newyorker--2020-09-22--Why the Supreme Court Battle Seems Unlikely to Transform the Election

Back in February , when pollsters for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal did some head-to-head polling for this year ’ s Presidential election , they found Joe Biden , who was then struggling in the Democratic primary , leading Donald Trump by eight points nationally , fifty-two per cent to forty-four per cent .
On Sunday , a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the Biden-Harris ticket leading the Trump-Pence ticket by exactly the same margin ( fifty-one per cent to forty-three per cent ) .
Other head-to-head surveys have exhibited a similar pattern .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on January 1st of this year , Biden was leading Trump by 49.0 per cent to 43.3 per cent , a gap of 5.7 points .
On Tuesday morning , the poll average showed Biden ahead of Trump by 49.5 per cent to 43.0 per cent , a gap of 6.5 points .
In eight and a half months , the race has shifted by less than a percentage point .
Of course , some people dismiss the polls entirely .
( After what happened in 2016 , you can hardly blame them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polling data seriously , the thing that stands out about the 2020 election thus far is its stability in the face of a whole series of tumultuous happenings—from Trump ’ s impeachment trial ; to the coronavirus pandemic ; to the death of George Floyd and the massive wave of protests it generated ; to the recent revelations about Trump insulting America ’ s war dead and admitting that he knew the dangers of the coronavirus back in February .
Now we are headed for another tumultuous happening : a bitter partisan battle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a conservative replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who died on Friday .
Should we expect this to have a bigger impact on the election than all the other consequential things that have happened this year ?
On Monday , I called Peter D. Hart , a veteran Democratic pollster , and he told me that we shouldn ’ t have any such expectation .
Together with a Republican pollster , Hart ’ s eponymous research firm carries out the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll .
The fight over the Supreme Court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election , Hart said , “ but , right now , I don ’ t have any evidence to say it ’ s going to happen .
Nothing that has occurred in the first nine months of this year has caused any major fluctuations in voter preferences.
” And it ’ s not just this lack of movement that makes this election different from many others , Hart went on .
The number of people who say they are still undecided is much lower than normal .
In a typical election year , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be somewhere in the double digits by September .
In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll , it ’ s now at six per cent .
So there are far fewer voters left to be won over .
When I asked Hart how he explained all this , he spelled out the name “ Donald Trump.
” After a chuckle , he went on , “ The polarization of attitudes towards Donald Trump has been greater than we have ever seen in our Presidential polling .
This is the only President in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had one month , one week , one day when the majority of the American public has given him a positive job-approval rating.
” Last December , the NBC/Journal poll showed Trump with a job-approval rating of forty-four per cent and a job-disapproval rating of fifty-four per cent .
The new poll shows Trump with a forty-five-per-cent job-approval rating and a fifty-three-per-cent disapproval rating .
In statistical terms , these findings are practically the same .
With the American public ’ s attitude toward Trump seemingly set in stone , it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could create a solid conservative majority on the Court for many years—to shift the race very much .
The counter-argument , which some Republicans are making , is that the fight over Ginsburg ’ s replacement will unite the G.O.P .
and increase turnout among Republican voters .
Speaking to the Associated Press over the weekend , Leonard Leo , the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society , said , “ This can be an important galvanizing force for President Trump.
” Hart didn ’ t entirely discount such a possibility .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Court nomination could have some effect on turnout .
But , if that happens , it seems likely to boost the Democratic voting tally as well as the Republican one .
With the balance of the Court having shifted sharply to the right since Trump took office , its future composition is now an issue of huge consequence for both Democrats and Republicans .
In a survey from the Pew Research Center that was released in August , sixty-one per cent of Trump supporters said the issue of Supreme Court appointments was “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the proportion of Biden supporters who said the same thing was even higher : sixty-six per cent .
So it seems perfectly possible that the Supreme Court fight could end up galvanizing more Democrats than Republicans .
Following the death of Ginsburg , ActBlue , the Democratic fund-raising Web site , took in more than seventy million dollars on Saturday alone .
According to the Times , some White House officials are already concerned about alienating suburban women by nominating someone who is seen as strictly anti-abortion .
Meanwhile , Biden is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservative to the Court could lead to its striking down the Affordable Care Act , insuring the demise of the law ’ s subsidized insurance policies and protections for preëxisting conditions .
“ In the middle of the worst global health crisis in living memory , Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court , trying to strip health care coverage away from tens of millions of families , ” Biden said , in Philadelphia , on Sunday .
In the 2018 midterms , the Democrats made defending the A.C.A .
a central plank @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worked .
Trump and the Senate Majority Leader , Mitch McConnell , are inviting Biden and the Democrats to use the same strategy again .
It could also help to win over independent voters .
According to a Politico/Morning Consult survey that was carried out over the weekend , forty-nine per cent of independents think that the winner of the election should pick Ginsburg ’ s replacement , compared with thirty-one per cent who think Trump should make the pick now .
Given the over-all stability of the political environment , which rests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up their minds about this President a long time ago , the untimely death of Ginsburg seems unlikely to prove decisive .
But what a delicious outcome it would be if Trump ’ s effort to exploit it ended up coming back to bite him .
Read More About the 2020 Election • Can Joe Biden win the Presidency based on a promise of generational change ?
• The fall and rise of Kamala Harris .
• When a sitting President threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual like an election , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election , look at what he has provided the executive class .
• What happens if Trump fights the election results ?
• The refusal by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever .
• Sign up for our election newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

