newyorker--2020-09-14--What to Do with a Confederate Monument?

What to Do with a Confederate Monument?

Across the South and well beyond , cities and states have been removing Confederate monuments , recognizing their power as @ @ @ @ @ foundational racism .
In the town of Easton , Maryland , in front of the @ @ @ @ @ s a statue known as the “ Talbot Boys.
” It depicts a young soldier @ @ @ @ @ , and it honors the men who crossed over to fight for secession .
It @ @ @ @ @ monument in Maryland outside of a battlefield or a graveyard .
Casey Cep grew up @ @ @ @ @ s watched as the town has awakened to the significance of the statue .
Five @ @ @ @ @ resolution to remove it came before the county council , the vote was 5–0 opposing @ @ @ @ @ a summer of reckoning with police violence and structural racism , the statue came up @ @ @ @ @ Is time finally catching up with the “ Talbot Boys ” ?

Download a transcript.
Photograph by Marcus Maddox for The New Yorker
Across the South and well beyond, cities and states have been removing Confederate monuments, recognizing their power as symbols of America’s foundational racism. In the town of Easton, Maryland, in front of the picturesque courthouse, there’s a statue known as the “Talbot Boys.” It depicts a young soldier holding a Confederate battle flag, and it honors the men who crossed over to fight for secession. It’s the last such monument in Maryland outside of a battlefield or a graveyard. Casey Cep grew up nearby, and she’s watched as the town has awakened to the significance of the statue. Five years ago, when a resolution to remove it came before the county council, the vote was 5–0 opposing removal. But, during a summer of reckoning with police violence and structural racism, the statue came up for a vote again. Is time finally catching up with the “Talbot Boys”?


newyorker--2020-09-14--Trump Accuses Biden of Using Performance-Enhancing Books

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Hinting darkly that “ people are saying there ’ s something going on , @ @ @ @ @ that the former Vice-President Joe Biden is using “ performance-enhancing books.
” Pointing to Biden @ @ @ @ @ the Vice-Presidential debates of 2008 and 2012 , Trump alleged , “ It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ the influence of books.
” “ Every time he got asked a question , he @ @ @ @ @ air , ” Trump said .
“ You can ’ t do that unless you @ @ @ @ @ books.
” Trump warned that , unless he is caught , Biden will try to @ @ @ @ @ Presidential debates , which start later this month , and urged that both candidates be @ @ @ @ @ contest .
“ I have no problem with being tested , ” Trump declared .
@ @ @ @ @ per cent book-free .
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Hinting darkly that “people are saying there’s something going on,” Donald J. Trump claimed that the former Vice-President Joe Biden is using “performance-enhancing books.”
Pointing to Biden’s strong performances in the Vice-Presidential debates of 2008 and 2012, Trump alleged, “It’s clear that he was under the influence of books.”
“Every time he got asked a question, he pulled facts out of thin air,” Trump said. “You can’t do that unless you’re pumped up on books.”
Trump warned that, unless he is caught, Biden will try to use performance-enhancing books before the Presidential debates, which start later this month, and urged that both candidates be tested for books before the contest.
“I have no problem with being tested,” Trump declared. “I am a hundred per cent book-free.”


newyorker--2020-09-13--How the Trump Campaign’s Mobile App Is Collecting Huge Amounts of Voter Data

Since the Trump campaign set up a shell company called American Made Media Consultants , in 2018 , an entity it describes as a “ vendor responsible for arranging and executing media buys and related services at fair market value , ” it ’ s been nearly impossible to know whom the campaign is paying , for what , and how much .
But , on May 27th , Alan Knitowski , the C.E.O .
of Phunware , an Austin-based ad broker and software company , announced a “ strategic relationship with American Made Media Consultants on the development , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Trump-Pence 2020 Reelection Campaign ’ s mobile application portfolio.
” Although Phunware never showed up in the campaign ’ s F.E.C .
reports , Phunware ’ s S.E.C .
filings show that , since last year , it has been paid around four million dollars by A.M.M.C .
On its face , Phunware seems like a strange choice to develop the campaign ’ s app .
Before working for President Trump , Phunware ’ s software was being used in relatively few applications , the most popular being a horoscope app .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ been embroiled in a lawsuit with Uber , a former client of the company ’ s ad-placement business .
The dispute stems from a yearlong investigation by two former Phunware employees who discovered that the company was pretending to place Uber ads on Web sites like CNN when , in fact , they were appearing on pornography sites , among others , if they appeared at all .
But , according to former Phunware employees and business associates , the company ’ s value to the Trump campaign is not in software development @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paying Phunware four million dollars for an app , ” a former business partner of the company told me .
“ They are paying for data .
They are paying for targeted advertising services .
Imagine if every time I open my phone I see a campaign message that Joe Biden ’ s America means we ’ re going to have war in the streets .
That ’ s the service the Trump campaign and Brad Parscale ” —the Trump campaign ’ s senior adviser for data and digital operations— “ have bought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of the package.
” The Trump 2020 app is an enormous data-collection tool in its own right .
When it launched , on April 23rd , Parscale , who was then Trump ’ s campaign manager , urged his followers on Facebook to “ download the groundbreaking Official Trump 2020 App—unlike other lame political apps you ’ ve seen.
” Despite the hype , the 2020 app recapitulates many of the functions found on the 2016 app .
There ’ s a news feed with Trump ’ s social-media posts , an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The “ gaming ” features that distinguished the 2016 app are still prominent—a “ Trump ’ s army ” member who accumulates a hundred thousand points by sharing contacts or raising money is promised a photograph with the President , while other members can use points to get discounts on MAGA gear .
Users are prompted to invite friends to download the app—more points !
—and can use the app to sign up to make calls on behalf of the campaign , to be a poll watcher , to register voters , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ events .
The most obvious new feature on the 2020 app is a live news broadcast , carefully curated by the campaign to push the President ’ s talking points .
It is hosted by a cast of campaign surrogates , including Lara Trump , Eric Trump ’ s wife , and Kimberly Guilfoyle , Donald Trump , Jr. , ’ s girlfriend and the campaign ’ s national finance chair .
There are also channels aimed at particular demographic groups , among them Women for Trump , Black Voices for Trump , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a crude approximation of a traditional news outlet , the Trump app enables users to stay fully sequestered within the fact-optional Trump universe .
“ I think everything we do is to counter the media , ” Parscale told Reuters in June .
“ This is another tool in the tool shed to fight that fight , and it ’ s a big tool.
” In May , after Twitter labelled one of Trump ’ s tweets as being in violation of its standards , sparking renewed claims of liberal-media censorship of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tweet was not taken down ) , downloads of the campaign app soared .
To access the Trump app , users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign .
“ The most important , golden thing in politics is a cellphone number , ” Parscale told Reuters .
“ When we receive cellphone numbers , it really allows us to identify them across the databases .
Who are they , voting history , everything.
” Michael Marinaccio , the chief operating officer of Data Trust , a private Republican data company , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new this year , or at least a sense of urgency , is getting as many cell-phone numbers as we can in the voter file data.
” An effective way to do that is to entice supporters to share not only their own cell-phone numbers with the campaign but those of their contacts as well .
One estimate , by Eliran Sapir , the C.E.O .
of Apptopia , a mobile-analytics company , is that 1.4 million app downloads could provide upward of a hundred million phone numbers .
This will enable the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who have not consented to handing over their personal information .
It ’ s not unlike how Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of nearly ninety million unsuspecting Facebook users , only this time it is one ’ s friends , family , and acquaintances who are willfully handing over the data for a chance to get a twenty-five-dollar discount on a MAGA hat .
By contrast , the new Biden app still collects data on users , but it outlines the specific uses of that data and doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of users ’ friends and family .
“ Unlike the Biden app , which seeks to provide users with awareness and control of the specific uses of their data , the Trump app collects as much as it can using an opt-out system and makes no promises as to the specific uses of that data , ” Samuel Woolley , the director of the propaganda research project at the University of Texas ’ s Center for Media Engagement , told me .
“ They just try to get people to turn over as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me , “ The Trump 2020 app was built by Phunware as a one-stop destination with a variety of tools to get voters engaged with President Trump ’ s reëlection campaign.
” Among its main contributions to the app ’ s data-mining capabilities is a “ location experience kit , ” which the company had previously marketed to hospitals and malls to help people navigate unfamiliar buildings .
Visitors could pair their phone ’ s Bluetooth with beacons set up throughout the facility .
Initially , the Trump 2020 app was built @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have been useful .
According to one former employee , however , the company ’ s location software , which functions even when the app is not open , may be capable of sucking up more than geographic coördinates .
It could potentially “ sniff out all of the information you have on your phone .
Any sort of registration data , your name , your phone number , potentially your Social Security number , and other pieces of data .
It could sniff out how many apps you have on your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have on your phone , what apps you deleted recently , how much time you ’ ve spent in an app , and your dwell time at various specific locations .
It could give a very intimate picture of that individual and their relationship with that mobile device.
” ( Phunware did not respond to multiple requests for comment . )

