newyorker--2020-03-09--Shhh! Choosing to Be Very Afraid

Shhh! Choosing to Be Very Afraid

Last week was a funny week to choose to be scared—there were so many reasons to be scared involuntarily : a deadly global pandemic , a careening primary season , a careening stock market , a Supreme Court case that could set the clock back decades on reproductive rights , and a President happily stomping all over the machinery of government ( including those parts that respond to deadly global pandemics ) as if he were Godzilla .
So who would make an effort to be scared , and—cough , cough ; sorry , just clearing our throat—in a confined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the bar set for a lavish promotional stunt that took place in SoHo .
The hype was for “ A Quiet Place Part II , ” the sequel to John Krasinski ’ s 2018 horror film , in which mantis-like aliens that can ’ t see ( or apparently smell ) but can hear quite well manage to eat most of humanity .
Thus the film ’ s hook : to survive , the characters have to stay quiet , even though the plot has them doing things like stepping on nails @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promotion in SoHo was an interactive high-tech riff on the “ Quiet Place ” premise : participants walked through a series of environments recalling the new movie ’ s trailer , where they encountered jump-scare sound effects and increasingly loud hazards—a fritzing electrical system , hissing oxygen tanks , and a crying infant ( played by a doll ) .
People had to figure out how to hush all the fritzing , hissing , and crying , lest the racket attract the hungry aliens .
Jasen Smith was in charge of the design @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the “ A Quiet Place Part II ” Survival Experience .
“ Obviously , we can ’ t really kill people , ” he explained , “ but we wanted to create that same layer of anxiety and anticipation and awareness of sound ” that the films do .
In case anyone ’ s anticipation and anxiety and , say , heart rate got out of control , there were liability waivers to sign .
But , on the first day of operation , visitors were enjoying themselves ; this was more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Marc Weinstock , a Paramount marketing executive , hoped that about seven or eight thousand people would go through the Experience , here and at one in L.A. That ’ s a small number in Hollywood terms , but , you know : influencers , fan engagement , etc .
Weinstock said that he expected to be pleased with the return on the studio ’ s investment , which was less than a million dollars .
The Experience is an example of what ’ s known as “ experiential marketing ” —a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ old-school showmanship exemplified by the schlock horror-meister William Castle , who once stocked a theatre lobby with a fake nurse dispensing “ nerve-steadying pills.
” Smith , who runs his own shop , the Experiential Supply Company , is a leading player in this world .
Four days before the “ Quiet Place ” Experience opened—or “ activated , ” in marketing lingo—he was supervising a crew putting it together .
Smith , who has a genial , ready-for-anything air , got into experiential marketing five years ago , by cold-calling studios and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the field was mostly limited to building giant props for premières or sending out costumed “ street teams ” to give away trinkets or samples .
Smith broke through with a pitch for a “ Mission : Impossible—Rogue Nation ” obstacle course , which included an airplane wing that people could run across like they were Tom Cruise .
In SoHo , the “ Quiet Place ” team was putting finishing touches on the scenic elements in a series of claustrophobic rooms .
There was an infectious this-is- gon na -be-great vibe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were setting up a back-yard spookhouse .
The attention to detail was impressive .
A young woman with a paintbrush , Alyssa Najafi , daubed a chain-link fence with a gunky greenish-brown substance .
“ I ’ m grossing the fence up , because in an apocalypse no one is cleaning things , ” she said , brightly .
She showed a colleague how to weather a stop sign with a jackknife .
Backstage , her husband , Sohail Najafi , who owns a company that does lighting and production design , opened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tangle of wiring and circuitry—it resembled a nuclear-bomb detonator from a spy movie—that controlled the Experience ’ s sound and light cues , as well as “ gags ” like the hissing oxygen tanks , which were real .
Sohail Najafi emphasized that an experiential-marketing experience can ’ t rely on the “ twenty-five-foot rule of theatre , ” a reference to an audience ’ s distance from the stage and a designer ’ s attendant license for fakery .
“ People are going to interact with this on a very intimate level @ @ @ @ @ @ @ various knobs , dials , and valves with which guests would have to grapple .
This raised an interesting question that no one was too eager to address .
On background , it was explained that the Experience ’ s many surfaces would be wiped down with disinfectant after every group of three guests had gone through .
Purell would be available .
But the word “ coronavirus ” was one more sound that the “ A Quiet Place Part II ” Survival Experience was hoping would be hushed .
There are scares @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ♦

Last week was a funny week to choose to be scared—there were so many reasons to be scared involuntarily: a deadly global pandemic, a careening primary season, a careening stock market, a Supreme Court case that could set the clock back decades on reproductive rights, and a President happily stomping all over the machinery of government (including those parts that respond to deadly global pandemics) as if he were Godzilla. So who would make an effort to be scared, and—cough, cough; sorry, just clearing our throat—in a confined public space, no less?
That was the bar set for a lavish promotional stunt that took place in SoHo. The hype was for “A Quiet Place Part II,” the sequel to John Krasinski’s 2018 horror film, in which mantis-like aliens that can’t see (or apparently smell) but can hear quite well manage to eat most of humanity. Thus the film’s hook: to survive, the characters have to stay quiet, even though the plot has them doing things like stepping on nails and going into labor. The four-day promotion in SoHo was an interactive high-tech riff on the “Quiet Place” premise: participants walked through a series of environments recalling the new movie’s trailer, where they encountered jump-scare sound effects and increasingly loud hazards—a fritzing electrical system, hissing oxygen tanks, and a crying infant (played by a doll). People had to figure out how to hush all the fritzing, hissing, and crying, lest the racket attract the hungry aliens.
Jasen Smith was in charge of the design and construction of what was officially known as the “A Quiet Place Part II” Survival Experience. “Obviously, we can’t really kill people,” he explained, “but we wanted to create that same layer of anxiety and anticipation and awareness of sound” that the films do. In case anyone’s anticipation and anxiety and, say, heart rate got out of control, there were liability waivers to sign. But, on the first day of operation, visitors were enjoying themselves; this was more theme-park attraction than C.I.A. black site. Marc Weinstock, a Paramount marketing executive, hoped that about seven or eight thousand people would go through the Experience, here and at one in L.A. That’s a small number in Hollywood terms, but, you know: influencers, fan engagement, etc. Weinstock said that he expected to be pleased with the return on the studio’s investment, which was less than a million dollars.
The Experience is an example of what’s known as “experiential marketing”—a slick millennial update on the gimmicky, old-school showmanship exemplified by the schlock horror-meister William Castle, who once stocked a theatre lobby with a fake nurse dispensing “nerve-steadying pills.” Smith, who runs his own shop, the Experiential Supply Company, is a leading player in this world. Four days before the “Quiet Place” Experience opened—or “activated,” in marketing lingo—he was supervising a crew putting it together. Smith, who has a genial, ready-for-anything air, got into experiential marketing five years ago, by cold-calling studios and brands with ideas. At the time, the field was mostly limited to building giant props for premières or sending out costumed “street teams” to give away trinkets or samples. Smith broke through with a pitch for a “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation” obstacle course, which included an airplane wing that people could run across like they were Tom Cruise.
In SoHo, the “Quiet Place” team was putting finishing touches on the scenic elements in a series of claustrophobic rooms. There was an infectious this-is-gonna-be-great vibe, as if a bunch of kids were setting up a back-yard spookhouse. The attention to detail was impressive. A young woman with a paintbrush, Alyssa Najafi, daubed a chain-link fence with a gunky greenish-brown substance. “I’m grossing the fence up, because in an apocalypse no one is cleaning things,” she said, brightly. She showed a colleague how to weather a stop sign with a jackknife. Backstage, her husband, Sohail Najafi, who owns a company that does lighting and production design, opened a tool case. Inside was a tangle of wiring and circuitry—it resembled a nuclear-bomb detonator from a spy movie—that controlled the Experience’s sound and light cues, as well as “gags” like the hissing oxygen tanks, which were real. Sohail Najafi emphasized that an experiential-marketing experience can’t rely on the “twenty-five-foot rule of theatre,” a reference to an audience’s distance from the stage and a designer’s attendant license for fakery. “People are going to interact with this on a very intimate level,” he said, mentioning the various knobs, dials, and valves with which guests would have to grapple.
This raised an interesting question that no one was too eager to address. On background, it was explained that the Experience’s many surfaces would be wiped down with disinfectant after every group of three guests had gone through. Purell would be available. But the word “coronavirus” was one more sound that the “A Quiet Place Part II” Survival Experience was hoping would be hushed. There are scares, and then there are scares. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-09--The L.A. Philharmonic Revisits the Weimar Republic

