question:

Besides Trump, is there anything that surprised you about 2016 election?

Maggie Haberman:

Great question. One surprise has been how little super PACs have mattered. Part of that is because they basically are only useful to air ads, and negative ads still have the most currency. But given the hype about how this was going to be the super PAC election, it hasn’t worked out that way.

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Question:

How has reporting changed given the near fact-free environment we are currently in? Facts matter less than ever.

Maggie Haberman:

I don’t think it’s quite right to say facts have little to no impact. But I do think we are operating in a particularly post-truth moment, as my colleague Michael Barbaro wrote a few months ago. In this primary race, direct contradictions to what candidates have said have mattered little to their supporters in many cases.

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Question:

What is the Republican path to victory at this point? If Trump wins, some have already started to mull a third party and many say they won’t support him. Will they just focus on down ballots? Is there any chance of a big name third party run?

Maggie Haberman:

There’s a chance – Mike Bloomberg is still considering it, and there might be others. But a third party run is logistically really, really hard and expensive, in terms of petitions to get on ballots. Trump could have a path to victory but the refusal to disavow Duke on CNN on Sunday — and while I know he said he had an earpiece problem, he answered Jake Tapper repeatedly and showed no evidence of not hearing the questions — will linger in a general, and makes it easier for other Republicans to criticize him.•

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Long before John Lilly used Apple IIs to attempt to speak to dolphins, the LINC, the first modern personal computer, was his tool of choice in trying to coax conversation from the marine mammals. That was in the 1960s, the decade in which physicist Wesley A. Clark, realizing that microchips would progressively get much smaller and cheaper, led a team that built the not-quite-yet-portable PC, which ran counter to the popular idea of computers as shared instruments. It retailed at $43,000. 

Clark just died at 88. From John Markoff’s NYT obituary of the scientist: 

He achieved his breakthroughs working with a small group of scientists and engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Early on they had the insight that the cost of computing would fall inexorably and lead to computers that were then unimaginable.

Severo Ornstein, who as a young engineer also worked at Lincoln in the 1960s, recalled Mr. Clark as one of the first to have a clear understanding of the consequences of the falling cost and shrinking size of computers.

“Wes saw the future 15 years before anyone else,” he said.

Mr. Clark also had the insight as a young researcher that the giant metal cabinets that held the computers of the late 1950s and early ’60s would one day vanish as microelectronics technologies evolved and circuit sizes shrank.

Each LINC had a tiny screen and keyboard and comprised four metal modules. Together they were about as big as two television sets, set side by side and tilted back slightly. The machine, a 12-bit computer, included a one-half megahertz processor. (By contrast, an iPhone 6s is thousands of times faster and has 16 million times as much memory.)

A LINC sold for about $43,000 — a bargain at the time — and Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company, ultimately built them commercially, producing 50 of the original design.

The influence of the LINC was far-reaching. For example, as a Stanford undergraduate, Larry Tesler, who would go on to become an early advocate of personal computing and who helped design the Lisa and Macintosh at Apple Computer, programmed a LINC in the laboratory of the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg.•

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Artist : Elliott Erwitt (France; United States of America, b.1928)  Title :  Date : 1957 Medium Description: gelatin silver photograph Dimensions :  Credit Line : Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors' Program 1995 Image Credit Line :  Accession Number : 287.1995

From the April 11, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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It may have looked suspiciously like an open casket, but Alfred Hitchcock had a casting couch. He wasn’t the chaste monk of the macabre he made himself out to be. It was just a few years ago that Tippi Hedren described how her career was held hostage post-Birds by Hitchcock, all because she wouldn’t give in to his sexual blackmail

Oriana Fallaci interviewed the British suspense master in 1963 when his crowpocalypse screened in Cannes, but while she had a good understanding of the cruelty beneath the surface of the filmmaker she so admired, she clearly was hoodwinked by his narrative of being a devoted, even sexless, husband, entitling the piece, “Mr. Chastity.” What follows is most of her introduction, which paints the director as tiresome and homophobic.