Since the Trump campaign set up a shell company called American Made Media Consultants, in 2018, an entity it describes as a “vendor responsible for arranging and executing media buys and related services at fair market value,” it’s been nearly impossible to know whom the campaign is paying, for what, and how much. But, on May 27th, Alan Knitowski, the C.E.O. of Phunware, an Austin-based ad broker and software company, announced a “strategic relationship with American Made Media Consultants on the development, launch and ongoing management and evolution of the Trump-Pence 2020 Reelection Campaign’s mobile application portfolio.” Although Phunware never showed up in the campaign’s F.E.C. reports, Phunware’s S.E.C. filings show that, since last year, it has been paid around four million dollars by A.M.M.C.
On its face, Phunware seems like a strange choice to develop the campaign’s app. Before working for President Trump, Phunware’s software was being used in relatively few applications, the most popular being a horoscope app. And, since 2019, it has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Uber, a former client of the company’s ad-placement business. The dispute stems from a yearlong investigation by two former Phunware employees who discovered that the company was pretending to place Uber ads on Web sites like CNN when, in fact, they were appearing on pornography sites, among others, if they appeared at all. But, according to former Phunware employees and business associates, the company’s value to the Trump campaign is not in software development. “The Trump campaign is not paying Phunware four million dollars for an app,” a former business partner of the company told me. “They are paying for data. They are paying for targeted advertising services. Imagine if every time I open my phone I see a campaign message that Joe Biden’s America means we’re going to have war in the streets. That’s the service the Trump campaign and Brad Parscale”—the Trump campaign’s senior adviser for data and digital operations—“have bought from Phunware. An app is just part of the package.”
The Trump 2020 app is an enormous data-collection tool in its own right. When it launched, on April 23rd, Parscale, who was then Trump’s campaign manager, urged his followers on Facebook to “download the groundbreaking Official Trump 2020 App—unlike other lame political apps you’ve seen.” Despite the hype, the 2020 app recapitulates many of the functions found on the 2016 app. There’s a news feed with Trump’s social-media posts, an events calendar, and recorded videos. The “gaming” features that distinguished the 2016 app are still prominent—a “Trump’s army” member who accumulates a hundred thousand points by sharing contacts or raising money is promised a photograph with the President, while other members can use points to get discounts on MAGA gear. Users are prompted to invite friends to download the app—more points!—and can use the app to sign up to make calls on behalf of the campaign, to be a poll watcher, to register voters, and to get tickets to virtual and in-person events.
The most obvious new feature on the 2020 app is a live news broadcast, carefully curated by the campaign to push the President’s talking points. It is hosted by a cast of campaign surrogates, including Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend and the campaign’s national finance chair. There are also channels aimed at particular demographic groups, among them Women for Trump, Black Voices for Trump, and Latinos for Trump. Though it is a crude approximation of a traditional news outlet, the Trump app enables users to stay fully sequestered within the fact-optional Trump universe. “I think everything we do is to counter the media,” Parscale told Reuters in June. “This is another tool in the tool shed to fight that fight, and it’s a big tool.” In May, after Twitter labelled one of Trump’s tweets as being in violation of its standards, sparking renewed claims of liberal-media censorship of conservatives (despite the fact that the tweet was not taken down), downloads of the campaign app soared.
To access the Trump app, users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign. “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” Parscale told Reuters. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.” Michael Marinaccio, the chief operating officer of Data Trust, a private Republican data company, said recently that “what’s new this year, or at least a sense of urgency, is getting as many cell-phone numbers as we can in the voter file data.” An effective way to do that is to entice supporters to share not only their own cell-phone numbers with the campaign but those of their contacts as well. One estimate, by Eliran Sapir, the C.E.O. of Apptopia, a mobile-analytics company, is that 1.4 million app downloads could provide upward of a hundred million phone numbers. This will enable the Trump campaign to find and target people who have not consented to handing over their personal information. It’s not unlike how Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of nearly ninety million unsuspecting Facebook users, only this time it is one’s friends, family, and acquaintances who are willfully handing over the data for a chance to get a twenty-five-dollar discount on a MAGA hat.
By contrast, the new Biden app still collects data on users, but it outlines the specific uses of that data and doesn’t automatically collect the e-mail and phone numbers of users’ friends and family. “Unlike the Biden app, which seeks to provide users with awareness and control of the specific uses of their data, the Trump app collects as much as it can using an opt-out system and makes no promises as to the specific uses of that data,” Samuel Woolley, the director of the propaganda research project at the University of Texas’s Center for Media Engagement, told me. “They just try to get people to turn over as much as possible.”
A Trump spokesperson told me, “The Trump 2020 app was built by Phunware as a one-stop destination with a variety of tools to get voters engaged with President Trump’s reëlection campaign.” Among its main contributions to the app’s data-mining capabilities is a “location experience kit,” which the company had previously marketed to hospitals and malls to help people navigate unfamiliar buildings. Visitors could pair their phone’s Bluetooth with beacons set up throughout the facility. Initially, the Trump 2020 app was built around big rallies, where this feature would have been useful. According to one former employee, however, the company’s location software, which functions even when the app is not open, may be capable of sucking up more than geographic coördinates. It could potentially “sniff out all of the information you have on your phone. Any sort of registration data, your name, your phone number, potentially your Social Security number, and other pieces of data. It could sniff out how many apps you have on your phone, what type of apps you have on your phone, what apps you deleted recently, how much time you’ve spent in an app, and your dwell time at various specific locations. It could give a very intimate picture of that individual and their relationship with that mobile device.” (Phunware did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
In 2017, as Phunware was moving into the election space, the company’s Web site announced, “As soon as the first few campaigns recognize the value of mobile ad targeting for voter engagement, the floodgates will open. Which campaign will get there first and strike it rich?” A year later, according to people familiar with the effort, the company used its location-tracking capabilities to create a lobbying campaign on behalf of a health-care company aiming to influence legislators in Georgia. It put a “geofence” around the governor’s mansion that recorded the I.D. of every device that went in and out of the building, and then used the I.D.s to send targeted messages to those phones (likely including the governor’s) about the legislation it was aiming to influence. The legislation passed. Phunware’s leadership has also discussed their ability to geofence polling places, according to people who were present during these discussions, in order to send targeted campaign ads to voters as they step into the voting booth. While it is illegal to advertise in the vicinity of the polls, using location data in this way to send targeted ads could enable a campaign to breach that border surreptitiously.
Phunware’s data collection on behalf of the Trump campaign likely extends beyond the app as well. According to Phunware’s chief operating officer, Randall Crowder, the company has created a “data exchange” that “enables digital marketers to design custom audiences within minutes using geographic, interest, intent, and demographic segments . . . high-quality G.P.S. location data points from one hundred million-plus devices in the United States to increase scale of location-based audiences.” In its promotional materials, the company also claims to have unique device I.D.s for more than a billion mobile devices worldwide, and to have developed what it calls a Knowledge Graph—a “consumer-centric collection of actions, preferences, characteristics and predicted behavior” from the data it has siphoned from mobile phones and tablets. Much like Facebook’s social graph, which has been described as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related,” this enables the company to quickly sort through large data sets, uncovering connections and relations that otherwise would be obscured. For example: middle-aged women who live alone, rarely vote, own guns, and live in a border state.
So how did Phunware obtain a billion unique device I.D.s? As the company described it to the S.E.C., they were collected from phones and tablets that use Phunware’s software. But, according to people who have worked with the company, in addition to the data it obtains through its software, Phunware has been using its ad-placement business as a wholesale data-mining operation. When it bids to place an ad in an app like, for example, Pandora, it scoops up the I.D. of every phone and tablet that would have been exposed to the ad, even if it loses the bid. By collecting and storing this information, the company is able to compile a fairly comprehensive picture of every app downloaded on those devices, and any registration data a user has shared in order to use the app.
This information can yield rich demographic data. If a campaign is looking for young men with an affinity for guns, for instance, it might look at who has downloaded both Call of Duty and CCW, the Concealed Carry Fifty State app. Then, using the location data associated with the device I.D., the data can be unmasked and linked to an individual. Once a campaign knows who someone is, and where a person lives, it is not difficult to start building a voter file, and using this information to tailor ads and messages.
Tom Wheeler, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission, told me, “These are Cambridge Analytica-like techniques. It’s collecting the descriptive power of data from multiple sources, most of which the consumer doesn’t even know are being collected. And that’s what Cambridge Analytica did.”
In late July, a group of lawmakers, led by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and his Democratic colleague Ron Wyden, of Oregon, sent a letter to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission asking him to investigate whether using bidding information in this way constitutes an unfair and deceptive practice. “Few Americans realize that companies are siphoning off and sharing that ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them,” they wrote, “which are then sold to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to the government without court orders.” According to Charles Manning, the C.E.O. of Kochava, a data marketplace, “There are no regulatory bodies that appear to be aware of the technological foundations upon which digital advertising operates. This is a challenge, because without understanding how programmatic ads are bought and sold, regulators face an uphill battle in applying regulation that deals with opaque supply chains where fraudulent behavior can flourish.”
The Trump app, at least, is explicit about what it expects from its users: “You may be asked to provide certain information, including your name, username, password, e-mail, date of birth, gender, address, employment information, and other descriptive information,” the app’s privacy policy states. “The Services [of the app] may include features that rely on the use of information stored on, or made available through, your mobile Device. . . . We . . . reserve the right to store any information about the people you contact via the Services. . . . We reserve the right to use, share, exchange and/or disclose to DJTFP affiliated committee and third parties any of your information for any lawful purpose.” (When I asked Woolley why the campaign was asking supporters to share their contacts, since it already had access to them through the app’s permissions, he pointed out that, when a user shares their contacts to earn points, “that actually sends out messages to your contacts asking them to download the app. So rather than just getting data on your friends and family, they are able to also reach out to them using you as a reference.”)
The policy also notes that the campaign will be collecting information gleaned from G.P.S. and other location services, and that users will be tracked as they move around the Internet. Users also agree to give the campaign access to the phone’s Bluetooth connection, calendar, storage, and microphone, as well as permission to read the contents of their memory card, modify or delete the contents of the card, view the phone status and identity, view its Wi-Fi connections, and prevent the phone from going to sleep. These permissions give the Trump data operation access to the intimate details of users’ lives, the ability to listen in on those lives, and to follow users everywhere they go. It’s a colossal—and essentially free—data-mining enterprise. As Woolley and his colleague Jacob Gursky wrote in MIT Technology Review, the Trump 2020 app is “a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power.”
I learned this firsthand after downloading the Trump 2020 app on a burner phone I bought in order to examine it, using an alias and a new e-mail address. Two days later, the President sent me a note, thanking me for joining his team. Lara Trump invited me (for a small donation) to become a Presidential adviser. Eric Trump called me one of his father’s “FIERCEST supporters from the beginning.” But the messages I began getting from the Trump campaign every couple of hours were sent not only to the name and address I’d used to access the app. They were also sent to the e-mail address and name associated with the credit card I’d used to buy the phone and its SIM card, neither of which I had shared with the campaign. Despite my best efforts, they knew who I was and where to reach me.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-09-15--Chapter Books Rewritten to Reflect the Catastrophic Effects of Climate Change