In modern discourse , the term “ Weimar Republic ” conjures a lurid host of associations , few of them related to the stately old German ducal city of Weimar .
One thinks , instead , of the mythical Berlin of the nineteen-twenties : dance halls , cabarets , the sexual underground , street fighting among Communists and Nazis , the clash between a decadent liberation and a decadent counterreaction .
The complex reality of the Weimar era , which lasted from 1918 to 1933 , is filtered through popular reimaginings : Christopher Isherwood ’ s “ Berlin Stories ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cabaret , ” based on Isherwood ; revivals of “ The Threepenny Opera ” ; and , most recently , the television series “ Babylon Berlin.
” It is easily forgotten that the German Republic was founded in the spirit of the Enlightenment ; the constitutional assembly met in Weimar , where Goethe and Schiller had once infused the city with their aesthetic ideals .
The composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen , perhaps the most consistently imaginative force in modern classical music , likes to put together festivals that isolate a pivotal moment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the past , he has organized series dedicated to Paris and Vienna , respectively , at the turn of the twentieth century .
In early February , he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic , which he led from 1992 to 2009 , to present a festival titled “ The Weimar Republic : Germany 1918-1933.
” Salonen has presented this concept before , in London , and he will reprise it next season at the San Francisco Symphony , where he is about to take over as music director .
Adding breadth to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of exhibitions , installations , auxiliary events , and film showings , all under the direction of the art curators Stephanie Barron and Nana Bahlmann .
More American orchestras should pursue this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement , which pulls abstract musical ideas back into the flow of history .
Although the L.A. Weimar series included an obligatory cabaret night , it took a broader view of the era ’ s multifarious stylistic trends .
Yes , we had a generous helping of Kurt Weill , who created the bitterly hummable soundtrack for what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Salonen gave equal weight to Paul Hindemith , who set the pace for musical invention in the Weimar period .
Hindemith , especially in his early years , was brash , caustic , even Dadaistic .
He also revered tradition and , especially in his later years , adhered to a more orderly , humanist philosophy .
He left Nazi Germany in 1938 , but not before contemplating the possibility of an official position , and settled eventually in the United States .
The mixture of radical and conservative strains in Hindemith ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Weimar Republic as it really was—a modern state struggling to overcome an upwelling of chaos and rage .
Needless to say , the spectacle is disturbingly familiar .
The festival began with the giddy uproar of Hindemith ’ s “ Rag Time ( Well-Tempered ) , ” a Jazz Age prank on the sainted Bach .
Hindemith wrote it in 1921 , at a time when he was augmenting his ensembles with alarm sirens , asking sopranos to scream at the top of their lungs , and telling instrumentalists that “ beauty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The main theme of “ Rag Time ” is derived from the C-Minor Fugue of Bach ’ s “ Well-Tempered Clavier , ” Book I .
In a program note for “ Rag Time , ” Hindemith proposes that “ if Bach were alive today he might well have invented the shimmy , or at least absorbed it into respectable music.
” In keeping with the condescension of that remark , the score more resembles rowdy marching-band music than anything in the African-American tradition .
Salonen and the L.A. Phil wallowed in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intact , so that the work seemed primarily to be a joke on itself .
Weill , by contrast , was first encountered in a sober-minded mode—that of the severe young composer who had studied with Ferruccio Busoni and idolized Arnold Schoenberg .
Weill ’ s Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra , composed in 1924 , is an exercise in reticence and ambiguity , shorn of Romantic excess and virtuoso display .
Anticipating works that Shostakovich would write years later , it alternates between meandering , brooding episodes and outbreaks of bristling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ensemble is reduced to a grotesque trio of xylophone and two double-basses .
The challenge in such a score is to establish direction where conventional narrative patterns are absent .
Carolin Widmann , the soloist , found her own tensely expressive thread in the labyrinth .
Salonen elicited eerily beautiful sonorities from Weill ’ s strange orchestration—for example , a slow-motion , proto-minimalist shimmer of winds in the third movement .
Hindemith ’ s “ Mathis der Maler ” Symphony ( 1934 ) , which followed after intermission , is derived from his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and his quest to root himself in the “ primal soil ” of the people .
Such a patriotic subject ought to have found favor in Nazi Germany , but Hitler had taken a dislike to the composer ’ s music , and performances of “ Mathis ” were not permitted .
In opera and symphony alike , the brattiness of the enfant terrible gives way to clean-lined monumentality , with plangent choirs of brass reminiscent of the symphonic climaxes of Anton Bruckner .
In some respects @ @ @ @ @ @ @ choice for a Weimar festival , since the piece stems from the early Nazi period .
But it partakes of the same urbane religiosity that marks certain creations of the Bauhaus movement : Lyonel Feininger ’ s woodcut “ Cathedral ” appeared on the cover of Walter Gropius ’ s manifesto of 1919 .
Salonen , in his interpretation , deëmphasized the symphony ’ s Germanic context and gave it a modern sheen .
The L.A. Phil offered up a sound that seemed to glow from within , drawing power from the deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the political distortions to which that tradition has been subjected .
Salonen ’ s second program jumped into the anarchy of Weimar music theatre .
The British actor-director Simon McBurney and his brother , the composer-scholar Gerard McBurney , devised a program , entitled “ Nightfall , ” with a brink-of-disaster theme .
First came Hindemith ’ s youthful , brutalist one-act opera “ Murderer , Hope of Women ” ( 1919 ) , which is based on a gruesome Expressionistic text by Oskar Kokoschka .
The score begins with horns and trombones @ @ @ @ @ @ @ motor horn in a nightmare city , and goes on from there .
That garish spectacle faded before the austere nobility of Weill ’ s “ Berliner Requiem ” ( 1928 ) , a choral cantata on poems by Bertolt Brecht .
The memorialized figures include the murdered Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg , an unknown soldier of the First World War , and a young woman who has died by suicide .
Lastly came the short ballet-opera “ The Seven Deadly Sins , ” which Weill and Brecht created in the first part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The text is a fantastical American travelogue , with scenes set in Memphis , Los Angeles , and Boston ; Weill ’ s songwriting is sinuous and sardonic in the “ Threepenny ” manner .
The agile players of the L.A. Phil handled the rapid changes of style with ease , as did an accomplished group of singers , including Nora Fischer , Madeleine Bradbury Rance , Christopher Purves , and members of the L.A. Master Chorale .
The disappointment was the McBurneys ’ production , which seldom rose above standard-issue Weimar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should be used to comment on the present day , and he would have expected any revival of these pieces to illuminate the darker currents of American and European politics , none of which would have surprised him .
Instead , we saw vintage film , photographs , and costumes , including an old-fashioned Hollywood movie shoot .
The only real burst of political energy came during the intermission of the first concert , when members of the activist group Refuse Fascism unfurled an anti-Trump banner in seats behind the orchestra .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the audience , but it would have been good to see the same fury onstage .
♦

