newyorker--2020-10-11--Donald Trump’s Consistent Unreliability on COVID, and Everything Else

Last February 7th , at five-thirty in the morning , Donald Trump tweeted praise for China ’ s “ great discipline ” in fighting the coronavirus and predicted that Xi Jinping would be “ successful , especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker , and then gone.
” Later that day , the President , in an interview with Bob Woodward , acknowledged that the virus was serious , but said , “ I think that that goes away in two months with the heat.
” On February 24th , as infections in America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.
” ( “ I wanted to always play it down , ” he later said , according to Woodward ’ s book “ Rage.
” ) It is painful to reflect today on the tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved if a less reality-challenged President occupied the White House .
Trump has been consistently unreliable across the eight-month arc of our national crisis .
Last week , as he recuperated from his own bout of COVID-19 , he unleashed a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These offered transparent nonsense ( “ Maybe I ’ m immune ” ) and also dangerous lies , such as the claim that for most people the coronavirus is “ far less lethal !
!
!
” than the seasonal flu .
( Scientists report that the coronavirus is about six times more deadly than the typical flu virus . )
“ He ’ s in denial , as he was right from the start , ” Nancy Pelosi , the Speaker of the House , said last Wednesday , as she tried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic-stimulus package .
She added , “ I could never explain to you any rational , linear path of action on the part of the President.
” Even after four years of Trump shocks , the operatic dénouement of his reëlection campaign has been staggering .
With early voting already begun , the President and the First Lady are both under care for covid-19 , and some three dozen White House employees , advisers , and recent guests have tested positive .
( The sickened aides include a military officer who followed Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the codes that would enable him to launch a nuclear attack . )
It remains unclear just how the outbreak began and spread , but such an occurrence was perhaps inevitable , given the Administration ’ s refusal to require masks and physical distancing in the White House and at public events .
Eventually , journalists and biographers will sort out exactly what the President knew about his own possible contagiousness before October 2nd , the day he announced that he had tested positive—and how he handled any risk that he might infect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his hospitalization at Walter Reed , when he was almost certainly contagious , he staged a photo op in which he was driven around in an S.U.V .
and waved to onlookers .
At least two Secret Service agents were required to join him in the sealed , armored vehicle , putting them at risk of exposure .
It was an inane campaign stunt , and a study in selfishness .
The next day , in a made-for-TV return to the White House , Trump stood on the Truman Balcony and peeled a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what was the point ?
His disdain for public-health guidelines often defies political logic .
In a new poll from National Geographic and Morning Consult , three-quarters of Americans say that they wear a mask every time they leave home , a figure that has risen by nearly twenty-five per cent since July .
According to a late-summer survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation , six in ten people think that the worst of the pandemic is yet to come , but last week Trump urged Americans not to let the coronavirus “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learning to live ” with it .
After the trauma of 2016 , Democrats may be reluctant to accept that Trump could be as severely misguided about his reëlection messaging as he is about so much else—such as , say , his failure to stand up to the far right .
On Thursday night , he tweeted , “ Governor Whitmer—open up your state , open up your schools , and open up your churches !
, ” just hours after members of a Michigan militia were charged with plotting to kidnap her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well ahead in the race , but an upset is , given the importance of the Electoral College , a real possibility .
Nate Silver ’ s FiveThirtyEight site , which publishes an obsessed-over election-forecast model , predicted last week that Trump had about a one-in-six chance of winning the Electoral College—not great odds , from the President ’ s vantage , but still only a lucky roll of a die .
For all his bravado , though , Trump surely understands that he is in a hole .
His campaign to discredit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , if the margin is narrow , he and his Republican allies will contest the outcome , and hope that the courts throw it Trump ’ s way .
Will it be close ?
Since Biden won the Democratic nomination , the election has played out mainly as a referendum on Trump ’ s record as President .
His dissembling about the coronavirus is in plain view , in his tweets and his Fox News interviews .
On Thursday , he told Maria Bartiromo , on Fox Business , that he may have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ want to kiss me.
” He added that “ I ’ m a perfect physical specimen and I ’ m extremely young , ” whereas “ Joe ’ s not lasting two months as President , O.K.
, that ’ s my opinion.
” On Friday , ABC reported that Trump planned to hold a rally with hundreds of people on the South Lawn on Saturday , less than ten days after his infection was made public .
His campaign announced that he would also hold one in an airport hangar in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s failure during the pandemic does not lie with his Administration ’ s crisis management , botched as that has been ; it is the result of his character .
“ I ’ m a total act and I don ’ t understand why people don ’ t get it , ” Trump told Anthony Scaramucci , his former communications adviser , according to “ A Very Stable Genius , ” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig .
Donald Trump and Joe Biden offer starkly different visions of America , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is whether voters will affirm the President in his delusions for another four years , allowing him to further his anti-democratic instincts and push against the limits of his power .
The electorate is battered , divided , and demoralized ; this summer , according to Gallup , Americans reported a level of dissatisfaction with how things are going in the country comparable to that of December , 2008 , in the grip of the Great Recession .
Democracies endure because of their capacity for self-correction .
In the postwar era , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
Last February 7th, at five-thirty in the morning, Donald Trump tweeted praise for China’s “great discipline” in fighting the coronavirus and predicted that Xi Jinping would be “successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.” Later that day, the President, in an interview with Bob Woodward, acknowledged that the virus was serious, but said, “I think that that goes away in two months with the heat.” On February 24th, as infections in America increased, he tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” (“I wanted to always play it down,” he later said, according to Woodward’s book “Rage.”)
It is painful to reflect today on the tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved if a less reality-challenged President occupied the White House. Trump has been consistently unreliable across the eight-month arc of our national crisis. Last week, as he recuperated from his own bout of COVID-19, he unleashed a fresh torrent of tweets and videos. These offered transparent nonsense (“Maybe I’m immune”) and also dangerous lies, such as the claim that for most people the coronavirus is “far less lethal!!!” than the seasonal flu. (Scientists report that the coronavirus is about six times more deadly than the typical flu virus.) “He’s in denial, as he was right from the start,” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said last Wednesday, as she tried to negotiate with Trump over a new economic-stimulus package. She added, “I could never explain to you any rational, linear path of action on the part of the President.”
Even after four years of Trump shocks, the operatic dénouement of his reëlection campaign has been staggering. With early voting already begun, the President and the First Lady are both under care for covid-19, and some three dozen White House employees, advisers, and recent guests have tested positive. (The sickened aides include a military officer who followed Trump around with the “football” containing the codes that would enable him to launch a nuclear attack.) It remains unclear just how the outbreak began and spread, but such an occurrence was perhaps inevitable, given the Administration’s refusal to require masks and physical distancing in the White House and at public events. Eventually, journalists and biographers will sort out exactly what the President knew about his own possible contagiousness before October 2nd, the day he announced that he had tested positive—and how he handled any risk that he might infect others. On October 4th, during his hospitalization at Walter Reed, when he was almost certainly contagious, he staged a photo op in which he was driven around in an S.U.V. and waved to onlookers. At least two Secret Service agents were required to join him in the sealed, armored vehicle, putting them at risk of exposure. It was an inane campaign stunt, and a study in selfishness.
The next day, in a made-for-TV return to the White House, Trump stood on the Truman Balcony and peeled a cloth mask from his face. But what was the point? His disdain for public-health guidelines often defies political logic. In a new poll from National Geographic and Morning Consult, three-quarters of Americans say that they wear a mask every time they leave home, a figure that has risen by nearly twenty-five per cent since July. According to a late-summer survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, six in ten people think that the worst of the pandemic is yet to come, but last week Trump urged Americans not to let the coronavirus “dominate your life” and suggested “learning to live” with it. After the trauma of 2016, Democrats may be reluctant to accept that Trump could be as severely misguided about his reëlection messaging as he is about so much else—such as, say, his failure to stand up to the far right. On Thursday night, he tweeted, “Governor Whitmer—open up your state, open up your schools, and open up your churches!,” just hours after members of a Michigan militia were charged with plotting to kidnap her.