“ Now let ’ s get yer wand , ” Hagrid said , opening the door to the shabby , dusty shop .
Harry couldn ’ t believe it .
A magic wand !
Once inside , they were surprised to see a Gringotts Goblin behind the counter .
“ Where ’ s Ollivander ?
” Hagrid asked .
“ The trees that they used to carve the wands from don ’ t grow anymore , ” the goblin replied .
“ It ’ s too hot .
The bank is repossessing this business and closing it .
Oh , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he tried to start a new shop up north and lost it all in an unseasonable flood.
” “ You could always get a wand made out of compressed bugs at Bugstick , ” the goblin added , with a shrug .
“ But those don ’ t work for shit.
” The sun played off Edward ’ s chiselled , handsome face , which sparkled like diamonds .
“ I love you , ” he murmured into Bella ’ s ear .
It was a hundred and sixteen degrees in Forks , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , thick with carbon monoxide and ash , rolled through town .
Most days it was impossible to go outside without an oxygen mask .
“ So you see , ” the Spelling Bee said , “ all the words in the world are from Dictionopolis .
We grow them in these very orchards—o-r-c-h-a-r-d-s. ” “ Words don ’ t grow on trees !
” Milo said , with a laugh .
“ Ah , but they do , ” the Bee said , sadly .
“ And in our rapidly warming climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thriving .
If they continue to ravage these orchards , it may soon spell the end of all language—l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e. ” “ Surely something can be done !
” Milo cried .
“ We ’ re dealing with several catastrophes at once here , man , ” the Spelling Bee replied , defensively .
“ The Sea of Knowledge flooded our scientific facilities , we have thousands of Lethargian climate refugees , and our new eco-fascist bee government threw all the bee scientists in jail.
” Milo began to weep as he realized that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the climate catastrophe .
With an enormous squelch , Augustus Gloop shot up the chocolate pipe , screaming all the while .
On the chocolate river ’ s far shore , the diminutive Oompa Loompas began to sing a strange , mournful tune : The syrup hurricane , viscous and lethal , stalled out over the town of Chewandswallow for three days .
The storm shattered windows , reduced houses to piles of tinder , and topped it all off with pure maple syrup , ten inches thick .
ChewCorp , meanwhile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign intended to distract the public from the fact that its powdered-sugar emissions had triggered the catastrophic weather .
The ChewCorp execs had known what was coming for decades but chose to reap huge profits at the expense of their fellow-humans .
Despite their complicity , the ChewCorp brass were able to escape the worst effects of the weather .
When brownie slides buried the local power plant , the wealthy turned on the generators in their mansions .
When ice-cream melts swept nuclear waste into the water reservoir , they retreated to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as they realized that even their gastro-meteorological paradise could not survive the solipsistic evil of corporate greed .
“ The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe ” Once , there were four children , named Peter , Susan , Edmund , and Lucy .
They were all consumed by a plague of ancient diseases unleashed from the melting Siberian permafrost .

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”
“Now let’s get yer wand,” Hagrid said, opening the door to the shabby, dusty shop. Harry couldn’t believe it. A magic wand!
Once inside, they were surprised to see a Gringotts Goblin behind the counter. “Where’s Ollivander?” Hagrid asked.
“The trees that they used to carve the wands from don’t grow anymore,” the goblin replied. “It’s too hot. The bank is repossessing this business and closing it. Oh, and Ollivander isn’t here; he tried to start a new shop up north and lost it all in an unseasonable flood.”
“You could always get a wand made out of compressed bugs at Bugstick,” the goblin added, with a shrug. “But those don’t work for shit.”
“Twilight”
The sun played off Edward’s chiselled, handsome face, which sparkled like diamonds. “I love you,” he murmured into Bella’s ear.
It was a hundred and sixteen degrees in Forks, Washington. A smog of unbreathable air, thick with carbon monoxide and ash, rolled through town. Most days it was impossible to go outside without an oxygen mask.
“I love you, too,” Bella said, coughing lightly.
“The Phantom Tollbooth”
“So you see,” the Spelling Bee said, “all the words in the world are from Dictionopolis. We grow them in these very orchards—o-r-c-h-a-r-d-s.”
“Words don’t grow on trees!” Milo said, with a laugh.
“Ah, but they do,” the Bee said, sadly. “And in our rapidly warming climate the alphamites that eat those trees are thriving. If they continue to ravage these orchards, it may soon spell the end of all language—l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.”
“Surely something can be done!” Milo cried.
“We’re dealing with several catastrophes at once here, man,” the Spelling Bee replied, defensively. “The Sea of Knowledge flooded our scientific facilities, we have thousands of Lethargian climate refugees, and our new eco-fascist bee government threw all the bee scientists in jail.”
Milo began to weep as he realized that not even language would escape the ravages of the climate catastrophe.
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
With an enormous squelch, Augustus Gloop shot up the chocolate pipe, screaming all the while.
On the chocolate river’s far shore, the diminutive Oompa Loompas began to sing a strange, mournful tune:
Dee-doop-ee-dee-dee!
Augustus Gloop is an awful child,
Whom we would normally body-shame through song,
But what we’re more concerned about
Is land degradation and desertification,
Which led to the collapse of global supply chains
And drove Willy Wonka out of business,
Leading to our acquisition by Amazon,
Which renamed us “Amazon Sugars”
And only lets us make hard, salty nut rolls,
So enjoy the rest of your tour, led by Jeff Bezos,
I’m sure that it will be a lot of “fun,”
Dee-doop-ee-dee-doo!
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
The syrup hurricane, viscous and lethal, stalled out over the town of Chewandswallow for three days. The storm shattered windows, reduced houses to piles of tinder, and topped it all off with pure maple syrup, ten inches thick.
ChewCorp, meanwhile, continued to wage a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign intended to distract the public from the fact that its powdered-sugar emissions had triggered the catastrophic weather. The ChewCorp execs had known what was coming for decades but chose to reap huge profits at the expense of their fellow-humans.
Despite their complicity, the ChewCorp brass were able to escape the worst effects of the weather. When brownie slides buried the local power plant, the wealthy turned on the generators in their mansions. When ice-cream melts swept nuclear waste into the water reservoir, they retreated to mountain resorts.
The townspeople sobbed bitterly as they realized that even their gastro-meteorological paradise could not survive the solipsistic evil of corporate greed.
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”
Once, there were four children, named Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. They were all consumed by a plague of ancient diseases unleashed from the melting Siberian permafrost.
The end.