In modern discourse, the term “Weimar Republic” conjures a lurid host of associations, few of them related to the stately old German ducal city of Weimar. One thinks, instead, of the mythical Berlin of the nineteen-twenties: dance halls, cabarets, the sexual underground, street fighting among Communists and Nazis, the clash between a decadent liberation and a decadent counterreaction. The complex reality of the Weimar era, which lasted from 1918 to 1933, is filtered through popular reimaginings: Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”; the musical and the film “Cabaret,” based on Isherwood; revivals of “The Threepenny Opera”; and, most recently, the television series “Babylon Berlin.” It is easily forgotten that the German Republic was founded in the spirit of the Enlightenment; the constitutional assembly met in Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller had once infused the city with their aesthetic ideals.
The composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, perhaps the most consistently imaginative force in modern classical music, likes to put together festivals that isolate a pivotal moment and space in musical history. In the past, he has organized series dedicated to Paris and Vienna, respectively, at the turn of the twentieth century. In early February, he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he led from 1992 to 2009, to present a festival titled “The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933.” Salonen has presented this concept before, in London, and he will reprise it next season at the San Francisco Symphony, where he is about to take over as music director. Adding breadth to the L.A. event was a surrounding program of exhibitions, installations, auxiliary events, and film showings, all under the direction of the art curators Stephanie Barron and Nana Bahlmann. More American orchestras should pursue this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement, which pulls abstract musical ideas back into the flow of history.
Although the L.A. Weimar series included an obligatory cabaret night, it took a broader view of the era’s multifarious stylistic trends. Yes, we had a generous helping of Kurt Weill, who created the bitterly hummable soundtrack for what Germans call the Golden Twenties. But Salonen gave equal weight to Paul Hindemith, who set the pace for musical invention in the Weimar period. Hindemith, especially in his early years, was brash, caustic, even Dadaistic. He also revered tradition and, especially in his later years, adhered to a more orderly, humanist philosophy. He left Nazi Germany in 1938, but not before contemplating the possibility of an official position, and settled eventually in the United States. The mixture of radical and conservative strains in Hindemith’s temperament gives a faithful picture of the Weimar Republic as it really was—a modern state struggling to overcome an upwelling of chaos and rage. Needless to say, the spectacle is disturbingly familiar.
The festival began with the giddy uproar of Hindemith’s “Rag Time (Well-Tempered),” a Jazz Age prank on the sainted Bach. Hindemith wrote it in 1921, at a time when he was augmenting his ensembles with alarm sirens, asking sopranos to scream at the top of their lungs, and telling instrumentalists that “beauty of sound is beside the point.” The main theme of “Rag Time” is derived from the C-Minor Fugue of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book I. In a program note for “Rag Time,” Hindemith proposes that “if Bach were alive today he might well have invented the shimmy, or at least absorbed it into respectable music.” In keeping with the condescension of that remark, the score more resembles rowdy marching-band music than anything in the African-American tradition. Salonen and the L.A. Phil wallowed in the welter of sound while keeping the humor intact, so that the work seemed primarily to be a joke on itself.
Weill, by contrast, was first encountered in a sober-minded mode—that of the severe young composer who had studied with Ferruccio Busoni and idolized Arnold Schoenberg. Weill’s Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, composed in 1924, is an exercise in reticence and ambiguity, shorn of Romantic excess and virtuoso display. Anticipating works that Shostakovich would write years later, it alternates between meandering, brooding episodes and outbreaks of bristling energy; at one point, the ensemble is reduced to a grotesque trio of xylophone and two double-basses. The challenge in such a score is to establish direction where conventional narrative patterns are absent. Carolin Widmann, the soloist, found her own tensely expressive thread in the labyrinth. Salonen elicited eerily beautiful sonorities from Weill’s strange orchestration—for example, a slow-motion, proto-minimalist shimmer of winds in the third movement.
Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony (1934), which followed after intermission, is derived from his opera of the same title—a portrait of the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and his quest to root himself in the “primal soil” of the people. Such a patriotic subject ought to have found favor in Nazi Germany, but Hitler had taken a dislike to the composer’s music, and performances of “Mathis” were not permitted. In opera and symphony alike, the brattiness of the enfant terrible gives way to clean-lined monumentality, with plangent choirs of brass reminiscent of the symphonic climaxes of Anton Bruckner.
In some respects, “Mathis” is a curious choice for a Weimar festival, since the piece stems from the early Nazi period. But it partakes of the same urbane religiosity that marks certain creations of the Bauhaus movement: Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut “Cathedral” appeared on the cover of Walter Gropius’s manifesto of 1919. Salonen, in his interpretation, deëmphasized the symphony’s Germanic context and gave it a modern sheen. The L.A. Phil offered up a sound that seemed to glow from within, drawing power from the deep roots of Western tradition rather than from the political distortions to which that tradition has been subjected.
Salonen’s second program jumped into the anarchy of Weimar music theatre. The British actor-director Simon McBurney and his brother, the composer-scholar Gerard McBurney, devised a program, entitled “Nightfall,” with a brink-of-disaster theme. First came Hindemith’s youthful, brutalist one-act opera “Murderer, Hope of Women” (1919), which is based on a gruesome Expressionistic text by Oskar Kokoschka. The score begins with horns and trombones blaring a semitone dissonance, like a motor horn in a nightmare city, and goes on from there. That garish spectacle faded before the austere nobility of Weill’s “Berliner Requiem” (1928), a choral cantata on poems by Bertolt Brecht. The memorialized figures include the murdered Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, an unknown soldier of the First World War, and a young woman who has died by suicide. Lastly came the short ballet-opera “The Seven Deadly Sins,” which Weill and Brecht created in the first part of 1933, soon after becoming exiles. The text is a fantastical American travelogue, with scenes set in Memphis, Los Angeles, and Boston; Weill’s songwriting is sinuous and sardonic in the “Threepenny” manner.
The agile players of the L.A. Phil handled the rapid changes of style with ease, as did an accomplished group of singers, including Nora Fischer, Madeleine Bradbury Rance, Christopher Purves, and members of the L.A. Master Chorale. The disappointment was the McBurneys’ production, which seldom rose above standard-issue Weimar iconography. Brecht insisted that historical settings should be used to comment on the present day, and he would have expected any revival of these pieces to illuminate the darker currents of American and European politics, none of which would have surprised him. Instead, we saw vintage film, photographs, and costumes, including an old-fashioned Hollywood movie shoot. The only real burst of political energy came during the intermission of the first concert, when members of the activist group Refuse Fascism unfurled an anti-Trump banner in seats behind the orchestra. The gesture received a round of applause from the audience, but it would have been good to see the same fury onstage. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-09--Dressing for the Surveillance Age

Dressing for the Surveillance Age

Tom Goldstein , an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland , took an “ invisibility cloak ” from a pile on a chair in his office and pulled it on over his head .
To my eye , it looked like a baggy sweatshirt made of glossy polyester , printed with garish colors in formless shapes that , far from turning Goldstein invisible , made him impossible to miss .
It was mid-January .
Early that morning , in my search for a suitable outfit to thwart the all-seeing eyes of surveillance machines , I had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to College Park .
As I rode the subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station , and then boarded Amtrak for my trip south , I counted the CCTV cameras ; at least twenty-six caught me going and returning .
When you come from a small town , as I do , where everyone knows your face , public anonymity—the ability to disappear into a crowd—is one of the great pleasures of city living .
As cities become surveillance centers , packed with cameras that always see , public anonymity could vanish .
Is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could have worn a surgical mask on my trip , ostensibly for health reasons ; reports of an unexplained pneumonia outbreak in China were making the news , and I ’ d spotted a woman on the C train in an N95 respirator mask , which had a black , satiny finish .
Later , when I spoke to Arun Ross , a computer-vision researcher at Michigan State University , he told me that a surgical mask alone might not block enough of my face ’ s pixels in a digital shot to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ match ; some algorithms can reconstruct the occluded parts of people ’ s faces .
As the coronavirus spread through China , SenseTime , a Chinese A.I .
company , claimed to have developed an algorithm that not only can match a surgically masked face with the wearer ’ s un-occluded face but can also use thermal imaging to detect an elevated temperature and discern whether that person is wearing a mask .
For my purposes , a full-face covering , like the Guy Fawkes mask made popular by the “ V for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have done the trick , but I doubt whether Amtrak would have let me on the train .
During Occupy Wall Street , New York enforced old anti-mask laws to prevent protesters from wearing them .
Goldstein ’ s invisibility cloak clashed with the leopard-print cell-signal-blocking Faraday pouch , made by Silent Pocket , in which I carried my phone so that my location couldn ’ t be tracked .
As a luxury item , the cloak was far from the magnificent Jammer Coat , a prototype of anti-surveillance outerwear that I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at Coop Himmelb ( l ) au , an architecture studio in Vienna .
The Jammer Coat , a one-of-a-kind , ankle-length garment with a soft finish and flowing sleeves , like an Arabic thawb , is lined with cellular-blocking metallic fabric and covered with patterns that vaguely resemble body parts , which could potentially render personal technology invisible to electronic-object detectors .
Swaddled in the cushy coat , I could at least pretend to be the absolute master of my personal information , even if its designers , Wolf and Sophie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leave the studio in it .
However , the invisibility cloak , while not as runway-ready as some surveillance-wear , did have one great advantage over other fashion items that aim to confuse the algorithms that control surveillance systems : the cloak ’ s designer was an algorithm .
To put together a Jammer outfit for my style of dressing—something like stealth streetwear—I first needed to understand how machines see .
In Maryland , Goldstein told me to step in front of a video camera that projected my live image onto a large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his office in the Iribe Center , the university ’ s hub for computer science and engineering .
The screen showed me in my winter weeds of dark denim , navy sweater , and black sneakers .
My image was being run through an object detector called YOLO ( You Only Look Once ) , a vision system widely employed in robots and in CCTV .
I looked at the camera , and that image passed along my optic nerve and into my brain .
On the train trip down to Maryland , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I glanced at other passengers , and I read my book , all without being aware of the incredibly intricate processing taking place in my brain .
Photoreceptors in our retinas capture images , turning light into electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve .
The primary visual cortex , in the occipital lobe , at the rear of the head , then sends out these signals—which are conveying things like edges , colors , and motion .
As these pass through a series of hierarchical cerebral layers , the brain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in turn stitched together into complex scenes .
Finally , the visual memory system in the prefrontal cortex recognizes them as trees , people , or my book .
All of this in about two hundred milliseconds .
Building machines that can process and recognize images as accurately as a human has been , along with teaching machines to read , speak , and write our language , a holy grail of artificial-intelligence research since the early sixties .
These machines don ’ t see holistically , either—they see in pixels , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a photographic image .
At the dawn of A.I.
, engineers tried to “ handcraft ” computer programs to extract the useful information in the pixels that would signal to the machine what kind of object it was looking at .
This was often achieved by extracting information about the orientation of edges in an image , because edges appear the same under different lighting conditions .
Programmers tried to summarize the content of an image by calculating a small list of numbers , called “ features , ” which describe the orientation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , colors , and shapes .
But the pioneers soon encountered a problem .
The human brain has a remarkable ability , as it processes an object ’ s components , to save the useful content , while throwing away “ nuisance variables , ” like lighting , shadows , and viewpoint .
A.I .
researchers couldn ’ t describe exactly what makes a cat recognizable as a cat , let alone code this into a mathematical formula that was unaffected by the infinitely variable conditions and scenes in which a cat might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the cognitive leap that our brains make when we generalize .
Somehow , we know it ’ s a cat , even when we catch only a partial glimpse of it , or see one in a cartoon .
Researchers around the world , including those at the University of Maryland , spent decades training machines to see cats among other things , but , until 2010 , computer vision , or C.V. , still had an error rate of around thirty per cent , roughly six times higher than a typical person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was much talk of “ smart ” CCTV cameras that could recognize faces , but the technology worked only when the images were passport-quality ; it failed on faces “ in the wild ” —that is , out in the real world .
Human-level object recognition was thought to be an untouchable problem , somewhere over the scientific horizon .
A revolution was coming , however .
Within five years , machines could perform object recognition with not just human but superhuman performance , thanks to deep learning , the now ubiquitous approach @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process input data learn through multiple trial-and-error cycles .
In deep-learning-based computer vision , feature extraction and mapping are done by a neural network , a constellation of artificial neurons .
By training a neural net with a large database of images of objects or faces , the algorithm will learn to correctly recognize objects or faces it then encounters .
Only in recent years have sufficient digitized data sets and vast cloud-based computing resources been developed to allow this data- and power-thirsty approach to work .
Billions of trial-and-error cycles might be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only what a cat looks like but what kind of cat it is .
“ Computer-vision problems that scientists said wouldn ’ t be overcome in our lifetime were solved in a couple of years , ” Goldstein had told me when we first met , in New York .
He added , “ The reason the scientific community is so shocked by these results—they ripple through everything—is that we have this tool that achieves humanlike performance that nobody ever thought we would have .
And suddenly not only do we have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way crazier than we could have imagined .
It ’ s sort of mind-blowing .
”