National polling averages put Joe Biden well ahead in the race, but an upset is, given the importance of the Electoral College, a real possibility. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site, which publishes an obsessed-over election-forecast model, predicted last week that Trump had about a one-in-six chance of winning the Electoral College—not great odds, from the President’s vantage, but still only a lucky roll of a die. For all his bravado, though, Trump surely understands that he is in a hole. His campaign to discredit the election result in advance suggests that, if the margin is narrow, he and his Republican allies will contest the outcome, and hope that the courts throw it Trump’s way.
Will it be close? Since Biden won the Democratic nomination, the election has played out mainly as a referendum on Trump’s record as President. His dissembling about the coronavirus is in plain view, in his tweets and his Fox News interviews. On Thursday, he told Maria Bartiromo, on Fox Business, that he may have been infected by Gold Star families who “want to kiss me.” He added that “I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” whereas “Joe’s not lasting two months as President, O.K., that’s my opinion.” On Friday, ABC reported that Trump planned to hold a rally with hundreds of people on the South Lawn on Saturday, less than ten days after his infection was made public. His campaign announced that he would also hold one in an airport hangar in Florida on Monday.
The essence of Trump’s failure during the pandemic does not lie with his Administration’s crisis management, botched as that has been; it is the result of his character. “I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it,” Trump told Anthony Scaramucci, his former communications adviser, according to “A Very Stable Genius,” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden offer starkly different visions of America, but the most important question in this election is whether voters will affirm the President in his delusions for another four years, allowing him to further his anti-democratic instincts and push against the limits of his power. The electorate is battered, divided, and demoralized; this summer, according to Gallup, Americans reported a level of dissatisfaction with how things are going in the country comparable to that of December, 2008, in the grip of the Great Recession. Democracies endure because of their capacity for self-correction. In the postwar era, we have never required one so desperately. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-11--Sunday Reading: Our Far-Flung Correspondents

For many decades , The New Yorker has run a series of columns called Our Far-Flung Correspondents .
These pieces commonly chronicle journeys our writers have taken that are by turns revelatory , moving , and sometimes harrowing .
This week , we ’ re bringing you a selection of pieces from our archive about these journeys and the distant regions that our writers traverse .
In “ Paddling After Henry David Thoreau , ” John McPhee retraces the philosopher ’ s famous canoe voyage through the rivers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire .
In “ A State of Nature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lush Central American forest known as the Darién Gap and explores the complexities of ecotourism .
In “ The March of the Strandbeests , ” Ian Frazier visits Holland and writes about the Dutch artist Theo Jansen ’ s remarkable kinetic sculptures , which are powered solely by wind .
In “ Medical Mountaineers , ” Rebecca Solnit reports on the heroic efforts of health-care workers in the Himalayas .
Finally , in “ Swingers , ” Ian Parker examines the fascinating habits of bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ as enchanting as we do—whether you ’ re currently sitting on your sofa or lucky enough to be on a journey of your own .

For many decades, The New Yorker has run a series of columns called Our Far-Flung Correspondents. These pieces commonly chronicle journeys our writers have taken that are by turns revelatory, moving, and sometimes harrowing. This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces from our archive about these journeys and the distant regions that our writers traverse. In “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau,” John McPhee retraces the philosopher’s famous canoe voyage through the rivers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In “A State of Nature,” Jennie Erin Smith travels to the lush Central American forest known as the Darién Gap and explores the complexities of ecotourism. In “The March of the Strandbeests,” Ian Frazier visits Holland and writes about the Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s remarkable kinetic sculptures, which are powered solely by wind. In “Medical Mountaineers,” Rebecca Solnit reports on the heroic efforts of health-care workers in the Himalayas. Finally, in “Swingers,” Ian Parker examines the fascinating habits of bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We hope that you find these pieces as enchanting as we do—whether you’re currently sitting on your sofa or lucky enough to be on a journey of your own.
— David Remnick
Illustration by Edward Sorel
Retracing the waterways of Thoreau’s first book.
Life, death, and tourism in the Darién Gap.
Photograph by Lena Herzog
Theo Jansen’s wind-powered sculpture.
Photograph by Chiara Goia for The New Yorker
Delivering basic care to the remote Himalayas.
Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?


newyorker--2020-10-11--Mandy Patinkin Is Still Singing

Mandy Patinkin Is Still Singing

Patinkin has said before that the word by which he defines his entire life and career is “ connect.
” It ’ s a word he uttered repeatedly when he played a fictionalized version of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat ( and Seurat ’ s artist great-grandson , also called George ) in the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 musical “ Sunday in the Park with George.
” “ Connect , George .
Connect , ” his character pleads with himself in the second act , lamenting his tendency to isolate himself from others in order to create works of art .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t know what I ’ m going to have or not .
I ’ m leaving it up to the children .
I can ’ t deal with that—but if there is anything written anywhere , I would like it to say ‘ He Tried to Connect , ’ ” Patinkin told me when our interview took place , over two and a half hours on a recent morning .
Patinkin ’ s own performances have connected so many times , and with so many different fandoms , over the course of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a child of the nineteen-eighties , you may know him as the avenging swordsman Inigo Montoya from “ The Princess Bride ” ( a role he recently revisited , with gusto , for a virtual cast reunion ) .
If you are a fan of Barbra Streisand ’ s directorial work , you may know him as the hirsute love interest Avigdor from 1983 ’ s “ Yentl.
” If you love television drama , you may know him as the kindly mentor Saul Berenson to Claire Danes ’ s unpredictable C.I.A .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Homeland.
” And if you are a musical-theatre buff , you may think of him as more or less a superstar , one of the most vibrant countertenors to ever grace the Broadway stage .
After growing up on the South Side of Chicago and studying at Juilliard—alongside the likes of Robin Williams , William Hurt , and Patti LuPone—Patinkin had his breakout stage role as Che in “ Evita , ” for which he won a Tony Award , in 1980 .
Still , Patinkin has to some extent flown under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He has been spending the pandemic at his small , converted farmhouse , in upstate New York , with his wife of forty years , the writer and actress Kathryn Grody , but he has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since the nineteen-seventies , and he still maintains a low-enough profile there to shop at Barney Greengrass and Murray ’ s Sturgeon Shop without causing a stir .
( This may be in part because , with his casual hiking clothes , rimless wire glasses , and bushy eyebrows , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
Over the past few months , though , Patinkin has fallen into a new , unexpected role : quarantine social-media star .
In April , his son Gideon began broadcasting the idle banter between his parents as they puttered around the house , and two new boomer Internet stars were born .
In an early video , Gideon asks Patinkin and Grody about popular web acronyms ; LMAO , Patinkin guesses , stands for “ let me alone , oaf.
” The couple munch on matzo , slow-dance to old half-remembered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , perform a Stooge-like comedy routine in which Grody breaks a bottle and an egg over Patinkin ’ s head .
Patinkin stressed to me that he recognizes the power of his new platform .
Between filming quirky home videos , Gideon has made it his “ full-time job ” to record political P.S.A.s , in which his parents talk about causes from Black Lives Matter to getting out the vote .
Patinkin is still singing , too ; he just does it alone , on long walks through the woods , sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when Grody accompanies him , she listens to podcasts instead .