newyorker--2020-09-15--How Cameo Blew Up During Quarantine

How Cameo Blew Up During Quarantine

A couple of summers ago , I was at my desk at work when I received a video link in a text message from a friend , with no additional explanation .
When I clicked on it , I was befuddled : on the screen loomed the face of James Kennedy , a Los Angeles-based d.j .
best known as one of the stars of the reality show “ Vanderpump Rules.
” Kennedy is British , cleft-chinned , and prone to referring to himself as “ the white Kanye ” ; his rageful tirades , party-animal benders , and fits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ do better ” had made him one of my favorite characters on the show , but he was not a real-life acquaintance .
Yet , in the video , he hailed me by name .
“ Thank you , Naomi , for an incredible support , ” he began , the indefinite article making the address more perplexing .
“ You ’ re amazing .
You ’ re doing amazing .
Keep being amazing.
” Kennedy seemed to be delivering the words from the doorway of his bedroom ; an unmade bed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mussed hair gave the sense that he had just woken up .
He rolled out some catchphrases , suggesting that we should one day drink “ Pumptini ” cocktails and share a “ pasta ” —a term that fans have speculated the show ’ s stars use to refer to cocaine , despite the cast ’ s denials—and ended the video by saying , “ Love you , Naomi .
Keep killing the game.
” The video , I soon learned , was not made with deepfake technology or sorcery , but purchased @ @ @ @ @ @ @ allows users to send “ personalized messages from your favorite celebrities.
” Its uncanniness stemmed from the difficulty of figuring out who , exactly , was behind its words .
Was it Kennedy or my friend who was telling me I was “ amazing ” and encouraging me to “ keep killing the game ” ?
It struck me that this category confusion underlined something utilitarian , and perhaps even soulless about the app— “ the rock bottom of capitalism , ” as another friend put it , when I explained Cameo to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or close enough to one , who , in the dead interstitial hour or two between , say , waking up and going to the gym , was likely banging out a half-dozen videos in which he repeatedly told strangers that he loved them , at the behest of their friends or family , for a hundred dollars a pop ( Kennedy ’ s fee , his profile informed me ) .
So why did receiving the Cameo make me so happy ?
I shared the video online , captioning it , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has ever done for me .
❤❤❤.
” There was something meaningful in the triangulation that Cameo had set up , in which a friend , wanting to delight me and familiar with my particular taste , selected the right marginal celebrity to wish me well .
( Recently , a girlfriend of mine told me that , when she and her B.F.F .
agreed to surprise each other with a Cameo , each booked the other a member from the Juggalo duo Insane Clown Posse .
“ I was , like , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said . )
The interaction with Kennedy was also surprisingly intimate .
Despite the one-sidedness of the video , and its read-from-a-teleprompter quality , it seemed pleasantly ad hoc : bad lighting , rumpled duvet .
In his Cameo , Kennedy managed to appear somehow both on and off the clock .
In March , I spoke over the phone with Steven Galanis , Cameo ’ s thirty-two-year-old C.E.O.
, who was living in Chicago , the site of Cameo ’ s headquarters .
The company , which now has about a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in 2017 , by Galanis , then a LinkedIn executive ; Devon Townsend , a onetime influencer on Vine ; and Martin Blencowe , an N.F.L .
agent .
Galanis was a party organizer in college at Duke—a fellow-alum told me that his bro-y affability led peers to dub him “ the mayor ” —and he initially culled talent from his and his co-founders ’ social circle .
“ A lot of our buddies were in sports and entertainment , ” he said .
The celebrities , however , were far from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like , backup quarterbacks from the Baltimore Ravens , ” Galanis told me .
“ The people we knew weren ’ t really famous.
” Popular performers from the early days included Gilbert Gottfried , a comedian from the eighties known for his abrasive style , and “ Countess ” Luann de Lesseps , a wealthy divorcée from “ The Real Housewives of New York ” known for her vanity single “ Money Can ’ t Buy You Class.
” Today , however , the bottom-feeder , has-been-or-never-were status of the app has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which sells approximately five thousand videos a day , has snagged a few bona-fide celebrities , like the hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg ( seven hundred and fifty dollars a video ) and the comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish ( a thousand dollars a video , when available ) .
Other mainstream stars , like Sarah Jessica Parker and Mandy Moore , have guested on Cameo to collect money for charity .
This transition may be part of a broader cultural shift .
Once , it was thought unseemly for a celebrity to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and in her free time .
But , in today ’ s extremely online existence , even A-list celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and J .
Lo purport to take us behind the scenes by posting on Instagram or TikTok .
“ Soon , you ’ re going to be losing your audience if you don ’ t participate through platforms like ours , ” Galanis told me .
“ It ’ s no longer considered diluting the brand.
” He added that Cameo provides a greater sense of mutuality than other platforms .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Instagram or Twitter , it ’ s unreciprocated .
With Cameo , it ’ s about the exchange of love , ” he said .
During our conversation , Galanis was exceedingly cordial and forthcoming , but , at the half-hour mark , on the dot , he brought the call to an abrupt end .
“ I ’ ve got a hard stop , this was great , though—thank you , ” he said suddenly , with no preamble , and hung up .
A switch from hot to cold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which are necessarily transactional .
But it struck me , too , that my exchange with Galanis was much like a Cameo , in which the warmth of human connection is sharply delimited by the boundaries of time and money .
There is something fascinating , and slightly addictive , about strolling the virtual aisles of Cameo , weighing your options .
The platform now has about forty thousand talents on its roster , with offerings for every cultural niche .
For the gossip-loving older millennial , you might book Perez Hilton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the early two-thousands for posting crudely scribbled-on paparazzi pictures of celebrities .
( His Cameo bio is more positive : “ You ’ re awesome !
.
.
.
please feel free to tip !
” ) For the nostalgic Gen X-er , you can book Larry Thomas , who played the “ soup Nazi ” on Seinfeld .
( If you want him in a chef ’ s coat , you have to upgrade to the “ business price option.
” ) For the irony-loving media worker , you can book the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( Her profile reads “ Scameos 🦋 ” ) You could choose the most expensive performer on the platform , the Kardashian-adjacent reality star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner , at two thousand five hundred dollars .
Or , for only twenty-eight dollars , you could book a YouTube-famous Jesus Christ impersonator .
( “ The ONLY verified Son of God on any social media is on Cameo !
” ) A few months ago , while scrolling through the app , I was surprised to discover that Ben Sinclair , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s “ High Maintenance , ” was now offering his services on the platform .
On the series , the bearded and amiable Sinclair , who is thirty-six , plays “ the Guy , ” a weed dealer who dips in and out of the lives of his New York clients .
The show has garnered praise from members of the metropolitan intelligentsia , who likely see themselves reflected in its neurotic , libidinal characters .
In his introductory video on the app , Sinclair appeared as fuzzy and light-touch as his “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I ’ m your favorite guy from that show .
.
.
whatever , ” he begins .
On a bright , chilly day in February , I visited Sinclair at his cozy Brooklyn office .
When I asked him how he came to join the platform , he told me that he had decided to take the plunge at the suggestion of the actress Gina Gershon , who also maintains a profile .
He has since recorded more than a hundred videos and made over ten thousand dollars .
Gershon , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commission off the company ’ s cut of his fee—one way the platform incentivizes its creators to bring in new talent , pyramid-marketing-style .
“ We don ’ t make as much money from the show as someone who ’ s on NBC or CBS , ” he told me .
“ Why wouldn ’ t I want to make extra money on Cameo and get a nice dinner at Roman ’ s ?
” he added , referring to a nouveau-hipster restaurant in Brooklyn .
( More recently , Sinclair has decided @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cameo to charity . )