Rama Chellappa, a professor at the University of Maryland who is one of the top researchers in the field, told me, “Let me give you an analogy. Let’s assume there are ten major religions in the world. What if, after 2012, everything became one religion? How would that be?” With computer-vision methods, he said, “that’s where we are.”
Computers can now look for abnormalities in a CT scan as effectively as the best radiologists. Underwater C.V. can autonomously monitor fishery populations, a task that humans do less reliably and more slowly. Heineken uses C.V. to inspect eighty thousand bottles an hour produced by its facility in France—an extremely boring quality-control task previously performed by people. And then there is surveillance tech, like the YOLO detector I was standing in front of now.
No one would mistake me for Brad Pitt, I thought, scrutinizing my image, but no one would mistake me for a cat, either. To YOLO, however, I was merely a collection of pixels. Goldstein patiently led me through YOLO’s visual process. The system maps the live digital image of me, measuring the brightness of each pixel. Then the pixels pass through hundreds of layers, known as convolutions, made of artificial neurons, a process that groups neighboring pixels together into edges, then edges into shapes, and so on until eventually you get a person. Nuisance variables—the bane of handcrafted C.V.—are removed along the way, as pixels are distilled into features that encode my presence. All this happens in about the same amount of time that it takes the brain to recognize an object. Finally, a red outline, called a “bounding box,” appeared around me on the live screen, with the label “Person.” Boom.
“You’re detected,” Goldstein said.
Advances in computer vision have occurred so rapidly that local and national privacy policies—what aspects of your face and body should be protected by law from surveillance machines—are lagging far behind A.I.’s technological capabilities, leaving the public vulnerable to a modern panopticon, a total-surveillance society that could be built before we know enough to stop it. Chris Meserole, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies China’s use of face recognition and other surveillance technologies—widely deployed as part of Xi Jinping’s “stability maintenance” drive—told me that policymakers in the States haven’t, so far, created governing structures to safeguard citizens. And, he added, “in the U.S., the government hasn’t thought to use it yet the way that China has.”
Some activists think we’ve already run out of time. Before travelling to Maryland, I had acquired several ready-to-wear anti-surveillance items from a woman named Kate Bertash, whom I went to see in Los Angeles. She met me in the lobby of my hotel in Venice Beach wearing a black dress printed with license plates. She handed me a black T-shirt, men’s large, also covered with license plates. It was a warm winter day in Venice Beach, where Bertash, thirty-three, lives and works. I stepped into the rest room and put on my T-shirt. The dummy plates spelled out words from the Fourth Amendment.
“Welcome to the resistance,” Bertash said, when I emerged.
We set off on a stroll down Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the main drag in Venice Beach. The plates on our clothing were designed to trigger automatic license-plate readers. In the U.S., the networks of A.L.P.R.s and databases that exist across the country make up a different kind of surveillance system. First developed in the U.K., in the late seventies, A.L.P.R.s began appearing in U.S. cities in the early two-thousands. The readers use optical character recognition, which captures plate numbers and stores the information, along with the location, date, and time of the recording. Newer systems can also pinpoint where a car is most likely to be found, based on travel patterns. A.L.P.R.s are mounted on street lights, highway overpasses, freeway exits, toll booths, digital speed-limit signs, and the tops of police cars. They are also found in parking garages, schools, and malls. Companies such as PlateSmart Technologies market software to the general public that can turn almost any surveillance camera into an A.L.P.R. The open-source version of a similar software is free.
A.L.P.R.s automatically record all license-plate numbers that come within their view, at a rate of thousands per minute. In newer systems, “hot lists” of “plates of interest” belonging to criminal suspects are widely shared by law-enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officers are alerted to a location when a plate shows up on a reader connected to the network they’re using. There are few privacy restrictions on this data, and it is not secure. Private companies collect and sell it. Police departments obtain data and share it with one another. According to The Atlantic, Vigilant Solutions, the industry leader, has a database of at least two billion unique license-plate locations. A recent audit of the Los Angeles Police Department and three other California law-enforcement agencies found that, at the time they were logged, 99.9 per cent of the three hundred and twenty million plate images in the department’s database had not been involved in criminal investigations. State Senator Scott Wiener, who requested the audit, told the Los Angeles Times, “I am horrified. We believed that there were problems with the ALPR program, but I did not anticipate the scale of the problem—the fact that we have so many law enforcement agencies that are not complying with state law, including LAPD.”
Bertash works for the Digital Defense Fund, a nonprofit that provides security and tech support for the abortion-access movement. In a café where we stopped for lunch, she explained that protesters often “stand outside of abortion clinics photographing all day long.” She was concerned that an anti-abortion activist with access to A.L.P.R. data could easily figure out where abortion providers and patients live.
Dave Maass, a senior investigator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-privacy advocate, confirmed Bertash’s fears about the insecurity of the data. Bertash wondered what, as an activist, she could do. Maass suggested postering public spaces with paper images of license plates that would feed false data into the system. Bertash had a better idea.
As a part-time gig, Bertash designs and sells novelty fabrics for kids—sheets and towels printed with manatees and kittens, pillows that look like cuts of meat. She started producing mockups of clothing with phony plates, testing them with an open-source A.L.P.R. app that might (or might not) work like those used by law enforcement. Eventually, she got her designs to read into the system as real plates and produced a line of garments and accessories with dummy plates printed on them, which she sells on Adversarialfashion.com.
Bertash’s anti-A.L.P.R. clothes are “poison” attacks, which aim to pollute databases with garbage, so that the system as a whole is less reliable. Poison attacks are predicated on collective action. A few people festooned in license plates won’t make much difference; a lot of people wearing them might. For that to happen, designers need to make anti-surveillance clothes that you’d want to put on. T-shirts strewn with fake license plates might not be everyone’s must-have look for spring.
We spent several hours strolling around. No one asked about our clothes: in Venice Beach, it takes a lot more than a license-plate outfit to stand out as unusual. When a police cruiser with an A.L.P.R. on top passed us on the sidewalk, I tried to feel adversarial. Honestly, I felt kind of sheepish.
Possibly to compensate for the guilt I felt about not being down with the resistance, I ended up buying a license-plate backpack, for $49.95. When I got home, my eleven-year-old daughter, to whom I often feel invisible—not in a good way—actually noticed me. “What’s that?” she said, studying the plates. “That’s really cool!” Detected at last.
When I told my children, both “Harry Potter” fans, that I was going to check out an invisibility cloak, they were excited. I’d learned of Goldstein’s cloak in a scientific paper that he and his students produced about their work. But when I saw Goldstein in his sweatshirt, which featured a foreground of blurry organic shapes in orange, like a display of horribly irradiated vegetables, with dark, vaguely human shapes above, I couldn’t imagine Harry or Hermione wizarding with one. The only recognizable shape (to me) was what appeared to be a traffic light just below the neckline. Considered more generously, the pattern loosely evoked Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” as it might appear at the bottom of a swimming pool painted by David Hockney.
Then Goldstein stepped in front of the camera, and the YOLO detector did a double take. It couldn’t see him at all. The computer saw the chair behind him (“Chair,” the bounding box was labelled) but not the six-foot-tall, thirty-six-year-old man standing right in front of it—Goldstein Unbound. I, in my supposedly anonymous city duds, was instantly detected and labelled. It was like a conceit from William Gibson’s 2010 science-fiction novel, “Zero History,” in which a character wears a T-shirt so ugly that CCTV cameras can’t see it.
The pattern on the sweatshirt was an “adversarial image”—a kind of deep-learning optical illusion that stopped the algorithm from seeing the person wearing it. Unlike poison attacks, which seek to subvert surveillance systems with bad data, adversarial attacks are images that have been engineered to take advantage of flaws in the way computers see. They are like hacks, but for artificial intelligence. The security vulnerabilities of operating systems and computer networks are widely known, but deep-learning A.I. systems are still new and so complex that scientists don’t yet fully understand the kinds of hacks they are vulnerable to.
The phenomenon of adversarial imagery was discovered more or less by accident in 2011, by Christian Szegedy, at Google Research. Szegedy trained a neural net to solve the problem of just how much he could change an image of a ship before the system reclassified the image as an airplane. He discovered that with only a minimal modification of pixels the system reclassified it with a high degree of confidence, even though to the human eye it was still obviously a ship and not an airplane. Students at M.I.T. printed a three-dimensional model of a turtle with a textured shell that fooled Google’s object-detection algorithm into classifying the reptile as a rifle. In a 2018 paper, “Robust Physical-World Attacks on Deep Learning Visual Classification,” researchers described an experiment in which they “perturbed” a stop sign with a few small decals that to a human look like graffiti but that made an object classifier see the octagonal red sign as a rectangular black-and-white sign that said “Speed Limit 45.” It isn’t hard to imagine the kind of chaos one of these perturbances could cause in a future world of autonomous cars.