This interview has been edited and condensed .
So , let ’ s just start with the quarantine videos .
Whose idea was this ?
It was Gideon ’ s .
Let ’ s see .
Kathryn ’ s and my first date was April 16 , 1978 , at the Black Sheep tavern , between Washington and Greenwich in New York , in the Village .
So that ’ s our big anniversary .
That ’ s even more important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ So that date came , April 16th .
The pandemic was somewhat new , about a month old .
Gideon had come back from wherever he was , and he was quarantining for a couple of weeks , and we would take walks on the road .
He asked us a question , and the question had to do with the anniversary or something , and then Kathryn started saying something .
We were standing in front of the forsythia trees on the road and he taped .
Then a few days later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ really something I liked.
” And he said , “ Can we put it on your social media ?
” So he posts it and it gets this crazy amount of attention .
And he ’ s like , “ Dad , people just want more of this.
” Has this made you more technologically savvy ?
I didn ’ t know how to upload or download .
I was just worried that if I touch it , I ’ ll destroy everything .
Now I know how to do that .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I can upload ; I can tweet .
I don ’ t know what it ’ s called on Instagram , but I can do that , too , without endangering the history of it all .
Does it feel like an accurate picture to you , when you watch those videos , of you and Kathryn ’ s relationship ?
It ’ s a hundred per cent accurate .
The kids would always say over the years , “ The two of you , you ought to be a TV show.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , shut up.
” I want to go back .
You grew up on the South Side of Chicago .
How much do you feel like Chicago is in you ?
Because I think of you in certain ways as such a New Yorker now .
I ’ m a Midwest Chicago boy .
I ’ ve only come to understand partly why I love it , because it is the heart of America .
It ’ s not the East or West Coast , where the populace is , that everybody ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ center of the country , and there ’ s a modesty .
It ’ s sort of the Avis of humanity .
But did you have New York as a dream , even as a young person ?
Well , I was thirteen years old .
I guess I was always performing in front of the mirror , and we had one of those stereos that you buy at Sears , Roebuck and Company , with the grille in front , made of wood , and it had a turntable .
My dad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ records .
One was Skitch Henderson doing selections from the Broadway musical “ Mame ” with Angela Lansbury .
Then there was another record of “ Fiddler on the Roof ” with Zero Mostel , and there was another record of “ Mame.
” So I had my bar mitzvah , and my dad , who I don ’ t think I ’ d ever been on a trip with in my life alone , decides to take me to New York .
I ’ m not sure why .
He died when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so I never got to ask him why .
I ’ d love to know now .
Maybe because you were becoming a man .
I think he wanted to show me some things in specific that I ’ ll tell you , but I don ’ t think it was about show business .
But one of the shows we went to see was “ Mame ” with Angela Lansbury .
Wow , you were all in on “ Mame.
” He was , not me .
My dad waited at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back of the Winter Garden Theatre .
We waited for one hour till Miss Lansbury came outside .
He wanted to get her autograph .
Years later , I ’ m at Harold Prince ’ s house .
I forget what the party was for , but I think we were doing “ Evita ” at the time .
I ’ m sitting in the back room , having a conversation with somebody on a couch , all alone , and there ’ s a piano .
A guy walks in the room @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talking to says , “ Mandy , this is Stephen Sondheim.
” I go , “ Oh .
Aren ’ t you the guy on that ‘ Scrabble ’ album ?
” At the time , I really hadn ’ t put it together that he was also the guy that wrote “ West Side Story ” and everything else .
But he says , “ Yeah.
” And he sits down at the piano and he sings , just for this person and myself , “ Anyone Can Whistle.
” And he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I turned to the person I ’ ve been sitting with , who happened to be Angela Lansbury , and I said to her , “ Miss Lansbury , that was wonderful .
But I have to tell you something much more important .
The wrong guy is sitting here .
My father loved you .
And if he were sitting here , he ’ d be in heaven ’ s heaven.
” Well , I love that story .
Now why do you think your father took you to New York ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Statue of Liberty .
We went to the top of the Empire State Building .
He took me to my first Broadway show , which was “ Walking Happy.
” Then he took me to Williamsburg to show me the community of the Hasidim who live in Williamsburg .
Then we went to Ellis Island , where Grandpa Max came and all my ancestors landed .
Now their family names are on the plaque at Ellis Island .

One recent afternoon, I picked up my cell phone to see that I had a missed call and voice mail from an unknown number. “Hey, Rachel, this is Mandy Patinkin calling,” a gruff, lyrical voice, not unlike that of Rowlf the Muppet, said when I pressed play on the message. Patinkin invited me to call him back to schedule our Zoom interview and concluded with “Look forward to hearing your voice,” as if his voice, a scraggly, gooey basso that can instantly vault upward into an angelic falsetto, were not the raison d’etre behind our conversation. There was a softness to the message—and a disarming familiarity. I’d figured his publicist would call me before he did; that’s how these things tend to go.
Patinkin has said before that the word by which he defines his entire life and career is “connect.” It’s a word he uttered repeatedly when he played a fictionalized version of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat (and Seurat’s artist great-grandson, also called George) in the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park with George.” “Connect, George. Connect,” his character pleads with himself in the second act, lamenting his tendency to isolate himself from others in order to create works of art. “If I have a tombstone—I don’t know what I’m going to have or not. I’m leaving it up to the children. I can’t deal with that—but if there is anything written anywhere, I would like it to say ‘He Tried to Connect,’ ” Patinkin told me when our interview took place, over two and a half hours on a recent morning.
Patinkin’s own performances have connected so many times, and with so many different fandoms, over the course of his four-decade career. If you are a child of the nineteen-eighties, you may know him as the avenging swordsman Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride” (a role he recently revisited, with gusto, for a virtual cast reunion). If you are a fan of Barbra Streisand’s directorial work, you may know him as the hirsute love interest Avigdor from 1983’s “Yentl.” If you love television drama, you may know him as the kindly mentor Saul Berenson to Claire Danes’s unpredictable C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison on Showtime’s “Homeland.” And if you are a musical-theatre buff, you may think of him as more or less a superstar, one of the most vibrant countertenors to ever grace the Broadway stage. After growing up on the South Side of Chicago and studying at Juilliard—alongside the likes of Robin Williams, William Hurt, and Patti LuPone—Patinkin had his breakout stage role as Che in “Evita,” for which he won a Tony Award, in 1980.
Still, Patinkin has to some extent flown under the radar as a show-business figure. He has been spending the pandemic at his small, converted farmhouse, in upstate New York, with his wife of forty years, the writer and actress Kathryn Grody, but he has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since the nineteen-seventies, and he still maintains a low-enough profile there to shop at Barney Greengrass and Murray’s Sturgeon Shop without causing a stir. (This may be in part because, with his casual hiking clothes, rimless wire glasses, and bushy eyebrows, he blends into the dad-ish neighborhood aesthetic.) Over the past few months, though, Patinkin has fallen into a new, unexpected role: quarantine social-media star. In April, his son Gideon began broadcasting the idle banter between his parents as they puttered around the house, and two new boomer Internet stars were born. In an early video, Gideon asks Patinkin and Grody about popular web acronyms; LMAO, Patinkin guesses, stands for “let me alone, oaf.” The couple munch on matzo, slow-dance to old half-remembered songs, and, at one point, perform a Stooge-like comedy routine in which Grody breaks a bottle and an egg over Patinkin’s head. Patinkin stressed to me that he recognizes the power of his new platform. Between filming quirky home videos, Gideon has made it his “full-time job” to record political P.S.A.s, in which his parents talk about causes from Black Lives Matter to getting out the vote. Patinkin is still singing, too; he just does it alone, on long walks through the woods, sometimes running through his entire repertoire. Lately, when Grody accompanies him, she listens to podcasts instead.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
So, let’s just start with the quarantine videos. Whose idea was this?