Back in February, when pollsters for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal did some head-to-head polling for this year’s Presidential election, they found Joe Biden, who was then struggling in the Democratic primary, leading Donald Trump by eight points nationally, fifty-two per cent to forty-four per cent. On Sunday, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the Biden-Harris ticket leading the Trump-Pence ticket by exactly the same margin (fifty-one per cent to forty-three per cent). Other head-to-head surveys have exhibited a similar pattern. According to the Real Clear Politics poll average, on January 1st of this year, Biden was leading Trump by 49.0 per cent to 43.3 per cent, a gap of 5.7 points. On Tuesday morning, the poll average showed Biden ahead of Trump by 49.5 per cent to 43.0 per cent, a gap of 6.5 points. In eight and a half months, the race has shifted by less than a percentage point.
Of course, some people dismiss the polls entirely. (After what happened in 2016, you can hardly blame them.) But, if you take polling data seriously, the thing that stands out about the 2020 election thus far is its stability in the face of a whole series of tumultuous happenings—from Trump’s impeachment trial; to the coronavirus pandemic; to the death of George Floyd and the massive wave of protests it generated; to the recent revelations about Trump insulting America’s war dead and admitting that he knew the dangers of the coronavirus back in February. Now we are headed for another tumultuous happening: a bitter partisan battle over the Republican effort to rush through a conservative replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday. Should we expect this to have a bigger impact on the election than all the other consequential things that have happened this year?
On Monday, I called Peter D. Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster, and he told me that we shouldn’t have any such expectation. Together with a Republican pollster, Hart’s eponymous research firm carries out the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The fight over the Supreme Court could yet shift the dynamics of the election, Hart said, “but, right now, I don’t have any evidence to say it’s going to happen. Nothing that has occurred in the first nine months of this year has caused any major fluctuations in voter preferences.” And it’s not just this lack of movement that makes this election different from many others, Hart went on. The number of people who say they are still undecided is much lower than normal. In a typical election year, Hart said, that figure would likely be somewhere in the double digits by September. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, it’s now at six per cent. So there are far fewer voters left to be won over.
When I asked Hart how he explained all this, he spelled out the name “Donald Trump.” After a chuckle, he went on, “The polarization of attitudes towards Donald Trump has been greater than we have ever seen in our Presidential polling. This is the only President in the history of Presidential polling who has not had one month, one week, one day when the majority of the American public has given him a positive job-approval rating.” Last December, the NBC/Journal poll showed Trump with a job-approval rating of forty-four per cent and a job-disapproval rating of fifty-four per cent. The new poll shows Trump with a forty-five-per-cent job-approval rating and a fifty-three-per-cent disapproval rating. In statistical terms, these findings are practically the same.
With the American public’s attitude toward Trump seemingly set in stone, it’s hard for any individual development—even one that could create a solid conservative majority on the Court for many years—to shift the race very much. The counter-argument, which some Republicans are making, is that the fight over Ginsburg’s replacement will unite the G.O.P. and increase turnout among Republican voters. Speaking to the Associated Press over the weekend, Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, said, “This can be an important galvanizing force for President Trump.”
Hart didn’t entirely discount such a possibility. He said that the rancor surrounding a Supreme Court nomination could have some effect on turnout. But, if that happens, it seems likely to boost the Democratic voting tally as well as the Republican one. With the balance of the Court having shifted sharply to the right since Trump took office, its future composition is now an issue of huge consequence for both Democrats and Republicans. In a survey from the Pew Research Center that was released in August, sixty-one per cent of Trump supporters said the issue of Supreme Court appointments was “very important” to their vote. But the proportion of Biden supporters who said the same thing was even higher: sixty-six per cent.
So it seems perfectly possible that the Supreme Court fight could end up galvanizing more Democrats than Republicans. Following the death of Ginsburg, ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising Web site, took in more than seventy million dollars on Saturday alone. According to the Times, some White House officials are already concerned about alienating suburban women by nominating someone who is seen as strictly anti-abortion. Meanwhile, Biden is busy emphasizing that the appointment of another conservative to the Court could lead to its striking down the Affordable Care Act, insuring the demise of the law’s subsidized insurance policies and protections for preëxisting conditions. “In the middle of the worst global health crisis in living memory, Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court, trying to strip health care coverage away from tens of millions of families,” Biden said, in Philadelphia, on Sunday.
In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats made defending the A.C.A. a central plank of their campaign, and the tactic worked. Trump and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, are inviting Biden and the Democrats to use the same strategy again. It could also help to win over independent voters. According to a Politico/Morning Consult survey that was carried out over the weekend, forty-nine per cent of independents think that the winner of the election should pick Ginsburg’s replacement, compared with thirty-one per cent who think Trump should make the pick now.
Given the over-all stability of the political environment, which rests on the fact that most voters made up their minds about this President a long time ago, the untimely death of Ginsburg seems unlikely to prove decisive. But what a delicious outcome it would be if Trump’s effort to exploit it ended up coming back to bite him.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-09-22--Trump Suspected of Altering C.D.C. Web Site After C.D.C. Is Misspelled

ATLANTA ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald J. Trump was accused of altering the content on the C.D.C .
Web site , after a post appeared in which C.D.C .
was misspelled .
The post in question urged visitors to stop visiting the C.D.C site for coronavirus guidance because “ there ’ s a lot that scientists don ’ t know , O.K .
?
” “ There will be a vaccine very , very soon , and even if there isn ’ t , the virus will disappear like magic , ” the post continued .
“ We are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A-plus , quite frankly .
Sincerely , the W.W.E.
” At the agency ’ s headquarters , Dr. Robert Redfield struggled to explain why the C.D.C .
had referred to itself by the initials of World Wrestling Entertainment .
“ We are working hard internally to make sure that , going forward , everyone at the C.D.C .
knows how to spell C.D.C.
, ” he said .
Redfield declined to respond to a reporter who asked why several words on the site were randomly capitalized and his name was listed as “ @ @ @ @ @ @

ATLANTA (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump was accused of altering the content on the C.D.C. Web site, after a post appeared in which C.D.C. was misspelled.
The post in question urged visitors to stop visiting the C.D.C site for coronavirus guidance because “there’s a lot that scientists don’t know, O.K.?”
“There will be a vaccine very, very soon, and even if there isn’t, the virus will disappear like magic,” the post continued. “We are doing a phenomenal job and deserve an A-plus, quite frankly. Sincerely, the W.W.E.”
At the agency’s headquarters, Dr. Robert Redfield struggled to explain why the C.D.C. had referred to itself by the initials of World Wrestling Entertainment.
“We are working hard internally to make sure that, going forward, everyone at the C.D.C. knows how to spell C.D.C.,” he said.
Redfield declined to respond to a reporter who asked why several words on the site were randomly capitalized and his name was listed as “Dr. Robert Rovfefe.”