newyorker--2020-03-09--Jamie Loftus, the Comedian Who Infiltrated Mensa

On a Monday evening in February , Jamie Loftus , enemy No .
1 of the high-I.Q .
society American Mensa , arrived at a sports bar in the East Village .
A twenty-seven-year-old comedian , Loftus is six feet tall , and wore a Harvard sweatshirt with a sketch of the Unabomber displayed under the proud lettering .
She settled into a booth , ordered a beer and half-price pizza , and began reminiscing about her time among the so-called geniuses .
“ I have too much empathy for them , and it will be my downfall , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of them kill me.
” Loftus performs standup , has written for television shows such as “ Robot Chicken , ” and co-hosts a feminist-film podcast called “ The Bechdel Cast.
” But , in the past few years , she has become best known for her comedic stunts .
In 2018 , Loftus took Mensa ’ s I.Q .
exam while hungover on shandies , scored in the ninety-eighth percentile , and celebrated her admission with a triumphant blog post titled “ Good News , They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ member contacted her to warn that the group is not all “ silly fun , board games .
.
.
and happy nerds ” but has a “ nasty alt-right undercurrent.
” She then discovered a reactionary , proudly unmoderated official Facebook group of American Mensans called Firehouse , in which , according to its description , subjects range from “ Fluffy Kittens to items that will make you wish you could bleach your brain.
” Typical content includes crude memes mocking Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez , bad-faith anti-trans bathroom opinions , and support for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ argues that black people have benefitted from slavery and women from human trafficking because “ their children enjoy a better life than in ‘ shitholes.
’ ” Loftus ’ s desire to understand this “ living , breathing hostile comments section ” culminated in her attendance at the 2019 American Mensa Gathering , in Phoenix , Arizona .
Last month , she released a four-episode podcast miniseries about the experience called “ My Year in Mensa.
” The show uses first-person reporting to offer insight into how the geeky group became a forum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is more straight-faced than Loftus ’ s usual comedy , much of which replicates the frenzied pace of the Internet and is disturbing and nonsensical to the point of chaos .
Like the prankish Nathan Fielder or the strangely sexual Megan Amram , she does elaborately dumb things to make fairly smart points .
In 2015 , Loftus sold “ Shrek nudes , ” naked photos of her body painted green , to raise funds for Planned Parenthood .
That same year , she started reading David Foster Wallace ’ s thousand-plus-page novel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she made documenting the process , she pops a page into her mouth like a potato chip and slurps up a ribbon of the book with spaghetti .
At some point , she began putting pages into a blender with apples and using a turkey baster to butt-chug the mixture .
The sheer grotesqueness of her comedy often obscures its implicit social critique .
Last year , the cultural critic Andrea Long Chu , in her spiky gender manifesto “ Females , ” mentioned # EatInfiniteJest as a curious form of female resistance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ men are constantly trying to shove the book down women ’ s throats ; Loftus just made their fantasy literal .
She conceived both of these stunts while working as a research assistant at Playboy .
“ I was facilitating , like , the male-gaze-iest male gaze of all time , feeling suffocated , ” she explained .
“ It was a reaction to being there sixty to seventy hours a week.
” She used a company printer to print the photos of her green body , and the company kitchen to film @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mustard-covered bread , as if they were delicate slices of ham .
Loftus was in New York in February to perform her one-woman show , “ Boss , Whom Is Girl , ” which was staged at Joe ’ s Pub and is currently touring the country .
The show is a loony , acerbic satire of corporate feminism , framed as an inspirational keynote from a character named Shell Gasoline-Sandwich , the billionaire G.E.O .
of the surveillance-tech company Pee Pee Smarthomes .
At the show , audience members were handed draconian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assassins ( “ drones and various men named Josh ” ) for even thinking of disclosing contents of the talk .
Loftus , as Shell , came out wearing a black turtleneck , and explained that she sleeps on a waterbed filled with tap water from Flint , Michigan , and is responsible for the massacre of a small island of European d.j.s .
( The latter is based on Facebook ’ s role in fomenting ethnic violence in Myanmar , which she researched while at Playboy .
“ The show is secretly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me . )
The ordeal ended with Loftus fishing a yoni egg out of her vagina and flashing her pubic hair , which glowed in the dark , to the audience .
Afterward , she emerged from backstage wearing a ruby utility jumpsuit that she had hand-bedazzled with sixty-five hundred rhinestones , as she put it , “ mid-manic episode.
” Onstage , she had carried herself with the crazed abandon of a little girl beheading a Barbie doll , but with her fans she was sweet and patient , posing for photos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ podcast “ My Year in Mensa ” condemns élitism , though it uses more traditional reporting methods .
Loftus ’ s first job out of college was at the Boston Globe ; she was fired when she tweeted , after a standup set , “ crushing so hard at an open mic that I cum bloods , ” which a local radio show referenced as “ the end of journalism.
” Nonetheless , she retains a reporter ’ s allegiance to fact .
The first episode delves into the fraught history of I.Q @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1905 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet , who adamantly insisted that it did not indicate fixed intelligence , and nonetheless adopted by eugenicists and racists to attempt to prove innate differences between social groups .
One of Mensa ’ s co-founders , Roland Berrill , believed in the pseudoscience of phrenology , which involves measuring skulls to predict mental ability .
The rest of the series is mostly dedicated to Loftus ’ s on-the-ground experience at the Mensa conference , some of which is pleasantly dorky ; she attends a panel called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Big Bang Theory , Sheldon and YOU !
” But she also overhears a drunken Mensan at the hospitality bar claim that “ not all dictators have been bad , ” including Germany ’ s .
( Later , he tips his waiter with a counterfeit three-dollar bill that features a caricature of Hillary Clinton . )
Afterward , at a panel , she hears a man argue that the fact that slaves were counted as even three-fifths of a person led to the demise of the American South , prompting people of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attributes Firehouse ’ s far-right politics to Mensa ’ s toxic belief in a fixed intellectual hierarchy .
“ There is no overstating what community can do for someone who , as many members described to me , feel like misfits in their everyday lives and want to belong somewhere , ” Loftus says in the podcast .
“ A society with murky goals whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to find it.
” At the conference , Loftus met Mensa ’ s enemy No .
2 , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is aptly known as Two .
He came with her to the bar in February , and I asked him whether he had listened to the podcast .
“ Yes , ” he replied .
“ It was a hundred-per-cent accurate.
” Herrera ’ s trouble with Firehouse began in April , 2018 , when he shared a Times article to the group arguing that white Trump voters are motivated by the fear of losing social status .
In the ensuing argument , Firehouse members accused him of being racist for suggesting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a screenshot of a Firehouse member ’ s comment that “ black women need to keep their legs closed ” and posted it on his own Facebook page .
Loftus also took screenshots of Firehouse posts , exposing a discrepancy between members ’ genial in-person presentations and their cruder online personalities , which incensed the group .
As a result , the members mass-blocked both individuals , which struck Herrera as hypocritical , given their avowed belief in free speech .
“ If it ’ s supposed to be unmoderated , by blocking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he said .
In the podcast , Loftus notes , “ If you can ’ t reconcile the person you are online with the person you are in real life , something in your community has gone wrong.
” Loftus concedes that she made mistakes , too , including the way she dealt with Mensa ’ s so-called boob thread .
In 2015 , a Firehouse member posted , “ I want to see some boobs !
Help me out ladies !
# boobthread , ” and the women of Mensa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ photos of their breasts .
The overwhelming supply spawned a secondary boob thread , which garnered more than five hundred more .
Loftus tweeted about it , to make fun of Mensa ’ s adolescent horniness .
In retrospect , she reflected that the thread happened between consenting adults , and worried that her earlier criticisms had come off as slut-shaming .
“ I just feel bad about that , ” she told me , at the bar .
“ I got called out , and they were right.
” She concludes her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a militant feminist myself .
.
.
I regret my condescension and wish all boobs involved health and happiness.
” Loftus ’ s Mensa membership is expiring in a few months , which is unfortunate : Firehouse might have been a good place to share her Shrek nudes .