It was Gideon’s. Let’s see. Kathryn’s and my first date was April 16, 1978, at the Black Sheep tavern, between Washington and Greenwich in New York, in the Village. So that’s our big anniversary. That’s even more important to us than our wedding date. So that date came, April 16th. The pandemic was somewhat new, about a month old. Gideon had come back from wherever he was, and he was quarantining for a couple of weeks, and we would take walks on the road. He asked us a question, and the question had to do with the anniversary or something, and then Kathryn started saying something. We were standing in front of the forsythia trees on the road and he taped. Then a few days later, he says, “This was really something I liked.” And he said, “Can we put it on your social media?” So he posts it and it gets this crazy amount of attention. And he’s like, “Dad, people just want more of this.”
Has this made you more technologically savvy?
I didn’t know how to upload or download. I was just worried that if I touch it, I’ll destroy everything. Now I know how to do that. I’m very proud of myself. I can upload; I can tweet. I don’t know what it’s called on Instagram, but I can do that, too, without endangering the history of it all.
Does it feel like an accurate picture to you, when you watch those videos, of you and Kathryn’s relationship?
It’s a hundred per cent accurate. The kids would always say over the years, “The two of you, you ought to be a TV show.” We’d say, “Oh, shut up.”
I want to go back. You grew up on the South Side of Chicago. How much do you feel like Chicago is in you? Because I think of you in certain ways as such a New Yorker now.
I’m a Midwest Chicago boy. I’ve only come to understand partly why I love it, because it is the heart of America. It’s not the East or West Coast, where the populace is, that everybody’s talking about. It is the center of the country, and there’s a modesty. It’s sort of the Avis of humanity.
But did you have New York as a dream, even as a young person?
Well, I was thirteen years old. I guess I was always performing in front of the mirror, and we had one of those stereos that you buy at Sears, Roebuck and Company, with the grille in front, made of wood, and it had a turntable. My dad had, like, three or four records. One was Skitch Henderson doing selections from the Broadway musical “Mame” with Angela Lansbury. Then there was another record of “Fiddler on the Roof” with Zero Mostel, and there was another record of “Mame.” So I had my bar mitzvah, and my dad, who I don’t think I’d ever been on a trip with in my life alone, decides to take me to New York. I’m not sure why. He died when I was eighteen, of pancreatic cancer, so I never got to ask him why. I’d love to know now.


newyorker--2020-10-12--Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself

Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself

One of Facebook ’ s main content-moderation hubs outside the U.S. is in Dublin , where , every day , moderators review hundreds of thousands of reports of potential rule violations from Europe , Africa , the Middle East , and Latin America .
In December , 2015 , several moderators in the Dublin office—including some on what was called the MENA team , for Middle East and North Africa—noticed that Trump ’ s post was not being taken down .
“ An American politician saying something shitty about Muslims was probably not the most shocking thing I saw that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who worked on content policy related to the Middle East told me .
“ Remember , this is a job that involves looking at beheadings and war crimes.
” The MENA team , whose members spoke Arabic , Farsi , and several other languages , was not tasked with moderating American content ; still , failing to reprimand Trump struck many of them as a mistake , and they expressed their objections to their supervisors .
According to Facebook ’ s guidelines , moderators were to remove any “ calls for exclusion or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American border to Muslims clearly qualified .
The following day , members of the team and other concerned employees met in a glass-walled conference room .
At least one policy executive joined , via video , from the U.S. “ I think it was Joel Kaplan , ” the former Dublin employee told me .
“ I can ’ t be sure .
Frankly , I had trouble telling those white guys apart.
” The former Dublin employee got the impression that “ the attitude from the higher-ups was You emotional Muslims seem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conversation where you feel heard , to calm you down .
Which is hilarious , because a lot of us weren ’ t even Muslim .
Besides , the objection was never , Hey , we ’ re from the Middle East and this hurts our feelings.
” Rather , their message was “ In our expert opinion , this post violates the policies .
So what ’ s the deal ?
” Facebook claims that it has never diluted its protections against hate speech , but that it sometimes makes exceptions in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as those by people in public office .
But a recently acquired version of the Implementation Standards reveals that , by 2017 , Facebook had weakened its rules—not just for politicians but for all users .
In an internal document called the Known Questions—a Talmud-like codicil about how the Implementation Standards should be interpreted—the rules against hate speech now included a loophole : “ We allow content that excludes a group of people who share a protected characteristic from entering a country or continent.
” This was followed by three examples of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The first was “ We should ban Syrians from coming into Germany.
” The next two examples— “ I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States ” and “ We should build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country ” —had been uttered , more or less word for word , by the President of the United States .
For the first few days after content moderators are hired , a trainer guides them through the Implementation Standards , the Known Questions , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are full of technical jargon , not presented in any logical order , ” Chris Gray recalled .
“ I ’ m looking around , going , Most of the people in this room do not speak English as a first language .
How in the hell is this supposed to work ?
” Mildka , who is from Indonesia and whose first language is Bahasa Indonesia , agreed : “ In the training room , you just nod , Yes , yes .
Then you walk out of the room and ask @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Can you explain it in our language ?
’ ” Unlike Facebook ’ s earliest moderators , who were told to use their discretion and moral intuition , the Grays were often encouraged to ignore the context in which an utterance was made .
The Implementation Standards stated that Facebook was “ inclined to tolerate content , and refrain from adding friction to the process of sharing unless it achieves a direct and specific good.
” There is a logic to the argument that moderators should not be allowed to use too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put it , “ You don ’ t want people going rogue , marking pictures as porn because someone is wearing a skirt above the knee or something.
” Nor would it make sense to have Raphael ’ s paintings of cherubs scrubbed from Facebook for violating child-nudity guidelines .
“ At the same time , ” he went on , “ there ’ s got to be a balance between giving your moderators too much freedom and just asking them to turn their brains off.
” Mildka and Chris Gray left Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the U.K. , Channel 4 aired a documentary that had been filmed by an undercover reporter posing as a content moderator in their office .
At one point in the documentary , a trainer gives a slideshow presentation about how to interpret some of the Implementation Standards regarding hate speech .
One slide shows an apparently popular meme : a Norman Rockwell-style image of a white mother who seems to be drowning her daughter in a bathtub , with the caption “ When your daughter ’ s first crush is a little Negro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot , ” the trainer says , “ there ’ s no attack , actually , on the Negro boy .
.
.
so we should ignore this.
” There ’ s a brief pause in the conference room .
“ Is everyone O.K .
with that ?
” the trainer says .
“ No , not O.K.
, ” a moderator responds .
The other moderators laugh uneasily , and the scene ends .
After the footage became public , a Facebook spokesperson claimed that the trainer had made a mistake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that that ’ s a lie , ” Chris Gray told me .
“ When I was there , I got multiple tickets with that exact meme in it , and I was always told to ignore .
You go , ‘ C ’ mon , we all know exactly what this means , ’ but you ’ re told , ‘ Don ’ t make your own judgments.
’ ” A former moderator from Phoenix told me , “ If it was what they say it is— ‘ You ’ re here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else can use it safely ’ —then there ’ s some nobility in that .
But , when you start , you immediately realize we ’ re in no way expected or equipped to fix the problem.
” He provided me with dozens of examples of hate speech—some of which require a good amount of cultural fluency to decode , others as clear-cut as open praise for Hitler—that he says were reviewed by moderators but not removed , “ either because they could not understand why it was hateful , or because they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of trouble with their bosses was to leave borderline stuff up.