A couple of summers ago, I was at my desk at work when I received a video link in a text message from a friend, with no additional explanation. When I clicked on it, I was befuddled: on the screen loomed the face of James Kennedy, a Los Angeles-based d.j. best known as one of the stars of the reality show “Vanderpump Rules.” Kennedy is British, cleft-chinned, and prone to referring to himself as “the white Kanye”; his rageful tirades, party-animal benders, and fits of regretful tears coupled with promises to “do better” had made him one of my favorite characters on the show, but he was not a real-life acquaintance. Yet, in the video, he hailed me by name. “Thank you, Naomi, for an incredible support,” he began, the indefinite article making the address more perplexing. “You’re amazing. You’re doing amazing. Keep being amazing.” Kennedy seemed to be delivering the words from the doorway of his bedroom; an unmade bed, a drawn shade, and his mussed hair gave the sense that he had just woken up. He rolled out some catchphrases, suggesting that we should one day drink “Pumptini” cocktails and share a “pasta”—a term that fans have speculated the show’s stars use to refer to cocaine, despite the cast’s denials—and ended the video by saying, “Love you, Naomi. Keep killing the game.”
The video, I soon learned, was not made with deepfake technology or sorcery but purchased on an app called Cameo, which allows users to send “personalized messages from your favorite celebrities.” Its uncanniness stemmed from the difficulty of figuring out who, exactly, was behind its words. Was it Kennedy or my friend who was telling me I was “amazing” and encouraging me to “keep killing the game”? It struck me that this category confusion underlined something utilitarian, and perhaps even soulless, about the app—“the rock bottom of capitalism,” as another friend put it, when I explained Cameo to him. Here was a star, or close enough to one, who, in the dead interstitial hour or two between, say, waking up and going to the gym, was likely banging out a half-dozen videos in which he repeatedly told strangers that he loved them, at the behest of their friends or family, for a hundred dollars a pop (Kennedy’s fee, his profile informed me).
So why did receiving the Cameo make me so happy? I shared the video online, captioning it, “This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. ❤❤❤.” There was something meaningful in the triangulation that Cameo had set up, in which a friend, wanting to delight me and familiar with my particular taste, selected the right marginal celebrity to wish me well. (Recently, a girlfriend of mine told me that, when she and her B.F.F. agreed to surprise each other with a Cameo, each booked the other a member from the Juggalo duo Insane Clown Posse. “I was, like, we’re soul mates,” she said.) The interaction with Kennedy was also surprisingly intimate. Despite the one-sidedness of the video, and its read-from-a-teleprompter quality, it seemed pleasantly ad hoc: bad lighting, rumpled duvet. In his Cameo, Kennedy managed to appear somehow both on and off the clock.
In March, I spoke over the phone with Steven Galanis, Cameo’s thirty-two-year-old C.E.O., who was living in Chicago, the site of Cameo’s headquarters. The company, which now has about a hundred and thirty employees, was founded, in 2017, by Galanis, then a LinkedIn executive; Devon Townsend, a onetime influencer on Vine; and Martin Blencowe, an N.F.L. agent. Galanis was a party organizer in college at Duke—a fellow-alum told me that his bro-y affability led peers to dub him “the mayor”—and he initially culled talent from his and his co-founders’ social circle. “A lot of our buddies were in sports and entertainment,” he said. The celebrities, however, were far from top tier. “It was, like, backup quarterbacks from the Baltimore Ravens,” Galanis told me. “The people we knew weren’t really famous.” Popular performers from the early days included Gilbert Gottfried, a comedian from the eighties known for his abrasive style, and “Countess” Luann de Lesseps, a wealthy divorcée from “The Real Housewives of New York” known for her vanity single “Money Can’t Buy You Class.”
Today, however, the bottom-feeder, has-been-or-never-were status of the app has begun to give way. Cameo, which sells approximately five thousand videos a day, has snagged a few bona-fide celebrities, like the hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg (seven hundred and fifty dollars a video) and the comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish (a thousand dollars a video, when available). Other mainstream stars, like Sarah Jessica Parker and Mandy Moore, have guested on Cameo to collect money for charity. This transition may be part of a broader cultural shift. Once, it was thought unseemly for a celebrity to make herself available to her fans directly, and in her free time. But, in today’s extremely online existence, even A-list celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and J. Lo purport to take us behind the scenes by posting on Instagram or TikTok. “Soon you’re going to be losing your audience if you don’t participate through platforms like ours,” Galanis told me. “It’s no longer considered diluting the brand.” He added that Cameo provides a greater sense of mutuality than other platforms. “When you comment on a celebrity’s Instagram or Twitter, it’s unreciprocated. With Cameo, it’s about the exchange of love,” he said.
During our conversation, Galanis was exceedingly cordial and forthcoming, but, at the half-hour mark, on the dot, he brought the call to an abrupt end. “I’ve got a hard stop; this was great, though—thank you,” he said suddenly, with no preamble, and hung up. A switch from hot to cold is par for the course in interviews, which are necessarily transactional. But it struck me, too, that my exchange with Galanis was much like a Cameo, in which the warmth of human connection is sharply delimited by the boundaries of time and money.
There is something fascinating, and slightly addictive, about strolling the virtual aisles of Cameo, weighing your options. The platform now has about forty thousand talents on its roster, with offerings for every cultural niche. For the gossip-loving older millennial, you might book Perez Hilton, the blogger who became infamous in the early two-thousands for posting crudely scribbled-on paparazzi pictures of celebrities. (His Cameo bio is more positive: “You’re awesome! . . . please feel free to tip!”) For the nostalgic Gen X-er, you can book Larry Thomas, who played the “soup Nazi” on Seinfeld. (If you want him in a chef’s coat, you have to upgrade to the “business price option.”) For the irony-loving media worker, you can book the Instagram influencer turned self-professed grifter Caroline Calloway. (Her profile reads “Scameos 🦋.”) You could choose the most expensive performer on the platform, the Kardashian-adjacent reality star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, at two thousand five hundred dollars. Or, for only twenty-eight dollars, you could book a YouTube-famous Jesus Christ impersonator. (“The ONLY verified Son of God on any social media is on Cameo!”)
A few months ago, while scrolling through the app, I was surprised to discover that Ben Sinclair, the co-creator and the star of HBO’s “High Maintenance,” was now offering his services on the platform. On the series, the bearded and amiable Sinclair, who is thirty-six, plays “the Guy,” a weed dealer who dips in and out of the lives of his New York clients. The show has garnered praise from members of the metropolitan intelligentsia, who likely see themselves reflected in its neurotic, libidinal characters. In his introductory video on the app, Sinclair appeared as fuzzy and light-touch as his “High Maintenance” character. “Hey, I’m your favorite guy from that show . . . whatever,” he begins. On a bright, chilly day in February, I visited Sinclair at his cozy Brooklyn office. When I asked him how he came to join the platform, he told me that he had decided to take the plunge at the suggestion of the actress Gina Gershon, who also maintains a profile. He has since recorded more than a hundred videos and made over ten thousand dollars. Gershon, as his recommender, takes a five-per-cent commission off the company’s cut of his fee—one way the platform incentivizes its creators to bring in new talent, pyramid-marketing-style. “We don’t make as much money from the show as someone who’s on NBC or CBS,” he told me. “Why wouldn’t I want to make extra money on Cameo and get a nice dinner at Roman’s?” he added, referring to a nouveau-hipster restaurant in Brooklyn. (More recently, Sinclair has decided to donate the money he makes on Cameo to charity.)
In some ways, Cameo is only a slightly more glamorous counterpoint to gig-economy platforms like Uber, which hires drivers at fluctuating rates, with no benefits. (Cameo takes twenty-five per cent of a performer’s earnings. “We always tell new talent to start on the low end of the price range,” Galanis told me. “Then, if they’re getting booked too much, they can raise it.”) The purported benefit of such a system is that contractors can determine their relationship to the job, though this clearly works best when one doesn’t have to rely on the platform as one’s main source of income. For Sinclair, it has been a boon. In April, 2019, he told me, he quit Instagram—partly because he felt he was becoming too psychologically dependent on fan validation, partly because he was tired of creating content for free, and partly because the fans could be demanding. One follower, he said, kept bombarding him with direct messages from a variety of accounts—a jag that culminated in a suicide threat from which Sinclair talked the man down, before reporting the incident to Instagram and, a couple of weeks later, deleting his account. “I didn’t want that sort of thing to happen again,” he said. Cameo has made it easier for him to control his relationship with his followers.
Still, the app has the potential to blur the boundaries between performer and fan. In late 2019, Cameo received a flurry of media attention when a user asked Mark McGrath, the frosted-tipped leader of the early-two-thousands band Sugar Ray, to break up with her boyfriend for her. (“I’m sure there’s big things ahead of you in the future, Bradyn,” McGrath said in the video, with touching heartiness.) The request, it turned out, had been a prank, but the potential responsibility that a celebrity takes on when agreeing to participate in strangers’ lives remains. Sinclair had recently received a Cameo request to help a man apologize to his girlfriend for acting badly on Valentine’s Day. Initially, Sinclair had hesitated. “I didn’t want to vouch for this guy!” he told me. “Who knows what he’s done?” In the end, he recorded the video; he had been reading a lot of Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher, and it had made him think about the importance of forgiveness. “Everyone needs to hear that we’re just doing our best, and that the world is complicated,” he told me. For the video, Sinclair wrapped himself in a robe, which gave him the aspect of a rogue guru, and spoke to the girlfriend and her partner. “He’s saying he fucked up, but that’s just words,” he said. “We all have to treat ourselves good to treat each other better.”
On Cameo, Sinclair has also seemed to find an opportunity to experiment as a performer. “I wanted it to be a place where I do weird stuff,” he said. As I sat by, he recorded several videos for the platform. For one, he took his cue from a request that was written in all-caps by screaming his words at the top of his lungs. (“GOOD FOR YOU FOR BUYING A HOUSE IN SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA! THIS IS FANTASTIC!”) In another, for a fan who had been promoted to oversee an H.R. department, he positioned himself upside down on a yoga chair made for practicing inversions and said, “Don’t forget to breathe at work, and, remember, those people’s problems are not your problems!” For a yoga teacher, he did a headstand wearing a wig and sang while playing a melodica: “You did such a good job graduating yoga class / Are you sure that the information they taught you is relevant? / I’m being interviewed for The New Yorker / It’s your birthday, does it mean you’re a Pisces?”
On “High Maintenance,” Sinclair’s character’s geniality is tempered by an essential detachment. “The Guy,” after all, appears at your place, gives you weed, maybe hangs out a little, then takes your money and disappears, on to the next client’s house. Cameo is perfectly made for projecting the same kind of fleeting presence. Sinclair is cognizant of the fact that his persona on the platform mirrors his role on his show: when we met, he wore a tie-dye sweatshirt that bore the words “Sensitive Stoner.” “I’m totally aware that I’m delivering on a product here,” he told me. He laughed. “One day, we won’t even need any social media, because they’ll just be able to brand actual, real-life engagement between human beings.”
When I first spoke to Galanis, America was only a couple of weeks into the pandemic, and the Cameo C.E.O. was speculating that lockdown orders would affect the company’s growth positively. “There’s a lot of talent who have wanted to work with us, but didn’t have the time,” he told me. “Now they’re at home. And, also, there’s no Comic Con, no concerts, no meet-and-greets.” He went on, “You’re going to see bigger and bigger people joining, because getting on Cameo is the best way for them to keep interacting with their fans in a way that is brand-positive and is making them money and keeping them safe.” It appears that Galanis’s predictions have been borne out. Between the beginning of quarantine and May, business went up a thousand per cent, and celebrities signed on at a higher rate: popular recent additions include Mike Tyson and Busy Philipps. “In a lot of ways, shelter-in-place has really transformed our business,” Galanis said, when we spoke in June. “It’s pushed it forward in unprecedented ways.” People have also begun to use Cameo to mark events like birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations that would otherwise have been celebrated in person. “For Mother’s Day, for instance, Cameo was a great way to give Mom those feelings of love and joy,” Galanis told me.
The pandemic, in a sense, has only accelerated a process that was already in motion. On apps like Instagram and Twitter, celebrities have always acted as laborers in an atomized, precarious economy, exchanging nuggets of seeming love and attention for money. That exchange, though, is circuitous. You might stream a new single by an artist who posts a picture of herself at the beach, or buy the sweatshirt she poses in and tags, but use of the platform remains free, so our sense of “celebrity influence” hovers fuzzily, eliding the monetary and highlighting the social. Cameo strips away the illusion: celebrity content is always a product. This realization is depressing, but there is also something unburdening about it. On Cameo, performers can be straightforward about the fact that they are exchanging their attention for money, and this frees them from the faux-authenticity of the Instagram influencer; users don’t have to worry that there is some subtle corporate sponsorship buried in the selfies. The transactional nature is out in the open, and videos swerve between overt, unapologetic shilling and surprisingly earnest sentiment.
Examples of the latter abound. In March, the première of the director Lynn Chen’s début film, “I Will Make You Mine,” at South by Southwest, was cancelled due to the pandemic. Chen’s husband, Abe Foreman-Greenwald, edited together clips from her friends to simulate a red-carpet event, and booked a Cameo from the actress Wai Ching Ho, who, years before, had worked with Chen on an episode of “Law and Order.” “A real red-carpet event can feel a little vapid, but this felt very moving,” he told me. In May, Jess Garman, a librarian who lives in San Francisco, lost her nursing-home-bound grandmother to COVID-19. On Garman’s birthday, a couple of weeks later, her friends got her a Cameo from the nineties-era singer Lisa Loeb. “She addressed my grandmother and her death, and she even called her ‘Nanna,’ ” Garman said. “Then she sang for me.”
The productive constraints of the platform allow, too, for the flourishing of some experimental weirdness. Alternative comedians, for example, have begun using it as a virtual space in which to produce quasi-avant-garde work. The comedian Meg Stalter has become known for odd, Andy Kaufman-esque sketches in which she plays characters who are both grand and a little pathetic. (In March, the Times called her “the most vital voice” to emerge in comedy during the pandemic.) Stalter produces these sketches on Instagram, but in the past few months she has also begun making similar videos on Cameo. She told me that she sees using the constrictions of the platform as an exercise in creating characters in response to a specific prompt. She often inserts herself into her Cameos, hijacking them for her own ends. In one recent video, Stalter begins by wishing a woman a happy birthday before suddenly guilt-tripping her, her niceness shifting into aggression, for not remembering Stalter from the high-school class they supposedly both attended. “I’m twenty-nine, a year older than you, but we were still together in the same math class,” she says in a suburban drawl. “I was just . . . a little bit behind.”