In her podcast “My Year in Mensa,” Jamie Loftus explores how the geeky group became a forum for the far-right. Photograph by Callie Biggerstaff
On a Monday evening in February, Jamie Loftus, enemy No. 1 of the high-I.Q. society American Mensa, arrived at a sports bar in the East Village. A twenty-seven-year-old comedian, Loftus is six feet tall, and wore a Harvard sweatshirt with a sketch of the Unabomber displayed under the proud lettering. She settled into a booth, ordered a beer and half-price pizza, and began reminiscing about her time among the so-called geniuses. “I have too much empathy for them, and it will be my downfall,” Loftus said. “I will let one of them kill me.”
Loftus performs standup, has written for television shows such as “Robot Chicken,” and co-hosts a feminist-film podcast called “The Bechdel Cast.” But, in the past few years, she has become best known for her comedic stunts. In 2018, Loftus took Mensa’s I.Q. exam while hungover on shandies, scored in the ninety-eighth percentile, and celebrated her admission with a triumphant blog post titled “Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa Now.” Soon after, a Mensa member contacted her to warn that the group is not all “silly fun, board games . . . and happy nerds” but has a “nasty alt-right undercurrent.” She then discovered a reactionary, proudly unmoderated official Facebook group of American Mensans called Firehouse, in which, according to its description, subjects range from “Fluffy Kittens to items that will make you wish you could bleach your brain.” Typical content includes crude memes mocking Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, bad-faith anti-trans bathroom opinions, and support for building a border wall. One post argues that black people have benefitted from slavery and women from human trafficking because “their children enjoy a better life than in ‘shitholes.’ ” Loftus’s desire to understand this “living, breathing hostile comments section” culminated in her attendance at the 2019 American Mensa Gathering, in Phoenix, Arizona. Last month, she released a four-episode podcast miniseries about the experience called “My Year in Mensa.” The show uses first-person reporting to offer insight into how the geeky group became a forum for the far right.
The Mensa saga is more straight-faced than Loftus’s usual comedy, much of which replicates the frenzied pace of the Internet and is disturbing and nonsensical to the point of chaos. Like the prankish Nathan Fielder or the strangely sexual Megan Amram, she does elaborately dumb things to make fairly smart points. In 2015, Loftus sold “Shrek nudes,” naked photos of her body painted green, to raise funds for Planned Parenthood. That same year, she started eating David Foster Wallace’s thousand-plus-page novel “Infinite Jest.” In the video she made documenting the process, she pops a page into her mouth like a potato chip and slurps up a ribbon of the book with spaghetti. At some point, she began putting pages into a blender with apples and using a turkey baster to butt-chug the mixture. The sheer grotesqueness of her comedy often obscures its implicit social critique. Last year, the cultural critic Andrea Long Chu, in her spiky gender manifesto “Females,”mentioned #EatInfiniteJest as a curious form of female resistance and a “tremendous self-own.” Pretentious men are constantly trying to shove the book down women’s throats; Loftus just made their fantasy literal. She conceived both of these stunts while working as a research assistant at Playboy. “I was facilitating, like, the male-gaze-iest male gaze of all time, feeling suffocated,” she explained. “It was a reaction to being there sixty to seventy hours a week.” She used a company printer to print the photos of her green body, and the company kitchen to film herself laying pages of the book on mustard-covered bread, as if they were delicate slices of ham.
Loftus was in New York in February to perform her one-woman show, “Boss, Whom Is Girl,” which was staged at Joe’s Pub and is currently touring the country. The show is a loony, acerbic satire of corporate feminism, framed as an inspirational keynote from a character named Shell Gasoline-Sandwich, the billionaire G.E.O. of the surveillance-tech company Pee Pee Smarthomes. At the show, audience members were handed draconian nondisclosure agreements threatening murder by Silicon Valley assassins (“drones and various men named Josh”) for even thinking of disclosing contents of the talk. Loftus, as Shell, came out wearing a black turtleneck, and explained that she sleeps on a waterbed filled with tap water from Flint, Michigan, and is responsible for the massacre of a small island of European d.j.s. (The latter is based on Facebook’s role in fomenting ethnic violence in Myanmar, which she researched while at Playboy. “The show is secretly very thoroughly overresearched,” she told me.) The ordeal ended with Loftus fishing a yoni egg out of her vagina and flashing her pubic hair, which glowed in the dark, to the audience. Afterward, she emerged from backstage wearing a ruby utility jumpsuit that she had hand-bedazzled with sixty-five hundred rhinestones, as she put it, “mid-manic episode.” Onstage, she had carried herself with the crazed abandon of a little girl beheading a Barbie doll, but with her fans she was sweet and patient, posing for photos.
Like her one-woman show, the podcast “My Year in Mensa” condemns élitism, though it uses more traditional reporting methods. Loftus’s first job out of college was at the Boston Globe; she was fired when she tweeted, after a standup set, “crushing so hard at an open mic that I cum bloods,” which a local radio show referenced as “the end of journalism.” Nonetheless, she retains a reporter’s allegiance to fact. The first episode delves into the fraught history of I.Q. testing, which was developed in 1905 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who adamantly insisted that it did not indicate fixed intelligence, and nonetheless adopted by eugenicists and racists to attempt to prove innate differences between social groups. One of Mensa’s co-founders, Roland Berrill, believed in the pseudoscience of phrenology, which involves measuring skulls to predict mental ability. The rest of the series is mostly dedicated to Loftus’s on-the-ground experience at the Mensa conference, some of which is pleasantly dorky; she attends a panel called “Because Science IS Funny: The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and YOU!” But she also overhears a drunken Mensan at the hospitality bar claim that “not all dictators have been bad,” including Germany’s. (Later, he tips his waiter with a counterfeit three-dollar bill that features a caricature of Hillary Clinton.) Afterward, at a panel, she hears a man argue that the fact that slaves were counted as even three-fifths of a person led to the demise of the American South, prompting people of color to leave the room. Loftus attributes Firehouse’s far-right politics to Mensa’s toxic belief in a fixed intellectual hierarchy. “There is no overstating what community can do for someone who, as many members described to me, feel like misfits in their everyday lives and want to belong somewhere,” Loftus says in the podcast. “A society with murky goals whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to find it.”
At the conference, Loftus met Mensa’s enemy No. 2, a young leftist named Alex Herrera, who is aptly known as Two. He came with her to the bar in February, and I asked him whether he had listened to the podcast. “Yes,” he replied. “It was a hundred-per-cent accurate.” Herrera’s trouble with Firehouse began in April, 2018, when he shared a Times article to the group arguing that white Trump voters are motivated by the fear of losing social status. In the ensuing argument, Firehouse members accused him of being racist for suggesting that they were racist. He later snapped a screenshot of a Firehouse member’s comment that “black women need to keep their legs closed” and posted it on his own Facebook page. Loftus also took screenshots of Firehouse posts, exposing a discrepancy between members’ genial in-person presentations and their cruder online personalities, which incensed the group. As a result, the members mass-blocked both individuals, which struck Herrera as hypocritical, given their avowed belief in free speech. “If it’s supposed to be unmoderated, by blocking, you’re moderating that experience,” he said. In the podcast, Loftus notes, “If you can’t reconcile the person you are online with the person you are in real life, something in your community has gone wrong.”
Loftus concedes that she made mistakes, too, including the way she dealt with Mensa’s so-called boob thread. In 2015, a Firehouse member posted, “I want to see some boobs! Help me out ladies! #boobthread,” and the women of Mensa flooded the comments section with twelve hundred photos of their breasts. The overwhelming supply spawned a secondary boob thread, which garnered more than five hundred more. Loftus tweeted about it, to make fun of Mensa’s adolescent horniness. In retrospect, she reflected that the thread happened between consenting adults, and worried that her earlier criticisms had come off as slut-shaming. “I just feel bad about that,” she told me, at the bar. “I got called out, and they were right.” She concludes her podcast with an apology: “As a militant feminist myself . . . I regret my condescension and wish all boobs involved health and happiness.” Loftus’s Mensa membership is expiring in a few months, which is unfortunate: Firehouse might have been a good place to share her Shrek nudes.