” Recently , I talked to two current moderators , who asked me to call them Kate and John .
They live and work in a non-Anglophone European country ; both spoke in accented , erudite English .
“ If you ’ re Mark Zuckerberg , then I ’ m sure applying one minimal set of standards everywhere in the world seems like a form of universalism , ” Kate said .
“ To me , it seems like a kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s no way for the standards to be strengthened , no matter how many people complain.
” They listed several ways in which , in their opinion , their supervisors ’ interpretations of the Implementation Standards conflicted with common sense and basic decency .
“ I just reviewed an Instagram profile with the username KillAllFags , and the profile pic was a rainbow flag being crossed out , ” Kate said .
“ The implied threat is pretty clear , I think , but I couldn ’ t take it down.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ Kill L.G.B.T.
, ’ unless they refer to a person or use pronouns , I have to assume they ’ re talking about killing an idea , ” Kate said .
“ Facebook could change that rule tomorrow , and a lot of people ’ s lives would improve , but they refuse , ” John said .
“ We can ask , but our questions have no impact , ” John said .
“ We just do what they say , or we leave.
” Tommy Robinson , a British Islamophobe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most abrasive allies , often gave interviews in which he was open about his agenda .
“ It ’ s a Muslim invasion of Europe , ” he told Newsweek .
On Facebook , though , he was apparently more coy , avoiding explicit “ calls for exclusion ” and other formulations that the company would recognize as hate speech .
At times , Gray had the uncanny sense that he and the other moderators were acting as unwitting coaches , showing the purveyors of hate speech just how far they could go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d do , anyway , if I were them , ” he said .
“ Learn to color within the lines.
” When Robinson or a Britain First representative posted something unmistakably threatening , a Facebook moderator would often flag the post for removal .
Sometimes a “ quality auditor ” would reverse the decision .
The moderator would then see a deduction in his or her “ quality score , ” which had to remain at ninety-eight per cent or above for the moderator to be in good standing .
Normally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rules multiple times , the page is banned .
But , in the case of Britain First and Tommy Robinson , the bans never came .
Apparently , those two pages were “ shielded , ” which meant that the power to delete them was restricted to Facebook ’ s headquarters in Menlo Park .
No one explained to the moderators why Facebook decided to shield some pages and not others , but , in practice , the shielded pages tended to be those with sizable follower counts , or with significant cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a meaningful flow of revenue .
On December 18 , 2017 , on a Workplace message board called Community Standards Feedback , a recruiter in Facebook ’ s London office posted a Guardian article about Britain First .
“ They are pretty much a hate group , ” he wrote .
He noted that “ today YouTube and Twitter banned them , ” and asked whether Facebook would do the same .
Neil Potts , Facebook ’ s public-policy director for trust and safety , responded , “ Thanks for flagging , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ However , he continued , “ while Britain First shares many of the common tenets of alt-right groups , e.g.
, ultra-nationalism , ” Facebook did not consider it a hate organization .
“ We define hate orgs as those that advance hatred as one of their primary objectives , or that they have leaders who have been convicted of hate-related offenses.
” Another Facebook employee , a Muslim woman , noted that Jayda Fransen , a leader of Britain First , had been convicted of hate crimes against British Muslims .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she asked , “ how was this missed ?
” “ Thanks for flagging , ” Potts responded .
“ I ’ ll make sure our hate org SMEs ” —subject-matter experts— “ are aware of this conviction.
” A month later , in January of 2018 , the female employee revived the Workplace thread .
“ Happy new year !
” she wrote .
“ The Britain First account is still up and running , even though as per above discussion it clearly violates our community standards .
Is anything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Thanks for circling back , ” Potts responded , adding that a “ team is monitoring and evaluating the situation and discussing next steps forward.
” After that , the thread went dormant .
A few weeks later , Darren Osborne , a white Briton , was convicted of murder .
Osborne had driven a van into a crowd near a London mosque , killing a Muslim man named Makram Ali and injuring at least nine other people .
Prosecutors introduced evidence suggesting that Osborne had been inspired to kill , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and by following Britain First and Tommy Robinson on social media .
The judge deemed the killing “ a terrorist act ” by a man who ’ d been “ rapidly radicalized over the Internet.
” Within six weeks , Britain First and Tommy Robinson had been banned from Facebook .
( Pusateri , the Facebook spokesperson , noted that the company has “ banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations.
” ) “ It ’ s an open secret , ” Sophie Zhang , a former data scientist for the company , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.
” Zhang left Facebook in September .
Before she did , she posted a scathing memo on Workplace .
In the memo , which was obtained by BuzzFeed News , she alleged that she had witnessed “ multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales ” ; in some cases , however , “ we simply didn ’ t care enough to stop them.
” She suggested that this was because the abuses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outlets were unlikely to cover .
When Facebook is receiving an unusual amount of bad press for a particularly egregious piece of content , this is referred to within the company as a “ press fire , ” or a “ # PRFire.
” Often , the content has been flagged repeatedly , to no avail , but , in the context of a press fire , it receives prompt attention .
A Facebook moderator who currently works in a European city shared with me a full record of the internal software system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There were dozens of press fires in progress .
Facebook was being criticized—by Facebook users , primarily—for allowing widespread bullying against Greta Thunberg , the teen-age climate activist , who has Asperger ’ s syndrome .
The content moderators were instructed to apply an ad-hoc exemption : “ Remove all instances of attacks aimed at Greta Thunberg using the terms or hashtag : ‘ Gretarded ’ , ‘ Retard ’ or ‘ Retarded.
’ ” No similar protections were extended to other young activists , including those whose bullying was unlikely to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ woman who worked as a content-moderation supervisor in the U.S. told me , “ You can ask for a meeting , present your bosses with bullet points of evidence , tell them you ’ ve got team members who are depressed and suicidal—doesn ’ t help .
Pretty much the only language Facebook understands is public embarrassment.
” Last year , she co-founded a not-for-profit called Foxglove , where she is one of two employees .
The foxglove , a wildflower also known as digitalis , can be either medicinal or toxic to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s ingested .
The group ’ s mission is to empower the tech industry ’ s most vulnerable workers—to help them “ clean up their factory floor , ” as Crider often puts it .
Her more ambitious goal is to redesign the factory .
She was influenced by Shoshana Zuboff , the author of “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , ” who argues that “ instrumentarian ” behemoths such as Facebook pose an existential threat to democracy .
In Crider ’ s analysis , not even the most ingenious technocratic fix @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the core problem : its content-moderation priorities won ’ t change until its algorithms stop amplifying whatever content is most enthralling or emotionally manipulative .
This might require a new business model , perhaps even a less profitable one , which is why Crider isn ’ t hopeful that it will happen voluntarily .
“ I wish I could file a global injunction against the monetization of attention , ” she said .
“ In the meantime , you find more specific ways to create pressure.
” In July , 2019 , Crider @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Europe who was able to map out how the whole system worked .
This moderator put her in touch with other moderators , who put her in touch with still others .
Sometimes , while courting a moderator as a potential source , Crider arranged a meeting and flew to wherever the person lived , only to be stood up .
Those who did talk to her were almost always unwilling to go on the record .
The process reminded Crider of the months she ’ d spent in Yemen and Pakistan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ They often have very little reason to talk , and every reason in the world not to , ” she said .
The content moderators were not yet ready to form a union— “ not even close , ” Crider told me—but she hoped to inculcate in them a kind of latent class consciousness , an awareness of themselves as a collective workforce .

There’s a brief pause in the conference room. “Is everyone O.K. with that?” the trainer says.
“No, not O.K.,” a moderator responds. The other moderators laugh uneasily, and the scene ends.