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For years I had been wanting to meet Hitchcock. For years I had been to every Hitchcock film, read every article about Hitchcock, basked in contemplation of every photograph of Hitchcock: the one of him hanging by his own tie, the one of him reflected in a pool of blood, the one of him playing with a skull immersed in a bathtub. I liked everything about him: his big, Father Christmas paunch, his twinkling little pig eyes, his blotchy, alcoholic complexion, his mummified corpses, his corpses shut inside wardrobes, his corpses chopped into pieces and shut inside suitcases, his corpses temporarily buried beneath beds of roses, his anguished flights, his crimes, his suspense, those typically English jokes that make even death ridiculous and even vulgarity elegant. I might be wrong, but I cannot help laughing at the story about the two actors in the cemetery watching their friend being lowered into his grave. The first one says to the other, “How old are you, Charlie?” And Charlie answers, “Eighty-nine.” The first one then observes, “Then there’s no point in your going home, Charlie.” …

My opportunity to meet him and really kiss his hand came at the Cannes Festival, where Hitchcock was showing The Birds, a sinister film about birds that revolt against men and exterminate them by pecking them to death. Hitchcock was coming from Hollywood, and I rushed to Nice airport to greet him. Three hours later I was in his room on the fourth floor of the Carlton Hotel, gazing at him just as my journalist colleague, Veronique Passani, had gazed at Gregory Peck the first time she met him–and she had subsequently managed to marry him. Not that Hitchcock was handsome like Gregory Peck. To be objective, he was decidedly ugly: bloated, purple, a walrus dressed like a man–all that was missing was a mustache. The sweat, copious and oily, was pouring out of all that walrus fat, and he was smoking a dreadfully smelly cigar, which was pleasant only insofar as it obscured him for long moments behind a dense, bluish cloud. But he was Hitchcock, my dearest Hitchcock, my incomparable Hitchcock, and every sentence he spoke would be a pearl of originality and wit. In the same way that we assume that intellectuals are necessarily intelligent, and movie stars necessarily beautiful, and priests necessarily saintly, so I had assumed that Hitchcock was the wittiest man in the world.

He’s isn’t. The full extent of his humor is covered by five or six jokes, two or three macabre tricks, seven or eight lines that he has been repeating for years with the monotony of a phonograph record that’s stuck. Every time he opened a subject, in the sonorous voice of his, I foresaw how he would conclude; I already read it. Moreover, he would make his pronouncements as if he knew it himself: hands folded on his breast, eyes cast up toward the ceiling, like a child reciting a lesson learned by heart. Nor was there anything new about his admission of chastity, of complete lack of interest in sex. Everyone knows that Hitchcock has never known any woman other than his wife, has never desired any woman other than his wife; because he’s not interested in women. This doesn’t mean that he likes men, for heaven’s sake; such deviations are regarded by him with pained and righteous disgust. It only means for him sex does not exist; it would suit him fine if humanity were born in bottles. Nor, for him, does love exist, that mysterious impulse from which beings and things are born; the only thing that interests him in all creation is the opposite of whatever is born: whatever dies. If he sees a budding rose, his impulse, I am afraid, is to eat it.

With the blindness of all disciples or faithful admirers, I took some time to realize his failings. In fact our interview began with bursts of laughter for a good half-hour. But then the bursts of laughter became short little laughs, the short little laughs became smiles, the smile grew cold, and at a certain point I discovered that I could no longer raise a laugh, nor could I have done so even if he had tickled the soles of my feet. That was when I realized the most spine-chilling thing about him: his great wickedness. A person who invents horrors for fun, who makes a living frightening people, who only talks about crimes and anguish, can’t really be evil, so I thought. He is, though. He really enjoys frightening people, knowing that every now and then somebody dies of a heart attack watching his movies, reading that from time to time a man kills his wife the way a wife is killed in one of his movies. Not knowing all the criminals whose master he has been is sheer torture to him. He would like to know about all such authors, to compliment each one and offer him a cigar. Because he can laugh about death with the wisdom of the sages? No, no. Because he likes death. He likes it the way a gravedigger likes it.•

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This weekend, I tweeted a link to a 2014 Tony Hiss Smithsonian article about E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal for combating biodiversity loss. This plan suggests we set aside 50% of the planet’s surface for non-human species, which would not only help safeguard them but us as well. There are some, like Stewart Brand, who think we’ll soon be able to de-extinct at will, but the ability to repopulate is far from certain and full of unintended consequences. Better to preserve what we have while learning to create (or re-create) even more.