newyorker--2020-09-15--The New Monuments That America Needs

The New Monuments That America Needs

Before protesters in America and Europe began painting over statues , or toppling them , or hanging them from trees , or rolling them into the nearest river , the historian Paul Farber noticed that people were putting masks on them .
In the early days of the pandemic , from Wuhan to New York , Valencia , and Limerick , anonymous people placed COVID-19 coverings over the faces of local monuments .
There was something tender , even a little funny , about these gestures , the kind of thing done for Instagram : a photo of a masked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that sit outside the main branch of the New York Public Library , went viral .
Whether monuments take the form of a statue , building , or pillar , they present themselves as universal and timeless , expressing something essential about all of us—at least in a way that flatters the powers that be .
Putting a mask on these inanimate objects shifted them to a new context : the present , rather than the historical past .
The act suggested a kind of solidarity , a symbol that we are all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who is the artistic director and senior curator of Monument Lab , a public art initiative that creates new monuments , saw the masked statues as an accusation , a reminder of how official systems had failed us .
Farber and the artist and scholar Ken Lum started Monument Lab in 2012 , shortly after they each began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania .
Farber is a native of Philadelphia , where Lum had just arrived from Vancouver , Canada , a city with comparatively few historical markers .
They shared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ monumental landscape , from the Liberty Bell and Robert Indiana ’ s “ Love ” sculpture to the famed “ Rocky ” steps .
But they were curious about what stories these monuments weren ’ t telling .
Lum lived near Billie Holiday ’ s childhood home , where only a small marker indicated its history .
“ I would see these white guys on pedestals who I ’ d never heard of , ” he said .
“ I was really interested in this unevenness.
” In 2015 , Farber and Lum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shipping container in the courtyard of City Hall and asked visitors : “ What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia ?
” They shared their answers with a team of artists , which included locals , such as the poet Ursula Rucker and the video artist and animator Kara Crombie , and others who shared Monument Lab ’ s fascination with the politics of public space , such as Mel Chin , a conceptual artist interested in the ecological imagination , and Tyree Guyton , who is famed for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he turned a block in his native Detroit into a kind of living sculpture .
Working with these artists , the Monument Lab installed prototype monuments throughout the city .
One of the most striking pieces , a twelve-foot-high Black Power Afro pick , by the artist Hank Willis Thomas , was recently acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts .
In March , Farber and Lum had just welcomed a new class of international fellows when COVID-19 forced everyone indoors .
Suddenly , conversations about public space seemed a tease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Floyd ’ s death , tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest , and they congregated in familiar spaces—near statues and monuments , in the shadows of yesterday ’ s supposed heroes .
Soon thereafter , statues across the country started coming down—removed by crowds or by city officials trying to get ahead of a controversy .
President Trump signed a series of executive orders to protect monuments from defacement , which provided the rationale for a violent crackdown on protesters in Portland , in July .
When I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was excited , likening the statue-toppling to the celebrations that took place along the Berlin Wall in the dying days of Communism .
Indeed , the scenes we were seeing throughout America felt like reënactments of news footage celebrating upheaval somewhere far away—the long-subjugated people , inspired by the democratic West , toppling a despot ’ s statue .
We were still in the “ dancing on the wall ” phase , he joked .
“ We still don ’ t know if East Germany will be dismantled.
” What isn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to describe an incredibly wide range of structures , from ancient burial mounds , stones arranged with some kind of intention , and the pyramids , to concrete archways , magnificent palaces , columns , and statues of obscure local merchants .
Monuments connect us to the furthest reaches of history , though why we value these things later on may have little relation to why someone was inspired to alter the landscape in the first place .
The Great Wall remains a symbol of Chinese manpower , as well as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contrast , the ornate façades of antiquity no longer communicate civilization ’ s greatness so much as warnings about imperial hubris .
In the case of Stonehenge—designated a “ scheduled ancient monument ” by the U.K. government—the mystery surrounding its origins and use contribute to its aura .
When we speak of monuments in America , we ’ re often talking about structures such as statues , obelisks , and memorials that celebrate a relatively narrow band of our history : the Civil War , the First and Second World Wars , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sense that we are an exceptional , upstart nation .
( American civilization may not boast standing stones that date back to the prehistoric era , but we do have Carhenge . )
The relative youth of our monuments also speaks to the enthusiasm with which previous generations simply erased the histories of those who came before .
Mount Rushmore , for example , was carved onto a mountain that was of great significance to the Lakota Sioux , who had previously been promised the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Civil War , there were not many monuments to the Confederacy , beyond memorials placed in cemeteries for soldiers who had died .
Today , there are over seven hundred Confederate monuments , situated in far more than the eleven states that seceded from the Union in 1860 .
Many of these monuments went up in city squares or in front of official buildings between 1890 and 1950 , coinciding with the Jim Crow era .
As the historian Mark Elliott observes , groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy were interested in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Monuments of this kind exist at the intersection of art and infrastructure , public memory and élite whim .
They possess what Farber calls an “ aura of permanence.
” But they embody the struggle to interpret a shared past , and they contain a desire , he said , to “ stop time , to hold on to power.
” For the past few years , Monument Lab has worked with fellows around the world to bring conversations about power and public space to new communities .
Initially , Farber and Lum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ local officials to act on problematic old statues and placards in their cities .
A turning point in the broader public imagination came with the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017 , when white-nationalist groups went to Charlottesville , Virginia , to protest the removal of Confederate statues and memorials .
The protests turned violent , resulting in the death of a counter-protester , Heather Heyer .
Monument Lab is now invited to assist forward-thinking local governments and historical commissions .