Telfar Clemens’s Mass Appeal

“ I ’ m not pressed , ” Clemens said .
“ They all said , ‘ Thanks for coming to Paris.
’ That ’ s all they ’ ve said .
‘ Thanks for doing this here.
’ I ’ m , like , O.K .
.
.
.
does that mean you liked it ?
” That evening , at a party at a bar nearby , there were pearl chokers on men , earrings that looked like bunches of grapes , do-rags , intricate spirals of braids , mullets .
One woman had dyed a black Telfar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before 3 A.M. , a d.j .
was playing Brazilian funk and Nigerian pop , and the crowd had thinned just enough that the truly committed could dance more freely .
Suddenly , the music stopped .
“ This is an announcement that the person who is throwing this party just got thrown out of it , ” someone said into a microphone .
A murmur of discontent filled the room .
“ Telfar got thrown down the stairs of his own party , so we are all going to leave this place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s a wrap , it ’ s a wrap !
How do you say that in French ?
” Downstairs , stone-faced security guards were confronted by an angry crowd .
The bouncers had pepper-sprayed a group of Telfar interns , models , and hairdressers , who were crying and pouring milk into their eyes .
A few people shouted obscenities .
A plastic water bottle hit a wall .
Then another one .
Clemens was down the street , surrounded by his friends .
He explained that he ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mother roughly , so he ’ d asked the club to make the bouncer leave .
An argument followed , which escalated until Clemens was dragged down the stairs .
The bouncers pepper-sprayed the interns and assistants who came to his defense .
“ I was just looking at this guy , like , You need to go , you need to go , you need to go , ” Clemens said of the bouncer .
He groaned .
“ I haven ’ t got into a fight since I was eleven.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” a friend next to him said .
“ Because you ’ ve had other people fighting for you .
You can ’ t fight !
” “ I can ’ t fight , ” Clemens said .
“ I can ’ t fight.
” A car was called .
Clemens got into it with Kelela , and they drove off .
“ It was like the film we made happened in real life and vice versa , ” Radboy said weeks later , at the shipping container .
The reviews of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the usual words resurfaced .
“ Clemens ’ s message of community and inclusivity is hard to resist , ” one critic wrote .
“ It was a super-energizing start to the week.
” Radboy and Clemens were already planning their next show , for Pitti Uomo , the men ’ s fashion event in Florence in early January .
Partly in response to their time in Paris , they were thinking about the dynamics of guest and host , and how a word like “ inclusivity ” can carry the implication that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone else ’ s house .
They had decided to spend their budget on flying friends and family to Italy for an all-night “ congress , ” at the Palazzo Corsini , that would be closed to the public .
Radboy had built a round conference table that had microphones ; it was inspired , he said , by the “ United Nations or ‘ Dr .
Strangelove.
’ ” At its center , there would be a conversation pit that doubled as a rehearsal space .
Beds would be set up for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea was that the participants would make things among themselves , without having to sell , pitch , or convince others that what they did deserved “ inclusion.
” For the runway show , which would be held on the wine-and-food-stained table the next day , the sanctum would be opened to the fashion press and buyers , who , finally , invited in as guests , would experience “ the result and residue ” of the party .
At the end of January , after four months of living mostly in Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sleep in his bed and ride his bike again .
So he returned to New York .
He spent his first full day in Queens at home , resting .
He stayed up late that night .
He exercised in his bedroom , then sat up watching “ Joseline ’ s Cabaret , ” the reality show about a strip club in Miami .
Midnight came and went .
It was January 21st , Clemens ’ s thirty-fifth birthday .
Sitting in his bathroom , where the Wi-Fi signal in his aunt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he had therefore set up a small office , he began reflecting on his life .
He used to joke that he wanted to design clothes that people would want to steal .
But , at the end of December , a burglar backed a truck into the yard with the shipping containers , broke into one of them , and stole five crates of clothes from the label ’ s archives .
Clemens was ready for more stability : his own apartment ; a place where his archive could be safely stored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could assemble every day during normal working hours ; a “ grown-up situation.
” It was time to move out of the shipping containers .
Thinking about his plans for the year , Clemens walked with his laptop into the kitchen to make a snack .
Then he started to smell smoke .
He walked around the apartment , checking on his aunt , who was asleep .
He went out on the terrace .
He went back to the bathroom and opened the door .
The room was in flames .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 911 , then dashed around collecting her things until he had to take her by the arms and make her leave .
The fire was electrical and had started in a light fixture .
The firefighters smashed out the windows in Clemens ’ s room , where he kept boxes of clothes from his earliest collections .
Everything was flooded and covered in soot .
“ My birthday present was a literal fire under my ass , ” Clemens told me during New York Fashion Week , in mid-February , when I visited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ district where he was staying while repairs were being made at LeFrak .
He was wearing a taupe zip-up hoodie and a pair of Telfar sweatpants made of thermal waffle weave .
The apartment ’ s living room was decorated in a kind of lowest common denominator of urban style , with a black modernist couch and stainless-steel appliances .
He was enjoying living among corporate nomads and working out in the gym downstairs .
Outside , it was raining .
Despite the tumult , he seemed serene .
The fire had come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He showed me a photograph of the card he had pulled at a tarot reading in Paris before the fire : the Four of Coins , from Miss Cleo ’ s deck .
It has an illustration with what looks like wisps of smoke in the background .
Living near Pace , he felt that he had returned to his first days in New York .
He could take the same walk to the Lower East Side to buy T-shirts that he had taken when he was eighteen .
Century 21 was down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he said , because , after the whirlwind of a season spent in the international fashion circuit , he wanted to remind himself of who he used to be , the striver biking around with his entire collection on his back .
In the fall , he said , he had realized , “ I don ’ t need to be this European person that ’ s , like , ‘ I ’ m going to design Balenciaga.
’ ” He had mostly ignored New York Fashion Week .
He was not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that served a small class of out-of-towners , and he contemplated how he might sell his clothes in a different way when he was in New York .
“ Telfar Home , ” he joked .
Perhaps he ’ d open a pop-up store .
“ People can come to Queens !
” Trecartin and Fitch were planning to build him a tiny house on their farm in Ohio , where Telfar clothes would be sold on the honor system .