Coincidentally, Aeon has published a piece by Wilson on the topic today, the first essay the great biologist has penned for the great online magazine. Among other things, he explains why 50% isn’t just a nice round number but a key one and how rising consumption won’t doom the project. An excerpt:

Today, every sovereign nation in the world has a protected-area system of some kind. All together the reserves number about 161,000 on land and 6,500 over marine waters. According to the World Database on Protected Areas, a joint project of the United Nations Environmental Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, they occupied by 2015 a little less than 15 per cent of Earth’s land area and 2.8 per cent of Earth’s ocean area. The coverage is increasing gradually. This trend is encouraging. To have reached the existing level is a tribute to those who have led and participated in the global conservation effort.

But is the level enough to halt the acceleration of species extinction? Unfortunately, it is in fact nowhere close to enough. The declining world of biodiversity cannot be saved by the piecemeal operations in current use alone. The extinction rate our behaviour is now imposing on the rest of life, and seems destined to continue, is more correctly viewed as the equivalent of a Chicxulub-sized asteroid strike played out over several human generations.

The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves worldwide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher.•

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Among space-exploration enthusiasts, Jean-Jacques Dordain, former Director General of the European Space Agency, is something of a dissenter. While he thinks humans traveling to Mars inevitable, he’s not among those contemporary thinkers (Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Elon Musk, etc.) who believes Homo sapiens is capable of being a multi-planet species. He’s probably right if we’re talking about the immediate future but almost definitely wrong if the long-term one is considered.

In a 2014 RT interview conducted by Sophie Shevarnadze, Dordain contended that space is too inhospitable to allow a Manifest Destiny on Mars and more. There were unfortunately no follow-up questions about domed environments and 3D-printed structures and such, so I don’t know precisely why he felt that way. In contrast, his successor at ESA, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, immediately proposed building moon colonies after taking office in 2015.

From RT:

Question:

Are you actually an advocate of Mars colonization?

Jean-Jacques Dordain:

Colonization – I don’t know, but we should certainly go to Mars with humans, and we should certainly stay on Mars – humans will stay on Mars, I think it is just a matter of calendar. I never said that it’s not “if” – it’s “when”. We have some time. If you go to Mars 10 years later – what’s the difference? It may make a difference for me, because I will not see it, but it will not make a difference for humanity. I must say, if we had gone to North Pole 50 years later than today – it would not change anything. I am convinced, yes, that humans will go to Mars, for me it’s not a question, it’s just a calendar.

Question:

I’m just trying to understand what’s at the root of…you’re saying “exploration is inherent for mankind, exploration makes us human and it must involve a human presence” – so you are for human presence everywhere, but – is it exploration just for discovery or exploration to conquer?

Jean-Jacques Dordain:

I think it’s more for discovery and also to make the future on planet Earth possible. I must say that there is no alternative of planet Earth for humanity. This is maybe something that we have learned from space. There is no other place where this humanity can live. We cannot live on different planets in Solar System and going to an exoplanet will be much too far away, at least with the technologies that we know. So, we have no alternatives but to stay together on planet Earth. Now, does that mean that we should continue to find all resources that we need just on planet Earth, that it’s number one, and maybe we should find some raw sources in other planets or on the Moon, for example- I don’t know. That is number one, number two – going to the other planet is also to understand what is future of planet Earth. Couple of billions of years ago, Mars, Earth and Venus were sister planets – and we have evolved very differently. There was water on Mars, we know it, the was, certainly, an atmosphere around Mars. Where is the water? We still find some traces. Where is the atmosphere? Today, we are living on planet Earth because there is water and atmosphere, so understanding why Mars has changed so dramatically since its creation would be certainly very interesting, to understand where we are going to ourselves. So, planet Earth is not isolated. I remember, that I ever started a speech by saying “space does not belong to Earth”, it’s the Earth which belongs to space, and we don’t have a chance to understand planet Earth if we don’t understand the overall system where we are living in, so I think that the Moon is not anymore “something” – it belongs to our environment. Mars – also, Venus – also, so I think that we have to understand that and we have to explore, because exploring Mars is also exploring planet Earth. Our future is on planet Earth, and we have to make our future possible. I am sure that our future on planet Earth, for humanity – not for me, it’s too late – but, to make the future of humanity on planet Earth possible we’d better understand the system we are living in.•

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Americans won’t likely always settle for bread and Kardashians.