Before protesters in America and Europe began painting over statues, or toppling them, or hanging them from trees, or rolling them into the nearest river, the historian Paul Farber noticed that people were putting masks on them. In the early days of the pandemic, from Wuhan to New York, Valencia, and Limerick, anonymous people placed COVID-19 coverings over the faces of local monuments. There was something tender, even a little funny, about these gestures, the kind of thing done for Instagram: a photo of a masked Patience and Fortitude, the two lions that sit outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, went viral. Whether monuments take the form of a statue, building, or pillar, they present themselves as universal and timeless, expressing something essential about all of us—at least in a way that flatters the powers that be. Putting a mask on these inanimate objects shifted them to a new context: the present, rather than the historical past. The act suggested a kind of solidarity, a symbol that we are all in this pandemic together. Yet Farber, who is the artistic director and senior curator of Monument Lab, a public art initiative that creates new monuments, saw the masked statues as an accusation, a reminder of how official systems had failed us.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, from Wuhan to New York, anonymous people placed mask-like coverings over the faces of local monuments. Photograph by Byron Smith / Getty
Farber and the artist and scholar Ken Lum started Monument Lab in 2012, shortly after they each began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Farber is a native of Philadelphia, where Lum had just arrived from Vancouver, Canada, a city with comparatively few historical markers. They shared a fascination with Philadelphia’s rich monumental landscape, from the Liberty Bell and Robert Indiana’s “Love” sculpture to the famed “Rocky” steps. But they were curious about what stories these monuments weren’t telling. Lum lived near Billie Holiday’s childhood home, where only a small marker indicated its history. “I would see these white guys on pedestals who I’d never heard of,” he said. “I was really interested in this unevenness.”
In 2015, Farber and Lum set up a makeshift office in a shipping container in the courtyard of City Hall and asked visitors: “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?” They shared their answers with a team of artists, which included locals, such as the poet Ursula Rucker and the video artist and animator Kara Crombie, and others who shared Monument Lab’s fascination with the politics of public space, such as Mel Chin, a conceptual artist interested in the ecological imagination, and Tyree Guyton, who is famed for the decades-long Heidelberg Project, in which he turned a block in his native Detroit into a kind of living sculpture. Working with these artists, the Monument Lab installed prototype monuments throughout the city. One of the most striking pieces, a twelve-foot-high Black Power Afro pick, by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, was recently acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
In March, Farber and Lum had just welcomed a new class of international fellows when COVID-19 forced everyone indoors. Suddenly, conversations about public space seemed a tease. But in the wake of George Floyd’s death, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest, and they congregated in familiar spaces—near statues and monuments, in the shadows of yesterday’s supposed heroes. Soon thereafter, statues across the country started coming down—removed by crowds or by city officials trying to get ahead of a controversy. President Trump signed a series of executive orders to protect monuments from defacement, which provided the rationale for a violent crackdown on protesters in Portland, in July.
When I spoke to Farber earlier this summer, he was excited, likening the statue-toppling to the celebrations that took place along the Berlin Wall in the dying days of Communism. Indeed, the scenes we were seeing throughout America felt like reënactments of news footage celebrating upheaval somewhere far away—the long-subjugated people, inspired by the democratic West, toppling a despot’s statue. We were still in the “dancing on the wall” phase, he joked. “We still don’t know if East Germany will be dismantled.”
What isn’t a monument? The term is used to describe an incredibly wide range of structures, from ancient burial mounds, stones arranged with some kind of intention, and the pyramids, to concrete archways, magnificent palaces, columns, and statues of obscure local merchants. Monuments connect us to the furthest reaches of history, though why we value these things later on may have little relation to why someone was inspired to alter the landscape in the first place. The Great Wall remains a symbol of Chinese manpower, as well as a willingness to reject foreign influence; in contrast, the ornate façades of antiquity no longer communicate civilization’s greatness so much as warnings about imperial hubris. In the case of Stonehenge—designated a “scheduled ancient monument” by the U.K. government—the mystery surrounding its origins and use contribute to its aura.
When we speak of monuments in America, we’re often talking about structures such as statues, obelisks, and memorials that celebrate a relatively narrow band of our history: the Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the civil-rights era. Our monumental landscape preserves a sense that we are an exceptional, upstart nation. (American civilization may not boast standing stones that date back to the prehistoric era, but we do have Carhenge.) The relative youth of our monuments also speaks to the enthusiasm with which previous generations simply erased the histories of those who came before. Mount Rushmore, for example, was carved onto a mountain that was of great significance to the Lakota Sioux, who had previously been promised the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were not many monuments to the Confederacy, beyond memorials placed in cemeteries for soldiers who had died. Today, there are over seven hundred Confederate monuments, situated in far more than the eleven states that seceded from the Union in 1860. Many of these monuments went up in city squares or in front of official buildings between 1890 and 1950, coinciding with the Jim Crow era. As the historian Mark Elliott observes, groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy were interested in rehabilitating and glorifying the Southern cause. Monuments of this kind exist at the intersection of art and infrastructure, public memory and élite whim. They possess what Farber calls an “aura of permanence.” But they embody the struggle to interpret a shared past, and they contain a desire, he said, to “stop time, to hold on to power.”
For the past few years, Monument Lab has worked with fellows around the world to bring conversations about power and public space to new communities. Initially, Farber and Lum found it was often hard to convince local officials to act on problematic old statues and placards in their cities. A turning point in the broader public imagination came with the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017, when white-nationalist groups went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues and memorials. The protests turned violent, resulting in the death of a counter-protester, Heather Heyer. Monument Lab is now invited to assist forward-thinking local governments and historical commissions.
Earlier this summer, I spoke with the indigenous artist and organizer Joel Garcia, a former Monument Lab fellow. Garcia grew up in Los Angeles, deeply immersed in the local punk scene. He found meaning in the punk ethos of D.I.Y. resourcefulness, particularly when it came to repurposing spaces, like restaurants or community centers, to perform, create, and commune. As a teen-ager, he got a job at Epitaph Records, a respected punk label. Although the office was a straight shot across the city from his home on the Eastside, he had to transfer buses at Grand Park, where a statue of Christopher Columbus stood on the courthouse steps. Looking at all the homeless people and those awaiting their court hearings, Garcia said, was a contrast of “domination and poverty.”
Over time, Garcia became fixated on how the city landscape was decorated with these tributes to a colonial past. “Who gets to decide what is the authentic history of Los Angeles?” Garcia drew on his experiences working as an organizer and realized that “you can spend a lot of energy doing a huge push and not move an inch. Or you can become this little pebble in somebody’s shoe that they’re always having to deal with. That’s what I became.” He familiarized himself with the county officials and their protocols, showed up to all the meetings, and became a kind of community liaison. When the city finally agreed, in 2018, to remove the Columbus statue, Garcia took part in a purification ceremony.
As part of the removal process, the city had hired an assessor to estimate the statue’s artistic or historic value. “It’s not worth shit,” Garcia told me, laughing. As far as Garcia knows, the Columbus statue is gathering dust in a warehouse. The question of what to do with these monuments after they’ve been taken down has proved vexing for many cities. Should they remain on public display in museums or historical institutions, where they might be surrounded by more detailed context materials? Or will they end up as a kind of petulant, élite in-joke? That’s the impression many came away with when a statue of Robert E. Lee that had been removed in Dallas in 2017 was purchased two years later and placed in a luxury golf course along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The question of what a community wants is at the heart of the Monument Project, but where does one find that data? In 2017, Farber and Lum worked with Sue Mobley, an organizer and researcher, and Bryan Lee, Jr., an architect and design activist, on Paper Monuments, a participatory design project in New Orleans. The people of New Orleans, Mobley explained, have a tendency to see themselves and their city as exceptional, overlooking the way that New Orleans reflects the same inequalities felt acutely throughout the American South. Mobley and her team posed similar questions to the ones that Farber and Lum had asked Philadelphians, about what new monuments people wanted to see. Predictably, many of the proposals were about culture—jazz, the Mardi Gras Indians, and other vestiges of New Orleans’s identity that are increasingly imperilled by gentrification. But many answers engaged with the deeper structures of civic life, Mobley said: “People were suggesting, ‘Tear down the statues. . . . but what I need is a police budget that’s half what it is.’ ‘What we need is health care, what we need are protections to voting rights.’ ‘What I actually need is a living wage for all. That’s my monument. That’s what I would propose.’ ”
Mobley was also in the midst of a separate research project that mapped the locations of protests in New Orleans. In the mid-nineteenth century, protests would take place at the headquarters of local political parties, the docks, or trade institutions. In the twentieth century, they took place in city squares and plazas. More recently, they’ve moved to the elevated highways. The two projects orbited the same set of questions about the politics of shared space. “What does it mean to try and create a demos that has room for all if inclusion is defined by ‘I get a statue, so you get a statue’ that breaks into further constituent parts?” asked Mobley. “Is there a way in which we can weave together and lift up what it means to occupy space together?”
On June 5th, photos circulated of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted in fifty-foot-tall letters along Sixteenth Street N.W., in Washington, D.C., near the White House. Photograph by Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post / Getty
From the perspective of the establishment, it would actually be easier to simply give everyone their own statue than to reckon with what it might mean to constitute a “demos that has room for all.” On June 5th, photos circulated of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted in fifty-foot-tall yellow capital letters along Sixteenth Street N.W., in Washington, D.C., near the White House. For many, this was a stunning and brazen rebuke of President Trump’s violent response to the Black Lives Matter protests. It turned out that Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., had commissioned it. The gesture came to seem hollow when D.C. activists pointed out that Bowser hadn’t cut the police budget at all. Within days, activists had added their own fugitive addendum, which would be harder to coöpt by the establishment: “DEFUND THE POLICE.”
When those images went viral, friends began calling Michelle Angela Ortiz, a Philadelphia-based artist, to ask if she had seen them. In 2015, she had overseen a similar piece, when she led community members and undocumented families to the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. They painted “WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, RISKING OUR LIVES, FOR OUR FAMILIES & OUR FUTURE” on the ground just outside, as agents looked on. In contrast to what was happening in D.C., where Bowser eventually renamed part of the intersection Black Lives Matter Plaza, Ortiz’s installation was always meant to be temporary. (She was not involved in the D.C. painting but has been working elsewhere with groups interested in making a similar statement.) For Ortiz, the fact that the words came and went outside the ICE building captured something essential about the protest. “The temporary nature of it responds to the temporary nature of this voice not always having a platform,” she said. In 2017, Ortiz worked with Monument Lab on an installation where the voices of families detained at the Berks County detention center, outside Philadelphia, were broadcast for an hour each day from City Hall.
Ortiz spoke to me from her home in South Philadelphia, where she was born and raised. When her family moved there, they were among the first Latinos in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood. As such, she grew up in a community that admired Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner and Philadelphia mayor, who came to be seen as an abrasive rags-to-riches hero in certain parts of the city’s large Italian-American community. As a child, she even won a drawing contest sponsored by the mayor and appeared at a public celebration by his side. Like many Americans, Ortiz felt that the monuments around us must be there for a good reason. “We’ve been taught to appreciate statues,” Lum said. “We’ve been taught to read and receive them with reverence. We are also taught to read them as unitary and their message as unified, rooted in consensus, as opposed to rooted in a subjective decision that is only a reflection of a segment of the community that had power.”


newyorker--2020-09-18--“It Was All About the Election”: The Ex-White House Aide Olivia Troye on Trump’s Narcissistic Mishan

“It Was All About the Election”: The Ex-White House Aide Olivia Troye on Trump’s Narcissistic Mishandling of COVID-19