newyorker--2020-09-22--How We Escaped the Worst of the California Wildfires

Maybe no one is ever ready for an emergency .
August 18th was our thirty-first wedding anniversary .
Kathy and I were still debating what we would do to celebrate when the sky behind our house turned Technicolor red and orange .
My first thought was how much it looked like the burning of Atlanta in “ Gone with the Wind.
” A movie .
Not real .
Yet tiny white flakes—ash , not snow—had been fluttering down for hours , and now the odd charred black leaf was coming too , batting against my face .
It was real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happening to me .
We had learned from earlier scares that the first few hours of a fire are a chaos of conflicting instructions .
Evacuation orders had been issued and cancelled , then issued again .
Kathy and I scuttled around doing what last-minute fire prevention we could in the dark .
We dragged bits of brush away from the house , so that stray embers wouldn ’ t ignite them .
But what to do with the cans of gas for the generator ?
We shut all the windows and inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside doors , or leave them open for firefighters ?
And what to take ?
Laptops , cell phones , and power cords ; passports ; our little stash of cash ; a tent ( we forgot the blankets and pillows ) ; and some senseless things , grabbed in a panic , like a bag of coffee beans .
Otherwise , not much more than the clothes we stood up in and food , medications , leashes , and carriers for the animals .
No two evacuations are the same .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It would have been hard enough to deal with our four cats and two dogs .
But Kathy volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation , taking in orphaned and injured animals until they are ready to be released .
We boxed up five baby raccoons—after something of a fight—to take back to Native Animal Rescue ’ s headquarters , in Santa Cruz , but all we could do in the moment for the two fawns we still had was open the doors to their pen and hope for the best .
( Kathy would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ catch and transfer them to another rehabber , in San Jose . )
The two feral cats who lived under the shed , however , evaded all efforts to trap them .
They would have to take their chances .
And then there were the horses .
Like most horses in the Santa Cruz Mountains , our two were rescues .
The joke you always hear is that rescue horses are free because the costs come later .
It certainly felt that way .
Smarty , a quarter horse , had no intention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the middle of the night .
It took a lot of shoving , begging , and frayed tempers to get him in .
With Ray , the mustang , we didn ’ t even try .
He ’ d been badly beaten by owners and trainers in the past , and , even in the calmest conditions , would not go near our small trailer .
So we walked Ray out , a mile or so through the woods and then along the road , to a ranch where , hopefully , someone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get us .
We sat in a dark field , the cats yowling , the horses eating , the dogs thinking it was all a great adventure .
Behind the ridge to the west , the sky flared red whenever the wind blew , then died back down to a dark gray-blue .
By 2 A.M. , the road had gone quiet .
All was strangely calm .
Maybe it would turn out to be a false alarm after all .
Maybe we would dodge the bullet again .
But maybe not .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who volunteers with one of the emergency-response teams .
We barely knew her , but she ’ d already called us more than once , offering to drive an hour or so up to Boulder Creek with a big trailer for Ray and lead our little convoy to safety .
It now felt like time to accept her offer .
I ’ m no horseman myself , so they gave me the easy job of holding onto Ray ’ s lead rope ( passed through the trailer ’ s window ) until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he did as he was told .
Thinking we were done , I stopped paying attention , whereupon Ray decided to back out again , pulling the lead rope and my hand back through the steel bars on the window .
When a twelve-hundred-pound horse decides to go somewhere , there ’ s not a lot you can do to stop him .
But they ’ d told me to hold onto the rope , so I did , until someone , I ’ m still not sure who , yelled into my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ d known enough not to wrap the rope around my hand .
There were rope burns and a surprising amount of blood , but nothing broken .
A reminder that professors are not always the sort of people you want around in an emergency .
My net contribution was to take two of the helpers away from loading the horse so that they could bandage me up .
By the time they were done , Ray was in the trailer .
At 7 A.M. , we were on the road .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ this could , and probably would , happen .
In 1860 , when the brand-new California Division of Mines and Geology sent the botanist William Brewer to study the state ’ s woodlands , he wondered whether Americans should be living here at all .
Heat waves , he wrote , melted the fat in uncooked meat until it would “ run away in spontaneous gravy.
” Forests turned abruptly into “ great sheets of flame , extending over acres.
” Before Europeans came , Native Californians had found ways to cope with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ partly to avoid forest fires .
As much as one-sixth of the state was deliberately burned each year , simultaneously removing fuel for wildfires and creating new environments for grasses , acorns , deer , and quail .
Most obviously , perhaps , people generally didn ’ t live in places like the Santa Cruz Mountains , where food was scarce and fires frequent .
Hardly anyone did , in fact , until the eighteen-seventies , when demand for timber to build new cities made the hillsides profitable ; the rebuilding of San @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , turned Boulder Creek into a boomtown , with an impressive twenty-six saloons , gambling houses , brothels , and hotels .
Almost every redwood tree in the seventy-mile stretch between San Francisco and Santa Cruz was sawed down—by hand .
Once the trees had gone , so , too , of course , did the fire risk and most of the people .
Eventually , the mountains started filling up again .
Roads , bridges , dams , and electricity opened up the forests to commuters who couldn ’ t afford the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beautiful views or alternative life styles , or both .
This quiet migration of hundreds of thousands of nature lovers has created one of the most unnatural landscapes on Earth .
We have sunk wells everywhere , suppressed fires until the forest floors are thick with fuel , and run high-voltage cables right above them .
The 2018 Camp Fire—which burned two hundred and forty square miles of northern California , caused an estimated $ 16.5 billion in damage , and killed eighty-five people—was sparked by a Pacific Gas and Electric power line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state ’ s fire-protection agency , one in ten Californian houses are in high-risk areas .