After the footage became public, a Facebook spokesperson claimed that the trainer had made a mistake. “I know for a fact that that’s a lie,” Chris Gray told me. “When I was there, I got multiple tickets with that exact meme in it, and I was always told to ignore. You go, ‘C’mon, we all know exactly what this means,’ but you’re told, ‘Don’t make your own judgments.’ ”
A former moderator from Phoenix told me, “If it was what they say it is—‘You’re here to clean up this platform so everyone else can use it safely’—then there’s some nobility in that. But, when you start, you immediately realize we’re in no way expected or equipped to fix the problem.” He provided me with dozens of examples of hate speech—some of which require a good amount of cultural fluency to decode, others as clear-cut as open praise for Hitler—that he says were reviewed by moderators but not removed, “either because they could not understand why it was hateful, or because they assumed that the best way to stay out of trouble with their bosses was to leave borderline stuff up.”
Recently, I talked to two current moderators, who asked me to call them Kate and John. They live and work in a non-Anglophone European country; both spoke in accented, erudite English. “If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, then I’m sure applying one minimal set of standards everywhere in the world seems like a form of universalism,” Kate said. “To me, it seems like a kind of libertarian imperialism, especially if there’s no way for the standards to be strengthened, no matter how many people complain.”
They listed several ways in which, in their opinion, their supervisors’ interpretations of the Implementation Standards conflicted with common sense and basic decency. “I just reviewed an Instagram profile with the username KillAllFags, and the profile pic was a rainbow flag being crossed out,” Kate said. “The implied threat is pretty clear, I think, but I couldn’t take it down.”
“Our supervisors insist that L.G.B.T. is a concept,” John explained.
“So if I see someone posting ‘Kill L.G.B.T.,’ unless they refer to a person or use pronouns, I have to assume they’re talking about killing an idea,” Kate said.
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Facebook could change that rule tomorrow, and a lot of people’s lives would improve, but they refuse,” John said.
“Why?” I said.
“We can ask, but our questions have no impact,” John said. “We just do what they say, or we leave.”
Around the time the Grays were hired, Britain First, a white-nationalist political party in the U.K., had a Facebook page with about two million followers. (By contrast, Theresa May, then the Prime Minister, had fewer than five hundred thousand followers.) Offline, Britain First engaged in scare tactics: driving around Muslim parts of London in combat jeeps, barging into mosques wearing green paramilitary-style uniforms. On Facebook, Chris Gray said, members of Britain First would sometimes post videos featuring “a bunch of thugs moving through London, going, ‘Look, there’s a halal butcher. There’s a mosque. We need to reclaim our streets.’ ” A moderator who was empowered to consider the context—the fact that “Britain First” echoes “America First,” a slogan once used by Nazi sympathizers in the U.S.; the ominous connotation of the word “reclaim”—could have made the judgment that the Party members’ words and actions, taken together, were a call for violence. “But you’re not allowed to look at the context,” Gray said. “You can only look at what’s right in front of you.” Britain First’s posts, he said, were “constantly getting reported, but the posts that ended up in my queue never quite went over the line to where I could delete them. The wording would always be just vague enough.”
Tommy Robinson, a British Islamophobe and one of Britain First’s most abrasive allies, often gave interviews in which he was open about his agenda. “It’s a Muslim invasion of Europe,” he told Newsweek. On Facebook, though, he was apparently more coy, avoiding explicit “calls for exclusion” and other formulations that the company would recognize as hate speech. At times, Gray had the uncanny sense that he and the other moderators were acting as unwitting coaches, showing the purveyors of hate speech just how far they could go. “That’s what I’d do, anyway, if I were them,” he said. “Learn to color within the lines.” When Robinson or a Britain First representative posted something unmistakably threatening, a Facebook moderator would often flag the post for removal. Sometimes a “quality auditor” would reverse the decision. The moderator would then see a deduction in his or her “quality score,” which had to remain at ninety-eight per cent or above for the moderator to be in good standing.
Normally, after a Facebook page violates the rules multiple times, the page is banned. But, in the case of Britain First and Tommy Robinson, the bans never came. Apparently, those two pages were “shielded,” which meant that the power to delete them was restricted to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. No one explained to the moderators why Facebook decided to shield some pages and not others, but, in practice, the shielded pages tended to be those with sizable follower counts, or with significant cultural or political clout—pages whose removal might interrupt a meaningful flow of revenue.
There is little recourse for a content moderator who has qualms about the Implementation Standards. Full-time Facebook employees are given more dispensation to question almost any aspect of company policy, as long as they do so internally. On Workplace, a custom version of the network that only Facebook staffers can access, their disagreements are often candid, even confrontational. The former Dublin employee who worked on Middle East policy believes that Facebook’s management tolerates internal dissent in order to keep it from spilling into public view: “Your average tech bro—Todd in Menlo Park, or whatever—has to continually be made to feel like he’s part of a force for good. So whenever Todd notices anything about Facebook that he finds disturbing there has to be some way for his critiques to be heard. Whether anything actually changes as a result of those critiques is a separate question.”
On December 18, 2017, on a Workplace message board called Community Standards Feedback, a recruiter in Facebook’s London office posted a Guardian article about Britain First. “They are pretty much a hate group,” he wrote. He noted that “today YouTube and Twitter banned them,” and asked whether Facebook would do the same.
Neil Potts, Facebook’s public-policy director for trust and safety, responded, “Thanks for flagging, and we are monitoring this situation closely.” However, he continued, “while Britain First shares many of the common tenets of alt-right groups, e.g., ultra-nationalism,” Facebook did not consider it a hate organization. “We define hate orgs as those that advance hatred as one of their primary objectives, or that they have leaders who have been convicted of hate-related offenses.”
Another Facebook employee, a Muslim woman, noted that Jayda Fransen, a leader of Britain First, had been convicted of hate crimes against British Muslims. “If the situation is being monitored closely,” she asked, “how was this missed?”
“Thanks for flagging,” Potts responded. “I’ll make sure our hate org SMEs”—subject-matter experts—“are aware of this conviction.”
A month later, in January of 2018, the female employee revived the Workplace thread. “Happy new year!” she wrote. “The Britain First account is still up and running, even though as per above discussion it clearly violates our community standards. Is anything being done about this?”
“Thanks for circling back,” Potts responded, adding that a “team is monitoring and evaluating the situation and discussing next steps forward.” After that, the thread went dormant.
A few weeks later, Darren Osborne, a white Briton, was convicted of murder. Osborne had driven a van into a crowd near a London mosque, killing a Muslim man named Makram Ali and injuring at least nine other people. Prosecutors introduced evidence suggesting that Osborne had been inspired to kill, at least in part, by a BBC miniseries and by following Britain First and Tommy Robinson on social media. The judge deemed the killing “a terrorist act” by a man who’d been “rapidly radicalized over the Internet.” Within six weeks, Britain First and Tommy Robinson had been banned from Facebook. (Pusateri, the Facebook spokesperson, noted that the company has “banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations.”)
“It’s an open secret,” Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist for the company, recently wrote, “that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.” Zhang left Facebook in September. Before she did, she posted a scathing memo on Workplace. In the memo, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, she alleged that she had witnessed “multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales”; in some cases, however, “we simply didn’t care enough to stop them.” She suggested that this was because the abuses were occurring in countries that American news outlets were unlikely to cover.