“Where are you from?” she asked a model who spoke English, as she tied a drawstring at the bottom of a cream-colored T-shirt, which had a band of brown horizontal stripes across the chest that reminded me of an Ocean Pacific skateboarding shirt from another decade.
The model, whose name was Brahim Hassan, said that he was from Chad. He was polite and a little bashful. When he’d arrived, Gallagher and Clemens had held a whispered conference of delight about his ears, which stuck out.
Clemens liked working in Paris. “There’s not that much going on, in comparison to New York, where there’s like a million things and it feels like it’s Fashion Week all the time or something,” he said. “People just actually go to sleep. They go and eat dinner, and they go to sleep.”
Telfar’s runway show took place at La Cigale, a historic music venue in Montmartre, on a Monday. The models emerged, wearing cargo-inspired looks, while on the screen behind them handsome young people floated on rafts and were wanded through T.S.A. checkpoints. The story of travellers confronting a surveillance state was cut with mini music videos by the rapper BbyMutha and the musician Steve Lacy. The film reminded me of waiting in the security line at John F. Kennedy Airport, where luxury-perfume ads play on a loop on L.E.D. screens overhead. At the film’s dénouement, a group of models, passing around a joint as the sun set over Oakwood Beach, discussed the Internet memes of last summer. “It was, like, Why y’all talking about Popeyes when the Amazon is on fire?” Johan Galaxy, wearing his blond wig, said.
At the end of the show, the models and the Telfar team returned to the runway and started dancing. Harris, who was wearing Telfar running shorts over fishnets with a pair of Mary Janes that Telfar had designed for Converse, sprang up and joined them. The rest of the audience seemed unsure how to respond. When they realized that the show was over, they applauded politely. Backstage afterward, Clemens, Gallagher, and Radboy sipped champagne and tried to parse the reaction.
“French people are stiff as fuck,” Clemens said.
Gallagher agreed. “I looked out there, and they were, like”—she made an expressionless face.
“I’m not pressed,” Clemens said. “They all said, ‘Thanks for coming to Paris.’ That’s all they’ve said. ‘Thanks for doing this here.’ I’m, like, O.K. . . . does that mean you liked it?”
That evening, at a party at a bar nearby, there were pearl chokers on men, earrings that looked like bunches of grapes, do-rags, intricate spirals of braids, mullets. One woman had dyed a black Telfar logo into her pink hair. Shortly before 3 A.M., a d.j. was playing Brazilian funk and Nigerian pop, and the crowd had thinned just enough that the truly committed could dance more freely. Suddenly, the music stopped. “This is an announcement that the person who is throwing this party just got thrown out of it,” someone said into a microphone. A murmur of discontent filled the room. “Telfar got thrown down the stairs of his own party, so we are all going to leave this place. It’s a wrap, it’s a wrap, it’s a wrap! How do you say that in French?”
Downstairs, stone-faced security guards were confronted by an angry crowd. The bouncers had pepper-sprayed a group of Telfar interns, models, and hairdressers, who were crying and pouring milk into their eyes. A few people shouted obscenities. A plastic water bottle hit a wall. Then another one. Clemens was down the street, surrounded by his friends. He explained that he’d learned that a bouncer had handled his mother roughly, so he’d asked the club to make the bouncer leave. An argument followed, which escalated until Clemens was dragged down the stairs. The bouncers pepper-sprayed the interns and assistants who came to his defense.
At the finale of Telfar’s Spring 2019 show, “Country,” which was designed around the tropes of cowboys and country music, Clemens crowd-surfed in a mosh pit. “You can’t get insurance for that,” he said. Photograph courtesy Mitchell Sams
“I was just looking at this guy, like, You need to go, you need to go, you need to go,” Clemens said of the bouncer. He groaned. “I haven’t got into a fight since I was eleven.”
“I know you haven’t,” a friend next to him said. “Because you’ve had other people fighting for you. You can’t fight!”
“I can’t fight,” Clemens said. “I can’t fight.” A car was called. Clemens got into it with Kelela, and they drove off.
“It was like the film we made happened in real life and vice versa,” Radboy said weeks later, at the shipping container. The reviews of the show had been positive, but the usual words resurfaced. “Clemens’s message of community and inclusivity is hard to resist,” one critic wrote. “It was a super-energizing start to the week.”
Radboy and Clemens were already planning their next show, for Pitti Uomo, the men’s fashion event in Florence in early January. Partly in response to their time in Paris, they were thinking about the dynamics of guest and host, and how a word like “inclusivity” can carry the implication that an included person is a guest in someone else’s house. They had decided to spend their budget on flying friends and family to Italy for an all-night “congress,” at the Palazzo Corsini, that would be closed to the public. Radboy had built a round conference table that had microphones; it was inspired, he said, by the “United Nations or ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ ” At its center, there would be a conversation pit that doubled as a rehearsal space. Beds would be set up for those who wished to nap. The idea was that the participants would make things among themselves, without having to sell, pitch, or convince others that what they did deserved “inclusion.” For the runway show, which would be held on the wine-and-food-stained table the next day, the sanctum would be opened to the fashion press and buyers, who, finally, invited in as guests, would experience “the result and residue” of the party.
At the end of January, after four months of living mostly in Europe, Clemens missed LeFrak. He wanted to sleep in his bed and ride his bike again. So he returned to New York. He spent his first full day in Queens at home, resting. He stayed up late that night. He exercised in his bedroom, then sat up watching “Joseline’s Cabaret,” the reality show about a strip club in Miami.
Midnight came and went. It was January 21st, Clemens’s thirty-fifth birthday. Sitting in his bathroom, where the Wi-Fi signal in his aunt’s apartment is strongest and where he had therefore set up a small office, he began reflecting on his life. He used to joke that he wanted to design clothes that people would want to steal. But, at the end of December, a burglar backed a truck into the yard with the shipping containers, broke into one of them, and stole five crates of clothes from the label’s archives. Clemens was ready for more stability: his own apartment; a place where his archive could be safely stored; an office where the Telfar crew could assemble every day during normal working hours; a “grown-up situation.” It was time to move out of the shipping containers.
Thinking about his plans for the year, Clemens walked with his laptop into the kitchen to make a snack. Then he started to smell smoke. He walked around the apartment, checking on his aunt, who was asleep. He went out on the terrace. He went back to the bathroom and opened the door. The room was in flames. He woke up his aunt, who called 911, then dashed around collecting her things until he had to take her by the arms and make her leave. The fire was electrical and had started in a light fixture. The firefighters smashed out the windows in Clemens’s room, where he kept boxes of clothes from his earliest collections. Everything was flooded and covered in soot.
“My birthday present was a literal fire under my ass,” Clemens told me during New York Fashion Week, in mid-February, when I visited him at the apartment-hotel in the financial district where he was staying while repairs were being made at LeFrak. He was wearing a taupe zip-up hoodie and a pair of Telfar sweatpants made of thermal waffle weave. The apartment’s living room was decorated in a kind of lowest common denominator of urban style, with a black modernist couch and stainless-steel appliances. He was enjoying living among corporate nomads and working out in the gym downstairs. Outside, it was raining.
“And, also, you will be satisfying the need for public art.” Cartoon by Frank Cotham Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Despite the tumult, he seemed serene. The fire had come laden with symbols, he said. He showed me a photograph of the card he had pulled at a tarot reading in Paris before the fire: the Four of Coins, from Miss Cleo’s deck. It has an illustration with what looks like wisps of smoke in the background. Living near Pace, he felt that he had returned to his first days in New York. He could take the same walk to the Lower East Side to buy T-shirts that he had taken when he was eighteen. Century 21 was down the street.
All this seemed meaningful, he said, because, after the whirlwind of a season spent in the international fashion circuit, he wanted to remind himself of who he used to be, the striver biking around with his entire collection on his back. In the fall, he said, he had realized, “I don’t need to be this European person that’s, like, ‘I’m going to design Balenciaga.’ ” He had mostly ignored New York Fashion Week. He was not motivated to make the kind of fashion that served a small class of out-of-towners, and he contemplated how he might sell his clothes in a different way when he was in New York. “Telfar Home,” he joked. Perhaps he’d open a pop-up store. “People can come to Queens!” Trecartin and Fitch were planning to build him a tiny house on their farm in Ohio, where Telfar clothes would be sold on the honor system.


newyorker--2020-03-09--“Wooden Bench,” by Jeffrey McDaniel

“Wooden Bench,” by Jeffrey McDaniel

I was sitting on a wooden bench when six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me , except she was inside a wooden box and the lid was closed .
She was on her way to becoming a skeleton .
My father is definitely a skeleton at this point .
Death is confusing .
Is my father the bones that sit inside a box on a hillside in Odessa , Delaware ?
Or is he on the other side of that keyhole in my mind that I talk into sometimes ?
Can he be in two places at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it up , the way twelve-step programs tell you you can make up God ?
God can be a ribbon on the door , a nail in the wall .
A nail in the coffin .
It ’ s 4:59 a.m .
The sky a deep ocean blue .
The birds going nuts in the trees .
Do birds dream ?
My daughter likes to tell me her dreams , especially when I do something bad .
In an hour , she ’ ll get up for school .
It ’ s exactly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ street don ’ t have any leaves .
Do I miss my father ?
In his presence , my head would start to throb like a blister and I ’ d take naps in random places to make the throbbing stop .
We were close when I was a child , and he wasn ’ t lying when he said he was my history book .
The birds are whistling but they are not whistling for me .

Audio: Read by the author.
I was sitting on a wooden bench
when six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me,
except she was inside a wooden box
and the lid was closed. She was on her way
to becoming a skeleton. My father
is definitely a skeleton at this point.
Death is confusing. Is my father the bones
that sit inside a box on a hillside
in Odessa, Delaware? Or is he on the other side
of that keyhole in my mind that I talk into sometimes?
Can he be in two places at once? Am I allowed
to make it up, the way twelve-step programs tell you
you can make up God? God can be a ribbon
on the door, a nail in the wall.
A nail in the coffin. It’s 4:59 a.m. The sky
a deep ocean blue. The birds going nuts
in the trees. Do birds dream?
My daughter likes to tell me her dreams,
especially when I do something bad.
In an hour, she’ll get up for school.
It’s exactly mid-May and half the trees on this street
don’t have any leaves. Do I miss my father?
In his presence, my head would start to throb
like a blister and I’d take naps in random places
to make the throbbing stop. We were close
when I was a child, and he wasn’t lying when he said
he was my history book. The birds are whistling
but they are not whistling for me.