Throughout the state, lightning touched the earth nearly eleven thousand times in three days. By the first morning, the fires had begun. The flames had neither a single source, from which they would spread as winds and topography dictated, nor a distinct perimeter, where they could be fought. Instead, hundreds of separate fires burned, merging together and splitting apart, a many-headed hydra defying standard firefighting tactics. Normal fires are named after their starting point, but this one needed to be called “the C.Z.U. Lightning Complex fires,” after Cal Fire’s abbreviation for its entire San Mateo-Santa Cruz unit.
The world is getting hotter because the atmosphere and oceans contain more carbon dioxide than they used to. Air bubbles trapped in polar ice show that, during the coldest spells of the last eight hundred thousand years of ice ages, carbon-dioxide levels typically fell in a range of a hundred and eighty to two hundred parts per million; in the warmest interglacial periods, they might rise toward three hundred p.p.m. But that was before we started burning fossil fuels. Since 1958, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was first consistently measured, it has been increasing a hundred times faster than when the world warmed up at the end of the last ice age. In 2019, the concentration reached 409.8 p.p.m., a level not seen in three million years.
No one can say categorically that fossil fuels caused the C.Z.U. fire, but too many of us are living in the wrong places, and the weather has gone wild. It used to be that hardly anyone in the mountains had air conditioning, because we rarely needed it, but every year now brings perhaps a dozen days in the nineties. The winters are getting drier, yet they also deliver storms of the sort we’d been told should only happen once a century. Everyone here is used to mudslides, in which saturated soils slither downhill and block roads, but in January, 2017, it rained so hard that we also got slip-outs, in which the dirt under roads liquefied and the roads simply disintegrated. When scientists talk about climate change making parts of the world uninhabitable, this is what it looks like.
Our initial plan was to set up camp with the cats, dogs, and horses at a showground eleven miles from Boulder Creek, but by mid-afternoon orders came to evacuate that, too. We ended up at the BackStretch ranch, in Aromas, in the farm country twenty-five miles farther south. Kathy had once volunteered there, and thought they might take in Ray and Smarty. In fact, its owners—Dennis and Janece Barwick—took in not just us and five of our friends but also a couple dozen other refugees, with their own array of animals. Coops full of dazed-looking chickens were unloaded off pickup trucks. Horse trailers were converted into kennels for multiple cats. Temporary corrals were thrown up for irate donkeys and peculiar-looking ponies. It could be hard to hear over the braying, whinnying, clucking, and barking, but everywhere dogs were sleeping through it all, in the dust. I felt like I had wandered into one of the migrant camps along Route 66 in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
We pitched our tent in a shady spot between some picnic tables, a standpipe, and a portable toilet (a better location than it sounds—no one enjoys hunting for the bathroom in the darkness of a ranch at night). Meanwhile, Dennis and Janece worked the phones, ordering extra hay for horses, rustling up R.V.s to put humans in, and organizing neighbors to bring over meals, clothes, and bedding.
There is something awe-inspiring about kindness on this scale, and it infected everyone. In those first few days, most of the volunteers who usually worked at the BackStretch were off doing animal rescue in the fire zone (one of our Boulder Creek friends, a good man around a horse, ended up in a hospital with blood poisoning, after being bitten by a cat he was saving); and, without being asked, everyone just pitched in and took over. Every day, a thousand gallons of water had to be delivered into horse troughs, a ton of hay into feed bins, and two tons of droppings carried away. Droppings were my job—even if I could not be trusted with a lead rope, I knew a thing or two about shovelling up. I will never again grumble about the meagre amount that Ray and Smarty generate.
On the face of it, evolution favors selfishness. Animals that focus on staying alive, well fed, and sexually active—that is, ones that act selfishly—have more chances to pass their genes on to the next generation. Other things being equal, selfish genes should, therefore, outbreed altruistic ones. Yet they clearly do not. Humans have somehow become animals who shovel up others’ dung, rescue their cats, and keep flames from their homes. To explain this, evolutionists who call themselves “group-selection theorists” say we need to think about culture as much as genes. Biology, they point out, has given us brains so powerful that we can work together to put men on the moon and build quantum computers. Much more than any other animal, humans depend on group coöperation to flourish, which means that, for us, natural selection operates at the social as well as the genetic level. The more a group’s members help one another, the better the group as a whole can do—and so, at the group level if not at the genetic, natural selection rewards humans who show humanity.
Not that this makes us all saints. For every Dennis or Janece who stepped up in the crisis, some old friend fell strangely silent. And then there are the outright sinners, such as the illegal pot-grower charged with setting a fire near Big Sur, the man arrested for stealing the wallet of a firefighter who was battling the C.Z.U. blaze, or the bright sparks who set San Bernardino County alight with a smoke bomb intended to reveal their unborn child’s gender. Ask any refugee from the flames: ain’t no dungeon deep enough, no hellfires hot enough, for free riders, villains, or fools. But group-level selection turns enough humans, enough of the time, into righteous enforcers of morality that altruism is, on a very deep level, part of who we are.
And not just us: anthropologists studying a fifty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal skeleton, from Iraq, found that, despite being deaf, possibly blind in one eye, and barely able to walk, this man had lived long enough to allow multiple injuries to heal, reaching the ripe old age (for a Neanderthal) of forty-plus. Even the soberest scientists conclude that he must have received constant support from able-bodied friends and family. Neanderthals, like us, were humane, yet even chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest genetic kin among surviving species, show only the slightest traces of altruism. Animals like Dennis and Janece are very recent sprouts on the tree of life.
We camped out at the ranch for two more nights. It gets cold before dawn in coastal California, even in August, and the ground where we pitched our tent was anything but even. We repeatedly rolled off the blow-up mattress that Dennis and Janece had lent us, waking up on sharp sticks and lumpy stones. On the fourth day, Emily, who had come to our rescue with her big trailer, called up and insisted that we, the cats, and the dogs join her and her husband, Bruce—and their own cats, dogs, and horses—in their house. Because we had no idea when, or even whether, we would get back to our home, we felt that we couldn’t impose on them for long. A friend and her husband offered us the use of a little cottage in their back yard whenever we needed it, and other Samaritans stepped up, too, but Emily and Bruce wouldn’t hear of us going through yet another relocation.
And so we stayed on, with our own bedroom and bathroom, in Emily and Bruce’s beautiful house, with its ocean view. Ours was a five-star, white-privilege evacuation. Even the cats calmed down in the comfort that Emily and Bruce provided. We had wonderful company, long conversations, fine food and martinis, faster Internet access than at home, and a big-screen TV—on which we watched, night after night, California burning, a plague slaying thousands, the Gulf Coast flooding, rioting in the streets, and a President, seemingly bent on banishing our better angels, sowing discord from the White House.
It is hard not to feel like these are the end times. Yet, if a career in archaeology and history has taught me anything, it is not to underestimate the human capacity to adapt, to innovate, and to find solutions. On average, we live thirty years longer today than our great-grandparents did, grow four inches taller, and earn six times as much. (These are global averages: in much of Africa and Asia, changes have been even faster.) In 1900, few men and almost no women had a say in choosing their own leaders. As recently as 1960, the year I was born, nearly half of the people on Earth still could not read or write their own names. The human condition has improved more in the past hundred years than it did in the previous hundred thousand, and, for all we know, the next hundred will go better still. 2020 does not have to be the new normal.
Although only one person was killed in the C.Z.U. fires, and the flames were stopped some yards from downtown Boulder Creek, nine hundred and twenty-five houses did burn, leaving perhaps three thousand people homeless. Six of those houses belonged to good friends. You can no longer tell yourself that this isn’t really happening when you’re holding a friend who’s lost everything. I can find words for an essay like this, but not for a moment like that.
In the old days, the only way to know if your home had burned was to wait until the roadblocks were removed and then drive up to see for yourself. It’s hard to imagine what it was like rounding the last bend. I suspect there are no atheists in a forest fire. Now, though, you can follow the fire online, on maps updated multiple times a day. If your house turns yellow on the map, up to twenty per cent of it has burned; if red, it has gone. No news really is good news. Gradually, as we compulsively checked the maps, our confidence grew that we were going to make it. By the end of the first week, the firefighters had secured a line along the Route 9 corridor, a mile or so from us.
We got back almost exactly two weeks after we left. Our place looked pretty much as we had left it. Someone had been inside, opening doors and knocking things over, but nothing had been stolen or vandalized. The garden was dry and shrivelled, but mostly still alive. Despite fourteen days without water, the tomatoes and basil were, in fact, going gangbusters. The feral cats had not only stuck around but brought a friend to stay with them. Even our disasters were vaguely comical: three wild pigs had taken up residence in the yard, cooling off in a trough and uprooting everything else. So we set to work, cleaning out our stinky fridge, fixing the damage the pigs had caused, and preparing for next time. The fire season is barely half done and it is a hundred and eleven degrees outside.