When Facebook is receiving an unusual amount of bad press for a particularly egregious piece of content, this is referred to within the company as a “press fire,” or a “#PRFire.” Often, the content has been flagged repeatedly, to no avail, but, in the context of a press fire, it receives prompt attention. A Facebook moderator who currently works in a European city shared with me a full record of the internal software system as it appeared on a recent day. There were dozens of press fires in progress. Facebook was being criticized—by Facebook users, primarily—for allowing widespread bullying against Greta Thunberg, the teen-age climate activist, who has Asperger’s syndrome. The content moderators were instructed to apply an ad-hoc exemption: “Remove all instances of attacks aimed at Greta Thunberg using the terms or hashtag: ‘Gretarded’, ‘Retard’ or ‘Retarded.’ ” No similar protections were extended to other young activists, including those whose bullying was unlikely to inspire such a public backlash. A woman who worked as a content-moderation supervisor in the U.S. told me, “You can ask for a meeting, present your bosses with bullet points of evidence, tell them you’ve got team members who are depressed and suicidal—doesn’t help. Pretty much the only language Facebook understands is public embarrassment.”
Facebook moderators have scant workplace protections and little job security. The closest they have to a labor organizer is Cori Crider, a lawyer and an activist based in London. Crider grew up in rural Texas and left as soon as she could, going first to Austin, for college; then to Harvard, for law school; and then to London, where she worked for a decade at a small human-rights organization, representing Guantánamo detainees and the relatives of drone-strike victims in Yemen and Pakistan. “It was through worrying about drones that I came to worry about technology,” she said. “I started to feel like, While we’re all focussed on the surveillance tactics of the Pentagon, a handful of companies out of California are collecting data on a scale that would honestly be the envy of any state.”
Last year, she co-founded a not-for-profit called Foxglove, where she is one of two employees. The foxglove, a wildflower also known as digitalis, can be either medicinal or toxic to humans, depending on how it’s ingested. The group’s mission is to empower the tech industry’s most vulnerable workers—to help them “clean up their factory floor,” as Crider often puts it. Her more ambitious goal is to redesign the factory. She was influenced by Shoshana Zuboff, the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” who argues that “instrumentarian” behemoths such as Facebook pose an existential threat to democracy. In Crider’s analysis, not even the most ingenious technocratic fix to Facebook’s guidelines can address the core problem: its content-moderation priorities won’t change until its algorithms stop amplifying whatever content is most enthralling or emotionally manipulative. This might require a new business model, perhaps even a less profitable one, which is why Crider isn’t hopeful that it will happen voluntarily. “I wish I could file a global injunction against the monetization of attention,” she said. “In the meantime, you find more specific ways to create pressure.”
“Can’t say I agree with his methods, but I’ll be damned if there’s a horse that man can’t break.” Cartoon by Lars Kenseth Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In July, 2019, Crider was introduced to a Facebook moderator in Europe who was able to map out how the whole system worked. This moderator put her in touch with other moderators, who put her in touch with still others. Sometimes, while courting a moderator as a potential source, Crider arranged a meeting and flew to wherever the person lived, only to be stood up. Those who did talk to her were almost always unwilling to go on the record. The process reminded Crider of the months she’d spent in Yemen and Pakistan, trying to gain people’s trust. “They often have very little reason to talk, and every reason in the world not to,” she said. The content moderators were not yet ready to form a union—“not even close,” Crider told me—but she hoped to inculcate in them a kind of latent class consciousness, an awareness of themselves as a collective workforce.
Last October, Crider met Chris Gray at a conference in London. She started introducing him to journalists and activists, helping to spread his story. Two months later, Gray hired a local law firm and sued Facebook in Irish High Court, alleging that his “repeated and unrelenting exposure to extremely disturbing, graphic and violent content” had caused him lasting psychological trauma. Shortly thereafter, about twenty more former Facebook moderators in Dublin contacted the law firm representing Gray to ask about possible lawsuits against the company.
Soon after Gray left Facebook, he wrote a fifty-three-hundred-word memo to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, laying out his critiques of the content-moderation process. He proposed a few fixes, which ranged from the granular (“The hotkey system is a mess”) to the sweeping (“Rewrite . . . all of your user privacy policies”). None, however, addressed what he considered to be the underlying issue. On the whole, he concluded, Facebook “is not committed to content moderation, does not have a clear strategy or even a good handle on how to do it, and the people trying to do the actual work are under immense pressure to shovel shit uphill without proper tools or direction. . . . There is no leadership, no clear moral compass.” He e-mailed the memo to Zuckerberg and Sandberg from an anonymous address: shovellingshituphill@gmail.com.
Jair Bolsonaro, the autocratic Brazilian politician, ran for President, in 2018, on a shoestring budget. To get his message out, he relied heavily on Facebook, whose social-media apps are the most popular in his country. Since taking office, in 2019, he has delivered a weekly Presidential address on Facebook Live. Earlier this year, during one speech, he said of Brazil’s indigenous population, “The Indian has changed. He is evolving and becoming, more and more, a human being like us.” Bolsonaro’s racism was not exactly a surprise, but his comments caused an uproar nonetheless. Facebook did not remove the video, even though its guidelines prohibit “dehumanizing speech,” including any insinuations of “subhumanity.”
David Thiel, a cybersecurity expert at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, read about the controversy. (He is unrelated to Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump donor who sits on Facebook’s board.) After searching for the speech on Facebook, he was shocked to find that it was still up. He wrote on Workplace, “I assume we’ll be removing this video from our platform?” His question was passed on to subject-matter experts, including one in Brasília and one in Dublin. Both ruled that the video did not violate the guidelines. “President Bolsonaro is known by his controversial and ‘politically incorrect’ speeches,” the expert in Brasília wrote. “He is actually referring to indigenous people becoming more integrated to the society (as opposed to isolated in their own tribes).” This did not satisfy Thiel, in part because the expert, who has worked for at least one pro-Bolsonaro politician, did not strike him as an objective source. Also, given that Facebook’s local sales representatives had surely encouraged Bolsonaro to use their products, there may have been a conflict of interest. “It’s awkward for a business to go from a posture of ‘Please, sir, use our product,’ to ‘Actually, sir, you’re now in trouble for using our product,’ ” he said.


newyorker--2020-10-12--“AngelHeaded Hipster”: Hal Willner Does T. Rex

Hal Willner , the music producer , who died in April of complications from COVID-19 , at the age of sixty-four , was perhaps best known and loved as a congregator of diverse talent , the ever-expanding stable of artists who shared , or soon came to share , his ardent enthusiasms .
Through the decades , he and these motley assemblages put on dozens of ( often chaotic ) themed concerts and released a dozen albums in tribute to other artists and genres .
The first of these , in 1981 , was a reinterpretation of Nino Rota ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fellini .
There followed eccentric homages to Thelonious Monk , Harold Arlen , Charles Mingus , and Kurt Weill .
His last , released posthumously this fall , is “ AngelHeaded Hipster , ” with a wide range of covers of the songs of Marc Bolan , the T. Rex front man , who died in a car crash in 1977 .
By this point , the guest players came not so much for the material as for the man .
“ If Hal called and said he wanted me to do yard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a minute trimming the hedges , ” Wayne Kramer , a co-founder of the band MC5 said the other day .
“ Everything he asked me to do was a complete pleasure .
It was always a big payday , but not in money .
Hal and I go way back , to his early sobriety days : his Edgar Allan Poe record.
” That would be “ Closed on Account of Rabies , ” a spoken-word album from 1997 .
“ I was improvising on guitar while Christopher Walken read ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Willner released a record he ’ d been hired to make , called “ New Prohibition : A Musical History of Hemp.
” Kramer worked on that one , too .
Willner conscripted Taj Mahal , John Sinclair , and Dee Dee Ramone , among others .
One track featured the singer Sweet Pea Atkinson , who also died last spring .
“ Sweet Pea was a crusty character , but he had a heart of gold .