When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon , she sounded more than a little scared .
She was about to go public with a scorching video , in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic .
Troye , who served as Vice-President Mike Pence ’ s adviser for homeland security until late July , has witnessed the Administration ’ s response to the crisis , as Pence ’ s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force .
She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans .
She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease , and that “ words matter , especially when you ’ re the President of the United States , ” and that it was time to speak out .
She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career .
But she plunged ahead anyway .
I asked about her firsthand observation of the President during the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ disruptive.
” That he could not “ focus.
” That he was consumed by himself and his prospects in November .
“ For him , it was all about the election , ” Troye told me .
“ He just can ’ t seem to care about anyone else besides himself.
” Troye joined the coronavirus task force when it was first established , in late January , before any Americans had died from COVID-19 .
Her experience on it , Troye told me , convinced her that Trump ’ s handling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the disregard for the task force ’ s work—had made the crisis far worse for Americans .
She warned about the President ’ s push for a vaccine before the November election and said that she did not trust him to do the right thing for the country ’ s health and safety .
“ What I ’ m really concerned about is if they rush this vaccine and pressure people and get something out because they want to save the election , ” she said .
Troye is the first White @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the coronavirus response to speak out publicly against Trump , but the President and the Administration she described were drearily consistent with portraits that have emerged in countless other tell-all interviews and books : a White House riven by backstabbing and suspicion , where trouble flowed from the top and good governance was subordinate to Presidential whim and partisan calculation .
She told me she believed that most other staffers on the coronavirus task force were genuinely motivated to help Americans weather the pandemic but that Trump blocked them from implementing the right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re putting in place is derailed not just by a random person—it ’ s derailed by a No .
1 .
It ’ s derailed by the person at the very top , ” she said .
Troye described herself to me as a lifelong Republican , whose first job out of college was at the Republican National Committee .
On 9/11 , she fled her office on foot , walking home past the smoldering fire of the Pentagon , a moment that convinced her , like many others in her generation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She went on to serve as a George W. Bush Administration appointee in the Pentagon .
For the first year and a half of the Trump Administration , she worked at the Department of Homeland Security , as a career intelligence official , before being detailed to Pence ’ s staff .
Civil servants like herself were reviled as “ deep staters ” by Trump ’ s political appointees , she said .
They were viewed with even more suspicion after Trump ’ s impeachment in the House , in December , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ House staffers , including Jennifer Williams , Pence ’ s national-security aide , who worked in the office next to Troye ’ s .
“ I actually find that term very offensive , ” she told me , “ because not once while I was there did I do anything that I believe would lead anyone to think that I was a ‘ deep stater , ’ constantly undermining his agenda .
.
.
.
At the end of the day , I ’ m a career officer and my job was to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ office.
” Soon after our conversation , a coalition called Republican Voters Against Trump released Troye ’ s video , the third such testimonial of a former Administration official speaking out against the President that the group has produced in recent weeks .
In the video , Troye speaks directly to the camera .
As pictures of her sitting alongside Vice-President Pence flash onscreen , she says that , by mid-February , the task force knew that the coronavirus was a lethal threat to the U.S. “ But the President didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biggest concern was that we were in an election year.
” Troye adds , “ It was shocking to see the President saying that the virus was a hoax , saying that everything was O.K .
when it was not , ” despite what he had been very clearly told in private .
Troye ends the video by calling herself a “ John McCain Republican ” and endorsing Trump ’ s opponent , Joe Biden .
In the video , Troye recounts when Trump , a noted germaphobe , met with the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis , and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “ disgusting people ” at his rallies and other public events .
During our interview , I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group .
She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him , deciding “ to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of focussing on the agenda at hand.
” Fox News coverage , in other words , preoccupied the President more than saving American lives .
I asked Troye if that shocked her .
“ No , ” she said .
She remembered what she thought at the time : “ This is exactly what you would expect.
” Sadly , the surprise here is not that Trump acted so callously in the midst of a pandemic but that so many senior government officials know that this is happening and are doing nothing to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like that of so many others , is from inside the room—in this case , from inside the very room that is supposed to be dealing with the single biggest crisis currently afflicting the United States .
Every Presidency has its dissenters , people who leave and tell tales after they do so .
But there has never been anything like the stories that have emerged from the Trump White House , from so many who worked with the President and observed him up close .
People like his former national-security adviser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unfit ” for office .
And people like the former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis , the former White House chief of staff John Kelly , and the former director of National Intelligence Dan Coats , all of whom have relayed grave concerns about Trump that have made their way to Bob Woodward and other journalists .
In the end , this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye : she is young , only forty-three years old , with a long career ahead of her , and she was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ line publicly , whereas people like Mattis and Kelly were not .
That contrast could not have been more stark as I read a Coats Op-Ed in the Times that published the same day as Troye ’ s video .
Coats , clearly referring to Trump ’ s recent undermining of faith in the upcoming election , said that a national commission should be established by Congress to insure confidence in this fall ’ s voting .
Coats never once referenced Trump by name , and he has never publicly come forward to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President .
Why not ?
He is a veteran U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador who closed out his career as the head of the massive U.S. intelligence bureaucracy .
What does he have to risk ?

When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon, she sounded more than a little scared. She was about to go public with a scorching video, in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic. Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s adviser for homeland security until late July, has witnessed the Administration’s response to the crisis as Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force. She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox News coverage as his public-health advisers desperately tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans. She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease, and that “words matter, especially when you’re the President of the United States,” and that it was time to speak out. She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career. But she plunged ahead anyway.
I asked about her firsthand observation of the President during the crisis. She said that Trump was “disruptive.” That he could not “focus.” That he was consumed by himself and his prospects in November. “For him, it was all about the election,” Troye told me. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself.”
Troye joined the coronavirus task force when it was first established, in late January, before any Americans had died from COVID-19. Her experience on it, Troye told me, convinced her that Trump’s handling of the situation—the conscious spreading of disinformation, the disregard for the task force’s work—had made the crisis far worse for Americans. She warned about the President’s push for a vaccine before the November election and said that she did not trust him to do the right thing for the country’s health and safety. “What I’m really concerned about is if they rush this vaccine and pressure people and get something out because they want to save the election,” she said.
Troye is the first White House staff member who has worked on the coronavirus response to speak out publicly against Trump, but the President and the Administration she described were drearily consistent with portraits that have emerged in countless other tell-all interviews and books: a White House riven by backstabbing and suspicion, where trouble flowed from the top and good governance was subordinate to Presidential whim and partisan calculation. She told me she believed that most other staffers on the coronavirus task force were genuinely motivated to help Americans weather the pandemic but that Trump blocked them from implementing the right policies. “Everything that you’re putting in place is derailed not just by a random person—it’s derailed by a No. 1. It’s derailed by the person at the very top,” she said.
Troye described herself to me as a lifelong Republican, whose first job out of college was at the Republican National Committee. On 9/11, she fled her office on foot, walking home past the smoldering fire of the Pentagon, a moment that convinced her, like many others in her generation, to pursue a career in national security. She went on to serve as a George W. Bush Administration appointee in the Pentagon. For the first year and a half of the Trump Administration, she worked at the Department of Homeland Security, as a career intelligence official, before being detailed to Pence’s staff. Civil servants like her were reviled as “deep staters” by Trump’s political appointees, she said. They were viewed with even more suspicion after Trump’s impeachment in the House, in December, was aided by testimony from mid-level White House staffers, including Jennifer Williams, Pence’s national-security aide, who worked in the office next to Troye’s. “I actually find that term very offensive,” she told me, “because not once while I was there did I do anything that I believe would lead anyone to think that I was a ‘deep stater,’ constantly undermining his agenda. . . . At the end of the day, I’m a career officer and my job was to serve, no matter who was in office.”
Soon after our conversation, a coalition called Republican Voters Against Trump released Troye’s video, the third such testimonial of a former Administration official speaking out against the President that the group has produced in recent weeks. In the video, Troye speaks directly to the camera. As pictures of her sitting alongside Vice-President Pence flash onscreen, she says that, by mid-February, the task force knew that the coronavirus was a lethal threat to the U.S. “But the President didn’t want to hear that, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year.” Troye adds, “It was shocking to see the President saying that the virus was a hoax, saying that everything was O.K. when it was not,” despite what he had been very clearly told in private. Troye ends the video by calling herself a “John McCain Republican” and endorsing Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden.
In the video, Troye recounts when Trump, a noted germaphobe, met with the coronavirus task force, early on in the crisis, and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “disgusting people” at his rallies and other public events. During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”
Sadly, the surprise here is not that Trump acted so callously in the midst of a pandemic but that so many senior government officials know that this is happening and are doing nothing to stop it. Troye’s testimony, like that of so many others, is from inside the room—in this case, from inside the very room that is supposed to be dealing with the single biggest crisis currently afflicting the United States.
Every Presidency has its dissenters, people who leave and tell tales after they do so. But there has never been anything like the stories that have emerged from the Trump White House, from so many who worked with the President and observed him up close. People like his former national-security adviser John Bolton, who called Trump “unfit” for office. And people like the former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the former White House chief of staff John Kelly, and the former director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, all of whom have relayed grave concerns about Trump that have made their way to Bob Woodward and other journalists.
In the end, this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye: she is young, only forty-three years old, with a long career ahead of her, and she was willing to put it all on the line publicly, whereas people like Mattis and Kelly were not. That contrast could not have been more stark as I read a Coats Op-Ed in the Times that published the same day as Troye’s video. Coats, clearly referring to Trump’s recent undermining of faith in the upcoming election, said that a national commission should be established by Congress to insure confidence in this fall’s voting. Coats never once referred to Trump by name, and he has never publicly come forward to share with Americans his misgivings about the President. Why not? He is a veteran U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador who closed out his career as the head of the massive U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. What does he have to risk?
Troye, with much more to lose—and with none of the stature of a former member of Congress or a former Marine general—had much more courage than all of them. She went ahead when they have not, knowing that she would be attacked. And, sure enough, when the video went online, the White House released a comment about her that was harsh and personal. Her direct supervisor in Pence’s office, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, told the Washington Post that Troye was a “disgruntled” former detailee from the Department of Homeland Security who was “no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties.” Later, when Pence himself was asked about Troye, he told reporters that she was just “one more disgruntled employee who’s left the White House [and] decided to play politics during an election year.” When I spoke with Troye once more, on Thursday evening, she was bracing for more such comments from powerful men.