newyorker--2020-09-22--The Perfect Prose of a Joan Didion Photo Caption

In the early nineteen-sixties , while on the staff of Vogue , Joan Didion was only half known to the magazine ’ s readers .
Her name appeared intermittently .
Her first signed piece , in June 1961 , was a short essay on jealousy , which already showed certain features of her mature writing : an earnest consideration of the brittle contours of her own character , and a fine attention to language , including her own .
She also wrote short , unattributed paragraphs—they can not be called essays , articles , or pieces—for Vogue ’ s regular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She wrote about “ Dr .
No ” and “ The Manchurian Candidate ” ; about the atom bomb , Telstar , and the construction of the Guggenheim ; about the budding careers of Willem de Kooning , Woody Allen , and Barbra Streisand ; and about the death of Marilyn Monroe , whom she called “ a profoundly moving young woman.
” And she composed photo captions : those “ signposts , ” as Walter Benjamin put it , that had become essential to the printed magazine page in the twentieth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sixties , captions were surprisingly substantial pieces of writing , accorded what might seem a remarkable amount of editorial care .
The captions Didion wrote make up a minor , telling aspect of the mythology around her work , though perhaps “ mythology ” is the wrong word .
It is a matter of style , where style is verifiable presence on the page .
Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer , her prose like a shiny carapace .
At the same time , she has a reputation for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
None of this adequately describes her prose .
It is usually direct and declarative ; it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions ; there is a wealth of concrete detail .
Irony in her work consists largely of the plain statement of such detail , inflected by the innocent , mad , or bad-faith language of the people or institutions she is writing about .
In a lecture at U.C.L.A.
, Didion said , “ I ’ m not much interested in spontaneity .
I ’ m not an inspirational writer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Producing captions , Didion has said , was part of mounting “ the monthly grand illusion ” of a glossy magazine .
The editor-in-chief then was Diana Vreeland , but the more detailed work was done by Allene Talmey , who had been with Vogue since the mid-nineteen-thirties and became an associate editor in 1963 .
By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries , Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss .
After she had wielded her pencil on another writer ’ s copy—flashing , all the while , a large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out .
( “ Well , my dear , I used to go home , sit in the tub , and weep , ” one young woman said . )
In an interview with The Paris Review , in 1978 , Didion said , “ Every day I would go into [ Talmey ’ s ] office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something .
She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words , about verbs not working.
” In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York Times , in 1979 , Talmey herself recounted how she would ask Didion to write a caption of three or four hundred words , and then together they would cut it down to fifty .
“ We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.
” The Times article coincided with the publication of “ Telling Stories , ” Didion ’ s only collection of short fiction—if you can call three stories a collection .
In the book ’ s preface , she elaborates on her time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ under Talmey .
“ We were connoisseurs of synonyms , ” she writes .
“ We were collectors of verbs.
” Certain words went in and out of fashion— “ to ravish ” was for some months an editorially approved verb .
“ I also recall it , for a number of issues more , as the source of a highly favoured noun : ‘ ravishments ’ , as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips , Fabergé eggs , other ravishments.
” Didion and her young colleagues learned—or else “ did not stay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ passive , to make sure “ it ” always had a nearby reference , to reach for the O.E.D .
to insure surprise as much as precision .
And , most of all , they learned to rewrite , time and again , in search of the correct balance of elegance and excitement .
“ Run it through again , sweetie , ” Talmey would say .
“ It ’ s not quite there.
” “ Opposite , above : All through the house , colour , verve , improvised treasures in happy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sentence first online , in the 1979 profile , where it is offered as an example of Didion ’ s caption-writing for Vogue at the start of her career .
So much to admire , not least the verbless economy of the sentence , as if the caption ’ s function—its act of pointing , or its open-handed gesture—does away with the need for verbs .
( What would the verbed alternatives be ?
“ All through the house are colour , verve .
.
.
” Or “ one finds.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sentence . )
The caption directs us to a single picture , but it also stands for a whole ; “ all through the house , ” with its slumberous familiarity— “ It was the night before Christmas .
.
.
” —conjures time as well as space .
In her preface to “ Telling Stories , ” Didion recalls that Talmey liked things , especially qualifiers , to come in threes .
And so it is here , with the somewhat abstracted features : “ colour , verve , improvised treasures.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found object , or Duchampian readymade , the value of which derives from the artist-collector ’ s choosing and acquiring it ?
Or maybe “ improvised ” refers to a casual mode of display , to a style of living with things rather than to the things themselves ?
Then we have “ happy but anomalous coexistence ” — “ happy ” here meaning apt , fortunate , and pleasing , rather than pleased or ( in the nearly vanished sense ) happenstance .
I like the way this term has been elongated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The absence of stricturing commas around “ but anomalous ” is in line with Didion ’ s later style : she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers ( or their editors ) instinctively reach , to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work .
The sentence sounds like Didion in its rhythm , care , and thrift , and also in its swerve toward something more troubling or mysterious , the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the sentence in this way ?
Here is what I found when I turned from the Times to Didion ’ s more detailed account , in the preface to “ Telling Stories , ” of her time at Vogue—an apprenticeship , she says , that is too easy to mock .
At first , she composed merchandising copy , and then promotional copy ( “ the distinction between the two was definite but recondite ” ) , and eventually editorial copy .
As “ a sample of the latter , ” Didion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ version of it :

“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” —Joan Didion
In the early nineteen-sixties, while on the staff of Vogue, Joan Didion was only half known to the magazine’s readers. Her name appeared intermittently. Her first signed piece, in June 1961, was a short essay on jealousy, which already showed certain features of her mature writing: an earnest consideration of the brittle contours of her own character, and a fine attention to language, including her own. She also wrote short, unattributed paragraphs—they cannot be called essays, articles, or pieces—for Vogue’s regular “People Are Talking About” column. She wrote about “Dr. No” and “The Manchurian Candidate”; about the atom bomb, Telstar, and the construction of the Guggenheim; about the budding careers of Willem de Kooning, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand; and about the death of Marilyn Monroe, whom she called “a profoundly moving young woman.” And she composed photo captions: those “signposts,” as Walter Benjamin put it, that had become essential to the printed magazine page in the twentieth century.
In Vogue, by the sixties, captions were surprisingly substantial pieces of writing, accorded what might seem a remarkable amount of editorial care. The captions Didion wrote make up a minor, telling aspect of the mythology around her work, though perhaps “mythology” is the wrong word. It is a matter of style, where style is verifiable presence on the page. Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, her prose like a shiny carapace. At the same time, she has a reputation for being brittle and spectral, barely there. None of this adequately describes her prose. It is usually direct and declarative; it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions; there is a wealth of concrete detail. Irony in her work consists largely of the plain statement of such detail, inflected by the innocent, mad, or bad-faith language of the people or institutions she is writing about. In a lecture at U.C.L.A., Didion said, “I’m not much interested in spontaneity. I’m not an inspirational writer. What concerns me is total control.”
Producing captions, Didion has said, was part of mounting “the monthly grand illusion” of a glossy magazine. The editor-in-chief then was Diana Vreeland, but the more detailed work was done by Allene Talmey, who had been with Vogue since the mid-nineteen-thirties and became an associate editor in 1963. By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries, Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss. After she had wielded her pencil on another writer’s copy—flashing, all the while, a large aquamarine and silver ring—the writer was wrung out. (“Well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and weep,” one young woman said.) In an interview with The Paris Review, in 1978, Didion said, “Every day I would go into [Talmey’s] office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something. She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working.” In a profile of Didion in the New York Times, in 1979, Talmey herself recounted how she would ask Didion to write a caption of three or four hundred words, and then together they would cut it down to fifty. “We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.”
The Times article coincided with the publication of “Telling Stories,” Didion’s only collection of short fiction—if you can call three stories a collection. In the book’s preface, she elaborates on her time at Vogue and the rigors of working under Talmey. “We were connoisseurs of synonyms,” she writes. “We were collectors of verbs.” Certain words went in and out of fashion—“to ravish” was for some months an editorially approved verb. “I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favoured noun: ‘ravishments’, as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Fabergé eggs, other ravishments.” Didion and her young colleagues learned—or else “did not stay”—to use active verbs instead of passive, to make sure “it” always had a nearby reference, to reach for the O.E.D. to insure surprise as much as precision. And, most of all, they learned to rewrite, time and again, in search of the correct balance of elegance and excitement. “Run it through again, sweetie,” Talmey would say. “It’s not quite there.”
“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” I came across the sentence first online, in the 1979 profile, where it is offered as an example of Didion’s caption-writing for Vogue at the start of her career. So much to admire, not least the verbless economy of the sentence, as if the caption’s function—its act of pointing, or its open-handed gesture—does away with the need for verbs. (What would the verbed alternatives be? “All through the house are colour, verve . . .” Or “one finds.” The additions all seem to weaken the sentence.) The caption directs us to a single picture, but it also stands for a whole; “all through the house,” with its slumberous familiarity—“It was the night before Christmas . . .”—conjures time as well as space. In her preface to “Telling Stories,” Didion recalls that Talmey liked things, especially qualifiers, to come in threes. And so it is here, with the somewhat abstracted features: “colour, verve, improvised treasures.” What is an improvised treasure? A found object, or Duchampian readymade, the value of which derives from the artist-collector’s choosing and acquiring it? Or maybe “improvised” refers to a casual mode of display, to a style of living with things rather than to the things themselves?
Then we have “happy but anomalous coexistence”—“happy” here meaning apt, fortunate, and pleasing, rather than pleased or (in the nearly vanished sense) happenstance. I like the way this term has been elongated, allowed to spread itself around. The absence of stricturing commas around “but anomalous” is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion in its rhythm, care, and thrift, and also in its swerve toward something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work.
Was I right to think about the sentence in this way? Here is what I found when I turned from the Times to Didion’s more detailed account, in the preface to “Telling Stories,” of her time at Vogue—an apprenticeship, she says, that is too easy to mock. At first, she composed merchandising copy, and then promotional copy (“the distinction between the two was definite but recondite”), and eventually editorial copy. As “a sample of the latter,” Didion includes our caption, or an extended version of it:
Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella, an art nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein. Not shown: a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.
The sentence, at least in this telling, is followed by two more that open out, show us the treasures, and include both some nice economies (“a Mexican find,” not “a find in Mexico”) and bright phrasing: the “frankly brilliant oilcloth.”
But run it through again, because we’re not quite there. On the desk in front of me—an eBay find, at fifty dollars—I have the August 1, 1965, issue of American Vogue. In the way of popular magazines of that period, it reads now as a surprisingly highbrow artifact. There is a substantial feature on Giacometti, a movie review by Elizabeth Hardwick, and a report by Didion on the new National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City: “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.” A few pages after Didion and Hardwick, the magazine announces its twenty-fifth Prix de Paris, “a career competition for college seniors,” the first prize a year on the magazine as a junior editor and a trip to Paris, to see the shows. Didion herself had won the prize, in 1956, with an essay on the California architect William Wilson Wurster. It was what brought her to New York; she turned down the Paris trip in favor of real work at the magazine.
Didion’s caption appears in the “Fashions in Living” department, alongside a culinary conversation with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and a short drinks feature titled “Through Deepest Summer with Zest and Cube.” The piece to which Didion contributed is called “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers”—the plural denoting both Hopper and his wife, the actor Brooke Hayward—and was written by the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, with photographs of house and family by Hopper himself. Southern’s tone is hipster New Journalist, a touch embarrassing even for its time. His opening paragraph: “The Den Hoppers are tops in their field. Precisely what their field is, is by no means certain—except that she is a Great Beauty, and he a kind of Mad Person.” Southern leads us on a zany tour of Hopper’s acting career, his politics (a “jaunt” to photograph the Selma marches earlier that year), counter-cultural affiliations (Ginsberg, et al.), and his art collection, a subject on which Southern solicits an approving comment from Frank O’Hara. It’s an entertaining, imprecise, and exhausting sort of writing, rather like its author’s description of his subject: “To walk down a city street with him is like being attached to a moving adrenaline pump.”