You could make a strong case that Donald Trump, the fluffer for a white supremacist porn film, has been significantly aided by our odd descent into un-reality, our constant desire to binge on entertainment, but Bernie Sanders’ surprising rise, though likely an abridged one, reminds that the very real Occupy unrest which informed the 2012 election season has dissipated no more than income inequality itself has. While these uneasy starts may never culminate in any elected official being able to reconfigure our system from the inside, the pressure from without may ultimately grow strong enough to make an impact.

Yet still there are rationalizations. The Libertarian economist Russ Roberts believes the Gig Economy isn’t populated mostly by struggling citizens but instead by entrepreneurs temporarily driving Ubers and Lyfts only until venture capital allows them to permanently park their mustaches. Roberts’ partner in the Cafe Hayek site, Don Boudreaux, offers up a doozy as well with his post “Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916.” The tacit implication is that since we now have antibiotics, Android phones and Amazon Prime, the fall of the middle class isn’t really so troubling.

We’ve enjoyed technological and material progress in eras when we’ve enjoyed a fair tax code and in ones in which we haven’t. It’s silly to suggest we need cling to what’s become a lopsided society because we like penicillin. It’s also tone-deaf analysis when many in our country struggle in this new Gilded Age to pay for the basics of shelter, food, health and education.

Below is piece from Boudreaux’s writing and the opening of Barry Ritholtz’s riposte in Bloomberg View.

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  • From Boudreaux, a passage about life in 1916:

While you might have air-conditioning in your New York home, many of the friends’ homes that you visit – as well as restaurants and business offices that you frequent – were not air-conditioned.  In the winter, many were also poorly heated by today’s standards.

To travel to Europe took you several days.  To get to foreign lands beyond Europe took you even longer.

Might you want to deliver a package or letter overnight from New York City to someone in Los Angeles?  Sorry. Impossible.

You could neither listen to radio (the first commercial radio broadcast occurred in 1920) nor watch television.  You could, however, afford the state-of-the-art phonograph of the era.  (It wasn’t stereo, though.  And – I feel certain – even today’s vinylphiles would prefer listening to music played off of a modern compact disc to listening to music played off of a 1916 phonograph record.)  Obviously, you could not download music.

There really wasn’t very much in the way of movies for you to watch, even though you could afford to build your own home movie theater.

Your telephone was attached to a wall.  You could not use it to Skype.•

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  • From Ritholtz:

Today’s discussion involves a visit to the here-we-go-again files. The website Cafe Hayek, in a post titled “Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916,” asks a seemingly simple question: What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for going back to live as John D. Rockefeller did in 1916?

The obvious point here is that we are doing better than the richest man of a century ago. Yet there’s a subtext (which becomes pretty clear by looking at the comments on the post): That all of this talk about wealth and income inequality — an important theme in this year’s presidential election — can and should be ignored. After all, as some have noted, even many of the poorest Americans own a smartphone today, whereas a century ago not even the wealthiest person on Earth had one.

I have addressed the logical failings of this kind of comparative exercise before (see this and this). For one thing, if you are going to make a temporal argument, you must recognize that time is two-sided. Yes, it is true, the average American in so many ways is better off than the rich were 100 years ago. However, by that same logic, everyone today rich, poor and middle-class — is much worse off than the poor of 100 years from now. It’s easy to consider what the folks will say about long-dead us in 2116: “Imagine — they were mortal, gave birth, bred animals to be killed and eaten, drove their own cars. How primitive!”

Comparing folks of different economic strata across the ages ignores a simple fact: Wealth is relative to your peers, both in time and geography.•

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You would understandably disagree if you or yours met with the business end of a drone, but these modern weapons aren’t, militarily speaking, the worst thing. 