There was a lyric in one of the songs about the Scythians .
Sweet Pea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is this shit ?
Who the fuck are these motherfuckers ?
’ And Hal tried to explain and Sweet Pea said , ‘ All right , play it again , I ’ ll sing it.
’ ” Kramer performed on two tracks on the Bolan album , though he couldn ’ t remember which .
( One was “ Children of the Revolution , ” with Kesha . )
“ The songs we did I learned that day on the job , ” he said .
“ Bolan and T. Rex , me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at about the same time.
” Lucinda Williams recorded a track , too : for Hal , not Bolan .
“ I remember when that song ‘ Bang a Gong ’ was on the radio , ” she said , over the phone from Nashville .
“ I never really connected to it .
But then I went onstage with Yo La Tengo at one of their Hanukkah shows in New York and we played it , and I thought , This is cool.
” On the Bolan record , she performs “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Thomas Bartlett , the pianist , who was the musical director on some of the Bolan sessions , said recently , “ I love Lucinda ’ s vocal .
It sounds like she ’ s possibly dying.
” ) Willner had produced Williams ’ s 2007 album , “ West , ” after her husband and manager , Tom Overby , a longtime Willner nut , played her the Willner-produced 1987 Marianne Faithfull album , “ Strange Weather.
” Williams had already basically recorded “ West ” with her band , but Willner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ including Bill Frisell and Jim Keltner .
Williams refused to sing the songs again , so they grafted her takes from the earlier sessions onto the new ones .
“ There was definitely some head-butting involved , ” Williams said .
Overby took the phone and said , “ Hal used to joke that he was the only producer who Lu worked with and still talked to.
” Williams and Overby had got the news of Willner ’ s demise on the same day they heard about John Prine ’ s .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Williams said .
Brrrng-brrrng .
“ I met Hal in 1999 , when we did the Harry Smith Project , ” the singer-songwriter Beth Orton said , from London , referring to Willner ’ s staging of Smith ’ s folk-music canon .
“ I sang a cover of ‘ Frankie , ’ the Mississippi John Hurt song .
That ’ s how I became part of his travelling theatre circus .
I never stopped off.
” For the Bolan project , she sang “ Hippy Gumbo , ” a deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knowing the person .
He cast people .
He brought an air of happenstance that ended up being anything but .
You always felt you were doing him a favor , not realizing that he was the one doing me an incredible favor by appreciating me.
” Click .
“ I am a Hal guy , ” Thomas Bartlett , the musical director , said , from his studio in midtown .
“ When I was fifteen or sixteen , I was living in London , studying classical piano .
I wasn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I did get to attend concerts .
I went to Nick Cave ’ s Meltdown festival ; this was the year they were doing the Harry Smith Project .
I knew very little about that world , but I felt immediately that I ’ d found my tribe .
I thought , These are the people I ’ m going to work with .
Hal was an unfailing champion of the delicate oddballs out there .
The ones who through self-sabotage , or whatever , never really made it.
” What about Marc @ @ @ @ @ @ @ music I knew or cared about , ” he said .
♦

Hal Willner Illustration by João Fazenda
Hal Willner, the music producer, who died in April of complications from COVID-19, at the age of sixty-four, was perhaps best known and loved as a congregator of diverse talent, the ever-expanding stable of artists who shared, or soon came to share, his ardent enthusiasms. Through the decades, he and these motley assemblages put on dozens of (often chaotic) themed concerts and released a dozen albums in tribute to other artists and genres. The first of these, in 1981, was a reinterpretation of Nino Rota’s scores from the films of Federico Fellini. There followed eccentric homages to Thelonious Monk, Harold Arlen, Charles Mingus, and Kurt Weill. His last, released posthumously this fall, is “AngelHeaded Hipster,” with a wide range of covers of the songs of Marc Bolan, the T. Rex front man, who died in a car crash in 1977.
By this point, the guest players came not so much for the material as for the man.
“If Hal called and said he wanted me to do yard work, I’d be there in a minute trimming the hedges,” Wayne Kramer, a co-founder of the band MC5 said the other day. “Everything he asked me to do was a complete pleasure. It was always a big payday, but not in money. Hal and I go way back, to his early sobriety days: his Edgar Allan Poe record.” That would be “Closed on Account of Rabies,” a spoken-word album from 1997. “I was improvising on guitar while Christopher Walken read ‘The Raven.’ ”
In 2000, Willner released a record he’d been hired to make, called “New Prohibition: A Musical History of Hemp.” Kramer worked on that one, too. Willner conscripted Taj Mahal, John Sinclair, and Dee Dee Ramone, among others. One track featured the singer Sweet Pea Atkinson, who also died last spring. “Sweet Pea was a crusty character, but he had a heart of gold. There was a lyric in one of the songs about the Scythians. Sweet Pea was all, ‘What the fuck is this shit? Who the fuck are these motherfuckers?’ And Hal tried to explain and Sweet Pea said, ‘All right, play it again, I’ll sing it.’ ”
Kramer performed on two tracks on the Bolan album, though he couldn’t remember which. (One was “Children of the Revolution,” with Kesha.) “The songs we did I learned that day on the job,” he said. “Bolan and T. Rex, me and the MC5, we all emerged at about the same time.”
Lucinda Williams recorded a track, too: for Hal, not Bolan. “I remember when that song ‘Bang a Gong’ was on the radio,” she said, over the phone from Nashville. “I never really connected to it. But then I went onstage with Yo La Tengo at one of their Hanukkah shows in New York and we played it, and I thought, This is cool.” On the Bolan record, she performs “Life’s a Gas.” (Thomas Bartlett, the pianist, who was the musical director on some of the Bolan sessions, said recently, “I love Lucinda’s vocal. It sounds like she’s possibly dying.”)
Willner had produced Williams’s 2007 album, “West,” after her husband and manager, Tom Overby, a longtime Willner nut, played her the Willner-produced 1987 Marianne Faithfull album, “Strange Weather.” Williams had already basically recorded “West” with her band, but Willner started over, with new musicians, including Bill Frisell and Jim Keltner. Williams refused to sing the songs again, so they grafted her takes from the earlier sessions onto the new ones.
“There was definitely some head-butting involved,” Williams said.
Overby took the phone and said, “Hal used to joke that he was the only producer who Lu worked with and still talked to.”
Williams and Overby had got the news of Willner’s demise on the same day they heard about John Prine’s. “I just can’t stand it,” Williams said.
Brrrng-brrrng. “I met Hal in 1999, when we did the Harry Smith Project,” the singer-songwriter Beth Orton said, from London, referring to Willner’s staging of Smith’s folk-music canon. “I sang a cover of ‘Frankie,’ the Mississippi John Hurt song. That’s how I became part of his travelling theatre circus. I never stopped off.” For the Bolan project, she sang “Hippy Gumbo,” a deep cut. “Hal chose the songs knowing the person. He cast people. He brought an air of happenstance that ended up being anything but. You always felt you were doing him a favor, not realizing that he was the one doing me an incredible favor by appreciating me.”
Click. “I am a Hal guy,” Thomas Bartlett, the musical director, said, from his studio in midtown. “When I was fifteen or sixteen, I was living in London, studying classical piano. I wasn’t allowed to do much, but I did get to attend concerts. I went to Nick Cave’s Meltdown festival; this was the year they were doing the Harry Smith Project. I knew very little about that world, but I felt immediately that I’d found my tribe. I thought, These are the people I’m going to work with. Hal was an unfailing champion of the delicate oddballs out there. The ones who through self-sabotage, or whatever, never really made it.”
What about Marc Bolan? “That’s not music I knew or cared about,” he said. ♦