newyorker--2020-09-23--Carrie’s Voice-Overs if “Sex and the City” Were Set in 2050

The Sumatran orangutan officially became extinct today .
As I sat by the phone waiting for Big to call , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : Will good men be the next species to be put on the watch list ?
New York ’ s smog had landed Charlotte in the I.C.U .
But she always found any cloud ’ s silver lining , and before long had a date with the on-call doctor .
If only they could capture carbon as fast as Charlotte captured hearts .
.
.
.
There I was , settling into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month .
As I bartered my last pack of Marlboro Lights for a cot , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : If hundred-year storms are happening every year , why aren ’ t once-in-a-lifetime romances ?
I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach .
Maybe Samantha was on to something .
Maybe monogamy had become as outdated as the fossil-fuel-based economy .
Big and I had been dating for a month , so I decided to cook him a romantic dinner : dehydrated beef , hardtack , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appétit , mon chéri !
They say that honey is one of the only foods that never goes bad .
Which got me thinking : Do relationships have expiration dates ?
Can expired relationships make you sick ?
Also , it ’ s probably fine to eat this honey after using it for a D.I.Y .
wax , right ?
’ Cause the Amazon is gone , but Brazilians are back !
I couldn ’ t believe it .
After inviting me all the way to his Kansas survivalist bunker , Big didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toothbrush in his medicine cabinet .
I wondered : Even in a fortified concrete compound , can you ever feel secure in a relationship ?
With New York descending into anarchy , I felt as though my life were descending into manarchy—a constant state of relationship drama .
As I sipped my canned-peach cosmo , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : Where are the fallout shelters to house you during the fallout from a breakup ?
They said that women with children were to board the evacuation barge first .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couldn ’ t help wondering : If childless women weren ’ t celebrated during an overpopulation crisis , would we ever be ?
I stepped onto the barge .
In my new Manolo Blahnik flood galoshes , I felt invincible .
But , as the megaphones warned of a twelve-foot storm surge , I felt a surge in my heart .
There he was , across the barge : Big .
And , this time , there was nowhere he could run .

The Sumatran orangutan officially became extinct today. As I sat by the phone waiting for Big to call, I couldn’t help but wonder: Will good men be the next species to be put on the watch list?
New York’s smog had landed Charlotte in the I.C.U. But she always found any cloud’s silver lining, and before long had a date with the on-call doctor. If only they could capture carbon as fast as Charlotte captured hearts. . . .
There I was, settling into the storm shelter for the third time this month. As I bartered my last pack of Marlboro Lights for a cot, I couldn’t help but wonder: If hundred-year storms are happening every year, why aren’t once-in-a-lifetime romances?
I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Maybe Samantha was on to something. Maybe monogamy had become as outdated as the fossil-fuel-based economy.
Big and I had been dating for a month, so I decided to cook him a romantic dinner: dehydrated beef, hardtack, and dried beans in tomato sauce. Bon appétit, mon chéri!
They say that honey is one of the only foods that never goes bad. Which got me thinking: Do relationships have expiration dates? Can expired relationships make you sick? Also, it’s probably fine to eat this honey after using it for a D.I.Y. wax, right? ’Cause the Amazon is gone, but Brazilians are back!
I couldn’t believe it. After inviting me all the way to his Kansas survivalist bunker, Big didn’t let me leave my pink toothbrush in his medicine cabinet. I wondered: Even in a fortified concrete compound, can you ever feel secure in a relationship?
With New York descending into anarchy, I felt as though my life were descending into manarchy—a constant state of relationship drama. As I sipped my canned-peach cosmo, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are the fallout shelters to house you during the fallout from a breakup?
They said that women with children were to board the evacuation barge first. As I stood aside with Samantha, I couldn’t help wondering: If childless women weren’t celebrated during an overpopulation crisis, would we ever be?
I stepped onto the barge. In my new Manolo Blahnik flood galoshes, I felt invincible. But, as the megaphones warned of a twelve-foot storm surge, I felt a surge in my heart. There he was, across the barge: Big. And, this time, there was nowhere he could run.


newyorker--2020-09-23--The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music