Worse is a ground-battle quagmire that stretches on seemingly endlessly, until, as in Iraq, the dead are so numerous you can’t make an exact accounting of them. Even though it’s strategically far from perfect as well as morally dubious, the U.S. drone offensive against ISIS, Al Qaida, et al., hasn’t been nearly as destructive. The catch is that while selective strikes are responsible for far less collateral damage than pre–push-button offensives, traditional wars always offered us an out. Operating less-accurate arms inside the fog of war, we could tell ourselves that things just happened. No one meant to inflict so much carnage–that’s just the nature of combat. It was true to some extent, though this escape clause was applied liberally, eliding some of the horror of the whole business, even if it was only a psychological trick.

Precision has, more or less, arrived with drones, and that means fewer excuses along with fewer deaths. We definitively pick and choose who lives and dies and execute those decisions. Drones, then, aren’t an impersonal way to conduct war despite the remoteness of the soldiers. In Thomas Nagel’s London Review of Books piece “Really Good At Killing,” which meditates on Scott Shane’s Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone, the philosopher addresses this thorny technological development.

An excerpt:

The 2010 United Nations report on targeted killings by Philip Alston says of drones that ‘because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a “Playstation” mentality to killing.’ But Shane contends credibly that this is not borne out by the experience of those who have done it, and who report an acute and disturbing awareness of the individual humanity of those they observe – not only the non-combatants nearby but also their intended targets. ‘The psychological toll on drone pilots and sensor operators was, paradoxically, far greater than on those who flew traditional fighters and bombers,’ he says.

The personal character of this kind of killing goes all the way to the top. Obama ‘did not trust the agencies carrying out the strikes to grade their own work. He felt it was his responsibility to invest the time – hours each week – to keep abreast of the operations and often to exercise his own judgment about what was justified and what was too risky.’ ‘He was the ultimate arbiter of a “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, and there were virtually no captures by American agencies … When the CIA sent word that there was a rare opportunity for a drone strike on a top terrorist – but that his family was with him – it was the president who had reserved to himself the final moral calculation.’ ‘On several occasions, he told aides, with chagrin, that as president he had discovered an unexpected talent. “It turns out,” he said, “that I’m really good at killing people.”’

The president as killer is a chilling new face of the role of commander-in-chief. I suspect that it is the personal, individualised nature of drone warfare that many people find so repellent. It is easier to be resigned to the slaughter of faceless multitudes by conventional missiles, bombs and artillery, with the inevitable attendant collateral damage, in pursuit of legitimate military objectives. War is hell, as we all know. But when the president puts someone on a kill list to be taken out by a precise drone strike, it creates the illusory sense of a more direct responsibility for that death than for the other kind. It feels like an execution, though it is just retail warfare, and the responsibility, individual and collective, is equally great in both cases.

Does it make a moral difference that this kind of killing exposes the killers to no physical risk? Is it a condition on the acceptability of warfare that those who kill should put their lives on the line?•

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When the world was slower, much slower, a quick gait could produce a huge gate.

Such was the case with pedestrianism, a pre-automobile sensation in which competitors would race-walk cross-country or do ceaseless laps around an arena track as bleary-eyed spectators were mesmerized by the oft-lengthy exhibitions of slow-twitch muscle fiber.

An excerpt from a report in the March 4, 1882 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about one such six-day contest, a blend of footrace and dance marathon, before a large Madison Square Garden audience that alternately yelled and yawned:

Popular interest in the race of the champions touched its highest point to-day. The opening of the last day of the walk was witnessed by over two thousand spectators. Fully one-half of these had lingered in Madison Square Garden all night. Drowsy and unkempt, with grimy faces and dusty apparel, they shivered behind their upturned coat collars, determined to see the battle out. The management’s order of ‘no return checks’ had far more unpleasant significance for them than hours of discomfort in the barnlike building. The permanent lodger in a six days’ match usually makes his bed upon a coal box, in a grocery wagon or beneath the roof of the police lodging room. Accordingly, it is his habit to come to the garden at the beginning of a race and remain for a full week, or until he is removed by the employees to make way for some more profitable customers. This contest had its full share of these persistent individuals. Beside them, many sporting men remained until almost daybreak, attracted by the enormous scores rolled up by the pedestrians and speculations as to what they would do in the way of the beating of the record. It was conceded that Hazael and Fitzgerald would surpass all previous performances. Hazael’s wonderful work was generally regarded as the marvel of the match.