The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music

Listening to music on the Internet feels clean , efficient , environmentally virtuous .
Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic , we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether .
Music has , it seems , been freed from the grubby realm of things .
Kyle Devine , in his recent book , “ Decomposed : The Political Ecology of Music , ” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion .
Like everything we do on the Internet , streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy .
Devine writes , “ The environmental cost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any time during recorded music ’ s previous eras.
” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising , using data culled from various sources , which suggests that , in 2016 , streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000 .
Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic , the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater .
The ostensibly frictionless nature of online @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components .
Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious ; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices .
Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt , which is used in iPhone batteries .
Spotify , the dominant streaming service , needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers .
No less problematic are the streaming services ’ own exploitative practices , including their notoriously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Not long ago , Daniel Ek , Spotify ’ s C.E.O.
, announced , “ The artists today that are making it realize that it ’ s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans.
” In other words , to make a living as a musician , you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour .
Devine ’ s findings may , at first glance , provoke a helpless shrug .
Every field of human endeavor entails some form of environmental destruction , and the music industry is perhaps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sour critic might point out that printing a book about the political ecology of music makes its own contribution to the despoliation of the planet .
But Devine isn ’ t interested in inducing guilt ; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music .
He writes , “ There is a highly intoxicating form of mystification at work in the ideology of musical culture more generally.
” As a result , music is “ seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ recording formats throws a necessary wrench into that mythology of musical purity .
When Devine goes back to the beginnings of the recording industry , he notes how often the innovations of Thomas Edison , Emile Berliner , and others were tied up in the science and business of chemicals .
Edison experimented with wax , celluloid , and phenolic resin , in the process becoming an early leader in the manufacturing of synthetic plastic .
Berliner favored shellac , which depended on a resin produced by the Asian lac beetle .
Shellac @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of vinyl , in the mid-twentieth century .
The harvesting of lac , in India , involved horrible conditions for laborers , although the material itself was biodegradable and therefore less environmentally troublesome than the plastic formats that followed .
Polyvinyl chloride , from which vinyl records are made , is produced from the hydrocarbon ethylene .
It is a petrochemical—and indivisible from the baleful behemoth of the oil industry .
The physical hardiness of the material has added to the quasi-spiritual aura surrounding the long-playing record : decades-old vinyl records can still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the same hardiness means that vinyl is exceptionally difficult to dispose of , once its usefulness is at an end .
Often , it winds up buried in landfills .
Devine naturally does not overlook the irony attendant on the much bruited vinyl revival : progressive-minded hipsters who fetishize vinyl are widening their carbon footprint in ways they may not realize .
When the compact disk entered circulation , in the nineteen-eighties , audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture—a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious .
Devine observes that polycarbonate , the medium ’ s principal ingredient , is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride .
Early on , the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage , but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market .
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era , Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables , servers , routers , and the like.
” This concealment of industrial reality , behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality , is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech , with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless .
In much the same way , it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests .
Spotify @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tends not to bother investors , who see vast potential in the company ’ s hoard of personal data .
The musicologist Eric Drott fills in more of that chilling picture in a recent Journal of the Society for American Music article , titled “ Music as a Technology of Surveillance.
” According to Drott , Spotify ’ s head of programmatic solutions once boasted , “ We not only know what our users are listening to , we also know their personal activities as well , ” and gave showering as an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shower streams per day.
” Even as new formats come to the fore , old ones cling to life , often in conjunction with nostalgia or longing for an idealized past .
The compact disk remains the bedrock of many people ’ s collections , mine included .
The vinyl revival proceeds apace , and a cassette revival is underway .
Perhaps we ’ ll see a shellac revival , or even a wax-cylinder revival .
The problem is that the accumulated glut of technologies and formats only increases the environmental stress that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the end of “ Decomposed , ” Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis .
“ Musically , we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage , ” he writes .
Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous .
It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire , but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth .
Devine holds out hope for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one that has taken place in our relationship with food .
When we listen to music , we may ask ourselves : Under what conditions was a particular recording made ?
How equitable is the process by which it has reached us ?
Who is being paid ?
How are they being treated ?
And—most pressing—how much music do we really need ?
Perhaps , if we have less of it , it may matter to us more .

Listening to music on the Internet feels clean, efficient, environmentally virtuous. Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic, we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether. Music has, it seems, been freed from the grubby realm of things. Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion. Like everything we do on the Internet, streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy. Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic, the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater.
The ostensibly frictionless nature of online listening has other hidden or overlooked costs. Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services’ own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians. Not long ago, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s C.E.O., announced, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans.” In other words, to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.
Devine’s findings may, at first glance, provoke a helpless shrug. Every field of human endeavor entails some form of environmental destruction, and the music industry is perhaps no worse than any other. A sour critic might point out that printing a book about the political ecology of music makes its own contribution to the despoliation of the planet. But Devine isn’t interested in inducing guilt; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music. He writes, “There is a highly intoxicating form of mystification at work in the ideology of musical culture more generally.” As a result, music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.” Devine’s critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into that mythology of musical purity.
When Devine goes back to the beginnings of the recording industry, he notes how often the innovations of Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner, and others were tied up in the science and business of chemicals. Edison experimented with wax, celluloid, and phenolic resin, in the process becoming an early leader in the manufacturing of synthetic plastic. Berliner favored shellac, which depended on a resin produced by the Asian lac beetle. Shellac was the dominant format until the advent of vinyl, in the mid-twentieth century. The harvesting of lac, in India, involved horrible conditions for laborers, although the material itself was biodegradable and therefore less environmentally troublesome than the plastic formats that followed.
Polyvinyl chloride, from which vinyl records are made, is produced from the hydrocarbon ethylene. It is a petrochemical—and indivisible from the baleful behemoth of the oil industry. The physical hardiness of the material has added to the quasi-spiritual aura surrounding the long-playing record: decades-old vinyl records can still produce a rich, evocative sound. But the same hardiness means that vinyl is exceptionally difficult to dispose of, once its usefulness is at an end. Often, it winds up buried in landfills. Devine naturally does not overlook the irony attendant on the much bruited vinyl revival: progressive-minded hipsters who fetishize vinyl are widening their carbon footprint in ways they may not realize.
When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture—a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium’s principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests. Spotify’s inability to become consistently profitable tends not to bother investors, who see vast potential in the company’s hoard of personal data. The musicologist Eric Drott fills in more of that chilling picture in a recent Journal of the Society for American Music article, titled “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” According to Drott, Spotify’s head of programmatic solutions once boasted, “We not only know what our users are listening to, we also know their personal activities as well,” and gave showering as an example. The company registers “550,000 shower streams per day.”
Even as new formats come to the fore, old ones cling to life, often in conjunction with nostalgia or longing for an idealized past. The compact disk remains the bedrock of many people’s collections, mine included. The vinyl revival proceeds apace, and a cassette revival is underway. Perhaps we’ll see a shellac revival, or even a wax-cylinder revival. The problem is that the accumulated glut of technologies and formats only increases the environmental stress that our demand for maximal musical variety imposes.
At the end of “Decomposed,” Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. “Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage,” he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.
Devine holds out hope for a shift in consciousness, similar to the one that has taken place in our relationship with food. When we listen to music, we may ask ourselves: Under what conditions was a particular recording made? How equitable is the process by which it has reached us? Who is being paid? How are they being treated? And—most pressing—how much music do we really need? Perhaps, if we have less of it, it may matter to us more.


newyorker--2020-09-23--New York’s Train Operators Face Life After a Collision, in “After the 12-9”