When Hazael, the Londoner of astonishing prowess, retired from the track at 11:37 last night, he had rolled up the enormous record of 540 miles in 120 hours. To his enthusiastic handlers in walker’s row he complained of feeling tired and sleepy. His limbs were sound and apparently tireless as steel. He partook heartily of nourishment and then, throwing himself on his couch, caught a few cat naps. At 1:49:20 he bounded out of his flower covered alcove, and once more took up the thread of his travels. His rest of two hours and twelve minutes had greatly improved him. He had been sponged and rubbed, and grinned all over his quaint face at his enormous score. That he was yet full of vigor and energy was apparent from the work he immediately entered upon. He had not walked more than half a lap when he gave a preliminary wobble. Then he clasped his hands over his ears, pulled his head down until his slender neck was well craned, and shot over the yellow pathway at a rattling pace. The sleepy watcher pricked up their ears at the shout which greeted this performance, and a fusillade of handclapping shook the garden. Fitzgerald was jogging over the tanbark at this time, sharply working to draw nearer to the Englishman’s figures on the scoring sheets. He accelerated his speed as the Londoner resumed the task before him. Within a few minutes both men were running like reindeer. It is doubtful they could have made better time if a pack of famished wolves had been at their heels. Volley after volley of applause thundered after them from the spectators. The runners kept close together. Between the hours of 2 and 8 o’clock this morning, so swift was their movements, that each man had added six miles and seven laps to his score or within one lap of seven miles. The struggle became so intense that the spectators began to realize that something unusual was in progress. A stir was apparent all over the vast interior and wearied humanity pushed itself to the rail to see what was going on.•

Black Lives Matter Protest Disrupts Holiday Shoppers At Mall Of America

Prior to the rise of the Internet and the fall of the Towers, is it possible we were unwittingly living in a golden age? Maybe for a moment.

If the 1990s was a good time, it was only briefly so. In the United States, the decade began with liberal Bill Clinton, Nirvana and brick-and-mortar, which gave way before the bell tolled to conservative Bill Clinton, Marcy Playground and point-and-click. In his latest Financial Times column, Douglas Coupland has warm thoughts about the pre-Internet era, fondly recalling the shopping mall, its fabricated community and food courts and fake trees, before we shrunk it all down to fit inside our phones. The opening:

On August 11 1992 I was in Bloomington, Minnesota, close to Minneapolis. I was on a book tour and it was the grand opening day of Mall of America, the biggest mall in the US. The local radio affiliate had a booth set up in front of the indoor roller coaster that strafed the booth like an air strike every 75 seconds. I was up on the stage with them doing a live interview for half an hour while thousands of people were walking by with “country fair face” — goggle-eyed and feeding on ice cream. I felt like I was inside a Technicolor movie from the 1950s. The show’s host assumed I was going to be an ironic, slacker wise-ass and said: “I guess you must think this whole mall is kind of hokey and trashy,” and I said: “No such thing.”

He was surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I feel like I’m in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn’t, not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, ‘You know, those people were living in golden times and they didn’t even know it. Communism was dead, the economy was good and the future with all of its accompanying technologies hadn’t crushed society’s mojo like a bug.’”

Silence.

And it’s true. Technology hadn’t hollowed out the middle class and turned us into laptop click junkies, and there were no new bogeymen hiding in the closet. We may well look back at the 1990s as the last good decade.•

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Mall of America, opening weekend, August 1992.

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During the heyday of the Magazine Age, when Playboy was still based in Chicago, Hugh Hefner thought most people would soon be enjoying his lifestyle. Well, not exactly his lifestyle.

The mansion, grotto and Bunnies were to remain largely unattainable, but he believed technology would help us remove ourselves from the larger world so that we each could create our own “little planet.” The gadgets he used five decades ago to extend his adolescence and recuse himself are now much more powerful and affordable. Hefner believed our new, personalized islands would be our homes, not our phones, but he was right in thinking that tools would make life more remote in some fundamental way.

In 1966, Oriana Fallaci interviewed Hefner for her book, The Egotists. Her sharp introduction and the first exchange follow.

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First of all, the House. He stays in it as a Pharaoh in a grave, and so he doesn’t notice that the night has ended, the day has begun, a winter passed, and a spring, and a summer–it’s autumn now. Last time he emerged from the grave was last winter, they say, but he did not like what he saw and returned with great relief three days later. The sky was then extinguished behind the electronic gate, and he sat down again in his grave: 1349 North State Parkway, Chicago. But what a grave, boys! Ask those who live in the building next to it, with their windows opening onto the terrace on which the bunnies sunbathe, in monokinis or notkinis. (The monokini exists of panties only, the notkini consists of nothing.) Tom Wolfe has called the house the final rebellion against old Europe and its custom of wearing shoes and hats, its need of going to restaurants or swimming pools. Others have called it Disneyland for adults. Forty-eight rooms, thirty-six servants always at your call. Are you hungry? The kitchen offers any exotic food at any hour. Do you want to rest? Try the Gold Room, with a secret door you open by touching the petal of a flower, in which the naked girls are being photographed. Do you want to swim? The heated swimming pool is downstairs. Bathing suits of any size or color are here, but you can swim without, if you prefer. And if you go into the Underwater Bar, you will see the Bunnies swim as naked as little fishes. The House hosts thirty Bunnies, who may go everywhere, like members of the family. The pool also has a cascade. Going under the cascade, you arrive at the grotto, rather comfortable if you like to flirt; tropical plants, stereophonic music, drinks, erotic opportunities, and discreet people. Recently, a guest was imprisoned in the steam room. He screamed, but nobody came to help him. Finally, he was able to free himself by breaking down the door, and when he asked in anger, why nobody came to his help–hadn’t they heard his screams?–they answered, “Obviously. But we thought you were not alone.”

At the center of the grave, as at the center of a pyramid, is the monarch’s sarcophagus: his bed. It’s a large, round and here he sleeps, he thinks, he makes love, he controls the little cosmos that he has created, using all the wonders that are controlled by electronic technology. You press a button and the bed turns through half a circle, the room becomes many rooms, the statue near the fireplace becomes many statues. The statue portrays a woman, obviously. Naked, obviously. And on the wall there TV sets on which he can see the programs he missed while he slept or thought or made love. In the room next to the bedroom there is a laboratory with the Ampex video-tape machine that catches the sounds and images of all the channels; the technician who takes care of it was sent to the Ampex center in San Francisco. And then? Then there is another bedroom that is his office, because he does not feel at ease far from a bed. Here the bed is rectangular and covered with papers and photos and documentation on Prostitution, Heterosexuality, Sodomy. Other papers are on the floor, the chairs, the tables, along with tape recorders, typewriters, dictaphones. When he works, he always uses the electric light, never opening a window, never noticing the night has ended, the day begun. He wears pajamas only. In his pajamas, he works thirty-six hours, forty-eight hours nonstop, until he falls exhausted on the round bed, and the House whispers the news: He sleeps. Keep silent in the kitchen, in the swimming pool, in the lounge, everywhere: He sleeps.

He is Hugh Hefner, emperor of an empire of sex, absolute king of seven hundred Bunnies, founder and editor of Playboy: forty million dollars in 1966, bosoms, navels, behinds as mammy made them, seen from afar, close up, white, suntanned, large, small, mixed with exquisite cartoons, excellent articles, much humor, some culture, and, finally, his philosophy. This philosophy’s name is “Playboyism,” and, synthesized, it says that “we must not be afraid or ashamed of sex, sex is not necessarily limited to marriage, sex is oxygen, mental health. Enough of virginity, hypocrisy, censorship, restrictions. Pleasure is to be preferred to sorrow.” It is now discussed even by theologians. Without being ironic, a magazine published a story entitled “…The Gospel According to Hugh Hefner.” Without causing a scandal, a teacher at the School of Theology at Claremont, California, writes that Playboyism is, in some ways, a religious movement: “That which the church has been too timid to try, Hugh Hefner…is attempting.”