Every few days in New York City , a subway operator stops a train , speaks the phrase “ 12-9 ” into a radio , and waits what may feel like an eternity for a police officer to arrive and inspect the train and tracks .
Operators learn this code during their job training , but many say that the experience is unimaginable until it happens .
In the parlance of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority , 12-9s describe collisions between trains and people .
They are the reason that the M.T.A .
warns passengers not to walk between subway cars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Do not enter or cross tracks.
” In 2019 , the M.T.A .
recorded a hundred and ninety-five 12-9s , the highest number in at least a decade .
About a third are fatal .
“ After the 12-9 , ” a short documentary produced and directed by Sara Joe Wolansky and edited by Brian Redondo , follows three operators in the year after their respective involvements in deadly collisions .
“ There ’ s really no way to prepare for them , and there ’ s absolutely no way to prevent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ operator who experienced her first 12-9 about five years into her career , says .
Webb remembers seeing two dark patches on the running rail and realizing that they were a person ’ s feet .
She immediately triggered the emergency brake .
“ I couldn ’ t have stopped any sooner than I did , ” she says .
For months afterward , she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks , and she couldn ’ t bring herself to even ride the subway .
Another operator , James Muriel , has experienced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he has worked for the M.T.A .
Once , he explains , he dreamed that a man who died in a collision knocked on his door to ask him why he hadn ’ t stopped the train .
This spring , after the coronavirus pandemic reached New York , subway ridership plummeted by as much as ninety per cent .
Without the millions of daily fares that help pay for the system ’ s thousands of trains and tens of thousands of employees , the M.T.A .
has been forced to reduce service @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A.M. and 5 A.M .
But , even with fewer trains running , the total number of 12-9s barely decreased .
Between March and late August , M.T.A .
trains hit at least seventy people , which was only slightly fewer than the eighty-five who had been struck during the same period in 2019 .
Meanwhile , the M.T.A.
’ s budget woes are getting worse : subway ridership has yet to recover , the trains have still not resumed running twenty-four hours per day , and the M.T.A .
now faces a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lin , a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic who previously worked as a fellow at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner , co-authored the most recent study of the city ’ s subway deaths , which was published in 2009 .
More than half of the deaths were ruled suicides , his research found , and more than a third were accidents , particularly those that occurred in the early morning after bars closed .
“ About once a week , we were seeing a subway-related fatality , ” Lin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ large number of these deaths , there ’ s a potential that they could be prevented.
” Other mass-transit lines use safety doors , which remain closed until each train is in the station , serving as a barrier between passengers and the tracks : the world ’ s most sprawling subway system , in Seoul , South Korea , uses such doors , as do the AirTrains at J.F.K .
and Newark airports .
But New York City ’ s subway relies on a wide variety of train designs and operates more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the oldest were built in 1904 .
The M.T.A .
has said that a system-wide installation of barriers would be too expensive , and , in 2018 , it scrapped a safety-door pilot project on the L line .
In the absence of physical barriers , fast-moving subway cars often come within inches of waiting passengers .
“ Modifying the speed of trains would not necessarily prevent the incidents , ” Barry Greenblatt , the M.T.A.
’ s vice-president and chief officer for service delivery , says .
“ But it would have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Webb started riding the subway again , she avoided the first car , where the operator sits .
Once , she had a panic attack while walking through Grand Central Station .
Gradually , her therapist encouraged her to move toward the front of the train , and , after more than a year , Webb decided that she was ready to return to work .
“ I can do this , ” she told herself on her first day back .
For the M.T.A .
as a whole , Webb says , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and there are protocols in place to resume service quickly after an accident .
“ But , for the train operator , it ’ s an incident that will stick with you for the rest of your life , ” she says .

Every few days in New York City, a subway operator stops a train, speaks the phrase “12-9” into a radio, and waits what may feel like an eternity for a police officer to arrive and inspect the train and tracks. Operators learn this code during their job training, but many say that the experience is unimaginable until it happens. In the parlance of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 12-9s describe collisions between trains and people. They are the reason that the M.T.A. warns passengers not to walk between subway cars and installs red signs that say, “Do not enter or cross tracks.” In 2019, the M.T.A. recorded a hundred and ninety-five 12-9s, the highest number in at least a decade. About a third are fatal.
“After the 12-9,” a short documentary produced and directed by Sara Joe Wolansky and edited by Brian Redondo, follows three operators in the year after their respective involvements in deadly collisions. “There’s really no way to prepare for them, and there’s absolutely no way to prevent them,” Kristan Webb, an operator who experienced her first 12-9 about five years into her career, says. Webb remembers seeing two dark patches on the running rail and realizing that they were a person’s feet. She immediately triggered the emergency brake. “I couldn’t have stopped any sooner than I did,” she says. For months afterward, she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, and she couldn’t bring herself even to ride the subway. Another operator, James Muriel, has experienced several 12-9s in the two decades that he has worked for the M.T.A. Once, he says, he dreamed that a man who died in a collision knocked on his door to ask why he hadn’t stopped the train.
This spring, after the coronavirus pandemic reached New York, subway ridership plummeted by as much as ninety per cent. Without the millions of daily fares that help pay for the system’s thousands of trains and tens of thousands of employees, the M.T.A. has been forced to reduce service and close the subway altogether between 1 A.M. and 5 A.M. But, even with fewer trains running, the total number of 12-9s barely decreased. Between March and late August, M.T.A. trains hit at least seventy people, which was only slightly fewer than the eighty-five who had been struck during the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, the M.T.A.’s budget woes are getting worse: subway ridership has yet to recover, the trains have still not resumed running twenty-four hours per day, and the M.T.A. now faces a sixteen-billion-dollar shortfall through 2024.
Peter T. Lin, a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic who previously worked as a fellow at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, co-authored the most recent study of the city’s subway deaths, which was published in 2009. More than half of the deaths were ruled suicides, his research found, and more than a third were accidents, particularly those that occurred in the early morning, after bars closed. “About once a week, we were seeing a subway-related fatality,” Lin told me. “I think a large number of these deaths, there’s a potential that they could be prevented.” Other mass-transit lines use safety doors, which remain closed until each train is in the station, serving as a barrier between passengers and the tracks: the world’s most sprawling subway system, in Seoul, South Korea, uses such doors, as do the AirTrains at J.F.K. and Newark airports. But New York City’s subway relies on a wide variety of train designs and operates at more than four hundred stations, of which the oldest were built in 1904. The M.T.A. has said that a system-wide installation of barriers would be too expensive, and, in 2018, it scrapped a safety-door pilot project on the L line. In the absence of physical barriers, fast-moving subway cars often come within inches of waiting passengers. “Modifying the speed of trains would not necessarily prevent the incidents,” Barry Greenblatt, the M.T.A.’s vice-president and chief officer for service delivery, says. “But it would have devastating effects on service.”
When Kristan Webb started riding the subway again, she avoided the first car, where the operator sits. She once had a panic attack while walking through Grand Central Terminal. Gradually, her therapist encouraged her to move toward the front of the train, and, after more than a year, Webb decided that she was ready to return to work. “I can do this,” she told herself on her first day back. For the M.T.A. as a whole, Webb says, collisions are an unfortunate regular occurrence, and there are protocols in place to resume service quickly after an accident. “But, for the train operator, it’s an incident that will stick with you for the rest of your life,” she says.