We Europeans laugh. We learned to discuss sex some thousands of years ago, before even the Indians landed in America. The mammoths and the dinosaurs still pastured around New York, San Francisco, Chicago, when we built on sex the idea of beauty, the understanding of tragedy, that is our culture. We were born among the naked statues. And we never covered the source of life with panties. At the most, we put on it a few mischievous fig leaves. We learned in high school about a certain Epicurus, a certain Petronius, a certain Ovid. We studied at the university about a certain Aretino. What Hugh Hefner says does not make us hot or cold. And now we have Sweden. We are all going to become Swedish, and we do not understand these Americans, who, like adolescents, all of a sudden, have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating. But then why are half a million of the four million copies of the monthly Playboy sold in Europe? In Italy, Playboy can be received through the mail if the mail is not censored. And we must also consider all the good Italian husbands who drive to the Swiss border just to buy Playboy. And why are the Playboy Clubs so famous in Europe, why are the Bunnies so internationally desired? The first question you hear when you get back is: “Tell me, did you see the Bunnies? How are they? Do they…I mean…do they?!?” And the most severe satirical magazine in the U.S.S.R., Krokodil, shows much indulgence toward Hugh Hefner: “[His] imagination in indeed inexhaustible…The old problem of sex is treated freshly and originally…”

Then let us listen with amusement to this sex lawmaker of the Space Age. He’s now in his early forties. Just short of six feet, he weighs one hundred and fifty pounds. He eats once a day. He gets his nourishment essentially from soft drinks. He does not drink coffee. He is not married. He was briefly, and he has a daughter and a son, both teen-agers. He also has a father, a mother, a brother. He is a tender relative, a nepotist: his father works for him, his brother, too. Both are serious people, I am informed.

And then I am informed that the Pharaoh has awakened, the Pharaoh is getting dressed, is going to arrive, has arrived: Hallelujah! Where is he? He is there: that young man, so slim, so pale, so consumed by the lack of light and the excess of love, with eyes so bright, so smart, so vaguely demoniac. In his right hand he holds a pipe: in his left hand he holds a girl, Mary, the special one. After him comes his brother, who resembles Hefner. He also holds a girl, who resembles Mary. I do not know if the pipe he owns resembles Hugh’s pipe because he is not holding one right now. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and, as on every Sunday afternoon, there is a movie in the grave. The Pharaoh lies down on the sofa with Mary, the light goes down, the movie starts. The Bunnies go to sleep and the four lovers kiss absentminded kisses. God knows what Hugh Hefner thinks about men, women, love, morals–will he be sincere in his nonconformity? What fun, boys, if I discover that he is a good, proper moral father of Family whose destiny is paradise. Keep silent, Bunnies. He speaks. The movie is over, and he speaks, with a soft voice that breaks. And, I am sure, without lying.

Oriana Fallaci:

A year without leaving the House, without seeing the sun, the snow, the rain, the trees, the sea, without breathing the air, do you not go crazy? Don’t you die with unhappiness?

Hugh Hefner:

Here I have all the air I need. I never liked to travel: the landscape never stimulated me. I am more interested in people and ideas. I find more ideas here than outside. I’m happy, totally happy. I go to bed when I like. I get up when I like: in the afternoon, at dawn, in the middle of the night. I am in the center of the world, and I don’t need to go out looking for the world. The rational use that I make of progress and technology brings me the world at home. What distinguishes men from other animals? Is it not perhaps their capacity to control the environment and to change it according to their necessities and tastes? Many people will soon live as I do. Soon, the house will be a little planet that does not prohibit but helps our relationships with the others. Is it not more logical to live as I do instead of going out of a little house to enter another little house, the car, then into another little house, the office, then another little house, the restaurant or the theater? Living as I do, I enjoy at the same time company and solitude, isolation from society and immediate access to society. Naturally, in order to afford such luxury, one must have money. But I have it. And it’s delightful.•

typewriterdog5

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

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This week, Time magazine's literary experts were embarrassed when they identified Evelyn Waugh as a...

This week, Time magazine’s editors were embarrassed when they incorrectly identified Evelyn Waugh as a…

…female writer. But it’ll be even worse next week when they present their cover story about America’s first female President…

...Barbara Obama.

…Barbara Obama.

 

  • Conspiracists just went on a seven-day cruise called “Conspira-Sea.”
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  • In 1967, Oriana Fallaci and Norman Mailer, two titanic egos, conversed.
  • Las Vegas is the least likely great American city.

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